Roasted garlic and parsley flatbreads

Roasted garlic and parsley flatbreads

Apologies for the unscheduled hiatus - life, in general, has continued to be full of good food but sadly lacking in time to write about it.

Anyway.  The other day, my parents visited, bearing the usual offerings.  No, not wine or flowers, those would be strange.  A couple of boxes of mangoes (they are in season so it is compulsory to eat at least a box of 12 a week) and five bulbs of garlic.  Now, usually anyone is welcome to bring multiple bulbs of garlic to my house (please take note) but, in this case, I had bought myself our usual weekly supply (4-5 bulbs) the day before.

What to do?  Well, the situation is ongoing so the full answer remains to be seen but - obviously - part of the answer had to be roasting a couple of bulbs.  While one can dispose of roasted garlic fairly straightforwardly with a spoon (if one is feeling civilised), on this occasion, I decided to make flatbreads and stuff them with roasted garlic and parsley.

To make the filling, I roasted some garlic, mixed it with some chopped parsley, drizzled some olive oil on top and added some salt and pepper.

Mmmm, roasted garlic

I used Nigel Slater's recipe for the flatbreads, which worked fairly well overall.  I love making breads on the hob, it's how most Indian breads are made, and it's just plain more fun than the oven approach.  I am tempted, at some point, to try finishing them on the barbeque to get that slightly burnt, smokey thing going on.

The only tweaks I made were that, because his recipe calls for 10g of yeast and yeast comes in 7g packets, I went with 14g of yeast.  I suspect that's why mine weren't the flattest flatbread of all time but it still worked fine...  I also didn't care for his method of stuffing the flatbread - he suggests getting a ball of dough, putting the filling inside and then rolling them out.  Totally didn't work for me so I switched to shaping them with my hands into a disc, putting in the filling, folding it over again and squishing a bit with my hands.

Dough before it grew immensely

Stuffed flatbreads ready to be cooked

Roasted garlic and parsley flatbreads are go!

I really enjoyed these and am already plotting what to fill them with next..  currently, burnt aubergine and feta is the lead contender..

Roasted garlic and creme fraiche spaghetti

Roasted garlic and creme fraiche spaghetti

I've been working late a lot recently and so my lovely husband has been taking on more of the cooking.  The other day he made a particularly lovely pasta dish involving roasted garlic, creme fraiche, mushrooms, mangetout and spaghetti.  Mmmm.

To make it, he first of all roasted the garlic, which takes around an hour so worth bearing that in mind if you're really hungry!

Roasted garlic and creme fraiche spaghetti

There are a number of ways to roast garlic but he went for the method described here (the bottom of the page, "roasting garlic for cooking purposes") which seemed to produce some pretty tasty roasted garlic. 

Then, he fried up the vegetables - an onion, a selection of mushrooms and some mangetout (though, really, any vegetables would work) - added a good slug of white wine, cooked for a while longer to let that reduce, stirred in the creme fraiche, left it to heat through, then added the roasted garlic and the spaghetti. 

 

Roasted garlic and creme fraiche spaghetti

We decided to pack up the left overs for lunches during the week but, if you wanted to, I bet it would make for a lovely frittata di spaghetti.  That's the Italian way of using up left over spaghetti which - like much Italian cooking - is straightforward but very very good.  All you do is grease a pan (olive oil/butter/as you wish), put the spaghetti in it, crack a couple of eggs in (more if you have loads of left over spaghetti, obviously) and then cook.  Particularly good with a little cheese on top.