What's cooking

Growing up one of my least favorite meals was macaroni and cheese; to my surprise I saw one day that there were hundreds of recipes for mac and cheese on the food blogs, maybe my mum just did not get it right, but after all these years I still don’t buy macaroni, I know it taste the same as the rest of the pastas, but I cant get myself to buy it, I still taste that macaroni and cheese of my childhood when I see macaroni.

One type of pasta I have no childhood recollections of is cannelloni, in fact until tonight I have never cooked it myself, but I definitely will cook it again. This recipe might not be traditional Italian, but then neither am I, so Janice and all the real Italians out there, if this makes you cringe, sorry about that, but it was good, and a glass or two of red wine made it even better.

You will need a tomato sauce, a filling and then the cannelloni.

Tomato Sauce:

2 tins peeled Italian tomatoes

1 medium onion finely chopped

1 Tbls olive oil

1 tsp Fish sauce

Fry the onions until soft in the olive oil, add the tomatoes and fish sauce. Liquidize the tomato with a hand blender and cook on a low heat for at least 45 minutes.

Filling:

450g lean beef mince

1 medium onion finely chopped

2 tsp Worchestire sauce

Khoisan Sea salt with sundried tomatoes and olive

Black pepper

125g cream cheese

2 Tbls olive oil

Handful of chopped fresh basil

Fry the onion until soft in the olive oil. Add the mince and flavor with the salt and pepper and Worchestire sauce. Fry until the meat are browned and cooked through, add the basil and the cream cheese and mix through until you can see no more white pieces of the cream cheese, cook for another minute or two and remove from the heat.

Cover the bottom of an ovenproof dish with the tomato sauce, fill cannelloni tubes with the filling and put on top of the tomato sauce. When you have a tight fitting layer of cannelloni in the dish, cover it with the tomato sauce, grate some parmesan cheese on top and bake in a pre-heated 180°C oven for about 35 minutes.

Serve with a side salad and as always, a glass of two of red wine.

Bon appetite

Potjie

The name for this pasta sauce might seem a bit odd, even more so I guess if you are Italian, but let me explain. The main ingredient of this pasta sauce is the Hot Italian Salciccia sausage from Rudi’s sausage deli.

Good Pasta                                                               Good Friends

Unlike a lot of pasta sauces that are made with sausage, this sausage is not cut into rings, I remove all of the meat out of the casings and use it as a spiced mince, then you only need to a add one or two more ingredients and you have a sauce to die for.

Italian Salciccia Pasta with Parmesan

To serve 4 people you will need:

4 Hot Salciccia sausages (Meat taken out of the casing)

2 Green chillies chopped

1 large onion chopped

3 cloves garlic chopped

3 cans chopped tomatoes

1 glass of red wine

Olive oil

Salt and pepper

1 packet of penne pasta cooked

Method

Fry the onion, garlic and chilli in a little olive oil until soft. Add the sausage (I guess its mince now and not sausage any more) fry until brown; add the tomatoes and wine, flavour with salt and pepper, reduce the heat and simmer until the sauce are quite nice and thick, at least an hour, add the pasta and mix through.

Serve withy a little parmesan cheese on top and a glass or two of good red wine, if you can share it with good friends it so much better.

Bon appetite

Potjie

You do not need to have a pasta machine to make pasta at home, but I would highly recommend that you use one, I tried once to do it with out a machine and decided to buy one afterwards, but even with a machine it is a time consuming process, not difficult at all, but time consuming.

For 6 servings you will need:

500g flour (I used stone ground bread flour)

4 large eggs

5ml salt

Mix the flour and eggs together, add the egg and mix through, you need a dry dough; otherwise it will stick to the pasta machine, if the mixture is to dry, add a little water. Knead well, roll into a ball and cover with cling wrap, let rest in the fridge for at least an hour.

Break one third of the ball and roll out into a flat sheet. Put through the thickest setting on the pasta machine, do that for about 7 times, then once on each lower setting up to the thickness you would like your pasta to be, I normally go down to the thinnest setting.

Cut your pasta to the required shape, using either the pasta machine or a knife.

Fresh pasta will cook slightly quicker than dry pasta, so keep an eye on it.

Tomorrow I will tell you about the smoked pork and tomato sauce I made with the homemade pasta.

Bon appetite

Potjie

On my Afrikaans blog “Die pannetjie roker”