deep frying, drought and a visit to the doctor

last night i hosted my round dinner party, in the company of JC and Young Jess. really it was just a coincidence that the food i had decided to make was round!

to start with we had arranchini. little balls of risotto, with a piece of mozzarella on the inside, rolled in bread crumbs and deep fried. mine were a little big, so the cheese in the centre didn't melt properly, but when done right these are extra delicious.

then we had cannelloni. equal parts of spinach and ricotta, a couple of cloves of garlic fried with spring onion piped into pasta tubes, covered in tomato sauce and cheese and baked in the oven.

i was going to do loukamades for dessert, but it was too hot to deep fry again.

Young Jess brought around the fixings for cannoli, but the shells had gone a bit stale. so like the classy women we are we just ate the ricotta filling out of the bowls with a spoon.
of course amongst all of this i totally forgot to take photos of the actual food.

as i was cooking the leftover risotto balls tonight, i remembered that when i was little i used to get a funny reaction from eating that really fatty, delicious, red chinese sausage. really, the tandoori colour i'd added to the risotto was sort of the same thing.....

..... maybe that's why i spent almost four fun filled hours in the emergency department of the royal adelaide hospital in the middle of last night with a face like some deranged monkey. it just puffed up, and the skin gets all tight and red. it truly is very unattractive.

i was so tired when i got home i just collapsed into bed and slept until about 5pm, and could go straight back to sleep right now that you very much!

but good news is at hand! very, very good news. as many of you probably know australia has been in the middle of a horrible, horrible drought for as long as many of us care to remember. for northern queensland recently this has been replaced by hurricanes and flood. for us here in the south, it has been weeks and weeks on end of blistering heat, that has made almost any type of outdoor activity totally unbearable.

but looking at the online weather report tomorrow will be in the high 20s, going down to 24 later in the week. there has also been rain predicted. oh, blessed rain!!!!! not that i'm getting my hopes up. we've been told this before and it normally amounts to about 30 minutes of light drizzle, but right now i think we're all prepared to take what we can get. BRING IT ON!!!!!

gnocchi made easy

whilst looking for something today – not sure what, think it might have been bus timetables – i came across canela y comino's lovely site full of delicious things, like peruvian chilli paste ...... mmmmmm.... peruvian chilli paste. but she mentioned her trouble with gnocchi.

avid readers of BHG (yeah, right), will remember i mentioned gnocchi last week and how easy it is to make. it seems that this is not the case for all. maybe i have been blessed with some suppressed italian gene, or perhaps it’s just one of those things that people are told is hard, and therefore they get so wound up about it that they doom themselves to failure. Kinda like brain surgery.

anyhoo, this is how i make potato gnocchi,

you’ll need: 1 potato per person, plain flour, an egg, a pot of boiling water, a fork.

• Peel and dice the potato and boil until well cooked. Drain potatoes and mash well

• As soon as the potatoes are cool enough to handle, put them out onto a floured surface. Add a handful of flour and mix it into the mash by hand
• Crack an egg into the centre and mix in. Also add approximately a handful of flour for every potato
• Continue to add flour while kneeding until you have a dough similar in texture to bread dough.

• Roll the dough out into sausages. It doesn’t really matter how thick as long as their diameter is consistent. Using the fork cut the individual gnocchi off the sausage (you’ll be glad i told you to get the fork out at the beginning. I always forget and have to rummage around my cutlery drawer with hands caked in potato dough)
• You can just cook them like this. If you want to get the little stripes on them you can either just press a fork down onto them, or i get the fork, and place it on the far corner of the gnocchi (cutting the gnocchi will have formed little rectangles). i then pull the fork across the dumpling, rolling my wrist up, so that the diagonal corner folds in over the gnocchi. Very hard to explain, but this almost creates little ‘cups’ to hold the sauce.
• Add the gnocchi in batches to fast boiling water. Once they rise to the surface they’re ready to eat. Make sure the water comes back to the boil between batches. Once they’re cooked scoop them out of the water between batches with a slotted spoon and add to the pot of sauce to keep them warm.

