Spaghetti with spinach pesto and soft boiled eggs – Or an absolutely Un-Christmas dish at Christmas time

Just to continue with the lunacy I have started…

Spaghetti with spinach pesto and soft boiled eggs

- 400 g spaghetti

- salt

- 4 soft boiled eggs

- lamb’s lettuce

- salted almonds, roughly chopped

- sheep’s-milk cheese, grated

For the pesto:

- 130 g spinach, chopped

- 3 cloves garlic, grated

- 120 g salted almond, toasted

- 80 g sheep’s-milk cheese

- 80 ml olive oil

- nutmeg

- salt and freshly ground pepper

Preparation:

1. Cook the spaghetti.

2. Blend the ingredients of the pesto in a food processor, then mix the pesto with the spaghetti.

3. Serve the pasta with the yolks of the soft boiled eggs, the salad, the salted almonds and the cheese.

Zucchini stew with pesto – I am waiting for you, basil, again…

(It is actually főzelék in Hungarian: it is a special category in Hungarian cuisine, thicker than a soup, and thinner than a stew.)

Some time ago I prepared an Italian zucchini soup with pesto from a popular magazine. I also took a photo of the soup – as an enthusiastic food photographer would normally do – and I uploaded the photo to my Facebook page and I got loads of comments instantly – unfortunately, not about my photo, but comments praising the soup! Well! That recipe was not my creation; I didn’t even post it on my blog, so I had to send the recipe to everybody in private e-mails.

Since autumn has started to overtake my basils on the balcony, I wanted to prepare something for my blog using them. But now I will show every freak of magazines and pesto that we will need no soup or pasta, I will use all my basil notwithstanding. And I managed! And now this is my own recipe!

Of course now I am waiting for the comments, because this recipe has surely appeared somewhere else, while I believe that it was my own idea. (Of course I don’t believe it, because it is now quite impossible to come up with something completely new, only something which is horrible: for example pesto with coke – it is surely something that has never been published!)

And I would be very grateful if you wrote to me if it is still true that you cannot taste anything for three days after eating Chinese pine nuts, because I only dare to buy the extremely expensive Portuguese pine nuts!

Zucchini stew with pesto

- 1000 g zucchini, sliced with a mandoline slicer

- salt

- 2 tbsp. olive oil

- 1 onion, chopped finely

- 50 ml whipping cream

 

For the pesto:

- 40 g fresh basil

- 100 ml olive oil

- 2 cloves of garlic, mashed

- 20 g pine nuts, toasted

- 20 gr parmesan, freshly grated

- salt and freshly ground pepper

For the top:

- 10 g pine nuts, toasted

For the parmesan chips:

- 50 g parmesan, freshly grated

Preparation:

1. For the parmesan chips preheat the oven to 190°C. Grease a large baking sheet with butter and sprinkle it with flour. Put a round cookie cutter on it; sprinkle some parmesan in the cutter sot that it would cover the baking sheet in the cutter in an even layer. Repeat this until the parmesan runs out. Bake the chips for some minutes until they turn golden brown and crunchy.

2. Blend the ingredients of the pesto in a food processor.

3. Sprinkle the salt on the zucchini and wait for 10 minutes to draw out the excess water.

4. Fry the onion on the olive oil, add the zucchini and steam it until it remains crunchy only in the middle, but it turns otherwise soft.

5. Add the whipping cream to the pesto and mix it to the steamed zucchini. Sprinkle with pine nuts on the top.

We had buckwheat bread with it.

 

Chicken & chard tartlets with salted almonds – Autumn has arrived

On our balcony, we grew chards with stalks of varying colours. And now, because autumn is coming, we had to use them up. So as the Hungarian proverb says, we have chosen now the coat for the button!

Chicken & chard tartlets with salted almonds

For the chicken part:

- 1 tbsp. olive oil

- 1 tbsp. butter

- ½ onion

- 2 cloves garlic, chopped to thin slices

- 250 g minced chicken meat (preferably leg)

- 25 ml dry white wine

- nutmeg, freshly ground

- 1 small clove garlic, mashed

- 125 cream cheese (Philadelphia)

- salt and freshly ground pepper

For the chard part:

- ½ tbsp. olive oil

- ½ tbsp. butter

- 250 g chard, chopped

- nutmeg, freshly ground

- 1 tsp. honey

- salt and freshly ground pepper

For the tartlets:

- 270 g ready-to-bake puff pastry

- a small amount of butter and flour

On the top:

- salted almonds, toasted and chopped

Preparation:

1. For the chicken part fry the onion and the sliced garlic in the mixture of the olive oil and butter, then fry the minced meat in it, as well, in two instalments. Add salt and pepper in the meantime. Pour the white wine to it, and stir it for 2-3 minutes, until the alcohol evaporates. Add the nutmeg, as well. In the end, mix in the mashed garlic and the cream cheese.

2. For the chard part, wilt the chard in the mixture of the olive oil and butter in 1-2 minutes, and mix in the remaining ingredients.

3. On a wooden board slightly sprinkled with flour, roll the puff pastry until thin. Spread butter in the tartlet pans and line them with the rolled puff pastry (you will have some remaining puff pastry). Preheat the oven to 170°C, and bake the puff pastry blind (e.g. covered with dried beans) for 10 minutes, then bake it for 2 more minutes without the beans.

4. Fill the tartlets with the chicken filling, then pile some chard on it, and finally sprinkle with salted almonds on the top.

Walnut & goat’s milk cheese zucchini cream with radish sprouts and eggs – Toddler food?

Autumn has arrived! Although this recipe doesn’t reflect this much, it is good to have autumn again, anyway. It is a bit like toddler food, but the piquant radish sprouts and the crunchy bread might compensate. By the way, I got the idea from the puréed version of a simple zucchini sauce, but I replaced the dill for thyme, walnut and creamy goat’s milk cheese. You can even combine the ingredients in layers. You can change anything to your taste. You can layer the goat’s milk cheese on the walnut and so on, and then it will be even more spectacular. I would also try the combination of aubergine, coriander, feta and salted peanuts! Maybe one day I will really try it, but then there will be too much of purée here.

Walnut & goat’s milk cheese zucchini cream with radish sprouts and eggs

- 1 large tbsp. butter

- 1 onion, finely chopped

- 1000 g zucchini, grated

- 2 large cloves of garlic, grated

- 125 g goat’s milk cheese

- 100 g walnut, toasted and ground

- leaves of 1 bunch fresh thyme

- salt, freshly ground pepper

On the top:

- 4 boiled eggs, sliced

- salt

- radish sprouts

- toasted and ground walnut

Preparation:

1. In a pan fry the onion in the butter.

2. Add the zucchini and cook it in 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.

3. Add the garlic, goat’s milk cheese and purée the mixture.

4. Add the remaining ingredients and decorate the cream on the top.