Walnut and Rocket Lasagne

Well that was a busy semester! We managed to photograph one or two interesting meals, but none made it up here... until now! I present you, the lasagne of your dreams (if you like unusual & oddly delicious lasagne variants). It even features homemade pasta, which might make you reluctant to buy boxed noodles once you see how easy & yummy it is. The walnuts and egg noodles make this a protein and "good fats" rich meal; it is healthy and very filling!

Walnut and Rocket Lasagne
Ingredients: (makes 2 servings)
For the pasta:
1 cup all-purpose flour
2 eggs
For the walnut-parmesan sauce: 
3/4 cup walnut pieces, lightly toasted
3/4 cup shredded parmesan cheese
1 tablespoon of flour
1 tablespoon of butter or olive oil
1 1/2 cups of milk
Salt & pepper
For the fillings:
1 small or 1/2 large white onion, diced
2 small or 1 large carrot, diced
2 cups rocket (arugula)
Drizzle of oil or butter
(I put in some left over green beans too, you can see in the photo...)
1 cup grated mozzarella cheese

1. Make the pasta: In a large bowl, combine eggs & flour. Mix until a dough forms, adding more flour if needed. Turn the dough out onto a floured surface and knead until it is smooth. Then leave it to rest while you cook the filling-- it will be easier to roll out after it rests. This quantity of dough makes enough for three layers in a loaf pan (it was just enough for 2 people). When you're ready to go, roll the dough out to about 1/8 inch thick, and cut it into rectangles using your pan as a template.

2. Make the sauce: First, finely grind the walnuts. My lovely food processor does this in seconds-- if I didn't have it, I'd use a big knife and chop, chop, chop! They don't have to be perfect. Make a white sauce by first cooking the flour and fat until brown & bubbly, then whisk in the milk and simmer, stirring constantly, until it thickens. Once it's thick enough to coat a spoon, remove from the heat and stir in the walnuts, parmesan cheese, and season to taste. Set aside.

3. Make the veggies: In a pan with a lid, fry the onion for a few minutes until softened, then throw in the carrots and cook for another five minutes or so, until just starting to soften. Remove the pan from the heat, stir in the rocket, and put the lid on it to let the leaves wilt a bit.

4. Build the lasagne! Start with a thin layer of walnut sauce on the bottom of the pan, then a piece of pasta, then about 1/3 of the veggies and a bit more sauce, then pasta, then mozzarella cheese... et cetera! Finish the top with a final layer of pasta and sprinkle of cheese. Cover the pan with foil, and bake in the oven at 375 F for 20-30 minutes. Remember, you're not just melting the cheese-- you are cooking the raw eggs in the fresh noodles! Once it's cooked, remove the foil and let the cheese brown for a bit.

Enjoy!

English/American New Year's Breakfast

Hangovers require fry-ups. Here's our multicultural vegetarian version: fried eggs, baked beans, mushrooms, tomatoes, veggie bacon (fyi: non-delicious, don't do it!), veggie sausages (pleasantly edible), fried bread, waffles & maple syrup & fruit. Not pictured: gallons of coffee and tea and juice and HP Sauce. Did I mention this magnificent feast was all planned, cooked, and consumed by the early hour of 3pm this afternoon? Happy New Year everyone!

Mince Pie Madness

In honor of Mum & Dad's annual New Year's Eve party, and in a vague attempt to introduce to the festivities an edible tradition other than the perennial, very trendy, pomegranate margaritas, today we have made mince pies. 1,000,000 of them. Well... 78, which comes to the same when your guest list numbers 20.

 Traditional mincemeat contains, along with apples, dried fruit, sugar, and spices, two problem children: suet and mixed peel. This threatened to put a damper on the adventure since neither is endemic to US supermarkets, or particularly delicious. Fortunately Minmi can use Google, and he found a lovely recipe that solved all our transatlantic vegetarian problems.

Mincemeat is really the kind of thing you make, put in jars, and keep for a long time-- but Mum & Dad politely declined to have their house filled with jars of mincemeat (some foreign concept called a "diet") so we halved the recipe. Our adaptation, printed below, makes enough to fill a 13x9 pyrex dish, then seventy-eight muffin-pan sized mini pies, then twenty hungry people's tummies. Or, one great big ravenous college freshman's tummy. Whatever happened to my little brother?

