Last night, for dinner, we had pumpkin and ricotta-filled tortellini topped with sage butter and chopped garden herbs, made without a recipe and without looking up how someone else cooks it.
So, how do I know how to cook pumpkin and ricotta-filled tortellini topped with sage butter and chopped garden herbs?
Growing up on a dairy farm, my mum milked the cows, so someone else had to cook dinner, and being the oldest child, usually meant me.
There are only so many times that you can cook mince meat with tomatoes before you start to come up with ideas on how to make it different, or take a plunge and do a roast.
At that young age, doing a roast was turning on the oven, putting the meat on a tray, peeling potatoes, cutting up a pumpkin and putting everything in the oven, until my parents came in from the shed for dinner.
It didn’t matter how it came out; it was dinner and there was nothing else.
Then add to that, I would read the cookbooks that were kept in the bottom kitchen drawer and whip up a batch of puff pastry on the weekends, ‘just for something to do’,
This is how I first learned to cook.
Secondly, after a stint working in the city, my desire to grow, cook, and share food with others was overpowering.
So, I went to TAFE, got a certificate in commercial cookery, and started washing dishes in a café before working as a chef.
Like reading the cookbooks in the bottom kitchen drawer as a child, my thirst for knowledge about food was intense.
I soaked up all the theory, read cookbooks and practised what I was learning, not scared of a new cooking technique or food to try.
That was 25 years ago; since then, cooking has been my happy place.
If I don’t cook something — a cake for morning tea, something different for dinner every night, try a new recipe, or read a cookbook — my life would become unhinged over time.
When a local farmer dropped off nine large pumpkins, my creative juices started to flow, with the thought, “How many ways can I cook pumpkin?”
I peeled the first pumpkin, cut it up, and roasted it.
Some went straight to that night’s roast (venison pot roast with potatoes cooked by throwing a jar of tomato chutney and a cup of red wine over it, topping off with bacon, and putting it in the oven for a couple of hours) and the rest of the pumpkin went into the fridge for later.
The next day, I looked up these recipes: pumpkin scones for morning tea and pumpkin pie for dessert.
Both recipes called for the roasted pumpkin to be puréed and strained, but still, there was cooked pumpkin, and now, puréed leftover.
Then, in my continual thirst for food knowledge, we watched Jamie Oliver's episode of Chef’s Table: Legends, where he talked about cooking a Rotolo of pumpkin with wild greens and ricotta.
This triggered my desire to cook pumpkin-filled pasta, so I could first remember how to make pasta (put 00 flour in the food processor, add eggs until you have pasta dough, wrap in glad wrap, rest in fridge until tomorrow, roll with pasta machine), and maybe soon tackle a Rotolo.
There was ricotta in the fridge, sage and herbs in the garden and the leftover pumpkin puree.
That is how last night's dinner became pumpkin and ricotta-filled tortellini topped with sage butter and chopped garden herbs.
Do you have a recipe you've never tried before and would like Jaci to cook? Share your recipe inspirations at jaci.hicken@mmg.com.au
