Astonishing Chorizo, Mushroom, Spinach Penne

Cooking Adventure Number #10 – Astonishing Chorizo, Mushroom, Spinach Penne

For my tenth main ingredient, my sister’s boyfriend selected ‘chorizo’. I researched and selected three recipes including Chorizo Pilaf, Chorizo + Mushroom + Spinach Penne and Spanish Chicken and Chorizo C. All recipes looked fantastic however I chose Chorizo + Mushroom + Spinach Penne because Casserole since it was cooking on Father’s Day, my dad really enjoys eating pasta dishes so this was my present to him. The ingredients for ‘Chorizo, Mushroom, Spinach Penne’ are:

Penne

Diced Tomatoes

Chorizo

Olive Oil

Garlic

Mushroom

Spinach

Pasta Sauce (no shown + optional)

 These are the ingredients for this recipe.

This recipe was very basic but it’s very heartfelt to me because it’s my dad’s present for Father Day so I have to make it to the best it can be. Before I started any main steps, I cooked the pasta because it’s one of the longest steps and if I finish everything on time, the pasta will be just cooked and warm. During the preparation photo, I boiled some water in the kettle so I don’t need to use lots of heat when it’s on the stove and it will take less time for the pasta to cook. Once I poured the water into a “pasta” saucepan, it didn’t take very long for the water to start bubbling.  

I think that I put too much water into the saucepan because whenever I put the heat onto high or medium, the water would rise and start bubbling out as this photo shows. That day, I also had to be a photographer while I was cooking because my cousin wasn’t here at that time.

I had to fry the chorizo which is a special type of sausage which has a very salty/spicy taste when eaten by itself. Usually you don’t eat it by itself but with other meals especially pasta dishes. I had to fry the chorizo for around two minutes. Within the two minutes, the smell from it was amazingly delicious, felt like I was working in an Italian restaurant!

After two minutes, I had to put in the chopped mushroom. The mushroom gave the chorizo sweetness so it’s not as salty as before. The juices from the chorizo started to separate from the chorizo and made an ‘oil seasoning’ for the mushrooms which made the kitchen smell absolutely divine!

Within ten minutes, the pasta had already been cooked. When I tried one penne, it was soft but some parts of it were still hard. I decided to transfer the pasta/water into another saucepan because the pasta was sticking to the saucepan because of its small size. It certainly made the pasta cooked more because now the pasta had free room to move around. Once the pasta had finished cooking, I poured the water and put the pasta into a bowl. My mum used a trick to make the pasta not stick together and give extra flavour which was mixing butter into the pasta. It gave a mouth-watering smell of butter which made my taste buds dance.

I placed the diced tomato into the chorizo/mushroom mixture. When I looked at the mixture, it was missing a major component which the recipe didn’t mention… PASTA SAUCE! Luckily, I found a 750ml bottle of pasta sauce which my sister who is currently overseas made with her fiancée for my mum. I poured the whole bottle in which now the mixture looked like a red pond with chorizo and mushroom. I had to wait for the mixture to thicken which took a long time but the smell was fantastic in the kitchen!

The mixture took almost forty-five minutes to thicken because the pasta sauce made the mixture extremely watery and made it take longer than the recipe says (the recipe said it should have taken 5 minutes but this was without the pasta sauce.) Once the mixture thickened, I placed the spinach in which gave out a really weird scent but the sauce made it smell like… tomatoes.

After one hour of cooking this recipe, I was extremely satisfied with the final product. The presentation of the pasta, sauce and spinach leaves looked so professional. As if I just inherited a famous artist’s designing skills! Since it was Father’s Day, I let my dad have the first taste. He was surprised that it tasted so amazing, he loved the chorizo and how the sauce made the chorizo less salty. Then it was my turn to taste my meal. It was extraordinary! The sauce was so rich in flavour, although it was still a bit watery, the chorizo was perfect in terms of flavour and the pasta was flavoursome although there was too much butter that it kind of overthrew the sauce’s sweet flavours. It was a great Father’s Day dinner and the food didn’t stop there; my cousin and I cooked lamb ribs and chicken/ beef sausages. Sadly my next recipe is going to be my last recipe for this project L but this recipe isn’t going to be a small, it’s going to be BIG!