The proper accompaniment to mince pies is brandy butter, which is something like buttercream but with more butter and alcohol i.e. delicious. The way it melts on warm mince pies is enough to make anyone give up their New Year's resolution.

Mince Pies (adapted from Poires au Chocolat)

Mincemeat:
225 g sour or cooking apples (we used 1 big Crispin)
255 g raisins
255 g golden raisins or currants
115 g unsalted butter, cubed
Juice & zest of 1 orange
Juice & zest of 1 lemon
25 g slivered almonds, roughly chopped
2 tsp mixed spice (recipe below)
1/4 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp nutmeg
3 Tbs brandy


Mix all the ingredients except the brandy, and let it sit, covered, in a cool place overnight or at least a few hours. Then put it in a baking dish, cover with foil, and bake at 225 F for 2 to 3 hours. Once it's cooled most of the way down, stir in the brandy... then restrain yourself from eating it all with a spoon!


Flaky Pastry:

SO MUCH BUTTER

700 g flour (I like to use half whole wheat, half white-- for textural rather than nutritional reasons of course)
300 g unsalted butter
enough cold water just to make a ball that leaves the bowl cleanly






 Pastry has a bad reputation, but if you're patient and if you have one of these magic beasties you can't really go wrong. Wrap it in cling film/saran wrap and let it chill in the fridge before rolling, and then use a biscuit cutter or the top of a glass to make your circles. Since we're at home, I had fun with all Mum's cookie cutters. Make sure to roll it really thin, because it puffs up and you want to leave room for plenty of mincemeat! After filling the pies, we topped them with little shapes (successful) and lids (less successful) and baked for 15-20 minutes at 400 F. We had a hunk of pastry left over when the mincemeat ran out.... good excuse for some jam tarts!

Mixed spice is commonly available in the UK, but over here it's not really a thing. Here's a recipe to make your own.

Mixed Spice:
8 parts cinnamon
4 parts ground coriander seed
2 parts allspice
1 part nutmeg
1 part ground ginger
1 part ground cloves


And, finally, the crowning glory of mince pies and Christmas puddings alike, brandy butter!

MORE BUTTER

Cousin Phil's Brandy Butter:
170 g unsalted butter, softened
170g icing/confectioner's sugar
pinch or ground nutmeg
pinch of cinnamon
zest of 1 orange
6 Tbs brandy




 Mix everything except the brandy until well combined. Slowly stir in the brandy-- there'll come a point when the butter mixture will absorb no more booze, so go slow and stop when you get there. Again, practicing great self restraint, decant into a pretty bowl and leave in the fridge until serving.

Mince pie induced musings

The graduate student is the butt of many jokes. And, on the face of it, we appear to be prime butt-of-joke candidates. Impoverished, over worked, undernourished...

Hold on. Undernourished? Us? The most educated citizens of the (supposedly) most advanced countries in the world? If you believe PhD comics (normally a depressingly accurate portrayal of graduate life), then most PhD candidates subsist on ramen noodles and free pizza.

While we cannot deny exploiting many a buffet of free pizza, the ramen noodle accusation is less accurate. Neither author of this blog has touched ramen noodles during our time as graduate students, and do not intend to start (at least not until we have to finish our dissertations). Good healthy food is less absent from our diets than popular culture might suggest.


But just who are we?

We are two graduate students, both paleontologists (people who study fossils). Unfortunately we live in separate cities but close enough to only spend weekends together.

The other day, Moropus's kid brother took his first foray into cooking and his Jerk Tofu (surprisingly good) inspired a conversation on where to find recipes online. A Google search churns up numerous sites with vast lists of recipes. Unfortunately they are invariably rubbish, and the occasional gem is buried beneath the chaff.

We came to the conclusion that the best online recipes are found on foodblogs. Not only do the bloggers stake their reputation on their dishes but they generally post mouthwatering pictures to boot. No contest.

To preserve the good (‽) reputation of graduate students and show that a healthy(er) diet on a shoestring budget is at least theoretically possible, we have created this blog. Each weekend we will embark on a culinary project which we will bring to you, our imagined reader. We have three goals

1. Cheapness
2. Simplicity
3. Tastiness

To start the New Year off with a bang, we will be making mince pies, a seasonal British recipe. Unfortunately good mincemeat is somewhat scarce in the US so we chose to make our own earlier today. In our next post we'll return with some scrumptious piccies, but for now, here is a taster of what is to come:

TTFN,
Moropus and Minmi