Stacerella

Ellen/Wendi/Mary/Betty/Jean/John and the rest of the gang:

GUNG HAY FAT CHOY!

Hope you have a lucky and happy Chinese new year.

And send me some of those chocolate gold coins if there are any left over, please.

Apparently it’s International Disturbed People’s Day today. … Ok, then. A friend emailed me some great food artwork photos. Don’t know who to credit, but the photos are massivly ingenious, cute and very well done. Kudos to the people who created them!

Well, I’ve been here off and on, but busy lately with gearing down from the holiday season, putting stuff away into storage, cleaning up the general mess that comes with Christmas presents and wrapping them up all pretty like, throwing stuff out, reading, beading, baking… the usual.

Also we’ve been dealing with birthdays (mine, Joe’s mum’s, etc.), sick family members as well as a few family deaths. It’s been a bit weird around here lately, but hopefully when the FIL gets out of the hospital at the end of this week, things will start to settle down.

I have yet to read the lovely Marcella Hazan pasta book (Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking) Joe bought me for Christmas. I’m totally dying to dive into that one! In the meantime, I’ve been reading Brain Fuel instead. Almost done that one, as well as another he bought me for Christmas 2007 called Fire And Ice about the social differences between Canada and the USA that I’ve been reading on and off all year. (I don’t get many pockets of reading time. Can you tell? *snort*)

Anyway, I really want to blog about Marcella’s thoughts on pasta making and traditional Italian ricotta pie when I finally do get to read the book. Any great tips will be passed along to you, of course! In due time, kiddies, in due time. Promise.

Addendum: So, I went through my Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking book and there isn’t much mention about ricotta pie. There as a bit about using ricotta in cakes, but it was a mere passing comment - no recipes. Disappointing. Will have to seek out her other cookbooks in the future. As far as her thoughts on pasta making, she definitely perfers to make hers by hand, forks and rolling pin over a mixer and pasta rollers, but concedes both are standards and acceptable methods. The most important factor to her is that the pasta is homemade. She also has a great section on dried pasta and when it’s a better choice over its fresh counterpart, and a whole list of sauces to make and with what pasta. Fabulous! She included her father’s fish recipe that caught my eye, too. Interesting. Must try it sometime soon. This is a must have book for any serious budding Italian cook. I give it two thumbs up for the Cooks Illustrated inspired renderings of how to handle/prep/cook the ingredients, too. That alone makes this book worth its weight in gold in my eyes!

Over this past Christmas, we head up north to share Christmas day dinner with my side of the family. The hostess asked me to bring a dessert, so I chose to make my lovely citrus fruitcake initially, but as the time grew closer, I changed my mind several times about making a bread for a dinner dessert - even one as lovely as Martha’s citrus fruitcake. The reason I kept going back and forth about this recipe was that I wanted to bake something that would be strong enough to stand out from all of the other usual candy/sugar/chocolate Christmas suspects and to really add balance to the dessert selections that night.

Having baked everything I needed to for Joe’s side of the holiday, I decided to see what I had left in my kitchen that I could smash together, and wouldn’t you know it but I had all the fixings on hand to make a lovely ricotta cheese cake. Suddenly a germ of an idea! Ok, I thought, I’ll start from there. I decided the best idea was to take the dried citrus fruit from the fruitcake recipe and gently fold it to the ricotta cake batter to make a hybrid holiday cake I could bake in my springform cake pan (so I didn’t have to make a crust).

I can’t tell you how lovely this worked out. It was easy to assemble, I didn’t have to worry about the bake times or the look of it, and I knew that chilling it for at least 24 hours would give the batter enough time to gel or set perfectly. And I was right. When I started slicing into this cake to serve it in sliver wedges, I could see all of the fruit and pistachio chunks had evenly been distrubed throughout the cake, and this added to the overall beautiful presentation of each piece as I passed them down the table, one after another.

Speaking of presentation, I decided to go minimal with this one - again, this was a dessert among many in a sea of sugar coated goods. I let the cake’s flavours as they came together stand on their own, but that’s not to say when you serve this after a lovely meal as the sole dessert you couldn’t top this cake with fresh fruit and some kind of sweet sauce. That would only enhance the lovely tastes of the cake itself as is. Feel free to make this ricotta cake your own by changing up the additions. I have provided some ideas at the end of this recipe to get you started and to make you feel confident about adding anything to this cake batter as you try it over and over again. I’m sure you will make this cake a staple in your baking repertoire as I have.

Basic ricotta cheese cake batter:
1 pie crust of your choice (optional if using a springform pan)
1C yogurt plain or flavoured – I used banana strawberry for the one I made for the dinner)
2C skim ricotta cheese
3 large eggs (lightly beaten)
1C sugar
2 to 4 tbsp all purpose flour (gauge the amount by the batter, it shouldn’t be too runny)
1 tbsp vanilla or almond extract (optional; can also be flavour syrup shots)

Strain the yogurt in a cheese cloth for one hour to drain the whey. Pre-heat the oven to 350, bake the crust for ten minutes.  Mix the yogurt and ricotta cheese, then add the eggs, sugar and extract. Gently stir till all is wet and mixed in.  Pour into the prebaked pie shell and bake for 1hour and ten minutes. Cool on a rack for up to two hours before chilling in the fridge for 2 to 48 hours. Serve with crème anglaise, ganache or any other sweet sauce.

Variations:  Citrus – Fold in a half cup of mixed dried fruit (golden raisins, dried ginger, dried apricot, etc.) and a half cup of crushed pistachios to the mixture to the batter. Chocolate Chip – use plain yogurt only and fold half to full cup of chips into the batter before baking, or use only a handful to scatter over the top of the poured batter right before baking so only the top is chocolate filled. Fruit - throw a handful of fresh or frozen fruits like blueberries, strawberries or even a mix of all kinds of berries into the batter or place gently on the top of the filled pan so the top layer is different from the body. Chocolate & Nuts - use some of your best cocoa powder and a handful of coursely crushed up nuts like halzelnuts, pistachios, walnuts or almonds in the batter to make a lovely coffee cake.

Notes:  I have baked this pie in all kinds of pans, glass being the gold standard of course, but any shape and any style will do, really. Springform is probably the best, but I have used small tort pans to make a few small pies of out the same batter.

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