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Oven-baked Tortelloni

October 13, 2010

Oven-baked Tortelloni

A couple years ago, Mariana, a very close friend, invited us for lunch at her house. This was the first time I tried this tasty oven-baked tortelloni with mascarpone, Greek-style yoghurt, and Parmesan cheese. We don’t have it for lunch as often as the spaghetti with salmon and the chicken with soy sauce but it’s definitely in my top list. Here’s what you’ll need to serve 2 people:

500g of fresh tortelloni
125g of mascarpone cheese
250ml of Greek-style yoghurt
60g of grated Parmeggiano-Reggiano cheese
2 garlic cloves
1 spoon of olive oil

That’s all! Very simple, right? So, How do you do it? Here are the steps:

Boil water in a big sauce pan with the 2 garlic cloves and olive oil. This is the same water you’re going to cook the tortelloni with.
Once water boils, add the tortelloni, cook it for 2 minutes, and drain it. Business as usual. Leave the tortelloni in a medium glass roaster.
Crush the now cooked garlic cloves into a bowl. Add the mascarpone and the yoghurt to the bowl and mix them thoroughly until they become a homogeneous cream.
Spread the cheesy cream on top of the cooked tortelloni in the glass roaster.
Pour grated Parmeggiano-Reggiano on top of everything.
Put it in the oven (200°C) for about 15 minutes until the Parmesan looks toasted (see photo).

I use fresh tortelloni with garlic and herb filling. The cool thing about this fresh tortelloni is that it only takes a couple minutes to cook – as I mentioned above. I prefer to use fresh Parmeggiano-Reggiano and grate it myself instead of the usual grated cheese packs because I can choose a better cheese and make it more chunky.

Voilà! The mix of the stuffed pasta with the cheesy cream with a touch of garlic is delicious! Enjoy!

Kindle 3

October 02, 2010

My Kindle

I decided that I wanted an e-book reader several months ago but wasn’t fully convinced about any of the available options. Until now. I’ve just bought a Kindle 3 and I really like it! It fixes most of the issues I had with previous Kindle versions (price, size, screen, connectivity, etc) and it’s by far the best e-book reader around. It’s light, small, beautiful, and it has a very good e-ink screen. It’s exactly how Robert Love described it: “the small improvements add up to a significant improvement in usability”. Some more reasons I like Kindle 3 and e-book readers in general:

The screen. I don’t like to read books and long texts on computer screens. It’s just a tiring experience for my eyes. So, I like the obvious fact that e-ink screens look very similar to the usual ink on paper. Kindle 3 has an especially good contrast.

Ergonomics and focus. A couple things really annoy me about the usual printed books. The first one is ergonomics. With the usual books, you end up having to hold them with both hands to keep them open and in a good position for reading. The second is that you always see two pages at the same time. It’s a bit distracting. Kindle 3 is small and light enough to allow you to hold it however you feel more comfortable – including holding it with only one hand. And you only see one page at a time allowing a more focused reading experience.

Fonts and spacings. It’s very frustrating when you buy a book you’re eager to read but the actual reading experience turns out to be quite bad because the publisher chose a too small font and too tight line spacing. That’s especially frustrating if you usually read books while in a bus or tube. With Kindle – and with most e-book readers I guess – you can set the font size, word and line spacings that best fit your personal preferences. I read slightly faster on the Kindle because of that.

Online experience. I buy the great majority of my books (and MP3s) from UK’s Amazon. Hence, having a device that is tightly integrated with my favourite online book store makes the experience of buying books much nicer. It sucks that Kindle is Amazon-specific with an awful DRM but this doesn’t affect me much in practice. I hope Amazon ends up doing the right thing and offer DRM-free books in the future – just like they did with their MP3 store. Charles Stross wrote some interesting notes on why the commercial e-book market is broken.

I know: those are all old news for Kindle and e-book reader owners. But it was good to have such a good feeling about my first e-book reader. It does only one thing and it does it very well.

Franco Manca

September 12, 2010

Franco Manca

It’s been a long time since I got so positively surprised about a restaurant. Yesterday Carol and I had lunch at Franco Manca, a pizza place with branches in Brixton and Chiswick. This is now my favourite pizza place in London! I heard about it from Marco and ended up reading a few reviews in Yelp.

Their pizza is made from slow-rising sourdough baked in a especial type of wood-burning brick oven called Tufae. What does it mean in practice? The dough alone is very tasty and light! For instance, we had garlic bread as starter. The garlic bread is pretty much their baked sourdough with a simple topping: a bit of tomato sauce, olive oil and chunks of garlic. Because the dough is so good, they don’t need a massive topping to make it tasty. Same applies to the pizzas. Impressive.

The menu is very simple. They offer only 6 pizzas and around 5 starters. The owners seem to be very strict about the ingredients they use in the pizzas. The cheese, meat, and tomatoes all come from trusted organic suppliers. It’s an affordable menu overall – if you compare with, say, Pizza Express – with pizza prices ranging from £6 to £8.

In terms of drinks, they serve a delicious organic lemonade with honey! I strongly recommend it! I also had a bottle of an Italian naturally-sparkling water called Ferrarelle. Refreshing one. To make it all even better: their espresso is made with Monmouth coffee, my favourite coffee shop in London!

I found some very good pizza places in London but none of them were outstanding. Franco Manca is a simple and affordable restaurant serving the best pizza in London in my opinion.

Gadget Names

September 04, 2010

Motherboards by maxw (CC-BY-NC-ND)

There are many things in life that we just take for granted and rarely think about. The way gadget companies name their products is one of them. I know, not an interesting topic. But I have always wondered about that since I started using my first gadgets a long time ago: video games, personal computers, VCR, cell phones, etc.

Gadget names such as Nokia 5230, TK2000, Asus Eee PC 1015PE, Canon PowerShot A110 IS, Garmin GPSMAP 62St, HP Deskjet F4580 and others really seem like they are supposed to be readable by machines, not humans. They sound too complicated, too techie, too cryptic, and even scary for people who don’t really care about technology itself. Those names are just unnatural for most of us. I know, you might argue that there’s a reason for using those weird sequences of letters and numbers. It doesn’t matter. Those names just don’t make natural sense for most people.

Some companies are doing a better job on naming their products though. Apple, for example, uses human-readable names for all their products. They even keep same name for different generations of the same product e.g. all generations of MacBook is simply called MacBook. HTC and Samsung are getting it right too with their new Android phones – Captivate, Galaxy, Desire, Hero, etc. And there are many others doing it right these days but it’s still quite common to see things like Panasonic TX-P37X20B and Toshiba HDDR320E04EL_CS, unfortunately.

So, if you’re directly involved in the decision of gadget names for your companies, please, give your next product a meaningful and human-friendly name! Let’s make the technology world a bit less scary for everyone.