Lottie Lomme
When I was earning some extra money as a student at the cash register of a bookstore in Utrecht, one of my regular customers was an Italian grandfather who, always in a suit, Corriere della Sera came to buy from me. We always chatted in Italian. On a gray winter's day I stood next to him at the bus stop. He asked me what I was going to eat. Pasta, I said. That wasn't an answer. What kind of pasta?
He himself went pappardelle al ragù di coniglio make, he said casually. Wide ribbon pasta with rabbit stew. Just a gray weekday in Utrecht Overvecht.
Tip: would you rather have a traditional Italian Christmas dinner with meat? We have that too!
I still haven't been able to casually tell anyone in my life that I'm going to make rabbit stew pappardelle. I bake pancakes, make pasta with meatballs and in the winter an endive stew.
The latter is called a in Italian pure di verdureI say that to my children. You'll see that once I make rabbit stew, no one asks me. Then I have to drop it as casually as possible! uh…. Siamo in Olanda. We are in the Netherlands.
You read it already: I'm not a professional chef, I look just as sweet to the pictures of Pastaio Via Corte or Matteo Zielonka on Instagram.
Table of contents
I would present this Italian Christmas menu that I made for This is Italy for 4 people.
After all, it is a Christmas tradition that you rather make too much than too little. You can always order the next day leftovers present, the cliques. good job!
Antipasti: cestini con mousse di zucchini
Courgettes raise a lot of questions for me. If I have to write it in Italian, I may as zucchini of zucchini, zucchini en zucchini to be. Males and females, singular and plural. There is also something about those flowers. Which are sold in Italy, still to zucchini.
Is there a difference between edible and non-edible flowers? Can I only eat male flowers? And how do I recognize it? In any case, I can clearly identify myself as a visitor to the supermarket and not as the owner of a vegetable garden.
You don't need to know the answers to all those questions for this Christmas recipe. Cestini is simply the Italian word for baskets and that is the shape we are going to give the dough.
Little hats that we are going to fill with zucchini mousse. Without flowers, because it is December. The baskets can be made a day in advance, the filling can be made a few hours in advance. Then you only have to fill the 'baskets' at the last minute.
Ingredients for about 10 cestin
- 100 grams of flour
- 50 grams of butter
- 30 grams of ice cold water
- Pinch of salt
- Supplies
- muffin pan
- Muffin baking papers
Preparation method
Knead the ingredients into a cohesive dough, roll it out with a rolling pin and cut out circles with a small glass. If you have a muffin pan, you can put those circles in a piece of paper in the mold. This way they get a bit of a raised edge when you bake them. They need about 15 minutes in a preheated oven at 180 degrees.
Ingredients for the zucchini mousse
- 1 cup ricotta
- 1/2 zucchini
- Black pepper
Preparation method
Coarsely grate the zucchini and mix with the ricotta. Season with a little black pepper. Before eating, fill the cestini with the zucchini mousse with a spoon.
Primo: rotolo di spinaci
As an appetizer we eat this Christmas rotolo di spinaci. This is for the slightly advanced Italian hobby chef. Because you have to fresh pasta to be able to make.
Ingredients
- 300 grams 00 flour
- 3 eggs
- A large glass jar of spinach
- Ricotta, 1 cup
- An egg
- Parmesan cheese, 100 grams
- 3 tablespoons breadcrumbs
- Butter, 25 grams
- 15 sage leaves
Supplies
- Cooking cloth / cheesecloth (no, you don't want to use a tea towel, then your rotolo will taste like detergent or fabric softener)
- Kitchen twine (do you know that fragment from Bridget Jones' Diary? You don't want to use a shoelace, trust me – trust me)
Preparation method
You can of course make your first fresh pasta for Christmas, but if you want to make sure it goes well, you should try it first.
Make the dough first. Place 300 grams 00 flour in a bowl and make a well in the centre. Add the 3 eggs that you have beaten beforehand with a fork.
Add the flour little by little and knead the dough for about half an hour. Then wrap it in transparent foil and let it rest for an hour in the fridge.
Meanwhile, make the spinach mixture. Drain the spinach (the moisture out) and mix with the ricotta, 100 grams of parmesan cheese, the raw egg and 3 tablespoons of breadcrumbs.
Then make the fresh pasta with the help of the pasta machine. Place the sheets you have made on a work surface and then spread the spinach mixture over the pasta sheet.
Then roll up the pasta sheets to the diameter of a large cup and wrap in cheesecloth. Close the package with kitchen twine and repeat the procedure with the other roll(s).
You should have 3 or 4 rolls. If you want you can do all this in the afternoon, and then all you have to do is cook the rolls in the evening. Leave them wrapped in a bowl in the fridge for a while.
