Carbonara With A Twist

Posted on May 18, 2015 by Our Growing Paynes

I wish that spring lasted longer here. Winter lasts way too long and summer is always anxious to arrive. We have been holding off putting in the A/Cs but we might not make it until the end of June like we are hoping. Yesterday was a scorcher! I fear summer will be a bit much.

Needless to say my long list for yesterday didn’t get done! Partly because I grossly underestimated how long it would take to clean out our closet. Hours! Just as well as it was to hot to bake. Hopefully I’ll get that done today. Wouldn’t want the kids to starve. 🙂

And I didn’t want to be standing over a hot stove either. We have some black garlic and proscuitto on hand and carbonara is a quick dish to make. Time for a twist on a great dish!

Prep everything ahead of time as this does not take long to cook. In a bowl whisk three eggs together with salt and pepper. Great about a cup of aged cheese together. I used pecorino, parmesan, and romano cheese for this dish. Cube the proscuitto, about 1/2 -3/4 cups worth. I finely chopped two bulbs of black garlic and garlic chives. I love having the fresh herbs from our garden again!

Heat a couple of tablespoons of olive oil and slowly saute the garlic. Don’t have the heat higher than medium. While this is cooking, cook the pasta. When the pasta is halfway cooked add the proscuitto and chive to the skillet. The trick with the proscuitto is that you don’t want to overcook it or the flavour will get really strong.

Add a 1/2 cup of dry white wine and lightly simmer.

Once the pasta is cooked add it to the skillet and mix well. Turn off the heat and add the egg and cheese mixture to the skillet.

Toss and serve immediately. Garnish with fresh basil and grated cheese.

This is a dish with strong flavours and is great with homemade ciabatta bread. Here is how to make the traditional carbonara dish. Both great for when it’s too hot to be standing over a hot stove!

Lamb with Prosciutto Mushroom Sauce

Posted on February 15, 2015 by Our Growing Paynes

Every once in awhile we’re confronted with how fast life really moves. This weekend our daughter had her semi-formal at the middle school. It was a masquerade ball which was a fabulous idea. I wish we had that theme in one our school dances. I had a great time help our daughter get ready.

It was striking to us though as it was obvious that she is no longer a little girl but a wonderful young lady. I kept thinking back to the first time I helped her do her hair and makeup. It was seven years ago for Halloween and she wanted to be a geisha girl. She was small enough I had to have her on the bathroom counter so I could do her face. Not being used to make up she kept twitching as I tried to do her eyes. 🙂

This time, as she is nearly as tall as I am, I had to reach up to curl her hair and do her eyes. It seems like the past seven years have gone by in a flash. And, if you don’t mind me saying so, she was stunning. We are just so proud of how she is turning out. Beautiful inside and out.

I was able to find time earlier this week to do some cooking and wanted to play around with prosciutto. I thought prosciutto with mushrooms would be a lovely pairing.

In a skillet melt a few tablespoons of butter. Season the lamb steak with salt and pepper and sear both sides of the lamb.

Finish off in the oven at 350F/175C to be medium rare. In the same skillet melt a little more butter and add a cup or so of sliced shiitake mushrooms and saute until they start to brown. Then add a few cloves of garlic that have been finely chopped with a teaspoon two of fresh thyme.

Allow this to cook slowly to soften the garlic. If the mushrooms soaked up a lot of the butter then add a bit more. Add 1/2 a cup of dry white wine and let it slowly simmer and reduce down. As the lamb is resting add about 1/3 cup of chopped prosciutto and stir well.

As a side dish I roasted golden beets, parsnips, and potatoes.

We need the good food to distract us from this crazy winter. We got another 6 inches or so dumped on us this weekend. We’re running out of places to put it! Some spots in our garden are about 4 feet deep. The actual snow fall is now mid-thigh to me. We have a slight problem of our greenhouse being snowed in and we can’t get the door open. Unfortunately our potting soil and pots are in there! Our seeds have arrived so we need to get this sorted out within the next week.

Spring can’t come soon enough this year!

