Italian Night with Friends!

We've been doing some themed potlucks with friends in town and this time it was Italian theme.

I was baking all week with my sourdough starters, which is great because they really build in strength the more you use them. I made a big batch of chapeau rolls, which turned out beautifully and were nice and hot for dinner still. I think I've blogged about making them already. Val made sweet potato gnocchi (!!!), which I've never had before (or even heard of) but were fun (and with a nice pale orange color) and would be good to try making sometime at home, perhaps round the holidays or even made with winter squash if it were dry enough? I digress... :-) They were served with sauteed spinach and mushrooms, which was great, and as a side I made a cannellini, black kale and carrot salad with olive oil, lemon and garlic. That was super and I'll definitely make some more soon. I made it as a side dish so just sort of improv'ed the dish. I cooked up 1/2 cup of cannellinis using the quick cook method where you heat the beans to a boil in plenty of water, boil about 5 minutes, then chuck out the boiling water (save the beans!!) and start over again. For whatever reason, this cooks beans quickly. After they cooked I let them cool completely. Later, I sliced all the veggies small and thin, then sauteed the veggies with garlic and lemon peel, and then tossed the beans in at the end to reheat and gently mixed it all together without crushing the beans. I reserved just a little extra lemon peel from dessert making and added this at the end as well and it made for a subtle but very nice addition.

For dessert, I made a lemon tart. So fun!! There were some beautiful lemons this week at the co-op and I picked out two big handsome ones to make the dessert. The dessert recipe comes from Carol Field's wonderful Italian Baker, which I love and am doing some nice baking from this year. This is a wonderfully lemony tart. Delicious with a strong cup of coffee freshly made, which is how we ultimately had it after dinner that night. I loved the intense tangy lemon. So perfect!!

I made a simple pasta frolla recipe using whole wheat flour. To this I added some lemon zest, a little lemon juice and some dried culinary lavender that Shawn's mom gave me. The lavender is awesome added. I considered rosemary too but started thinking I'd better get using the lavender. :-) It smells heavenly when baking in the shell. Fills up the house with the wonderful smells of lavender and lemon. So summery!! This would make for excellent shortbread as well!! I'm definitely making this tart for Shawn's mom when she comes to visit next month as she is a die hard lover of lemon curd and for some reason I've never really made much of it for her, despite knowing this!!!

Here's the pasta frolla (tart dough, Italian style) recipe, with my additions:
1 1/2 cups whole wheat flour (use a lower protein whole wheat or wheat berry, as you wish)
3/4 cups brown sugar (I used a bit less than this and substituted sucanat)
1/2 tsp salt (or a bit less)
7 tablespoons butter, room temp or a bit cooler
1 egg
1 tsp lemon (or substitute vanilla if you are using this for some other non lemony dessert)
lemon zest, 1 TBSP culinary lavender
Cream butter and sugar, add dry ingredients. When nice and crumbly, add your egg and other ingredients. Don't overmix! Just let it come together and you can shape it into a ball and allow it to rest and cool, at least an hour.

Lemon Cream (doesn't Crema al Limone sound more beautiful?)

3 eggs lightly beaten
1 cup powdered sugar
3/4 cup sugar (I used a lightweight, unrefined cane sugar rather than coarse sucanat as i didn't want the molasses flavor or the dark color)
scant 1/2 cup fresh lemon juice (two large, organic lemons well squeezed gave me plenty)
grated zest of two large lemons
7 tablespoons butter

Again, you'll need to use or improvise a double boiler (I sometimes think I'd like to get a double boiler someday...but then again, improv works just right, too, with less stuff cluttering everything up!). Heat up your eggs and sugars, beating them up first. Stir in the juice, zest and butter and mix this with a whisk or some other implement. Let the water come to a boil and then turn it down to simmer. Keep stirring basically the whole time, for about 10 minutes. The cream will thicken beauteously. I didn't strain this afterwards, either. There's no need, which is nice and easy after so many years of making pastry cream!! Place your finished curd into a glass container and refrigerate.

Something I find distressing about curds and creams is that they form a skin as they cool. If you mix them up well before putting into your tart shell, that's not such a big deal. I do not like to nor do I recommend placing plastic cooking wrap right on food - all sorts of studies are showing that soft, malleable plastic to leach like crazy and who knows what weird stuff is in there...I also don't like plastic period. I used one of my corn based bio bags to cover the curd while it cooled. I'm not really crazy about that solution either, but at least it isn't plastic wrap. I think next time I'll just put the glass lid over the glass bottom and if a little skin forms, let it.

Once it's cool, it's ready to use. This tart requires the tart shell to be baked straight through. Put it in either a tart shell or a glass pie pan, pierce the bottom many times with a fork to allow steam to get out. For the first 12 to 15 minutes, I laid a bit of parchment inside and put in some dried beans too, to help the tart shell keep its shape and not expand all over the place. For the last 10 or so minutes of baking, I took them out to let it brown. Bake the shell at 350.