Uszka (and other hand-made pasta in the ravioli family)

Uszka (and other hand-made pasta in the ravioli family)
(no filling recipes included)

I have made tagliatelle, but I usually make uszka (small ravioli with a particular shape which is hard to describe) or pierogi (larger pasty- shaped ravioli).

The recipe is easy - 1 cup of flour (00 durum flour is best, but bread flour will work), a small egg, about 1/4 cup of water and a pinch of salt. Mix the ingredients to make a firm dough, then knead it for 10 minutes or so. You can feel the texture change when it is 'right'. I've never made the dough in a processor, but I'm sure that would work too.

On a floured board, roll out perhaps a third of the dough (depends on the size of the board) and roll it out so thin you can read a paper through it :). Seriously, this stuff expands like mad when you cook it, so you want it very, very thin.

Now make into the shapes you want. For uszka, I cut into 2" squares, drop a little filling in the centre, dampen 2 edges, fold over into a triangle and seal well. Then join the two long points to make a 'tiara' shape. Much easier is just to leave it as triangles, or cut into 2-3" rounds, fold those in half over the filling and seal.

Drop into boiling salted water and cook till they are how you like them.

Jenny, CoSS in England
(1/27/05)

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Wild Mushroom Soup

Wild Mushroom Soup

Well uhhhh.... (shuffling my feet and looking embarrassed.) When all those folks started lining up outside the kitchen door with their bowls, I got kinda shy. I tried to figure out how to make enough chanterelle soup for 527 people and figured that, if I go every week and buy and freeze all the mushrooms I can get my hands on and make soup when I have enough, it's still gonna be about 6 years 'til I can feed the lot of you! So I figure I'll share the recipe I came up with instead. It was pretty rich!

1 lb assorted wild mushrooms (though domestic will do in a pinch)
1/2 small onion, finely minced
3 cups homemade chicken stock
6 tbsp butter
1/4 cup sherry
3/4 cup of heavy cream
salt and pepper to taste
pinch of thyme

Use any broken or crumbled pieces of mushroom and chop 2/3 of the total you have.

Sauté the minced onion in 3 tbsp butter until tender. Add chopped mushrooms and sauté until mushrooms are soft. Add chicken stock, a pinch of thyme and simmer for an hour or so.

Set aside and slice the remaining mushrooms nicely then sauté them in the remaining butter. When they are fully cooked, add 1/4 cup sherry and let warm for 5 or 10 minutes while you puree the mushroom and stock mixture in a blender or food processor. It won't be completely smooth, but fairly. Return this to the pot and add the sliced mushrooms and sherry. Bring to a simmer, reduce heat and add cream, salt and pepper to taste, just heating through. Serve and enjoy.

Made about 4 or 5 servings.

It was good. It was very good.

Joy in SF
(1/14/05)

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Sylvia's Sourdough Starter Method

Sylvia's Sourdough Starter Method (capturing the Wild Yeast)

To make the starter, I cleaned my kitchen, emptied the trash and washed the can, scoured everything until it glowed, and washed and put away the pre-compost collecting bin for the duration. Opened the windows and aired the house. That got rid of most of the potentially negative invaders. Oh, and we ate all the ripe fruit in the house (fruit flies are death on starter and they gravitate toward the stuff, naughty little dive bombers).

In a glass bowl, with my bread-only wooden spoon, I stirred a couple of tablespoons of active culture plain yogurt, a cup of unbleached wheat flour, and a cup of filtered water. I set it out on the kitchen counter in a room temperature spot and left it uncovered.

To fill the air with good little yeastie beasties to befriend and influence the yogurt guys, I set a pyrex measuring cup of proofing yeast next to the starter bowl and replaced it daily. I also placed some empty wine bottles nearby, empty but for the sediment that is. An unfiltered 1980's French Bordeaux has a lovely effect on starter.

The starter burbled pretty quickly and I fed it for a few weeks before consigning it to a Tupperware in the frig. I gave my dad some of it a few years ago and within months his had a completely different flavor from mine.

beadlizard
(1/11/05)

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Avital's Sourdough Starter for the Super Lazy

Avital's Sourdough Starter for the Super Lazy

Mix 1 cup of water with 1 cup of flour. Leave the bowl out overnight with a handkerchief covering it to keep ants out. If it bubbles, you've got a starter.

