Cloudberry Quark

Cyberkocken - vinnaren!

2007-09-13T14:16:00.000+02:00

Ja, nu har äntligen alla domare gjort sina omdömen (i ärlighetens namn så är det mest jag själv som sölat, tusen tack till Tiina och Micki för hjälpen) och kommit fram till en värdig vinnare, nämligen

"det alldeles garanterat UNIKA bidraget, som låter som nåt man läser på en restaurangmeny och inte riktigt vet om man skall våga pröva på, men som visar sig vara riktigt riktigt roligt i praktiken (kan en av domarna som själv hunnit pröva betyga)"

det vill säga Brazilian Lindas nötbottnar med kantarell- och rocculamousse toppad med söta bönor. Grattis!

Folkets val var däremot med god marginal Lilla Myzan med sin fläskfilé med svamppasta och ruccola pesto. Grattis!

Nästa gång är det alltså Linda som arrangerar, hoppas ni kan vara med då också!

Cyberkocken - sammanställningen

2007-09-04T07:30:00.000+02:00

Jag har ådragit mig en riktigt irriterande höstförkylning så nu blir det inte så mycket pladder här, bara en snabb sammanställning på månadens cybrkock-bidrag. Åtta stycken blev det, det tycks vara en ganska typisk fångst i det här sammanhanget. Ingedienserna var alltså rucola, nötter, gröna bönor och svamp, en ganska så enkel kombination i mitt tycke.

I Lilla Myzan's kök bjöds det på
fläskfilé med svamppasta och ruccola pesto. Det här var Lenas första Cyberkock-etapp, hoppas det blir många fler!

I Annes Mat vankades det en höstligt värmande risotto med kantareller och hasselnötter.

Hos Ilva i Aglio e olio blev det både förrätt och huvudrätt: ugnsbakade champinjonhattar och så nätinnanlår med gröna bönor, karl johansvamp, ruccola, hasselnötter och balsamvinäger.

Granivoren var också med för första gången, med champinjoner med överraskning.

Middagstipset fick med alla ingredienser av en slump! Hasselnötsfisk med kantarell- och ruccolabulgur.

Lata Mamman bjöd på portabello med ljummen sallad på råris, gröna bönor och rucola samt sås av soltorkad tomat och valnöt.

Broccoli gjorde väldigt lockande ruccolagratinerad lax med ljummen potatissallad.

Brazilian Linda hade blogger-problem men hann ändå med med sina nötbottnar med kantarell och rocculamousse toppad med söta bönor.

Dessvärre hann jag själv inte få till stånd ett bidrag, vilket kanske var tur i oturen eftersom hälften av min tilltänkta jury är bortrest den här veckan. Så nu består juryn av mig och två svenskatalande Quarkläsare, Tiina och Micki. Vi återkommer med resultat på veckoslutet, och tills dess kan ni också rösta på era egna favoriter i folkets val.

Ruokahaaste menikin arvonnaksi!

2007-08-31T17:03:00.000+02:00

Kuten alempaa voitte todeta, puoliltaöin ratkennut haasteäänestys oli aikalailla kahden kauppaa. Tiukan kärkikaksikon muodostivat kaksi kalaherraa, ja äänestyksen napsahtaessa kiinni haasteveteraani Polkkapossun friteeratut pekoniin käärityt ahvenfileet punajuuri-rommi-smetanakastikeella sekä Suu Auki-blogiuutuuden marinoitu nieriä hunaja-jalapeno-tartarilla (kastike se selvästikin kalan tekee...) olivat aivan tasan tasoissa. Huh-huh!

Koska maalikamerakuvasta ei tässä lajissa ole hyötyä (ai miten niin MM-kisaviikko...) ja itseäni moisten mestariteosten välillä valitseminen suoraan sanottuna hirvitti, päätin antaa arvan ratkaista, ja onni suosi tällä kertaa nieriää. Kuvakin on aikasta nami, eikö?

Arctic char
Originally uploaded by huono_ekonomi.

Onneksi olkoon sekä Mikolle, joka saakin vetäytyä miettimään syyskuun haasteteemaa, että Polkkikselle, jolle uskaltaa kyllä menneiden perusteella luvata parempaa tuuria jatkossa.

Lakkarahka kiittää kaikkia osallistuneita hienoista resepteistä ja vetäytyy vaihteeksi miettimään ruotsinkielistä ruokahaastetta (*vink vink* siihenkin saa mielellään osallistua jos ruotsi edes auttavasti sujuu).

Cyberkocken

2007-08-29T10:38:00.000+02:00

Äntligen är det dags för höstens (ja, här har det åtminstone varit riktigt höstligt redan) första cyberkock-tävling. Det hela går alltså helt enkelt ut på att tillreda en måltid med fyra givna ingredienser (och så många andra du vill, naturligtvis).

Från Ilvas lista på ingredienser lottade jag ut tre stycken, och sen var det bara att hitta på den fjärde, vilket gick ganska lätt för jag har haft svampar på hjärnan i några veckor nu redan och dessutom, se ovan: höst! Cyberkockens ingredienser är den här gången:

rucola
nötter
gröna bönor
svamp

Bonus blir det om alla ingredienserna finns i samma rätt men såklart går det också med en meny. Om det är nåt du inte gillar, inte tål, eller bara inte får tag på går det bra att byta ut det mot något annat.

Nu har ni alltså till måndag eftermiddag (kanske fem-tiden svensk tid i praktiken) på er att skicka in era bidrag, antingen genom att länka mig (i en kommentar här eller per mail till deinin@gmail.com) till bloggposten i fråga, eller (om det är nån som inte bloggar men ändå vill vara med) genom att maila text och (helst också!) bild till mig.

To my English-speaking readers: I swear I'll have some actual cooking-made-by-me content here soon. Well, one of these days. The transition from summery foods to stews and soups is not going very smoothly here, as anyone eating my cooking lately will testify.

Ja suomenkielisille vielä: huomisiltaan (tai siis puoleenyöhön) asti voitte vielä antaa äänenne kalahaasteessa.

Äänestä suosikkiasi!

2007-08-26T08:33:00.000+02:00

Nyt on sitten kuukauden kalaruoat kokkailtu - ja ainakin itselleni löytyi monenmonta kokeilulistalle menevää keitosta. Pidemmittä puheitta arvon ehdokkaisiin:

1. MonkeyFoodin Ylimuuli paneroi kalaa dukkah-seoksessa: puna-affen pähkinöinä.

2. Suu Auki oli meikäläiselle ihan uusi tuttavuus. Tarjolla olisi marinoitua nieriää ja hunaja-jalapeno-tartaria.

3. Otetaan ensin puoli kiloa voita... tyhjentää pakastinta ja taikoo esille lohi-pinaattilasagnea.

4. Keittokomerossa taas hyödynnetään torin sienisatoa ja kokkaillaan rakuunalohta kantarellihöysteen kera.

5. Polkkapossun haastevastauksen nimi puhunee puolestaan: friteerattuja pekoniin käärittyjä ahvenfileitä ja punajuuri-rommi-smetanakastiketta.

6. Kulinaarimurujakin tarjoilee ahventa, vähän italialaisittain: parmesaaniahvenet.

7. Pastanjauhannassa jauhettiin tällä kertaa lohta: tuloksena lohipihvit.

Äänestysaikaa teillä on torstaihin asti, voittaja julkaistaan perjantaina!

Challenge Time Ahoy!

2007-08-22T20:01:00.000+02:00

I'm in the (very enviable!) position of playing host to both a Finnish and a Swedish food blog challenge this month. Which is kind of lucky, because I'm having serious issues with getting food from the "shots on camera, recipe in head" stage to "edited pictures and post" one. Without further ado:

The Finnish one: elokuun ruokahaaste alkaa olla loppusuoralla; lähettääkääpi kalapostauksenne minulle lauantai-iltaan mennessä!

Samaten vinkkaan että koulu (tai koti-) ruotsin taitoja verestävät cyberkokkiosallistujat (lisätietoa alempana) saavat meikäläiseltä kymmenen pistettä ja papukaijamerkin. Ja keksejä.

And the Swedish one: det är dags att välja ingredienser till Cyberkocken igen! Hos Ilva i Aglio e olio kan ni ge förslag på nya ingredienser att lägga till de här: muscovadosocker, rucola, soltorkade tomater, fetaost, gurka, nötter, gelatin, färsk spenat, hallon, kyckling, västerbottensost, quinoa, rädisor, och rödlök. Nästa onsdag, dvs 29.8, lägger jag sedan ut tre ingredienser lottade ur de förslagna, plus en extra (som jag nog redan har lite tankar kring). Sen har ni till måndagen (3.9) på er att laga en måltid med de givna ingredienserna, posta om den och länka mig till posten. (Blogglösa deltagare skickar sitt inlägg antingen till Ilva eller till mig, så lägger vi upp det på våra bloggar.)

Bonuspoäng om alla indredienserna kommer i en och samma rätt, extrasuperbonuspoäng för alla finländare som vågar sig på att blogga på svenska. Men först ska det alltså ges ingrediensförslag, och det gör du här.

And so it's not all Foreign Tongues, All The Time: dear Quark readers - tell me about your experiences with mushrooms! Do you only eat the ones to be had in shops? Do chanterelle and porcini sneak in now and then? Or funnel chanterelle and horn of plenty? How about sheep polypore? (That's lampaankääpä / fårticka over here.) Enquiring minds want to know!

Glazed Turnips for One

2007-08-14T22:56:00.000+02:00

.

I feel a bit like the turnips pictured above, sticky and slighly singed. It's about eleven hundred degrees out there. And a bit more in here. Last night I tried to make ice cream and it wouldn't freeze. Someone tell me about the housing situation on the North Pole, please?

If it weren't so infernally hot, I'd tell you about these glazed turnips, or turnip to be precise as I was feeding only myself on Saturday. But what can you do? Have some shots from Kauppatori (Salutorget) instead.

One end of the market is a tourist trap full of horrible T-shirts and reindeer hats (which reminds me to cook Rudolf soon, I think we have some in the freezer), and there's a food court where fried vendace (yum) battles paella (um), but the part closest to Esplanadi is a genuinely fabulous market with wonderful if fairly pricey produce.

None of this has anything to do with glazed turnips, except that I actually bought them there. Also chanterelles, but more on those later.

Glazed Turnips

1 medium turnip, peeled and julienned
1 tsp butter
pinch each of salt and pepper
1 tbsp brown sugar
1 tbsp chopped parsley

Melt the butter in a pan and add the turnip and just a splosh (like a tablespoon, tops) of water. Stir fry for just a minute or so until the turnip softens a bit. Add the sugar and a bit each of salt and pepper and stir until the sugar melts and goes all sticky. Mix in the chopped parsley before serving.

This boatful of potatoes (at least I'm assuming it started out full of potatoes, but I'm not a very early riser) didn't have anything to do with turnips either:

BLT Baguette

2007-08-13T23:49:00.000+02:00

I love sandwiches. I love them with just a bit of cheese, and maybe a few thin slices of cucumber, and now I'm just starving, I wonder if there's any roe paste left in the fridge... erm. Yes. Sandwiches. Are good made with toast, and usually even better made with rolls or baguettes or rye bread or... you know, any bread is good, really. (I wouldn't last a day on a low-carb diet. Possibly this was already glaringly evident.)

I haven't necessarily had enough BLTs to judge, but it is my firm belief that this is the best BLT known to man. Of course, it's not so much bacon-lettuce-tomato as parmesan-lemon-avocado-red-onion-bacon-lettuce-tomato. But that makes for an unwieldy acronym, so.

As a bonus, it travels really well, wrapped in clingfilm, and is popular not just with the two-legged-crowd.

BLT
adapted from the Swedish TV show Mat med Tina, serves 2

2 20-cm (or so) pieces of baguette
1 avocado (make sure it's nice and soft)
half a red onion
juice from half a lemon
4 slices of bacon
some sliced tomato
lettuce

1 tbsp mayo
2 tbsp crème fraîche
2 tbsp finely grated parmesan
½ clove garlic, finely minced

Slice the red onion finely, rinse in cold water and drain well. Chop the avocado and sprinkle with about half of the lemon juice. Sprinkle the rest over the bacon and fry in a large pan (this will be important later) until nice and crisp. Drain on paper towels, leaving the bacon fat in the pan.

Mix together mayo, crème fraîche, parmesan and garlic and season with salt and pepper to taste. Mix together avocado and red onion and season those as well.

Split the baguette pieces and toast them in the bacon fat until nice and crispy. Spread the baguettes with the mayo mix and assemble the sandwiches. I'm sure you have your quirks about which ingredient goes next to which. It's OK, I won't judge.

Rhubarb-Strawberry Lattice Pie

2007-08-13T19:24:00.000+02:00

...but didn't you say you didn't like rhubarb? you may ask. Yes, I did, and yes, I'm quite prepared to eat my words as well, for I have come around to this most enthusiastic of our homegrown goods (the gooseberries are just barely ripe, and the birds got most of the redcurrants). It's still going strong in the garden, although of course the stalks aren't quite as tender as in, say, June. Never mind, though, as this pie spends a whopping hour and a half in the oven - just the thing to go for in the middle of a heat wave! Whoops.

I can't believe I haven't blogged about it here, but the summer's foremost dessert has been a fabulous crumble with rhubarb and strawberries (I've adapted it somewhat - throw some oatmeal and nuts in the crumble, reduce the sugar in the fruit mix and use more rhubarb than strawberries) that for some reason just refuses to photograph. I hope I'll still have time for a last attempt, but we're fast running out of strawberry season, too, so it may have to wait until next year. Wonderful on its own, divine with vanilla custard or ice cream.

But back to this rhubarb dessert. With over a hundred reviews at epicurious (most of them debating the cooking time - I did reduce mine a bit because the lattice was starting to turn unattractive, but really I think the long stay in the oven gives this a rounded, jammy taste that I for one adored) I was fairly certain there couldn't be much wrong with it. I made my own crust because shortening is not something I'm familiar with, have access to, or am in favor of, and I don't know if things'd be different with the original, but I have to say I prefer pre-baked crusts. But that's really the only thing I'd change, and I'm usually known for my nitpicky habits!

Rhubarb-Strawberry Lattice Pie
adapted from Bon Appétit, April 1997

500 ml (2 cups) cups all-purpose flour
2 tbsp sugar
¾ tsp salt
175 g (6 oz) butter
100 ml (7 tbsp) ice water

750 ml (3 cups) chopped rhubarb
1 l (4 cups) strawberries
100 ml (7 tbsp) soft brown sugar
100 ml (7 tbsp) sugar
50 ml (about 3 tbsp) potato flour
½ tsp ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon salt

lightly whipped egg for glaze

Cut the butter into small cubes and pop in the freezer for 15 minutes. Mix together the dry ingredients for the crust, cut in the butter (I do this by pulsing it in a food processor) and add enough of the water (start with about 75 ml/5 tbsp) to make the dough gather in small clumps. Tip out on a piece of clingfilm and press together to form a cohesive dough. Divide the dough in two, one piece slightly smaller than the other, form into flat disks and wrap in clingfilm. Refrigerate overnight (or at least an hour).

Hull and halve/quarter the strawberries and mix together fruits, sugars, cinnamon, salt & potato flour in a large bowl.

Roll out the larger piece of dough on a floured surface and transfer to a buttered, floured pie form. Pour in the filling. Roll out the smaller piece of dough and cut into strip. Arrange the strips in a slanted lattice pattern and press the ends against the bottom crust to seal. Brush the lattice top with eggwash and sprinkle with sugar. Bake at 200°C (400°F) for 20 minutes, reduce the heat to 175°C (350°F) and bake for another hour. Let cool completely before serving.

Potato Salad with Peas

2007-08-11T21:47:00.000+02:00

...and the previously touted tartar sauce. After a fairly cool and rainy July (I swear I wasn't complaining about it! At least, if I was, I wasn't serious.) August has delivered some seriously sweaty days lately. Cue a diet of sandwiches, ice cream and, you guessed it, cold salads.

At this point, new potatoes have been around for almost two months. I'm not really a new potato person (when my mother gets back to a computer after the weekend, she's going to disown me) but I think they work very well here, and not just because the cooking time is short. Along with some parboiled mangetouts/snowpeas, about half a cup of chopped pickled cucumber, and the rest of the tartar sauce, this turned into a super-fast supper. Almost superb, even.

Potato Salad with Peas
serves 3

1 pickled cucumber, chopped
150 g snowpeas
12 baby new potatoes
100-150 ml tartar sauce

Boil potatoes in salted water until almost tender. Drain and let cool. Boil the snowpeas until almost tender, drain and run under a cold tap (or put in an ice bath) to stop the cooking process.

Once the potatoes have cooled, halve or quarter them and toss with the chopped cucumber, snowpeas and tartar sauce.

Tartar Sauce

2007-08-11T21:41:00.000+02:00

This little bowl of sauce doesn't exactly look like a momentuous occasion or anything, but it actually contains my first-ever batch of homemade mayo. (Usually when I call for mayo in the recipes posted here, what I actually use isn't even the best commercial stuff, but low-fat artificial gunk. Where do I hand in my food cred, again?) To summarize: mayonnaise - not impossible. Also quite high-fat. Funny how making stuff from scratch drives these things home (puff pastry, I'm looking at you).

Although invented to go with steak tartare (duh), tartar sauce is generally served with fish over here (fish fingers in particular - this was a regular and popular lunch at school) and we had some of this with simple breaded fish fillets that were devoured before I had any chance to take pictures and then threw the rest in a potato salad - this makes a lot of sauce but the batch is easily halved.

Tartar Sauce
adapted from the Swedish food blog Kärlek, mat och folköl, served three people twice, but your mileage may vary

2 egg yolks
2 tbsp dijon mustard
2 tsp cider vinegar
a few drops tabasco sauce
250 ml oil
150 ml finely chopped pickled cucumber
100 ml capers, rinsed, drained and chopped
a big bunch each of parsley and chives, chopped
salt and pepper to taste

Whisk together egg yolks, mustard, vinegar and tabasco until well combined. Add the oil a little at a time in a slooooow trickle, still whisking (I did this in a food processor). Mix in the cucumber, capers and herbs. Season with salt (if needed) and pepper to taste.

Radish & Mint Sandwiches

2007-08-08T22:21:00.000+02:00

Oh man. Remember when I used to post about every other day? I haven't been out of town or anything. I haven't even stopped cooking, although you may want to brace yourself for a slew of posts on the joys of fabulous sandwiches - for example, I've had the world's best BLTs twice this week, but more on that later - once I get around to it. The pictures just keep piling up on the hard drive, and doing something about them seems disproportionally momentous (it was probably the five thousand cat photos from my vacation that did me in) and so nothing really gets done.

Except, as I said, sandwiches. I'll have something on egg sandwiches and BLTs and some other things later (see, I'm writing that here in the vain hope that something will happen) but for now let's talk about the ones I actually took, edited and uploaded pictures of, namely these radish and mint ones. The original recipe was for tea sandwiches which is all very good if you want something dainty and thin and deceptively light-looking, and it's not that I didn't, but accomplishing thin-enough slices of bread just felt beyond me, and besides I happen to like this dark, partly whole-grain, pre-sliced bread, both for its taste and because it looks pretty next to the vibrantly colored radishes.

You know what would be the greatest thing since sliced bread, though? Thinly sliced bread. Again, if you live somewhere with easy access to said commodity, please don't tell me about it unless said place is Helsinki, Finland. Sometimes people talking about their groceries makes me want to cry. If you happened to have a recipe for a basic sandwich loaf (preferably not-completely-white) that is easily sliceable and doesn't crumble, that is a different story altogether. I have great faith in my kitchen cooling down to temperatures at which I could justify turning on the oven again. Maybe in November.

Anyway. Radishes. Mint. Bit of mayo mixed with lemon peel (and juice) and salt and pepper. Sliced bread. Enjoy.

Goo Cake

2007-08-01T22:03:00.000+02:00

kladdkaka

Look, I'm just translating the name literally here! Kladdkaka is, as I see it, the Swedish version of a brownie, but generally it's baked in a thinner layer, and also left deliciously sticky. Not a fancy dessert by any means, but very easy and popular. The only tricky part is getting it out of the oven at the right time - too long and it's just your average boring cake, too short and, well, it's still a batter. (That said, the batter is, um, extremely edible. Or so I hear.) You want the edges of the cake to be quite firm, but a large area in the middle should still be well wobbly, as it'll firm up as it cools.

This time I went with the zest of an orange for extra flavor, but like with brownies, there's really no end to how you can spice it up - nuts, liquor, flavorings like peppermint or coffee, you name it. (Another favorite of mine is a few tablespoons of cognac and about a cup of toasted nuts.)

Goo Cake

300 ml (1¼ cup) sugar
150 ml (5 fl oz) all-purpose flour
2 tsp vanilla sugar
½ tsp salt
75 ml (5 tbsp) cocoa powder
finely grated zest of one organic orange
150 g (generous 5 oz) butter or baking margarine, melted
2 eggs

Mix together the dry ingredients and orange rind. Stir in the butter and then the eggs one at a time, just until it's evenly mixed. Pour into a buttered, floured pan and bake at 175°C (350°F)for about 20-25 minutes. Let cool and serve with whipped cream or ice cream and maybe some fruit or berries (raspberries are especially good).

Cauliflower & Spring Onion Dal

2007-08-01T20:01:00.000+02:00

I eat a lot of lentils, usually in vaguely Indian stews, and so far these have been sadly underrepresented on this blog. This was pretty much what I lived on during my vacation, at least on the chillier days, but I actually went almost three weeks without taking a single food picture, so what you see is a reconstruction. (And wow, gas stoves are SO MUCH QUICKER than my regular electric one.)

I don't have a particular source for this recipe, but I think it's safe to say that everything I know about Indian cooking I learned from food blogs.

Cauliflower & Spring Onion Dal
serves 1 greedy person as is, probably two with rice

¼ tsp ground cumin
¼ tsp ground coriander
½ dried red chile
2 pods cardamom
3 whole cloves
about ½ cup moong dal (split, skinned mung beans)
about a cup of cauliflower florets
one fairly mature spring onion, chopped
oil for frying
about a cup of water
1 clove garlic, minced
2 tbsp dried coconut, toasted
1 tbsp ghee
1 tsp black mustard seeds
salt & pepper to taste

Rinse the dal well. Heat the oil in a medium-sized pan until sizzling, add the first five ingredients and stir for about 30 seconds. Add cauliflower and the white bits of the onion and fry until the cauliflower is nicely browned. Stir in the dal and add some water, reduce the heat to a minimum and cover. Let simmer until the dal is very soft and starting to go mushy. Stir in the green bits of the spring onion, cover again and take off the heat.

In a small frying pan, heat the ghee and add the mustard seeds. Let sizzle until the mustard seeds start to pop, pour over the dal and stir to mix.

Note: if you're serving this with rice, it's probably a good idea to make it a bit less dry. So increase the water a bit!

Vietnamese Grilled Chicken Sandwich

2007-07-31T20:59:00.000+02:00

banh mi ga

In my quest to master the art of Grilling Edible Food, I meant to explore a number of different marinades and glazes for chicken - we tend to eat a lot of chicken breast which really needs a bit of a kick to be worthwhile. Unfortunately, the first thing I stumbled upon was this recipe for five-spice chicken in vietnamese sandwiches, and we've pretty much been eating just this nonstop since. The marinade works wonderfully on chicken and almost as well on pork ribs, and it's pretty much perfection regardless of how you prepare it - grill, oven, pan.

Despite all the times we've had these sandwiches lately, they've been almost impossible to photograph. Not because they're ugly, it's just that the photos don't... happen. (If you come here for the pretty pictures, please be advised that the one above was taken around 9 PM while I was walking the cat. Also: yes, after three weeks of constant sunbathing, I'm still this pale.)

The meat is all well and good, then, but banh mi are really so much more. Thinly sliced meat chucked into a mayo-slathered baguette* along with cucumber, just lightly pickled julienned carrot and daikon, thinly sliced red onion and jalapeno peppers may not sound like the best summer meal ever, but believe me, it IS. In general I'm not much of a fan of pickled things, but together with the spicy-salty chicken... it's just divine. Everyone I've served them to has loved them.

I know julienning this much carrots and daikon radish may seem like a lot of work - I happen to find it soothing - but making a big batch is definitely worth it as they'll keep for several days in the fridge. (I just had some on a slice of sweet-ish rye bread. Talk about fusion.)

*you're meant to use light bread and I must say I prefer it, but sometimes you've just got to make at least a game attempt at health-consciousness, hence the more rustic baguette in the pictures.

Vietnamese Grilled Chicken Sandwich
adapted from Bon Appétit, Dec 2005, serves 4

3 skinless, bonless chicken breasts
2 tbsp soy sauce
3 garlic cloves, minced
2 shallots, chopped
1 tbsp fish sauce
1 tbsp oyster sauce
1 tbsp sugar
1 tsp five-spice powder
1 star anise, ground

100 ml sugar
100 ml white wine vinegar
pinch of salt
½ l julienned carrots
½ l julienned daikon radish

4 20-cm (or so) pieces of baguette

mayonnaise
thinly sliced red onion (soak in cold water for milder taste)
thinly sliced cucumber
1 jalapeño chile, thinly sliced
(fresh cilantro)
worchestershire sauce

Mix together the ingredients for the marinade in a bowl. Turn the chickens in it to coat and let marinate in the fridge for a few hours.

Stir the ingredients for the "pickle" marinade until the sugar's dissolved. Mix in the julienned vegetables and let stand in the fridge for at least a few hours, or overnight. Drain well before serving.

Grill the chicken on medium/high heat until cooked through. Let cool just a bit and slice thinly.

Cut the baguette slices open and grill the cut sides until slightly crispy. Spread mayo on the bottom half of the baguette, top with chicken, cucumber strips, carrot-radish pickle, red onion and (if using) cilantro. Sprinkle with jalapeño and worchestershire sauce, top with the top half of the baguette and eat.

(As for the original epicurious recipe: if you live in an area with ready access to "skinless boneless chicken thighs" please don't tell me about it, because I'm going to CRY.)

