Sunday cooking is fun-day cooking

It seems like I have been in the kitchen all day today and I really do not have a great deal to show for my efforts, unless of course your taking a look at my ever growing girth!

I have had a craving to try making choux pastry, I do not know why, maybe I am afraid I will one day be fool enough to enter a cooking competition and be handed the task to cook profiteroles, or perhaps it is just wanting to replicate the food I grew up with, my Mum makes awesome chocolate éclairs, I ate so many of them on one occasion it made me sick, perhaps that is why I don’t seek them out nowadays.

Whatever the reason I found myself boiling water and butter together this morning and then adding some flour, which is whisked as quickly as you can, I loved it the way the dough formed, very similar to making rue for a white sauce.  Even more interesting was piping out the creamy dough and then watching it puff up whilst cooking in the oven, I was like a big kid I got so excited, and I am really developing a love for baking!

It seemed to turn into a marathon effort to get the bloody things finished though and I in fact left them to first make lunch and then dinner before going bake to make custard for the filling and a chocolate sauce to go on top, and they ended up looking pretty ordinary, so it seems I have still a bit of work to do to get them to a point that I am going to be satisfied with them.

Somewhere between making lunch, custard and a chocolate sauce I got started on a simple tomato sauce for dinner to go with some pasta, I like to cook tomato sauce for as long as I can and to I had the opportunity to do just that.

I made some pasta dough with a fifty-fifty mix of 00 flour and semolina and used 1 egg and five yolks I had left over from another dish, the dough was a lot harder than I am used too, but once I had it through the rollers it worked out alright.  Once it was rolled out I made some little pasta pillows stuffed full of a ricotta, mozzarella and prosciutto mixture.  

Originally I started out making ravioli, but actually ended up with some half moon shapes, but I wasn’t too worried, especially when I got to eat it, as it tasted great and had a nice little bite to it.  I dished Jo up three of the flavour packed pasta pillows with some tomato sauce and a couple of slices of garlic bread, she obviously like them as she came back for some more, but then to be honest, so did I, they were delicious!