Kale Chips, the easier way

Nearly year-round, both Trader Joe's and Costco carry bags of pre-washed, ready-to-use fresh kale leaves. This takes a lot of the prep work for these chips away since all you need to do now is remove whatever stems are still attached to the leaves. By the end of summer, the stems are usually thick and woody and not terribly good for eating.

Fresh kale ready to be baked in the oven

In two 5-quart mixing bowls, separate one Trader Joe's bag of fresh kale leaves into equal portions. With each bowl, you'll be able to spread the leaves in a single layer across two 17" x 11" rimmed cookie sheets. 

Add a teaspoon of olive oil to each bowl and work the oil onto the leaves with your hands.

If you are going to lightly salt these, use less than 1/4 tsp of regular table salt or sea salt. A little bit of salt goes a long way. I used a Himalayan pink salt that I ground into a finer texture using a mortar and pestle. You don't have to do this. I just wanted to see what it would taste like. 

Kale chips, ready to eat!

Bake in a pre-heated 350 degrees F oven for 9-10 minutes.

Baked Nachos with Black Beans and Sundried Tomatoes

For a rainy August day, this dish really hit the spot. I thought I'd add in some sun-dried tomatoes for flavor and color contrast. I found that the shallowest oven-safe dish I had to use was a pie plate, imagine that. If I make this again, I think I will try making a cheese sauce for the nachos.

Ingredients

some quantity of organic tortilla chips
a large quantity of a cheese (jack cheese)
an equal portion of another cheese (grass-fed sharp cheddar cheese)
6-8 sun-dried tomato strips, roughly chopped
1/2 can of organic black beans, rinsed and drained

Directions

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F

Layer ingredients starting with chips at the bottom, followed by cheese, then beans and some sun-dried tomatoes. Repeat until all the ingredients are used up.

Bake for 20 minutes, or until all the cheese has melted.

Ravioli Filling #2 - Lobster Mushroom/Sundried Tomato/Ricotta Cheese

Ah, finally found the small square of paper I scribbled out the ingredient ratio on. This might have well just been sun-dried tomato and ricotta cheese. I couldn't taste the lobster mushrooms at all. The other flavors in this filling mixture were too too strong. Definitely in retrospect, the amount of sun-dried tomatoes was too much for this batch. And, the cheese should have been the liquidish stuff instead of the dried curds from Trader Joe's. Alas, I couldn't taste the lobster mushrooms at all. <sad face>

Ingredients

1 c dried lobster mushrooms (rehydrated and coarsely chopped)
1 tsp lemon juice
1/2 tbsp olive oil
1 garlic clove, minced
1/4 tsp ground nutmeg
1/2 c whole milk ricotta cheese
3-4 sun-dried tomato strips, finely chopped
1 egg white
1 tsp each fresh basil, fresh thyme, fresh rosemary, finely chopped
1 tsp each dried oregano and marjoram (if not available fresh)

Whirl all the ingredients together in a food prep until mixture resembles fine crumbs. Let chill in a covered container in the refrigerator until ready to use.

Ravioli Filling #1 - Sausage/Ricotta/Spinach

An afterthought note on the ricotta cheese. At the store there were two types of ricotta cheese. One came in a pint tub, but was nonfat ricotta cheese. I'm not sure how this is even possible since cheese is made from the coagulation of the protein and fats in dairy. The other was dry and crumbled; and notably very salty. There was so much salt in the ricotta cheese that it overpowered all other ingredients in the ravioli. I couldn't taste the spinach or the sage. And heck, the cheese was saltier than the Italian pork sausage. If you're going to procure ricotta cheese for this recipe, skip Trader Joe's. Neither of TJ's ricotta cheese products are right for making ravioli. You'll want to get a ricotta cheese made from whole milk. Anyhow, onto the Better Homes & Gardens recipe ratio.

Each ravioli uses 1 tsp of mix, so keep that in mind if you have only made one batch of ravioli pasta dough.

Makes 1 cup.

