How was your christmas? And your new years eve? And all the other reasons to eat too much food and have too much to drink! I hope you had a great time and enjoyed everything you did (and ate), because I sure did haha. First christmas day a dinner at a nice restaurant with my boyfriends family, second christmas day (it's a Dutch thing, don't ask) a Indonesian dinner cooked by my parents and the days after that all the left overs of the pies my mother baked, can you believe that there are STILL left overs?!
New years eve was a lot of fun too, I spent it with my boyfriend and his friends. An evening filled with music, dancing, too much food, too much to drink and too little sleep. For some reason however I take very little pictures these days... I have a very nice camera but I always forget to take it places... So that is my first new year resolution: take more (good quality) pictures.
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| Fun on the train to Liege (Belgium) |
My second new years resolution has something to do with all of that food I ate over the last two weeks. I'm all for eating. But I'm also all for looking good, that is why I am going to work hard to be more practical about cooking and to cook more and healthy.
I can imagine you wondering how all of those things add up, so let me explain that to you: I don't always have the time to eat, which results in me eating something simple which is not very good for me. On other days however I have more time to cook and do groceries, so I'm planning to just (ha-ha) plan ahead, do more groceries at once, cook more for a couple of days ahead so that I can enjoy more healthy home cooked meals. Oh and I'll have to cycle more so that I'll burn that extra weight that I might have gained.
I started this resolution quite good today. My parents where out so I had their kitchen all to myself and I decided to make butternut squash ravioli. I got the idea while I was strolling over the market in my hometown with Joost when I saw some delicious looking butternut squash and sage, so I bought all of the ingredients that I thought would fit well together and then when I looked it up on the internet I discovered that SortedFood had already done a similar recipe, so if you want to see a youtube video about this recipe you can check it out here:
I adapted this recipe a little bit, but I used their recipe for pasta. It ended up tasting wonderful, and soooo filling! It is a little bit time consuming, but it was the first time I made it so I hope it'll take me less time the next time I make pasta. To give you some inspiration, here is the recipe for my butternut squash ravioli with goatscheese and sage.
Butternut squash ravioli with goats cheese and sage
1 butternut squash (diced)
1 red onion
1 clove of garlic
1 large handful of sage
fresh goats cheese
olive oil
salt
pepper
250g of pasta flour (00 type)
3 eggs
a pinch of salt
I started with roasting off the cubes of squash with some olive oil and a bit of the sage. I put the oven on 200 degrees Celsius and left the squash in there for about half an hour or until everything is soft, and a little bit darker of color.
While the squash is in the oven dice the red onion and sweat it off in a pan with some olive oil, then add the garlic and the rest of the sage. When the squash is ready, mix it with the red onion, add salt and pepper, squash and mash it until it is almost a smooth mixture and then let it cool down.
It doesn't take long to sweat down the onion and the garlic so when the butternut squash is still in the oven, make the pasta dough. Put the flour in a bowl and make a little well in it. In this well I added the three eggs and a pinch of salt. I mixed everything together with a fork until it had a crumbly texture and then I put it on a clean surface to knead the dough. I did that for about 5 minutes until I had a nice and elastic dough. Leave the dough for about 15 minutes.
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| Make sure to use type 00 flour! |
This is the moment when I got out my parents' pasta machine and my little brother. I think it is possible to roll out the pasta by yourself but it definitely goes faster with the help of someone else. I separated the dough into smaller pieces and started to work them trough the machine, first on the first setting, then I folded over the dough a couple of times and kept putting the dough through the first setting and then I went on through the settings until I reached setting 8 on my pasta machine.
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| You can also make some linguine if you made too much dough! :) |
When you have your thin sheets of pasta you make sure you have two sheets ready to go (either you make two or you cut one long piece in two, that's what i did). I put a lot of flour on the bottom of the bottom sheet to make sure it wouldn't stick to my surface, and then I brushed the top of this bottom layer with milk. I then started to spoon my squash mixture with teaspoons on the bottom layer, to every heap I added a little bit of goats cheese and then carefully I added the top layer of pasta. When you do this you have to make sure there are no air-bubbles between your bottom and top sheet, because that would cause your ravioli to explode when you try to cook them. After I covered them I cut little shapes with a pasta cutter and I made sure all edges were sealed.
I cooked them off in a pot of salted water for about 3 minutes, and I served them with a simple tomato sauce and some more goats cheese. It was very very very yummy and really not that difficult to make! You could very easily make a large batch and freeze a lot of this stuff for later in the week (that's what I did!).
Yummy home cooked deals every day of the week! YES!
I hope you enjoyed this post and this recipe. Please let me know what awefully yummy things you ate over the holidays and whether you have any similar new years resolutions and how you are planning to stick to them, I'd really love to hear it!
Lots of love,
Floor
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