Quick Meals: Pasta Fixes

I apologize to everyone who reads SybDive for not posting for over a week now.

The good news is that Biscotteria Margherita is going great gangbusters and the lemon-poppy seed and coffee-granola biscotti have both been getting major raves. (Shameless plug alert! Place your orders now: call or text 0915-8517362.)

Anyways, given how I go to the office in the daytime and bake biscotti in the evenings (and sometimes at the break of dawn!), my eating habits have been rather sketchy. I’m just glad that pasta doesn’t take so long to prepare and I can store the cooked noodles in the fridge, nuke ’em to serving temp, and then throw in the sauce of my choice.

These are particularly nice whenever you want a quick pasta meal:

• Creamed Shiitake Mushroom Pesto from Jaq’s Kitchen (Pictured above) This gorgeously creamy take on traditional basil pesto is quite flavorful and the chunky bits of mushroom make it really good.
• Filippo Berio’s Sun-dried Tomato Pesto This is a great way to keep things deliciously simple. A tablespoonful of this onto a serve of hot pasta plus a generous blizzard of Parmesan = yum-o!
  
• Gourmet Daing from Connie’s Kitchen This particular product isn’t so salty, but makes for a really savory treat when mixed into pasta. Add a fresh, diced tomato and you’re good to go.
  

Biscotti and Cupcakes for Sale!

Just so you all know, the home baking biz I tried to launch a few years ago is being given another try! 😀

Please click the pic above for a better view of the menu and price list.

I’ll be accepting orders beginning Monday, 13 April 2009.

Till then, have a meaningful Holy Week and a very Blessed Easter! 😉

The Madness of Midnight Peanut Butter Cup

Ice cream meister Ian Carandang of Sebastian’s is one crazy-mad genius. And I mean that in the best possible way!

Take a gander at the cup o’ joy above: a magnificent scoop of Midnight Peanut Butter Cup. Think of insanely rich, wickedly dark chocolate ice cream with chunks – not bits, CHUNKS – of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup scattered evenly throughout the scoop.

It’s the sort of dessert you eat by taking only the smallest dabs on the tip of the spoon, savoring it slowly, feeling the delirious theobromide rush searing through your veins.

Insanely, intensely, fervently good.

DIY: Biscotti (Part II of II)

After the success of my first batch of biscotti, I got rather bold and decided to do a few experiments. What if I made chocolate biscotti? The results, I am pleased to say, turned out quite well despite a slight glitch at the beginning.

The thing here is not to use melted unsweetened chocolate (which was my mistake, though the results were amazingly delicious), but to add unsweetened cocoa powder to the eggs and oil during the preliminary whisking. Plus, variety is a key word for this particular recipe. The use of three kinds of chocolate – dark, milk, and white couverture – adds visual and textural interest to the finished cookie.

DIY: Biscotti (Part I of II)

Lemon-poppy seed biscotti with tsokolate ah

I recently found a recipe for biscotti, those crisp Italian biscuits that are great for dipping into hot coffee, tea, or chocolate.

The name itself – also the root word for the English and French word biscuit – is a compound of “bis” (twice) and “cotto” (cooked).  That in mind, classic biscotti calls for the biscuits to be baked twice: once to firm them up, the second time to make them crisp.