I set out to make agnolotti stuffed with braised chuck and spinach but the universe conspired against me.  Well, not really, I just got three hours and nine hand-rolled pasta sheets into the dish and decided rather than take the time to carefully form agnolotti I would cheat and no one would be the wiser.  It’s not really cheating if you slow-braise your stuffing, hand cut your pasta and grow your own spinach, too, but I still felt a touch of guilt for not molding my little squares into perfect agnolotti.  You see agnolotti requires some fancy folding, pinching and crimping, but my lovely quadrati (squares) stay together so nicely with just a slathering of egg wash and a few quick cuts in a way I view them as the perfect filled pasta. 

I had a wine-soaked weekend of sexy soirees and tantalizing tastings, so I felt some classic comfort food was in order. My go-to is always hand-cut pasta because the meditative process is so soul-soothing.  I’m experimenting with different ratios of semolina, tipo 00 flour, and eggs/egg yolks in my dough lately.  This time I decided to try 100% tipo 00 (which is basically standard unbleached white flour), forego the semolina, and do whole eggs instead of a mixture of egg and yolk. I added a touch of salt, but held back adding oil, which I sometimes do for viscosity.

It turned out the oil was far from necessary this time- the dough lacked the stiffness semolina adds to it and it was malleable and soft as putty. It was a dream to roll into rectangular sheets, so acquiescent to the rolling pin, and not at all sticky.  I prefer semolina pasta if I’m going to turn it into tagliolini, fettucine or another non-filled noodle, but all-flour dough is a dream if you’re making precision pasta. 

I had a glut of spinach begging to be eaten, so I steamed it up and mixed it along with some duck eggs into braised, minced chuck.  I added a few sprinkles of parmesan and I had the perfect filling.  I retained the stock in which I braised the chuck; that’s what I used to make the sauce that would ultimately coat the quadrati.  Normally I would have braised in a wine/stock combo, but after such a heavy red weekend I was feeling a tad wined-out, so straight stock won in the end. 

I tend to make my pasta dough, let it rest for maybe half an hour while I’m finalizing the filling, then roll it into sheets as needed to stuff and cut.  This way the sheets won’t dry out, though it does go against the rule of finishing like tasks at the same time.  I roll out two rectangular sheets, maybe 3-4” wide by 30” long and dollop filling every few inches down one of the sheets.  Then I wash it with egg everywhere the filling is not. This way the top sheet sticks beautifully and they meld as if into one sheet. I also think the egg wash helps the two sheets to thin out once they grab one another, which makes for better, less chewy pasta. 

Once I drape the top sheet onto the bottom, I squeeze it shut down its entire length.  All that remains is to cut the final pasta forms (in this case quadrati, or squares) and set them to dry on a baking sheet.  Different pasta-makers have different rules on air-drying before the boiling plunge, but I’ve always found 30-45 minutes to be ideal. I like a touch of crispness, but not so dry the pasta cracks and cooks unevenly. 

I add a bit of stock to the pasta water so the meaty flavor soaks through the noodle- a little trick I happened upon accidentally when I had excess stock one day.  While the pasta is boiling I reheat the sauce and whisk in a few tablespoons of butter to emulsify it.  After three or four minutes of boiling I remove the pasta from the water with a slotted spoon, and toss it in the sauce.  The perfect comfort plate consists of three or four of these lovely quadrati drenched in sauce and topped with a generous shaving of parmesan.  After the three hour process of making this pasta any impurities from a weekend spent having a ball virtually vanish and suddenly a bottle of Barolo isn’t sounding like such a bad thing.  It sure complements the lovingly-prepared meal to a tee, but don’t let me be a bad influence, drink what you will.  Mangia!

Wow- over two weeks without a post. Boy did I ever miss you lovely people? I was off on a crazy top-secret adventure that will reveal itself very soon. I hate secrets, so I should probably just stop talking about it and get to the meat of this post, I just wanted to share exactly how much I wanted to be here blogging, and to let you know in no uncertain terms that my absence was in no way self-imposed.  When I first started blogging and I would read other bloggers’ posts about how supportive and amazing the blogging community was I thought it was a bunch of cheesy drivel.  Now, after two weeks away, I realize just how much I depend on this strange connection to people I’ve never met, but seemingly I have more in common with than folks I’ve known since infancy.  I’m happy to be back and I hope you enjoy the Tim Tam Slam as much as I did. 

Australians have damn good taste in cookies! Or do they call them biscuits down under? Maybe they have some hybrid word for it I haven’t yet heard, like biscookies or cookscuits.  I’m going to go with biscookies. I like the ring to it.  Plus it doesn’t sound so fattening that way. How could something that sounds so cute be fattening? Yup, going with biscookies. That way I can eat like 20 and not worry about the excessive indulgence- yes! Well anyway, this post is all about the best little biscookies to come out of Australia, swim across several seas and land in my lap.