Tuuletuksia ja elokuun ruokahaaste

2007-07-31T15:55:00.000+02:00

[I won the Finnish food blog challenge for June-July (whee!) so there'll be some food challenge-related blather here every now and then, since I'm the host for August. Scroll on past if Finnish is not your thing!]

Grillatut nektariinit näköjään purivat muihinkin sen verran hyvin että veteraanihoustaaja Polkkapossun isännöimän grillaushaasteen voitto tumpsahti tällä kertaa rahkalaan! Kiitoksia kovasti kunniasta, meikäläinen virnuilee täällä kuin hangon keksi konsanaan.

Elokuun ruokahaasteen aihe olikin sitten vaikeampi juttu, jota miettiessä meni tovi jos toinenkin (itse asiassa jouduin turvautumaan entten-tentteniin kahden vaihtoehdon välillä). Pari viimeistä etappia on kisattu valmistus- ja jalostusmenetelmän pohjalta, nyt palataan kesäisen iloittelun jälkeen tiukkaan raaka-ainekuriin. Elokuun raaka-aine on monipuolinen, nopeavalmisteinen (ja -liikkeinen), terveellinen ja ennen kaikkea MAUKAS vedenelävä eli kala.

Inspiraatiota voi hakea vaikkapa Pro Kala ry:n kotisivuilta, ja myös Maku-lehden sivuilta löytyy ihan kiitettävästi kalankäsittelyneuvoja.

Osallistuminen

Haasteeseen voivat osallistua kaikki blogia pitävät henkilöt. Osallistua voi vain yhdellä ruoalla per blogi. Jos haasteruoan resepti ei ole postaajan oma viritelmä, on postauksessa kohteliasta ilmoittaa ohjeen alkuperä.

Haasteruoka tulee postata 1.-25.8.2007 välisenä aikana.

Haasteeseen osallistutaan ilmoittamalla haastepostauksen URL joko tämän postauksen kommenttiosioon tai sähköpostitse osoitteeseen deinin [at] gmail.com. Ilmoittautuminen päättyy lauantaina 25.8.2007, jolloin haastepostausten osoitteiden on oltava tiedossani.

Äänestys

Haasteeseen määräaikaan mennessä ilmoitetut postaukset julkistetaan sunnuntaina 26.8.2007, jolloin alkaa myös äänestys. Äänestystapa ilmoitetaan haastepostausten julkistamisen yhteydessä.

Äänestysaika päättyy torstaina 30.8.2007. Elokuun ruokahaasteen järjestäjänä jäävään itseni ulos sekä kilpailusta että varsinaisesta äänestyksestä. Jos äänestysajan päättyessä useammalla postauksella on yhtä korkea äänimäärä, valitsen minä voittajan näiden postausten joukosta.

Voittaja julkistetaan perjantaina 31.8.2007.

Syyskuun ruokahaaste

Elokuun 2007 ruokahaasteen voittaja järjestää syyskuun 2007 ruokahaasteen. Aiheen valinta, aikataulu, äänestystapa ja säännöt ovat hänen päätettävissään.

Paahdejälkkäri (Grilled Nectarines with Balsamic Syrup and Mascarpone)

2007-07-25T17:50:00.000+02:00

This is my entry for the Finnish food blog challenge for June-July, the theme of which was grilled food. There's a writeup and recipe in English after the Finnish versions, as usual.

Hupsista! Ihan meinasi unhottua koko ruokahaaste kesähuumassa vaikka jatkoaikaa saatiin peräti kuukauden verran. Teemana siis Polkkiksen valitsema grilliruoka, mikä kyllä allekirjoittaneelle oli iiiihan vieras toimialue, rahkalassa kun noudatetaan perinteisiä sukupuolirooleja keittiöhommissa ja jätetään grillaaminen miehille. (Tai äidille. Tai kelletahansa vaan tulta pelkäämättömälle.) Nyt on sitten koko kesä grillailtu, ja meikäläiseltä sujuu jo ainakin vihannesten ja kalan grillaaminen Ihan Hyvin. Kanallekin on löytynyt suosikkigrillimarinadi jonka itse asiassa piti päästä haastevastaukseksi kun sitä on jo monenmonta kertaa kokeiltu ja aina hyväksi todettu, mutta kuinka ollakaan aika loppui kesken ja piti keksiä jotain kivaa pikaruokaa.

Tai siis pikajälkiruokaa. Ettei vaan makeiden haastevastausten suora katkea. Noin yleisesti ottaen en ole mikään hedelmäfani - c-vitamiinit uppoavat paremmin marjojen ja vihannesten muodossa - mutta kuinka ollakaan grillissä nektariineistakin kehkeytyi ihan muhkea jälkkäri, pieni pala auringonpaahdetta sateista iltaa ilostuttamaan. Tästä voitaneen kiittää varsinkin balsamicosiirappia, jota voisi melkein syöda ihan sellaisenaan jäden tai marjojen kera...

Paahdejälkkäri näyttää vaikeatekoisemmalta kuin on, lähinnä ehkä siksi että se koostuu neljästä osasta: sokerissa paahdetuista pistaaseista (voi korvata tavallisilla pähkinöillä), sitruunamehulla notkistetusta mascarponejuustosta (voi korvata esimerkiksi vaniljajädellä), balsamicosiirapista (koko reseptin juju, ja suoraan sanottuna ihan ilmiömäisen hyvää) ja sitten itse nektariineista (voi korvata vaikka persikoilla). Kaikki osaset kuitenkin valmistuvat alta aikayksikön, ja kaiken paitsi grillaamisen voi sitäpaitsi valmistella hyvissä ajoin.

In English: I seem to be making a habit of running very very late with my food challenge posts. This time I have an excuse though: after spending the first half of the summer learning how to grill (when it comes to cooking we subsrcibe to traditional gender roles in this household, and so as a girly-girl I usually stay well clear of the grill), I completely forgot about the whole thing until Polkkapossu posted a reminder. Yesterday. For today. Eeek!

This may seem like a complicated recipe, and it does consist of several different parts: a pistachio brittle type thing (I'm sure plain nuts would also be lovely); mascarpone softened with a bit of lemon juice (I wouldn't say no to vanilla ice cream); a syrup made with balsamic vinegar (this is, quite frankly, genius, so shouldn't be fiddled with) and grilled nectarines (peaches would do as well, I think). So, sort of involved, yes, but all of these are fairly quick and very easy, and you can make everything except the grilled nectarines well ahead.

The balsamic syrup is really amazingly good, both sweet and tart and somehow rounded - I actually think it could stand completely on its own as a sauce for ice cream or berries. As it is, it made a fabulous glaze for the grilled fruit, and I'm not even someone who likes fruit very much (give me berries any day).

Grillatut nektariinit mascarponella ja balsamicosiirapilla
neljälle, inspis haettu täältä

pistaasit:
noin desi kuorittuja pistaasipähköitä, karkeasti rouhittuna
½ rkl voita
2 rkl fariinisokeria

Sulata voi ja sokeria kasarissa, sekoita joukkoon pähkinät ja pidä liedellä kunnes sokeri kuplii ja tihenee. Levitä pähkinäseos lautaselle ja siirrä jääkaappiin jäähtymään.

balsamicosiirappi:
25 g voita
2 rkl balsamicoviiniettikkaa
¾ dl fariinisokeria

Sulata voi ja sokeri kasarissa, lisää balsamico ja kiehauta. Anna kiehua miedolla lämmöllä kunnes seos tihenee, 5-10 min.

mascarpone:
200 g mascarponejuustoa
4 rkl sitruunamehua
(1 rkl tomusokeria)

Notkista mascarpone sitruunamehulla. Sokerisyöpöt (esmes minä) lisäävät hiukkasen tomusokeria makeuttamaan.

nektariinit
4 suht pehmeää nektariinia
1 rkl sokeria
1 rkl sitruunamehua

Halkaise nektariinit ja poista kivi. Ripottele leikkuupinnalle sokeria ja sitruunamehua ja anna seistä sen aikaa kun grilli lämpiää. Sivele balsamicosiirapilla ja grillaa keskilämmöllä kymmenisen minuuttia, pari kertaa kääntäen. Annostele kuumien nektariinipuolikkaiden päälle mascarponea ja pistaaseja ja kruunaa koko komeus lopuilla kastikejämillä. Oli muuten hitusen vaikea kuvattava.

Grilled Nectarines with Balsamic Syrup and Mascarpone
serves 4, inspired by this recipe

for the pistachios:
about half a cup of pistachios, roughly chopped
½ tbsp butter
2 tbsp brown sugar

Melt the butter in a saucepan. Add the pistachios and sugar and stir on medium heat until the sugar starts to bubble and thicken. Spread the pistachios on a plate and transfer to the fridge to cool

for the balsamic syrup:
25 g (2 tbsp) butter
2 tbsp red balsamic vinegar
75 ml / 2½ fl oz brown sugar

Melt sugar and butter in a pan, add balsamic vinegar and bring to a boil. Simmer on a medium-low heat unti the syrup starts to thicken.

for the mascarpone:
200 g mascarpone cheese
4 tbsp lemon juice
(1 tbsp confectioners' sugar)

Soften the mascarpone with lemon juice. If you have a sweet tooth like me, add some confectioners' sugar.

for the nectarines
4 more or less ripe nectarines
1 tbsp sugar
1 tbsp lemon juice

Halve the nectarines, remove the pits. Sprinkle with sugar and lemon juice. Heat the grill to medium-high, brush the nectarines with the balsamic syrup glaze and grill until nice and soft (about ten minutes for me), turning a few times. To assemble, dot each fruit half with a bit of mascarpone, sprinkle with pistachios and drizzle with leftover balsamic syrup. Serve immediately.

Summer Soup

2007-07-24T23:44:00.000+02:00

kesäkeitto / snålsoppa

It's been a while since I featured a really really Finnish dish on this blog, bilberry pies aside. This is a somewhat controversial one, I think mostly because either the thought of vegetables in boiled milk puts you off, or it doesn't. (Insta-poll of six Finns in their mid-twenties to early forties says four in favor and two vehemently against.) It also has a slightly sweet taste to it, not just because of the milk but also because you're using the newest of the new season's vegetables, which of course are naturally sweet.

The recipe comes from Farmors Café, a restaurant in the Finnish archipelago close to where our summer island is. I've never actually had summer soup there, but it's worth a visit for the cakes alone. :P

Summer Soup
serves four

1½ l (6 cups) season's new vegetables, cut into chunks (carrot, spring onion, leek, caulflower, parsnip, sugarsnap & radish)
½ l ( 2 cups) small new potatoes, cut into chunks
1 l (4 cups) vegetable broth

2 tbsp flour
200 ml (7 fl oz)milk
200 ml (7 fl oz) "cooking" cream (about 5-15% fat)
100 ml (3&frac; fl oz) cream cheese

salt, pepper & sugar to taste

parsley & a few thinly sliced radishes to serve

Simmer the vegetables (save for the green parts of the spring onion) in vegetable broth until about half-done, then add the onion greens. In a separate pan, heat the milk and cream until almost boiling, then whisk in the flour. Pour into the soup pan (through a sieve if it's lumpy in spite of the whisking), add the cream cheese and continue cooking until the vegetables are done - you want them to be fairly soft but by no means mushy or anything. Season with salt, pepper and (optionally) a pinch of sugar. Serve with parsley and sliced radish sprinkled on top.

Women's Week Bilberry Pie

2007-07-20T23:59:00.000+02:00

mustikkapiirakka / blåbärspaj

We're in the middle of Women's Week, (naistenviikko / fruntimmersveckan), which is what we call July 18th to 24th, when a lot of ladies with popular names celebrate their name day (including me, if only for my middle name). Scandinavians tend to acknowledge name days, usually with baked goods of some sort, and for my family (I share my middle name with my mom and grandmother) the tradition is to bake a bilberry pie from bilberries picked on our summer island - if there are any, which is the subject of much fretting during the preceding weeks.

Not this year though, as I got the first pie baked almost two weeks ago. This is, in fact, the third one I've had since - the summer's been both warm and rainy so far, so it's an excellent year for bilberries. I think English speakers could probably debate the pieness of this particular dish; it might be more of an, erm, double-sided... crisp? To be honest, the crumbles, cobblers, slumps and grunts kind of blur together for me. Anyway, the dough is incredibly simple, just the kind of thing to throw together in a poorly equipped cabin (although for gas ovens, heat it to 250°C and then turn down to 225), and while it might not be the neatest of desserts to eat, it's very very good. Especially with a bit of cream.

The recipe is my mother's, and I think she got it from her mother, although it's not My Grandmother's Bilberry Pie which uses a different kind of dough. (Actually, I think the original uses only flour, whereas I went for part rolled oats for more texture.) If you can't get hold of bilberries, blueberries would probably work, although they're a bit bland in comparison.

Bilberry Pie
75 g (2½ oz) cold butter
200 ml (7 fl oz) flour
100 ml (3½ fl oz) rolled oats
50 ml (generous 3 tbsp) soft brown sugar (fariinisokeri / farinsocker)

500 ml / 2 cups bilberries
1½ tbsp sugar
½ tbsp potato flour

Mix together the dry ingredients for the pie crust. Cut in the butter until the mixture resembles coarse breadcrumbs. With your fingertips, press half of this "dough" into the bottom of a 10-inch pan (don't bother with getting crust on the edges).

Mix together bilberries, sugar and potato flour and spread onto the pie. Crumble the rest of the flour mixture on top and bake at 225°C (~450°F) for about 25 minutes, until the topping goes light brown and the filling beneath it is bubbly. Let cool for a while, but it is extremely good when still a bit warm.

Sommar & kål-och-lökröra (Summer and Cabbage-Onion Stew)

2007-07-20T23:34:00.000+02:00

Scroll past the foreign blather to get to the recipe in English.

Efter några månaders mer eller mindre gediget matbloggande är det riktigt skönt att glömma allt som har med intressant matlagning att göra och bara röra ihop diverse ingredienser utan att bry sig om hur det ser ut. Mina barndomsminnen från sommarholmen utgår mer på väderlek etc (regn, regn, vind som blåser rakt igenom den skrangliga stugan, mygg, ågan om blåbären skall mogna i tid för en paj innan semestern tar slut, den årliga återläsningen av kåseriböcker äldre än jag själv, bromsar, sol och heta släta klippor, doften på Niveas solkräm - den som inte är vattentät doftar fortfarande helt rätt) än mat. Likaså bra, kanske, för nu när jag tänker efter handlar det mest om vattenkakao och sikanauta burkkött (med ris och burkmajs blir det rådigågga) - det känns som ett mirakel att vi överlevde, faktiskt. Eller åtminstone att mitt matinresse blev som det blev.

När man har en hel stuga och ett helt (litet, gasdrivet) kylskåp för sig själv så kan man faktiskt laga kakao helt med mjölk om man vill. Och burkköttet ersätts med fördel med diverse linser. När man har en hel stuga och en hel (minimal, stökig) köksvrå för sig själv har man inte heller nån mamma där att laga mat, så man får själv försöka lista ut gasugnens förvecklingar. Det är mindre roligt än mjölkkakao.

Gasspis skall vara det bästa i mattillredningsväg, heter det. Nåt motsvarande lär ingen påstå om gasugnar, som väl mest är bra för att sticka huvet i om man vill sätta slut på sin miserabla tillvaro efter ett (ojämnt!) vidbränt frukostbröd för många.

Här följer ett recept som faktiskt inte är vackert, eller ens särskilt somrigt, men som passar bra att värma stugan med en kulen dag (alternativt då man försöker få slut på en nästan tom gasbytta så man kan byta in en ny och baka bröd utan att vara rädd för att ugnen skall slockna mitt i). Går bra med lite ris och en bit överblivet grillkött, en skiva stekt halloumi, eller helt som så. Som plus är ingredienslistan möjligtvis den kortaste jag nånsin skrivit, och både lökar och kål håller länge.

In English: I had a wonderful vacation; gas stoves are lovely; gas ovens are mostly good for suicide; the shot below is as close as I got to taking a food picture. (What do you mean, it was a lot wordier in Swedish?)

Lök-och-kålröra

två små lökar
ett halvt (pytte)litet kålhuvud
1-2 msk smör + 1 tsk olja
(&frac2; tsk kumminfrön)
salt & peppar

Skiva löken fint. Strimla kålen. Värm smör och olja i en kastrull med tätt lock. Häll i löken och stek under omrörning tills den börjar få lite färg. Tillsätt kålstrimlorna och lite salt (+ ev. kummin), vrid ner värmen så lågt det går, sätt på locket och låt sjuda i en halvtimme eller så (rör om alltid nu och då!), tills det hela är en sötaktigt brunaktig röra. Smaka av med peppar & mera salt. Mums.

Cabbage & Onion Stew

two small onions
half a head of cauliflower
1-2 tbsp of butter + 1 tsp vegetable oil
(½ tsp whole cumin seeds)
salt & pepper

Slice the onion and cabbage finely. Heat the oil and butter in a pan with a tight-fitting lid. Pour in the onion and cook, stirring, until it starts to get a bit of color. Add the cannage and a bit of salt (+ cumin, if using), lower the heat to as low as you can, cover and let simmer for about half an hour. Stir every now and then! You'll wind up with a brown, sweetish mush that looks terrible. Season with salt and pepper and eat it.

Taking Off

2007-06-25T11:49:00.000+02:00

The Quark menagerie is heading off to summer pastures for a few weeks, so the blog will be going radio silent for a while. I can't even promise a backlog of fabulous things when I return as both groceries and cooking facilities are kind of incredibly basic. Oh well, at least the view is very nice:

Enjoy your summer!

Noodle Salad with Spicy Peanut Dressing

2007-06-24T10:35:00.002+02:00

Do you remember the first time you had peanut butter? Peanut butter wasn't much of a thing in Finland when I was growing up (understatement), so I do. I was a slow convert to the peanut butter straight up, not mixed with anything school (and I still don't get the PBJ sandwich, but then I don't want jelly anywhere near my sandwiches anyway), but used in spicy sauces (and peanut butter cookies, but that's a bit different) it has a more instant appeal, adding this smooth and creamy depth to, er, whatever you're mixing it with.

A noodle salad with carrots, bell pepper and scallions, in this case. The sauce is really the star of this thing, fabulously spicy and satisfying, so obviously you could, and should, play around with the amount and type of vegetables. (I did make it again later on with chicken, and that was lovely too, and for a more nutritionally balanced vegetarian option, mung sprouts would be lovely.) I chose to mix in just half of the dressing before serving, so everyone could add more to their plates according to taste.

Noodle Salad with Spicy Peanut Dressing
adapted from Bon Appétit, Oct 2004, serves 3

75 ml (1/3 cup) peanut butter
4 tbsp soy sauce
2 tbsp rice vinegar
1 fresh red chili pepper, deseeded and finely chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 tbsp soft brown sugar
1½ tbsp ginger, minced
about 50 ml vegetable (or chicken) stock, or enough to make the above a fairly runny sauce

150 g rice noodles
3 medium carrots, julienned
1 red bell pepper, julienned
1 bunch scallions, julienned

(I find julienning things therapeutic. If you don't, this dish is going to be a lot less fun to prepare.)

Combine the ingredients for the sauce in a food processor and blend until smooth. (I find that you need to chop the chili really finely for this to work at all, but your mileage may vary.)

Bring a pot of water to the boil and throw in the carrots and bell pepper. Add the rice noodles, take off the heat and let stand for however long it says on the package. (3 minutes in this case, which was just perfect for the veggies.) Drain and run under cold water, then drain well again. Mix in the scallions and enough sauce to make it nice and slick. Serve as is or cold, with more sauce on the side.

Grilled Mustard & Dill Salmon

2007-06-21T18:41:00.000+02:00

First of all, I'm thrilled (and a little bit amazed) to have won the most recent installation of the Swedish food event Cyberkocken. A huge thank you to Anne for hosting, the judges for, um, voting for me, and most of all to the mussles for not giving us food poisoning in spite of the less-than-stellar treatment they got on the way home. Tack!

Now that's out of the way, this was one of the things I thought about entering to the Finnish food blog challenge, the theme of which is grilled/barbecued food. I've only recently started enjoying cooking fish - I've always liked eating it - but this was one of my first times ever grilling fish. A big fillet of salmon lends itself really well to this purpose, as it's not going to overcook and turn dry in a matter of minutes the way smaller white fish would, and the ease of preparation was a major plus. The minus being... the taste of the topping. The mustard was a bit overpowering, and I was using bought mayo which was just a bit too sharp here. With some tweaking (maybe some yogurt or soft cheese replacing part of the mayo?) it'll be wonderful - you just slap the fish on the grill and top with the seasoning and leave it for about 20 minutes and it's done! - but it's not exactly a challenge entry yet. Good thing we got an extension due to our general summer laziness...

Speaking of laziness, I'm just going to link you to the recipe.

Lemon & Chili Ice Cream

2007-06-20T01:21:00.000+02:00

Here's a newsflash: ice cream is hard to photograph. It melts. (Cloudberry Quark - bringing you the very latest in physics. Since, um, February.) Also our ice cream scoop is not made for scooping, I think.

One of the problems with having a food blog, I've discovered, is that I rarely repeat fabulous recipes after I've blogged about them. Because what would I have to blog about then? It really takes some begging to make me repeat things, and even then, unless I'm strictly supervised, I tend to... tinker.

This is more or less a repeat of the incredibly lemony ice cream from last month - the proportions are 4 yolks, 120 g sugar, 200 ml whipping cream, 100 ml light cream, 100 ml milk (or just 400 ml liquids to make it simple), zest and juice of two lemons and one fairly mild chili pepper. (It could have been zingier, is what I'm saying.) Throw in the chili with the lemon zest. The sauce is from Nigella's Forever Summer and is very simple: simmer 250 ml water and 250 g of caster sugar until it thickens (without stirring), dump in one finely chopped chili (again, not a mild chili necessarily), wait until it cools a bit, then stir and store in the fridge.

Beet, Blue Cheese & Walnut Salad

2007-06-19T23:24:00.000+02:00

Season's first beets are here! I find beets somewhat challenging to prepare, since roasting (and maybe grilling) is the only way to do it right, and it does take an age. (Actually it's not so much the time as the fact that you never know how long it'll take.) Once you're done, you sort of want there to be more to it than a bunch of, well, edible root veg.

Not to knock the old beets-with-butter side dish, which is after all a classic for a reason (it's not just the butter, either), but this time I wanted to go for another classic combo: beets, walnuts and blue cheese. The last time I went for this pairing, it was in somewhat unorthodox empanadas, but that's just too fussy for a weeknight in summer, so I turned to the trusty Epicurious for some salad hints. The dressing is, erm, less-than-beautiful (this is what comes of reading a recipe, thinking "yeah, I'll remember what to do" and then... not remembering what to do), but very tasty!

Beet, Blue Cheese & Walnut Salad
adapted from The Figs Table by Todd English and Sally Sampson

5 medium-sized beets, with stems trimmed to an inch or so of the root, scrubbed clean
1 tbsp or so of olive oil
a handful of walnuts
a few tbsp fresh chopped herbs; I used mint and basil
salt & pepper to taste
1 tbsp balsamic vinegar

½ tbsp olive oil
¼ cup chopped walnuts
½ small red onion, thinly sliced
80 g (about 3 oz) blue cheese (I used Roquefort)
a few tbsp light cream

Rub the beets with a bit of olive oil, wrap tightly in tin foil and roast at 200°C (400°F) for about 40-50 minutes, until tender. Let cool for a while, then rub the skin off and cut into strips/slices/whatever. Mix in walnuts and herbs and season with balsamic vinegar, salt and pepper. (If your salad isn't all wilted and sad, toss some in, too - the original used arugula.)

Sautée the chopped walnuts in the olive oil and set aside. Whizz together cheese and cream in a food processor until smooth, add the cooled walnuts and the onion and run the blender for a while longer. Add more cream if it's too solid and more cheese if it's runny. Serve with the beets.

Pressed Bread with Roasted Vegetables

2007-06-16T23:05:00.000+02:00

You may have noticed the recent slew of recipes lifted from the Finnish food mag Ruoka & viini (food & wine) here. This would be because the most recent issue was pretty much filled cover-to-cover with stuff I not only want but NEED to make. (Although strictly speaking, I'm not going to follow all to the letter - where's the fun in buying vanilla ice cream and mixing in lime and chilies when you can make your own?)

Anyway, I made this filled, pressed bread for our impromptu picnic last week - the recipe called it a pan bagnat, but as I understand it that's a nicoise sandwich, while this involved mostly roasted vegetables. Whatever the name, it's chock-full of Mediterranean goodness (literally, in my case, since we don't exactly have baby zucchini here yet - and if we did, they'd be hothouse-grown and decidedly non-eco friendly) and a very nice picnic or lunch item for a hot day. I pressed it pretty heavily, as you can see, with a whole stack of plates overnight, which was... perhaps just a bit overzealous? The bottom of the bread was a bit soggier than the top, so maybe I should have turned it over at some point. But those a really minor quibbles, and the basic concept is definitely one I'll use again. Maybe with some goat cheese thrown in.

Possibly even with home-baked bread. Right now it's even cool enough to bake (I know you just live for these weather reports, y'know).

Pressed Bread with Roasted Vegetables
adapted* from Glorian ruoka & viini 4/07, serves 6-8

1 boule-shaped bread

2 small bell peppers
2 small zucchini
1 medium aubergine
2 tbsp olive oil
1 tsp salt
½-1 tsp freshly ground pepper
3 tbsp chopped sun-dried tomatoes
100 ml (scant ½ cup) kalamata olives, deseeded and sliced

2 tsp red wine vinegar
100 ml chopped fresh herbs (I used basil and lemon-thyme)
½-1 tsp freshly ground pepper
2 tbsp olive oil

Slice the zucchini and aubergine fairly thinly (you can do the salt-sweating thing for the aubergines or not - I usually do if I have the time, because that was the way I first liked aubergine). If you have a gas stove, roast the peppers over the flame. I don't, and I didn't feel like firing up the grill, so I halved them and threw them in the oven with the rest (of course, you could grill all the vegetables if you wanted, I bet that'd be fabulous).

