Home-made pasta

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I consider this one of my great achievements: I can now make pasta without too much stress, even for a dinner party. There are a few gadgets that help me on my way, the most important one being the KitchenAid pasta attachment. I can really recommend it!

The recipe I use is from the tried and tested book Made in Italy, page 330. I cannot add to or substract from this recipe, but I am too lazy to retype it; instead, here is another very similar version.

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Tarte Tatin

This cake is a classic, and for all the right reasons. And if you make it with shop-bought puff pastry, it makes for quite an easy and impressive dessert.

I am kicking myself now for not taking a photo when I made this, but I was so into it at the dinner party where I made it, I simply forgot. It looked stunning, and I am sure there will be additional opportunities to take photos.

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Weekday dinner party

We had some friends over for dinner on Friday, and I wanted to push the boat out a bit, but Friday being a (very!) working day and the week not allowing  for any preparation in advance, I had to be a bit careful in choosing the dishes. In the end, I was too optimistic with the timing, as usual, but with the Boyfriends help, the dinner was a hit. This one should for sure be repeated for the right crowd.

Here it is. For the starter, goat cheese, mushroom, thyme, and puff pastry tart. For the main, home-made pasta with a tomato, sausage, and chicken sauce. For the salad, mixed salad with tomatoes cucumbers and spring onions. For the dessert, tarte Tatin.

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The Aunts visiting

This weekend, the Aunts from the Netherlands1 visited us, and this was a nice opportunity for me to unwind with some nice cooking. The goal was to have really nice food, straightforward to make, and be in the general Mediterranean area with respect to the flavours. The one constraint we had was that one of the Aunts is vegetarian, so we had a vegetarian option with every meal.

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Salmon, polenta chips, and zucchini fritters

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This dish is a combination of two recipes from a cookbook I recently discovered entitled “How to be a better cook.” I like how the dishes are simple, classic, and yet innovative. The book is intended to be a guide for those that do not dare enter the kitchen; indeed, the concept of the show that bares the same name is to take a newbie cook (i.e., someone who thinks that cooking an omelet is easy) and teaching them how to make a three-course meal from scratch.

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Salmon with lentils

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I am attempting to reduce my carbs input, and this recipe just hits the spot. It is surprisingly delicious, with two crucial points in the recipe. First, the crispy salmon crust that is made by searing the fish in a very hot pan; second, the addition of vinegar to the lentils adds a fantastic freshness.

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A flower bouquet, my way

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It makes me very happy to stumble upon a cake recipe that is both stunning and simple to make. It is not that I do not enjoy a challenge—on the contrary—but the beauty of simplicity is something I can readily appreciate. My Mom found this recipe on Youtube: it is not unusual that there is something useful in the 300 hours of video that are uploaded every minute. When my Dad sent me the photos and the link, I was hooked: I do not remember the last time I was so thrilled by a recipe, so it did not take long for the first try.

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