scott’s spot

So, by now I’ve stated that I’ve recently started to cook, and that I’m loving the process. So, deciding I wanted to continue this pursuit, I asked my sister-in-law what, if anything, she wanted for a birthday dinner. Her response?

Cheese tortellini with proscuitto in a cream sauce.

Apparently this is a staple dinner in Italy, and almost non-existent in the States. I’ve certainly never heard of it (but this, quite frankly, means absolutely nothing.)

So I trolled through my favorite cookbook looking for something that might fit. I found a tortellini recipe online at Cooks Illustrated (see here), and decided to use the alfredo sauce recipe from the book, along with the parsley and ricotta cheese filling recipe. The proscuitto would be as easy and chopping up some that I bought at the grocery store and throwing it into the sauce at the end.

And for dessert? A lemon chiffon cake that I didn’t know was lemon chiffon until my wife asked “Why are you beating the egg whites so much?” (There’s a modification to the chiffon cake recipe to make it lemon–I didn’t realize it was still a chiffon cake).

How’d it all go? Not bad. My wife and sister-in-law enjoyed it, but I presonally found the whole dish too heavy. I probably wouldn’t choose to make it again for myself. The tortellini came out in varying sizes and therefore varying degrees of al dente. And they take forever to roll out, cut, fill, and fold.

And the cake? Tasty, but not quite right. All of the lemon sank to the top (it bakes upside down), which means I didn’t beat the eggs enough. But the glaze on top was good, and when the cake was drowned in it, it still tasted pretty good.

Oh, and one other thing I learned while cooking this weekend:

Never open a bottle of seltzer water too fast. You’ll get seltzer flavored food.