Ravioli with avocado sauce vierge

When I first came across this dish at the Château de la Chèvre d'Or, I thought it was sheer madness. Then I tasted it and decided otherwise.
A few weeks later, I can no longer buy sheets of Niçois ravioli stuffed with beef and Swiss chard or spinach without also picking up a ripe avocado and a punnet of cherry tomatoes. It helps that the first time I served this combination at home, Sam - who had never previously gone wild for avocadoes - declared it the best thing he had ever eaten as he lapped up the last drops of sauce.
Of course, I appreciate how lucky I am to have the fresh pasta shop Barale at the end of my street. Founded in 1892 and still run by the Barale family, it's the place I turn to whenever I feel like eating something delicious without going to any effort (which turns out to be quite often). I buy the pâtes vertes (thick-cut spinach tagliatelle) for pâtes au pistou, panisses (a kind of chickpea polenta) to cut into strips and fry as an apéritif or side dish, and ravioli à la ricotta to serve with a simple tomato sauce.
Until recently, it had never occurred to me to serve ravioli niçois, otherwise known as ravioli à la daube, with anything other than daube sauce, or perhaps tomato sauce (with or without meat). These ravioli were originally designed to use up leftover beef stew, known as daube in these parts, and the extra sauce from the stew would be spooned over the ravioli. Pasta shops in Nice almost inevitably sell this rich, winey stew, more for serving with pasta than eating on its own.
Avocado, lemon and tomato make a brighter, more summery accompaniment, one that works surprisingly well with these earthy-tasting ravioli. A generous quantity of freshly grated parmesan brings it all together, balancing the acidity of the lemon. If you don't have access to Niçois ravioli - I'll post the recipe one of these days - it would be worth experimenting with other types of meat or ricotta ravioli or even plain pasta.

* I'm thrilled to report that Les Petits Farcis was featured alongside other small and informal cooking schools in this month's issue of Gourmet magazine. If you happen to have a copy, turn to page 88 for the article and page 199 for my recipe for Lemon curd tart with olive oil.

Niçois ravioli with avocado sauce vierge
Serves 3

8 dozen Niçois ravioli, or about 450 g (1 lb) other ravioli
1 small avocado or 1/2 large avocado
150 g cherry tomatoes (6 oz)
Juice and zest of one organic lemon
Good-quality olive oil
Salt and pepper, to taste
Plenty of fresh parmesan cheese
A few fresh basil leaves

Heat a large pot of water for the ravioli. Cut the avocado and tomato into small dice and toss together with the lemon zest. Squeeze the lemon, measure the juice and add it along with the same amount of olive oil to the avocado and tomato. Season with salt and pepper.

Cook the ravioli just until tender and drain carefully (they are fragile). Top with the avocado-tomato mixture and its juice, a generous amount of freshly grated parmesan and the torn basil leaves.

Fava bean gnocchi

There hasn't been much time for experiments in my kitchen lately. That doesn't mean that I haven't been cooking, just that for the past couple of weeks most meals have consisted of leftovers from my cooking classes or the handful of dishes that I can make again and again without anyone in the house tiring of them.
This week, leftover monkfish from bourride - fish stew with aïoli - and its accompanying new potatoes came back as Thai yellow curry thanks to a tub of spice paste at the back of the refrigerator and a can of coconut milk. For lunch every day I ate a big plate of mesclun with buttery local avocados and the juiciest lemons from the organic shop across the street. With Georges' goat's cheese grilled on pain tonique - sourdough bread with sultanas, pistachios and hazelnuts - from the Moulin du Païou bakery, the meal was complete. Last night I fell back on spicy herbed meatballs served with instant couscous, cinnamon and raisins, my favorite use for the steak haché that is ground in front of me at my local butcher's. It's even better if you replace the couscous with cooked bulgur and whip up some hummus to serve with it.
Today being a holiday in France, I was in the mood to try something new and went looking for inspiration on the astounding blog B comme Bon (never mind if you can't read French, just admire the pictures). Her idea of making gnocchi with leftover fava bean purée appealed to me, even if I can't imagine ever shelling enough fava beans to have leftover purée. The instructions were charmingly vague, which made me a bit nervous as I've had some disasters in the past with non-potato gnocchi. Still, the knowledge that gnocchi and fèves are Sam's two favorite foods in the world - after chocolate, of course - gave me the incentive to try my luck.
For this recipe I looked for fully grown fèves rather than the smaller févettes, which are delicious raw but too tiny to consider using for purée. I came back with what looked like a big bag of the long, knobbly pods, but experience has taught me that no matter how many fava beans you shell, there are never enough. I ended up with about 2 cups of beans, which thanks to Sam's expert help became 1 cup of peeled beans and (sigh) about 1/2 cup of emerald green purée.



