Baked penne dish

Did you know that the Dutch are known as ‘cheese heads’ (kaaskoppen)? I’m quite sure it is not a term a Dutch person would use for themselves but it is an internationally known term. I wasn’t entirely sure how we got to be called that, other then the fact that we sure do eat cheese a lot.

As it turns out, our friendly neighbors the Belgians, came up with that name in the period of the “Belgische Opstand” (1830-1939) when they no longer wanted to belong to the Netherlands and were calling us names. You guess what one of those names was; ‘kaaskop’. The thinking was that the round cheeses produces looked a bit like a head.

Gooey goodness

In fact when going a bit further into detail there appear to be several stories about the origin of the word but in general it is definitely something the Belgian’s call us..:) And that’s fine; there is quite some name calling involved in the relation between Belgians and the Dutch! Lol…

Now having said that; I LOVE cheese. Seriously. Any cheese really but I have a strong preference for Italian cheese, French cheeses and strong cheeses. But then I also love Old Amsterdam (strong old Dutch cheese, which is delicious!) or well, like I said all cheese.

So when I was approached by Sargento to feature one of their recipes on my blog I did not have to think long and hard. I mean… it’s cheese! When browsing through the collection of seriously yummy recipes on their site I kept going back to the one featured on the front page, which was an oven dish with baked penne and eggplant featuring some lovely mozzarella cheese. I used minced veal in this dish but the original is vegetarian so check it out here if you’re more a veggie person!

Baked penne

My father in law was coming for dinner last night so this is a good dish to serve if you have an informal dinner party. You can prepare the dish upfront and just pop it in the oven half an hour before you’re ready to eat. Tom thought it was a tiny bit on the cheesy side, but then he is not a big fan of cheese (weird man, that man of mine!!) but he did find the flavors here lovely, so this will definitely be made over and over again.

Baked Penne with eggplant, tomatoes and cheese

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Serves	4
Prep time	10 minutes
Cook time	1 hours, 5 minutes
Total time	1 hours, 15 minutes
Meal type	Main Dish
Misc	Serve Hot
Region	Italian
Website	Adapted from Sargento

Ingredients

• 4 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 tablespoon garlic (minced)
• 4 tablespoons fresh oregano (chopped)
• 3 pieces tomatoes (chopped into cubes)
• 3 sprigs thyme (leaves only)
• 1 shalot (finely minced)
• 350g minced vealmeat
• 400g penne (or other type of pasta)
• 1 courgette (chopped in cubes)
• 150ml tomato sauce
• 200g mozzarella (chopped or grated)
• 100g old cheese (grated)
• 1 eggplant (cut into cubes)

Directions

Preheat the oven to 180 C. (350 F) Brush a large enough baking dish with 1 tbsp of olive oil.

In a heavy skillet first brown the vealmince first until cooked. Bake the eggplant separately until cooked and set aside. Add the chopped onions to the veal, with the garlic and zucchini and bake until cooked. Add the eggplant back in and add the chopped tomatoes. Leave cooking until the tomatoes have lost most of their liquid at which point you add the tomato sauce in. I use a sofrito tomato base for this.

Mix in chopped oregano and thyme and season the dish to your liking with salt and pepper and remove from the heat. Cook your penne pasta in 11-12 minutes until al dente. Drain, rinse and add a little olive oil to the pasta to prevent it from sticking. Add the pasta in your vegetable mixture and fold in 2/3 of the grated cheese. Transfer to the baking dish. Put the mozzarella on top of the dish and finish with the remaining grated cheese. Bake this dish for 25-30 minutes in the oven. If it becomes to brown then you can cover it with aluminium foil.

Junglefrog Cooking disclosure: This post was sponsored by Sargento. Though I have been compensated to write this post, all opinions expressed are my own.

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Home made fresh buns

Don’t you just totally love it when you walk into the house and you smell that best of smells; freshly baked bread? And then to take it out of the oven and the moment you hear that soft crack when you break of a piece of warm crust and pop it in your mouth, unable to resist? O how I wish that scenario actually happened here in this very house!

