Day 33: Viva Italia!

Today it was all about Italian food. Our recipes for today: focaccia bread, stuffed meat balls, fresh pasta, tomato sauce, and a lemon dill cream sauce.

We started out by measuring out the ingredients for a focaccia bread. Today's focaccia bread is served with our pasta. It's a simple focaccia bread with an oil and coarse salt topping.

Working in a kitchen making different dishes is all about time management. Because bread needs yeast ~ we need to wait for the yeast to bloom. While that is happening, we can work on our mise en place for the pasta dishes that we will be preparing today ~ spaghetti and meatballs and lemon dill pasta. Our mise en place for the first dish was onions, red pepper, green pepper and garlic. For our second dish it was garlic, lemon zest, and garlic.

After the yeast bloomed we make our dough for the focaccia bread and let it rise to double it's size. While we waited for the dough to rise, we started making our first sauce ~ tomato sauce. We saute our onions in oil and seasoned with salt and pepper, add the peppers (red and green) and herbs such as thyme and basil to build the flavours for the sauce. We also added other optional enhancers such as Worcestershire and  balmai (sarachia). Next we add some canned tomatoes and their juice and continued to season adding sugar, salt and pepper. The sugar helps to cut the acid taste that you get from the tomatoes. When all ingredients have been incorporated, the sauce is left to simmer on the stove.

We are back to the focaccia dough that has now rise and spread it out on a small baking sheet. We do not want this focaccia dough to rise in the baking, so we punch it down with our finger tips. After we have done this we brush oil over the top and sprinkle sea salt all over and put it in the oven to bake at 375 F.

In a hot sauce pan with oil we saute onions and season with fresh thyme, salt and pepper. When the onions become soft we hit the pan with some white wine to deglaze (which removes the brown bits from the pan) and let it cool to be used later for making the meatballs.

We're ready to make the pasta and measure out some flour, salt and oil. To the flour and salt we mix in oil and two eggs ~ mix and knead the dough until we get the right texture for pasta. Once the dough is ready we wrap it in saran wrap and let it sit for a bit before we roll it out in a pasta machine.

It's time to make the stuffed meatballs. We are using a mixture of pork and beef to make our meatballs. The stuffing is cream cheese and shredded mozzarella and cheddar cheese. The meatballs are a fair size ~ smaller than a tennis ball and bigger than a golf ball. For a regular serving, we would plate about three meatballs. Mine are kind of large and I'll likely plate one for Chef to taste and critique. The meatballs are put in the oven to cook at 350 F turning halfway through cooking.

The tomato sauce should be just about ready now and we get the immersion blender and give it a good buzz to break down all the ingredients in to a smooth sauce. It takes a few minutes to do this and the pot of tomato sauce is back at the stove to use later.

Getting back to the pasta dough, we set up the pasta roller and roll the pasta starting with the largest thickness (number one). With each pass through the rollers, we decrease the thickness by one for five passes in total. After the fifth pass we are ready to cut the pasta. With the first serving (half the pasta dough made) we put the dough through the linguine rollers and hang the pasta to dry on a pasta dryer. Next we run the second serving of dough through the angle hair rollers and put the pasta to dry until we are ready to use for our dishes.

Everything is just about ready and Chef wants us to plate the lemon dill pastas and then the paghetti and meatballs. To a pot of boiling water seasoned with salt we add our angle hair pasta. For the lemon dill pasta, in a large sauce we add butter and saute the garlic and lemon zest, deglaze with white wine and add cream. We leave the sauce to reduce by about half. When the sauce has reduced and the pasta is al dente, the pasta is tossed in to be mixed with the sauce. The pasta is plated on a warm plate with a few slices of focaccia.

Up next is spaghetti and meatballs. First we add our linguine pasta to a pot of hot boiling water seasoned with salt. To a sauce pan we add our meatballs (enough for one serving) and tomato sauce and heat through. When the pasta is ready we plate the pasta (on a warm plate), top with meatballs (in my case one meatball) and tomato sauce with a few slices of focaccia bread for Chef to taste and critique.

One thing that Chef likes us to keep in mind is that when serving hot food, that it should be served on a warm plate. The warm plate helps in keep the food being served hot. A cold plate will cool down hot food too quickly... and cold food does not taste very good at all! Unless it's pizza the next morning ;-)

It was a busy day in the kitchen and there were lots of dishes, pots and pans to clean up. We were kept busy from beginning to end. No time for eating any of our dishes at school today. Still not getting use to eating dinner meals at breakfast time anyway ~ and I'm good to wait until I get home.

Thinking about homework tonight and testing out how to cost out my recipes. Need to put some work in to the project as the weeks are beginning to rush by quickly.