Pavlova with Sea Fruit
We live to please ourselves. That is why I decided to make myself and my family happy today with a reliable, simple, inexpensive and easily accessible method, which is preparing dinner with dessert.
I don't usually stick to recipes, but in the case of the dish I chose for dinner today, even if I wanted to, it would be impossible because there is no recipe for it. In the Mediterranean, this dish is a staple of the diet, and everyone makes it in their own unique and inimitable way. You can't mess this dish up, it always tastes delicious, probably because of the garlic, parsley and olive oil.
I started with pasta. To half a kilogram of regular 480 flour, I added six egg yolks, two whole eggs and a little water. Then I kneaded it for twenty minutes, which is the most enjoyable thing I do in the kitchen. The feeling I get when I touch the springy, velvety, elastic and smooth dough is incomparable to anything. Well, maybe only to one thing, but I won't write about it because children might read this. After an hour in the fridge, I used an Italian pasta machine that I once brought from Italy and in a few minutes I used it to shape fettuccine.
The frutti di mare were tiger prawns, a strip of cuttlefish and black mussels. I poured a lot of olive oil into a large pot, in which I fried garlic, half a red onion in cubes and the heads of the prawns. After a few minutes I poured white wine over everything and when it had evaporated I removed the heads and added the prawns, sliced cuttlefish and mussels. I cooked for six minutes. Then I added a piece of butter and when it melted I added the al dente pasta and after two minutes I removed it from the heat, sprinkled with parsley and served.
Heaven in your mouth, although I have to admit that I still have some way to go before the best seafood pasta I've ever eaten in my life. My best is served at the Emilio-Comici restaurant at the ski lift station opposite the Sassolungo peak in the Val Gardena region in the Italian Dolomites.
The sweet treat was a Pavlova cake, named after a Russian prima ballerina from St. Petersburg who, while visiting Australia with her ballet in 1926, asked the chef at the Esplanade Hotel in Perth for something light for dessert.
I beat the whites of six eggs. When they were almost beaten, I slowly added a glass of caster sugar, spoon by spoon. When all the sugar had dissolved completely, I added a spoon of lemon juice and a spoon of potato flour and stirred for a while longer.
I put baking paper on a baking tray, on which I drew a circle with a plate and a pencil, in which I placed the mass, forming an even cylinder with a spatula. Then I put it in the oven for an hour and a half at 120 degrees.
I made the cream from mascarpone cheese, cream and a little sugar. I whipped all the ingredients in a machine until I got a stiff cream, which I put on the cooled meringue. I decorated it with strawberries, pomegranate, sprinkled with powdered sugar and grated chocolate.