I add another cup of water and cup of flour, stir, then put in the fridge in a container with a loose lid. It will need feeding every couple weeks or so.

I should add that I find it easier to catch yeast in the Judean desert than in Boston, so YMMV. Generally it's easier in summer than winter, too. In summer the mixture will start bubbling like a milkshake within a few hours. In winter sometimes it takes a little more than a day.

If you have a vintage starter with a pedigree, it is a good idea to keep some frozen and occasionally throw out your current starter and replace with the 'new' starter from the freezer. The reason is that the local fungi (including yeasts) will eventually crowd out the foreign fungi. That is why starters vary from region to region.

Avital
(1/11/05)

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Lena's Himalayan-style Whey-leavened Bread

Lena's Himalayan-style Whey-leavened Bread
(a method, not a recipe)

So I ran it by Lena who, after living 8 years in a cave in the Himalayas, is something of an expert on cooking with a wood fire.

She said her method in those years was first to make yogurt and then strain it to make yogurt cheese. Then she would use the whey drained from the yogurt as leavening for the bread. Then she'd have bread and cheese and said that this way, the amount of bread would be about right for the amount of cheese, no matter how much this turned out to be.

Anyway, for a basic sour dough/whey leavened whole wheat loaf, she would make a hardwood fire (oak, rhododendron, etc.) in the oven (hers was clay/mud and tin, but whatever oven) use it to cook a meal and then, afterwards, when it was burned down to coals and some ash, do the actual baking using hardwood coals.

Her advice is to make smallish loaves - no bigger than what a bread machine would make. Let the loaf rise (twice preferably) put it in a lightly oiled heavy pot that isn't a whole lot bigger than the final loaf will be (she says better to make two smaller loaves in two smaller pots than try to do one big one as they will bake more evenly that way.)

Invert the lid of the pot so it's concave. Heap coals around the pot and put a layer of coals on top on the inverted pot lid so that the pot has heat all around. Bake an hour or even two depending on temp or until the bread sounds crisp and hollow when you rap it.

She sez it's easy <g>  But this is from the gal who I've watched start a fire in the rain with three wet sticks and a handful of damp straw.
shared by Joy
(1/10/05 and 1/11/05)

---

(What else would you need for the bread, and what proportions? a bit of salt, a bit of oil/fat, sweetener? what else? Please?)

I asked Lena about this as she was falling asleep last night and got a rather rambling and entertaining explanation.

She says that, if you have enough whey from yogurt cheese to use it as the only liquid in your bread, it doesn't need starting.

Otherwise, if you're low on whey, you can use a smaller amount of it, a spoonful or two of yogurt and make a sponge by adding some flour to the liquid and letting it
sit for half a day or more in a warmish environment.

The ingredients were mainly whey, flour and salt. She said you could add a bit of oil if you had it, but they rarely had enough to spare. If one was short of flour (they often were - these were yogis living in caves on nothing) you could stretch it by adding a handful of ehrmung flowers (a kind of peppertree bush that grows up there.) or even rhododendron flowers with the stamens removed (the leaves and stamens are poisonous but the flowers are edible - they made wine and jam from them.)

She never used any sweetener in the bread, but might sprinkled sesame seeds on the outside of the loaves for extra flavor.

She says that, locally (Himachal Pradesh in the Himalayan foothills) this was referred to as "bahm roti" (risen bread) as opposed to chapatis or flat breads.

Joy
(1/10/05 and 1/11/05)

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Monk's Milk (aka new and improved version of Mock Bailey's)

They haven't been heard from in ages, but I've been assured that they are still hard at work in the wine cellar, scriptorium and the laboratory (say: la BOOOR a tory in a deep voice ;-).

From the later comes a refined beverage based on the Mock Bailey's Irish Crème posted annually since the beginning of Sheep Thrills.

Monk's Milk (aka new and improved version of Mock Bailey's)

1 can sweetened condensed milk
1 quart of non-dairy creamer (or dairy sub of your choice, the thicker the better)
1 tablespoon instant coffee granules dissolved in:
1/3 cup hot water (more or less)
1 cup cheapest of cheap blended whiskey (or better, if that's what floats your boat)
1 cup rum (any color)

Blend, shake or whisk together for at least three minutes. Serve very cold when freshly made. After the flavors mellow, serving at room temp is nice too.

Denise, Monk Liaison
(1/03/05)

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