Instead I tend to end up with bread that is either too dry, too firm or just plain disappointing… In all of the before three cases, it still beats getting the bread of the supermarket. Not that they have bad bread perse, but it’s just not the same as homemade, now is it? So yes, I do struggle with breadbaking. I followed a breadcourse before as you know, but as with many such things, haven’t baked a bread since. It was an enormously interesting course and I learned a lot but it was also pretty daunting to do all that stuff yourself. So when I learned about Levine’s workshop I decided that’s where I wanted to go.

Dough rolled and ready to be baked sprinkled with poppyseed

She approaches the whole breadbaking from a homebaking perspective, so I felt right at ease and with her guidance I actually started to feel confident I could maybe do this myself at home without too much danger of messing up the bread. We made two types of bread; the soft buns you see above and some crusty pistolets that I haven’t eaten yet. Too much bread to all eat in one go so they went straight into the freezer. But if the lunch we had is anything to go by then I just know that it is going to be awesome too. O and Levine gave us some amazing baguette too, which basically means I will have to come back to learn how to make those too.

Fresh crusty bread

For now I will tempt you with this recipe for soft buns, which you can also make into the pretty ‘braided’ buns you see on top and below. And trust me when I say that it took me a while to make anything resembling a knot with that bread but it was fun and if you can’t do that you can always just keep them round!

Fresh soft buns with seeds

Soft buns

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Serves	16
Allergy	Egg, Milk, Wheat
Meal type	Bread
By author	Levine van Doorne

Ingredients

• 560g flour (Good quality)
• 9g yeast (dry yeast)
• 10g sugar
• 60g butter (unsalted, at roomtemperature)
• 100g egg (At roomtemperatue, whisked loosely)
• 250 g full fat milk (lukewarm)
• 10g salt
• baking tin of 24 cm, greased

Additional ingredients

• 1 egg
• baking trays lined with baking paper

Additional ingredients (Optional)

• poppyseed or sesameseed for the top

Directions

Kneading the dough in the kitchenaid; put all ingredients, except the butter in a bowl. Stir together with a wooden spoon. Using the doughhook, knead the dough for about 8 minutes and then add slowly add the butter and keep kneading until the dough feels pliable and is stretchy. It should feel as sticky as a post-it note. It is usually around 10-15 minutes. If you're kneading by hand; put all ingredients into a large bowl. Stir with a wooden spoon until the flour gets moist. Turn out onto a worksurface and knead by hand for about 15-20 minutes til you have a pliable dough. Don't ad extra flour if it's not really necessary; the dough will get less sticky during the kneading.

1st rise; Grease a large bowl with some oil and put the dough in. Turn once so all sides are covered with oil. Cover the bowl and leave the dough to stand at roomtemperature for about 1 hour so it doubles in volume.

Shaping: Turn the dough out onto a lightly oiled workbench. Divide with a doughcutter into 16 equal parts and make them into little balls. Leave those covered for about 10 minutes and round them again firmly.

For separate buns: put the balls of dough onto a baking tray a few centimeters apart. If they do not fit onto one tray take your other tray and divide them over the trays. Bake them one after the other.

Breadcrown: Divide 8 balls of dough into a baking tin and put the other 8 in the other one.

Coat the dough balls with a little bit of eggwash and sprinkle with seeds if you want to.

Second rise; leave them covered at roomtemperature for about 60 minutes until almost doubled in size. The dough has risen enough once you press a finger in and it slowly moved back.

During the second raise preheat the oven to 200 C. Bake the buns for 15-20 minutes brown. Remove from the baking tins or from the baking trays and leave to cool on a cooling rack. You can freeze these really well. You can use the same dough to also make little knots in your bread. See notes

Note

As mentioned you can use these same buns to make different shapes. You can rol them out after the first raise to very thin long strand and then tie a knot in them or use your imagination to make something pretty of them. Continue also here with the second raise

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Sage and corn cake

Are you all excitedly waiting for the new challenge to see if it is any better then the last one?? Well I can assure you it IS better then the last one, although it doesn’t take a lot to make it better. I thought about which recipe to pick a lot before choosing. It is the time right before Christmas after all and a lot of people are stressed and feeling the pressure of performing for Christmas dinner. So I am giving you a real easy recipe this time. A real easy one that you can also use for the actual Christmas dinner itself. Now what more do you want?