Toss the vegetables with 2 tbsp of olive oil and roast - in a single layer, I had to do it in two batches - at 225°C (440°F) until slightly browned, turning once during roasting.

Slice the peppers and season the vegetables with salt and pepper.

Halve the bread length-wise and carve out most of the innards from both halves, leaving about a cm at the edges. Mix together the ingredients for the dressing and spread evenly over the cut-sides of the bread.

Layer vegetables, olives and sun-dried tomatoes evenly on each carved-out bread half, then carefully place the top half, er, on top of the bottom. Um, so you have a bread shaped bread again, yes? Wrap tightly in clingfilm, then weigh down with a few plates or something and place in the fridge overnight.

*they used one zucchini, and had capers where I had sun-dried tomatoes, and the total of 2 tsp pepper specified was just a bit too much.

Simple Tomato Salad

2007-06-16T08:23:00.000+02:00

So last Sunday was a bit of a letdown all around - the internet went boom, and getting up we realized we'd be spending a goodish part of the day at the vet, fixing the girlcat's infected foot. Luckily the lunch we had planned benefited from waiting a bit, and so we threw together a potato salad and this fresh tomato concoction before leaving. (The foot is fine now. The cat it's attached to hates me for the antibiotics though.)

The original recipe called for cilantro, which I'm not too fond of in its raw state, so I substituted parsley. Yes, traditional, curly parsley. It has a bad rep, and I just don't understand why. Is it the mouth-feel? You just need to chop it more finely than your average herb! Is it that it's just not as hip as its flatter cousin? I would be happy to use flat-leaf parsley in a load of things, but sadly the flat parsley you get in the shops here is disgustingly overgrown and coarse. Which makes me wonder how hard it is to grow? I have yet to kill my chili plants and I made a piece of ginger root shoot up an enormously tall, er, stalk, so clearly I now have the magic touch and could grow anything.*

Anyway, this salad is fast and easy and the season of non-disgusting tomatoes is just around the corner, so I think this'll be one of our summer go-tos in the future. Yum!

*never mind that the chili isn't actually blooming or anything. It's not dead! It's making loads of pretty leaves!

Simple Tomato Salad
adapted from Glorian ruoka & viini 4/2007, serves 2-4

500 g (1 lb) ripe plum tomatoes
1 mild red chili
2 cloves garlic
1 bunch scallions
100 ml (scant ½ cup) chopped fresh parsley (or cilantro)

dressing:
1 tbsp red wine vinegar
1 tsp sugar
1 tsp salt
1 tsp freshly ground black pepper
2 tbsp olive oil

De-seed and chop the tomatoes and chili. Mince the garlic and slice the scallions finely. Mix together the ingredients for the dressing and combine with the chopped vegetables in a bowl. Sprinkle in the chopped herb of your choice and let stand in the fridge for a few hours before eating.

Grilled Couscous Salad

2007-06-15T16:33:00.000+02:00

The problem with only just getting around to typing up dishes you prepared, ate, and forgot about more than a week ago is, well, the "forgot about" part says it all really. I have the picture I took, and I have the recipe that I know I didn't follow (because no way do I put 300 ml of oil in anything, except maybe a pan for deep-frying), and a vague memory of what I did do, and an equally vague memory of the result being quite tasty.

This is why my internet should never ever break. That, and the bit where I rely on reittiopas to tell me how to get from point A to point B on time and without getting lost.

So. This may have been good? Maybe. The only reason I remember it at all is that I grilled the vegetables myself and didn't set anything on fire. I think the dressing was the best part. In general, the trick with couscous (in the absence of a couscoussiere) is either a) butter, lots of, or b) a nice lemony dressing. Which leads me to posit that if you combined the two... well, maybe next time.

Grilled Couscous Salad
adapted from Glorian ruoka & viini 4/2007, serves 4

2 small zucchini
1 medium aubergine
1 medium bell pepper
olive oil

200 ml couscous
300 ml water
1 tbsp concentrated vegetable stock (or however much you need to get 300 ml fairly strong stock)
1 tbsp butter
250 ml chopped fresh herbs (I used basil, mint and oregano)

juice from one lemon
75 ml olive oil
4 cloves garlic
1 tsp salt
½ tsp freshly ground black pepper

Bring the water and vegetable stock to a boil. Add the couscous and let stand over a low heat for a few minutes. Take off the stove and stir in the butter, then cover and let stand while you grill the vegetables.

Chop the vegetables - my chunks were pretty big, but obviously do as you like - and toss them in a bit of oil. Grill over medium-high heat until lightly charred.

Mince the garlic and combine with the rest of the ingredients for the dressing.

Toss together vegetables, chopped herbs, dressing and couscous. Serve.

Sounding Radish Slivers

2007-06-15T15:37:00.000+02:00

xiang luo bu si

I seem to have gone on a bit of an unplanned hiatus here lately - although it was partly unwilling, too, as our internet kind of blew up on Sunday. Or rather, fizzled and died, and, wow, is there a word for being woefully incompetent without internet access? Measurement conversions, word translations, recipes... it's all here. (And then we went and got a new DSL modem and I got lazy.)

I had a bit of a debate with myself about posting this recipe. It's very (VERY) good, but when eating it we were struck by how well some salmon would go with it. It would probably be, hrrm, less than authentic (the recipe comes from Fuchsia Dunlop's book on Hunan cooking, Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook), but then I'm already substituting daikon with black radish, so it's probably well ruined anyway.

It takes some slicing and dicing (I used the slicer on my KitchenAid and then cut the slices into strips), but otherwise it's just a breeze, especially as I seem to have finally mastered the art of seasoning the wok so stuff doesn't stick to it.

Sounding Radish Slivers
from Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook by Fuchsia Dunlop

500 g (1 lb) daikon radish (black radish was fine, although probably different)
1 tsp salt
1 red chili
1 bunch scallions, green parts
1 tsp soy sauce
1 ½ tsp rice vinegar
1 tsp potato flour mixed with 2 tbsp cold water
1 tsp sesame oil
3 tbsp groundnut oil for cooking

Slice the radish finely, then cut the slices into slivers. Toss with the salt and set aside for 15 minutes. Slice the chili and scallions.

Drain the radish slices and squeeze dry. Heat the wok until smoking, then pour in the groundnut oil and the chili. Let sizzle for a "a few seconds" (whatever), then add the radish slivers and soy sauce and stir fry for a few minutes. Add the spring onions and vinegar and stir to combine, then add the potato flour goo and stir until it thickens. Take off the heat and stir in the sesame oil.

Blogimiittiä pikavaroituksella

2007-06-08T18:28:00.000+02:00

Pääkaupunkiseutulaiset hoi! Monkeyfoodin Ylimuulin kanssa olemme jonkin aikaa vähän miettineet piknikluontoista tapaamista nyt alkukesälle. Alkukesä kuitenkin on ihankohtajo muuttumassa *kröhöm* kesäksi, joten Hyvällä Varoitusajalla päätimme tavata huomenna lauantaina Kaisaniemen puistossa iltapäivällä kolmen maissa.

Mukaan jotain pientä purtavaa (itse olen tekemässä juuri saapuneesta Ruoka & viinistä täytettyä maalaisleipää, mutta näillä säillä & pika-ajoituksella ostoruoalle ei todellakaan nirpistellä neniä) ja pelkäämätön mieli. Mikäli ajatus ei ihan hirveästi pistä vastaan, pistäkee meiliä joko minulle (deinin-at-gmail-piste-com) tai Muulille niin vaihdetaan puhelinnumeroita ja sovitaan joku tunnistamiskeino. :P

[This is an invitation to meet up tomorrow for a picnic in Kaisaniemi park. If you're in Helsinki and would like to join us, do mail me at deinin-at-gmail-dot-com. Yes, I'm always this well prepared, why do you ask?]

Pasta Salad with Zucchini, Red Onion & Sun-Dried Tomato

2007-06-07T15:03:00.000+02:00

[Because I'm nothing if not bad with timing, we had this salad last week. After the first heat wave. Before the current heat wave. (Which, luckily, isn't as bad as the first one, if only because it's not as oppressive.) I wrote this after I'd made it and then had internet troubles and forgot to come back and actually post it when they were resolved.]

Of course, by the time I get around to cooking sweltering heat-appropriate dishes, the weather's gone back to +17°. (Note: THIS IS NOT A COMPLAINT. I like seventeen-degree weather. It'll pretty much have to be minus seventeen* for me to start bitching about the cold.) I just wish I'd had this salad ready earlier this week when the thought of keeping the stove on long enough to cook pasta was enough to make me want to burst out crying. (I believe we've established that I'm a wuss when it comes to heat, yes?)

This is perhaps not the fastest hearty salad you'll ever make - unless you take to a mandolin or similar, the chopping will take a while, and it is really so much better when you really get the zucchini into fine slices, at least to my mind - but when you have it, should you follow the amounts given below, you'll have a huge salad, enough to feed six people at least, and it will stay fine in the fridge for several days. I've usually left the pine nuts to be sprinkled on each serving, so I'm not sure if they'll go soggy in the fridge, and sometimes I've perked it up with more fresh basil and some arugula, or even cherry tomatoes.

I wish I could give credit to someone for the recipe (the balsamic white vinegar is a stroke of genius, for one thing), but it's a copy-pasted document on my computer from a time way before knowing the source of something because I'd be presenting it to the public became an issue.

*all degrees in Celsius. Obviously.

Pasta Salad with Zucchini, Red Onion & Sun-Dried Tomato

½ l (2 cups) fairly sturdy pasta
3 baby zucchini, about 200g each
3 medium red onions
100 g (or so, translates to roughly half a cup chopped) sun-dried tomatoes in oil
200 ml cream (I used light cooking cream)
2-3 tbsp balsamic white vinegar
salt & pepper
a lot of fresh basil
toasted pine nuts

Cook the pasta in plenty of salted water. When it's al dente, drain and run under cold tap water to stop the cooking. Set aside.

Chop the sun-dried tomatoes finely. Reserve some of the oil.

Slice the zucchini and onion finely; cut the zucchini rounds into strips.

In a very large saucepan, heat about a tablespoon of the oil from the tomatoes and soften the onions in it. Add the zucchini and stir to blend, then add the cream and let come to the boil (if you prefer your zucchini pieces a bit thicker than mine, wait a bit before adding the cream to cook them properly) and take off the heat. Stir in the tomatoes and pasta, season with salt, pepper and balsamic vinegar.

Let cool to room temperature, then stir in a big bunch of chopped basil. Let stand in the fridge for a few hours and check to see if it needs more seasoning before serving. Sprinkle on the toasted pine nuts.

Risotto med musslor & rökt bacon (Mussel & Bacon Risotto)

2007-06-07T02:48:00.000+02:00

This is my entry for this month's Swedish food blog challenge. Scroll down for the English writeup & recipe.

Normalt brukar man ju skriva ganska vitt och brett om sina hopkok, men nu blir det faktiskt nästan bara ett recept för månadens cyberkock - om jag skall hinna somna innan väckarklockan ringer så blir det ingen tid över till annat pladder fast rätten eller snarare ingrediensanskaffningen nog torde kunna dryftas. (Tänk dig bara att sitta med ett nät musslor i en solgassad, fullproppad buss vars värmesystem gått totalt ur balans så att det blåser hetluft på dina stackars fötter. Ja, musslorna såklart också. Men dom är uppätna nu, medan mina fötter fortfarande liiiider.)

Månadens ingredienser var förutom musslor ingefära, koriander och nånting rökt. Det rökta blev för min del bacon och färsk koriander smakar tvål så den bytte jag ut mot persilja, men om man har såna smaklökar som står ut med eller rent av njuter av det så lär koriander passa hur bra som helst. Titta in på Annes mat senare i veckan för att se resten av bidragen!

In English: Cyberkocken is a monthly event where you prepare a dish or meal containing four given ingredients. This month's hostess is Anne of Anne's Food, and the ingredients mussels, ginger, cilantro (or coriander, as the Swedish word is the same for both spice and herb) and "something smoked." I could tell you stories about finding the mussels, but since I was in too much of a hurry to do so in Swedish when I posted this, I shall just say that heat is evil, my shoes are evil, and the bus I came home on tried to steam-boil both my feet and my mussels by running the heater (my feet were just by an air-vent) in 25°C weather. It's a miracle I didn't give all of us food poisoning, but miraculously a decent amount of the mussels survived the trip.

I'm not a fan of cilantro (it tastes like soap) so I substituted fresh parsley, and my smoked ingredient was bacon, because nothing can go wrong with bacon. Yesterday was perhaps not the perfect day to make risotto, but eating it was wonderful. Recipe in English follows the Swedish one after the jump.

Risotto med musslor & rökt bacon

ett nät blåmusslor
ett paket rökt bacon (eller vanlig)
en stäng selleri
en rödlök
en ca. 4 cm lång bit färsk ingefära
3 dl arborioris
2 dl vitvin + lite till till musslorna
ca 1,25 l (tillredd, sjudande) hummerfond
1 knippe vårlök, strimlad
persilja/koriander, grovhackad
peppar

Skär baconen i små bitar och stek en stund i en medelstor kastrull på ganska låg värme - avsikten här är att få fettet att smälta. Hacka selleri och rödlök fint och stek dem med baconen i några minuter. Riv ingefäran och tillsätt den. Rör ner riset i grönsakerna (tillsätt lite olja om det ser torrt ut) och låt värmas nån minut tills riset börjar se lite genomskinligt ut i kanterna. Häll i 2 dl vin och rör om tills riset sugit upp vätskan. Sen kommer det roliga med risotton: tillsätt hummerfond (eller kräft- eller fiskbuljong, antar jag) en slev i taget allteftersom riset suger i sig vätska. Det hela borde ta en knapp halvtimme eller så, och vätskemängden kan variera.

Under tiden: pochera (de tvättade) musslorna i en slurk vin tills de öppnar sig, ställ åt sidan.

När risotton är mer eller mindre färdig: rör i den strimlade vårlöken och hackade örter. Smaka av med peppar (salt behövs knappast, det är ganska mycket bacon) och blanda i musslorna.

Mussel & Bacon Risotto

a net of mussels (I... have no idea how much that is. A pound and a half?)
170 g smoked bacon
1 stalk celery
1 red onion
a scant-two-inch-long piece of fresh ginger, grated
300 ml arborio rice
200 ml white wine + some more to poach the mussels in
1¼ l prepared, simmering lobster (or fish or prawn) stock
1 bunch of scallions, sliced
parsley or cilantro, roughly chopped
pepper to taste

Cut the bacon into smallish pieces and cook in a medium-sized pot on a medium-low heat. You're not crisping them here, just releasing the fat. Chop the red onion and celery finely and add to the pot, stir-frying until translucent. Add the grated fresh ginger, stir for a minute or so, then pour in the rice and keep stirring until the rice starts to look a bit translucent at the edges. Pour in the wine and stir until it's been absorbed, then add the stock, one ladleful at the time, stirring often, until the rice is ready.

Meanwhile, poach the mussels in a bit of wine in a large, covered pan until they open - just a few minutes really. Set aside.

Once the risotto is almost ready, stir in the sliced scallions and chopped herbs. Taste off with pepper (what with the stock and the bacon, I shouldn't think you'll need salt, but of course tastes vary.) and stir in the mussels.

Rhubarb & White Chocolate Tart

2007-05-30T18:52:00.000+02:00

Here comes a sad confession: I don't generally like rhubarb that much. It's not that it tastes bad to me or anything, but it feels like for a lot of people the start of rhubarb season is just as avidly awaited as the asparagus one. (My spring/summer list goes like so: asparagus, new potatoes, peas, raspberries. Yes, that means I don't really care about strawberries either. Or at least, I never want to make anything with strawberries. Eating them raw, that's fine.)

It's not really my style to blog in the vein of "well, I, hated it, but..." so you may already have surmised that this rhubarb pie, laced with whiskey and mellowed by white chocolate (who knew white chocolate could have a function?), was... very nice. Good, even. I suspect partly because it was made with home-grown rhubarb - incidentally, I wish my favorite plants worked on the principle of "pick some to make it grow more" - and partly that I have some sort of mental defect by which stuff automatically tastes better with a lattice crust, especially if I've made it myself. What? It's fun! (Although looking at the picture below for extended periods of time makes me kind of dizzy.)

The recipe comes from Bon Appétit, and since I didn't change a thing (although next time I'll probably halve the amount of chocolate), I'll just link you to it instead of transcribing. Do serve it warm like the recipe says - the leftovers were OK at room temperature, but the warm one was divine.

Leftover Tuesday: Roast Chicken Sandwich

2007-05-29T15:58:00.000+02:00

AKA the dear lord, it's too hot to cook! edition. (Seriously, the thermometer on my balcony, which hasn't got any sun so far today, is showing 29.5°C. My personal comfort zone kind of ends around 20°, which I realize is totally wussy, but still. Make it stop!) This month, Leftover Tuesday is hosted by Pam of Project Foodie, so head over there later in the week for a round-up of inventively repurposed dishes. You know, something that isn't a sandwich.

It's a wonderful sandwich though, partly because the fabulous breakfast rolls that I already used for a Caesar salad are still perfectly edible - I toasted them lightly to hide the hint of staleness, and partly because fried onions, sun-dried tomatoes, goat cheese and herbs are all very very fine things indeed. Not to mention the actual leftover I used: grilled chicken (bought, not home-made - it was too hot to cook yesterday, too).

P.S. for more interesting use of leftovers here in quarkland, check out the chocolate pastries from this weekend.

Roast Chicken Sandwich with Sun-Dried Tomatoes, Onions & Goat Cheese
heavily influenced by Bon Appétit

Really, the title is pretty much the recipe. OK, somewhat more elaborately: chop 3 sun-dried tomatoes (per serving). Cut half an onion (per serving) into fairly thick rings and fry in a bit of oil - I used the oil from the jar of tomatoes - until nicely browned. Mix together a few tablespoons of goat cheese with some chopped herbs - I used basil - and spread it over toasted/grilled breakfast roll halves. Cut thin(ish) slices of roasted chicken; wash a small bunch of arugula. Sprinkle half of the onions and tomatoes on the bottom half of the roll, top with chicken slices, arugula, and the rest of the tomatoes and onions, plonk top half of the roll on top. Eat. Consider doing this lying down on the cool tile floor downstairs.

Waiter, Someone Stuffed Eggs in My Tomato!

2007-05-27T16:30:00.000+02:00

I've missed a couple of editions of the huge "Waiter, There's Something In..." event, and to be quite frank, I almost let this one go by, too, out of sheer lack of attentiveness. On Friday, I finally noticed Jeanne of Cook Sister had chosen stuffed vegetables for this month's theme. In the end I had to scramble a bit to find something I wanted to try out, and stumbled upon this recipe at Epicurious.

I know, right? It was just a bit fiddly for me, so I decided to fiddle some more. For one thing, my eggs were large; my tomatoes weren't. Out went the romaine pesto (although in retrospect it would probably have worked very well there), in came separation of yolks and whites. One of the whites I mixed with goat cheese, parmesan, and crumbled bacon (I thought pancetta might be too flimsy, and besides I had some bacon I needed to dispose of). Then I just spooned a bit of the white mixture into the carved-out tomatoes, carefully poured a yolk into each, and topped with some more cheese paste. Sprinkle with some extra parmesan and into the oven.

The amount of cheese mixture given would probably fill three or four tomatoes of this size - I mixed in the extra white and another whole egg and made a frittata.

Egg, Goat Cheese & Bacon-Stuffed Tomatoes
inspired by Gourmet Sept 2006, serves 2

2 eggs
2 large tomatoes
80 g soft goat cheese
30 g + 1 tbsp freshly grated parmesan
4 rashers bacon
1 tbsp chopped basil
salt & pepper

Fry the bacon until crisp, drain on paper towels. When cooled a bit, crumble into largeish pieces.

Separate the eggs, discarding one of the whites (or putting it aside for something else) and gently sliding each yolk into a bowl of cold water. Take the remaining white and whisk it with goat cheese and pepper until well blended. Stir in parmesan, basil and bacon, check taste to see if it needs salt.

Cut the top off each tomato and remove pulp & seeds with a spoon. Spoon some of the cheese mixture into each tomato "bowl," leaving room for the yolk in the middle, then carefully pour the yolks in and top with more of the cheesy stuff, trying not to break the yolks while you do so. Sprinkle with the rest of the parmesan and bake at 200°C (400°F) for about 15 minutes.

Hay, Hay, It's Caesar Salad Day!

2007-05-26T18:23:00.000+02:00

I've been meaning to make salad-filled rolls for a while now, because I like baking but have a hard time incorporating the bread into actual meals - I wind up eating sandwiches way more than what's good for me, and not even interesting sandwiches - cheese and cucumber is about as good as it gets. (You really don't want to know about the quality of the cheese I use for this, either.)

Of course, carved-out roll innards are just begging to be made into croutons, and when Katie of Other People's Food chose Caesar Salad as the theme for this month's HHDD, my choice was made for me. Now, I've made Caesar salad the original way, with raw egg and without anchovies, and quite frankly I don't see what the fuss is about. (Read: I probably just bungled something, but that was vile.) So I was quite happy to find a version using mayo instead.

Normally I'd fill the bread bowls with something a bit more substantial and creamy than this, maybe a mushroom or chicken salad (in which case, make/buy your buns in a bigger size...) which is why, upon consideration, I decided to toss in some crispy bacon with the romaine and croutons. OK, really it was because I wanted to fry the croutons in bacon fat, but once I had acquire said fat, what was I supposed to do, throw away the lovely by-product? I don't think so. I liked the dressing a lot and made a double batch of it to have some leftovers for the weekend. You'll have to go by feel as to amounts of lettuce and dressing anyway, depending on the size of the bread you're filling.

Caesar Salad-Filled Bread Rolls
Caesar dressing adapted from Bon Appétit, Feb 2002, serves 2

2 anchovy fillets
2 tbsp mayonnaise
2 tsp lemon juice
½ tsp Dijon mustard
a few drops Worcestershire sauce
1 clove garlic, finely minced
50 ml good olive oil
salt & pepper to taste
3 tbsp grated parmesan

2 breakfast rolls, about 120 g each (and a third one for extra croutons)
a few leaves romaine lettuce
3 rashers bacon
some shaved parmesan

In a blender, whizz together the first six ingredients until smooth. Slowly drizzle in the olive oil while keeping the motor running. Add salt, pepper and grated parmesan.

Cut off a "cap" from two of the breakfast rolls and carve out the innards from the bottom, leaving about 1 cm of the edges. Try to get the middle of the rolls out in as large chunks as possible so you can cut it into croutons, otherwise just slice off the crust of the third roll and cut it into scant-cm cubes. If you have time to leave the bread cubes to dry for a while, that's all the better.

Fry the bacon until crisp. Drain on paper towels but don't discard the fat from the pan - fry the bread cubes in it until they're nice and crisp.

Crumble the bacon in a bowl and toss with the shredded romaine. Blend in an appropriate amount of dressing, toss in the croutons and parmesan shavings, and divide into bread bowls. Top with the caps.

Breakfast Rolls

2007-05-26T14:47:00.000+02:00

It's been a while since I posted about bread. It's not that I've stopped baking, but mostly I've been doing repeats of stuff that's already appeared here. This, then, is a roll recipe I found over on Anne's Food. I played around with it a bit, replacing 150 g of the plain flour with whole grain and increasing the size of the rolls themselves so I got 16 instead of 24, but really it's the same recipe. And like Anne said, I should think it's pretty much foolproof.

Tryffelitäytteiset chiliperunaleivokset (Chocolate-Filled "Potato" Pastries)

2007-05-25T18:25:00.000+02:00

Scroll down for the English version!

Ehdinpä juuri ja juuri saada aikaiseksi ihan onnistuneenkin vastauksen Ylimmulin emännöimään reilun kaupan ruokahaasteeseen. Alkuviikon chilikakun jämät saivat odotella keittiössä pari päivää kuivumista sillä aikaa kun mietin murusille käyttötarkoitusta. Perunaleivoksethan (tai siis ainakin yksi versio) tehdään kuivakakunmurusista, joten ei muuta kuin menoksi. Resepti on aika lailla hatusta tempaistu - paransin reiluus-astetta pyöräyttämällä reilusta suklaasta ja kermatilkasta tryffeleitä jonka ympärille tämä kakunmuru-voi-sokeri-hilloihanuus sitten muovattiin. Ai että oli sottaista puuhaa! Muuten kyllä ihan kivaa...

Yleensähän tällaiset leivokset kostutetaan rommitilkalla, itse ajattelin kakkupohjan tuovan hommaan ihan riittävästi ytyä chilipoltollaan. Koska mitään vastaavaa ei ole meillä ennen tuunattu, taikinan kosteusasteen päättäminenkin meni vähän arvailuksi - melko tahmea muttei vetinen oli oma töherrökseni, ja ihan hyvin se oli yön ja päivän aikana vetäytynyt. Kakunpuolikkaasta tuli niin sanotusti ihan reilu satsi, sen verran tujua kamaa nämä ovat ettei yhtä pingispallon kokoista leivosta enempää tee kerralla mieli, vaikka hyvää onkin. Onneksi kuulemma vain paranevat ajan myötä.

Niin, ja se peruna-nimike? Suoraan sanottuna en viitsinyt lähteä näitä sen pahemmin muotoilemaan. Perunat kun eivät kuitenkaan ole tummanruskeita. Ainakaan jos niitä tahtoo syödä. Nih.

In English: Fair Trade produce was the theme for this month's Finnish food challenge, and I have to say this time my entry is a bit convoluted: I took the leftovers of the failed chili chocolate cake (my original idea for the challenge) and used it to make a bastardized version of a fairly well-known Finnish treat: potato pastries.

