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Posts Tagged ‘holidays’

Panettone cake bites with mandarin chocolate ganache

Posted in Dolce recipes, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 25, 2013 | Leave a Comment »

Nudo olive oil panettone cake bites.

It was like the panettonegeddon. This past Holiday season we received all sorts of the famous Italian holiday confection.  There were bite-size ones and fruity ones and chocolate-covered ones and two that looked like golden Mayan temples (inappropriately delivered on December 22nd). And then there was the delicious Nudo olive oil panettone, of course. Unfortunately now that January is at its end and we’ve still not managed to eat out way out of the panettone mountain, we decided to save ourselves and others from this cakey lot. The time has come to use our leftover panettone for some delicious desserts. Cathy shared a quick and easy recipe for panettone bread and butter pudding, and below we have another rather decadent invention to try at home.

Ingredients (makes 12 bites)

Nudo olive oil panettone – 1 quarter

Mandarin (or orange) – 1 small, juiced

Marsala liqueur - 2 tsp to sprinkle (optional)

For the ganache

Nudo olive oil with mandarins – 3 tsp

Organic white chocolate – 100g/3.5 oz bar

Double cream – 2 tbsp

Start by peeling off the soft panettone crust. Using a sharp bread knife, cut the remaining cake in thin slices and then small cubes, placing the pieces into a mixing bowl. In a separate bowl mix the Marsala liqueur with the orange juice (optional).  Drizzle the mandarin juice mixture over the cake pieces, mixing it with a fork or your hands as you pour to spread the moisture. The cake should be moist, but not wet.

In a bain marie or small glass bowl over a pot of hot water, melt the chocolate. Once melted, add the olive oil and stir until mixed through. Now add the cream and mix through. Take off the heat. Make 1.5 inch balls with the moist cake pieces, pressing and rolling it together in your hands. Dip and roll the balls in the chocolate ganache so that all sides are covered. Place on a baking sheet to cool and set. Chill in the fridge before serving.

No panettone in store anymore? Get one of the last Nudo Olive Oil Panettone in the Nudo Italia shop (USA only).

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Turkey, capon, and beef with salsa verde

Posted in Secondo piatto recipes, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 20, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

Salsa verde on a festive Natale table at La Morla grove.

The tender meats used to make the broth for our festive Natali pasta recipe, tortellini in brodo, are used here in a simple and satisfying recipe which brings the meat to life with a colourful, zingy and deeply flavoursome sauce. It beats lumpy gravy any day.

Salsa_egg-yolks_500px

Ingredients

Parsley – 50g

Anchovies fillets – 3

Garlic – half a clove

Capers – 1 tbsp (remove the salt)

Hard boiled egg yolk – 1

Green olives – 4 pitted

Extra virgin olive oil 100g

Vinegar – 1 tbsp

Breadcrumbs –

Salt – pinch

Simonetta_making-salsa_500px

First soak the breadcrumbs in the vinegar for a few minutes. Add all the other ingredients and put everything in a  food processor to mix. Add the oil as the machine is running and salt to taste.

Cut thin slices of the meat and serve with a generous helping of salsa verde.

Meat-with-salsa-served_500px

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Festive Tortellini in brodo

Posted in Pasta recipes, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 19, 2012 | 4 Comments »

Making tortellini with help from the whole Talocchi family - even the junior members.

This traditional Christmas soup of handmade pasta and a rich capon broth is typically eaten just once a year, so you need to get it right. Its preparation is an exercise in old-world patience, the perfect antidote to too many hours spent on twitter. Simonetta does have one labour saving trick up her sleeve; the meat used to make the broth goes on to star in the second piatto.

Ingredients for the broth (for 4 people)

Capon thigh – 500g

Turkey breast – 300g

Tender beef – 400g

Celery stick – 1

Carrots – 3

Onion – 1

Salt – pinch

Roughly chop the vegetables and then soak them with the meat in cold water. Bring to the boil, add salt and then leave to simmer for about 2 hours, until the meat is tender and the broth has concentrated a bit.

Matriarch of the family, Simonetta, making tortellini in the La Morla kitchen.

Ingredients for the tortellini filling

Lean veal – 150g

Turkey breast – 100g

Lean pork – 100g

Prosciutto crudo – 50g

Mortadella – 50g

Parmesan cheese – 50g grated

Eggs – 2

Sausage – 1/50g

Salt – a pinch

Nutmeg – a pinch

Mince all the meats together, then add the eggs, the grated cheese, nutmeg and salt. Mix together well until you have a solid paste.

Ingredients for the Tortellini pasta

Eggs – 3

OO flour – 300g

Extra virgin olive oil – 1 tbsp

Salt – pinch

Making tortellini in a few simple steps. Press down sides, fold tops back and under, and then twist around to close the loop.