Ingredients

4 oz Italian pork sausage (if you buy the links, simply remove the casings from 2 of them)

3/4 c fresh spinach leaves, packed

1 egg yolk, lightly beaten

1/3 c ricotta cheese

1 tsp fresh sage, minced

1/8 tsp grated whole nutmeg or ground nutmeg

Directions

1. If you bought sausage links instead of bulk sausage, simply remove the casings from two of the sausages. Fry sausage over medium heat and break up the sausage as it cooks. When no more pink remains, remove the sausage to a plate and add spinach to the hot pan. Cook the spinach until it wilts. Drain off the fat, if any.

2.  In a food processor, combine the cooked sausage and spinach. Pulse until it resembles ground pork.

3. In a medium bowl, combine egg yolk, ricotta cheese, sage, nutmeg. Stir in sausage mixture. Cover and chill until needed.

This is more than enough filling to make twenty 1" ravioli, each filled with 1 tsp filling.

Basic Pasta Dough for Ravioli

This recipe ratio comes from the French Laundry cookbook. First time making ravioli, second attempt at making pasta from scratch. There are two parts to any noodle dish. The most important part, I've discovered is having a pasta dough that tastes good on its own. It's not too salty; it holds up well to being boiled, and when you eat it, the pasta says: eat more, eat more. The second part is packaging. No, not how the product starts out, but how it looks when it ends up on your plate.

For a pasta-making beginner, this dough didn't exactly come together like it does in all those YouTube videos about how to make pasta dough from scratch; but what I can tell you (and the cookbook says this, so it must be true) is that you cannot overknead the dough.

I hope you are in shape because kneading the pasta dough by hand is an upper body workout!

Ingredients

1 3/4 c (8 oz) all purpose flour
6 large egg yolks
1 large egg
1 1/2 tsp olive oil
1 tbsp milk

Directions

Mound the flour in the center of a Silpat mat or large cutting board. Make a well in the center large enough to accommodate the wet ingredients (milk, egg yolks, whole egg, and olive oil). Pour wet ingredients into the well.

Mixing. Using your fingers, break the eggs up and turn the flour in a circular motion (same direction, don't go all changing direction when incorporating the wet ingredients into the flour). Supposedly this circular motion helps to incorporate the flour into the eggs otherwise it'll be all lumpy. Eventually the mixture will get too tight to keep turning with your fingers.

At this stage, I thought I had more of the ingredients stuck to my hands than what was on the board. My hands looked as though I'd been sparring with the Pillsbury dough boy. Alas, I think this is normal. 

Kneading.  Knead the dough by pressing it in a forward motion with the heels of your hands. Do this several times until the dough doesn't feel sticky. Let the dough rest for a few minutes. Form the dough into a ball and knead it again until the dough becomes silky smooth. What was interesting that the more I kneaded the dough, the more it came off my hands and by the time I felt like I was done kneading, most of it was off my hands. 

I'm not sure that the dough ever got to the silky smooth stage from kneading; but after I let it rest in a closed plastic food storage container, the dough was smooth and pliable.

The cookbook suggests that kneading can take anywhere from 10 to 15 minutes. This might be true if you were a seasoned bread maker with massive forearms. I think this step took me longer.

Resting. You could wrap the dough in plastic wrap, but a sealable airtight plastic container will suffice.

Let the dough rest for 30 minutes to an hour before making it into something else, like noodles or ravioli.

Making. This batch of dough made 40 ravioli dumplings, though I'm sure more could have been made if I didn't waste so much figuring out the hand-cranked pasta machine. The cookbook says to take this ball of dough and cut it into thirds, then each third (roughly 5 oz each by weight) should be cut in half. The amount of dough that should be fed through the pasta machine is 2.5 oz. I used a digital kitchen scale to measure out the dough.

I ran the dough through the pasta machine starting from the largest width setting (7) to the second smallest (2). I found that the smallest setting on that machine makes a paper-thin, translucent sheet of pasta; maybe this is how filo dough is made. Run the pasta through the machine 2-3 times per knob setting, gradually making it thinner.

Most pasta recipes will tell you to fold it and turn it a quarter. I watched a YouTube video on this because I had no conceptual idea what the cookbook was talking about. I used an egg wash (1 egg yolk + water) with a pastry brush on one side of the ravioli and pressed the two sheets of pasta dough together after putting in the filling. That method worked well for sealing it.