Now, there are at least two desserts known as "perunaleivos" in Finland: one contains actual potatoes; the other one is made out of dried-up sponge (or similar) cake. That one gets called "potato pastry" because it's supposed to get rolled into a vaguely potato-like shape. Needless to say, I didn't bother to do that. Moistened with jam, butter and, traditionally, rum or cognac (I skipped this, figuring the chili in the cake would be quite interesting enough), this is a fine way to get rid of dry cakes, and, for the stressed-out hostesses out there, actually needs a day or two in the fridge to really shine. The traditional version doesn't contain the chocolate truffle center, but I wanted to add more fair trade chocolate to the thing. Scroll past the Finnish recipe to get the English version!

Tryffelitäytteiset chiliperunaleivokset
noin 16 kpl

puolikas reilu chilikakku (5 dl kakkumuruja)
1 dl korppujauhoja
100 g voita
1 dl tomusokeria
3 rkl (reilun kaupan) kaakaojauhetta
4 rkl vadelmahilloa
(konjakkia tai mehua kostutukseen)

100 g (reliun kaupan) tummaa suklaata
½ dl vispikermaa
(tilkka konjakkia)

suklaaströsseliä (pieni purkki riitti noin puoleen satsiin)

Hienonna suklaa oikein hienoksi murskaksi. Kiehauta vispikerma kattilassa ja kaada suklaarouheen päälle. Anna seistä hetki ja sekoita tasaiseksi suklaasulaksi. Anna jähmettyä jääkaapissa puolisen tuntia ja vatkaa sitten kovaksi (lisää tässä vaiheessa loraus konjakkia). Siirrä tryffelitahna takaisin jääkaappiin.

Hienonna kakku ja korppujauhot monitoimikoneessa oikein hienoksi muruksi.

Vatkaa voi, sokeri, hillo ja kaakaojauhe ilmavaksi tahnaksi. Lisää kakkumurut voitahnaan ja lorauta mehua/konjakkia kunnes taikina on kosteahko muttei ihan velliä. Itselläni meni pari ruokalusikallista mehua, olisi ehkä voinut olla vähän enemmän. Jos lipsahtaa liikaa nestettä, anna taikinan vetäytyä hetki.

Pyörittele suklaatahnasta pieniä, reilun teelusikallisen kokoisia palleroita. Muovaile murutaikinasta reilun sentin paksuinen "kuori" tryffelipallojen ympärille ja pyörittele suklaaströsselissä. Anna seistä jääkaapissa vähintään yön yli ennen tarjoilua.

Lisäys: ovat muuten 100x parempia jos malttaa antaa seistä tunnin huoneenlämmössä ennen syömistä...

Chocolate-Filled "Potato" Pastries
makes about 16 smallish pastries (they're very rich!)

half a fair trade chocolate cake (500 ml/2 cups cake crumbs)
100 ml breadcrumbs
100 g butter
100 ml icing sugar
3 tbsp (fair trade) cocoa powder
4 tbsp raspberry jam
(cognac, rum, or juice for softening)

100 g (fair trade) dark chocolate
50 ml thick cream
(splosh of cognac)

chocolate sprinkles for decoration

Grate or chop the chocolate finely. Heat the cream in a small pan and pour over the chocolate. Let stand for a minute or so, then stir to dissolve the chocolate. Let cool in the fridge for about half an hour, until slightly thickened. Whip like you would a ganache (splosh in the cognac at this point, too, if using), then put back in the fridge.

Whizz the cake- and cookie crumbs in a blender.

Beat together butter, cocoa powder, jam and sugar until fluffy. Mix in the crumb mix and then enough juice (with a splosh of rum or cognac if you wish) to get a fairly moist but not runny "batter" - if it's too wet, just let it stand for a while to let the crumbs suck up the excess moisture.

Roll out small rounds of the chocolate truffle mix, then surround each truffle with a half-inch-thick layer of the cake batter. (Both of these steps are very very messy!) Roll in the chocolate sprinkles to coat completely - you'll need more of those than you think - and let rest in the fridge overnight (or longer) before serving.

Addendum: do let them come back to room temperature before eating to let the flavors emerge properly.

Asparagus with Browned Butter and Scallions

2007-05-24T20:06:00.000+02:00

I've actually made this dish twice this month without managing to get a decent picture - and it's a beautiful one on the plate! The recipe comes from Tina Nordström, a popular Swedish TV chef, or rather from the homepage of the channel that airs her show here. (Swedish speakers ahoy, you can find lots of interesting stuff on FST's Mat & Fritid pages.)

Stir-frying until just al dente is my new favorite method of preparing asparagus. Not to blow my own horn overmuch, but they always wind up beautifully crunchy. And the browned butter, spiced with soy sauce, herbs and onions, is a stroke of genius and would probably go well with chicken or white fish fillets as well.

Asparagus with Browned Butter and Scallions
adapted from Tinas mat, serves 3-4

500 g asparagus
100 ml grated parmesan (the first time around I made parmesan shavings as per the original instructions, but that was a pain, although very pretty)
small bunch of tarragon, finely chopped
3 scallions, finely chopped (the recipe called for shallots, and indeed that was good, too)
2 tsp soy sauce
3 tbsp butter
salt & pepper

Trim the ends of the asparagus spears by snapping them off.

Cook the butter in a small pan until just slightly browned. Mix with soy sauce, onions and herbs; set aside.

Fry the asparagus in a bit of oil (really, half a teaspoon was plenty in a non-stick pan) until just al dente - mine took about 2-3 minutes. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, then the sauce, and finally the grated/shaved parmesan.

Reilusti epäonnistunut kakku & upea sitruunajäde (Failed Fair Trade Cake + Lemon Ice Cream)

2007-05-22T22:21:00.000+02:00

Tästä chilisuklaakakusta piti tulla rahkalan ruokahaastepostaus, mutta innostuin muokkailemaan sikavarmaa reseptiä liian monella reilulla tuotteella ja kakun koostumus on niin mureneva ettei sitä oikein voi suositella. (Epäilisin syypääksi suklaata, koska se oli ainoa aines jota alkuperäiskakussa ei ollut.) Kakunloput odottelevat nyt keittiönpöydällä kuivumista, sillä muruille keksin jo muuta käyttöä. Pitää vain toivoa että ehdin siitäkin rustata postia ennen perjantai-iltaa... Itse maussa ei siis ole vikaa, ja alempana annan myös sen alkuperäisreseptin joka on pari-kolme kertaa onnistuneesti tullut tehtyä.

Sen sijaan kyytipojaksi väsätty sitruunajäätelö, joka on ennemmin luomu kuin reilu (vaikkei sitäkään ihan täysin), oli ihan tajuttoman onnistunut väkerrys, varsinkin sitruunoja joskus poikasena sellaisenaan mutustaneelle ruokailijalle...

In English: This cake was going to be my entry for this month's Finnish food challenge, the theme of which was fair trade products. However, it's kind of... crumbly. As in, very. I think the chocolate is to blame, because I've made this cake minus the chocolate more than once and always had great success - chili and chocolate is just one of those perfect combinations. But now I have cake crumbs drying out all over the kitchen counter, because I have a Fabulous Idea - I'm just not sure I'll have the tie to implement it before the deadline on Friday.

The lemon ice cream I winged to go with turned out fabulous though. You'll find the recipes for both after the cut - just leave off the chocolate to get the foolproof recipe.

Chilisuklaakakku
2 dl jogurttia
120 g voita, sulatettuna
(100 g tummaa reilun kaupan suklaata) - tämän jättäisin pois
2,5 dl (reilun kaupan) ruokosokeria - urtekramin sitä hienointa
2 dl jauhoja
6 rkl (reilun kaupan) kaakaojauhetta
2 tl chilijauhetta
1 tl kanelia
½ tl ruokasoodaa
1 (luomu)kananmuna
100 ml hasselpähkinöitä paahdettuina ja hienonnettuina

Sulata suklaa voisulassa jos ehdottomasti haluat toistaa omat mokani. Sekoita voisula ja jogurtti. Vatkaa kananmuna kevyesti ja sekoita jogurttiin.

Sekoita keskenaan kuivat ainekset: jauhot, sokeri, kaakaojauhe, kaneli, chili ja sooda. Sekoita jogurttiseoes varovasti jauhoihin; kääntele joukkoon hasselpähkinärouhe.

Kaada irtoreunaiseen kakkuvuokaan ja paista 175ssä asteessa noin 30 min.

Sitruunajäätelö

3 (luomu)kananmunankeltuaista
2 dl (luomu)vispikermaa
1 dl kevytmaitoa (voi korvata kermalla)
90 g sokeria
2 pienehköä luomusitruunaa

Raasta sitruunoista kuori ja sekoita kerman ja maidon kanssa kattilassa. Kuumenna melkein-kiehuvaksi, ota liedeltä, ja anna seistä parisenkymmentä minuuttia.

Vatkaa sokeri ja keltuaiset vaaleaksi vaahdoksi. Kaada kermaseos hitaasti munasokerin joukkoon (vatkaten!). Kaada seos takaisin kattilaan ja kuumenna keskilämmöllä, koko ajan sekoittaen, kunnes seos sakenee, kymmenisen minuuttia. (Itse teen tätä aika korkealla lämmöllä eikä ongelmia ole ollut, mutta kukin tehköön niin varovaisesti kuin viitsii.) Anna jäähtyä huonenlämpöiseksi ja pistä jääkaappiin vähintään tunniksi.

Purista sitruunoista mehu ja sekoita se jäätelöseokseen. Jäädytä jäätelökoneen ohjeiden mukaan.

Chili Chocolate Cake
200 ml yogurt
120 g butter, melted
(100 g dark fair trade chocolate) - I'd skip this
250 ml (fair trade) sugar
200 ml flour
6 tbsp (fair trade) cocoa powder
2 tsp chili powder
1 tsp cinnamon
½ tsp baking soda
1 (organic) egg
100 ml hazelnuts, toasted and finely chopped

Melt the chocolate in the melted butter if you must, but as I said, I suspect this to be the bad guy texture-wise. Mix butter and yogurt; lightly whip the egg and mix that in too.

Sift together the dry ingredients: flour, sugar, cocoa powder, cinnamon, chili and baking soda. Fold the yogurt mixture into the dry ingredients and finally blend in the chopped hazelnuts.

Pour into a cake tin with removable sides and bake at 175°C for about half an hour. Cool before serving.

Lemon Ice Cream

3 (organic) egg yolks
200 ml (organic) whipping cream
100 ml milk (or cream)
90 g sugar
2 smallish organic lemons

Zest the lemons and mix with the cream and milk. Bring to an almost-boil and take off the stove. Let stand for about twenty minutes.

Whip the sugar and egg yolks white and fluffy. Slowly pour the cream into the whipped eggs (while whipping to prevent the scrambled egg thing). Return the mixture to the stove and heat on medium-high while stirring continuously until the custard thickens, about ten minutes. Let cool to room temperature and refrigerate for an hour.

Squeeze the juice from the lemons and mix into the custard, freeze according to the instructions of your ice cream maker.

Black Radish Omelet

2007-05-19T18:59:00.000+02:00

When I'm eating alone and don't happen to have any leftovers to finish (admittedly, this happens rarely) I usually go for an omelet. It's fast, easy, you can vary the ingredients indefinitely, and it tastes great plonked on whatever bread you have around. This time, I used sourdough rye crispbread with nettles - bought, not made, although I may have to copy this some day.

The recipe comes from Fuchsia Dunlop's Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook, which I got just this week - this was the first thing I tried, but certainly not the last! (Note to self: find fermented black beans somewhere.) Of course, the book called for daikon radish, which I didn't have, so instead I went for black radish which tastes very similar to me. (At least my dictionary tells me it's black radish, however there's not actually anything black about the ones you get here - I was going to say Finnish but, um, these were from Italy - and the small thin ones are fairly mild.)

Black Radish Omelet
adapted from Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook, serves 2

about 150 g young black radish (one smallish radish)
½: tsp salt
3 sprigs spring onions
1 tbsp groundnut oil
3 eggs
salt & pepper
cilantro

Slice the radish thinly, then cut the slices into strips. Sprinkle with salt and let stand for half an hour. Whip the eggs lightly and season with salt and pepper. Slice the spring onions thinly and mix into the eggs.

Heat the oil in a medium-sized nonstick pan. Squeeze out as much liquid from the radishes as you can (I know I read somewhere about drying shredded potatoes in a ricer for hash, that'd probably go well here, too) and stir fry in the pan for a few minutes. Pour in the eggs and fry on medium-low for a few minutes. When the omelet's solidified and taken some color at the bottom, flip it over and fry on the other side for a minute or so. Sprinkle with more pepper and chopped cilantro.

Goat Cheese, Cherry Tomato & Herb Tarts

2007-05-18T20:35:00.000+02:00

Operation Empty Freezer continues! These parmesan pastry crusts had lived there for so long I don't even remember anything about the recipe. Ooops. Since the goat cheese-disliking contingent of the household is away for the long weekend, I filled them with a mix of Dijon mustard, grated parmesan, soft goat cheese and fresh herbs (oregano and tarragon, and a few leaves of basil) and topped with cherry tomatoes brushed with a bit of olive oil.

Sprinkle with sea salt and bake at about 175°C/350°F for 20 minutes, until the tomatoes are soft and crinkly and the cheese gets a bit of color. And don't try to eat them while hot. No-one likes boiling cherry tomato explosions in their mouth. Ahem.

Eurovision Salad

2007-05-12T20:20:00.000+02:00

At first, this was going to be just blue potatoes and yellow beets, but then I realized that serving a dish in the colors of the Ark*-nemesis (oh, how I crack myself up sometimes) tonight of all nights (Eurovision song contest!** In Helsinki!), never mind tomorrow (Hockey World Championship final! Although it looks like we're playing Canada and not Sweden) would not be politic, so I wound up adding hard-boiled eggs, red bell pepper and scallions, so you can make up the flag of whomever you wind up supporting.

Except Ireland. I knew I'd forgotten something! Well, you could add carrots.

I wish I'd taken a picture before mixing in the dressing - it was like an explosion of bright, happy colors, whereas afterwards... well, you can see. I've decided that the gooey look is a representation of the general musical quality of tonight's entries. (It's a good dressing though. Don't skip it.)

Happy watching, everyone! I know I'm going to be hiding behind a pillow from embarrassment at least 25% of the time (and howling with laughter for another quarter), but that's kind of the point, right?

*note to non-Europeans: this is a Eurovision reference.
**although actually, Ark is one of my favorite entries. Not the favorite though.

Blue Potato, Yellow Beet (& Normal-Colored Vegetable) Salad
3 medium Blue Kongo potatoes
2 medium yellow beets, roasted
small bunch of scallions
2 bell peppers, grilled, peeled, and cut into slices
2 tbsp capers, rinsed
3 eggs, hard-boiled
1 tbsp Dijon mustard
100 ml crème fraîche
100 ml mayonnaise
juice of half a lemon

Boil the potatoes in salted water until tender. Drain & cool. Cut potatoes and beets into chunks and chop the scallions.

Separate the egg yolks from the whites. Chop the whites and set aside. Mash the yolks with a fork, mix with the mustard, then blend with crème fraîche and mayo. Mix in the lemon juice and finally the capers.

Inm a big bowl, mix together potatoes, beets, peppers, scallions and egg whites. Fold in the dressing. The taste improves if you let it stand (in the fridge) for a few hours before serving.

Beet, Goat Cheese & Nettle Tart

2007-05-11T15:48:00.000+02:00

This was going to be a glowing explosion of colors, with yellow beets nestling with their pink-and-white striped siblings, and nettle-speckled goat cheese peeking out from underneath. Alas, the candy-striped beets turned out to be... not. I rather want my money back on those.

So instead this is just a sunny repeat of the last post, in pie form: leftover wilted nettles mixed with soft goat cheese under a layer or two of beets, sprinkled with the last of the mint dressing. All contained in a shell of store-bought pastry dough (low fat & partly whole grained - don't do it! or at least, if you have a good recipe for a dough of this kind, let me know!) and baked at 200°C for about half an hour.

Goat cheese works really well with beets, so with a decent crust, this would have been a keeper. If you try this at home, I'd also consider reserving some of the mint vinaigrette to sprinkle on after it comes out of the oven, mostly for aesthetic reasons.

Roasted Beet "Flowers" with Nettles and Mint Vinaigrette

2007-05-09T22:55:00.000+02:00

Earlier this week I headed over to one of the larger grocery/deli places in town (Stockan Herkku, for those of you playing in Helsinki). With no planned meals in mind, I went a little overboard in the fresh produce aisle and came away with a motley assortment of interesting things: a nice-sized rosemary plant to plonk on the balcony once we're past the frost scares for good, blue kongo potatoes, cinnamon basil (proved to be Quite Nice on top of some salmon), and yellow and candy-striped beets. (What can I say? We all go a little crazy sometimes.)

In the checkout line, I noticed the customer before me buying some nettle bread. It was too late to go back for some without causing severe irritation in my fellow shoppers, but it did remind me that our stamp-sized garden, besides patches of wood anemones and a few straggling tulips, also has some nettles pushing up amidst all the moss. Now, the Swedish food blogs I follow have been fairly bursting with wild greens lately (for whatever reason, this doesn't seem to be a Thing for Finnish foodies), and while botany is not my thing, I do feel confident in my ability to not poison myself with nettles.

Then, of course, I was completely stumped as to what to do with all these vegetables, until an Internet Friend, who shall go nameless, told me: Wilted Nettle Salad With Roasted Beets And Mint Vinaigrette. You should all have Internet Friends as great as mine, yeah? That is just sheer genius, right there. Unfortunately, I totally wimped out with the nettles at the last minute and mixed them with some ricotta instead. (In retrospect, I think they were better this way.) The presentation is totally stolen from Alanna's beet carpaccio, which I must try out sometime.

Now if I could figure out what to do with the blue potatoes. I understand they taste like... potatoes, which is bound to be something of a let-down, so it has to be good. I haven't made the microwave potato chips yet...

Roasted Beet Flowers with Nettles and Mint Vinaigrette
serves 2

2 medium beets
1 tbsp olive oil
2 cups young nettle leaves
125 ml (or so) ricotta cheese
salt & pepper

vinaigrette:
1 bunch mint, finely chopped
2 tbsp cider vinegar
3 tbsp olive oil
1 tsp sugar
½ tsp fennel, ground
salt & pepper

The method for roasting the beets apes that of Alanna: wash the beets thoroughly, pat dry, then rub skins with some olive oil. Wrap tightly in foil and roast at 190°C (375°F) for about an hour. Let cool a bit, then rub between your hands to remove the skin. (It's pretty silly to keep the oven turned on for an hour for two beets, so I did a whole bunch at once. Look for more beety things later on in the week, I guess.) Slice thinly.

Wilt the nettles in a bit of simmering water, drain. Chop them finely and season with salt and pepper, then mix with the ricotta. (I should have squeezed the nettles to dry them out a bit more.)

Whisk together the ingredients for the vinaigrette. Arrange the beet slices prettily on plates, sprinkle with dressing (you'll probably have some over), and spoon the nettle mixture in the middle.

Asparagus, Bacon & Poached Egg Salad

2007-05-06T23:00:00.000+02:00

This salad was part of our May Day brunch, which was luckily very small - this was the only dish to be prepared on the spot. As a light lunch, it works marvelously on its own (although I'd accompany it with either croutons or garlic-and-oil-rubbed toast) and you certainly don't want to be fussing about trying to prepare other things while frying the asparagus and poaching the eggs.

Maybe it's just that my poaching skills still leave something to be desired, though - it always feels like such a stressful procedure. In the end I wound up taking pictures before drizzling on the dressing, so if you could imagine this whole shebang with flecks of herb-oily goodness I would be most obliged.

Asparagus, Bacon & Poached Egg Salad

based on this recipe at Finfood, serves 4

500 g (1 lb) asparagus, trimmed
170 g (6 oz) bacon, cut into bite-size pieces
a few cups mixed greens
4 eggs
2 tbsp vinegar

dressing:
3 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
2 tbsp white balsamic vinegar
1 tsp sugar
a big bunch of basil, finely chopped
a big bunch of thyme, finely chopped
salt & pepper

Start off by mixing the ingredients for the dressing or you'll be in trouble later on (not that I'd ever, etc).

Fry the bacon until crisp, drain on paper towels. Reserve some of the fat from the bacon and fry the asparagus in it until (barely) soft and slightly browned. Meanwhile, bring a pot of water to a simmer, and add the vinegar to it.

Mix together salad greens, bacon and asparagus, add most of the dressing and toss gently to coat. Divide onto plates.

Crack the eggs and pour into individual cups/glasses. Carefully slide the eggs into the water and let cook for about two minutes (the yolks will still be fairly runny), then remove eggs with a slotted spoon (making sure they're properly drained) and place on top of salads. Drizzle with the rest of the dressing.

Lemon Poppyseed Muffins

2007-05-06T21:46:00.000+02:00

Apologies for the lack of updates lately - the Quark team has been feeling a bit under the weather, from writer to co-cook to computer. Not quite in a curl up and die way, more on the lines of putter around listlessly, emptying freezer of various casseroles instead of cooking; discover a wonderful new brand of caramel-flavored mints and rave about it for days. (Or, in the case of the computer, take fifty-three seconds to switch between one window and the next; develop love affair with hourglass cursor; make crunchy noises at random intervals.)

I do have a salad from last week to post about later if the pictures turned out even halfway decent, but meanwhile, here are some lemon poppyseed muffins I made last night. They're based on Elise's recipe, but since I only had super-thick Turkish yogurt I added some lemon juice to thin it out as well as decreasing the sugar and using partly white poppy seeds (for the prosaic reason that I ran out of regular ones). They were fabulous fifteen minutes after coming out of the oven, and pretty damn good for breakfast today.

This type of muffin is another one of my late-teen US discoveries. I remember the best ones being somehow crunchier than this; next time I think I'll add some rolled oats or something to change the texture a bit. And I could do with even less sugar for a breakfast treat - morning is the only time of day when I don't have a sweet tooth.

Lemon Poppyseed Muffins
makes 12 largish muffins or about 15 regular ones

700 ml (3 cups) all-purpose flour
1 tbsp baking powder
½ tsp baking soda
3 tbsp poppy seeds (I used about half black, half white)
zest of one lemon

130 g (about 4½ oz) lightly salted butter, softened
200 ml (scant 7 fl oz) sugar
2 eggs
300 ml (10 fl oz) thick yogurt (or a bit more regular yogurt, drained)
50 ml (about 3 tbsp) lemon juice

200 ml (scant 7 fl oz) icing sugar
2 tbsp lemon juice

Mix together flour, baking powder, soda and poppy seeds in a large bowl.

In another bowl, beat the sugar and butter until light and fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time and beat until well incorporated. Blend in the lemon zest.

In a third bowl (sorry! use a measuring cup or something), mix together lemon juice and yogurt.

Add the dry ingredients and yogurt to the egg-butter fluff in alternating batches, stirring until just barely dissolved. Spoon into a muffin tin and bake at 200°C (390°F) for 20-25 minutes.

Stir together icing sugar and lemon and brush over the still-warm muffins. Eat warm.

May Day: Raspberry Doughnuts & Mead

2007-05-01T14:20:00.000+02:00

vadelmamunkit & sima / hallonmunkar & mjöd

There are two kinds of fried sweet goods traditional for May Day over here, doughnuts and May Day fritters (tippaleivät/struvor), which Americans at least would recognize as funnel cakes. The fritters are really more authentic, but as I don't have an army to feed and happen to prefer doughnuts, the choice had to be made.

This was my first time making jam-filled doughnuts, so some research had to be done into how to accomplish this miracle of haute cuisine. In the end, it turned out to be surprisingly simple.

As for the mead, every year I astound myself by managing to not blow up bottles or wind up with a flat sugar syrup instead of this wonderfully refreshing fizzy delight. I wouldn't call this foolproof, because I've seen the former happen (my mother is still traumatized fifteen years after the fact). I do believe the recipe comes from the side of the bag of brown sugar, except I use more lemons.

Raspberry Doughnuts

makes about 35 smallish doughnuts

2 eggs
150 ml sugar
2 tsp salt
1 tbsp ground cardamom
500 ml lukewarm milk
50 g fresh yeast
150 g butter, softened
~1½ l flour

raspberry jam

1-1½ l oil for frying

Beat the eggs and sugar until light and fluffy. Dissolve the yeast in the warm milk and blend with the egg mixture. Blend salt and cardamom with about half of the flour and stir into the liquids. Work in the softened butter, then add the rest of the flour, a little at a time until you have a soft, springy dough. (You may need a bit more flour than specified, but try to use as little as you can as this will make the doughnuts softer.) Cover and let rise for about 40 minutes, until doubled in size.

Divide the dough in two, roll out to a thickness of about a cm (scant ½-inch), and cut out circles with a cookie cutter or glass. Flatten these a bit, dot a teaspoon or so of jam onto half of the dough rounds, then top each with another round and pinch the edges of the two rounds together firmly. With a cookie cutter (or glass), trim off the edges so you have a neat, round jelly-filled disc. Repeat with the other dough-half and then the scraps. Cover with a towel and let rise while you heat the oil.

Fry in hot oil for about a minute and a half on each side, until nicely browned. Drain on paper towels, then toss in a plastic bag with some caster sugar to coat.

The jam inside these is VERY HOT. Let them cool properly before trying to eat.

Mead
250 g soft brown sugar
250 g caster sugar
2 large organic lemons
4 l water
1 ml fresh or dry yeast

Dissolve the sugars by bringing them to a boil mixed with about a liter of the water. Add the rest of the water to the sugar mixture together with the juice and peel from the lemons (large strips are easier to deal with later on). Wait for the liquid to cool to lukewarm, then sprinkle on the yeast and stir. Let stand at room temperature for about 24 hours, stirring occasionally, then pour (strained through cheesecloth) into clean bottles with tight-fitting caps. Before closing the bottles, drop a few raisins in each and sprinkle on about a tsp of sugar. Let stand at room temperature for about 3 days or in the fridge for 5 (safer). Serve cold.

Hamburger Buns

2007-04-29T22:40:00.000+02:00

We kicked off the grilling season last weekend with these extremely conventional hamburgers. In truth, it could have happened a lot earlier, weather-wise, but the barbecue, which had wintered on the balcony, had mysteriously acquired a layer of greeny-gray mold, and it took some girding of loins, etc, before it could be tackled. (Please tell us how to avoid this fate next year, as it will then be my turn to clean it!)

