Raspberry coconut cake

I love Instagram. For many reasons but especially when I find out about new recipes.
At the moment I crave anything sweet. Breast feeding two babies has turned me into a ravenous eater. I can't muck about if I get a free 5 minutes, I eat.
Rather than feeding my sweet tooth with chocolate (which is what I have been doing) I have been trying to bake an almond based cake for snacking on. For two reasons, Rob is on a gluten free diet, and an IG friend, @jenni1029, kindly sent me a book "Mother Food" which notes that almonds are lactogenic. Since then I've regarded any cake with almond meal as an essential dietary requirement. So I was a bit excited when I saw this cake pop up on my IG feed. The recipe was kindly passed onto me from @brionyk and she had sourced it from @andykitten.

Robert's Coconut cake

125g butter
125g SR Flour (or as I did 60g GF flour, 70g almond meal and 2 tsps baking powder)
1 cup desiccated coconut
3/4 cup caster sugar
2 eggs
1/2 cup of milk

Heat oven 180 degrees
Line 23cm round cake tin

Melt butter and allow to cool.
Mix all dry ingredients together.
Pour in butter and mix.
Mix eggs and milk together and then add to batter and mix.

Pour into cake tin and top with frozen berries, like blueberry or raspberry.

Bake for 25 minutes (I baked mine for 55 minutes until the middle stopped wobbling and a skewer came out cleanish).

It is delicious and we've nearly eaten the whole thing already. It is easy to bake and easy to eat.

I love Instagram.

Monday's Menu {Rob's baked ziti}

Silver beet is still featuring quite regularly at our dinner table at the moment. Rob snuck it into four of our meals this past week. I don't mind really. It feels so right to be eating vegetables from your own garden.

So this weeks menu:

Monday: Pea, speck and mint risotto
Tuesday: Steamed greens from the garden (silver beet, cabbage tops and purple sprouting broccoli)
Wednesday: Pasta puttanesca
Thursday: Scrambled eggs and wilted silver beet on rye toast
Friday: Tomato sugo, cacciatore salami, anchovies, olives, bocconcini and silver beet thin crust pizza
Saturday: Rob's baked ziti
Sunday: Slow roasted lamb shoulder, with potatoes and minted peas

I had a few Instagram requests for the ziti recipe, which I have shared below. In true Rob style he tinkered with the recipe, but I think when it comes to baked ziti anything goes!

Rob's baked ziti

Based on Antonio Carluccio's Ziti al forno alla Napoletana and Nigella's Rigatoni Al Forno (from Feast). Basically it was a Bolognese sauce, with cooked pasta (should be ziti but I couldn't find it so substituted penne), a béchamel sauce, mozzarella and a layer of silver beet.

Would easily feed 8 (greedy) people or 10 (more self controlled) people!

For the meat sauce:
1 onion
2 carrots
2 sticks of celery
2 cloves of garlic
50g unsmoked streaky bacon or pancetta - Rob substituted thinly sliced Cacciatore salami.
50 g butter
2 tablespoons olive oil
700g pork and veal mince
700mL bottle of tomato passata
2 tablespoons tomato puree
250ml red wine
2 bay leaves

For the béchamel
85g butter
50g plain flour
500ml milk
Salt or stock granules to taste
Freshly grated nutmeg

1 x 500g pack penne pasta
Couple of handfuls of fresh silver beet (or you could have used spinach), washed and drained.
Grated parmesan
Sliced mozzarella

Finely chop the peeled onions, peeled garlic, peeled carrots, the bacon or pancetta or salami and the celery.  Heat the butter and oil in a large pan and fry the onions, garlic and celery until softened, then add the chopped carrots.  Add the mince and fork it through until it browns in the pan as much as possible. Pour in the tomato passata, puree, red wine, and bay. Stir well and bring to the boil, then turn down the heat, partially cover and let cook gently for 2 hours, (well ours probably only cooked for an hour but it was good, you just want it to be nice and thick).

To make the white sauce, melt the butter in a saucepan then add the flour and stir and cook together to make a roux. Take off the heat briefly, and whisk in the milk – just using a hand whisk – then put back on the heat and, stirring all the time, let the sauce come to boil and bubble away for a few minutes to get rid of the floury taste. Season with salt and pepper (or you could use some crumbled stock cube or bouillon concentrate). Turn down the heat slightly and cook until slightly thickened. After turning off the heat stir some freshly grated nutmeg through the sauce.

Preheat the oven to 200˚C/fan oven 180˚C/gas 6 and put the water on for the pasta. When the water comes to the boil, add salt and cook the pasta until its al dente (don't overcook it here as it will keep cooking in the oven). Drain the pasta.