To this I added a beaten egg and a pinch of salt, as instructed by B comme Bon, then just enough flour to form the dough into long sausages. I kept in on the very soft side, for fear of producing tough little dumplings. At this stage, Sam got involved again in rolling and shaping the gnocchi. I resisted the urge to demand that they all be the same size and shape, concentrating instead on sautéeing thin strips of smoked duck breast to use as a garnish. I also mixed some chopped chives with crème fraîche, which I dolloped on top of the cooked gnocchi.
The verdict? "Génial," said Sam, who didn't mind that they were firm compared to the fluffy potato gnocchi we usually buy. I enjoyed them too, but wasn't sure that they made of the most of market-fresh broad beans. So please don't feel in the least bit guilty if you are tempted to use the frozen kind - I won't tell.


Fava bean gnocchi
Serves 2 as a main course, 3 as a starter

2 cups shelled fava beans (broad beans), unpeeled (I started with 1.2 kg of beans in their shells)
1 tsp olive oil
1 tbsp water
1 egg
A pinch of salt
About 1 1/4 cups flour (I used Italian 00 flour but all-purpose will do)
Good-quality olive oil

Garnishes:
Crème fraîche or fromage blanc mixed with chives
Smoked duck breast or bacon, cut into matchsticks and fried until golden

Blanch the shelled broad beans in boiling water for 1 min, then drain and rinse with cold water. Pop each broad bean out of its skin, making a small slit in the opposite side from the pointy tip. You should have about 1 cup of peeled beans.

In a small pan, cook the beans with the olive oil and water until very soft, then purée in a food processor or put through a food mill. (I cooked them in the Thermomix for 5 mins at 100 C and puréed them on Turbo for 30 secs).

Transfer the beans to a bowl and add the egg, salt and 1 cup of flour. Mix well to form a dough using a rounded pastry scraper or wooden spoon, then add a little more flour bit by bit until the dough is sticky but workable.

Divide it into three and roll it as best you can on a heavily floured board into long sausages. Cut into short lengths and place on a floured plate. (My gnocchi could have been smaller, as they swelled up in the water.)

Meanwhile, heat a large pot of boiling water. Add 1 tbsp of coarse salt, gently add the gnocchi and cook for about 2 mins, until the gnocchi have been floating at the surface for about 30 secs.

Drain, toss with a little olive oil and top with the garnishes.

Tortelloni

The inspiration for this slightly ambitious Saturday afternoon cooking project came from the lovely and talented Fanny, who I am hoping will soon be teaching pastry workshops with me in Nice (stay tuned on the Petits Farcis website). When I saw her version of a Jamie Oliver recipe for caramelle with ricotta, basil and black olives, I had the irresistible urge to dust off my pasta machine and invite a couple of friends over for dinner.
I intended to make her recipe, but as I began to knead the pasta dough I remembered a cooking class I had taken three years ago at the Agriturismo I Fontanini in Emilia Romagna, the region that brought us parmesan cheese, 25-year-old balsamic vinegar and Parma ham (need I say more?). In this exceptional class, four generations of women from the same family - counting the two-month-old baby, who had probably absorbed every movement in the womb - taught us to make tortelloni, which are a bit like tortellini only bigger and filled with ricotta and herbs or vegetables. I have never forgotten their delicate taste and texture, the pasta so thin you could see right through it.
The 80-year-old nonna had been making fresh pasta by hand every day of her life since childhood, and her skill and efficiency were more than a little intimidating. I came home with a long wooden rolling pin specially for pasta, which I'm deeply ashamed to say is still in its plastic packaging. I do use my hand-cranked pasta machine occasionally, but with Barale at the end of my street and the impressively stocked deli Exquis d'Italia five minutes away I had never reattempted the tortelloni recipe.
After all this time I wasn't sure if I remembered how to shape this pasta, and the Internet for once proved not much help - I couldn't find step-by-step directions for tortelloni. Luckily, I had taken some scribbled notes and it turned out that my hands had a better memory than my brain. Once I started to shape the pasta, it all happened naturally and before long I even found myself working at a good pace. Sam got involved in this project, and while I can't say that he was turning out tortellini with the skill of an Italian nonna (neither was I) he did have a lot of fun feeding the pasta through the machine and making his own shapes with the dough.

