Fusillotti pasta with Cantaloupe

Ideal lunch for summer. It's quickly prepared, light, refreshing. And also you don't need any special skills and ingredients. Every time I don't know what to cook or there's not much stuff in the fridge, I use mascarpone, fresh herbs, vegetables or chicken breasts, and take a look everywhere around the house hoping to find something unusual, interesting for my dish and a disgusting dish haven't came out so far. With pasta there is a lot of space for improvisation - that's what I love about it. The mesurements are just approximate - work with your instinct and sense of taste. So here's the recipe for about six people.

Ingredients:
1 cantaloupe
handful of walnuts
handful of mind leaves
190 g mascarpone
1 glass of white wine
parmesan cheese for sprinkling
4 big cloves of garlic
tbsp virgin oil
salt
pepper
pasta (for 6 people I used 270 g)

Cook the pasta al dente. Peel the melon and cut it in cubes. Heat the oil in a pan and leave the garlic cook until golden brown. Stir in the melon, pour in the wine. Let the sauce bubble for a while in order to eliminate the alcohol (about 2 minutes and less) but not for long time - in that case we would't feel the taste of the wine at all! Add the walnuts that I gently crushed with a blade of knife and mascarpone, leave it cook until it melts. After turning off the hotplate, mix in the mint and flavour with salt and pepper. Put the pasta into the sauce in the order to mix the flavours together and let it rest for several minutes. Serve with grated parmesan cheese on top, decorate with pieces of walnuts and leaves of mint.

Loupáky - Sweet Rolls with Poppy Seeds

Hot weather rules the world right now, even here, in the Czech republic. Temperatures over 30°C are not very usual and certainly not very popular and every normal person dreams about a cold bath or a trip to Siberia. But not me. I'm just looking forward to heating up the oven and baking fresh sweet rolls for breakfast.  Since I'm not a fan of getting up early in the morning, I decided to make the dough the evening before, put it into a fridge and then, in the morning, just put it into the oven and have crunchy breakfast in less than twenty minutes. I was finished late at night because I was so oveheated and squashed on a couch the whole afternoon. I have to admit though, that I had absolutely no idea what will happen to the dough. But there's a lot of "first time" in life so I tried it and it worked out. How simple morning breakfast can be. Especially when I convinced my mum to put it into the oven before she leaves home and all I had to do was just take it out and eat it. I have to do it more often.

But what are actually these "sweet rolls" I have on my mind? In the Czech republic, they are called "loupáky" (pronounce lopaki - the "a" as in the word "father" and the "i" as in the word "kid" - sorry it's really difficult to describe it) and I think I could call it a traditional czech pastry. Kids love it and adults adore it. They're also used as dunkers - for a snack with a cup of cocoa - and usually are sprinkled with poppy seeds. They can be eaten with a jam, nutella or just the way they are, without anything.

Here's the recipe for about 12 medium sized "loupáky":
Ingredients:
125 ml milk
320 g plain flour
70 g butter (melted or not - doesn't matter)
20 g fresh yeast
30 g caster sugar
1 egg yolk ( save the egg white for eggwash)
4 g salt

First, we prepare the sourdough. Sieve the flour into a bowl and make a hole in the middle in which you crumble the yeast. Pour the sugar on the yeast. In a pot, heat the milk to about 35°C - a temperature in which you're still able to hold your hand - normal warm milk.  Spoon some of the milk onto the yeast. Cover the bowl with a (tea)towl and put in a warm place. ( I usually put it on a hotplate where the milk was) Wait about ten minutes. The yeast should make "bubbles", they should form a brown foam. That means everything is working good. Add the rest of ingredients into the bowl (see the note below*)

Knead the dough until smooth and elastic and not sticky. Again, cover it and keep in a warm place about 40 minutes and more. It should at least double its size. If there are little "blisters" on the dough after a while, you stired it very well (three or two very small). If not, no big deal. Rolls just won't be that fluffy and perfect. But still very tasty. Just knead it a little bit longer next time.

Roll the dough on a thickness of about 8 mm, make it round, a circle. Divide it into triangulars and roll them from the base up to the top. If you want to have the rolls even better, roll the three sharp tops of triangulars out (but don't make them thinner than the rest of the triangular!) After rolling them up, curve the rolls a little bit - to get the "loupáky" look. Place the rolls onto a baking sheet lined with parchment paper. Cover them again and let them rest for about 20 minutes. Preheat the oven to 250°C. Mix the egg white with a spoon of milk and brush this glaze on the rolls. Put into the oven and immediately lower the temperature to 160°C and bake for about 15 minutes. Leave them cool on a rack (it's because of the humidity - we don't want the rolls to become damp).

*note - my great-grandmother was always saying that the sourdough can't get in touch with the salt. So she always sprinkled it at the edge of the bowl, put the rest of the ingredients onto the sourdough and mixed it very carefully in order to not place the salt on the brown foam. After that, she finally mixed it with the salt. According to her, the white crystal substance was blocking the yeast and the dough didn't rise. She supported this statement with good results. So I'm doing it too even though I'm still not sure whether she was right ot not. I just don't risk it and make it her way with 100% success.

About...

Why was this blog created?
Originally only because of creating a spot to post my completed challenges from the Daring Kitchen. But as time passed, I realized that if I created a blog, I could work on it more intensively than I had initially intended and make of it some kind of a list, an overview of my baking and cooking recipes and experience. And also to make myself to take photos of my creations for my potential readers and customers (AKA my friends and family). And maybe even to pass on some of my tricks and experience. My goals are among other things like to make myself a better cook or to make jealous the ones who couldn't taste my delicacies :) to get at least one reader and one comment.