cooking | Bewitching Kitchen

This is easy but so elegant and tasty, hard to come up with a better idea to impress guests or just enjoy a beautiful side dish on a warm Spring evening. I caught the recipe during a recent episode of TheKitchen, courtesy of Alex Guarnaschelli.

ASPARAGUS AND PROSCIUTTO PHYLLO ROLLS
(very slightly modified from FoodTV Network)

Kosher salt
18 medium stalks asparagus, ends trimmed
24 to 28 sheets phyllo dough, defrosted
olive oil spray
1 cup finely grated Parmesan
12 thin slices prosciutto

Prepare an ice bath with a medium bowl half filled with water and ice cubes.
In a large pot, bring 4 quarts water to a rolling boil. Add salt until it tastes like mild seawater. Layer a baking sheet with a clean kitchen towel. Drop the asparagus into the boiling water and cook until slightly tender when pierced with the tip of a knife, 2 to 3 minutes. Use a large slotted spoon to remove the asparagus from the water, transferring them immediately to the ice bath so that they cool down and don’t continue cooking. Let chill 5 minutes, then drain the asparagus and spread them on the baking sheet with the towel.

Heat the oven to 375 degrees F.

Place one sheet of phyllo on a flat surface with the short end closest to you. Spray the phyllo with olive oil. Sprinkle with a little of the Parmesan. Place another sheet of phyllo directly on top. Brush with additional butter and sprinkle with Parmesan.

Arrange 2 slices prosciutto in a single layer closest to you on the phyllo. Place 2 to 3 stalks of asparagus in bunches along the short side of the phyllo on top of the prosciutto and tightly roll the asparagus up in the prosciutto and phyllo to form a log. Trim the ends of the phyllo to fit the asparagus perfectly. As you make the asparagus rolls, arrange them on a baking sheet with distance between each so that they brown when baking. Spray their tops with olive oil right before baking.

Place the baking sheet in the center of the oven and bake until golden brown on the outside, 20 to 25 minutes. Sprinkle with salt.

ENJOY!

to print the recipe, click here

Comments: I wrote the recipe as published, except for the use of olive oil instead of melted butter. Amounts are really going to be flexible, I only made four rolls for us, we had three at dinner and one was my lunch next day, still delicious. I never go through the trouble of making the ice bath, I just rinse the blanched asparagus in running very cold water in a colander, and call it a day. But do as it pleases you, your kitchen, your rules. I have stopped brushing phyllo with butter a long time ago – the olive oil spray is amazingly easy, never hurts the sheets and gives enough flakiness without the extra saturated fat. We love the taste also, so it is a win-win situation for us.

I hope you give this super easy recipe a try, it is wonderful! And if you want to go the vegetarian route, maybe a little black olive tapenade or red bell pepper pesto could be nice instead of the prosciutto.

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The moment I stumbled on this amazing blog – Ghoulatheart.com – I knew I had to make something from it right away. The recipe for Muertos Rancheros called my name really loud, as I had the right pan for it and the timing could not be more perfect: the week before Halloween! I made a tomato-free version, so if you want a more authentic version, check her blog post.

MUERTOS RANCHEROS
(inspired by Ghoulatheart.com)

Mock tomato sauce:
1 jar of roasted red bell pepper (12 ounce)
8 ounces mushrooms
1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
salt to taste

2 tablespoons olive oil
1 shallot, finely minced
1 celery stalk, diced
1 pound ground turkey
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp chili powder
1/2 tsp cumin
1 can black beans
cilantro leaves to taste
chicken stock to adjust consistency

jumbo eggs, whites and yolks separated
olive oil spray

garnish (optional)
flour tortillas cut in ghost shapes
olive oil spray

Heat oven to 350F.

Cut flour tortilla in ghosts shapes of varied sizes. Spray olive oil on both sides and bake until golden. Reserve for garnish.

Make the bell pepper sauce by running all ingredients in a food processor until super smooth. Reserve.

Heat the olive oil on a large skillet, add the celery and shallots, season lightly with salt. Sautee until fragrant. Add the ground turkey, salt, chili, cumin, and cook until the turkey is almost cooked through. Add 1 cup of the red bell pepper sauce, cook gently in low heat for 10 minutes, with the lid on. Add the black beans, cilantro, and a little chicken stock to loosen the sauce and make it a good environment to place the eggs over. Cover the pan and keep it at a simmer.

Make the eggs. Spray the skull pan with olive oil, add the egg white of the JUMBO egg, season lightly with salt. Cook in the oven for 4 minutes. Remove the pan, add the egg yolks, one per cavity. Put back in the oven and cook for 3 to 4 minutes more. Remove the pan from the oven, go over the edges of the eggs with a plastic knife or spatula to make sure it is loose enough to slip off the pan. Place a parchment paper and a baking sheet on top of the pan (careful, it is HOT), invert it. Eggs should slip off easily. Carefully place them with a silicone spatula over the sauce, with the heat turned off. You might need to add more chicken stock depending on how dry the sauce looks. Serve immediately decorated with tortilla ghosts.

ENJOY!

to print the recipe, click here

Comments: If you ever need to adapt a recipe that calls for tomato sauce due to food sensitivities, I recommend you try this red bell pepper version. I saw it online in a discussion forum and was intrigued. We really like it a lot. It is of course a huge departure from the ranchero sauce, but I hope the Ranchero Police won’t come after me. Cooking the eggs in the pan can be tricky, I had a big mess on my first try, I did not use spray, I rubbed olive oil in the cavities and that was clearly not effective. Some readers of her blog recommended adding the yolk to the sauce and just cooking the whites in the pan, but I found it harder to invert the egg whites only as the volume is very shallow. I think what works best is add the eggs to the sauce with the heat OFF, and let the yolks just cook in the residual heat. You might want to practice with one egg in your oven and see how it goes. Nudge the egg gently with a plastic spatula before inverting on the parchment paper.

Such a fun meal for scary times! The tortilla ghosts I saw on FoodTV The Kitchen show, and thought it was a good way to add something else to this meal. Poor little ghost was a little scared, knowing his end – another end – was near!