I made the basic filling from I Fontanini's recipe, adding only some parsley to the ricotta, parmesan, egg and seasonings, but you can also use a larger proportion of herbs or vegetables (say, onion, artichoke, zucchini or borage leaves) and reduce the amount of ricotta. You'll notice that the recipe is imprecise, which is the way it's supposed to be. The tortelloni are served with a simple sauce of melted butter and sage, rather than anything like tomato that might detract from their subtle flavor.
I have to admit that I used my pasta machine to roll the dough, but next time I am getting out that rolling pin - really!

I'm submitting this recipe to the weekly Presto Pasta Night roundup at Once Upon a Feast.

Tortelloni with cheese filling
from Agricurismo I Fontanini
Serves 4

Egg pasta:
200 g flour (7 1/2 oz)
2 eggs

Filling:
500 g ricotta (1 lb 2 oz)
1 egg
100 g Parmesan (4 oz)
Flat-leaf (Italian) parsley
Garlic
Grated nutmeg
Salt and pepper
Butter, sage and parmesan to serve

For the pasta, sift the flour onto a work surface and make a well in the center. Add the eggs and knead for about 15 minutes to create an elastic and smooth dough. (If you mix the dough in a food processor, use a little more flour for a firmer dough.) Let the dough rest for at least 30 mins.



Meanwhile, make the filling: Mince the parsley or other herbs or vegetables and put in a bowl with the ricotta, egg, parmesan, grated nutmeg and salt. Mix until smooth.

Flatten the dough with a rolling pin and roll into a paper-thin sheet, or roll as thinly as possible in your pasta machine. Cut it with a rotary cutter into 6 cm squares. (Note: keep the sheets of rolled pasta covered with a towel to prevent them from drying out.)

Put a little filling in the center of each square, then fold the dough over the filling to make a triangle and press along the edges to seal.

Bring the edges of the triangle together to complete the shape.

Cook the tortelloni in plenty of salted boiling water unti they float to the surface (a little longer if your pasta is not paper-thin), then drain carefully with the slotted spoon and pile in the warmed serving dish, alternating with the melted butter, parmesan and sage.

Fregola sarda

I had great plans for my bag of fregola sarda, which I bought at the Italie à Table show on the Promenade des Anglais back in early June. I meant to thoroughly research this Sardinian pasta, which looks like overgrown couscous grains or coarsely ground almonds that have been toasted until golden.
But then I was hungry, I had some diced raw eggplant leftover from the previous day's ratatouille and Sam was starting to get restless. I reached for the bag of penne but the fregola sarda was calling out to me, full of mystery and promise.
I remembered the woman who sold them to me saying something about tomatoes, which was all I understood of her rapid-fire instructions in Italian. Even at the height of tomato season my cupboard is never without a can of Mutti* crushed tomatoes, which I decided on impulse to combine with flavors that seemed to me vaguely Sardinian. There was time only for the briefest internet search to see how long to cook these little toasted pasta bobbles (about 12-15 minutes, or until just tender).
The result was a hugely satisfying dish thanks to the texture contrasts: the firm bite of the toasted pasta, the crunch of the walnuts, the silkiness of the eggplant and the dry crumbliness of the 40-month-old parmesan, which I also bought at the Italian show. Next time I would add chili pepper, as it seemed the pasta could take quite a bit of seasoning. I held back this time because of Sam, who reacts as if I've tried to kill him if I add the tiniest pinch of chili pepper to a dish: he grabs his throat, turns a dramatic shade of purple and spits out the offending mouthful. I at least had the satisfaction of seeing him gobble up the pasta, which looked to him like tiny gnocchi.
Note: I've just discovered that fregola sarda can be cooked like rice, by letting the cooking water evaporate. Luckily I still have half a bag left.

* I've just visited the Mutti website and discovered that Mutti claims to have INVENTED tomato pulp in 1971. I wonder how Italians made tomato sauce before then?

Fregola sarda with eggplant and walnuts
Serves 2

9 oz fregola sarda (250 g)
1 tbsp coarse sea salt
1 small eggplant, cut into 1/2-inch (1 cm) dice
2 tbsp olive oil
1 can crushed Italian tomatoes
1 tsp chopped fresh rosemary
Fine sea salt and freshly ground pepper
A handful of shelled walnuts
A handful of flat (Italian) parsley leaves
A sprig of mint, leaves only
Fresh parmesan
Your best olive oil

Bring a large pot of water to a boil, add the coarse salt and throw in the fregola sarda. Cook for 12-15 mins, checking for tenderness now and then after about 10 mins. Drain in a fine strainer.

Heat the olive oil over medium-high heat in a large frying pan. Add the eggplant and toss to coat with the oil, then cook, stirring occasionally, until soft. Add the canned tomatoes, rosemary and salt and pepper to taste. Cook over medium-high heat until thickened.