Anyway, the point of this isn't the grilled patties (since I'm not the designated griller in this household), or even the rest of the fillings. (Look, it was the first hamburger of the season. Nasty processed cheddar-like substance is totally required. I think there's a law somewhere.)

The point is, I love these hamburger buns. It's slightly embarrassing, because it's basically just... white bread. Very unhealthy white bread. That goes stale in, like, twelve hours. Still. They taste right, and not like the plastic-textured ones you buy ready made.

Hamburger Buns
based on Jorden runt på 80 degar by Annica Triberg

for 6-8 buns

25 g (scant 1 oz) butter
250 ml (&1 cup) milk
25 g (scant 1 oz) fresh yeast
½ tsp salt
½ tbsp sugar
600-700 ml (2½-3 cups) all-purpose flour

1 egg
sesame seeds

Melt the butter in a pan, add the mil and heat until lukewarm. Crumble in the yeast and stir until dissolved. Add salt, sugar, and most of the flour and knead until you have a smooth dough. Cover and let rise for 30 minutes.

Punch down the dough and roll it out to a thickness of about 1cm (scant ½inch). Cut out rounds about 10 cm in diameter and transfer to a cookie sheet. Cover and let rise about half an hour.

Whip the egg lightly and brush the buns with it. Sprinkle with sesame seeds and bake at 225°C (440°F) for about 10-12 minutes. Cool on racks.

White Bean & Pecan Salad

2007-04-29T20:17:00.000+02:00

I usually see beans as belonging in stews and soups, mostly because I can't for the life of me cook them to perfection. Beans turn mushy, this is a fact of life, and mushiness in salads is generally frowned upon. Imagine my joy when I noticed, in a recent issue of Ruoka & viini, a recipe for a bean salad where you overcooked the beans on purpose. (This was part of a Georgian - the country, not the state - menu with several other dishes I've been meaning to try out - there's a cheese pie that sounds divine.)

Then, of course, I forgot about it for over a month until one day while grocery shopping I thought I remembered the details well enough to wing it. I didn't, as it happened, and wound up having to improvise a bit. It's not a very pretty dish - the pecans are ground together with spices and herbs, the browned onions are kind of the same color as the mushy beans - but there's a nice piquant edge to the thing, where the sharpness of the vinegar is cut by earthy, cinnamon-dominated spiciness.

White Bean & Pecan Salad
serves 4 as a light lunch/starter; adapted from Glorian ruoka & viini 2/2007

150 g dry white beans (cannellini or navy)
2 large onions, chopped
4 cloves garlic, minced
2 tbsp olive oil
3 tbsp white wine vinegar
150 ml pecans, lightly toasted
a bunch of fresh basil
a bunch of fresh parsley
½ tsp each ground coriander and cinnamon
¼ tsp each ground cloves and nutmeg
1 tsp Maldon salt
(fresh greens)

(the original used walnuts instead of pecans and dill and cilantro instead of parsley, among other things)

Soak the beans in plenty of water overnight. Drain and cover with fresh water in a largeish pan. Cook for about an hour, until just slightly overcooked. Drain and set aside.

Fry the onions in the oil until nicely browned. Reduce the heat, add the minced garlic and stir until the garlic's cooked through. Add the beans and cook for a few minutes, stirring occasionally.

In a blender, grind the pecans, basil, parsley and spices. Mix with the vinegar, add salt and blend with the beans. Let stand at room temperature for about half an hour.

Toss with a few handfuls of greens just before serving.

Vuohenjuustotryffelit (Goat Cheese Truffles)

2007-04-25T14:43:00.000+02:00

This post is an answer to the Finnish food blog challenge for April. Recipe & writeup in English after the Finnish versions.

Ihanko oikeesti piti vuohenjuustostakin värkätä makea haastevastaus? Ilmeisesti. Tämä resepti osui alkukuusta silmään kun mietiskelin haasteideoita. Pistin sen varoksi muistiin "jollei muuta keksi" - ja kuinka ollakaan, huhtikuu on ihan loppumetreillä eikä vuohenjuustosta sen pahemmin ole täällä kokkailtu.

Koska halusin osan tryffeleistä sisuksiltaan valkoisiksi muokkailin tuota alkuperäistä aikalailla. Myöskään "tuoretta" vuohenjuustoa ei kuun aikana osunut kohdalle, joten päädyin käyttämään jonkin verran mascarponea äksyn vuohen taltuttamiseksi. Puolet tryffeleistä on suklaassa käytettyä juusto-voi-sokeri-sössöä, ja loppuun juustosekoitukseen sekoitin suklaan jo valmiiksi. Ne pyöriteltiin sitten pistaasirouheessa, lähinnä ulkonäkösyistä.

Ja se maku sitten? Hieman yllättäen ihan tajuttoman hyvä. Vuohenjuusto terästyttää kummasti tryffeleiden makua jännällä, vähän kahvimaisella(?) tavalla.

In English: the theme for April's food challenge was goat cheese. No, not goat cheese in sweet dishes, just goat cheese. I noticed this recipe when surfing for ideas earlier this month, and saved it "just in case" - right. Since I wanted to keep the filling of half the truffles white, I had to do quite a lot of changes: half the truffles are just balls of cheese-butter-sugar mixture dipped in melted chocolate - for the rest, the chocolate is mixed in with the cheese etc, then formed into balls and rolled in chopped pistachios.

I have to admit I chose to make them solely for the truffles with WHAT?? aspect, but they're really surprisingly yummy. Like mini chocolate cheesecakes with a nice tang of something I bet people wouldn't be able to put a name to if they didn't already know.

Vuohenjuustotryffelit
innoitus: Gourmet lokakuu/1993

75 g pehmeää vuohenjuustoa
75 g mascarponea
50 g voita (huoneenlämpöistä)
2 rkl tomusokeria
¼ tl vaniljauutetta
75 + 100 g tummaa suklaata
(pistaasipähkinöitä koristeluun)

Notkista juustot keskenään (jos tykkää vuohenjuustosta ja vahvoista makuyhdistelmistä vuohenjuuston osuutta voisi mielestäni vielä lisätä) ja sekoita joukkoon sokeri ja vanilja. Vaahdota voi ja sekoita muihin aineisiin.

Rouhi 75 g suklaata ja sulata joko mikrossa tai vesihauteessa. Ota juustoseoksesta noin kolmannes ja sekoita suklaaseen. Anna sekä suklaa- että maustamattoman juustoseoksen jähmettyä jääkaapissa noin tunti. Tee kummastakin seoksesta noin kymmenen pikkupalloa. (Melkoisen sottaista puuhaa, toim. huom.) Kierittele suklaapallot heti pistaasirouheessa (tai muussa vastaavassa).

Valkoisten tryffelien kohdalla minulla ainakin oli sen verran ongelmia löysyyden kanssa että käväytin niitä pakkasessakin sillä aikaa kuin sulatin loput suklaasta kuorrutusta varten. Rouhi loput suklaasta ja sulata kuten aikaisemmin. Anna jäähtyä viitisen minuuttia. Dippaa juustopallot suklaaseen ja asettele voipaperille (jääkaappiin) jähmettymään.

Säilytetään jääkaapissa.

Goat Cheese Truffles
based on a recipe from Gourmet, Oct. 1993

75 g soft goat cheese
75 g mascarpone
50 g butter (softened)
2 tbsp icing sugar
¼ tsp vanilla
75 + 100 g dark chocolate
(pistachios for decoration

Blend together the cheeses; add sugar and vanilla and blend until smooth. Cream the butter and add to the cheese mixture.

Chop or grate 75 g of the chocolate and melt either in a water bath or the microwave. Take about a third of the cheese mixture and fold into the chocolate. Let both the chocolate and plain batter rest in the fridge for about an hour, then form each into about ten small balls (this will be somewhat messy). Roll the chocolate truffles in chopped pistachio - or your topping of choice and set aside (in the fridge, where the truffles should be stored).

I had to put the plain cheese balls in the freezer to firm them up enough to coat with chocolate, ymmv. Melt the rest of the chocolate as before and let cool for a bit, then dip each ball in the chocolate to coat completely and transfer to a plate (again, in the fridge) to dry.

Ginger Mead

2007-04-23T21:39:00.000+02:00

inkiväärisima / ingefärsmjöd

Note: apologies for the lack of decent pictures! Today was a rainy, dismal day, besides which, I don't really have a finished product yet. I'll update with more pictures later in the week.

It's that time of the month again - Leftover Tuesday! This time, I'm using some extremely potent ginger syrup, a by-product from making crystallized ginger, to make a slightly different version of a very topical Finnish treat: mead, which is typically served with May Day fritters or doughnuts on, yes, May Day (and Walpurgis Night, the day before).

Now, making Finnish mead isn't quite as involved as brewing in general, nor does it produce a beverage with any more than a negligible alcohol content. You don't need any special equipment - I've even made it in regular plastic bottles - or ingredients, since it's made with regular fresh yeast. What you do need, however, is a bit of time and patience, and since I only bottled this last night, I can't even tell you what it tastes like yet. I'll be making a post on regular sima later in the week in honor of the upcoming Walpurgis, but if you want to get some ready by the 30th, here is a very typical recipe.

Of course, for the impatient among us, there's always ginger ale - a splosh of ginger syrup, another of soda water, and some ice.

Look for a roundup of all the fabulous leftover ideas over at Ceres & Bacchus later in the week.

Ginger Mead

350 ml strong ginger syrup (leftovers from making crystallized ginger last week)
125 g dark brown sugar
250 g caster sugar
4.5 l water
1/5 tsp fresh yeast
(raisins)

Dissolve the sugars in about half of the water. Mix with the syrup and the rest of the water in a large pan/jar/bucket and leave to cool a bit. Once the mixture is lukewarm, sprinkle on the yeast (yes, that is one fifth of a tsp) and stir to dissolve. Cover loosely and let stand at room temperature overnight.

Once the mixture has started to ferment the following day, strain through a sieve into bottles. Sprinkle a tiny bit of sugar and some raisins into each bottle, then close tightly. The mead is ready when the raisins puff up and rise to the surface, about three days at room temperature or 5-7 days in the fridge.

Be careful when opening the bottles - it can be very fizzy!

Crystallized Ginger

2007-04-23T18:08:00.000+02:00

This may sound a tiny bit twee (making your own candied ginger?), but as a mitigating circumstance I should say that this isn't a condiment to be readily found in the shops here - I'm sure you could get it, but I've never come across any. Which is kind of a pity, because I have a weird obsession with it: I could eat it like candy! At first, there is the pronounced sweetness of the sugar it's rolled in, then the slight tang of ooh, fruity, and then finally the wonderful burn. Oh, how I love it.

Sadly, I'm the only one who does, it seems. Someone should really hide that jar from me, because I can't walk past it without grabbing a slice or two of ginger and gobbling it up. I had plans for this batch! Plans which included doing stuff with it. Other than coating it in chocolate and eating it all up (instead I settled for mixing it with some mocha beans I got for my birthday - one of each, open mouth, savor).

I'm not going to post the recipe here, since it's available on the internet and I followed it to the letter (how could I not - there was 7-up! steaming! 6 hours of cooking!). Just keep in mind when starting out that although there's not much actual work involved, it does take the better part of a day to finish, so make a big batch. Supposedly it will keep forever, but I doubt I'll ever find out.

Oh, and don't throw away the syrup! Make mead with it instead.

Ansjovis- och lökpasta (Sprat & Onion Pasta)

2007-04-21T21:40:00.001+02:00

As before, there's a writeup and recipe in English if you scroll down.

Tidigare i veckan skrev jag ett inlägg om nåt som jag kanske mot lite bättre vetande ville kalla "frestelse" - främst för att det är roligare att tala om "temptation" än om "casserole" som låter direkt mos(s)igt. Nå, oberoende fick jag till min stora förvåning reda på att det vi på svenska (och finska, måste man väl därmed anta) kallar ansjovis inte alls är anchovies på engelska, utan sprats. (Anchovies är sardeller.)

Nu har jag en längre tid kockat främst från engelska recept, ganska ofta från sådana som innehåller "anchovies" ty det blir gott och pikant tycker jag. Fast jag alltså gjort helt fel hela tiden. Efter att ha återhämtat mig från chocken insåg jag såklart att detta i praktiken utökar min lista på favoritrecept avsevärt, eftersom man ju såklart måste testa allting också på det avsedda viset.

Sen hade min närbutik inga sardeller alls, så då fick jag nöja mig med det gamla vanliga ändå. Lite snopet, såklart, men å andra sidan kan jag då lägga in det här receptet i Jespers ansjovistävling. Så värst originellt eller nyskapande är det ju inte, men tycker man om karamelliserad lök (vilket jag gör) så blir det här en mumsig och enkel (om än inte så snabb) pastarätt.

I övrigt är det på riktigt bästa ansjovisreceptet gubbröra, men det har jag aldrig gjort själv, bara glufsat i mig mammas och mormors.

In English: having detailed my problems with the "my anchovies aren't anchovies but sprats" conundrum earlier this week, here is a recipe that would probably work just as well with either fish. Not fast, and not very elegant (a broader pasta would do the trick but I didn't have any), but if you like caramelized onions (and I do), this makes for a very pleasant lunch.

Ansjovis- och lökpasta
för två-tre personer

3 stora lökar
en slurk olivolja
8 små ansjovisfileer (hälften av en 80g burk)
5 soltorkade tomater
(en slurk vin eller sherry)
lite persilja
peppar
pasta (själv har jag en konstig med fullkornsspagetti, men man tager såklart vad man haver lust för)

Skiva löken fint och fräs den mjuk i en ordentlig slurk olja (använder jag oljedränkta tomater så tar jag av den) på relativt hög värme. När löken börjar ta färg sänks värmen och stekningen fortsätts (under omrörning) tills den är helt igenom gyllenbrun.

Tärna den soltorkade tomaten och ansjovisen fint och blanda dem med löken, eventuellt också med en slurk vin eller sherry. Koka i några minuter, smaka av med peppar och blanda i persiljan.

Blanda med den färdigkokta pastan i kastrullen och servera genast, med parmesan om du inte är Fiskpasta Utan Ost!!!-purist.

Sprat & Onion Pasta
serves 2-3
3 large onions
a tbsp or two of olive oil
8 small sprat filets (or anchovies, about 40 g drained fish)
5 sun-dried tomatoes
(a few tbsp of wine or sherry)
a few tbsp of fresh parsley
pepper to taste
pasta

Slice the onion thinly and soften on moderate heat in the oil (if I'm using oil-stored tomatoes, I use oil from the jar). Once it starts getting a bit of color, lower the heat, cover, and keep frying, stirring every now and then, until the onion is a deep golden brown color.

Chop the sprats and tomatoes finely and add to the onions, possibly with a splosh of wine or sherry. Keep frying for a few minutes, then toss in the parsley and season with freshly groud black pepper. Mix with the pasta and serve immediately, with parmesan if you don't disapprove of the cheese-and-fish combo.

Fish & Quips: Cottage Pie

2007-04-20T20:20:00.000+02:00

I love English desserts. When I think of English food, it's not blandness that springs to mind (of course, Finnish cuisine is the only one inferior to the English, so my opinion shouldn't count for very much), but an abundance of hearty, unfussy sweets, laden with fruits and especially berries - take a look at summer pudding as a prime example. Not to mention trifles, and fools, and crumbles. (I've even tried to make my own clotted cream, with, erm, interesting results.) Oh, and custards. Homemade custard is so good... In fact, I think I've solved my what about Sunday's dessert problem, or rather, replaced it with its opposite: how to choose from all of those...

With all this love for English desserts, it may be a bit of a surprise that the dish I'm presenting for the English food isn't a joke-event, hosted by Sam of Becks & Posh, is a savory one, and it's not even an English breakfast (mmm, fried tomatoes and rashers and eggs and baked beans). And there's nothing funny about cottage pie other than the name - that the lamb version is a shepherd's pie is quite understandable, if you overlook the fact that it is in fact not the least pie-like, but rather a casserole. A layer-deficient casserole. But what's so cottage-y about beef mince?

Anyway, we all know how I like my casseroles, and the weather is obliging me by being very English (pouring rain and 10°C), so we're going to tuck into this hearty and comforting dish RIGHT NOW.

Cottage Pie

I don't really have a recipe for you: I made a mince sauce out of finely chopped onions, celery and carrots, half a package of bacon and about 800 g of minced beef, a can of crushed tomatoes and a squeeze of tomato puree, a bay leaf, some beef stock, and salt and pepper. (I let the sauce simmer gently for about half an hour, while preparing the mash topping and heating the oven.)

Then made a mash out of four medium-large potatoes and two parsnips by boiling them, peeled and cut into chunks, in salted water and mashing them together with an, ahem, generous amount of butter and some finely grated cheddar (not exactly kosher, but good), seasoning with freshly ground pepper and nutmeg.

Transferred the meat sauce to a large ovenproof casserole (plus some portion-sized ones) and topped with the mashed root veg, dotted the whole thing with butter, and baked at 175°C until it got a nice color, about 45 minutes.

And, erm. If you fill your baking dishes very full, make sure to have a piece of foil or something at the bottom of your oven catching drips.

Just saying.

Hay, Hay, It's... Earl Grey Mousse with Pear Slices and Raspberries

2007-04-19T23:59:00.000+02:00

As far as I can recall, I haven't made mousse since home ec class. No, wait, I lie! There was this FABULOUS Mint Chocolate Mousse in Nyt (that would be the weekly supplement to Helsingin Sanomat, not the Times) maybe ten years ago, and I made it once and loved it... and lost the recipe (fellow Finns, I would be eternally grateful for that recipe). No, wait, I lie some more! Last year for Independence Day I made a three-mousse dessert (Lemon, Dark Chocolate and Mascarpone & After Eight) that was just... wow. Especially the After Eight.

Maybe I've made mousse once a month my whole life and just keep forgetting about it? This mousse will be remembered, at least, because I made it for Helen's edition of Donna Day, the 11th all-in-all. And because it was interesting - in a good way! It's definitely a grown-up dessert, even though no booze is involved: the combination of Earl Grey tea and dark chocolate gives it quite an edge, which is beautifully cut by the oven-dried pears it's served with.

Indeed, when, erm, licking the bowl, I had some pangs of doubt - the taste of tea felt a bit harsh and overpowering. I don't know whether it was the time in the fridge, settling, or just pairing it with the sweetened, crisp pears and juicy raspberries that brought everything together beautifully by the time it went on the table.

Earl Grey Mousse with Dried Pear Slices and Raspberries
adapted from Glorian Ruoka & Viini, serves 5-6

for the pears:
2 pears
icing sugar

for the mousse:
100 g dark chocolate (I used Lindt 70%)
150 ml + 150 ml + 2 tbsp thick cream
1 tbsp Earl Grey leaves (my tea is VERY strong, so you may want to up this if yours doesn't fill the entire kitchen with bergamot fumes when you open the tin)
150 ml sugar
2 tbsp water
4 egg yolks
2 sheets gelatin

to serve:
raspberries

Wash and dry the pears and slice them thinly. Place the slices on a papered cookie sheet and sprinkle with icing sugar. Dry in a 125°C oven for about an hour or until they're crisp to the touch. Let cool, then carefully peel off the parchment paper.

Chop the chocolate very finely and place in a bowl. Bring 150 ml of cream and 1 tbsp tea to the boil. Take off the heat and let steep for a few minutes, then strain and discard the tea leaves, bring the cream back to the boil, and pour over the chocolate, stirring gently until the chocolate melts.

In another pan, bring sugar and water to a boil. Slowly add the egg yolks to the hot sugar syrup while beating with a handheld electric mixer. Keep beating for a minute or so, then transfer to the bowl of your ~~KitchenAid~~ standing mixer of choice and beat until very light and airy.

In yet another bowl (I know!), beat 150 ml cream to soft-ish peaks. Fold the chocolate mix and the cream into the beaten egg mixture.

Soak the gelatin leaves in cold water for five minutes, then squeeze off excess water and dissolve into the remaining 2 tbsp of cream. (Um, which you've heated. Or it won't dissolve.)

Fold the gelatin cream into the mousse and let rest in the fridge for about an hour (alternatively, spoon into whatever dishes you want to serve it from and save yourself the bother of trying to do the next step). Spoon lumps of mousse onto pear slices; try to make this look attractive.

Serve with raspberries.

Sweet Potato and Bacon Temptation

2007-04-17T23:54:00.000+02:00

OK, so strictly speaking, it's probably not traditional enough to be a temptation: the ur-temptation, Jansson's frestelse (Janssonin kiusaus) consists of layers of julienned potatoes and anchovies (which that wiki article just told me I should be calling sprats - I had no idea!) drenched in cream, and I'd have no qualms about calling a potato-and-ham casserole a temptation, but this? It doesn't even look very tempting (I hate it when that happens), even though I made a few portions in those snazzy little cups, which is so not How It's Done.

Yes, whatever. It's another mushy casserole. I love them. This one involved bacon and cheese, so of course it was yummy. Enough said.

Sweet Potato and Bacon Temptation
based on two different temptations from an old issue of Ruoka & Viini

about a kg (2 medium/large) sweet potatoes
1 medium potato
170 g bacon
3 large onions
3 cloves garlic
a big bunch of basil
350 ml cream (or milk, or a mixture of both)
100 g feta, crumbled
salt & pepper
butter

Julienne the potatoes. Cut the bacon in bite-size pieces and fry until slightly crisp; drain on kitchen paper to get rid of excess fat.

Chop the onions and mince the garlic and mix together in a bowl. Mix with the (coarsely chopped) basil.

Arrange layers of potatoes, onions, feta and bacon in a pan (or several), salting and peppering between layers. Pour over the cream, dot with a bit of butter, and bake at 200°C for about an hour, until the surface of the dish is slightly crispy and the inner parts very very soft.

Sans Rival

2007-04-15T23:59:00.000+02:00

Much like Haalo, when it comes to birthday cakes I am the designated baker even when the birthday is my own. This year, one of my presents was a cream-colored KitchenAid (and believe me, you were *this* close to getting a postful of KitchenAid porn instead of this recipe - it is perhaps the prettiest thing in this apartment, save one of my three cats), so naturally I wanted to make something with lots and lots of whipped things. Such as egg whites and, oh yeah, buttercream. How convenient, then, that I'd already earmarked a recipe that consists almost (actually, there's no "almost" about it) exclusively of meringue and buttercream.

This cake is also known as Ellen Svinhufvud Cake in Finland, after the wife of one of our presidents who liked to have this served at receptions and the like. In other countries I think it's known as Fragilité, but I'm not sure if the recipes are exactly the same. Either way, it's decadent without being cloying, which is always a plus.

It consists of layers of crackling macaroon sheets and is filled and covered with mocha-flavored buttercream and sprinkled with toasted flaked almonds. It's not nearly as difficult to make as I'd thought, and like a lot of things it improves if you have the patience to let it sit in the fridge for a day or two.

And yes, it's exactly as healthy as it sounds.

Sans Rival
the recipe for this was all over the newspapers this winter because of some sort of legal battle. I snagged the proportions from Hufvudstadsbladet and the method from, I think, Helsingin Sanomat

Macaroon layers
150 ml icing sugar
200 ml egg white (~6 eggs)
150 g (very finely) ground almonds

Filling
150 ml strong coffee
5 tbsp sugar
150 ml cream
300 g butter
100 g (very finely) ground almonds

Garnish
25 g flaked almonds, lightly toasted
icing sugar

Cover two cookie sheets with cooking parchment.

Whip the egg whites and sugar for about 15 minutes, until it turns sticky. Carefully fold in the ground almonds.

Divide the meringue in four parts, two on each sheet, and spread into 25*16 cm rectangles. Bake both sheets simultaneously at 125°C for about an hour (switching the positions a few times during baking), until they are completely dry.

C-a-r-e-f-u-l-l-y loosen the macaroon sheets from the parchment with the help of a spatula and equally carefully transfer them to wire racks to cool.

Blend the sugar into the still-hot coffee, stir to dissolve. Add the cream and let the mixture cool. Whip the butter until light and fluffy. Adding just a little at a time, drizzle in the coffee-cream mixture while beating continuously. Finish by beating in the ground almond.

Spread the mocha cream on the cooled macaroon layers and assemble the cake. Sprinkle with the toasted almond flakes and finish with a dusting of icing sugar. (As you may notice from the pictures, I kind of forgot the icing sugar part. Maybe I'm getting old.) Transfer to fridge until you're ready to serve (can be made 2 days ahead).

Notes: yes, you are meant to ruin the smooth buttercream with ground almonds. I did, although it PAINED ME to see my lovely shiny frosting turn all gritty. It tasted good though. (Maybe almond extract would do the same?) If you buy ready-ground almonds, be sure to grind them some more in a blender, both for the frosting and macaroons.

Crispbread-crusted Perch Fillets

2007-04-13T00:32:00.000+02:00

hapankorppuleivitetyt ahvenfileet / surskorpsbröade abborrfileer

There was a time when "fish" to me meant something oven-baked. Seasoned, foil-wrapped baked fish is all very well and good, and above all healthy, but it's not, you know, very fun. Because fun = butter, I suppose.

I had some breaded teeny-tiny perch fillets at a restaurant in Tampere last month, and there was no mistaking the fact that they were made with lots of fun, er, butter. It seemed simple enough, and indeed my own attempts almost surpassed the restaurant's at the first try although, or possibly because, I couldn't find perch fillets as tiny as theirs. The breadcrumbs are made of sourdough thin crisps (hapankorppu/surskorpa), which may of course be a bit hard to find since they're a Finnish speciality, but I should think any sour rye bread would yield a similar result.

We had ours with Elise's Sesame Spinach and some chive-studded mashed potatoes. (I totally fail as a photographer for not noticing how utterly unbeguiling the lump of mash in the background was. Agh! Alas, there were no leftovers to rectify things with.) At the last minute I realized it could probably do with some kind of sauce, so I threw together various liquid-or-meltable dairy things and some garlic and chives.

