Check your spam, here comes the sun, and vote on

First a discovery I made that someone I thought had decided not to respond to my emails had not received them. Her system, unknown to her, had started rerouting my emails to spam.  I was distraught, not knowing how she was.

Please, if you haven't heard from me, find your spam file, check it and rescue any emails you should have received. Usually it's as simple as marking them "not spam".  

The morning sun is moving around the living room. A few weeks ago, it was shining here

Now it's shifted to shine on the sofa

Seasonal change as seen from indoors.

And, walking the walk, my mail in voting materials arrived, and I voted from the sofa.

Into the mailbox today in plenty of time to be counted. In NJ primaries are party -specific, so you get the materials for the party you belong to. 

And cooking ahead, I'm thinking of making pasta again, ravioli to be exact, so I made a mushroom filling, to freeze ready for whenever I get around to it.

Cream, minced baby Bella mushrooms, fresh thyme, doing fine in its new digs,  garlic, butter, cooked down to a spreadable sort of mixture. 

I think the rest of the mushrooms might go well with yellow potatoes in a pasty, haven't done pasties in a while.

Happy day everyone. 

Yogurt cheese, ravioli, and Cooking for One

I thought you'd like to see the yogurt cheese complete.  And the whey that came off it.  

You'll notice that it's about half and half solid to liquid.  The whey is great in soup, and can go in any color soup without changing its appearance. I have Indian friends who add honey or sugar to this cheese, for a dessert type food, and other hardy souls who salt it.

So the ravioli came to be.  This is fun to do.  You will notice that if you use wonton wrappers instead of going the long route of making your own pasta, they are a bit translucent.  They do seal nicely, though, so you don't get any separating in the boiling water.

The filling was hot Italian sausage, browned, mixed with an egg, a helping of yogurt cheese, and a big shake of shredded Parmigiano.  I added no seasoning at all, since the sausage had plenty, and the yogurt cheese was tangy, the Parmigiano salty enough. 

Full disclosure on the sausage: I forgot to get them out of the freezer early enough, and they were still partly frozen when I sauteed them. So the skin wouldn't come off as planned, and I had to scrape the meat from it.  However, it made some very nice cooked skin with a bit of meat, which is now in the freezer in the chicken bone bag, to use in a future soup as flavoring. And I still had plenty of the meat for the ravioli filling.

This batch of filling made just under two dozen ravioli, most of which are in the freezer for the next time Handsome Son comes to dine.

Egg wash around each wrapper edge to help it seal, then a spoonful of filling in each, press down all around the edges, then turn each one over and press down again.  These get dropped into boiling water, just a few at a time so as not to lose the boiling point, and when they come to the surface give them just a minute before lifting them out to drain.

Cook's privilege, the first few.  Good without any sauce or anything.

I got the Cooking for One book, and recommend it to people who love meat, and have a budget for the more exciting seafood.  I don't, so it might not fit my kitchen, though I may yet find something, and she has some great ideas about how to keep using the same base in interesting and different ways.  

That way you don't have to eat the same meal over and over, always a good point for a single diner. I also like her assumption that you can be a good guest and host to yourself, enjoy the process of both cooking and dining. So definitely take a look at this one.

And here's a little afternoon tea, fresh hot biscuit with yogurt cheese spread, to accompany my reading.

Ravioli makings and yogurt cheese, thinking ahead

I've been browsing through The Splendid Table cookbooks, and suddenly thought of making ravioli.  Not from their books, in fact, just one of those tangential ideas that fly out from seemingly unrelated contexts. Haven't made them for ages.

So today I added wonton wrappers to the lineup of  hot Italian sausage already in the freezer for whatever it fits with, and whole milk plain yogurt, and a supply of eggs. I probably only need one egg, but it looked nice to display them all.

I've made my own pasta for ravioli, and it was good, but not enough to justify that much work at least not right now, before I've recovered from the Rustic Apple Tart.  So the wonton wrappers are a great substitute.  You use them for dumplings of various sorts, but for ravioli I find them good, too.  I do like cooking the sort of things you plunge into boiling water and wait till they emerge at the top.

And since it's a while since I made yogurt cheese, which I use in many places where cream or cream cheese or ricotta is listed, since I like it better, I set some up to go. Here's the whole container full, turned out into a cheesecloth-lined strainer set on a bowl to catch the whey.  This is whole milk, since I want that consistency for the ravioli particularly, but I've made it with nonfat, too, and it's fine but not as coherent as the whole milk version.

 
And here it's in the fridge till tomorrow, with a glass lid on, to drain slowly, to set up a nice cheese consistency ready to use.
 

Kept the original container for the whey which will feature in some future soup.

This is all very good, because it means I have to wait till tomorrow for the cheese to be ready for the ravioli caper, fine by me, I can read my mystery story, an Emma Lathen set in the Baltic,  instead of pounding about in the kitchen.  And have a cup of tea, too. Such larks.

Tomorrow I'll sizzle the Italian sausage, beat in the eggs and some cheese and various spices for the filling and go from there.  I'll probably freeze a bunch of them, since you can't make just a couple of ravioli.  And they can go with various sauces, but I think I'll make a red sauce this time.

Oh, and a postscript on the Rustic Apple Tart -- Handsome Son stopped in for a cup of tea and a healthy hunk of the tart.  I whined at great length about the complications, multiple tools, and various other things and whether it was worth it really.  

He listened patiently, so tactful, don't know where he gets it from, certainly not from his parents, and said, well, it was worth it, how soon will you make it again?  Oh.  So I undertook to do it for some future special occasion.   

Speaking of which, Carol G., a friend in stitching and a blogista, mentioned a great cookbook she, herself a seriously good cook, swears by, The Pleasure of Cooking for One.  So I've put it on request at the libe, and will no doubt have some adventures with it for your future reading pleasure.