Short Crust Pasty recipe (for Cornish Pastys)

Last night I made Cornish Pastys again, this time however I also made the pastry instead of buying it ready-rolled, and for the first time ever I used the (apparently) traditional short crust pastry instead of flakey-puff. I'll now continue to do so!  The result was fabulous and very very yummy.

Short Crust Pastry
for 2 main course sized pastys

200g plain flour
110g butter
pinch of salt
2-4 Tbsp cold water
extra flour for rolling

• Chop the butter into small cubes (about 1cm), add flour & butter to bowl of food processor with metal blade.
• Pulse until it resembles fine-breadcrumbs (briefly wonder if that slightly electrical smell is the beginning of the end for my student-days food-processor.... and keep going anyway )
• Add 1Tbsp of water at a time while running the food-processor until the dough comes together
• Remove and knead briefly, then roll into a ball (processor survives to be used another day, phew!)
• Cover in gladwrap and chill for at least 15 minutes
• tick tock tick tock tick tock........tick tock DING
• remove from the fridge, sprinkle your clean bench surface with a little more flour, and a little on your rolling pin
• gently shape the ball into a flatish rectangle with your hands then begin gently rolling out until you can cut 2 dinner plate sized rounds from the pastry
• and do so (cut the dinner plate sized rounds)
• at this point Simon offerred to make a J and an S from the left over pastry, so he did that while I filled the pastry with the pasty filling, rubbed the edge with milk, folded over, formed the crimp and brushed the resulting pastys in milk.  
• add the initals (this point is optional in case you were wondering!) and brush them with milk too.
• (oh - for the filling recipe, see my Cornish Pastys post - note I got the spelling wrong on that post - I have since searched on google for pasties and realised what a mistake this was and will never do it again.)
• Bake for 45 minutes at 220°C.  (actually, this is a bad idea.  it's what I tried to do last night, but I ended up having to turn it down to 160°C at about 30 minutes, and managed to get another 8 minutes out of it before I decided I really had to rescue the pastys.  So, I need to experiment with this - my original method was 1 hour at 180°C - next time I'll try 45 minutes at 200°C - I feel pastry ought to be cooked hotter than 180°, however I want to give the skirt steak as long as I can to achieve a slightly more tender result.)
• Serve with my dad's delicious tomato relish and devour while admiring your handiwork with that delicious golden, crusty pastry outer.

Fresh Ravioli Update

I've been a little absent from the blog of late, working hard, playing a bit to keep my mind off working hard, and sometimes, like tonight, finding time to cook!

Hmm, ok, I just glanced back at what I have actually blogged on the pasta making adventure - turns out it's not much! C'est la vie. Suffice to say I'm pretty comfortable making fresh pasta these days, and as of tonight, I'm pretty happy including fresh ravioli in my list of pasta making competencies.

I had tried making ravioli before, but without a ravioli tray - so just rolling the pasta, adding dollops of filling, another sheet of pasta, sealing the edges and cutting. The end result was tasty, if terribly ugly! And frankly, it was a frustrating and unsatisifying process, redeemed only by the fact that it was really very very tasty. There was a lot of swearing and serious grumpiness by the end of that particular evening however.

Ooh, but one good thing did come out of that little episode - I had truckloads of filling left, so the next night I made fresh cannelloni. Oh my word! That was heaven on earth! (and THAT episode in turn resulted in far too much pasta - so Simon made lasagne the following night! Which is probably the other reason it's been so long since I've made pasta - we ODed a little!).

So, back to present day! We were at a Living & Giving sale recently and they had several ravioli trays available. We weren't quite sure whether to go for lots of small ravioli parcels, or less larger parcels. We concluded that fewer, larger parcels would be easier to work with and bought essentially this:Good grief - why did I ever try and make ravioli without it??? This was SO easy. Yay! I'd made a filling of chopped up roast lamb, ricotta & parmesan with a bit of mint sauce - this was tasty, but needed more moisture in it. It's all trial and error though, and I was happy with the result - I just took notes to improve it next time!

Happy Days! Until next time - hopefully sooner than this time!

Cooking Schnitzel

I cooked schnitzel for dinner tonight. Simon is always a little nervous when I cook schnitzel, despite really liking it. Patience is not my strong point and as far as he's concerned, good schnitzel requires a concerted exercise in patience.

Well, tonight I cooked seriously impressive schnitzel. Thanks to a little help from German Food Guide. Every tip on this page helped.

• Lightly flour the schnitzel, then egg it, then coat in the crumbs without patting it on and IMMEDIATELY get it into the oil/butter mix at a medium temperature. I used Canola Oil & Butter.
• This requires a bit of preparation - I had the german potato salad (made last night) and green salad served on the dinner plates before I even removed the schnitzel from the fridge. And had the oven on to keep the schnitzels warm while I cooked the rest of them.
• I cooked one at a time. And I replaced the oil/butter after the 2nd schnitzel.

Delicious! (And Simon reallly wanted me to make a note of it here for reference next time around).