Attempt #61: Gennaro's butternut squash & pancetta penne

I was not able to get butternut squash, hence I replaced it with pumpkin. And I replaced pancetta with bacon. Penne was also replaced with Tagliatelle by a dear friend and her hubs! 

The result: Equally balanced with the right sweetness from the pumpkin and saltiness of the bacon, making it a wonderful pasta dish that warms up the tummy.

Jamie's version: 

The recipe as below in this link:

Attempt #55: Pancetta hash with eggs & apple salad

One of the best thing that I love about Jamie's salad recipes is that you can replace or add new ingredients to them and they still taste wonderful! 

The result:

I replaced pancetta with bacon and watercress with spinach and I added zucchini into the recipe. But with the core or foundation of the salad being bacon, poached eggs and apples...whatever ingredients throw in or replaced will just further enhance the magical combination of this dish. 

Method

Heat a wide frying pan and add a splash of oil. Fry the pancetta, ham and potatoes together for 10–12 minutes, tossing occasionally until the potatoes are cooked, golden and crisp. Divide between 2 plates.

Meanwhile, bring a wide saucepan of water to the boil and add a splash of white wine vinegar. Poach 2 eggs gently in the water for a couple of minutes, until softly set. Remove and place one on each plate of ham and potatoes.

Toss the watercress and sliced apple together and dress with a pinch of salt and pepper, a squeeze of lemon juice and a splash of olive oil. Top the poached eggs with a little pile of salad and serve.

Serves 2

Ingredients

• olive oil
• 6 slices higher-welfare pancetta, cut into wide strips
• 2 slices good-quality ham, torn into pieces
• 500 g potatoes, cubed
• 1 splash white wine vinegar
• 2 very fresh free-range eggs
• 1 large handful watercress
• 1 red apple, very finely sliced
• 1 squeeze lemon juice

Attempt #10: Delicious roasted white fish wrapped in smoked bacon with lemon mayonnaise and asparagus

My 10^th attempt! Wait a minute, 90 more recipes to go. L

Anyway, this 10^th attempt didn’t turned out to be as great as I thought it would have been. Reason being, I thought that anything with bacon is easy breezy to cook. As I just found out, so not true for a chef wannabe.

The buying process:

As I was doing the shopping for bacon, I realized that there are so many different types of bacon. OK, in my defence of the shallow knowledge of bacon, I am not much as a meat eater moreover bacon which is the part of the swine that carries one of the fattest content.

Anyway, not know the difference between smoked and unsmoked bacon, I checked out ehow.co. The explanation:

The difference between the two bacon types come from the way in which they are cooked. The smoked bacon is just that: smoked over a specific type of wood to give it a distinct flavour; unsmoked bacon is cooked to whatever specification the chef would like, with no flavour initiated into the meat before it is sold commercially.

The cooking process:

When I was wrapping the fish with the bacon, I felt almost like an actual chef as the wrapped fish looked so artistically creative.

Photo of the marinated raw fish being wrapped in smoked bacon as below:

 

As for steaming of the asparagus, I can never get this right. It is either overcooked which means it gets all limpy or undercooked, which makes it taste too close to eating grass.  

The result:

The fish was quite dry while the bacon wasn’t crispy enough. The recipe asked for 10-12 minutes in the oven but I had mine for 15 minutes but the bacon did not turn crisp nor golden like the recipe said it would. The lemon mayonnaise did helped to add some tangy juicy taste to the dryness of the fish.

Picture below shows better clarity of the dryness of the fish without the lemon mayonnaise.

Link to full recipe here.