Haydenei

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As a tradition in the holiday season, this weekend we met with friends to bake some cookies. And at this time of the year, it is definitely a must to get the spirit. But as usual, if one starts early, one can finish early. And after a half days work, nobody wanted to go home, so we decided to pop in a DVD an have something to eat. But what we would eat was mine to decide. Since going shopping on a Sunday is hardly a choice in Germany, I roamed the fridge and shelves and found some dried tomatoes and artichokes in oil, goat cheese and some anchovies. With some yeast and flour it should be possible, to prepare something decent. But since we didn’t have enough cheese, the pizza was out of the race. So we settled for the big cousin – Focaccia.

Foaccia and pizza are more or less the same when it comes to the dough. But for the focaccia you don’t spread the dough very thinly. The basic dough consists of flour, yeast, a bit of salt, a bit of sugar, water and some olive oil. Depending on your taste, you can add further things like nuts, dried tomatoes, olives, or fresh herbs to the dough. I also saw some recipes adding pieces of San Daniele ham and roasted fennel seeds. Like with the dough, depending on the taste, you can put stuff on top and sprinkle olive oil over it.

Since we couldn’t settle on one topping, we just had different sections with different toppings.

Basic recipe for the dough:

• 500g all purpose flour
• 20g yeast
• 350ml warm water
• 1 Teaspoon salt
• 1 Teaspoon sugar
• 1 Tablespoon olive oil

Step 1:

Dissolve the yeast in warm water and add the sugar and salt. Add the water with yeast and the olive oil to the flour and knead it to a smooth dough. Knead in all additional ingredients you want to add to the dough. Let it rise for 30 minutes at a warm spot.

Step 2:

Knead the dough, that should have risen by now, for a second time and let it rise again for another hour.

Step 3:

Give the dough a short kneading and spread it thickly on a roasting pan. Poke with your finger a couple of dents in the dough and add the topping you like (for example dried tomatoes in oil, ham, chorizo and the like. If you don’t want any topping, it is tasty to add some fresh herbs like rosemary and thyme along with some salt and pepper. At the end sprinkle some olive oil onto it, so it can settle in the dents.

Step 4:

Let the dough rise for some 15 minutes an put it in the oven for 20 – 25 minutes at 220°C.

Tips: I wouldn’t use chopped pickled artichokes as a topping, because the can become real hard due to the baking. If you put on anchovy fillets they add a real tasty salty note to it. When you bake them, afterwards, they have a real pasty texture and kind of melt with a salty taste on your tongue. If you eat the focaccia while it’s still warm, it’s really soft and tasty. But even if it’s cold, it’s still very good, because it is more like a bread.

It was the weekend once again so Line and I were deciding over breakfast what to cook and which ingredient to buy. After a short deliberation, we settled on malfatti, extremely delicious spinach ricotta dumpling originally from the Lombardy.

So we put spinach, ricotta, parmesan and a few other things on the list and headed out for some shopping. But what do you know – we left the shopping list at home on the table. So now we where confronted with the task to find all the necessary stuff without any help from the list, which worked out pretty well. And yes, just pretty well. We bought some more things than we decided on over breakfast, but forgot others, which we only realised Sunday afternoon, when I fetched all the ingredients in preparation for cooking.

Parmesan, ricotta, flour, eggs, onions, butter – everything was there on the counter except for the spinach. And this fact makes it pretty hard to prepare spinach ricotta dumplings. So what’s to do? A couple of days ago I read on the delicious:days blog how they did gnocchi out of pumpkin instead potato. I immediately tried that and was thrilled with the result – so I said to myself, if they do something like that with gnocchi, why not substitute the spinach in the malfatti. Ok, it is a traditional dish and you’re not supposed to change dishes like that in a radical way, but what could I do? So I roamed the freezer, decided on broccoli and got to work.

Malfatti

Step 1: Cook the broccoli and chop it up small. Mince the onion and cook them until they turn golden. Add the chopped broccoli, stir and let it cool.

Step 2: Stir the ricotta until creamy, add eggs and half of the parmesan and blend everything with the broccoli and flour. Season with salt, pepper and nutmeg.

Step 3: Use two table spoons to form dumplings and drop them into boiling salted water. The dumplings are done, when they are floating.

You can eat the malfatti as a side dish or gratinate them with butter and the rest of the parmesan and serve them as main dish. Even though we used broccoli instead of spinach, we really enjoyed the malfatti and for us, it was a nice variety to serve broccoli. To give the dish an extra twist we added some roasted pine seeds.

Ingredient:

• 600g Spinach (or in our case broccoli)
• 150g ficotta
• 100g fresh grated parmesan
• 200g flour
• 100g butter
• 1 onion
• 2 eggs
• 1 egg yolk
• salt
• pepper
• nutmeg