Crispbread-crusted Perch Fillets
serves 3
9 perch fillets à about 30 g each
salt & white pepper
1 egg
1 tbsp milk
60 g thin crisps, crushed
2 tsp dried dill (or a bit more fresh, finely chopped)
butter for frying

Very Improvised Sauce
100 ml or so cream
3 tbsp crème fraîche
3 tbsp soft goat cheese
2 cloves garlic, minced
some chopped chives
salt & pepper

Mix all the ingredients (except chives) for the sauce and bring to the boil. Simmer gently while you prepare the fish, then add the chives and taste off with salt and pepper just before serving.

Season the fish fillets lightly with salt and pepper.

Mix together egg and milk in a bowl and breadcrumbs and dill on a plate. Dredge the fish first in the egg and then in the breadcrumbs, making sure to coat both sides and dusting off excess crumbs.

Fry the fish in a medium-hot pan in a bit of butter - a very short time on each side is enough for fillets this size. (I'm hedging here because I didn't exactly time it. 45 seconds? 30? They were extremely thin!)

Serve immediately.

Cold Roast Beef

2007-04-11T18:37:00.000+02:00

Paahtopaisti / rostbiff

I don't really know that I'm using the right name here. What I mean when I say "roast beef" is indeed a big hunk o'cow, but the preparation method is fairly specific: the surface of the roast is rubbed with pepper and garlic, it's browned in a hot pan with a bit of butter, then roasted at a low temperature until medium-rare, then marinaded overnight in a garlicky, herb-infused brine-type... thing.

Um. Then it's sliced thinly (thinner than in my pictures - equipment at the cottage does not include sharp knives) and served cold. Or you could get it from the cold cut section in well-stocked groceries, but that's nothing to blog about.

Cold (Garlic) Roast Beef

originally from Stockmann's customer magazine

big hunk of beef roast - size doesn't really matter here, but this makes for excellent leftovers
a tbsp or two of butter
ground black pepper & salt
1 clove garlic, cut in half

1 l (4 cups) beef stock (I use commercial)
100 ml (scant half-cup) balsamic vinegar
1 large-ish onion, sliced
1 small leek, white & light green parts only, sliced
fresh oregano & thyme - quite a lot
5 cloves garlic

Bring the meat to room temperature, then rub it all over with the cut sides of the garlic. Rub in a generous amount of pepper and a dash of salt. Brown all sides of the roast in a bit of butter. Roast at 125°C/260°F until the internal temperature reaches 59°C/138°F.

While the roast is, er, roasting, throw all the ingredients for the marinade in a pot and bring to the boil. When the meat comes out of the oven, place marinade and roast in a sealed ziploc or roasting bag (that is then placed in a bowl). Refrigerate overnight, brush off stray pieces of herbs and onions, and bring to room temperature before serving.

If you have leftovers, they keep well wrapped in foil (only slice as much as you'll eat at once, though, as the thin slices will go dry and ucky). Makes for excellent sandwiches!

Goat Cheese, Asparagus & Mushroom Tart

2007-04-10T16:41:00.000+02:00

On Why Easter Is Evil: I have eaten my weight in chocolate, and eggs, and chocolate eggs. In fact, I'm fairly sure I have chocolate trickling out of my ears, which is why I can't think of a thing to say about this pie. Tart. Whatever.

The recipe comes from Epicurious, I only decreased the cream a bit and added some asparagus. And used my own crust recipe. It was very pretty straight out of the oven, which I took as a sign that I could wait with the pictures until just before brunch. This was a mistake, as it turned a bit... wrinkly in the meantime. (I was really just holding out hope-against-all-hope that the gale-like winds would ease up so I could go outside and take pictures without my fingers freezing off. In vain, as it turned out, but luckily some superglue rendered me ten-fingered anew.)

Goat Cheese, Asparagus & Mushroom Tart
adapted from Bon Appétit Nov/97

100 g (3½ oz) of cold, lightly salted butter, cut into small cubes and then chilled
250 ml (generous 1 cup) all-purpose flour
3 tbsp ice-cold water

200 ml (6¾ fl oz) whipping cream
4 cloves garlic
½ tbsp dijon mustard
1 egg
200 g (7 oz) fresh asparagus
400 g (14 oz) shiitake mushrooms
salt & pepper
100 g (3½ oz) soft goat cheese

Put the flour in a bowl and top with the butter. With the tips of your fingers, work the butter into the flour until it's almost cohesive. Add the water and stir gently with a fork until the dough starts coming together (adding more water if needed). Dump the dough on a piece of clingfilm and bring it together with your hands to form a ball, then press down to a disc. Cover with the clingfilm and refrigerate overnight.

On a piece of lightly floured parchment paper, roll out the dough. Transfer to a 27-cm (10-inch) pie pan and chill while your oven heats to 175°C/350°F, then cover with tin foil and weigh down with beans. Bake for about 30 minutes, remove the tin foil and bake until the shell is pale golden.

Meanwhile, boil the cream and garlic until reduced to about ¾s; put through a blender to puree. Fry the shiitake in a dry pan until soft and the asparagus in some butter until al dente. Once the garlicky cream has cooled a bit, mix in the egg and dijon.

Once the shell is cooked and has cooled a bit, spread the goat cheese on the bottom. Sprinkle the shiitake on top of the cheese and arrange the asparagus on top of the shrooms. Spoon over the cream and bake until set, about 25 minutes.

Sweet Easter: Paskha, Kulich, Mämmi & Mignon

2007-04-05T08:09:00.000+02:00

Pasha, kulitsa & mämmi / pasha, kulitsa & memma

Easter is one of the seasons when you really feel the Russian influence on Finnish food traditions: mämmi, a truly strange-looking (and tasting, it has to be said) malted rye pudding, is our own, but paskha and kulich are both of Russian Orthodox origin.

My aunt supposedly tried to make mämmi herself once (read more about making it at Axis of Ævil) and never repeated the experience, and quite frankly, I'm not that wild about it (nor do I have enough people to serve it to to make it worthwhile), but paskha, a creamy, eggy, buttery, Lent-busting quark concoction is easy to make as well as yummy, and so it gets made every year. I've used a fine sieve to drain it in previous years, but this year I am in charge of THE paskha and got to use my aunt's wooden mould, decorated with Orthodox crosses.

Almost every recipe available would have you contaminate this fabulously tangy-creamy dish with either raisins, candied lemon peel, crushed almonds or a combination of the above. I'm going to flout public opinion here and state that they are wrong. And not just because I hate raisins.

We usually have our paskha spread on top of slices of plaited sweet pulla bread, but this year I was inspired to try out the saffron-scented round kulich instead. I'm borrowing the form from Marianna* but deviating a bit from her great-grandmother's recipe in favor of a firmer, more conventional dough, mostly because I didn't have the time to do otherwise.

To cap this post off (I'm heading out to our cottage in just a few minutes and won't be back until Monday, so happy Easter!), here is a Mignon - the quintessential Finnish chocolate egg. It looks just like a regular egg, you may think, and that's because it is - Fazer has sold these nougat chocolate-filled egg shells since 1896.

Hyvää pääsiäistä / glad påsk!

*whose Nordic Recipe Archive I really can't recommend enough - her recipes aren't necessarily exactly like the ones I use, but they always seem right. Besides, she agrees with me on the evil of crunchy bits in paskha. So there.

Paskha
600 g quark (look for tvorog in East-European specialty shops or make your own)
150 g sugar (I used about 50 g from my vanilla bean repository and the rest normal caster sugar)
200 g butter, softened
3 egg yolks
200 ml thick cream

Drain the quark in cheesecloth or a coffee filter overnight. If you're using a wooden mould, soak it overnight.

Whip the butter and sugar until light and creamy. Add the egg yolks, one at a time, still beating. Mix in the quark and, you guessed it, beat some more. You want everything to be smooth and airy.

In a separate bowl, whip the cream until it's thick and heavy. Fold it into the buttery quark mixture (no more beating!).

Line your mould (or strainer, sieve) with a single layer of dampened cheesecloth and spoon in the paskha batter. Fold the edges of the cheesecloth over the paskha, top with a plate or two for weight, and place in a bowl (to catch the drippings). Refrigerate for about 24 hours, then unmould and serve spread over slices of kulich or other sweet bread.

Kulich

25 g yeast
200 ml milk
pinch of saffron
1 egg
100 ml sugar
about 425 g all-purpose flour
100 g ground almonds
125 g softened butter
almonds for decoration
1 egg for eggwash

Heat the milk until it's lukewarm and dissolve the yeast and saffron in it. Mix in eggs and sugar, then ground almonds and finally about 375 g of the flour. Stir with a fork until everything is evenly mixed, then add the softened butter. Work in the rest of the flour, kneading until you have a soft, springy dough.

Let rise in a covered bowl for about half an hour, then shape into a flat disc about the size of your cake mould. Line the sides of said mould with buttered parchment paper that comes a fair bit over the edges of the mould (but not so high it won't fit in the oven *cough*), transfer dough to it. Cover with a towel and let rise for another half-hour.

Decorate with whole almonds, brush with the lightly whipped egg (er, I totally forgot), and bake at 200°C for about 30-35 minutes. Cool on a rack, then keep wrapped in foil, cutting slices to serve with paskha.

Rostad höna med chorizo & kronärtsskocka (Chorizo and Artichoke-Stuffed Roast Chicken)

2007-04-02T10:20:00.000+02:00

I'm at the speaking in tongues thing again, this time for the Swedish food blog event Cyberkocken (check out the roundup here). Writeup and recipe in English below.

Så var det då dags att försöka blogga om mat på det andra inhemska (som visserligen är det första för mig, men ändå - jag har blivit van vid att både skriva om och tänka på mat mest på engelska, bisarrt nog).

Ingredienserna till Cyberkocken var ju då citron, chorizo, kronärtsskocka och bröd. (Se alla bidrag här.) Färsk kronärtsskocka hittade inte jag (har faktiskt ingen aning om när det är säsong) så tanken på en gräddig, chorizospäckad gratäng fick jag begrava redan i startgroparna. Samtidigt var det ett tag sen jag rostade höna, faktiskt var det före jag började matblogga här, så då kom det ju sig naturligt att (istället för att hitta på ett riktigt recept) bara blanda ihop alltihop i en fyllning till en (eller i det här fallet två; brodern min var tillväntad till söndagslunch och honom får man reservera gott om kött åt) höna och sedan bara slänga hela härvan i ugnen. Eller?

I praktiken satt jag sen där med en hel massa fyllning (jag brukar kalla det stuffing vid julbordet och få förebrående blickar från den ~~äldre~~ mer språkvårdande generationen) som inte rymdes i hönan, men kom på att i *host* salmonellahysteriska trakter så tillreds stuffingen (hjälp! kan inte tänka på det med rätta namnet!) ofta separat. Så då blev det diverse små formar i ugnen också.

Att rosta kyckling/höna i ugnen är lätt som en plätt, det var det ingen som berättade åt mig före jag själv, med stor bävan, försökte mig på en av Nigellas allra simplaste versioner. Fortfarande räknar jag ut stektiderna enligt tabellen i How to Eat: 30 minuter i 200°C + 20 minuter för varje halvkilo. Har man fyllning med skall vikten av den räknas med, och även så gäller det att inte packa den för tätt. Men annars är det inget att vara rädd för (så länge själva fågeln man får tag på är någorlunda saftig) och framförallt ser det väldigt imponerande ut. Vilket man nog inte kan säga om fyllningen själv.

To recap in English:

Cyberkocken is the Swedish equivalent to the Paper Chef event - you get a certain number of ingredients and prepare a meal or dish using all of them. This time the ingredients were lemon, chorizo, artichoke and bread. I'd been dreaming of a chorizo-specked creamy artichoke gratin, but couldn't find fresh artichoke so I guess I'll have to keep on dreaming for a while. In the meantime it had been a while since I last roasted a chicken, so instead of actually coming up with a recipe, I threw all the ingredients together for a stuffing.

In fact, I got a little bit carried away and wound up with way more stuffing than I actually needed. Luckily salmonella fears have taught me that stuffing ~~should~~ can be prepared separately, so the leftovers went into these lovely new cocottes.

The great thing about a roasted chicken is that it looks pretty. And more complicated than it is - the first time I roasted one whole I couldn't imagine winding up with anything other than a complete mess on my hands, but no, it's really easy and fairly foolproof. My formula for roasting times comes from Nigella Lawson's How to Eat - 30 minutes at 200°C/400°F + 20 minutes for every pound (500 g).

Rostad höna med chorizo & kronärtsskocka
1.5 liter brödtärningar
225 g riktigt stark chorizo, också den tärnad
1 msk olja
1 lök, skivad
4 vitlöksklyftor, hackade
2 burkar kronärtsskockshjärtan (det skulle säkert gå fint med färsk också), sköljda ock skurna i bitar
färska örter (själv hade jag bara persilja, men det gick helt bra)
2 dl hönsbuljong
1 msk torr sherry
1 citron
1 (eller 2) hel kyckling
salt & peppar

Toasta brödtärningarna lätt i en 150-gradig ugn (skaka om då och då) - ca 20 minuter.

Fräs löken och vitlöken i oljan (med chorizon om den är rå och inte rökt som min) tills de är mjuka, blanda i kronärtsskockan och örterna (och chorizon). Rör om tills allt är varmt. Just före du skall stoppa i fyllningen blandar du i brödet och en slurk hönsbuljong med sherryn iblandad. Peppra enligt smak.

Värm ugnen till 200°C. Skölj och torka fågeln och nyp bort ev. fjäderrester (uck). Salta och peppra både ytan och innanmätet, fyll på med så mycket av fyllningen som ryms. Peta in citronskivor under skinnet på bröstet (eller släng i dem tillsammans med fyllningen - under skinnet ger mer smak tycker jag men det blir såklart mindre vackert). Gnid in lite olivolja i skinnet och bind eventuellt upp vingarna. Stek på galler (eh, med en ugnsform under, såklart) i 30 minuter + 20 min för varje 500 g, pensla ytan med lite hönsbuljong några gånger under stekningen.

Resten av fyllningen häller du i en smord ugnsform (eller flera - det kanske bara är jag som har fnatt på portionsformar men i det här fallet var det också praktiskt för en större form hade nog inte rymts i ugnen) och steker täckt med lock eller folie i ungefär en kvart och sedan otäckt (hrm) en kvart eller så till, tills ytan blir vackert krispig. Att sätta in formen ca 20 minuter före hönan skall vara färdig borde fungera bra, för den kan gärna sitta kvar i ugnen en stund medan hönan vilar på skärbrädet.

Hur man vackert skär upp en höna får ni lista ut själva, för det kan inte jag.

Chorizo and Artichoke-Stuffed Roast Chicken
1.5 l (6 cups) breadcubes
225 g (½ lb) chorizo, cubed
1 tbsp olive oil
2 medium onions, chopped
4 cloves garlic, minced
2 cans artichoke hearts, drained, rinsed and cubed
fresh herbs (I used parsley)
200 ml chicken stock
1 tbsp dry sherry
1 lemon
1 (or in this case, 2) chicken
salt & pepper

Toast the breadcubes in a 150°C oven for about 20 minutes, stirring a few times during baking. Soften the onions and garlic in the olive oil (together with the chorizo if it's raw), then add herbs and artichoke hearts (and chorizo) and stir until it's heated through. Just before stuffing the bird(s), mix in the bread cubes and a splosh of sherried chicken stock. Add pepper to taste.

Clean and dry the birds and salt and pepper inside and out. Add some stuffing to the inner cavities and lemon slices either together with the stuffing or pushed in under the skin on the breasts of the chicken.

Roast at 200°C for 30 minutes + 20 minutes for every pound (500 g), basting with the remaining chicken stock a few times during roasting.

Pour the rest of the stuffing into one or several greased oven-proof bowls and bake, covered, for about 15 minutes, and then uncovered another 15 minutes or until crisp on the surface.

Bagels

2007-04-01T22:18:00.000+02:00

I came to bagels comparatively late in life, in my late teens, the first time I visited the US. And then I went to the US several times in the span of a few years, but now it's been more than five years since the last trip and all that time I've been deprived of bagels. Because they aren't widely available here and I didn't crave them enough to go a-hunting.

Having been burned by my one and only bread book's naan and tortilla recipes, I sort of assumed the bagels would be similarly disappointing - that there are certain kinds of region-specific recipes that you just can't reproduce, even with a native's grandmother's super secret recipe.

And maybe it's just that my memory isn't quite what it was, but these are some fine bagels right here. They look right, except for the part where I can't bother to stretch the rings out far enough to make a proper hole in the finished product. (The hole is my least favorite part of the bagel anyway. It makes filling them a lot fussier than it need be.) I think the egg wash makes them too dark, but that's the only way the seeds and stuff will stay on when you eat it. But mostly, they just taste exactly right, chewy and slightly-sweet-but-not-really.

Bagels
from Jorden runt på 80 degar by Annica Triberg*

800-900 ml (3.3-3.8 cups) all-purpose flour
2 tsp salt
15 g (½ oz) fresh yeast
250 ml (1 cup) water, lukewarm
2 + 1 tbsp light syrup
2 tbsp melted butter or vegetable oil
1 egg + 1 white
sesame or poppyseeds for decoration

Mix 800 ml of the flour and the salt in a large bowl.

Dissolve the yeast in the barely warm water, then mix in oil, the whole egg and 2 tbsp of the syrup. Pour the wet ingredients into the dry and work together. Once it's all smoothly mixed, let the dough rest for five minutes, then knead (adding more flour as needed) for ten minutes.

Rinse and oil the bowl from earlier, put the dough in and turn it around once so all surfaces are greased, then cover with clingfilm and let rise for an hour and a half.

Tip out onto a work surface and knead a few times, then divide dough into 12 pieces (will make fairly small bagels). Form each piece into a round bun, then press your finger through the middle and stretch out a largeish hole in the middle (will shrink like crazy as the bagels rise, so if you want a proper hole, make it HUGE at this stage). Let rise on a slightly floured surface, covered with a kitchen towel, for 15 minutes.

Meanwhile, heat the oven to 200°C/400°F and bring a large pan of water, with the remaining tbsp of syrup and a dash of salt mixed in, to the boil.

Boil the bagels, a few at a time for about a minute, turning them halfway through, then drain and brush with the egg white and sprinkle with topping of choice. Bake for 20-25 minutes, until golden brown. Cool on racks.

These are out of this world fresh from the oven, but I haven't quite figured out how to get them that way for breakfast. The best version so far is putting the boiled but un-garnished bagels in the fridge overnight (certainly this is better than refrigerating the pre-boiled ones, because those have tended to rise too much and then deflate), but the crust dries up and doesn't become as typically chewy and bagel-ish that way. Luckily, they're still very good the morning after, especially if you toast them first.

*highly recommended, despite the naan and tortilla mishaps. Of what I've made, the Estonian rye bread (which is just like Finnish rye bread), hamburger buns, and feta-garlic bread are firm favorites.

Ginger Crème Caramel

2007-04-01T14:32:00.000+02:00

One Christmas I failed to list enough presents on my wish list (in retrospect I have no idea how that could have happened - I've always been fairly materialistic) and my dad punished me by buying one of those kitchen blowtorch thingies. (That was also the year my aunt got me a pineapple peeler/slicer/torture device, and those two regularly do battle over Least Used Kitchen Gadget in the cupboard.) I think I've made crème brûlée about four or five times since then, and each time the brûlée part has been a dismal failure. (I'm afraid of fire, OK?)

So this time when it came upon me to do a solid custard type dessert, I decided to leave the blowtorch in the furthermost corner of the cupboard where it belongs and go for crème caramel instead. I also had a piece of the most beautiful ginger I've ever seen wasting away in the fridge, so choosing a flavor was no hassle at all. And it works SO WELL, people! The caramel has an intense, almost peppery tang of ginger, while the custard part is just faintly spicy (and superbly soft and creamy - be careful not to leave them in the oven for too long, the cups need to be fairly wobbly still when you take them out and will solidify while they cool).

This pudding is fairly creamy on purpose, but I'm sure you could skew the cream-to-milk ratio without any problems. The method for infusing the caramel and custard with ginger comes from this recipe at epicurious, but otherwise I stuck to a favorite baked custard recipe of mine.

Ginger Crème Caramel
makes 6 servings
for the caramel:
70 g peeled and sliced ginger
155 g caster sugar
50 ml water

for the custard:
200 ml heavy cream
200 ml light (cooking-safe) cream
100 ml 1.5% milk
75 ml caster sugar
2 whole eggs
2 egg yolks

In a thick-bottomed pan, stir the ginger, sugar and water until sugar dissolves, then cook on a medium heat, without stirring, for six minutes. Fish out the ginger with a fork and set aside (you'll be steeping them in the cream in a moment) and continue cooking the caramel until it turns golden brown. Pour immediately into ramekins, tilting to spread over the bottoms. (Mine solidified to the point that I thought the dish ruined for sure, but miraculously there was actual runny caramel when I overturned them the following day. Don't despair!)

Heat the creams, milk, sugar, and ginger pieces in a large pan until it comes to the boil. Take off the heat and let stand for a few minutes. Mix the eggs and yolks in a bowl. Pour in about a third of the warm cream in a slow stream, stirring gently, then pour the egg custard in with the rest of the cream, still stirring. Strain through a fine sieve to get rid of the ginger pieces and divide into ramekins.

Bake at 150°C in a bain marie for 20-30 minutes, until the edges are just set and the centers are still wobbly. Cool on racks to room temperature, then cover with clingfilm and refrigerate until ready to use.

To serve, run a knife around the edge of each ramekin, then invert a plate over it and, holding everything tightly together, invert crème caramel onto plate. (May be easier said than done.)

Salmon Blobs with Bell Pepper Sauce

2007-03-31T22:12:00.000+02:00

Such an attractive appellation, don't you think? I happen to be a staunch proponent of truth in advertising, and the original recipe called these "Salmon Bacon Balls" - which is just a dirty dirty lie on several levels: there's no bacon, just crisp-fried strips of cold-smoked salmon, nor could I come up with a way of forming actual balls from a batter that was just this side of runny. To make matters worse, this post could also be called When Bad Photos Happen to Good Dishes. Sometimes things just don't work out the way you planned, especially the first time around.

If I haven't scared you off with the blunt name and picture, let me just assure you that while not pretty, round or bacony, what these little spoonfuls (well, little and little, I may decide to go for teaspoons instead of soup spoons for forming them next time) of salmon pâté are is yummy and easy. And the sauce (not pictured - sorry about that!), which is really just a mixture of thick yogurt and ajvar relish, is a perfect contrast to the crisp, super-salty strips of smoked salmon. I'll probably develop this recipe further on my own (some capers or maybe a roasted bell pepper thrown in the salmon batter would not have gone amiss, I think) but they were very nice in this plain version, too.

Expect a post on bagels in the not-too-distant future. ;)

Salmon Blobs with Bell Pepper Sauce
from Hufvudstadsbladet 29.3.07 (The Easter food article was fabulous, there will definitely be more featured here.)

300 g salmon fillet
1 egg
2 tsp sambal oelek
125 ml light cream (recipe called for 250 ml, but I'm pretty sure that would have left me with a soupy batter)
salt & pepper

150 g thinly sliced cold-smoked salmon

for the sauce:
300 ml yogurt (I used 250 ml super-thick Turkish yogurt)
3 tbsp ajvar relish (ours was mild and worked very well, which is not to say the hotter versions wouldn't)
salt & pepper to taste

Cut the salmon fillet into chunks (and remove bones if it has any), then mix in a blender with the egg and spices until you have a smooth paste. Drizzle in the cream and blend well. Let rest in the fridge for at least half an hour.

Bring a large pot of lightly salted water to the boil, then drop balls of the salmon paste into it (with the help of two spoons) and let simmer for about 10 minutes, turning about halfway through.

Meanwhile, cut the smoked salmon slices into 2-cm strips and fry (in a dry pan) until crisp on both sides. (My salmon turned out to be pretty thickly sliced, which is not something you can do much about when you notice it ten minutes before the rest of the meal is ready. Thinner slices would have made for easier/prettier assembly, but we don't really care about such things. Do we?)

For the sauce, if you're using regular yogurt, drain it for an hour or so, then mix with the ajvar relish and heat gently. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

Fish out the fish blobs with a slotted spoon, top each with a strip or two of crisp salmon, and serve with the sauce.

Pasta with Asparagus and Shrimp

2007-03-30T15:40:00.001+02:00

Depending on where you live, you may already be sick to death of asparagus, but over here I've just barely started finding decent ones. And I always knew that the first batch would go to this, a recipe my mom came upon sometime last year.

I've always found boiling asparagus to be incredibly tricky - the timing between just right and eeww, mushy has always been a problem - especially as you need to time whatever goes with it accordingly. Grilling and roasting is somehow less fussy, and in this recipe the asparagus is actually fried in a bit of butter until tender (and maybe a bit browned, yum), then mixed with parmesan, shrimp and a creamy lobster sauce.

The lobster fond I use (and that the recipe called for) is a bought concentrate (Touch of Taste, anyone?), but I'm sure if you're the kind of person who makes his/her own stock, shrimp/lobster/crayfish stock would work even better. Just beware that the amount called for here is undiluted concentrate and adjust accordingly.

Pasta with Asparagus and Shrimp
originally from Hufvudstadsbladet, I've upped the wine a bit and reduced the lobster fond
1 pound (500 g) shrimp (or however much unpeeled shrimp it takes to make one pound, er, shrimp)
2 pounds (1 kg) fresh green asparagus
2 tbsp butter
1 cup (250 ml) grated parmesan
1.5 cup (350 ml) crème fraîche (I used low-fat, but make sure it's a type that doesn't separate when heated)
½ cup (120 ml) dry white wine
3 tbsp concentrated lobster fond/stock
pinch of cayenne
flat-leaf parsley, chopped

Cut the asparagus into slanted slices, about half-inch long. Brown the butter slightly and fry the asparagus for a few minutes, stirring constantly. Set aside and stir in the grated parmesan.

