Faster pasta

Making one’s own pasta is a winner on every count. It’s easy to do, hard to make mistakes, and is an excellent way to involve the kids. Home-made pasta is so cheap that it can save a home with a few mouths quite a lot of money. And, best of all, the results are fantastically tasty.

We’ve just sourced a new supply of pasta-making machines – slightly heavier, about the same size as the previous model. As always, I tried it out to make sure I was happy with it, and made fresh egg pasta. And it couldn’t have been easier. Flour and eggs, and five minutes to make the pasta, thirty minutes to have a glass of red whilst the pasta rested, and then into a saucepan of boiling water. The sheer freshness of home-made egg pasta is wonderful.

Store-bought pasta is sometimes just a neutral backdrop for the sauce or filling, but this is so good I could eat it with just some olive oil drizzled through it and shaved hard cheese grated over it. And black pepper.

Homemade pasta is about the cheapest meal you can possibly have, and yet still packs a taste punch. But for me, cost aside, the best thing is just how darn good egg pasta is to eat.

http://www.cuisine.com.au/recipe/Egg-pasta provides decent instructions on how to make pasta – I leave the eggs out of the fridge for an hour beforehand though to let them assume room temperature.

There are electric pasta machines available now at ‘domestic’ price points, and we might look at selling one next year. Love to get feedback from anyone who already has one.

Gin, when mixed with tonic water, remains the sophisticated drink of many. The combination of Gin and tonic – leavened with lime or lemon, and usually with ice – is an aromatically flavoursome aperitif, particularly at the end of a warm day.

Gin is a family — a very close-knit family, but a family nonetheless — that share certain traits: most notably a reliance on juniper berries for their main flavouring component. The word Gin, after all, comes from the spirit’s original name; Jenever, Dutch for Juniper.

So, what goes into your Gin then? Well, each recipe is different but the main ingredient of course is juniper berries: purple-bluish little berries redolent of evergreen. Not surprising, since they are the fruit of an evergreen. So, what else is used in these sometimes-secret recipes?

Well, a typical Gin recipe may include some 5 to 10 botanicals. A botanical is any of a wide variety of herbs, seeds, roots and berries. Some are very common, shared among almost all the major Gin brands, while others are used in only a single recipe, a mark of distinction used to set one distiller’s Gin apart from all the others.

Here’s a brief rundown on some of the most common botanicals used in the production of Gin, and a few of the rarer ones as well.

Angelica Root – If you like the traditional Italian cakes known as panettone, then you have tasted candied angelica root. In Gin, this root, and sometimes even the seeds, is used to add an earthy, lightly floral element to Gin.

Cassia Bark – Another botanical with evergreen origins, this bark of a tree lends a pungent, spicy cinnamon flavour to Gin.

Coriander Seeds – These seeds add some subtly spicy, earthy undertones to Gin and are one of the most common botanicals used after the requisite juniper berries.

Orris Root –  The root of a member of the Iris family, ground orris is used not only as a flavouring compound, contributing its lightly floral tone to the bouquet of many a Gin, but it also helps to bind the volatile aromatic compounds in solution.

Liquorice Root – While we are all familiar with liquorice, the flavour from the root is both particularly intense and bitter when compared to the candy some of us love. This botanical really helps to define the flavour profile of Gin with its bright, refreshing tones.

Almonds – Almonds are a surprisingly common element in Gin, contributing an aromatic sweetness and a base for other, more intense flavour tones to build upon.

Grains of Paradise – These spicy seeds are a member of the ginger family and add their zesty essence to many a Gin. While their contribution tends to be mostly a spicy sensation as opposed to a distinct aromatic element, they do have an aroma that faintly recalls cardamom.

Citrus Peels – A signature element in the bouquet of Gin, distillers have used a variety of fruits such as limes, lemons, oranges, and bitter oranges to enhance the flavour and perfume of their Gins.
Flowers – Some producers have added flowers to their Gins, aiming for a more perfumed nose.

And here’s my favourite Gin-based drink recipe – a Tom Collins:

* 60 ml gin

* 60 ml lemon juice

* 1 teaspoon sugar syrup

* soda water

* slice of lemon

* 1 Maraschino cherry

Technique

1) – Fill a tall glass with ice

2) – Add the gin, lemon juice and sugar. Stir to combine

3) – Top up the glass with soda water

4) – Garnish with lemon slice, cherry and serve

Same drink – different name. American and Irish makers prefer ‘whiskey’ whilst the Scots, Canadians and the rest of the world’s single prefer ‘whisky’.

This started during the 19th century as a point of product differentiation. Back then, Scotch whisky was of often of very low quality – just an alcohol delivery system, without refinement or depth. So, to build an export market to fast-growing America, Irish distillers wanted to differentiate their product from the poorer Scotch whisky, thus they added the ‘e’ to mark the crucial distinction. Today, Scotch whisky has become one of the world’s greatest spirits, but the spelling still differs. Americans still spell their spirit with an ‘e’, though legally it is spelt ‘whisky’.

A few American distillers such as Maker’s Mark for example, do use the Scottish spelling – mostly because the company founders were Scottish.

I love eating duck in all its forms (well, not live or raw) – and developed this recipe – my first soup with duck. Smoked duck is important to extract the full flavour.

INGREDIENTS

400g of smoked duck breast, skin on

1 cup finely diced Italian pancetta

1 large onion, minced

2 carrots, coarsely chopped

1 bay leaf

750g split peas

8 cups chicken broth

Sea alt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

1 teaspoon lemon juice

1 tablespoon olive oil

1 cup heavy cream

2 cups minced watercress

PREPARATION

1.

Cut the smoked duck into a fine dice and place it, skin side down, in a heavy-bottom pan over medium heat along with the pancetta. Cook for 3 minutes to release the fat from the meat, stir and continue cooking for 5 minutes. Remove half the meat, drain well and set aside.

2.

Add the onion and carrots, stir and cook until the vegetables begin to soften, about 3 minutes. Add the bay leaf, the split peas and the chicken broth, stir, partly cover and simmer for 40 minutes to 1 hour until the peas are tender.

3.

Adjust the consistency of the soup with more chicken broth if necessary to achieve a thick, but still soupy, consistency. Adjust the seasoning with salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste. The soup can be made to this point up to one day before serving.

4.

A half-hour before serving, warm the soup. Place the lemon juice in a bowl with a dash of salt and several grinds of black pepper. Slowly whisk in the olive oil. Add the reserved duck and pancetta and toss. Add the watercress and set aside. When the soup is hot, stir in the heavy cream, quickly and vigorously. You want to completely enrich the soup while smashing as few peas as possible. Serve garnished with the duck and watercress salad.

Last night was a chance to be a sophisticate (or a bore?) – anyway, out at a bar, and asked to explain what an “eaux de vie” is. Well, “eaux de vie” is French for “waters of life”, which is a clever branding description of brandy.

Brandying, perhaps?

Technically, it is a spirit (high alcohol – 40%) distilled from fruit (not grapes – they are fermented into wine). Ah, you might say, but isn’t Cognac made from grapes. Mmmmm – true, but that is why it is called Cognac and not brandy.

So, eaux de vie is a fruit-based brandy. I like it chilled, and a snifter nightcap of it after dinner can help digestion after a heavy meal.