Prosciutto, Fig, and Goat Cheese Lollipop

We’re going to do a Prosciutto and Goat Cheese Lollipop. This is a great dish. It’s really a lot of fun. People always comment on this dish because it looks exactly like a lollipop. So, we want to get some prosciutto. There is a prosciutto that you can just buy in the market as well. Put a couple of pieces of prosciutto on our board. Okay, as you can see it’s nice and thinly sliced. The very important, any time you use prosciutto, you must have it nice and thinly sliced. Actually, it has a much better flavor that way when it’s thinly sliced. Here, we’re going to start off a little bit of goat cheese here. Okay, so this is a Montrachet goat cheese. You can use any other type of goat cheese that you wish. You can have it in the in the log, you can have it also in bulk which is already mixed up together, you can have that as well. We have some figs here that I have soaked in a little bit of balsamic vinegar, okay. About 15 to 20 minutes, you want to keep them in there, in that way it’s going to rehydrate the dried figs, okay. That’s a very important part in this process, okay. Then we’re going to put our figs inside. And then I have some pine nuts that I’ve previously toasted in the oven, this take about five minutes in the oven. Put them right directly on a sheet pan and they toast up very nicely. Now, we put some of those in there, okay. Mix that around just a little bit, okay. Put a little bit of salt. We’ll add a bit of pepper. I always remember to use fresh ground pepper, it has much better flavor than pepper that you buy that’s already ground. A little bit of olive oil in there, okay. Now, we’re going to make our mixture. So, we just continue mixing it until everything is incorporated. Now, the reason I’ve put pine nuts in this dish is because pine nuts have a lot of nice texture. It will give you that crunch when you bite down because it’s very, very soft. You have the prosciutto, you have the goat cheese which is soft and you have the figs which looks semi-soft. So, you want to take a little bit of that. So, we take a little bit of this. We’re going to put it right inside of our prosciutto like that, about a quarter size, okay. Then we’re going to snip off a little bit of the ends here, okay so puff a little bit of that, okay. And then it’s just a matter of folding it on top like this, okay and you’re going to make your little pouch. Okay, so we fold those up real nice like that, okay. Now, that we have a nice little pouch then we’re going to take a chive. Okay now this chive, I have previously blanched in a little bit of water, okay. So, it’s a little bit of boiling water, you put the chive in for about three to four seconds and then you remove it, okay. So, we’re going to wrap the top of that. So, if you guys can see that out there, we’re going to tie it basically just like you tie a shoe string. Then we tie it like that, okay. And then we’re going to tie a knot in the top, okay. So, you’re knotting the top there. And we’re going to go ahead and we’re going to trim off some of the excess so we put it to the side, fill off just a little of the excess, okay, just like that, alright. And then we’re going do our pasta. Okay, this is the lollipop stick. Now, what I’ve done with this pasta, this is just ordinary spaghetti which you’d buy in the store and this has been deep fried, okay. So, you take a little bit of oil in the pan, take your spaghetti and you immerse it inside the oil and as soon as it becomes golden brown, then it’s ready to go, okay. So, what you’re going to do is you’re going to take your stick and you stick it right inside like that, okay. So, we form it like a lollipop shape. And there you go, okay. We have a prosciutto and goat cheese lollipop so they’re very, very cute, you can pick them up like that, you can eat them like that. The key with this dish is you really must make sure the goat cheese solidifies a little bit in the refrigerator. So, after you make them, you need to put them in the refrigerator a little bit, that way the goat cheese will harden up around your stick of spaghetti.