In a separate pan, bring the crème fraîche, lobster fond and wine to a boil and let simmer gently for five minutes. Season with cayenne, mix in the shrimp. Keep on the stove just until the shrimp's heated through, then mix with the asparagus and parsley and serve immediately with pasta.

Serves 3-4.

Leftover Tuesday #3: Carroty Karelian Pasties

2007-03-26T17:05:00.000+02:00

(Porkkanakarjalanpiirakat/karelska piroger med morot)

Leftover Tuesdays is one of my favorite food blog events, mostly because I get to see other bloggers being way more inventive than I am. You see, normally I have no problem with leftovers staying just the way they are - I can quite happily eat chicken korma three nights in a row without doing anything to spiff it up. So making something new from an already-prepared dish is something of a challenge - it's not how I'm used to thinking about things.

And this time, strictly speaking I'm probably cheating. I made carrot casserole last week, deliberately leaving part of the carrot puree-rice mix to make Karelian pasties from later. Karelian pasties are very ubiquitous Finnish mini-tarts, I guess - you can get decent ones in any grocery store, anywhere. They're eaten for breakfast or as a snack, either plain or topped with sandwich-fillings or, as tradition dictates, eggy butter. The crust is basically rye flour and water, the filling rice porridge or pureed root veggies (potato being the most common), or a mixture of the two.

The pleated construction of these looks very fussy, I know, but I've never found it the least bit difficult (and I only made Karelian pasties for the first time last summer). The trick is to keep both the pasty dough and the filling fairly dry - I cook the hell out of my rice porridge for this, until it's mostly solid. I usually make a whole bunch of them all at once and freeze most of them raw, to be popped into the oven when needed, but that's not to say they make a convenient fast snack - once the pasties come out of the oven, they need to be brushed with milky butter and then kept in a cloth-covered bowl for a while to soften the crust.

Karelian Pasties

Rice filling
250 ml (1 cup) water
250 ml (1 cup)rice (the kind you'd use for rice pudding)
1000 ml (4 cups) milk
1 tsp salt

Bring the water to a boil, add the (rinsed) rice, let simmer until the water's absorbed. Add the milk, crank up the heat until it's back to simmering, then lower the heat to an absolute minimum and let simmer, mostly covered, until the milk's absorbed and you have a thick goopy porridge. Season with the salt and let cool.

Optionally, boil some root veg, puree it, and mix with the rice. Or use up leftover mashed potatoes. (Do people ever actually have leftover mashed potatoes? I find it to be one of those dishes where I could mash four pounds of potatoes for four people and still have an empty bowl at the end of the meal. Maybe we just like our mash...)

The filling-to-dough ratio seems to depend more on the phases of the moon, stars, and Finnish cross-country world cup placements than any actual grams and milliliters. Since the dough is just flour and water, I usually make another batch of it if I run out before all the filling's gone and then just throw away the leftovers.

Pasty dough
250 ml (1 cup) rye flour
100 ml (3 fl oz) water
1 tsp salt
butter and milk, a few tbsp each

Mix the flour, salt and water. It should become a pretty dry dough - the amount you'll need depends a lot on how coarse your flour is. I had some very fine rye flour (ruissihti/rågsikt) this time, but I actually prefer the normal coarseness, even though you can't roll it out as thinly. (In fact, I rolled mine so thin this time that the pleated edges kind of scorched before the filling had set. Don't do that. The pictures I'm linking to instead of showing here are from last summer; those pasties were perfect.) Either way, it shouldn't feel moist when you squeeze it between your fingers. Once you've worked it into a cohesive, dry dough, roll it out as a log and cut into twelve pieces.

Roll out the pieces, one by one, to thin ovals. (I'm told a pasta maker comes in handy, but haven't tried it myself.) You'll want to make sure the pasty doesn't stick to your work surface, or to the rolling pin, so make sure both of those are floured, and keep moving the dough around while you're rolling it. It's a bit annoying to have spent time rolling out the perfect crust only to realize it's stuck to the table. Not that I'd know about such things, obviously.

Once you have your thin oval pastry shell, fill it with a good dollop of filling, spread it out to about an inch (probably a bit less) of the edges, and fold up the edges in soft pleats like so. Personally I like filling mine one by one before rolling out the next piece, but you could stack the rolled-out shells under a towel or something so they don't dry out.

Anyway, once you have all your pasties filled and pleated, heat your oven to as hot as it will go and bake for 10-15 minutes, until the filling looks dry and has taken on some color.

Brush the shells with a mixture of milk and melted butter (about half-and-half) and stack the pasties in a bowl (with kitchen towels or something between layers) and cover with a tea towel. This is so the shells will soften.

Eat as is, or as an open-faced sandwich, or with egg butter, which is about equal amounts softened butter (or margarine, even reduced-fat) and chopped hard-boiled eggs with (optionally) some chives mixed in.

Carrot Casserole

2007-03-24T23:30:00.000+02:00

(Porkkanalaatikko in Finnish, morotslåda in Swedish)

This is really a Christmas dish, and about as traditional as you can get. I started thinking about it when I read about the Finnish food blog challenge for this month and just couldn't let go, because I've never made it myself - my grandmother and aunt both bring their own versions to Christmas Eve dinner, so there hasn't been any need. It's filling, slightly sweet (to go with the salty ham that people usually have for Christmas), a bit mushy and ultimately just a great comfort food.

We had ours with sauteed brussels sprouts and bacon. (Mmm, bacon.) I could also have gone for (don't laugh) canned petits pois and some sort of gravy, but I got voted down. It made me miss all the snow, not that we had any last Christmas.

There are some variations to what I consider the basic recipe, as presented here: sometimes the carrot isn't boiled and pureed but finely grated, and sometimes other grains, namely barley, are used instead of the rice. Obviously those are healthier versions, and I do like the nuttiness and texture of barley, but for me the rice-and-puree edition is The One.

Carrot Casserole
150 ml (5 fl oz) short grain rice
150 ml (5 fl oz) water
600 ml (2½ cups) milk (I used 1.5%, but you could go for whole)
1 kg (2 lb) carrots
1½ tsp salt
200 ml (scant 7 fl oz) whipping cream
3 tbsp dark syrup (or molasses, I guess)
2 eggs
ground white pepper
freshly grated nutmeg
breadcrumbs
butter

Bring the water to a boil in a large-ish pan. Add the rice and stir until the water dissolves. Pour in the milk and bring to a simmer, stirring frequently. Boil on a very low heat, covered, until the rice has been absorbed and a thick, smooth porridge has formed. (This takes quite a while, maybe 45 minutes or so.)

Meanwhile, chop the carrots coarsely and boil in a bit of water until they're very soft. Drain and return the pan to the stove until the carrots are completely dry. Puree and mix with the rice, syrup and spices.

Once the rice and carrots have cooled enough that they won't cook the eggs on contact, add those and stir to blend. Whip the cream and fold it in gently. Transfer to one or two buttered, oven-proof casserole dishes. (Ramekins are cuter, but I think it's better made in a large dish.) Sprinkle with enough breadcrumbs to cover and dot with butter. Bake at 175°C (350°F) for about an hour and a half, until it's set, puffed and golden.

Roasted Cauliflower & Blue Cheese Soup

2007-03-23T23:31:00.000+02:00

A while ago, I made this cauliflower/blue cheese soup that turned out really well. I didn't blog about it because it was too dark to take pictures and there weren't enough leftovers to do it justice afterwards. (I guess I could have photographed it in a spoon or something. How come I never come up with these genius ideas when they're needed??)

Anyway, then I read about Anne's roasted cauliflower soup, remembered that roasting makes cauliflower the Best Thing Ever, and decided to do things a bit differently this time. (Unfortunately "differently" also involved a bad burn on my hand. Boo! But not so bad as to mar my enjoyment of this fabulous soup.)

If you're not into blue cheese, 1) you may like this anyway, although 2) it'll probably be fine even without it, as there's rather a lot going on: roasted cauliflower and garlic, and dashes of sherry, nutmeg and worcestershire sauce (I can never tell if I've spelled that right) adding a bit of depth. I personally really like it with a base of chicken stock and thickened with a roux, but switch to vegetable stock and throw in a potato or two to thicken things up if you're looking for something more healthy and/or vegetarian.

Roasted Cauliflower & Blue Cheese Soup
2 heads cauliflower, about 1200 g total (2½ lb)
4 smallish onions
3 stalks celery
8 cloves roasted garlic*
1 tbsp butter
2 tbsp flour
1 l chicken stock (4 cups)
200 ml light cream (needs to be the kind that doesn't separate from heat, over here we have something called "food cream") or non-nonfat milk
4 tbsp dry sherry
1 tsp worcestershire sauce
½ tsp freshly grated nutmeg
100 g (3½ oz) blue cheese, crumbled
white pepper (and salt, at least if you're not using the cheese) to taste

*I roast several whole heads of garlic wrapped in foil (in a low heat) until very very soft, then press out the innards, mush them up, and put them in an ice cube tray that I pop in the freezer. Once the garlic cubes are frozen solid, I transfer them to a ziploc bag. After which I just throw in a frozen cube of soft-flavored garlicky goodness into whatever stew-type thing I'm making.

Cut the cauliflower into florets, toss in a bit of olive oil and spread out in a large pan. Peel the celery (I find this cuts the harsh taste some people dislike) and chop them fairly finely. Cut the onion into chunks. Toss onion and celery (+ garlic if you don't have pre-roasted) with a bit of olive oil and wrap in foil.

Roast both cauliflower and onions at 175°C/350°F until the cauliflower's soft and slightly browned, stirring a few times so it doesn't stick too badly. (If possible, avoid burning your hand in the process. Ouch.)

Once the cauliflower is ready, melt the butter in a large pan until it's all bubbly. Add the flour and stir for a few minutes, then add, still stirring, cauliflowers, onions and garlic and (hot) chicken stock. Season with sherry, worcestershire sauce and nutmeg, cover, and let simmer for about 20 minutes. Puree in a blender (in batches) until very smooth, then return to the pan and add cream/milk and cheese. Stir on a low heat until the cheese has melted. Check the taste and add pepper and salt if needed.

Tomato Tart with Bacon and Red Onion

2007-03-22T00:18:00.000+02:00

It's probably only fair to warn you that the tart I'm going to describe possesses some strange powers. Namely, it robs people (read: me) of all self-control. The night we had this, it was too dark to take pictures. The only thing that kept me from downing the whole thing, in spite of not being the least bit hungry, was knowing how much butter went in the crust.

The following day I cut out a slice to take out and photograph (trimming a bit off the edges because it didn't quite look right), snapped a few pictures that turned out to be all out of focus and weirdly lighted, and promptly wolfed down the subject. The day after that, I was at home with my trusty lampshade-cum-lightbox and interfering felines, snapped a few shots of the last slice and... suddenly... through no conscious decision... ate it up.

Possibly I'm just telling you that, like grocery shopping, food photography is best left to when you're not hungry.

This tart owes a lot to Molly's Roasted Tomato Tart with Crème Fraîche and Thyme, in the way that that was what I was going to make, to the letter, until I discovered my tomatoes were a bit sad and felt the need to add something to the mix. Namely bacon, onions and balsamic vinegar.

I was also making it in the wilds of, er, the place where we have our vacation home and no internet, and had a crust recipe calling for sticks of butter which is just one of those things I haven't yet learned conversions for, so the shell is improvised. I would also like bonus points for making said shell without the benefit of a mixer and freezer, which is how I usually survive the trauma of crust-making. Incidentally, it was also the flakiest crust I have ever managed to produce. Maybe I'll have to eschew the mixer in the future. (EXTRA bonus points for doing the cleanup without running water.)

Anyway, it was yummy, as things containing stuff like bacon, onions, tomato and cheese tend to be, especially when encased in a ton of buttery crust, and I'm sure it would be very acceptable even without the bacon if you want to go the vegetarian route.

Tomato Tart with Bacon and Red Onion
for the crust:
100 g (3½ oz) of cold, lightly salted butter, cut into small cubes and then chilled
250 ml (8½ fl oz) all-purpose flour
3 tbsp ice-cold water

for the filling:
about 700 g (1½ lb) tomatoes
1 tbsp fresh thyme, chopped
50 ml (1.6 fl oz, or 3 tbsp + 1 tsp) olive oil
3 cloves garlic
3 slices bacon, finely chopped
1 tsp balsamic vinegar
1 medium red onion, sliced
2 tbsp crème fraîche
2 tsp dijon mustard
150 ml (5 fl oz) grated gruyère

Put the flour in a bowl and top with the butter. With the tips of your fingers (it helps if your hands are cold from, um, the cold), work the butter into the flour until it's all almost cohesive. Part crumble, part paste. Add the water and stir gently with a fork until the dough starts coming together (this is like three or four swirls). Dump the dough on a piece of clingfilm and bring it together with your hands to form a ball, then press down to a disc. Cover with the clingfilm and refrigerate overnight.

Halve and deseed the tomatoes. Toss with the thyme, olive oil and some salt, then arrange on a baking tray, cut side down. Bake for half an hour at 175°C (350°F), remove from the oven and let cool until you can handle them, then remove the skins. (Note: this was a pain, and I wonder if blanching and peeling before the baking wouldn't be easier.) Turn the tomatoes cut-side up and sprinkle with garlic, bacon, balsamic vinegar and the onion. Bake for 40 minutes.

On a piece of lightly floured parchment paper, roll out the dough. Transfer to a 27-cm (10-inch) pie pan (I do this by taking parchment and dough to the pan, inverting the whole thing and letting the dough rest on the edges of the pie pan, and peeling off the parchment paper) and chill until the tomatoes are done in the oven, then cover with tin foil and weigh down with beans. Bake, still at 175°C/350°F, for about 30 minutes, remove the tin foil and bake until the shell is pale golden. Mix together crème fraîche, mustard and cheese and spread over the bottom of the shell. Arrange the tomatoes in the pan (in flat layers, not just tossed around) and bake for half an hour.

Inkiväärikuorrutetut porkkanamuffinit (Ginger-Frosted Carrot Cupcakes)

2007-03-19T14:40:00.000+02:00

This is my entry for the Finnish food blog challenge for March, hence the bilingual post. There's a full recipe in English after the jump as usual.

Lakkarahka vaihtaa nyt hetkeksi kieltä tai ainakin tilapäisesti kaksikielistyy maaliskuun ruokahaasteen kunniaksi. Suolaisia porkkanaruokia kävi mielessä yksi jos toinenkin haastetta miettiessäni - porkkanalaatikkoa en ole itse koskaan tehnyt, ja porkkanaiset karjalanpiirakatkin houkuttelevat (lisäys: itse asiassa laatikko ja piirakat tulikin jo tehtyä) - mutta sitten iski niin armoton porkkanakakkuhimo ettei sitä oikein voinut vastustaa.

Kutsun näitä nyt muffineiksi kun ei sopivampaa sanaa tule mieleen, mutta oikeastihan nämä ovat päivänselvästi cupcake-ejä - kakkuja minikoossa ja vielä kuorrutettujakin. Periaatteessa taikinan voisi paistaa parissa pyöreässä kakkupohjassa ja tehdä kuorrutuksesta sitten oikein kerroskakku (ehkä appelsinimarmeladilla höystettynä?), mutta itse olen kovasti ihastunut näihin annoskokoisiin leivoksiin. Ne kun ovat järjestään niiiiiin söpöjä. Maunkin puolesta olen näihin aikalailla tykästynyt; ne ovat yllättävän kevyttä kamaa (sekä rakenteeltaan että rasvasisällöltään) ja juuri sopivan mausteisia.

And now for the English version:

When thinking about the food challenge, the topic of which was carrots, I touched upon several savory ideas like traditional carrot casserole, which I've never made, or Karelian pasties with carrot filling - and I'm fairly certain both of those will get made sooner or later (ETA: sooner, as it happens. Read about the casserole here and the pasties here.) - but then I was struck by a craving for carrot cake, and that was pretty much that.

I love these cupcakes - for one thing, they're amazingly light (in texture, and fairly light in terms of calories as well) with just the right degree of sweetness and spicyness. I think the batter would work just as well as a whole cake, but cupcakes are cuter, and also you feel less like a pig eating three cupcakes than devouring an eighth of a cake. Not that I'd know about such things, but anyway.

Inkiväärikuorrutetut porkkanamuffinit
24 keskikokoista muffinia
500 g porkkanaa
2,5 dl kookoshiutaleita
2,5 dl saksan- tai pekaanipähkinöitä rouhittuina
2 dl fariini- tai tummaa muscovadosokeria
5 dl vehnäjauhoja
2 tl kanelia
1 tl jauhettua inkivääriä
1 tl suolaa
¼ tl kutakin muskottia, neilikaa ja maustepippuria
2 tl ruokasoodaa
1 tl leivinjauhetta
3 kananmunaa
2,5 dl sokeria
1,5 dl ruokaöljyä
1 pieni (227g) purkki ananasmurskaa valutettuna

Pilko puolet porkkanoista hienoiksi kuutioiksi ja keitä pikkutilkassa vettä oikein pehmeiksi. Survo sauvasekoittimella muusiksi, anna jäähtyä. Raasta loput porkkanoista suht pieneksi silpuksi (ei sillä raastinraudan isoimmalla puolella).

Paahda ensin pähkinät ja sitten kookoshiutaleet kauniin kullanruskeiksi - varsinkin kookoksen kanssa saa olla tarkkana ettei se kärtsää. Anna jäähtyä.

Sekoita keskenään jauhot, pähkinä, kookos, mausteet, leivinjauhe ja ruokasooda sekä fariinisokeri. Vatkaa munat ja sokeri kuohkeiksi, sekoita joukkoon öljy, porkkanat ja ananasmurska. "Kääntele" märät ainekset kuiviin. Paista 200:ssa asteessa 15-20 min.

Kuorrutuksen kanssa minulla oli senverran ongelmia että annan vaan sinnepäin-ohjeen; ilmeisesti syntipukkina oli light-philadelphia josta ei meinannut saada järkevää laisinkaan. Mutta jotakuinkin näistä lähtökohdista aloitettiin:

300g Philadelphia-juustoa
4 rkl voita huoneenlämmössä
1 rkl rouhittua inkivääriä
tajuton määrä tomusokeria (yli 500g)

Sekoitetaan tomusokeria lisäten kunnes kulhossa on kuorrutkseen soveltuvaa, aika kiinteää mönjää. :P Käytännössä kannattaa vatkata voi pieneen Philadelphiamäärään, sitten lisätä loput juustosta ja inkivääri, ja lopuksi tomusokeria pari desiä kerralla. Jos *kröhöm* tomusokeri loppuu kesken ja menee hermo, voi sitä koittaa kiinteyttää yön yli jääkaapissa.

Koristele muffinit kuorrutuksella. Itse lisäsin vielä lopuksi reunoille paahdettua kookosta ja pähkinää, mutta suoraan sanottuna se nyt oli vaan turhaa fiineilyä. Itse asiassa nämä menettelevät ihan hyvin ilman kuorrutustakin, ja paljaina ne voikin hyvin pakastaa. (Sulatus ensin jääkaapissa ja sitten hetki uunissa, ainakaan omilla mikronkäyttökyvyilläni ei niistä syötäväksi kelpaavia saa.)

Ginger-Frosted Carrot Cupcakes
makes 24 medium-sized cupcakes
500 g (1 pound) carrots
250 ml (8½ fl oz) dried coconut
250 ml (8½ fl oz) walnuts or pecans, chopped
200 ml (6¾ fl oz) brown sugar
500 ml (17 fl oz) all-purpose flour
2 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp dried ginger
1 tsp salt
¼ tsp each nutmeg, cloves and allspice
2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
3 eggs
250 ml (8½ fl oz) caster sugar
150 ml (5 fl oz) vegetable oil
1 227 g (8 oz) can crushed pineapple, drained

Chop half of the carrots finelly and boil in a bit of water until very soft. Grate the rest of the carrots finely.

Toast the nuts and coconut flakes in a pan until golden and fragrant (I'm a wuss and did them separately, because I was afraid of burning the coconut); set aside to cool.

In a large bowl, mix flour, nuts, coconut, baking powder and baking soda, spices and the brown sugar. Whip caster sugar and eggs in another bowl until light and fluffy; add the vegetable oil, pineapple and carrots and mix well. Fold the wet ingredients into the dry and spoon the batter into muffin tins. Bake at 200°C (400°F) for 15-20 minutes, cool on racks.

I had huge problems with the frosting, so I don't really want to give out the recipe (is there something about light cream cheese that makes it extra-runny?). For the consistency I wanted I would have needed a metric tonne of icing sugar, but as it was, I kind of gave up just when it was starting to get borderline-sweet but still remained a bit runny. The fresh ginger gives it a terrific bite, but I don't want it to drown in the sweetness!

Anyway, the formula I went by was pretty much like so:
300 g (1/3 lb) cream cheese
4 tbsp softened butter
1 tbsp grated ginger
lots and lots and lots of icing sugar. More than 500g/1 lb.

Er, you mix them together. Duh. I decorated with some more toasted chopped nuts and coconut, mostly to hide the runniness of the icing.

Hay, Hay, It's... Um, My Mother's Birthday

2007-03-15T22:30:00.000+02:00

Here's the deal: I don't really do innovative in the kitchen. At least not when I'm baking. I'm OK with trying anything, no matter how weird, as long as I have A RECIPE OMG, but stick me with a general theme and a request to "come up with something interesting" and you'll find me tearing out my hair in desperation. HOWEVER, for my first ever Donna Day, I was going to change all that. I was going to boldly go where, OK, others had probably gone before, but I wouldn't follow on purpose.

Except... it's my mother's birthday. My mother wanted cheesecake for her birthday, which was fortuitous as I couldn't justify baking two cakes in a single week. My mother wanted chocolate orange cheesecake. (My mother is probably getting tired of being namechecked in this here blog, and in such a disparaging manner. Can I tell you about the fabulous pork she made for our family lunch on Sunday? It was fabulous! And pork! Which is a meat!) And like the creature of habit I am, I just took a tiny peek at epicurious and just happened to search for "cheesecake," "orange" and "chocolate" - I swear it was an accident! - and found... this Mocha-Orange Cheesecake. And that, as they say, was that.

Now, once I have a recipe, I'm perfectly fine with tinkering. For one thing, I wouldn't know a Pepperidge Farm Orange Milano cookie if, er, I bit into it, although chances are I would like it really a lot. I'm also not sure where I'd ever find frozen juice concentrate, and my booze collection pretty much consists of cooking sherry, and I ~~didn't feel like tinkering about with~~ forgot to buy sour cream. So really, I couldn't actually follow the recipe at all. Still, it was Mocha-Orange or nothing.

I'm always surprised when something I do without a set recipe turns out fabulous, and this totally did (even if I had some, er, issues with construction). The crust is wonderful, the cheesecake layer fresh and intensely orange-y, and the ganache faintly coffee-flavored and fairly sweet. In fact, if you make this without the ganache you may need to up the sugar in the actual cake a bit. (Yes, that is a Moomin spoon. Do you know how long I've waited to post a recipe displaying my Moomin spoons? Longer than I've had this blog, that's how long!)

~~Layered~~ ~~Blotched~~ Marbled Mocha-Orange Cheesecake

for the crust
150 g (5½ oz) crushed chocolate chocolate chip cookies
grated peel of one untreated orange
1 tbsp cocoa powder
1 tbsp sugar
50 g (1¾ oz) butter, melted

for the cream cheese
250 g (9 oz) mascarpone cheese
400 g (14 oz) cream cheese (Philadelphia)
4 eggs
130 g (4½ oz) sugar
juice and grated peel of one orange
1 tsp instant espresso powder
50 g (1¾ oz) dark chocolate

for the ganache
240 g (8½ oz) dark chocolate
200 ml (6¾ fl oz) thick cream
2 tsp instant espresso powder
250 ml (1 cup) icing sugar

Whizz together the ingredients for the crust and press into the bottom of a springform pan (mine is 23 cm (9 inches) in diameter, but a smaller one would probably yield a prettier result). Bake at 175°C (350°F) for about ten minutes, let cool.

Mix the cheeses until smooth and, er, mixed. Add sugar, orange juice & peel and the eggs, whisk until combined.

Melt the chocolate for the cake in the microwave. Add 1 tsp espresso powder and about a third of the cheese/egg mixture, blend well.

Pour about half of the plain cheese mixture in the springform pan, then gently spoon over the chocolatey cheese. The plan here was to go for layers, but of course the chocolate mixture was much less runny than the plain orangey one, so that totally didn't work out. If you feel strongly about layers you could probably bake the bottom plain layer for a while, until it firms up a bit, then add the chocolate and top with the rest of the plain orange layer, but I did not have the time for that crap, so settled for dumping blips of chocolate in the pan, topping with the rest of the orange, and finally running a knife around the thing for a marbled effect.

Bake in a bain marie (wrap your springform pan in foil first!) at 150°C (300°F) for 50 minutes, turn off the oven and leave the cake there to cool.

For the ganache, heat the cream until almost boiling, the pour over the (chopped) chocolate and espresso powder, let stand for a minute and mix to combine. Blend in the icing sugar and let cool. Once it's thickened, whip until dense and fluffy and decorate pipe on top of the cake.

Rolls with Crunchy Bits and Rosemary

2007-03-15T11:09:00.000+02:00

I spotted these fabulous-looking rolls (buns? whatever) in the Swedish food blog Ett öppet fönster and knew I had to try them - I love throwing seeds and stuff in bread doughs, and the preparation method for this is somewhat unusual: you take the crunchy bits - flax- and sunflower seeds, coarse rye flour and wheat bran - and douse them in boiling water, let the thing stand for an hour, and then add the flour, yeast &c.

I didn't have all the stuff called for and didn't feel like further overcrowding my flour pantry, so I did some substitutions, and also had a few sprigs of rosemary threatening to wilt, so there are some differences between this and the original. I'm sure both are equally fabulous, though, and you can vary the seeds and brans according to what you have on hand (sesame pumpkin, anyone?).

