House-Made Cheese and Bubble Gum Pink Ravioli
Our finished plate of pink pasta, with lemon cheese filling, strawberry and white chocolate sauces.
In Garde Manger class, we’ve been studying cheeses and making a few of them ourselves.
There’s something about this that makes me giddy. I told several people, “It’s like, making food. From nothing.”
Last week, our group made a fresh (meaning unaged) lemon cheese, and our homework assignment was to develop a dessert recipe to prepare the next week. We decided to make a dessert lasagna, using a strawberry puree (tomato sauce), chopped chocolate (ground beef) and the cheese. There was some fiddling around with gluten-free options for my sake, but the supplies for such things are low at the school. So we decided to go with phyllo dough, making it more of a napoleon.
This week, the chef turned us loose to create our goodies. We made the napoleon, as pictured above. The sauce was particularly fun…I got creative (er, bossy) with my group and added balsamic vinegar and red wine to some strawberry puree and sugar, and cooked it down. De.LISH.
So, long story short, we present our napoleon to the chef, and she loves it. We think we’re done. We mention that the original idea was using real pasta, and she says…”Okay, make me one like that.” Oooookayyy…
No problem, actually. This class is fun because we get to play and make stuff up on the fly, even if the beginning is a prompt from the instructor. One of my group partners is quite adept at making pasta, so he whipped up a quick batch, adding some red food coloring as the instructor requested.
We decide on making raviolis, filling them with the lemon cheese and dressing them with two sauces, the strawberry and a white chocolate sauce. While Pasta-Guy and I have done this, the other two students hadn’t, so much of the rest of their class was spent playing and filling. PG and I boiled the pasta and finished the sauces and the plate, which turned out pretty nice, considering its impromptu provenance.
It was also a fanTAStic week in Food IV. And that is saying a lot. Things are looking up; I may know how to cook after all. More on that later.
Happy cooking!
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LaTonya replied:
Sounds like you’re having fun. That dessert lasagna looks really yummy!
November 8, 2011 at 4:48 PM. Permalink.
Say Cheese (Recipe for Bocconcini Mozzarella Balls) « Fancy Pants Foodie replied:
[...] showed you earlier our fresh lemon cheese, which is somewhere between ricotta and cream cheese in consistency. It was amazingly delicious and [...]
January 26, 2012 at 8:16 AM. Permalink.