If you take the easy route and use a food processor just add everything in together and mix until the dough is stiff. If you are more hard-core and make the pasta by hand, build yourself a little volcano of flour and break the eggs into the middle. Add the oil and salt and work together with a fork until you get a solid ball. Wrap the pasta ball in cellophane and leave it in the fridge for about 30 minutes. Take it out and halve it. Work the first half through the pasta machine, gradually working down the thickness levels one at a time until you reach the lowest numbers. With the resulting piece, square off the top and bottom and cut into 5cm squares. Repeat with the other half of the pasta.

Place a tablespoon of the filling (like a little ball) on each square, fold to form a triangle and seal by squeezing the edges. Fold a corner under the tortellino and shape the tortellino around your finger to form a ring. Carry on until all the pasta and filling is used up.

Place the tortellini on baking paper on a tray (you can also freeze them at this point if you wish), and cover with cling film or a tablecloth.

Tortellini in brodo, plated for the festive Natale table.

Pour the broth through a sieve to make a clear liquid brodo. Cook the tortellini in this for a couple of minutes and serve in a bowl with a drizzle of oil.

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40% Off your very own olive tree in Italy

Posted in Stories from the Olive Grove, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on November 26, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

It’s Cyber Monday, and we’re feeling generous.  Here’s some great offers to get your Holiday shopping started:

#1 Adopt an olive tree FOR YOURSELF today and get 40% off your first delivery when you enter code ‘CYBERNUD49‘.

#2 Adopt an olive tree AS A GIFT today and get 20% off your purchase when you enter code ‘CYBERNUD69‘.

There’s many more gift ideas and kitchen cupboard essentials over in the Nudo Italia shop too – take a look now.

Have a great Monday!

Ciao for now,

Nudo Team x

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Grilled Asparagus preserved in extra virgin olive oil

Posted in Antipasti recipes, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on November 22, 2012 | 2 Comments »

These look a million dollars. It will break your heart when you actually have to crack them open. But then they’ll taste a million dollars. It’s win win my friend.

Ingredients

Asparagus – 500g / 1.1 lbs

White wine vinegar – 300ml/10 fl oz

Garlic – 2 cloves

Shallot – 1

Peppercorns – 1 tsp

Rosemary – 2 sprigs

Lemon juice – 100ml / 3.4 fl oz

Extra virgin olive oil – 500ml/ 17 fl oz

Cut the woody bits off the asparagus and throw away. Cut the remaining spears in half lengthways, and find a jar a bit taller than this height. Put the vinegar in a saucepan with 200ml/7 fl oz of water, boil it and then take off the heat. Grill the asparagus on a griddle pan, and then transfer to the vinegar water. Leave for a few minutes and then drain.

Sterilise the jars in the oven for 10 minutes, and meanwhile finely chop the garlic and shallot. Put them in the bottom of the jars with the peppercorns. Then carefully pack the spears into the jars, along with a sprig of rosemary. Fill the jar up to about a 5th of the height with lemon juice, then fill to the top with olive oil. Close the jars and then store in a cool dark place for 6 weeks. Consume within 4 months, and once open keep the asparagus covered in oil and in the fridge.

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Panettone bread and butter pudding

Posted in Dolce recipes, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 19, 2011 | 1 Comment »

At this time of year no bona fide Italian would turn up to a dinner party without an elegantly packaged panettone, pandoro or torrone. If you people-watch at passeggiata time (that lovely post-day, pre-evening interlude), you’ll see all sorts strolling about, carrying their tasteful confections. In deference to this simple and lovely tradition, we started to make our own olive oil panettone. We were very proud when it recently came a close second in a Guardian taste test, and were the first panettone to be mentioned in the New York times for 9 years. Trouble is that this meant we ran out of stock in just three days. So in case you get given a panettone made by someone else, we’ve got a little recipe to turn it into something special.

Ingredients

Panettone – 750g/26oz

Butter – 75g/2.6oz

Milk – 400ml/13.5fl oz

Cream – 150ml/5fl oz single or double

Eggs – 2 free range

Sugar – 125g/1oz

Ground cinnamon – sprinkling

Ground nutmeg – sprinkling

Preheat the oven to 180oC/350oF/GM4. Cut your panettone into slices about 1.5cm/½ inch  thick. Butter one side of each slice and then cut it into triangles.

Lay the pieces on an oven proof baking dish. Continue until you fill the dish, nice and cosy.

Crack the eggs into a mixing bowl and gently whisk them with the sugar. Heat the milk and cream in a saucepan (you can add vanilla too if you like) until it just below boiling. Slowly pour the milk/cream mixture into the mixing bowl with the eggs, stirring continuously. Pour the mixture evenly over the panettone soaking each bready peak, and then put it in the oven for about 25 mins, or until the exposed panettone starts to brown. Eat straight away with cold single cream. (You can also cool it, take to a friend’s house, receive adulation, reheat and eat there).

See some more photos in our Panettone bread & butter pudding album here.