This recipe was taken from TASTE.COM

Q: What type of sausage do you like?

Please place your comments in the comment section below.

Exquisite Vietnamese Crispy Savoury Pancakes

Cooking Adventure Number #9 – Exquisite Vietnamese Crispy Savoury Pancakes

For my ninth main ingredient, my friend selected ‘prawns’. I researched and selected three recipes including Char Kway Teow, Chinese – Style Mushroom Rice and Vietnamese Crispy Savoury Pancakes. All recipes look amazingly delicious however I chose Vietnamese Crispy Savoury Pancakes because it is a traditional Vietnamese recipe, one of my favourite recipes that my mum cooks and I want to know how to make it like my mum. The ingredients for ‘Vietnamese Crispy Savoury Pancakes’ are:

Mushroom

Pork Belly

Bean Sprouts

Prawns

Spring Onions

Coconut Cream

Ground Turmeric

Salt

Onion

Garlic

Sugar

Water

Rice Flour

Pork Belly

Since this is my first time making this recipe, I’ve let my mum do most of the steps such as cutting the pork belly. The first thing you have to do is to separate the bones and the meat (belly). While my mum was cutting through the meat it made this squeaky sound which I didn’t like.

Once my mum separated the bones form the meat, the next thing she did was cut the fat off the belly. According to Luke Nguyen’s pancake recipe, you would usually leave the fat on but since my mum and dad do not eat the fat, she cut it off. I love eating the fat but it’s my mum’s decision.

Once she removed most of the fat from the meat she cut the meat into strips.

She probably cut around 60 strips and I couldn’t wait to fry them.

Pancake Mixture

This is me pouring in the coconut cream into the rice flour. The coconut cream tasted really sweet and smooth but the rice flour was tasteless so I believe the combination would only taste like coconut.

The next thing that went in was the water. Obviously it tasted plain but it made the mixture look less powdery.

Next was the milk. The milk added a smooth texture to the mixture and after adding all the other ingredients in, it still smelt like coconut.

The next thing was the ground turmeric which is an Indian spice. It smelt really bad but when I added it into the mixture it was delicious!

Next was the chopped spring onions. It gave the mixture a lovely onion scent.

he last step was to mix it all together so it turns into a smooth mixture with no lumps of rice flour left. While I was mixing, the turmeric flew into my eyes and I couldn’t see for like five minutes but I could still mix! When I got my vision back, the mixture was smooth and had no lumps.

This is what the mixture looked like after mixing it for ten minutes. I tasted it and it was absolutely divine!

Fillings

This is me cutting the mushrooms in half for the filling which goes into the pancake. Although it says not to use mushrooms on Luke Nguyen’s recipe, my mum tends to use mushroom for extra flavour. Since I love mushrooms, I agreed with her to use them.

These are the finished prawns after ripping their heads off, peeling the skin and legs off. This is my first time actually peeling uncooked prawns, it was difficult at first but I got the hang of it after my fifth prawn. Some of the prawns had sharp things coming out of their skin which pricked me a couple of times.

This is me lightly frying the stripped pork belly with garlic. The aroma in the kitchen was amazingly delicious! 

Making “banh xeo “

The first thing was to put three strips of pork belly onto a heated pancake pan with oil on it. I left the pork belly on the pan for a few minutes. Sometimes the oil splatters so it may be best to put a pan on top. Then I put in two prawns and left it for a few minutes. Next I put in a handful of chopped onion and leave it for a few minutes.  The aroma from the fillings was exquisitely indulgent and I couldn’t wait to try it with the pancake mixture.

