Ricotta makes a lighter cheesecake than cream cheese. In the summertime that might be just the ticket.

This recipe is based on an epicurious.com recipe. I added a good dose of rosewater to the batter, because I like the flavour and it compliments the rose petal – apple jelly used as a garnish. The red currants I found riding my bicycle in the Don Valley Park. I stopped because I spotted a mulberry tree, and underneath the tree there was a red currant bush teeming with berries. Nice!

Ricotta Cheesecake

2 lbs ricotta cheese
1 cup sugar
6 T all purpose flour
6 eggs
zest of 1 lemon
2 T rose water
2 tsp vanilla
pinch of salt

Preheat the oven to 320° F. Butter a 9½ inch springform pan. Place parchment paper on the bottom and around the sides.

Place the ricotta and lemon zest in a mixing bowl and beat until smooth. Add the sugar and flour and keep beating. Mix in the eggs one at a time. Mix in the rest of the ingredients. Pour batter into the prepared pan and bake for about one hour, until a skewer inserted into the centre comes out cleanly. Cool on a wire rack. The cake will sink a bit. No cause for concern.

Serving this with some seasonal fruit — like a pile of raspberries — is not a bad plan.

Stracnar is a pasta native to Puglia. It is formed by rolling a sheet of dough on a carved wooden board called a cavarola. The pasta sheet takes on the herringbone pattern of the wood, which is then cut into rectangles of about 1 inch by 2 ½ inches. I would like to thank Terry Mirri for crafting such beautiful works of form and function.

The following recipe is based on Giuliano Bugialli’s recipe for stracnar in “Bugialli On Pasta.” It should be enough for 4 people.

Stracnar

150 g all purpose flour
100 g semolina
3 large eggs

Roll out the pasta so that it is thick enough to accept the impression from the cavarola. On my machine that would be about the second or third last notch.

The ragu is a mixture of homemade tomato sauce from Ontario field tomatoes, some olive oil, garlic, softened onion, fresh basil and sea salt. To that was added a generous handful of cooked wild mushrooms. Simmer slowly and adjust the seasoning. Grated on top is some grana padano. A robust red wine compliments this pasta nicely — perhaps a glass of Primitivo.

As Bugialli makes a point of mentioning, “This is another of those great old pastas that must be made manually and is disappearing, but let us work to revive it.”

Recently I purchased a number of pasta making tools from Terry Mirri, an artisan handcrafting some traditional items out in Sonoma, California. Check out his website to see some amazing craftsmanship www.artisanalpastatools.com. He makes corzetti stamps, cavarola boards, garganelli/gnocchi boards and polenta boards. Everything is very traditional, just like artisans were making similar implements hundreds of years ago.

Last night I made some corzetti and served it with basil pesto as is done in Liguria. Some zucchini blossom pieces are scattered on top (because the zucchini vine is taking over the front yard).

But first things first. What are corzetti? Here’s the description from ‘The Dictionary of Italian Food and Drink’ by John Mariani:

“Pasta made with white, whole wheat, or chestnut flour, shaped into rounds, and embossed with a pattern (commonly a star) with a wooden stamp, from Liguria. Corzetti are named after old Genovese stamped money pieces, and old stamps, many now family heirlooms, commemorate heraldry or Genoa’s history.”

Here’s what the pasta discs look like after being pressed between the 2 segments of the corzetti stamp:

Beautiful. At this point I didn’t even care if I cooked them. I was happy just to look at the corzetti.

But eventually hunger won out. The dough is a basic ravioli dough with flour, eggs, semolina, a little milk and a splash of olive oil. Your favourite egg-based pasta recipe should work fine. Roll the dough so it still has enough thickness to accept the impressions on both sides. Too thin and it won’t work out. Too thick and your pasta will be too heavy.

Serve with basil pesto:

2 cups packed basil leaves
4 garlic cloves, minced
1/2 cup toasted pine nuts
1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil
1/2 cup parmigiano-reggiano, grated

Put everything in the food processor and pulse until the desired consistency is attained.

A crostini with some pheasant back mushroom sauce, some slivers of the mushrooms fried until a bit crispy, fiddleheads, asparagus and pecorino. Sea salt and olive oil added for good measure.

There have been some showers lately which probably helped with the forest being inundated by the pheasant backs. May is generally their month to shine in these parts. Not all of them were good eating, but there were some keepers. Here’s one growing straight up out of a log, instead of the usual shelf-like structure coming horizontally out of a tree stump.

Pansotti are ‘pot bellied’ pasta triangles from Liguria, usually stuffed with ricotta and borage. I don’t have any borage growing at the moment, but I do have a bunch of wild leeks. The filling is simply equal parts of seasoned wild leeks sautéed in butter, with freshly made ricotta. Place everything in the food processor with a few gratings of pecorino romano to make a thick paste for stuffing the pansotti.

The pasta dough is my usual ravioli dough recipe (which makes enough for about 3 main course portions):

250 g all-purpose flour
2 eggs
1 T extra virgin olive oil
1 T milk

The pasta has been garnished with sautéed wild leek bulbs and some shavings of pecorino romano. All the leek tops are inside the pasta. You have to cut open the pansotti with a fork for the green to be revealed. If you do use borage leaves, the purple-blue flowers would make a beautiful garnish.