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Nudo and the olive oil panettone

Posted in Stories from the Olive Grove, tagged , , , , , , , , on December 8, 2011 | 2 Comments »

There are three things guaranteed to put me in the Christmas mood. The first is the smell of pine trees. The second is the first December airing of Jason’s copy of Phil Spector’s ‘Sounds of Christmas’ CD. And the third is the sight of someone carrying a preposterously prettily-packaged panettone. I absolutely love panettone and as far as I’m concerned it was one of the loveliest things you can give or receive. It’s a big fat show off of a gift and as delicious outside as in.

So we were very excited at the prospect of creating our very own Nudo panettone. We got talking to several panettone makers about the idea of experimenting with olive oil (it is traditionally made using only butter) and eventually decided on the Signor Scarpato bakery. They made some panettone using our mandarin olive oil and others with the lemon, but in the end the one we liked best (and a special thank you to our Nudo customer tasters) was the one they made with our plain Nudo olive oil. We then discovered that we couldn’t actually call our ‘panettone’ ‘panettone’ in Italy as the strict protection of this Milanese classic dictates that to be a ‘panettone’ it must be 100% butter (ours is half butter and half olive oil). We still secretly call it panettone amongst ourselves, please don’t dob us in to the Italian food special ops.

Anyway, our first panettone-esque-large-cakes-of-delicious-airy-dough-and-dried-fruit was featured in no less a publication that the New York Times’ Dining Section, so we must have done something right. Better clear your larders in anticipation – and get your order in before it’s all gone. Nearly time to dig out that CD…

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F is for Faulty

Posted in Stories from the Olive Grove, tagged , , , , , , , on December 18, 2009 | Leave a Comment »

The sign that it’s really, really Christmas and not just puff, is the moment Jason erects our huge ‘Buone Feste’ (happy holidays) fairy light filled giant letters. They are about 10 feet long and I’m sure  designed with something a bit more showy than a small family living room in mind. The electrics are pretty dodgy (they were bought from a local Chinese shop – a sort of everything-for-a-pound shop but with a technical spin – dangerous combination, bit like advertising ‘cheap homemade plutonium’). There’s also no way to hang the letters properly so they usually end up propped on bits of furniture. This wouldn’t be perilous except we do boast a 2 year old with a sixth sense for anything which hasn’t been industrially drilled into position.

Anyway, it’s up and it really is a thing of beauty. That warm Christmassy feeling in electrical form. The only niggle is that the F is not properly committed to the cause and usually remains un-illuminated. So its ‘Buone este’ round our place. Este means east in Italian. Could we be looking at an act of international sabotage by the apparently charming staff at the Chinese pound shop?

Buone este one and all.

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That Festive Feeling

Posted in Stories from the Olive Grove, tagged , , , , , , , on December 8, 2009 | Leave a Comment »

My first thrill of ‘Christmas feeling’ usually comes around late October. It is always inspired by someone far better prepared than me, someone who has already got round to buying their Christmas presents, someone who has decided to give someone an olive tree adoption, someone who has asked for ‘Happy Christmas’ to be lovingly inscribed in the message card. The heady childish thrill of Christmas thoughts and the smell of imaginary mince pies and fires and decorating trees and aching anticipation is usually coupled with a very grown up non-thrill of ‘oh my god how come some people are so organised?’ Personally I can barely think about Christmas shopping until the shop assistants are looking hopefully at their watches towards the tail end of 24th December.

Those message cards nowadays teleport me to Nudo’s very first Christmas. The company had only been going for a few months and we had just, rather ineffectively, done our first olive harvest. I think the total number of trees we’d adopted stood at around 14 and we knew the names, and birthdays, of all the foster parents. Friends and family are the saviours of early hopes in a new business. Anyway we were approaching Christmas and somehow hoped that ‘real’ customers might somehow, magically start emerging in force. But how would anyone find us? How would anyone in the ‘real world’ even know we existed? Is this something Father Christmas asks himself?

The answer, at least as we saw it, was Christmas gift guides- you know those lists in newspapers (so old school!) that give you great ideas for last minute presents? We were prepared to do anything, including as it turned out, selling our children, to get in one. I exaggerate of course. But I do remember in our desperation, sending a photograph of one year old Rosie with a sorry expression and the words ‘What kind of Christmas?’ with the press release that we sent to friends to scatter to anyone they knew who’d ever even had a paper round.

Emotional blackmail is a very effective tool (a fact soon to be confirmed, were confirmation needed, by spending Christmas in the company of Italian mammas). By the miracle of modern communication, that press release made it into the hands of someone who knew someone who knew someone who was compiling no less an opus than the Independent’s guide to ‘Great Christmas presents for men’ in the Independent. Those Christmas gift guides really do make a difference. People knew we existed. People adopted our olive trees. And Rosie had a lovely first Nudo Christmas.

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