Holiday part 1

Instead of putting all pictures from this Summer holiday together in one long blog post, let's divide them into separate posts per events. That ought to save me some time and prevent me from postponing it until the next holiday.

We spent a few days in the nice rural counties in the South-East of England. While staying their, our friends S & O took us to one of their favourite Oxford restaurants: the Trout (map), situated in a lovely place near a water mill and a river. But of course we don't care about scenery at a food blog. We care about the food!

Let's state upfront that I didn't take any pictures of my own food. Why? Well, the food of the other three in our company was served first. So, while waiting for my course, I took pictures of the other three courses. When finally my food arrived, I was so hungry that I immediately dived in, without the slightest notion of taking a picture (the wait probably took only 1-2 minutes, but seeing the other food and having whetted our appetites with some bread and olives I guess I let myself go). For myself, I had ordered deepfried cod in Peroni beer batter with chips and pea puree and a tartare sauce, which in itself was good because it was prepared with fresh ingredients; the cod itself was a little tasteless unfortunately.

Now, for the pictures:

O had a burger with gherkin, mustard mayo, cheese, relish, extra bacon and chips.

S had a pasta dish, strozzapreti, with artichokes, olives, tomatoes, rocket and goats cheese

N had a ribeye steak, with balsamic roast onions, rocket, horseradish, parmesan and chips.

Soy Lasagna

Because of her throat infection, N had difficulty swallowing food. So for today, she wanted lasagna, because that would be easy to swallow. Having done groceries shopping with a different menu plan in mind last saturday, I actually hadn't ingredients at hand to make my traditional lasagna. So, I came up with the improvised stuff I'll describe below.

No store-bought pasta sheets in the cupboard. Darn. That would mean that I had to make my own pasta. The agony :'(. So, to start with, I took 200 grams of pasta flour (tipo 00), two eggs and some salt. Clutched the eggs in the pile of flour and gradually stirred in more and more of the flour to form some dough.

Well, that doesn't look too bad for someone who doesn't like making dough. The kneading wasn't actually that hard, because the dough basically wasn't too sticky. I let it rest for over an hour in a plastic bag in the fridge, while making the tomato sauce.

I fried some onion, carrot and zucchini along with a laurel leaf. My traditional recipe requires leeks and leaves out zucchini and carrot.

Added a tin of tomato chunks and half a liter of tomato passata. Then some fresh basil leaves and freshly ground salt and pepper, and three teaspoons of sugar. In hindsight, I might have left the sugar out because of the bechamel sauce.

Instead of browning the ground meat first in a skillet, I crumbled it straight into the boiling sauce. Normally, there should be a tin of corned beef included also. I let it cook for an hour.

Rolled out the pastry and cut it in half.

Mangled it through the pasta machine to get some nice long sheets of pasta.

Cut it into pieces which I thought would fit the tiny oven dish, cooked it for two minutes and let it drain off on a teacloth.

Cooking some pasta sheets in water with an added beef stock cube.

Next, I set out to make my very first bechamel sauce using soy milk instead of regular milk, because of N's trying out to avoid dairy products, while waiting for her lactose tolerance test. I was afraid it might winnow, but it behaved very well, just like regular milk. Consistency turned out to be the same.

There you have it. The first layer of tomato sauce and bechamel sauce.

Stuffed the dish to its max and sprinkled some grated parmesan cheese on top (hard cheeses apparently lack lactose, so this should be safe).

And there you have it! My very first improvised lasagna with soy, made from scratch.

I didn't like it that much. The soy milk was too sweet compared to regular milk, and the bolognese sauce didn't come near my regular bolognese sauce. N liked it though, so she was happy. Today, she took the leftovers with her for lunch while trying to work for a few hours despite being sick.