It snowed again last night.  Shoveling snow and picking ice cubes off of my poor olive tree is not my idea of a relaxing Sunday morning.  Yesterday, facebook sent me one of those ‘your memories from one year ago’ messages with this black and white photo.  It snowed a LOT last year, and this particular Saturday night, I was bloccato dalla neve -snowed in.  I decided this was a good time to do my recipe testing for Julia Busuttil Nishimura’s cookbook Ostro.  Ostro is also the name of Julia’s website.  The recipe was for Ricotta tortelloni with butter, sage and hazelnuts.  Tortelloni are super-size tortellini and I had not made them before.  Filling and shaping them was fun and easier than I thought.

I had to use a beer glass to cut the circles, so they came out quite big.  Once I was done making the tortelloni, I made the butter sage and hazelnut sauce-except I had to improvise.   It was dark outside and still snowing heavily.  The sage was growing in the backyard.  I had to dress like an Eskimo and go out with my flashlight to forage for sage under a foot of snow!  Brrrr.  I did not have any hazelnuts, and had even run out of butter making cookies.  Grocery shopping was not an option at this point, so I ended up making an olive oil, sage and toasted almond sauce instead. It was so delicious I did not even have a chance to take a decent photo of the finished dish!

I have made these ricotta tortelloni a few more times, even with ricotta fatta in casa.  Ostro is now out in print and is Gourmet Traveller Australia’s 2017 book of the year.  Auguri Julia!   I believe Ostro is available only in Australia for now.  In Canada, it is only available on kindle so far, so I have not seen it yet.  You can find the recipe here.More about my adventures in (and complaining about) the snow along with snowy photos can be found in Bloccato dalla neve.

Another recipe from Julia and a review of Ostro can be found on Emiko Davies’ blog here.

Ciao e buon appetito, Cristina