Once it had been in for a couple of minutes, I put one ladle of pancake mixture into the pan and spread it evenly around the pan and cooked it for three minutes. At this point, the kitchen smelt like a real Vietnamese restaurant.

After three minutes, I put in a bunch of bean sprouts on one side of the pancake and then placed a handful of mushrooms on top of the bean sprouts.

I then use a spatula to flip half of the pancake to one side. The tip from my mum was to slide the spatula ¾ of the way under and flip it. So far, it has been successful as this photo shows.

After two hours of cooking this recipe, I was extremely pleased about my final product. The presentation of the pancake with the salad and fish sauce looked strikingly brilliant. The pancakes looked like bowls and the salad looked like the food which was in the bowl. I was the first person to try the recipe.  The pancakes were fairly crispy but may have been crispier if we ate them immediately and the filling was gorgeous and exotic. Dipping the pancakes into the fish sauce made it taste marvellous. My family enjoyed the recipe, as usual but most of pancakes had too much turmeric which overpowered the filling. My highlight was the pancake with the filling and the lowlight was the mint because I didn’t like the taste of it. I can’t wait for my TENTH RECIPE!

This recipe was taken from SBS Food Website and my mother’s knowledge.

Q: Do you like Vietnamese cuisine? If not, why?

Please place your comments in the comment section below. 

Extravagant Goat’s Cheese Tortellini with Roasted Beetroot, Beetroot Puree, Beetroot Broth and Candied Walnuts

Cooking Adventure number #8 – Extravagant Goat’s Cheese Tortellini with Roasted Beetroot, Beetroot Purée, Beetroot Broth and Candied Walnuts

For my eighth main ingredient, my friend selected ‘beetroot’. I researched and selected three recipes including beetroot and thyme muffins, beetroot and carrot soup and goat’s cheese tortellini with roasted beetroot, etc. All recipes look delightfully tasty however, I chose Goat’s Cheese Tortellini because when I first saw this recipe on Masterchef, I was really interested about how all the components on the dish worked together to taste excellent. I also love beetroot and goat’s cheese so maybe the combination of beetroot and goat’s cheese would be brilliant. Also, this recipe is one of the best and signature dishes of Masterchef 2011. The ingredients to ‘Goat’s Cheese Tortellini with Roasted Beetroot, Beetroot Purée, Beetroot Broth and Candied Walnuts’ are:

Goat’s Cheese

Chives

Lemon Zest

Thickened Cream

Flour

Egg Yolks

Whole Egg

Pure Olive Oil (used Extra Virgin)

Milk (used Full Cream)

Sea Salt (used Table Salt)

Carrots

Celery

Onions

Garlic Cloves

Water (not shown)

Parsley

Bay Leaves

Peppercorn

Beetroot

Fennel Seeds

Horseradish

Walnuts

Sugar

It took me one hour and thirty minutes in total to prepare all the ingredients. This included zesting, peeling, chopping, measuring, etc. with lots of ingredients for this recipe, I knew that preparation was going to take a long time.

Goat’s Cheese Filling

This is me putting the lemon zest, chives and thickened cream onto the goat’s cheese. When I tasted the goat’s cheese on its own, it was extremely salty so I believed that when everything was finished and ready to taste, the beetroot will balance the flavours out since beetroot is very sweet. The chives had a very unpleasant scent which put me off the filling for a little bit but the lemon zest smelt nice. 

This is the goat’s cheese filling being mixed well. I could barely smell the chives’ unlikable scent which was great. I tasted some filling and it was still salty with extra lemon and chive flavour.

Tortellini dough

This is me pouring in the egg yolks, olive oil and milk into the flour which has been shaped into a well.

Once I finished pouring the ingredients in, I mixed the mixture with a fork until the mixture came together. 

This is me mixing the mixture with a fork.  It doesn’t look like it’s together but my mother said it looked fine enough. I usually follow some of my mother’s instructions because she’s cooked more recipe than I have and she knows if that’s ready or not ready.