The challenge recipe by Ben Dearley or William Meppem

The challenge recipe this month comes from Donna Hay issue 48 and the photo is either by Ben Dearley or William Meppem. It was a Christmas feature with various menu’s and it didn’t specify which photographer took which photo, so I’ll just name them both. Having learned from the previous challenge I tested the recipe this time beforehand and I am glad to tell you that it is correct and works. I couldn’t find instant polenta which the recipes calls for so I used semolina instead. That worked fine. I also did a batch with cornflour. Those were drier and slightly less fluffy so I would advice to go with either polenta or semolina, but if you have nothing else, you can use cornflour and add a little bit more sour cream to make it moist enough. That should work too. I’ll first give you the recipe

Sage and prosciutto corn cakes

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Serves	12
Prep time	10 minutes
Cook time	25 minutes
Total time	35 minutes
Meal type	Side Dish
From magazine	Donna Hay Magazine

Ingredients

• 170g instant polenta
• 75g all purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/4 teaspoon baking soda
• 2 tablespoons sage leaves (chopped)
• sea salt
• black pepper
• 360g sour cream
• 2 eggs
• 12 sage leaves (extra)
• 12 slices prosciutto

Directions

Preaheat oven to 180. Place the polenta, flour, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda (baking soda), sage, salt, pepper, cream and eggs in a bowl and mix well to combine. Place extra sage in the bases of 12 lightly greased 1/2 cup capacity (125 ml) muffin tins. Line each tin with prosciutto and fill with polenta mixture. Bake for 15-20 minutes or until cooked. Turn out to serve. Makes 12

Note

I could not find instant polenta so I used semolina flour instead. That worked fine, so if you have no polenta use that. I also made a batch with cornflour and that worked as well although the batter and the final cakes were a littl drier then the one with semolina. I would use a bit more fluids if you bake with the cornflour.

Now… you can see that the first photo here is by me, so I can also post this to foodgawker and the likes.. I’m not entirely satisfied with my result and I am sure you can do a better job. Couple of notes to remember; while the light is coming from roughly behind and a little from the right it is not extremely bright light. As you can see in my photo I was too close to the light source (south facing window) so it is too bright in the background. I also noticed that they actually wrap the prosciutto around the bottom of the cakes giving it a different look. Keep that in mind when following the recipe. I will try and redo them too since I finally found polenta too. I am curious to see the difference in taste.

We ate these pretties together with our red lentil soup and it was quite good. I can see this work really well with some good gravy (as that is what they’re intended to be for.. as a side dish to your Christmas turkey.)

You can find all the rules for the Donna Hay Styling and Photography Challenge on the special page here. Deadline for this entry is December 30th. Due to Newyears it’s gonna be one day early so I can actually post it before the new year. (Can you believe it is almost 2012??)

If you’ve completed your entry please fill in the details through the below list. You will only be able to see it once it is approved. Like an image? Click below! Clicking on the image will bring you to the blogpost of the entry!

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Delicious persimmons cake

Do you have certain ingredients that you simply cannot resist? The type of ingredient you see in the markets or supermarket and just HAVE to have? I’m pretty terrible when it comes to things like that, so I tend to end up in a lot of cases with ingredients that have no immediate need or use. Or maybe terrible is not the right word. To me it is the perfect reason to try out new things, recipes that you have never tried before or ingredients you have no clue what to do with.

That is more or less how I ended up with a couple of persimmons. Persimmons are not very well known here in Holland and they’re also known by the name of sharonfruit or kakifruit. I kind of forgot to take a photo of the whole fruits for easier identification so I

Persimmons, kaki fruit or sharonfruit

got a stockphoto here to do that for me.

 

 

We do not want you to get confused… Now I love these fruits and I have known them for a while. But then again, like I said, I am the kind of girl who will buy any unknown ingredient. Just to see what it is and discover – maybe – a new taste. So I’ve known these orange lovelies for a while, love to eat them but had only eaten them in their raw shape and form.

I can’t remember exactly how the conversation went but Meeta and I were chatting on twitter and she mentioned she had a recipe for persimmon cake on her blog. Naturally I immediately looked and liked the sound of the spices so that is what I wanted to make. And I can tell you, it was delicious!! The persimmon inside the cake makes it lovely and moist and great to eat and it also stays edible for quite a long time (no, no.. I’m not talking weeks here but trust me this cake will not last you a week!!)

