the sourcerer: Making Manti.

Sunday, August 8, 2010

Making Manti.

I spent a few hours yesterday afternoon making Manti, or Turkish style Ravioli. Following the Moro recipe, I made and rolled out the dough, made the filling (finely ground lamb with mint, parsley, oregano, shallot, allspice...) and stuffed about forty little triangles of thin dough. Cooked them in hot chicken stock, served with garlicky yoghurt and caramelized butter. Worth all the trouble? Definitely, we ate them with much happiness and a big chopped salad.

4 comments:

Marie said...: Wow. Is the lamb cooked when it goes in the filling?; August 9, 2010 at 2:04 AM
the sourcerer said...: no, so actually easier to handle - like making small meatballs. I have both Moro books and they are a constant inspiration - the recipes are mostly simple and easy to tinker with, always delicious.; August 9, 2010 at 8:08 AM
tanjawilmot said...: food for the heart, truly. taking chickensoup for the soul to a more garlicky level - gotta love it. sounds like the tart's heavenliest food.; August 9, 2010 at 6:31 PM
Anonymous said...: Lily dear, How do you ground a lamb and avoid all the baa baa-ing?; August 16, 2010 at 5:31 PM

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You could tend a garden at night, only at night, pouring dark water onto leaves, and into the earth, like pouring midnight onto midnight. You could hold your soil-stained hands up to the moon. The stars would gleam on the bottom of the shovel. It would smell the same as a daytime garden - it would smell green, violet, red, white. But come back, in daylight. Come back, to see the colours without closing your eyes.
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You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in the windows and people ate outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food. When you had given up journalism and were writing nothing that anyone in America would buy, explaining at home that you were lunching out with someone, the best place to go was the Luxembourg gardens where you smelled and saw nothing to eat all the way from the Place de l'Observatoire to the rue de Vaugirard. There you could always go into the Luxembourg museum and all the paintings were sharpened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry. I learned to understand Cézanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when I was hungry. I used to wonder if he were hungry too when he painted; but I thought possibly it was only that he had forgotten to eat. It was one of those unsound but illuminating thoughts you have when you have been sleepless or hungry. Later I thought that Cézanne was probably hungry in a different way.
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) - from A Moveable Feast.