After mixing the mixture with a fork, I sprinkled some flour in the almost finished dough and started kneading it until the surface of the dough was smooth and elastic. It took a lot of effort to knead for seven minutes but it was worth my energy.

Once the surface was smooth and was elastic, I rolled it into a log-like shape and placed cling wrap around it and placed in the fridge for the dough to rest for half an hour. This dough was a time-consuming as the pizza dough which had to rest in total for two hours at the heater.

Vegetable Stock

This is me mixing the chopped vegetables into an oiled saucepan until the vegetables start to caramelise. The smell of the vegetables was plain and I hoped something could make it smell nice.

Once the vegetables began to caramelise, I had to add the garlic then leave the vegetables to cook for two minutes without stirring. The smell of garlic made the other vegetables smell delicious. Thank heavens for the garlic!

Once the vegetables had been cooked for two minutes, I poured the water into the vegetable saucepan and waited until the water began to boil while stirring and adding the bay leaves and peppercorn. Once I added the last ingredient, I turned the heat from high to low and let the stock simmer for the next hour. I occasionally tasted it and it was a bit plain but the smell was amazing.

Beetroot Broth

Next step was the beetroot broth. First, I had to roast the beetroot which had been drizzled with olive oil in the oven for thirty to thirty five minutes. It took almost an hour for them to become soft which was caused me to become curious about why this had happened.

After one hour, this is what the roasted beetroot for the broth looked like, although it looks burnt, it is actually soft, sweet and you couldn’t taste that burnt flavour. 

After the beetroot had cooled down, I placed them into a saucepan and poured some of the vegetable stock into the saucepan so it covered all the roasted beetroot.  It smelt flavoursome in the kitchen when I poured the stock into the saucepan. I couldn’t wait for the dish to be finished.

After putting the stock in, I had to wait for it to boil and when it started boiling, I put in some fennel seeds as it says in the recipe. After putting in fennel seeds, I put the heat down to low and it simmer for half an hour. The smell was extravagant.

After thirty minutes, I put the beetroot/stock into a blender so it combined into a puree and sifted it to remove the remaining fennel seeds and beetroot that did it get blended. I poured it back in the saucepan and added horseradish, salt and pepper for extra taste. This is the photo of the beetroot broth. I did a taste test and it tasted so marvellous, I couldn’t wait to try it with the other components of this recipe.

Beetroot Purée 

To make the puree, I had to put beetroot into a saucepan of boiling water and leave it to boil for twenty-five minutes or until soft. Similar to roasting the beetroot, it took longer to soften the beetroot for some reason. It took almost one hour to become soft.

Once the beetroot had softened, I had to leave them out so they could cool down. When I tried one beetroot, it was so soft and sweet that it was like the flavour was dancing on my tongue.

After they cooled down, I placed them into a saucepan and added thickened cream. After adding cream, I had to turn on the heat to medium and let the beetroot cook with the cream for five to ten minutes.

After ten minutes, the beetroot had gone very soft to falling apart soft and the cream had turned from white to warm red. In just ten minutes, they changed dramatically.

This is the blender filled with the ‘falling apart’ beetroot and red cream which is about to be pureed. Before I poured everything into the blender, I tasted the beetroot and cream and it had a lovely sweet taste so I was impressed with progress so far.

After the beetroot and cream had been blended into a smooth puree, it looked really good and it tasted absolutely divine!!! I couldn’t wait for the other components to be ready.

Roasted Beetroot

This is one of the baby beetroot with olive oil on it. When I was buying the beetroot for each component, I had a problem in finding fresh small beetroots at the supermarket or grocery. When I finally realised that I couldn’t find any, I decided to buy the canned baby beetroots. I wish they were fresh ones because I usually buy fresh produce. I baked the baby beetroots for twenty minutes.

Before I put the beetroots in, the recipe that I was following came too close to the fire on the stove and burned one sector of the sheet. The sheet now looks interesting to look at but some of the instructions were missing so we had estimate what we had to put in, how long it would  take and what the temperature was.