Meanwhile, toast the walnuts on a baking dish in the oven at 375 F (180 C) until fragrant and lightly browned. Chop coarsely.

Chop the parsley and mint leaves.

Toss the pasta with the tomato-eggplant sauce and divide between two serving bowls. Top with the walnuts, herbs and shaved parmesan (use a vegetable peeler for this). Drizzle with your best olive oil.

Pâtes au pistou

One of the things I love about Nice is the Italian influence in the food. But it wouldn't be entirely accurate to say that Nice adopted Italian cooking during its time under the rule of Piedmont and Sardinia, which ended in 1860. Rather, the ever-resourceful people of the Comté de Nice (the city and surrounding mountains) made Italian specialties their own.
Porchetta, which in Italy is a whole deboned pig rolled with herbs and roasted, became a pig stuffed with every bit of its innards so that nothing goes to waste. Pizza became pissaladière, a humble tart made of oily bread dough, slowly-caramelized onions and seasoned anchovy paste (pissala in the local language). And that Genovese classic pesto became pistou, a sauce of basil, garlic, oil and parmesan in which pine nuts are noticeably absent.
La Merenda, a little bistro two blocks from the end of the flower market, serves the definitive version of Nice-style pâtes au pistou. I've eaten this dish here time and time again and have always marveled at its unctuous quality, the perfect melding of green pasta and green sauce (in Genoa pesto would be tossed with little pointy-tipped white pasta called trofie, small cubes of potato and green beans). How does chef Dominic Le Stanc do it? There wasn't much hope of him telling me, since this former Negresco chef spent six months training with the old couple who ran this bistro in order to master their secret recipes. He has been kind enough to give me his recipe for daube, beef slowly imbued with wine and scented with porcini mushrooms (known as ceps in French), but when it comes to pistou his lips are firmly sealed.
Luckily, a few months ago one of the market stallholders introduced me to Jean himself, the former owner of La Merenda who still shops at the Cours Saleya market now and then. It couldn't hurt to ask, I said to myself, and boldly blurted out, "So what is the secret of your pâtes au pistou?"
To my amazement, Jean was forthcoming. "It's the cheese. You have to use emmental instead of parmesan to give the sauce its creaminess. When the pasta is cooked you drain it, but not too much, and then you toss it in the warmed bowl with the butter and pistou."
The butter???
I should have guessed. So often in France, when a dish is mysteriously delicious, butter turns out to be the key. In Nice I have got so used to dousing all my food with olive oil - preferably the smooth, almost buttery AOC Nice oil - that I rarely even think about butter. But sometimes there is simply no replacement for it. I've since made pâtes au pistou many times, using the thick spinach noodles sold at the fresh pasta shop Barale down the street. I could make my own, but Dominic Le Stanc doesn't, so why should I? My pâtes au pistou are very good indeed, though perhaps not quite as good as his. Maybe he uses a little more butter, maybe he sneaks in a little parmesan with the emmental, or maybe it's just the way he tosses it (very vigorously). Whatever the slight difference, it's what makes me not feel too guilty about giving away this recipe.
I'll be contributing my pâtes au pistou to Presto Pasta Nights, a weekly event at Once Upon a Feast.

Note: I used to make the pistou in a mortar, the traditional way, but I found that this resulted in a darker sauce. I'm now happy to make it less romantically in a food processor.

Pâtes au Pistou
Serves 2-3

1 lb fresh spinach tagliatelle (if you make your own, the dough should be rolled 1.5 mm thick. Sorry, I don't know what that is in inches!)
A handful coarse sea salt
1 tbsp butter (you could probably use a little more, but this is how much I use)

Pistou:
1-2 cloves garlic
1 small bunch basil (about 2 cups of leaves)
1/4 cup very good quality olive oil (50 ml)
A good pinch of coarse sea salt and a few grindings of pepper
2 generous tbsp finely grated emmental

Bring a large pot of water to a boil. When it boils, add the salt and the pasta. The pasta from Barale needs to be cooked for 4 mins once the water comes back to a boil, but yours might be ready a little faster.

Peel the garlic clove(s), cut in half and remove any sprouts from the center. Separate the basil leaves from the stems and discard the stems (or save to flavor a tomato sauce). Place the garlic, basil, oil and seasonings in the food processor and blend until you have a smooth paste. Transfer to a bowl and stir in the grated emmental. The sauce should be fairly runny, so add more oil if necessary.

Warm your serving bowl with the butter in the oven at the lowest setting. Drain the pasta quickly, transfer to the bowl and toss vigorously with the butter and pistou. Serve immediately.

La Merenda, 4 rue Raoul Bosio, no phone.