Twitter Tagliatelle Tutorial – almost as good as being in someone else’s kitchen

For the full Tweety Conversation pulled together by Lynne using Storify click here : Twitter Tagliatelle Tutorial

My abbreviated version with mainly Carla’s tweets and photos – loads quicker or if you have a slow connection – click here) of the tutorial on Twitter that Carla gave us yesterday on making pasta with the Imperia pasta machine. I was given this wonderful gadget as a birthday present last year by my lovely sister and this was its first outing. I had borrowed one last year from Mitch who lives in Bristol but there was something lacking in our technique the one time we tried and we felt a bit out of our depth, so when Carla, expert chef, (in Rome) offered to teach me yesterday, I jumped at the chance!

I could write it all out here as a post but that doesn’t give the feeling of the fun of doing this yesterday and this way you get to see all Carla’s wonderfully detailed photos and read her instructions. She is a fantastic tutor and I feel really confident now that I can do this again!

Lynne, who tweets as @josordoni, another Twitter friend of Gibassier fame, has kindly spent some time to make the Storify story. I had a try at using Storify, but left out my own tweets. Lynne joined in and made the noodles by hand, an act of great determination!

I served the tagliatelle with chestnut mushrooms, onion, parsley, and a sauce of Charvroux goats cheese and some Serrano ham

So thank you Carla and thank you Lynne so very much for the company and the joy of sharing. You are both such kind and generous friends and I wonder daily at this world where one can be friends with people who one has never met in person and have such fun.

Have a lovely weekend!

My pasta was made with

3 eggs weighing about 140g unshelled
150 g of 00 Italian flour
150g of Semonlina Rimacinata flour (the finely milled durum wheat, which has a fine slightly gritty feel)
1 tbsp of water
and a lot of love from Carla

Citrus Fruit and the loveliness of Curds

Zeb Bakes Marmalade with Meyer Lemons I have made two lots of marmalade, started on 1st January which seems a long time ago now and then I moved on to the Seville Oranges when they arrived in the shops. Then I got bored with chopping peel and I cut my finger (poor little me!) so used up the remaining Meyer lemons and Sevilles in the house, which were getting a little ripe to make divine fruit curds which are now in the fridge. We love lemon curd and we love Seville Orange curd too now!

That is my red chilli plant in the kitchen still fruiting away in case you were wondering.

Zeb Bakes Lemon Shred Marmalade Did I tell you about the Meyer lemons, fabled for their sweetness and aroma, a fruit well known to Americans, but one I had never seen here. Gloria Nicols went shopping in Bristol and tweeted that she had found them at Tescos so we went off to find them and we did! I got some for a friend too who lives in a food desert in the East of England where their Tescos don’t stock such delights and gave her some as well at Christmas, the exchange of food being a great excuse for a get together!( along with smoked bacon ribs from Cockermouth, a Northern delicacy rarely seen in the South. But I am guessing it will become trendy one of these days to nibble on boiled bones once again… mark my words… but I digress)

The lemons are indeed quite different from Sicilian or Greek lemons, they have a delightful aroma of clementine and what I imagine is a laid back Californian sort of way about them, the sort of lemons that rollerblade and don’t moan about the weather.

I made luscious lemon curd with them two times. The second time I reduced the sugar as the first batch was a bit sweet for our tastes.

Lemon Curd by Zeb Bakes

Meyer Lemon Curd

Four ripe Meyer Lemons, finely zested and juice squeezed out. If you mash the remains gently in a sieve you can get a little thick extra goodness out of the pulp.
4 large eggs, lightly beaten
125 grams of unsalted butter, softened and chopped into small pieces
250 grams of sugar

Note: if using regular sour lemons or bitter Sevilles you might need more like 300 – 325 grams of sugar, but it is all to taste, best thing is to dissolve it all first and have a taste and take a view before you start the final cooking part. You might find you get away with a lot less sugar or you might be able to use half and half, I am not sure.

3 – 4 seven oz jars, washed and put in a warm oven to sterilize them. Lids in saucepan of boiling water on the hob. (I got three jars out of the above quantity and a ramekin over)

In a bain marie, or a bowl over a saucepan of simmering water, put all the zest, juice, butter, sugar and beaten eggs together and stir until the butter and sugar is all dissolved. If you don’t want any stringy bits in your curd, then it is probably a good idea to sieve the eggs first. I forgot and just hoiked out the stringy bit when I saw it lurking in there.