This time, the baby beetroots actually were soft after the twenty minutes were finished. They smelt so heavenly but since they were HOT, I didn’t want to try them yet.

Tortellini 

This is me and my cousin rolling out the pasta dough through a pasta machine. To get the consistency of thin and smooth pasta, I had to put the dough in number 6 once and number 2 twice. Sometimes, the pasta didn’t get to the consistency so I did number 6 twice.

This is the pasta dough being rolled out at a fine consistency. Sometimes, the pasta dough got stuck in the machine because there wasn’t enough flour in the roller or the dough was too dry, but usually , there isn’t enough flour.

After rolling out the dough, we had to cut 10cm circles for the tortellini. Since I didn’t have a cookie cutter, I used the pastry cutter used in my corn entrée pastries recipe instead. I had lots of dough leftover so I put the leftover dough together and rolled it out to a fine consistency and cut circles of them again. If there was more, I repeated the same step.

Making the tortellini

In the past, I’ve always thought making tortellini by hand was very tricky and would usually buy the pre-made ones. For this recipe, I looked on the internet to see how to make tortellini by hand and it was extremely easy. Here’s Step 1:

Use one circle to make one tortellini.

Step 2: Put a small (very small) amount of the goat’s cheese filling in the middle of the circle. Some of my tortellini had too much filling which exploded when I tried folding it into halves.

Step 3: Apply water or egg whites to the half of the circle and hold in half. Press the sides down to make sure the sides are secure. If they are not, when cooking them; the filling will fall out and all you have is dough.

Step 4: Pull the sides together and you’ll form the tortellini! Now I know that it isn’t hard after all.

Step 5: Once finished a tortellini, keep repeating till there is no filling or dough left.

My collection of hand-made tortellini. At one point, I had no pasta dough left but had lots of filling so I used my mother’s wonton sheets and as a replacement. It looked as good as the ‘real’ tortellini but it wasn’t a good idea. You’ll find out why it wasn’t a good idea.

To cook the tortellini, I had to put salted water in a saucepan to boil and once it was boiled, I plopped each tortellini. To see whether a tortellini has cooked, they have to float to the top then wait for an extra minute for the pastry to cook. The ‘pasta dough’ tortellinis were fine but once I put the ‘wonton’ tortellini, the filling just blended in with the water and all I had was a cooked wonton sheet. That’s why I will never use wonton sheets for tortellini.

Candied Walnuts

This is me mixing the sugar and water in a saucepan at a medium heat. This was actually my second attempt at caramelising because my first attempt, I accidentally used salt instead. I didn’t realise until I noticed it was browning. It was a funny moment for me.

After waiting for fifteen minutes or so, the sugar started browning but it browned so quickly that it looked like the sugar was burning. That wasn’t too good!

Once I saw it was burning, I threw the walnuts in and they added a lovely and nutty smell into the burnt sugar which made it more appetizing to eat.

 Once the walnuts had an even coating, I poured the walnuts onto a baking tray to rest. Although it smelled burnt, I loved the colour of the caramel which made me want to eat the walnuts. I tried one and it just had a little burnt flavour to it but it was delicious to eat.

After three and a half hours of cooking this recipe, I was exceptionally pleased about my final product. The presentation of all the components looked stunning and the green towel makes the plate look spectacular. I was the first person to try the recipe. The beetroot puree was sweet but not oversweet, the beetroot broth was amazingly delicious, the candied walnut was brilliant but slightly burnt, the tortellini was slightly hard but the filling was completely flavoursome. The best thing about this recipe is that everything works together, not just by itself. My family really enjoyed the dish, everyone’s highlight was the broth and the lowlight was either the candied walnut or the tortellini. I can’t wait for my ninth recipe!!!

This recipe was taken from the Masterchef Australia website.

Q: Do you like beetroot? If not, why?

Please place your comments in the comment section below.