Cheesy Canapés to Ring in the New Year

Posted on January 2, 2015 by Our Growing Paynes

Well 2014 is done and dusted. They go by faster as we get older. I do wish I can figure out how to slow it down a bit. Ah well, I’ll just have to enjoy the ride at the speed it goes.

As usual we had a lot of fun with our friends for New Year’s Eve, letting our hair down probably more than is good for us. And as usual we had a lot of good food, enough for an army!

A few weeks ago apointgourmet posted about Thyme and Gruyere Canapés and I thought they would be perfect for the party. I could make them earlier in the day and them warm them up at the party.

I decided to use the cheeses I had on hand for this dish which was jarlsberg and parmesan cheese.

Preheat the oven to 400F/200C

It’s a good idea to prep the ingredients prior to starting the recipe. The amount of cheese needed is about 1 2/3 cups with half a cup of that being parmesan and the rest jarlsberg. Grate the cheese and set aside. Finely chop fresh thyme to give you two teaspoons and set that aside with the cheese. Add a pinch of sea salt and a few dashes of cayenne pepper to the cheese. In a sauce pan bring a cup of water and 4 tablespoons of butter to a boil. Remove from the heat and add a cup of flour. Mix well until the dough becomes smooth.

In a mixer incorporate the dough with the cheese mixture.

One at a time add 4 eggs and mix well.

Scoop into a pastry bag with a tip that has a large hole. This is my least favourite bit as the dough is thick and sticky and likes to find it’s way out the top of the bag. So annoying! And it’s hard on my hand squeezing all the dough. Create dollops about an inch in diameter and place them about 1/2 an inch or so apart. Beat one egg and egg wash the dollops without letting the egg drip down the sides otherwise the egg can prevent the puffs from rising.

Bake 25-30 minutes until they are golden brown. Now the recipe I followed said 20-25 minutes but mine weren’t golden in that time frame, I suspect because of different ovens. At any rate bake until golden.

I had also come across an idea to do apples with cheese and pancetta. So I used that for inspiration and decided to use fontina and prosciutto. Very easy, just wrap the apple and cheese and bake until the cheese is melted.

I really liked the balance of the sweetness of the apple and saltiness of the prosciutto.

Cheers!

Fig Pizza and Big Victories

Posted on July 21, 2014 by Our Growing Paynes

A few years ago the leash that we used to walk Guinness wore out and my husband made a big mistake in tasking me to go online and see what hours the humane society was open. Suddenly he hears me call out to him to come and look at the photo of the cutest dog. We had been thinking about getting another dog but we were having a hard time pairing one with Guinness. Guinness had been termed an inappropriate punk. He is a lovely dog but is insecure around other dogs and tries to dominate them. So we kept failing.

But this day we trooped down to the humane society to meet this goofy dog. They did warn us that he was on prozac and that was my big oops. We don’t know Murphy’s history but we do know he spent 6 months in 3 different humane societies. But I thought we should take him off the meds. Try training, that sort of thing. It’s been a tough few years. It took him a long time to trust us, understandably, and while he was a sweetheart in the home, he was a nut job on the walks. His anxiety overran any attempts for him to listen. He isn’t malicious just a big nut job. We were despairing with my back being thrown out and my husband starting to feel it as well.

There is now light at the end of the tunnel! We found a new harness that fits him better and a low dose med that takes the edge off of him without making him a drooling fool. We still wanted Murphy to be Murphy. I was able to take him back to training this past week and it’s been amazing. He’s listening and we aren’t being jerked around. I can’t tell you how big a victory this is for us! I’m not dreading the walks, woot!

In the midst of all this the kids were getting ready to head to Florida to see their grandparents so for their last night here I made a light meal for us. Given that figs are in season I thought it would be fun to do a pizza with naan using the figs.

I grilled the naan on a cast iron grill until it was almost cooked.

While the naan is cooking chop up a shallot and a couple of cloves of garlic. Saute in olive oil until softened.

I am late to the whole fig thing. But now I love it when fig season swings round. It works so well with many different recipes. And I love it with the saltiness of prosciutto.