Layer the meat sauce in a buttered roasting pan, then the cooked pasta, followed by a layer of silver beet, top with the béchamel and layer the mozzarella and grated parmesan over the top.

Cook for 30- 40 minutes or until the top is crispy and golden.

Now I'm really hungry and glad that this is sitting in our fridge waiting for us to reheat for dinner tonight.

Lemon linguine

I meant to post this recipe (if you can call it that) yesterday, but blogger was having some weird issue with the length of the post. I did ramble on a bit yesterday, sorry about that, but I wanted to capture the feel of our weekend.

This is my favourite pasta meal to make, it's so easy and delicious, and we usually have all the ingredients in our home, so no special shopping required. I found it in my first Nigella cook book, How to Eat, the page has became dog eared and splashed.  I remember when I used to dine alone I would make this for myself, serving a rocket salad on the side and drinking a gin and tonic as I waited for the pasta to cook.
I have left out the cream from Nigella's recipe, that used to make it a bit runny, this sauce is much thicker and voluptuous, clinging to the pasta, rather than pooling in the bottom of my bowl.

Lemon linguine

{based on Nigella's recipe in How to Eat}
To serve 2

300g dried linguine pasta
2 egg yolks
2 eggs
1 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese, plus more to serve on top
Finely grated zest and juice of a lemon
salt
pepper
1 tablespoon butter
Italian parsley

While your pasta is cooking in a big pot of very salty water, mix together the egg yolks, whole eggs, the grated Parmesan, the zest and juice of the lemon, salt and pepper and whisk to combine well.

Once your pasta is cooked, drain quickly and then return it to the pot (off the heat), add the butter and stir to coat the pasta well. Tip in your sauce and stir around to coat. Tip into your bowls, top with extra cheese, chopped parsley and some more pepper.

Eat. Rocket salad and gin and tonic optional.

Monday's Menu {cheat's ravioli}

How can it be the last week of March already?
This last week flew by, with my trip up to Brisbane, the weekend was upon us before we knew it. Poor Rob had a cold this week, so with the cold weather on the weekend a pot of soup and a casserole was in order.

This weeks menu:
Monday: After making a zillion spinach and ricotta triangles (Claudia Roden's recipe) for a Harmony Day lunch, I came home with the leftovers. We reheated them and made a Lebanese salad to match. I finally used the purslane I insisted we grow, it's nice and crunchy in salads. We froze the remaining triangles for an emergency meal some time.
Tuesday: Another salad with soft boiled eggs, prosciutto, Meredith Dairy Goat Cheese.
Wednesday: Our cheat's ravioli - see below for the recipe.
Thursday: Massaman Curry, whilst I was in Brisbane. I need to cook this one at home, I haven't eaten it before I don't think, if anyone has a favourite recipe for this curry please pass it on. Oh, and I couldn't resist the chocolate tart either.
Friday: Beef pho in the Canberra airport.
Saturday: Vegetable and barley soup.
Sunday: River Cottage Chicken and mushroom casserole with Cider. Best thing was there are enough leftovers to eat on pasta tonight after work and the gym.

The Hut Ravioli

As we ran through the supermarket the week before, we grabbed a packet of wonton wrappers from the refrigerated section.

Image from Supreme Quality Foods

We hadn't used these in a long time. But we had a faint memory of seeing Simon Bryant use them on the Cook and the Chef as ravioli instead of fresh pasta.

It was a week night, which means by the time we've been to the gym, collected our dogs from doggie day care (ie my parents place) and driven to the hut it was probably around 7. We decided to "make" ravioli for dinner. A week before I made a batch of Nigella's meatballs and frozen them for use in pasta and soups.

Nigella's meatballs

250 g pork, minced

250 g beef, minced (or we used 500g pork and veal mince)

1 eggs

2 tbsp parmesan, freshly grated

1 clove garlic, minced

1 tsp oregano

3 tbsp semolina, or breadcrumbs

1 pinches pepper

1 tsp salt

To make the meatballs, just put everything in a large bowl, and then, using your hands (if you wet them with a little water the mix doesn't stick as much), mix to combine, before shaping into small balls.

So I wrapped (a still frozen) meatball in between two wrappers (sealing the edge with a little water and squishing it out a little so the joins were not too thick).  Meanwhile Rob quickly fried a chopped onion and some garlic in a little olive oil before adding a bottle of tomato passata. We quickly boiled the ravioli then added them to the tomato sauce to finish off.

We served them with some dollops of ricotta cheese (left over from the triangles I'd made earlier), lots of chopped fresh basil and some grated parmesan.

They were good. I think we might have to try another filling this week. Any suggestions?