A recipe for harmony
Cooking together is a great way to create a bond. At home with a partner or in the office with colleagues, preparing (and then sharing!) a meal will improve communication, coordination and collaboration..
Why not end the year with a culinary journey? We have chosen three recipes for you to work together on a tasty meal. A starter, a main course and a dessert:
Smoked tuna roll in salmorejo (veggie version with aubergine)
Risotto duo: a classic “Milanese” risotto with saffron and a radicchio and red wine risotto, served alongside each other
Plum and blackberry friand, a light cake that replaces flour with almond power
These are simple and tasty preparations that work best if cooked in tandem, as a team effort, rather than as a competition. The salmorejo and tuna roll can be prepared side by side and joined at the end. Both risottos need to be prepared at the same time, or one will be cold before the other has finished cooking. A cake has a lot of small preparatory steps, before the ingredients can be assembled and placed in the oven. Share the work!
Salmorejo and smoked tuna roll
Ingredients
Smoked tuna
Mozzarella
Crushed almonds
Cherry tomatoes
Small skewer
Large ripe tomatoes
Bread with crust removed
Garlic clove
Olive oil
Cumin
Salt
Keep on rollin’
Boil a pot of water and plunge the large tomatoes into it for a few minutes. Together, take them out and peel them. Chop the peeled tomatoes and put them in a bowl.
At this point, divide up the tasks: finishing the salmorejo and preparing the tuna rolls.
For the salmorejo, add the bread, olive oil, cumin, a pinch of salt and peeled clove of garlic. Blend them together, in a blender or with a handheld mixer.
In the meanwhile, make sure the smoked tuna is in fine slices. If you have a whole smoked tuna steak, filet it with a sharp knife. Cut up the mozzarella into small cubes and lay them out on the tuna filets. Wrap the mozzarella inside the filet.
Once the salmorejo is ready and resting in the fridge in individual portion sized glasses, take the small skewers, and skew a cherry tomato on each one and hand it to the person making the tuna rolls. They will skew the roll, so it doesn’t open and push the tuna up to where the cherry tomato is.
Sprinkle crushed almonds on the rolls, then place inside the glass with the salmorejo.
Risotto duo
Ingredients
Risotto rice
Two shallots or onions
A pinch of saffron
White wine
Red wine (we like Barolo with this dish, but any dry medium-bodied wine can do the trick)
Radicchio
Parmesan
Olive oil
Butter
Vegetable stock
Pronti, attenti e risotti!
Work together to finely chop the shallots and radicchio.
Heat the vegetable stock in a pot.
Heat a bit of olive oil in two separate pans. Don’t let the oil overheat and start to smoke! Throw in the chopped shallots in both pans and add the chopped radicchio to one of the pans and let them simmer.
While one stirs, keeping the shallots from burning, another will weigh-out the risotto rice, around 80g-90g per person and throw half into one pan and half into the other.
Add a pinch of salt and keep stirring, allowing the rice grains to toast ever so slightly, then throw half a cup of white wine in the pan without shallots and half a cup of red wine in the pan with radicchio. Turn up the heat.
Add a little bit of vegetable stock to both pans. Stirring both every now and then and lower the heat. Do not put too much stock at any one time, the rice grains need to absorb it slowly, not boil in it.
As the stock evaporates, a bit more can be added until the risotto is ready; not too hard, but not mushy. Most risotto packages will indicate cooking times. These are a useful guide, but there is only one sure way to tell when it is al dente: taste it!
When the risotto is almost ready, in the pan with white wine and no radicchio, add the saffron and stir for a few minutes. Turn the heat down.
The next part is optional, but highly recommended.
You will make the risottos creamy and luscious through a process known as mantecare.
Mantecare is regularly used in Italian cuisine, and the term has no equivalent in English or most other languages. It is, however, an example of international linguistic cooperation.
The term originates with Latin: mantice a skin bag or sack used to carry liquids and greases. The ancient Arabs would use a mantice to carry the ingredients necessary to make butter. From here, the term for butter entered the Spanish vocabulary as mantequilla and from there back to Italy - where in modern Italian butter is “burro” – as the process of making something unctuous and buttery or mantecare.
Returning to your pans, on low heat, add a little bit of butter and grated parmesan, stirring vigorously for a few minutes.
Lay out the two risottos in neat little shapes on large dishes, keeping them apart. Sprinkle a little bit of parmesan over them and enjoy …. together.
Plum and blackberry friand
(inspired by Ottolenghi)
Ingredients (for 6 people)
Blackberries (200g)
Plums (4)
Caster sugar (250g) can also work with normal sugar.
Cinnamon (tablespoon)
Flour (60g)
Almond powder or ground almonds (120g)
Large ripe tomatoes
Egg whites (4)
Butter (180g)
Vanilla extract (tablespoon)
Ready, set, bake!
Cakes are a little trickier. With the savoury recipes there is some flexibility in how ingredients are dosed. Personal taste and the cook’s inventivity have as much of a role as the original recipe.
With cakes, you can - and are encouraged to - take some liberties. However, chemistry also plays a significant part.
We indicate, therefore, the amounts of each ingredient. Feel free to play around with them, more or less sugar if you like your cakes sweet or not so sweet, more or less cinnamon, or vanilla. Less plums, more blackberries? Or why not replace the blackberries with cherries? But keep the proportions in mind or your cake might not rise, might not cook or could burn.
One of you or part of the team cleans the blackberries and plums, cuts the plums into wedges and places all the fruit in a bowl with about 50g of sugar, the vanilla extract and half the cinnamon.
In the meantime the other(s) mix the flour, remaining sugar, almond powder and remaining cinnamon in another bowl.
Make sure someone is charged with preheating the oven at 190°C, ideally on fan setting. And distribute the following two tasks: melting the butter in a pan, low temperature so as not to burn it, and whisking the egg whites until they are fluffy and “snowy”.
Stir the butter and egg whites into the bowl with the flour and almond powder to make a batter. In the meanwhile, someone else should be lining a baking tray with baking paper or - like in the old days - greasing it with butter and sprinkling flour on the bottom and around the edges so that the cake doesn’t stick while cooking.
Pour the batter into the baking tray. Once you have evened it out, delicately add the fruit that has been mixing with the sugar and vanilla.
Pop the cake in the oven for 30 minutes. Then, cover it with foil, and leave it in the oven for a further 10 minutes.
This should be enough time to set work on the starter or main…
Bon appétit and happy holidays!