Supper in the garden

Last night was our first night to eat outside as I made supper for all my neighbors. The weather, the number of shoulders to help lift the gazebo, parties elsewhere had all conspired to put off a season that usually starts in late May.

We’ve reached the point, we neighbors, where it doesn’t matter what I cook they’ìll try to eat it. They aren’t suspicious or nervous any more. It’s why I decided to try my experiment as shown in that foto and serve it to them. That foto represents all presentation. I will take credit for thinking out a cmbination that works, but I didn’t make anything you are looking at.

I am told people are way too busy for good cookery now. It is unimaginable to me that people might not be not eating good, healthy food. Delicious I insist on too, but at least healthy! So if cooking from scratch fits so few lives now (do they really think an hour in the gym makes up for nasty lists of chemicals?) where does beauty come in?

There is a grand tradition in parts of Italy for serving complicated and rich cases of pastry for certain feast holidays. The finished item may 8 or 9 inches tall, a browned and crispy pastry which when cut reveals cooked and sauced pasta. I don’t really like them, because parts invariably have to be overcooked, they are heavy in the midst of a feast and they are usually big enough to feed the masses.

What if you just used the idea but didn’t make it so complicated? What if it could be served like any pasta? How would Italians like it?

I used a round of purchased fresh puff pastry which came in its own parchment baking paper. If it had not I would have used my own. I took a moderate sized stainless steel mixing bowl and lined it with the paper-supported pastry. I put it into a hot (400°F/200°C) oven and baked it about 10-15 minutes. I then removed it to cool a bit before taking it out of the bowl and removing the paper. That pastry is usually flexible while still hot, and flexibility is not a virtue in a serving bowl.

A few minutes before pasta time I boiled some salted water. I tossed in purchased cheese and spinach ravioli from my freezer and cooked them until done. Those I put to drain in a colander. leaving a little, perhaps 1/4 cup/65 ml, of the pasta water in the hot pot.

I added a package of ready truffled sauce to the pan and stirred it to loosen it with that hot water. I tossed the ravioli back in and mized them well with the sauce. I then just scraped the ravioli and the sauce into my pastry bowl and carried it to the table.

And they loved it. They ate the ravioli until they could begin to tear pieces of the pastry off the “bowl” and then they satisfyingly munched at the truffled pastry. It could have been any of the drier sauces, really, like pesto or a stiff cheese sauce, I just didn’t want anything juicy to make the “bowl” soggy. Even the one neighbor who can pretty much always find a weak spot to insert criticism was over the moon about this.

This is something I will do again. I’ll try using a loaf pan with rectangular pastry, or if I get energetic and order the pastry from the pastry shop, I could make much bigger containers, too.

Try this out. If you’ve the time to make it all from scratch, good for you. If you’ve only half an hour, do it my way. That’s ten minutes to make the case and a few minutes to cook and heat the rest and voila!

If I hadn’t been making an entire 5 course feast I’d have taken the time to garnish it, but really it’s all one big garnish if you think about it.

It’s been so long since I last made pasta, I almost forgot to send it to Presto Pasta Nights, next Friday to be found at Sidewalk Shoes. Check it out.