 I discovered Tim Tams completely serendipitously, which is how I can really tell we are meant to be together for life.  I was in the grocery store the other day talking to one of my best friend’s on the phone while I shopped for a gift. What was I doing shopping for a gift in the supermarket, you ask? Well it was a gift for some foodie friends of mine, one of whom lives in Canada and has the lovely blog www.eatlivetravelwrite.com while the other lives in Australia and can be found at http://jeroxie.com/addiction/We were participating in an exchange, basically mailing off food items that would be incredibly common where we lived, but not so common where we were shipping them off to.

 I was on the phone with Lily because she had just gotten back from Australia the week before and I wanted to run my selections by her to ensure that they would indeed be unavailable in Oz.  Well truth be told she wasn’t much help because she just kept raving on and on about how great everything is in Australia and how they have this and that and all these glorious things we doltish Americans blindly go without.  She focused especially on these nuggets of caramelly-chocolately goodness called Tim Tams.  I happened to be walking down the cookie aisle and I thought I would take a quick peek to see if perhaps they had actually made it here without her knowledge.  You see she lives in the backwoods middle of nowhere and doesn’t get out much, so I figured cosmopolitan Seattle (ha!) might have a leg up on tree-ville snowland. Sure enough, staring back at me from a tucked away corner of the cookie aisle was a gleaming box of Tim Tams.  Lily was outraged that I had direct access to such lovely biscookies, but I offered to mail her some so I think she’ll be alright. 

I took them home and managed to leave them in the cupboard and forget about them for roughly one week.  I had a glut of homemade ice cream to get through, plus early spring is more of a savory time for me and I don’t crave a ton of sweets. That all changed when I opened the damned package of Tim Tams.  I typically hate pre-packaged snacks, but these little monsters are “open the package and eat the whole thing in one sitting” good!  I had picked up two packages thinking I’d mail one to Lily, but alas, that never happened since they all ended up in my tummy.  It’s quite sad, really, I’m training for a half marathon so I go out and run five miles most days, but I come home and undo all that hard work with one whiff of Tim Tams.  If you have never tried them, I caution you not to, or at least if you do, don’t hold me responsible.  This is not the attitude I’m adopting toward my immediate friends.  I’m trying to infect Seattle at-large with a Tim Tam addiction as big as my own, so whenever a new person walks through my front door, I practically shove a Tim Tam straight down their throat.  I’ve made converts by the dozen- it’s getting dangerous. 

Lily told me about this amazing thing called a Tim Tam Slam.  Basically you bite off each end of the Tim Tam then use it as a straw to ingest a shot of espresso. Or maybe coffee, but I steadfastly refuse to believe people drink that watered-down drivel, so espresso it is in my mind.  I’m not much for coffee beans in any form factor, truth be told, but I have been meaning to get around to espresso ice cream, and the Tim Tam Slam gave me a way to make it all the more palatable.  I made my espresso ice cream which definitely passed the paddle-licking good test all on its own according to all three members of my household.  Then I made it even better by churning in a bunch of Tim Tams a la frozen Tim Tam Slam.  I had eight people for dinner that night and they all went back for seconds on the Tim Tam Slam! This from a group of gay men who rarely eat and tend to watch their figures more than I do.  “Oh I don’t eat dessert” quickly gave way to moans of pleasure as we all savored the genius of those clever Australians.   Well, and the genius of me too, since I came up with the whole frozen twist, not to toot my own horn or anything since I’m sure it’s been done before, though pretty good for an American, right? Ok, I’m going to sneak downstairs and steal a Tim Tam from the locked away secret stash before dinner.  Please don’t tell anyone, ok?

Corned beef doesn’t exactly conjure images of glamour and sophistication; nevertheless it’s one of those things I get a craving for it roughly once a year. How convenient that my craving happened a short while before St. Patrick’s Day so I can share my results with you lot (I’m told that’s a right Irish way of saying things- correct me if I’ve misspoken). 

Supermarket corned beef, in my experience, is tough, plagued with a lingering flavor of skeevy salt, and downright bilious in many cases.  Doing it right, which means doing it yourself, really only takes a bit of planning, is more economical and tastes infinitely superior.  I borrowed the corning technique from Michael Ruhlman’s Charcuterie with only minor adjustments based on my own taste preferences.  I’m a bay leaf fanatic, so I doubled up on those since my bay leaf tree is only too happy to oblige me with her radiant foliage.  I started with a lovely first-cut brisket that I picked up for a song from my favorite butcher in Pike Place Market.  The capable butcher men are always eager to help now that they know I write a Seattle food blog and they can log on and check out the crazy things I do to their meat. 

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