Even spinach haters like these

Spinach is one of those poor maligned vegetables that everyone loves to hate, but happily eats when it’s mixed in with other ingredients, such as eggs or cheese. Even my kids, who vow and declare that they detest spinach, gobble it up when it’s “hidden”. I put hidden in quotation marks as it’s obviously there, yet they eat it anyway and don’t complain as if I’m trying to poison them. These spinach and ricotta self-crusting mini quiches are a big mouthful to say for such a small thing.  I need to come up with a zappy name for them……anybody got an idea? Verdant Delices, Eggy Wonders? Just as long as there’s no mention of the word spinach!

Spinach quiches are great for any occasion

If you have a muffin tin, these spinach quiches are incredibly easy to make. There’s no fussy messing about with pastry. The most difficult thing you have to do is thaw the frozen spinach, or cook the fresh stuff.  The rest is just a matter of mixing all the ingredients together.  I made them for Thanksgiving as a side to the fabulous turkey (I’ll tell you about that beast another time).  They would be perfectly at home as a first course draped in an elegant robe of béchamel sauce, or as part of a crowd in a buffet at a party.  They make great finger food too.  The spinach quiches are really just all-round kinda guys. Though….maybe not for dessert….unless you’re into that sort of thing.

Do make sure to get as much water out of the spinach as possible before adding it to the egg mixture.  I stick it inside some paper towels and squash it as much as I can.  It’s not a very pleasant feeling, but it does get rid of most of the water.  If you have fresh spinach, boil or steam it and then after squeezing the water out (when it’s cooled down so that you don’t burn your hands), try to mince it up in as small pieces as possible.

With the holiday season coming up on us like a freight train, I hope this gives you an idea to make the preparation for it a little it easier.

Travel Photo of the Week

This week I thought I’d take you to California!  This is Malibu Beach in Los Angeles.   I’ve never seen a beach that was so incredibly wide, even when the tide was in!  In fact, the kids decided to run to go and see the water when I wasn’t paying attention.  When I did look around, I just saw them as tiny dots on the horizon, waaaaaaay down near the sea. It took a lot of slogging through the sand to get within shouting distance of them and tell them to come back.

By Lisa Watson

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Mini Self-Crusting Spinach Quiches

These quiches are easy to make and great for any occasion.  Find the recipe on Italian Kiwi!

Course Appetizer, buffet, fingerfood, Side Dish, Snack

Cuisine French

Prep Time 15 minutes minutes

Cook Time 35 minutes minutes

Total Time 50 minutes minutes

Servings 15 quiches approximately

Ingredients

• 250 g frozen, or two large bunches of fresh Spinach 10oz
• 4 Eggs
• a pinch Nutmeg
• 1 tsp Salt
• Pepper to taste
• 100 ml Single Cream 1/2 cup
• 100 ml Milk 1/2 cup
• 100 g Fresh Ricotta 3 Tbsp

Instructions

• Thaw the frozen spinach and let it cool enough to squeeze it in a few paper towels to get as much of the water out as possible.  If you have fresh spinach, boil it for 5 minutes before draining and squeezing it. Mince up the spinach if it is not already in tiny pieces.
• Heat the oven to 180°C (350)°F.
• Put all the ingredients except for the ricotta in a bowl, then stir them until they are well mixed.
• Add the ricotta in small lumps and stir it in gently.
• Grease a muffin tray very well with butter or oil.  I cut little circles of baking paper out and put them in each muffin well.  This helps to unmold them after cooking.
• Fill the muffin wells until they are 3/4 full.
• Bake in the oven for 30 -40 minutes until the quiches are set and slightly browned on top.
• Leave them in the muffin trays until cooled. Run a knife gently around the sides of each quiche and carefully lever them out.
• The quiches can be kept in the fridge for up to 4 days.  To prepare the quiches for eating, heat them for 5 minutes in the oven.

Spaetzle, mountains, and intriguing areas of Italy

The kids are back at school.  All is quiet on the Cote d’Azur as the tourists have flown back to the far corners of Europe from whence they came.  We can start thinking about Autumn and writing blog posts (oh, that last bit is about me, not you!).  During the Summer we spent two weeks wandering around the Dolomite mountains in Alto-Adige, Italy. The area is very confusing, and therefore incredibly interesting.  Everything is bilingual Italian/German.  The vast majority of people living in the region speak German as their first language, although they officially live in Italy. And, many of them speak Italian badly or with a very heavy German accent. The fabulous thing about the valley we stayed in, aside from the mountains, Heidi fields and quaint villages, was the food. They’ve taken the best of Austrian and Italian cuisine: spaetzle, frankfurters, sauerkraut and wonderful cakes along with great coffee, pizza and gelato.  Lucky we were hiking and biking all the time.  That way we could stuff ourselves with all these goodies! “Spaetzle?” you say. “What is spaeztle?” Well, you’re in for a treat!  It’s……..dare I say it without getting my Italian passport ripped out of my hands……even better than pasta! It’s a batter made of flour and eggs.  You drop bits of it into boiling water to create puffy little morsels.  It’s not pasta exactly, but not dumplings either.

Yearning for more spaetzle

After coming home, we had a longing to eat Spaeztle again.  A fabulous German friend of mine gave me the recipe for it years ago.  She used to make it for me often when I lived there. Another fabulous friend gave me a spaetzle maker years ago too, so all I had to do was scramble through the cupboards to find the recipe and spaetzle grater, and voilá!  Off we went!  Lucky that I have these thoughtful friends around to help me on my spaetzle quest.  It’s really very easy to make if you have the grater.  The hand you see in one of the photos below is that of my 10 year old son.  He also made the batter.

