Day: 6 February 2021

Pasta bolognesa was my favourite dish as a kid. We had it I think once every week. Canelones was another big one but my mum didnt cook it that often as it was more time consuming assembling the canelones and preparing the white sauce.

Anyway, I wanted to try the spinach version so I found this recipe that looked nice. I used lasagna sheets cut in two for the canelones and worked nicely.

Ingredients for filling

• 12 lasagna sheets
• 250g frozen spinach (put in boiling water to unfreeze)
• 1 chopped onion
• 1 piece of garlic
• 1 boiled egg
• 20g of pine nuts
• a bit of grated parmesan cheese (or similar hard cheese)

Ingredients for bechamel sauce:

• 2-3 big tsp of plain flour
• 25g of butter
• nutmeg
• salt and pepper
• 200ml milk
• grated parmesan cheese

Process

• Boil 1l water in a pan, with salt and a bit of olive oil. Once boiling, put lasagna sheet in 2-3 at each time. They should be ready in a couple of minutes (they should float). Remove and leave it rest.
• In a sauce pan, heat some oil, add the onion and garlic. Until soft
• Add the unfrozen spinach, keep stirring.
• Add the pine nuts and the boiled egg (cut in small pieces). Salt and pepper.
• Add a bit of cheese.
• Retire from the heat.
• In a saucepan, melt the butter, add the flour little by little until forming a paste.
• Start adding the milk, again little by little stirring without stopping. This is at low-medium heat. Add nutmet, salt and pepper. Taste from time to time. Add the cheese at the end.
• Once you have a sauce that is not very liquid neither thick, we are ready to assemble everything.
• Pre-heat oven at 200C
• Put some of the bechamel in the spinach mix and stir.
• Prepare an oven dish. Put some butter or bechamel sauce in the dish to avoid stickiness.
• Take the cold lasagne sheets, cut in two squares. In each square put a spoon of the spinach mix and roll like a canelone. Put in the oven dish in lines.
• Once you the oven dish covered with canelones, pour the bechamel soauce on top of them. Add some grated cheese. I had some tomato sauce left over and I add it too.
• Put the oven dish in the oven. 30m or until the top is grilled.
• Let it cool down a bit and ready to eat!

I read this book in 2019 about fermentation as I was already doing sourdough and wanted to learn more things. It is a great about anything related to fermentation. From there I started doing sauerkraut (still haven’t achieved the required results though). Another thing I wanted to try was kombucha, a fermented fizzy drink. I thought it was difficult to develop the scoby until I watched this video and learned that I can buy it! So I got my scobby and started the process:

1- Boil 900ml filtered water. Then add 50-60g sugar, stir well.

2- Add two bags of black tea for 10 minutes, then remove the bags.

3- Let it cool down to room temperature

4- Add the mixture to a 1 litre jar, add the scoby with its liquid.

5- Cover the jar with a cloth and leave it somewhere warm for 5 days without direct sunlight (I put it under the sink)

6- Remove the scoby and 100ml of the mix into a small jar, keep it in the fridge for the next batch.

7- Put the rest of the mix into a airtight glass 1l bottle at room temperature for 3-7 days until fizzy. I put it under the sink again. You may release a bit of gas after a couple of days if you dont want to see the bottle explode when opening…

8- Put the bottle in the fridge, and afterwards you can enjoy a refreshing fizzy homemade drink!!!

It is a slow process but it is easy. In my first bottle, I was surprised because it was actually quite fizzy!!! The taste was a kind of cider, redbull , etc without the after taste of dead by sugar.

I am doing my second bottle and at some point I would like to add flavours, like ginger… I need to check if this is consider ginger beer. Although no idea if it generates any alcohol… (there is a fermentation process involved and breakdown of sugars….)

Happy with it, and hopefully adding to my routine.