Keep the heat low, a gentle simmer, not a fast boil. If it is too hot you might get a scrambled egg effect. Stir continuously and watch the colours change gently in the pan. You might get a little foam as the eggs start to cook, turn the heat down, if necessary remove the bowl from the pan and allow it to cool down a bit. The most important thing is to keep stirring and be patient. The curd is ready when it coats the back of your spoon like a thin custard or single cream. It will thicken up more once it has cooled.

Boil up your funnel and ladle and put it into your jars and screw the lids on tightly. Books vary in saying how long it keeps from a month to three months. We try and eat it within a month but Brian remembers his Gran making it and keeping it in the larder for several months.

For the Seville Orange Curd I followed the same procedure as above, (I had six oranges left) used more sugar (325g) as the juice was more sour.

There was more juice so it took longer to set off and gave us four jars as opposed to three. I didn’t use more butter though or more eggs. Some recipes suggest adding cream or extra egg yolks, I think it is just one of those things that you can be fairly relaxed about. Keep the temperature low and stir constantly and you should be fine. Or try Celia’s microwave method which she blogged about here.

Gibassiers by Zeb Bakes

You can eat the curds just as they are with a spoon. You can spread it on toast, on teacakes, use it in pastry tarts, to sandwich cakes together, dip your Gibassiers in it for complete luxury and just enjoy it. It’s the sort of thing I make once a year and eat and give away and then it’s gone till next time. Though now I think about it, there is no reason not to make it more often…

There was a cake with a delicate lemon glaze for a while in the kitchen too. I liked these lemons and hope that we continue to import them into the UK.

CrackLemonGlazedcake

Chocolate Frangipane Tart from thelittleloaf

Quarry Park, Bristol

It’s been a grey and icy weekend here in Bristol. I have been out with YakTrax over my boots to grip into the ice, I am getting too unsteady on my feet to slide and skid, though I have fond memories of setting up iceslides on the street when I was younger and more bendy. We have played briefly in the park, wandered down through the wood, kicked a few snowballs into the air to be blown to smithereens by jumping poodles, inspected a magnificent seated snowman hanging out on a bench in Quarry Park, and climbed over small saplings brought down by the weight of snow on their branches.

Zeb inspects snowman in Quarry Park

It is very quiet though, I have seen the neighbours but that is about it. So what better way to spend a few spare hours than to imagine you are baking with a friend? I suggested to Heidi @ Steps On the Journey that we have a go at TheLittleLoaf’s Chocolate Frangipane Tarts. I was seduced by TheLittleLoaf’s lovely writing and her gorgeous photography as I have been many times before, but usually I look, bookmark and say “I must make this” and then I forget. I am very forgetful.

The recipe we did can be found in its beautiful entirety on by cliicking here. I am just going to include some pictures and notes from making it before they are all gone!

the thinnest pastry I have probably ever made!

This is a really clear recipe. I don’t have tartlet tins with loose bottoms, which I realised when I read the recipe properly this morning, so I improvised with these tins which worked fine.

An array of improvised tart tins

I used all the pastry and filling and made 4 4” tarts which are bigger than they look and hold a lot of filling and 6 little flat 3 “ tarts which are more like a small flat jam tart. The hour in the freezer was the time out crunching across the icy wastes of suburban Bristol with the poodles. Brian commented that we could just have left them in the garden!

All puffed up out of the oven

I needed to adjust the baking temperatures to accommodate the different sizes, the big ones took a bit longer and the small ones less time, but I didn’t burn anything and I think they are cooked OK.

Clementine topped chocolate frangipane tarts I wasn’t going to skate up to Waitrose to see if they had fresh cherries on a Sunday, so I carefully peeled some segments of clementines to try and stay true to the spirit of the recipe with a fresh fruit on the top. They look a bit 1970s don’t they?

I also finally used this little chocolate microwave melting pot thing that I got from Lakeland and it worked beautifully and I got a lot less chocolate over me than I do usually when I melt chocolate.

The fiddly part for me is always working with pastry, it really isn’t my strong point, but chilling it helps, and freezing it definltely stopped it shrinking while it baked, so I have learnt a useful tip there.

Anyway these are rich and delicious and everything a dark chocolate-almond loving person could want in a tea time treat! Thank you Little Loaf for the recipe! I need to get better at presentation but I was so relieved they didn’t fall apart with their thin and delicate pastry that I was perfectly content with the results. And here is Heidi’s post, an almost simultaneous broadcast! Hee hee! I love blogging at times like this :)