• You can freeze uncooked gnocchi on a floured baking tray and then transfer to a plastic bag. But once you get the hang of making them, they’re so quick and easy you probably won’t bother anymore. They’re much, much nicer fresh

Buon apetito!

On a personal note i went to a new argentinean restaurant tonight with the brother who is in town from up north. Big pieces of steak! mum ordered the goat leg. and that’s what she got. a whole goats leg. i kid you not (boom boom). i seriously wish i had a camera. we all helped out, but she took at least half of it home. it was truly delicious!

three things

well, that sauce sat in my fridge for about a grand total of 4 hours before i was forced to do somethign with it. gnocchi. oooooooo.... can anything be more comforting that a big plate of freshly made potato gnocchi.

there are three things that people think are difficult to make and pay a fortune for: pizza, gnocchi and risotto (oh, and jiaozi, but this is a european food post). these are three things that i really resent paying restaurant prices for, because i know how cheap and easy they are to make at home. i always make extra gnocchi, for work lunches and the like, and it's always a great temptation just to eat the whole lot in one go. i've found the trick is to make the first serve really small, so you can still have a second helping, but not eat the lot. todays batch were particularly silky and delicious. i normally cook them in a tomato, bacon and chilli sauce, so the batch of sugo i did this morning was perfect for this.

as i mentioned yesterday, since i started this blog, only a month or so ago, a lot of it has been about food. and while writing it i've realised just how many other food bloggers there are out there. and there are lots of women out there who can eat what they want and not put on a gram. i am about as far away from being one of those people as it is possible to be. i look at butter and i gain a kilo. the only reason i am not totally enormous (and trust me, there's plenty of me to go around), is a reasonable attempt at self control and the love of the pool and my bike.

however, not only are there hundreds of food bloggers, they all seem to be talking about dessert. now i'm more of a gnocchi person than i am a dessert person, but all of a sudden i have a million desserts i want to try, like dulce de leche cheescake squares. not something i should be putting in my mouth. errrr... and tomorrow i'm making cupcakes. these should be interesting, I have lots of different flavours to try (i bought tequilla today, say no more). so tomorrow's post should be a good 'un.

oh, and if there is anyone out there who acutally reads this (and i'm pretty sure there isn't), the spell check on blogger has given up the ghost, so please excuse my horrible spelling. it gets worse when i type.

lazy weekend

when i first started boringhistory girl, it was supposed to be about history. i envisioned myself regaling the world with tales of second century african bath houses (a favourite topic of mine. no - really) and the delicacies of athenian red figure pottery (another great read). However all it seems to be about is food. maybe i should rename it to boringgreedygirl. of course i am that too, but at the heart of it i am boringhistorygirl, as any of my friends will tell you.

but this weekend i am boringstayathomeonmyownandeatandcookgirl. mmmm.... it’s been one hell of a week, so after work i went to the central markets and shopped up big. adelaide is often thought of as being a little slow, the leader of a rival state recently referred to it as a backwater. And quite frankly, it is. it does, however, have a few redeeming qualities, and the central markets is top of the list. i like to think i’ve seen a little bit of the world, but nowhere have a encountered a food market like adelaide’s. barcelona was the closest i’ve come, and it was still a long way off.

of course it’s chinese new year too. xin nian hao to all you sinophiles out there. so i should be cooking chinese food. But i’ve a hankering for italian. lots of pasta and lots and lots of pizza. so i got a tonne of tomatoes and i’m making sauce tomorrow morning and then turning it into all sorts of lovely things. got two very large bags of flour. one for pizza dough, and one for cupcakes. but more about that later.

at any rate expect lots of food related posts this weekend.

on an entirely different note – dinosaurs. lovely greggie gave me a dinosaur egg during the week. he could tell i was stressed i think. photos of the birth available thanks to the nice folk at flickr.