Main: Freeform pork & fennel lasagne with bacon béchamel
Delicious Magazine May 2020
Dessert: Fig & pistachio crumble cake
Delicious Magazine May 2020
“Family and friends are hidden treasures, seek them out and enjoy their riches.”
Hi Everyone!
Feels amazing to have a little freedom doesn’t it! More than ever, this time has made us realise the importance of family and dear friends. It’s so good to be able to share a meal with them.
We also had breakfast on the weekend at our favourite local café The Tramshed at Narrabeen. Keen to support our local coffee shops and restaurants and help them get back on their feet. It’s been a hard road for them.
Anyway dinner this week was very interesting in deed. If you have been following this blog you will remember that my family is not particularly fond of pork. Well, the MAV is but that’s because he loves anything that is meat. However, I wanted to give this very interesting twist on the simple lasagna a go. A couple of tips when making this. 1. There is no instruction as to the size of the fennel or the onion so I suggest just making it what you would call medium for both. 2. Breaking up the pork mince takes a bit of time but please persevere because otherwise the texture of the lasagna will be too lumpy (see photo pre breaking up).
3. It requires white wine which I have never used in lasagna before and was tempted to substitute red wine but the flavours of this lasagna are more subtle than the traditional form so stick with the white.
The béchamel sauce with the addition of the bacon is really delicious and I would probably use this with a regular lasagna. The construction of the dish is not layer upon layer as we are all accustomed to doing. You place the mince into the appropriate dish and “poke” the torn lasagna sheets into the mince.
Now here is the “BUT”. We all enjoyed the overall flavour of the lasagna – “very tasty” was the general comment. I personally found the texture very odd. Because of the way the lasagna sheets are pushed into the meat you would get lumps of the pasta with your mouthful of mince and lovely sauce.
Now many would not care about that but for me it felt quite odd in my mouth. Okay – call me weird but there you go! Would I cook it again? Yes! but I would layer the lasagna sheets in the traditional way. It scored 8/10.
And so to dessert. How beautiful does this look and not very difficult to make either. It would feed 10 easily, however, the flavour is surprisingly bland. It definitely needed home made custard (which I did), ice-cream or cream. The making of this cake and the main course was enhanced for me because I now have a new Breville food processor (my old one went to heaven). I’ve been without one for quite a few months and I didn’t realise just how much I used mine until I didn’t have it any longer.
The texture and smell is lovely and somehow very wintery so I was surprised to find that it was rather dry and uninspiring. Sorry Delicious Magazine but this one is not a winner for me. It only scored 5/10.
Next week I’m going to do a roasted fillet with red wine risotto. That should go down well with the MAV!
Until then,
From my table to yours with love. x