Alternatives to try if you can’t find a spaetzle grater

If you don’t have a special grater, never fear!  You can use a colander with big holes in it, or a flat grater and a knife, or even (so I read somewhere), drip the batter off a fork.  I think the last method would be pretty tricky and you might get big lumps of batter in the water…..when you use the special piece of equipment you see in the photo above, you dump a large spoonful of batter into the white plastic chamber and then run it back and forth over the grater part.  The strips of batter fall into the boiling water and cook almost immediately. You need to then scoop them out with a large spoon with holes in it (what are those spoons called?) and put it into the sauce you have already prepared ahead of time.

I made a sauce with cream, speck that we brought back from San Candido, and peas.  You can use pretty much any sauce that you would use for pasta, such as ragù, tomato or cream and cheese sauces.  You can also eat it as a side with a little butter or oil added to it so that it doesn’t stick together.  Just for the record, unlike spaetzle, this eating it as a side thing is something you should NEVER do with pasta, especially if you have an Italian coming to dinner!

Travel photo of the week

This magnificent landscape is in the Dolomite mountains in north-eastern Italy.  Here you can only see two of the three peaks that tower above you as you ant-hike far below them.  the day we were there (and I imagine on my other days too) there were climbers who made it to the top of these pinnacles.  you could see their tiny figures sitting on the top and swinging their legs into the void.  As I have a bit of vertigo, I had enough trouble with some of the trail that ran along the moiddle of the scree slope far below, without going to those crazy lengths.

By Lisa Watson

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Spaetzle with cream, peas, and bacon

Spaetzle: Alto Adige's Ingenious Answer to Pasta. find out how to make it easily at home.

Course entree, first course, Main Course

Cuisine German, Italian

Prep Time 10 minutes minutes

Cook Time 1 minute minute

Total Time 11 minutes minutes

Servings 6 people

Ingredients

• 3 1/2 cups All-purpose flour 440 g
• 4 Eggs
• 1 tsp Salt
• 1 cup Water 250 ml
• 1 pinch Nutmeg

For the Sauce

• 3/4 cup Single cream
• 100 g Cooked Peas
• 150 g Cubed Speck or cooked ham 1 cup

Instructions

• Put the flour, salt and nutmeg in a bowl.
• Add the eggs and half the water.  Mix everything together.
• Add the rest of the water bit by bit and mix until the batter is thick.
• Bring a large pot of salted water to the boil.
• Use the spaetzle grater, or a colander, or a flat grater to drip bits of batter into the water.
• It will puff up slightly and cook immediately. Scoop it out and place it in the already prepared sauce.

For the Sauce:

• If you are using speck, sauté it in a little olive oil until it is cooked. Boil the peas in salted water.
• Drain the peas. Drain the speck on a paper-towel to remove the oil.
• Gently heat the cream (but don't let it boil). Add the speck (or cubed ham) and peas. Don't add salt as the sauce will already be salty enough.

Notes

Spaetzle is also good reheated.  Just add a little oil or butter to it after it is cooked, and then keep it in the fridge.

Fishy pasta for people who don’t like fish 

Pasta with salmon is an easy pasta dish to keep up your sleeve when you need to get something on the table in a hurry, and feel as though it’s about time you ate some fish as you know it’s good for you, but you don’t really like it much, but anybody can eat something covered in cream.  Oh, hang on….that’s my thought process, not yours. It is true that I’m not an avid fish lover, but I’m trying to become one by eating fish every now and then.  I have to say that even for someone like me who’s pretty diffident to fishy things, I do like pasta with salmon a lot.  OK, I imagine you’re shaking your head right now and saying to yourself (I hope it’s to yourself anyway, so that everyone at the office is not staring at you), “But, smoked salmon isn’t very ‘fishy’!  She can’t say that she likes fish because she eats this!”.  Well, everyone’s got to start somewhere, right?

Travel photo of the week

I have actually been to salmon country: the beautiful Alaska.  And the salmon I ate there, that is truly wild and fresh from the river IS amazingly good. Yes, that’s me lagging behind my friends in the photo below! We were hiking up the side of a glacier on the Kenai Peninsula.  Honestly, if you have the choice of one place to go in your life (and you like nature), this is it!  I’ve never seen such awe-inspiring wilderness, and that’s saying something as I come from New Zealand. But, of course, the other nature-filled place to go if you’ve only able to go to one is New Zealand…… I know the math doesn’t add up, but it is impossible to choose between the two. Just an added note about the photo…just after this was taken, we came around a corner and stumbled across a mother bear with two cubs, who were only about 20 metres away.  We quietly sidled past…thanks goodness it was a black bear and not a grizzly…….I remember some very sage advice I read just before going there: “In Alaska, you should always go hiking with people who run more slowly than you do”…….

So this is the perfect pasta dish for those who should eat fish, but don’t and also for those who like fish.  A great all-rounder.  Adding capers giving it a nice salty zing.  The two flavours marry perfectly together. And, if you don’t think you like capers either, try them in this dish.  You may be pleasantly surprised!

To find out how to cook pasta like an Italian does, check out my handy guide.

By Lisa Watson

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Pasta with salmon and cream

A recipe for pasta with salmon and cream. Even those who don't like fish will eat this!

Course entree, first course, Main Course

Cuisine Italian

Prep Time 2 minutes minutes

Cook Time 10 minutes minutes

Total Time 12 minutes minutes

Servings 4 people

Ingredients

• 400 g Penne Rigate or other short pasta
• 150 ml Single cream
• 80 g Smoked Salmon 7.9 oz
• 2 Tbsp Capers optional

Instructions

• Boil the pasta.
• While the pasta is boiling, gently heat the cream.  DO NOT let it boil.
• Cut up the smoked salmon into small pieces or strips and add to the cream.
• Add the capers, if using.
• Drain the pasta and add to the sauce.