Instead of a regular cake tin I used a Bundt pan. It might be an old-fashioned shape (is it??) but I love it and it came out looking very pretty indeed. The only thing I changed from the original recipe is the addition of pistachio instead of walnuts. For the simple reason that I had those in the kitchen.

I also used only 4 persimmons. Mine were pretty big and I figured the 400 gram of puree that came out of those 4 (!) would be sufficient. Unfortunately mine could have been a little bit sweeter but still the cake was entirely delicious and definitely one I will be making again! If only to please my dad who has been eyeing my blog too closely and is disappointed he does not get more cakes brought to him. Sorry dad, I will make up for that soon!

 

Spicy cake with persimmon

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Recipe type: Dessert

Author: Meeta at What’s for Lunch Honey

Prep time: 20 mins

Cook time: 50 mins

Total time: 1 hour 10 mins

Serves: 12

Ingredients

• 4 – 6 ripe and soft persimmons – peeled and puréed. You can use an electric mixer or blender for this.
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 115 grams butter
• 200g brown sugar
• 350g all-purpose flour
• 1 egg
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon ground clove powder
• 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
• 60g roasted pistachio – coarsely chopped

Instructions

1. Preheat oven at 180 degrees Celsius.
2. Add the baking soda to the puréed persimmon. You will notice that the persimmon will set and become more solid. No cause for alarm. Although this might look strange it is perfectly normal.
3. In a mixing bowl whisk the butter and sugar with and electric mixer, until creamy and fluffy. Stir in the persimmon and egg, beating until well combined. Using a rubber spatula, stir in the dry ingredients to the persimmon mixture. Blend in well and stir in the nuts.
4. Spoon the batter into a round greased cake pan and bake for 40-50 minutes or until the knife comes out clean.
5. Take out and allow to cool on a rack. Sprinkle generously with icing sugar. If you would like to freeze this cake then skip this part and freeze in an airtight container.

2.1.7

Moist with a crunch from the pistachio!

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Beautiful and tasty nectarine and frangipane flan

Masterchef Australia by itself is responsible for me producing a whole lot of recipes that I watched on the show. This delicious nectarine frangipane flan is one of those. Original recipe is from Maggie Beer.

While Tom and I watch episode after episode of season 1 of masterchef Australia, dish after dish is whipped up and even the ones that get bad reviews are probably all dishes I would not be able to make myself. So I’m always pretty impressed with what they make. Granted there are always people that tell me that the people on masterchef cannot cook. That it’s all child’s play. Child’s play?? Are you serious? Sure there is an element of show in there that’s just part of the tv series and that’s fine, but I refuse to believe that the top 24 of masterchef cannot cook. That’s just a ridiculous assumption.

I think they’re all brilliant. Some more then others (we all have our favorites) but I totally love watching the show and I do get inspired by it a great deal. I would not have made a chocolate mousse with olive oil if it wasn’t for George Calombaris and now this dessert. I think it was actually from season 3 that they showed this dish… I’m starting to wonder about the season now… (the reason being that they started season 3, while season 1 was still running. Very nice if the first episode shows you the winner of season 1. That was a total bummer…)

Delicious small flan with nectarine and verjus glaze

It was part of a 3 item dessert that Maggie Beer (what a lovely lady!!) presented to the contestants and they had to reproduce. This flan caught my eye and I just had to make it. Luckily the recipe was on the website of Maggie so that was easily fixed. However; one of the ingredients that was needed for this was verjuice glaze… What?? I never heard of verjuice (or verjus as we call it here) before so it took some tweeting around before I had the answer. It’s essentially the juice of unripe grapes and ofcourse, not something you can buy in a supermarket.

With a little taste of summer; nectarine flan

Luckily Hans Klomp, who is the (head?)chef at Vineyard Catering where I did a few foodshoots a couple of months back, tweeted to me that it was sold at Vanilla Venture. They responded via twitter quite quickly and while they normally don’t deliver to consumers they kindly agreed that I could buy a bottle. It was delivered to a restaurant here in Almere where I could pick it up. So fantastic service by Vanilla Venture! I was really happy with that.

