Pumpkin Ravioli

This afternoon we finally made some fresh pasta for the first time: pumpkin ravioli. My new oxo rolling pin rulez! It made rolling dough into smooth thin sheets super easy. Maybe one day I will be ready to make a committment to a pasta maker, but for now I'll stick with with the basic tools. I didn't follow any particular recipe. The dough was regular egg dough (400 grams of flour, 4 eggs, salt), the stuffing was pumpkin, with some sage and parmesan. We ended up with 60 ravioli and froze 45 of them. The other 15 were cooked, served with cream sauce and some leftover prosciutto butter chicken. Check out the photos here:

Pumpkin Ravioli

Making “no knead” bread after the recipe from the New York Times

About two weeks ago I started baking our own bread. Mostly because all of our groceries are delivered by Amazon, but they do not carry any breads from Grand Central bakery (they do sell bread from Macrina, but we don’t like it). First off, I am NOT a baker. Really, I am not. I never make dough and even when I make pizza or pies, I always buy dough from Trader Joe’s. So baking bread from scratch was really venturing into an entirely new territory for me. I finally decided to do it after reading this recipe in NYT. It looked easy enough, so I decided to give it a try. It turned out to be very easy, delicious and very successful, even for a beginning baker with zero experience like me. And there’s almost no clean up. This weekend we decided to document the process, so that you’d see that that home-made bread we’ve been telling you about is for real…

Step one, the tools:

From BreadMaking

Step two: measure all dry ingredients into the bowl (3 cups flower, 2 tsp salt, 0.25 tsp yeast)

From BreadMaking

Step three: add 1.5 cups of water and mix everything into ‘shaggy’ dough and cover with plastic wrap

From BreadMaking

Step four: ok, i’m not sure if this qualifies as a “step”, if all one has to do is to wait 12 or so hours… after 12 hours the dough looks like this:

From BreadMaking

Step five: fold the dough with a spatula 2-3 times, shape it into a ball and put it out on a mat (you can put it on a piece of parchment paper instead, this will make moving it around much easier later on). Oil the dough.

From BreadMaking

Step six: dust the dough with flower, cover and let rise for another 4+ hours:

From BreadMaking

Step seven: heat the oven to 450 degrees, with a heavy dutch oven inside. After about 30+ minutes, when the oven is hot, slide the dough into the dutch oven and cover. Bake for 30 minutes.

From BreadMaking

Step eight: Remove the lid from dutch oven and bake for another 10 minutes or until golden brown.

From BreadMaking

Step nine: Cool on rack. The loaf is not as big as the Como, but it does last us 3 days.

From BreadMaking

From BreadMaking

Here’s the final product, served with eggs and bacon:

From BreadMaking

And a close-up on the texture:

From BreadMaking

NOTE: this weekend Amazon was out of King Arthur Flour, so I ordered Stone Bur (sp?) brand instead. The bread tastes ok, but NOT as good as the bread made with KA flour. So when Amazon has it back in stock, I plan to buy a few extra packages.

The Swedish Pancake Breakfast

I came across a mention of the Swedish Club's pancake breakfast in the Seattle Weekly yesterday, so Anya and I though we'd give it a try. Tourists in our own city. The Swedish Club puts on the breakfast once a month, on the first Sunday of each month... (Hm, one thing the Seattle Weekly really got wrong. In the article, they had June 7th as being the day for the breakfast... how could that ever be true? Hmmm...)

Anyways, the breakfast was a good time. The pancakes are solid. You get two tickets for the $7 per person. One for the first pass, a couple of crepe style pancakes with lingonberries, whipped cream and a slab of ham. The second ticket for another plate of pancakes minus ham. Drip coffee and orange juice are thrown in along with occasional live music and dancing. You'll leave full. Anya didn't go back for seconds. I did and felt just full enough, probably due to the healthy dollop of whipped cream.

If you go, the place will be packed. We had to wait a short bit for a table, joining a family already there. Its a good place to just randomly see people that you wouldn't otherwise. And yes, the nordic presence is strong. I give it a thumbs-up for an old-school community breakfast.

Crepes under Glass - Le Creperie Voila

On a whim after a movie in downtown we headed over to try out Le Creperie Voila. Could this place be any good when compared to Paris and Vancouver B.C.?
I give it a yes.
Under the glass covered sidewalks of the Convention Center, Le Creperie Voila is a small kiosk outside of the Convention Center, across the street from the Cheesecake Factory. Seating is limited to a few tables anchored to the sidewalk, on the edge of Pike Street. Not the most picturesque place in the world to eat, but not that bad.
The crepes? Good enough for me. We split a Bananas Foster with ice cream, mmmmmmmm good. A lot of people we saw were taking savory crepes to go.
Not really the Parisian tea and crepe experience, but for Seattle, a good place for a solid crepe.

Le Creperie Voila