Make the sage butter. Place 100 grams of butter in a saucepan and melt over a low heat. Add the sage and let it sit for a while. The sage should be a little crispy but the butter not brown, then the sage butter is ready.
Bring your largest pot of water to a boil and salt the water with a tablespoon of table salt. Put the wrapped rolls in the water and let them cook for half an hour. Then remove them from the water with a slotted spoon, take the roll Cut it into thick slices and place in a nice bowl.
Put the sage butter over it with the nice leaves and pronto e il tuo primo! Your Italian appetizer is ready.
Secondo: 3 main courses
Not one vegetarian Italian main course, but 3 vegetarian Italian main courses!
Or rather:
3 contorni vegetariani che fanno il secondo, 3 vegetarian side dishes which together form the main course.
Finocchio con le arance
Fennel with orange.
Ingredients
- 2 fennel bulbs
- 2 oranges
Preparation method
Cut both wafer-thin and place nicely on a plate.
grilled polenta
Polenta is slow cooking and should actually be stirred continuously while it simmers on the fire for half an hour. I don't always have the time for that myself, so I take the polenta off the heat sooner. Some people think that's okay.
Ingredients
- About 300 grams coarse polenta (corn semolina)
- About 1,5 liters of vegetable stock
- 100 grams of parmesan cheese
Preparation method
Bring the stock to a boil and lower the heat. Then add the polenta slowly, little by little, stirring constantly. You have to keep stirring and you will see that the porridge gets thicker due to the heating. It should have the consistency of thick Greek yogurt. Then add the Parmesan cheese. Everything that you stir extra now (up to about 30 minutes) is extra and better for the taste, but it is also tasty if you take it off the fire now.
Place a baking paper on your counter and moisten it with water. Then pour the polenta onto the baking paper. Wet your hands a bit and press the polenta a bit so that it is a bit flatter. Then take another baking paper that you put on top. Run a rolling pin over the baking paper and roll out the polenta into a large rectangular piece the size of your baking paper until it has a thickness of about 0,5 - 1 cm. Then let the polenta cool.
After about an hour, the polenta has become stiff and you can cut it into pieces or, for Christmas, cut it out into a star shape. Then they have to go in the oven for another half hour, drizzle some olive oil over it. Together with the stuffed aubergine, which by the way has to be done for an hour, at 175 degrees.
Stuffed eggplant
When I advise my students to read an Italian recipe on cucchiaio.it or on another Italian site, I always advise them to make an eggplant recipe.
In the Netherlands we often eat the aubergine too raw, insufficiently cooked, fried or cooked, so that it remains gummy. Not tasty! Gli italiani invece l'hanno capita, la melanzana. Italians, on the other hand, have understood it, the aubergine.
Ingredients
- 2 eggplants
- Coarse sea salt to extract the bitter moisture from the aubergine
- Cherry tomatoes, about 100 grams
- Good black olives, handful
- Salted capers, handful
- Mozzarella, 1 ball
- breadcrumbs
- Parmesan cheese, 100 grams
Preparation method
Cut the aubergine in half lengthwise and hollow it out with an ice cream scoop, for example. Put a tablespoon of coarse salt on all halves and let the liquid drain in a colander for half an hour. Then rinse the aubergines well with water and dry them with some kitchen paper.
For the filling, fry the cherry tomatoes in a frying pan. Then remove it from the pan and mix it with the black olives, the salted capers rinsed well with water, the crumbled mozzarella and the breadcrumbs.
The filling goes into the hollowed out aubergine and you put some parmesan cheese on top.
The aubergines are placed in the oven at 60 degrees for 175 minutes.
Dolce: the dessert
Dolce di latte di soia con marmellata and fruit di bosco. To keep the menu a bit light I chose a light version of it Dolce and instead of whipped cream – as in the traditional panna cotta – sweetened soy milk is used.
Because fair is fair: if the Befana coming on January 6, it is also not nice for her to see that we have gained 4 kilos during the holidays.
Un po di calma con i dolci allora mi raccomando! Take it easy with those desserts. And if you don't agree with me, you can too the Torta Santa Pollastra make, with the traditional amount of sugar.
Ingredients
- 0,5 liters of sweetened soy milk
- 2 level teaspoons agar agar
- Blueberry Jam
- Blueberries
Supplies
- 4 beautiful glasses
- Agar-agar and soy milk are DOP products from Basilicata, just look at the packaging
Okay, that's not true. The original pannacotta is Italian, this is a Dutch infusion, all right?
You can also make these soy milk desserts the day before, which saves work on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day.
Preparation method
Bring the soy milk to a boil and add the agar agar and continue stirring for another minute or two over low heat. Put the warm, but not boiling soy milk in nice glasses. Let it set for 4 hours and then add some blueberry jam and blueberries. Serve cold.
Have a wonderful Christmas the Italian way!
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