On dessert and demo-ing

I spent most of Thursday shopping for ingredients, Friday was cooking/prepping, and Saturday was more cooking and the actual party. A neighbor hosted an Italian dinner party for 12 that I "catered". The lady of the house had attended a couple of my pasta making classes and other dinners and her husband was jealous that he didn't get to come enjoy the food on those occasions. They decided to host a dinner so all the men could partake in the fun of making pasta and enjoying great food. The dinner consisted of a cooking demonstration of the lasagnettas (little lasagnas) we were serving for the first course of the meal, then a cocktail hour with cheeses, olives, and appetizers, then the meal itself and lots of wine.

The menu:
First Course, Lasagnetta with roasted pepper sauce.

Salad with red pepper, red onion, sundried tomatoes, goat cheese, homemade croutons, and my roasted red pepper and tomato vinaigrette.

Beef tenderloin with a port and cherry sauce (amazing!), roasted garlic asparagus, and lemon thyme carrots.

Dessert (made by my lovely assistant and sous chef, James) was a fabulous chocolate cake with a white chocolate mousse and strawberry champagne sauce garnished with strawberry dust and fresh strawberry.

The lasagnetta, salad, and dessert were plated and served while the main course was served family style and passed (as you can tell by the pictures).

The demo of the lasagnetta was a lot of fun. Everyone got ONE (some snuck a second) cocktail before so there were several distractions, but it made the process more entertaining. I had the pasta dough made and ready to roll and cut. I sauteed the veggies for the filling and blended the sauce as part of the demo.

Lasagnetta recipe:

This is my version of a recipe we made at ICIF in Italy when I was studying there. It was one of my very favorite things we made in class. Very tasty, fun to make, and impressive to serve to friends.

1 batch pasta dough rolled to desired thickness and cut to desired size.

Cook pasta for about 5 min in boiling salted water and lay flat on paper towels to cool and dry.

Filling-

1 bell pepper julienned

1 zucchini julienned

1/2 red onion sliced thin

1 tub ricotta cheese

Parmesan cheese

Salt and pepper to taste

Saute veggies in olive oil until tender. Deglaze with a splash of balsamic vinegar and season. Mix with ricotta and parmesan, salt and pepper to taste.

Sauce-

1 roasted red pepper

1/2 pint roasted grape tomatoes

splash of red wine and balsamic vinegar

red pepper flakes as desired

Salt and pepper to taste

Blend all ingredients until smooth. An immersion blender works best, but a regular blender will work too.

Constructing the lasagnetta:

Lightly oil the bottom of a baking pan and place first layer of pasta on the oiled pan. Top with ricotta and veg mixture and alternate with pasta circles for as many layers as you want; I have found 4 pieces of pasta is usually best. Top the final piece of pasta with a dribble of olive oil to prevent drying out and parmesan cheese. Bake at 350 until warm, about 15 min. Serve with warm red pepper sauce and enjoy! Be careful- it gets messy, but is totally worth it.

I am guessing there are some questions regarding this so called strawberry dust....

This was an experiment of mine. At the Ristorante Magorabin (the restaurant I did my stage at in Torino, Italy) we had an orange dust that was made by dehydrating orange rind then grinding it in a food processor until it was the consistency of dust. It was really cool to garnish both savory and sweet dishes with. I thought it might be fun to do something like that for our strawberry dessert (and I had large quantities of strawberries to use). It's time consuming and sort of tricky to dehydrate things without an actual dehydrator. I sliced my berries (and tomatoes and red peppers-but that didn't work as well) thin and put them on a pan with parchment paper. I set the oven to 170 degrees and it took several hours over the course of 2 days to get the berries sufficiently dry and crispy, and even then a few got slightly darker brown than I would have liked. Once the berries were dry and brittle, I put them in the food processor with a little bit of sugar and processed away for what seemed like days. In the end I had to run the dust through a fine mesh strainer to get it down to the size I wanted, but it worked out pretty well and looked nice on the dessert plates.

Try some dust of your own, the color and taste possibilities are endless!

And Chop on.