So I had a bottle of verjuice but now I still needed to make the dessert. And that is what I did today. I loved the taste of the dessert; the sweetness of the frangipane and the slightly sour taste of the verjuice went brilliantly together. I did make a few mistakes when baking so it could have looked better, but this was my first time with this dough (never my strongest point) so all things considering; I’m pretty happy with how it turned out!

Nectarine frangipane flan with verjuice glaze

5.0 from 4 reviews

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Recipe type: Dessert

Author: Maggie Beer (small adaption from me)

Prep time: 30 mins

Cook time: 30 mins

Total time: 1 hour

Serves: 2

It’s summery, it’s fruity, it’s not as complicated as you might think and well, simply delicious!

Ingredients

• Sour Cream Pastry
• 75 gr flour
• 60 gr cold, unsalted butter, in cubes
• 40 gr sourcream
• Frangipane
• 60 gr butter, soft at roomtemperature
• 75 gr caster sugar
• 1 egg
• 1 tbsp grand marnier
• zest 1/4 lime
• 100 gr almond flour
• 10 gr all purpose flour
• Verjuice glaze
• 1/2 cup Brix verjus red (mix of red and white grapes)
• 1/4 cup castor sugar
• 2 nectarines, halved, deseeded and sliced thinly

Instructions

Pastry

1. Place flour and butter in a kitchen machine or stickblender and process until mixture resembles fine breadcrumbs.
2. Add sour cream and pulse until pastry just starts to come together. Remove, divide in half and press into two discs. Cover with cling wrap and place in a refrigerator to chill for 10 minutes.

Frangipane

1. Preheat a fan forced oven to 175 C. For the frangipane, place butter and castor sugar into kitchen machine or stick blender and process until light and creamy.
2. Add egg and process for 1 minute. Add the Grand Marnier and lemon zest and process for 30 seconds before adding the flour and almond meal. Process to combine.
3. Set aside until ready to use.

For the verjuice glaze, pour the Brix verjuice and sugar into a small saucepan and allow to boil rapidly for 2 minutes.

1. Remove from heat and set aside. Place pastry between two sheets of baking paper and roll out to 3 mm thick.
2. Roughly cut two 6 cm x 9 cm rectangles, transfer to a baking paper lined oven tray.
3. Make a slight insertion, only half way through the pastry, 3 mm from the edge, down both sides and at either ends. Prick the centre cut section with a fork. Place onto a baking paper lined oven tray and bake for 15 minutes. Just to be clear here; you remove the puffed up part of the centre piece, so not the entire middle part as that will leave you with just the edges. What you need is like a little basket where you can put the frangipane in. In the oven the middle part will have puffed up a bit, you take that top layer of.
4. Remove from oven and remove the centre piece of the pastry, leaving you with a small case. Fill centre with 1 tbsp of frangipane.
5. Top frangipane with 5-6 slices of nectarine and brush with verjuice syrup.
6. Bake for 10-15 minutes, remove from oven and brush with verjuice syrup and set aside to cool.

Notes

Depending on your oven the baking times might be longer. I found that mine were not browning yet after 15 minutes in the oven, but I didn’t know how much more they would brown in the 2nd part so I took them out which was a mistake looking back. They can be a bit brown when you start on the second process. If it is still too raw it will not cook properly.

The part where it says to remove the middle section can be a little confusing. I know I was confused initially. What you need to do is you remove the top layer of the middle section but you leave the bottom in as that will have to support your frangipane.

2.1.7

If you’re also curious to find out how the former contestants and winner of the first season of Masterchef Australia are doing? I know I was, so I  looked up the websites of my favorites. So have a look if you want!

Julie Goodwin – Julie is on her second cookbook now which is about to be released soon.

Justine Schofield – Justine has started her own catering company

Poh Ling Yeow (with her artwork) – and via ABC tv where she has her own tv series called Poh’s Kitchen I would love to watch that but it’s in Australia only apparently…

Chris Badenoch – He wrote a cookbook too but there is also some controversial stuff going on around him. I’m not interested enough to find out but if you’re into juice gossip… I would google some more.

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