Homemade Wholemeal Orecchiette

Homemade Wholemeal Orecchiette with Brocolli
Serves 4 (small)

This is adapted from the Kitchen Garden Companion recipe by Stephanie Alexander called Orecchiette and Brocolli on page 180.
Ingredients

For the Pasta:

50g (about ½ cup) chickpea flour
200g (1 cup) wholemeal plain flour
½ tsp salt
100g (½ cup) tofu ricotta
Almost half a cup of water

For the Brocolli:

500g brocolli, cut into even sized pieces
4 cloves garlic, finely chopped
3 tsp capers
2 fresh red chillies, finely chopped
vegan margarine (I use Nuttelex Lite) optional
2 tbsp Nutritional Yeast

Method:

First, make the pasta. If you can live without it, trim the thumb nail on whichever hand you use most real short.

In a small bowl mix together the flour, chickpea flour and salt. If you want you can sift it all (I'm too lazy to do this!), but make sure you add the bran back in afterwards otherwise it isn't really wholemeal any more!

Stir in the Tofu Ricotta until it starts to clump together in lumps of dough. Add water a little bit at a time (I started with ¼ cup) until dough comes together cohesively. I ended up using almost a ½ cup. This depends on how moist your 'ricotta' is.

Turn out onto a floured bench and knead for about 5 minutes. Wrap up in cling wrap or a plastic bag and leave at room temperature for 15 minutes.

After that (I ended up leaving mine for more like half an hour because I got distracted) take dough out of the plastic wrap (keep it!) and knead again on a floured surface until very smooth and supple. Break away a small lump (about the size of an egg) and re-wrap the remaining dough in plastic (so it doesn't dry out). Roll out the dough into a long snake shape, about 1cm thick. You should do this in a bit of flour so it doesn't stick to the knife too much in the next step.

Get a sharp knife and slice little bits of dough off the snake at about 3mm intervals. This is like making tiny gnocchi! Once you've done that, pick up a bit of dough and press with your (trimmed nail) thumb into the palm of your other hand and twist slightly. Put your first orecchiette on a baking tray lined with baking paper and continue repeating until all your dough has become little pasta shapes. (I'd have taken a photo of how to do this step, but I'm home alone and no one really wants to see my hands anyway! Maybe there is something on google.)

Now, either let your fresh pasta dry out, or freeze it until you need it for the meal. Or you can cook it straight away in boiling water. It shouldn't take too long fresh – about 5 minutes. Just keep tasting until it's ready for you :) They should float when done, like gnocchi does.

Put a large pot of water on to boil for cooking the pasta.

Then in a frying pan, start to fry your finely chopped garlic and thinly sliced red chilli in a fair amount of oil on med-low heat until the garlic is softened.

If the water is not yet boiling, take garlic and chilli off the heat until it is.

Once water is boiling, add your chopped brocolli pieces to the frying pan and return to the heat. Put your orecchiette into the boiling water and give it a stir. Don't forget about it! Mushy pasta isn't really fun. Especially since you just spent a fair bit of time making it!

Cook your brocolli on a higher heat until it turns bright green and starts to soften. Add in your 3 tsp of capers and let cook until the pasta is done.

Drain pasta and serve out equally into four bowls. (We had our two bowls then some containers for lunch the next day). Stir through the brocolli 2 tbsp of nutritional yeast and stir until it dissolves/goes soft. Divide evenly between bowls, top with a little blob of vegan margarine (if you want) and stir through pasta.

These seem to be really small serves so we had a bit of garlic toast with it. A salad would be better as the pasta is actually pretty filling!

I believe the tofu 'ricotta' really made a difference to the pasta. It resulted in a chewy texture and the herbs in it added a little bit of flavour. I was worried I'd put too much chickpea flour in because that's all I could smell when I was kneading it but it was perfect :) I'll definitely be making pasta like this again. The process didn't actually take that long, once I got the hang of twisting the little shapes. It probably took me an hour to make them all, not including kneading and sitting time. :)

Nadine's birthday food :)

I decided to make a recipe from The Complete Vegetarian Barbecue Book by Susan Geiskopf-Hadler. However, I forgot to buy mushrooms! So I used eggplant instead. And regular white potatoes because there weren't any red potatoes at the farmer's market on Sunday. (The recipe was 'Red Potato and Mushroom Skewers' by the way.)

So I cooked up some pasta (I was hungover and bought like 6 packets of different kinds of pasta for $1 each!) with some homemade basil pesto . This time I used my own homegrown basil and parsley as they are going nuts in this heat right now, and I also used pine nuts as we had some from a recipe we made ages ago. Then I mixed the pesto through the pasta with a little bit of the cooking water and topped with skewers that had the potato, eggplant and some kohl rabi on it. I had marinated the eggplant in some red wine vinegar and soy sauce for about 10 minutes before I made them. The eggplant soaked it up straight away.

The whole combination was rather delicious :)

And of course I had to make a birthday cake! This is a red velvet cake dyed with beetroot pulp and juice, with vegan cream cheese icing. I made a red velvet cake because the last time I attempted one (also Nadine's birthday) I didn't own an electric blender and it turned out an utter failure (I made 4 cakes stirred with a fork! Long story.). And tasted of food colouring. People at the party demolished it though! Ah, alcohol.

The picture came out way darker than it actually is! The cake was really a deep red/purple colour. Our cocoa powder also seems really dark so I used half the amount the recipe called for but it didn't seem to make a difference.

Anyhow it was still a rather good cake (and I really hate chocolate cake). I was going to cut the cake in half and put icing in the middle but the whole thing deflated to about half it's size! I am not sure why. Maybe because the recipe was for muffins. I just doubled it and stuck in a cake tin and baked it for ages. :)

I used this recipe from BitterSweet blog. The icing is just a basic cream cheese icing (¼ cup vegan cream cheese, ¼ cup vegan margarine, 2 cups icing sugar). Delicious but so sweet. I apologise to my teeth. I made double that because I thought I was going to ice the middle, so now we have leftover icing in the fridge. We almost managed a whole piece! Nadine liked it which is the main thing! Don't get me wrong I liked it too, but I'm not going to rush to make another one :)

 We ate it with this coffee substitute my step mum Margaret got us on to. Well she has Caro at home but this stuff was half the price for twice as much and had the same ingredients. It tastes a bit like coffee to me. I really like it, it's something a little bit different.

Make your own hummous! Hummus? Hommous? chick-pea spread!

Why? Because it's cheaper than buying a tiny little container of it at the supermarket. And it tastes better.

Hummous

Makes a fair bit

Ingredients:

2 cans chickpeas, drained (reserve one can's liquid)

3 tablespoons tahini

2 tablespoons lemon juice

1 large garlic clove, crushed

Black pepper

Parsley

Put the chickpeas (minus liquid), tahini, lemon juice, crushed garlic, and some black pepper in blender. Blend. Add small amounts of reserved chickpea liquid until desired texture is reached.

I like mine really thick. Add more pepper if you want, and quickly blend in the chopped parsley at the end. You don't really have to have parsley, but it does taste nice. Put it in a air tight container in the fridge. You can probably keep it up to two weeks, if you can make it last that long :) I can't.

I usually put on sandwiches or toast, or I buy rice crackers...but that's bad because I usually eat the whole packet. Use it as a dip with raw vegetables like carrot, celery, brocolli, cucucumber, zuchini, anything really.