Preheat the oven to 350F/175C. Layer the naan with the shallots and garlic, figs, prosciutto, and goat cheese. Fontina also works for this.

Bake until the cheese is warmed and melty.

This is perfect with a small side salad. The tomatoes in the picture are the last we’ll buy in awhile as our tomatoes are starting to ripen. Can’t wait to start eating them!

And oh get this! I finally have a preview button. 🙂 They never responded to my note to support but at least I’m seeing positive changes.

I Don’t Give a Fig, Actually That’s Not True….

Posted on November 15, 2013 by Our Growing Paynes

As many of you know I do my best to buy local foods but because some ingredients can’t be grown here and we’ve been spoilt by having them available anyway as I’d be hard pressed to give up real Parmesan cheese. And wine. But there are some ingredients that either we just can’t get or are strictly seasonal and we may get lucky here and there. Figs are such an ingredient. I have come across many a fig recipe that just makes me envious and I can’t do anything about it because we can’t get figs! So you better believe when I saw some at the co-op I grabbed them. They are very expensive so I only got one pack. Wonder how many I would need to get to make fig bars?

In any case I wanted to do something simple for dinner. I came across Taste Spotting on Pinterest that has loads of crostinis. Their version of crostini used brie which I did for my husband but for me I used goat cheese. I also made up so more buttery mushrooms and baked brie to have with crackers. Perfect after a long day!

This is super easy but the flavour is amazing. The ingredients needed are figs, goat cheese, salad greens, prosciutto, and crusty bread toasted.

You can grill the figs on a proper grill but it was really cold so I took our cast iron grill and did it stove top style. Slice the figs and place on the hot grill. I did spray some cooking oil on the grill before heating up. Cook on each side until grill marks start forming. You want them to soften and warm through.

After you toast the crusty bread spread the cheese, layer on prosciutto and salad greens, then top with the fig.

As I said this was amazing! This is now one of my favourites by far. The sweetness of the fig against the savory of the rest of the ingredients was a great balance. And it takes less than 10 minutes to make. Perfect!

Buttery Mushrooms and Other Yummy Tapas

Posted on November 6, 2013 by Our Growing Paynes

It will come as no surprise when I say I love food. It’s part of our life experience. Something to be enjoyed and to add to our memories. I could not wait to try all the amazing food I was sure we’d come across on our holiday. Equally I could not wait to share it with our kids. I think tapas is an amazing way of eating. You can order many different flavours and be able to walk away from the table at the end of the meal as opposed to rolling away. Only once did we get too much food because while they called it tapas it wasn’t. The portions were too big. Delicious but huge.

So this past Saturday we decided to share with the kids our version of a tapas night. It was fun and we got to talk about some of the food we sampled as we traveled.

Our favourite tapas dish was a mushroom dish we had in Barcelona. It was fabulous and the start of my planning of the meal. Super easy to do which is good as we’ll be having this again.

Chop up regular mushrooms, some fresh thyme, and a few cloves of garlic.

Melt a couple of tablespoons of butter. They aren’t buttery for nothing! Perhaps this isn’t the healthiest but I threw caution to the wind! Saute the ingredients together in the melted butter. After a couple of minutes add a couple of tablespoons of chicken stock. Salt and pepper to taste. Saute until the mushrooms are cooked through and they are ready to serve.

My son also requested I make up some zucchini flan. I did as what we didn’t eat we saved for their school lunches.

I bought some Manchego cheese, prosciutto, salami, and olives for one of the tapas. Aside from the mushrooms on our trip this type of platter was up there in terms of favourites. Add fresh baguettes to the mix and we were very happy.

I also thought it would be fun to introduce caviar to my daughter. At the Champagne Bar on the ship they would often serve some smoked salmon with a bit of caviar on top. I loved it. Unfortunately the caviar I found at the store tasted a bit muddled. So it didn’t wow her like I’d hoped. I’ll have to try another brand.

Overall though it was a delicious meal to share with the kids. I think we’ll be doing this again with different dishes. After all if you can’t have fun with the flavours why bother! 🙂

Our Growing Paynes

A journey about cooking, traveling, gardening, and crafting.

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