Dandelions have a lot to offer. However, they are much maligned by those who want their golf course perfect lawns. Must keep up with the Joneses. Get out that weed killer. Too bad children and pets can’t play on the grass.

Enough.

Here’s a batch of dandelion flower syrup. Nice on pancakes, in cold drinks, on ice cream. Lots of possibilities. The leaves will make their way into salads and pastas. In the autumn I may also dig up the roots.

Dandelion Flower Syrup

250 dandelion flowers (snip off the stem, which is very bitter)
3 litres water
sugar

Wash the flowers and place them in a pot with the water. Bring to a boil. Turn off heat. Cover and let steep overnight.

Strain the liquid and then weigh it. I ended up with 2.2 kg of liquid. Measure out half that amount of sugar (1.1 kg in my case). Your exact results will vary.

Place the dandelion liquid and sugar in a pot and boil until reduced by half. Cool and decant into jars. Store in the refrigerator.

Here is a simple cake that has a bit of a sponge quality to it, all the better to absorb warm dandelion syrup and some wild blueberries:

As mentioned, the leaves can be used in salads among many possibilities. Here is a dandelion, baby potato, maitake mushroom and egg salad, all bound by a garlic and mustard dressing:

As an aside, there are a number of articles which point to dandelions as being useful in the fight against cancer. It would be ironic in the extreme if a plant that some have tried so hard to exterminate, is actually useful in combatting one of humanity’s most fearsome diseases.

The “pheasant back” (aka “dryad’s saddle” — a seat for a tree nymph (if you ever see a tree nymph, email me)) is edible as long as it’s tender. Test it first with your knife. Or better yet, if your fingernail can get through the outer rim of the mushroom then at least that part can be eaten. I plan on drying thin slices of the tougher ones, and making mushroom powder for inclusion into soups, pastas, etc. The smell of the freshly picked mushroom bears an uncanny resemblance to watermelon rind! That’s one way to find them, although as you can see, they’re easy to spot.

The outer arc of the mushrooms were good for immediate eating, so here’s a crispy polenta cake with sauteéd mushrooms and stinging nettle butter sauce.

This is a good patch of stinging nettles. They are perfect at this time of year — just bring along some work gloves, your kitchen scissors and a plastic bag and snip off the tender tops. I could literally fill the freezer with cooked nettles awaiting their uses in pasta, risottos, or just on a plate with a little butter, salt and pepper.

You’ll get some strange looks when you’re out harvesting. Some people wonder about the green plant you’re stuffing into a shopping bag, one guy asked me about all the ‘mint’ I was cutting (it’s probably a bad idea to make a mojito with these). A woman out walking her dog knew they were nettles, but was surprised that they were actually edible, and not just painful.

Well they are both painful and edible. Cook them and they won’t be painful. For dinner, stinging nettle risotto.

You can just see the hairs that deliver the payload of chemical irritants into your skin (if you’re not wearing a long-sleeve shirt, long pants and gloves). Fortunately, cooking them in boiling water completely negates the stingers.

The risotto was made with the intense liquid remaining after cooking about 5 lbs of nettles. This liquid is medicine. Save it for a nutritious tonic. Some nettle purée has also been added to give the deep green colour and flavour. If green had a flavour, this might be it. Some cooked nettles and parmigiano-reggiano are on top.

You could also use the nettle stock as a soup. Here is some quinoa cooked in the stock with chopped nettles and caramelized onions. Quinoa is a source of complete protein. Nettles are very high in protein. Needless to say, this soup is extremely healthy and delicious.

The white trillium is the flower emblem of the Province of Ontario.

Instead of white trilliums carpeting the forest floor, we end up with the garlic mustard plant. Lots of it.

Introduced to North America by settlers back in the late 1800s, garlic mustard is now considered an invasive weed.  Prime habitat for the trillium is being taken over by garlic mustard. Good thing garlic mustard is edible.

If you enjoy bitter greens (like dandelion) you will like this. When the leaves are bruised they smell like garlic (hence the name). Mixed with some ricotta, they’d make a good filling for ravioli, or the main ingredients in some gnocchi.

Gnocchi it is.

Garlic Mustard Gnocchi

400 g ricotta
350 g garlic mustard greens, chopped (weight after blanching in boiling, salted water, squeezed dry)
1 egg
70 g flour, maybe a bit more
20 g gruyère, grated
20 g parmigiano-reggiano, grated
sea salt
freshly ground black pepper
nutmeg, grated

Bring a large pot of salted water to the boil.

Meanwhile, put the ricotta and chopped greens into a food processor and form a paste. Pulse in the flour, egg, cheese and seasonings. Turn down the heat so that the water is simmering. Take a small spoon of the dough and drop it into the water. After the gnoccho has floated to the surface and cooked for a couple more minutes, remove it with a slotted spoon and taste. If it has broken apart, add a bit more flour. Adjust the seasoning if necessary.

Process all the gnocchi, removing them to a sheet pan that has been lightly coated with olive oil. Use right away with an appropriate sauce (like scamorza affumicata, for example), or cool completely and refrigerate or freeze.