Some baking and Italian

Between contracts at the moment, but not cooking as much as I thought I might.  Plenty of other stuff to keep me busy.

Have made croissant dough from scratch, split it into four, froze three and used them up over the last month

The jam squares were better when I folded the edges in and I didn't retry the cinnamon ones, too much cinnamon and a bit grainy, but I wasn't really following a recipe....

In the next batch I put chocolate (dark was better than milk) in the croissants - very popular

I also made lovely sausage rolls, picture is rubbish though - we had some sauage meat in the freezer, probably from christmas

I made some bread, great hot, not bad toasted as well.  White below and a brown seed loaf (A had left some mixed seed from Lidl / Aldi when she was last here, sort of thing, as a veggie, she eats)

 As the weather is great, had coffee and apricots out side one day:

I had some friends over last week, started with the last of the croissants, made suppli, porcini raviolo in a butter sauce (with sage flowers), involtini, that I learned from the Italian cookery school, butternut squash risotto with rolled chicken breast in jamon (as proscuitto) stuffed with homemade pesto, will definately make this again, San really liked the leftovers we had the next day.  Followed by the crostana from the cookery school - San though the orange was too much.

As I has some left over aubergine bits from the involtini, when I was on my own I sliced, salted and griddled them, fried off red onion, peeled yellow pepper and garlic, mostly cooked some large pasta, mixed them all together with some green olives, anchovies and a small tomato sauce from the freezer. Tore up some old Cambozola from the back of the fridge on top and baked it, as below:

Really enjoyed it, I think the fact I only had a bit of sauce was a big plus, I would normally of put two or three times as much, but it would have been more about the tomato than the other ingredients, will also try less sauce with the next involtini

This, the rolled chicken breast (beaten with meat hammer between two sheets of cling film, laid on jamon / proscuittio,  with a stuffing a one end, then rolled up and baked) and the involtini will all be done again