Rolls with Crunchy Bits and Rosemary
adapted from Ett öppet fönster, makes 24 rolls

150 ml (5 fl oz) whole wheat flour
100 ml (scant ½ cup) oat bran
100 ml (scant ½ cup) linseed (also known as flaxseed)
100 ml (scant ½ cup) sunflower seeds
2 tbsp olive oil
2 tsp salt
400 ml (about 1¾ cup) boiling water

50 g (1¾ oz)fresh yeast
350 ml (1½ cup) lukewarm water
100 ml (scant ½ cup) honey
1 tbsp finely chopped rosemary
1300-1500 (5½-6 cups) ml bread flour

Mix the first seven ingredients in a very large bowl. Cover with clingfilm and let stand for an hour.

Dissolve the yeast in the water and add to the seed porridge (which is totally meant to look disgusting at this point) together with the honey, rosemary and most of the flour. Knead until you have a soft, springy dough (adding more flour as necessary), about ten minutes by hand.

Cover with a floured kitchen towel and let rise for three hours. (Note: this is a huge, gigantic dough. It makes a lot of buns. When I make it again, I'll probably halve the recipe. I mention this because I had to leave my dough to rise on the table - I didn't have a bowl large enough to hold it.)

Gently deflate the dough and knead it a few times. Cut into 24 pieces and form into rolls. Let rise on a baking sheet until doubled, 30-45 minutes, then bake at 200°C (400°F) for about 15 minutes.

I had mine with some cream cheese and garden cress - the first thing I've managed to grow from scratch since I got my Boss Cat five years ago. Whee!

A Healthy(er) Snack

2007-03-12T16:30:00.000+02:00

I'm a girl who likes to munch on things. You know those diet quizzes where you're asked about your weaknesses - is it chocolate, salted nuts, cheese, candy, potato chips? Surely I can't be the only person whose instinctive response to this question is "um, yes, ALL OF THOSE, gimme!"

Luckily (for me, that is), I also like chickpeas. Specifically, crunchy-on-the-outside, tender-on-the-inside, nutty and fragrant roasted chickpeas.

Indian Roasted Chickpeas
I feel silly calling a recipe, because there's really nothing to it (plus I didn't exactly measure anything, so you'll have to go by feel with the spices - not that you shouldn't, anyway). Nevertheless...

1 can chickpeas (or you could soak and cook your own)
1 tbsp olive oil
whatever spices you fancy: I used turmeric, ground cumin, amchoor powder, cayenne, a dash of garlic powder and salt & pepper

Rinse and drain the chickpeas. Mix oil and spices and toss the chickpeas in them to coat. Roast in a large-ish pan at 200°C (400°F) for 20-35 minutes, until crisp and golden brown, stirring a few times in between.

Eat warm.

Roasted Tomato, Chickpea & Red Onion Salad with Halloumi

2007-03-09T21:20:00.000+02:00

Sometimes the title just says it all, you know? I feel like there's nothing I can do to sell this salad after giving you its (very prosaic) name. It should be enough! Well, maybe I'll just add that it's really no work at all - the onions and tomatoes are roasted in a mixture of balsamic vinegar and olive oil until the tomatoes start crinkling at the edges and the onion turns soft and sweet. After that it's just a question of tossing things together and frying the halloumi.

I have this sneaking suspicion that halloumi is a bit 2002 (for one thing, I can get it at my corner store* which is probably not a good sign), but quite frankly, I don't care. Fried halloumi is one of the best cheese-related experiences you can have, soft and oozy and salty and crisp and tangy. And I say this as someone who loves her cheese.

*even low-fat. Trust me when I say that low-fat halloumi is the devil.

Roasted Tomato, Chickpea and Red Onion Salad

serves 3-4, originally snagged from Hufvudstadsbladet last fall but tinkered with a bit

500 g (1 pound) cherry (or smallish plum) tomatoes
2 red onions, thinly sliced
1 can chickpeas
1½ tbsp balsamic vinegar
1 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
salt & pepper
fresh basil, oregano and tarragon or any combination thereof
200 g (7 oz, or whatever size it comes in, really) halloumi
salad greens

Halve the tomatoes and bake at 200°C (400°F) for about ten minutes. Season the onion with balsamic vinegar, a bit of olive oil, salt and pepper, and sprinkle over the tomatoes. Bake for another 10-15 minutes, until the onion's softened and maybe taken on some color, and the tomatoes are starting to crinkle at the edges.

Mix the onions and tomatoes with the rinsed and drained chickpeas and coarsely chopped herbs. Taste off with more balsamic vinegar and/or salt & pepper.

Cut the halloumi in 5-mm slices and fry it on both sides in a dry pan until golden brown.

Serve on a bed of whatever green stuff you have around. Except not the romaine from my fridge, because that had gone all wilty. Boo.

Horseradish-crusted Salmon

2007-03-08T16:59:00.000+02:00

I've been experiencing some setbacks cooking-wise lately: an apple pie that was quite tasty but extremely ugly (plus the crust really wasn't worth sharing) as well as a Caesar salad that was, to put it plainly, NASTY. Ugh, vinegar. In addition we've been working our way through some leftover roast beef (paahtopaisti), which is very good but doesn't make for very interesting meals (especially as I didn't actually make the roast - incidentally, my mother would like you to know that I'm a dirty rotten liar and she does too know how to cook meat).

But last night! I made the horseradish salmon I spotted in the Finnish food blog Keittokomerossa last week, and it was fabulous. I played around with the amounts a bit, making this a bit less horseradishy - there was a definite tang but nothing overpowering.

Horseradish-crusted Salmon
served three, with a bit of leftovers
700 g (1½ lb) salmon fillets, with skin
75 g (2½ oz) prepared horseradish
2 egg yolks
75 g (2½ oz) breadcrumbs
3 tbsp chopped fresh parsley
butter for frying

for the sauce:
250 ml (1 cup) light cream
½ tbsp Dijon mustard
25 g (1 oz) prepared horseradish (they come in tubes à 100 g here, so I just went by feel)
juice of one lemon
a whole lot of chopped chives
salt and pepper to taste

Cut the salmon into serving-sized pieces and remove bones. Salt lightly. Mix the horseradish paste and egg yolk on a plate and the parsley and breadcrumbs on another. Dredge the salmon, skin side up, first in the horseradish and then in the breadcrumbs.

Fry the salmon in a bit of butter, breaded side down, on a medium-hot pan, for about 3 minutes. Transfer to a baking tray, skin side down, and bake in the oven at 180°C (350°F) for 6-10 minutes, depending on the thickness of your fillets.

For the sauce, reduce the cream in a saucepan for a bit (I thickened it with a bit of cornstarch, but I'm not sure it was necessary, really). Add the rest of the ingredients and take off the heat before it comes back to the boil.

Beer, Thyme & Cheese Spelt Bread

2007-03-03T13:22:00.001+02:00

95% of you probably aren't aware, but Right Now, at This Very Moment (or at least until a very few moments ago, when I started writing this), the Nordic Ski World Championships are underway in Sapporo. What this has to do with a food blog? Well, it serves, at least partway (the other part being "yours truly is INSANE"), to explain how I got to getting a start on today's bread at 2.30 AM. You see, that's when they jumped the ski jumping part of the Nordic Combined. Ahem. (No, really. In some circles, this makes sense.)

I needed to use up a half-empty bag of spelt flour (to make room for more flours), but of course what really caught my eye was the cheese part. Who doesn't love cheese? The recipe called for gruyère, which I didn't have, so I made do with the somewhat milder cheddar.

Like a lot of my creations, this isn't, you know, perfect look-wise. I mean, the cheddar on top kind of looks like some sort of weird fossilized slugs or something, and also the jellyroll-type construction split in the oven, so you can see its cheesy, thyme-studded innards spilling out. But, mmm... cheesy innards! It was meant to go with a soup for lunch, but the first bread kind of disappeared while we were watching the ski jumping small hill competition. In fact, I'm not sure I have any room for lunch. But if I do, there's another bread for us to gobble up with it.

Beer, Thyme & Cheese Bread
from Glorian ruoka & viini

200 ml (6¾ fl oz) beer
100 ml (3.3 fl oz) water
20 g (¾ oz) fresh yeast
1 tsp sugar
1 tsp salt
50 ml (1¾ fl oz, or 3 tbsp + 1 tsp) melted butter or canola oil
400 ml (13½ fl oz) wholemeal spelt flour
200-300 ml (7-10 fl oz) all-purpose flour
~200 ml (scant 1 cup) oat bran

filling
50 g (scant 2 oz) finely grated cheese (I used cheddarn)
3 tbsp chopped fresh thyme

topping
some more beer
30 g (1 oz) finely grated cheese

Dissolve the yeast in the water and beer. Blend in sugar, salt and melted butter. Work in the flours and oat bran a bit at a time and knead until you have a springy dough.

Let rise for about an hour at room temperature or for several hours in the fridge. Tip the dough onto a floured work surface and divide in two. Knead a few times to get rid of air bubbles.

Roll each dough-half to a rectangle of 35*20 cm (14x8 inches). Sprinkle with thyme and grated cheese. Roll up to a tight log and form the log into a pretzel-like knot.

Transfer the breads to a floured baking sheet and let rise, covered, for 30 minutes. Brush the breads with beer and sprinkle on some more cheese.

Heat the oven to 250°C (480°F) and mist with cold water just before putting in the breads. Lower heat to 225°C (440°F). Bake for 25 minutes, misting with more water a few times during baking.

Chorizo Muffins

2007-03-02T16:36:00.000+02:00

I feel like I've been cannibalizing my favorite Finnish food mag, Glorian ruoka & viini, in this blog. The reason for this is that I've started to go through my hyoooge piles of cut-out recipes to transfer them to my computer where I can keep them organized, and, well, a lot of them are from Gloria, as the recipes tend to be inventive but not too fussy.

Such as this Chorizo Muffin.

Yes, muffin. By the time I got around to taking pictures, there was just one left, which was a bit of a pity, as one really expects muffins to come in quantities larger than one. A seasoned reader may also notice I had some other problems while photographing this, too:

(Anyone know how to edit out cat tails from food porn? How about cat heads? This wasn't intended to be a weekend cat blogging post!)

My favorite muffin is actually lemon poppyseed, but I haven't had one in years. Although now that I've started thinking about it this will probably need to be rectified like tomorrow. (Or maybe tonight. Lemon is good for a sore throat, right?) I'll probably find a fabulous new recipe from the roundup for the first-ever Muffin Monday, hosted by Elena.

Chorizo Muffins
adapted from Glorian ruoka & viini

makes 12 (can be halved, if you feel like halving an egg, which I did):
200 g chorizo, finely diced
3 tbsp chopped fresh parsley
1 tsp garam masala
½: tsp ground paprika
3 eggs
200 ml yogurt (the recipe calls for a cultured milk product called kermaviili - kesella in Sweden, but I don't think it exists in the US. I think you could use lowfat sour cream.)
50 ml olive oil
300 ml cornmeal
150 ml bread flour
2½ tsp baking powder
pumpkin seeds for decoration

If your chorizo is of the raw kind, saute it in a bit of oil. Season with parsley, garam masala, salt and paprika.

Whip the eggs, [cultured milk produce of choice] and olive oil in a mixing bowl. Mix flours and baking powder and sift into the egg mixture, fold to combine. Fold in the chorizo.

Spoon into muffin tins and sprinkle with pumpkin seeds. Bake at 200° C for 15 minutes. Serve warm.

State of the Onion + 5 Things Meme

2007-03-02T14:55:00.000+02:00

I've been feeling a bit under the weather this week, so there hasn't been much interesting cooking going on. However, remember the onion from a few weeks ago? Well, I popped it in a glass of water, and it's only been batted out of it and nibbled on 3247 times (give or take), and, well:

(Yes, yes, raw onion is bad for cats. I haven't noticed them actually eating it - mostly the Clown Cat only wants to get at the water.)

I got tagged for the Five Things You Didn't Know About Me meme not once but twice this week, so I guess I should comply. However, since I only just started this blog there's probably not much you do know about me, so I'm going to go fairly easy here and concentrate on food-related stuff.

1. My first food obsession was blue cheese (Aura, to be precise). I'd just learned to crawl, my parents had guests over, and some cheese crumbled to the floor. I think they expected me to spit it out, but no, it was yummy!

I still like blue cheese, but not enough to eat it off the floor. Or so I like to tell myself.

2. For a while in my mid-to-late teens I was a vegetarian. I seem to have repressed most of this time in my life because try as I might, I can't recall when or why I started, or even what made me give it up (laziness most probably). Needless to say, I enjoy food a lot more now, both when it has meat in it and when it doesn't.

3. I hate raisins. Also, cold-smoked fish and tortellini, although the latter is mostly about finding them utterly boring, not off-putting. Even so, I consider myself the least picky eater in my family, mostly because my father's one prejudice (pineapples) is so virulent and UNREASONABLE. (Mom's are, among other things: raisins; goat cheese; celery. My brother's are the worst though: beans and lentils; Brussels sprouts; fish; shrimp; zucchini and eggplant.)

Except if you count the whole I-don't-drink-because-the-taste-of-alcohol-is-awful thing. Actually, it probably makes me lose this game right off the bat. I don't drink coffee, either.

4. I'm a messy cook. In fact, I'm a messy anything. (Except computer user. My files are always impeccably organized, at least until I burn them on a CD and promptly lose track of it.) It's not a proper meal unless I've used every last bowl and A LOT of cooking utensils. Also, I'm not one of those people who cleans up after herself as she goes along - once I'm finished (and most often after I've eaten) the kitchen looms as a huge wasteland of dirty dishes, piles of vegetable peel and empty cartons of what-have-you. Sigh.

5. I like eating at home about 4376 times better than at restaurants. Moreover, I like my own cooking better than other people's. This is probably some huge character flaw type thing, because it's not like I'm the best cook I know or anything.

Summer Pudding

2007-02-27T13:47:00.000+02:00

My grandmother served this dessert once, maybe seven or ten (or more!) years ago. It was so good, fresh and spicy and wonderfully berry-y that I've been thinking about it periodically ever since. Every now and then I'd bring it up in conversation with my mother and go "we should make that sometime!" And then I'd get distracted by crème brûlée or cheesecake or chocolate souffle, and the summer pudding never happened.

Until this weekend. This isn't my grandmother's recipe, just something I cobbled together, adding my favorite spices (ever since making the spicy swirl cake that kicked off this blog I've been living some kind of cardamom renaissance - it really is a fabulous spice to use in desserts) and using up the leftover French Bread from Friday and an I'm-afraid-to-think-how-old splosh of white wine from the fridge, thus making this my entry for this month's Leftover Tuesday, hosted by Rachel. (ETA: check out the roundup here.)

I think you can probably use any kind of fruit in this, frozen or fresh. I went for raspberries, bilberries and blackcurrants, frozen ones naturally since we are about as far from summer as you can get, and added a splosh of white wine for extra depth. The berries are simmered in sugar and spices (cardamom and cinnamon in this case) and poured into a bowl lined with bread and topped with another layer of bread and then weighted down in the fridge overnight so the bread soaks up all the juices and turns a wonderful purple color. A perfect easy/healthy dessert to finish a heavy meal or a weeknight dinner. Yum.

Summer Pudding with Cardamom & White Wine

1 large loaf of dense (white) bread, sliced and with crusts cut off
1 kg (2 pounds) berries, I used about 600 g raspberries and 200 g each bilberries and blackcurrants
3 whole cardamom pods + ½ tsp crushed cardamom seeds
1 stick cinnamon
100 ml sugar (depending on how tart your berries are and how much of a sweet tooth you have)
splosh of white wine
grated peel of ½ a lemon

Heat the cardamoms, cinnamon, sugar and wine in a large pan until sugar is dissolved. Turn off the heat and let stand for a while to let the spices flavor the syrup. Add the berries and lemon peel to the pan. (If you want to make things easy for yourself, fish out the cardamom pods at least before adding the berries. I didn't and had had to hunt for them later.) It will seem like A LOT of berries, but don't worry.

Turn on the heat again and simmer until the berries start letting out their juices. Meanwhile, line a medium-sized bowl (or several small ones, or ramekins, or whatever) first with a large piece of clingfilm (you'll need to cover the bowl completely with the edges later) and then with bread slices, overlapping and pressing them together so there are no cracks in between. If you're making this in portion-sized cups, make sure to slice your bread very thinly or the berries-to-bread ratio will go all wonky.

Spoon the berry mixture on the bread, reserving some of the juices (if you've used frozen berries like me, chances are you'll have a lot of liquid, but that's OK). Top the bowl with more bread, again making sure there are no cracks, and spoon on some of the reserved juices (not all of them, though).

Fold the edges of the clingfilm over the bread and weigh down with a plate topped with something heavy (such as, say, more plates). Leave in the fridge overnight.

To serve, unfold the clingfilm, invert bowl over a plate and remove both bowl and clingfilm. Moisten any white patches of bread with the last of the juices and serve along with whipped cream or vanilla ice cream. (Although frankly, when I had it the following day without either it was even better.)

Waiter, There's Something in My... Pie

2007-02-25T09:32:00.000+02:00

Pumpkin in a pie? How novel! But wait, this isn't a sweet pie with pumpkin puree (which is fairly impossible to find here anyway), but a savory one with parmesan, onions and cheddar. And the pumpkin is coarsely grated and steamed. In fact, my pumpkin was grated, steamed and frozen several months ago (you seasonal produce people can just bite me), making today's cooking operation a breeze.

This has been one of my favorite uses for pumpkin (closely followed by a bean-ham-pumpkin soup I haven't made in far too long - now I'm wondering if I still have pumpkin puree in the freezer) ever since I found the recipe a few years ago. I waffled a bit between this and the Tamale Pie for my Waiter, there's something in my...-entry (check out the roundup here), but seriously, parmesan + cheddar + whole wheat pastry beats cheddar + cornbread any day in this household.

If you can't find fresh pumpkin this time of year, I'm sure this would be wonderful with any kind of winter squash. Or even with just extra onions - I dare anyone to find fault with the cheese-onion-cheese combination. Especially in a shell made wonderfully nutty by whole wheat flour. (You can feel all virtuous about the pumpkin and the whole wheat. And gluttonous about the cheese. And the butter. Best of both worlds!)

Two-Cheese Pumpkin Pie

from Glorian ruoka & viini 6/2005

for the pastry:
450 ml (scant 2 cups) whole wheat flour
½ tsp salt
70 g (2½ oz) butter
150 ml (5 oz) cold water

for the filling:
500 g (1 generous pound) fresh pumpkin, coarsely grated
2 large onions
½-1 tbsp olive oil
salt & pepper to taste
100 g (3½ oz) parmesan, grated
100 g (3½ oz) cheddar, grated

a bit more butter
one egg, lightly beaten

Mix the salt in the flour. Work the (cubed) butter into the flour with a fork, then the cold water. Divide the dough in two and form flat disks. Wrap in clingfilm and let rest in the fridge for at least 30 minutes.

Steam the pumpkin until softened, about 3 minutes. Soften the onions in the oil. Mix with the pumpkin, season with salt and pepper, and leave to cool a bit.

On a lightly floured surface, roll out each disk of dough to about 30 cm (12") in diameter. Transfer one of them to a (greased, floured) springform pan, about 23 cm (9") in diameter. (Or, you know, adjust sizes to fit your pan.)

Brush with some melted butter, sprinkle the grated parmesan, then the onion-pumpkin mixture, and finally the grated cheddar. Top with the other pastry disk and crimp the edges together. Brush with the egg.

Bake at 180-200°C (375° F) for about 40-50 minutes, until the crust is a deep golden color. Once you take it out of the oven, brush with some more butter (OMG yes I know. Feel free to skip.)

Served with a simple green salad on the side, this is fabulous both warm and cold.

In Defense of Kneaded Bread

2007-02-23T17:05:00.001+02:00

So here's a radical opinion: the no-knead bread that's seemingly swept the culinary world by storm this fall/winter is not actually a great favorite of mine. Partly it's an unfair prejudice (my first try left me with a stupidly ruined cast-iron pan) and partly I'm just a big old philistine who doesn't really care about crispy crusts and the open crumb The Ones In The Know seem to value over everything else. I like small-crumbed sandwich bread. I like it with lots of crunchy bits. I like it straight out of the oven, with (gasp) reduced-fat margarine, and I like it toasted the same way. I like it even when it's not the least bit airy. Hell, I like the dense Finnish rye breads, where heavy is the whole point.

I'm not saying the no-knead isn't pretty good - it's perfectly acceptable as artisan breads go. And it's certainly very pretty. Mostly, I just didn't find it any less fussy than regular kneaded bread. Besides, kneading is a lot of fun.

Possibly this is just a quirk of chance or whatever, but I've never made bread that didn't, when coming out of the oven, fill me with happiness. Bread that didn't look very nice, yes. Bread that didn't rise as much as it should, sure. Bread that spread more than it rose, most definitely. But they were still good.

Just like this Honey-Butter French Bread from epicurious that I stumbled upon this week. It's not exactly perfect - I kind of hate how the crust looks - but still making-you-overeat yummy. Normally I like working with fresh yeast (I love love love the texture and the smell and everything about it), but I didn't have the energy to think about conversions, never mind walking over to the shops (the freezing -19°C weather didn't help) to get some. Hence the slavish following of a recipe that had a lot of rave reviews. (Does anyone else have problems cooking from books these days? I tend to go all "but how will I know if it's any goooood?" a lot.)

This is a very very white bread - not something I'd go for usually, even if it IS good. But I had some leftover soup and the recipe called for it to be served with white bread, and I have something in the works for Sunday lunch that requires white bread, and mostly I just wanted to bake something to heat the apartment a bit (SO COLD). And for all of those things, this was a very good choice. (Now if only I hadn't devoured half a loaf in one sitting. Ugh.)

Tamale Pie

2007-02-23T11:32:00.000+02:00

I have owned Moosewood Restaurant's Low-Fat Favorites for about six or seven years, and their Tamale Pie has been one of my favorite kidney bean dishes for all that time (I have never tasted a proper tamale, so it might be helpful for those of you in the know to expect a spicy bean-and-vegetable casserole topped with low-fat cornbread since that is what this is) and yet it was only when making it last week that I realized I haven't been following the recipe AT ALL.

As it happens, I've been pretty much doubling all the vegetables - bell peppers, zucchini, carrots - (NO WONDER I always felt the need to double the seasoning!) while keeping to the prescribed amount of topping. Of course I set to rectify things immediately by doubling the cornmeal-eggwhite-buttermilk topping as well. Frankly, I shouldn't have bothered: it works far better with just a thin layer of "cornbread" barely covering the veggies. This way there's about as much topping as there is casserole, and that's just... wrong.

Tamale Pie
adapted from Moosewood Restaurant's Low-Fat Favorites, the amounts below are the ones I've used normally.

2 tsp olive oil
3-4 medium onions, chopped
3 tbsp minced garlic
2 tsp dried oregano
1½ tbsp ground cumin
1 tbsp ground coriander
2-3 medium carrots, diced
1 red bell pepper, diced
1 yellow bell pepper, diced
1 small zucchini, diced
(about 2 cups each of all veggies)
1-2 medium chiles, minced
2 cups canned crushed tomatoes
2 cups pinto, black or kidney beans
salt & pepper to taste

grated cheddar (the recipe calls for low-fat, but if I'm that desperate for healtfulness I'll just omit the cheese completely, thank you)

¾ cup cornmeal
1 tbsp unbleached white flour
½ tsp salt
1 tsp baking powder
¼ tsp baking soda
2 egg whites, beaten
½ cup nonfat buttermilk
2 tsp canola oil

Cook the onions and garlic in the olive oil, covered, on medium heat, for ~10 minutes. Add cumin, coriander, oregano and enough water to prevent sticking, and the carrots, cover, cook for 5 min. Add bell peppers, zucchini & chili, cover and cook for 5 more minutes. Stir in the tomatoes and beans, cover, cook for 10 minutes. (If it looks very wet, remove the cover half-way through.) Remove from heat and add salt and pepper to taste.

Coat a casserole dish with cooking spray and spread the vegetable mixture on the bottom, sprinkle cheese on top.

In a mixing bowl, combine cornmeal, flour, salt, baking powder, and baking soda. In a separate bowl, mix together the beaten egg whites, buttermilk and oil. Gently fold the wet ingredients into the dry until just mixed. Pour the batter over the vegetable mixture, pressing it down a little with a spatula. Bake for 30-35 minutes at 200°C (400°F), until the top is golden.

Variations: I'm sure some jalapenos would go very well in the casserole, and I've been meaning to destroy the vegetarian pureness with bacon or chorizo, but somehow I never seem to get around to it.

Pea Soup Day (with Shrove Buns)

2007-02-20T16:40:00.000+02:00

People in warmer climes have their carnivals, but in Finland the onset of Lent is celebrated with tobogganing followed by slow-cooked pea soup and Shrove buns (laskiaispulla/fastlagsbulle in Finland, semla in Sweden).

Pea soup landed here during the 12th-century Crusades when the Swedish crusaders would fortify themselves for the Friday fast by filling up on this hearty dish on Thursday, which is how pea soup became a traditional Thursday meal in both Finland and Sweden (later on followed by a dessert of oven-baked pancake). Naturally this was the first soup I thought of when reading about A Veggie Venture's Soup challenge.

The best pea soups are cooked in giant 100+-portion batches, and so my version is far, far larger than what I expected six lunchers to eat, especially knowing what was for dessert. (With two pounds of dried peas I really expected to have a week's worth of leftovers, but a lot of seconds were had. So, maybe three days' worth, then.) The soup is fairly predictable and gets its deep flavor from being cooked with a bit of smoked pork shank, but the buns...

I've already talked about our sweet buns at some length. Shrovetide buns are plain "pulla" buns with a filling of ground almonds and whipped cream (there is some controversy between righteous almond-proponents and blasphemers who prefer to corrupt the creamy Shrovetide experience with jam, which I won't go into beyond saying that I AM RIGHT). You can eat them as is, but the REAL way to go is to serve them on a deep plate with steaming hot milk. The bun soaks up amazing amounts of milk and becomes a warm, mushy mess, the whipped cream retains a bit of cool distinction before melting in your mouth, and the almond filling is the crowning glory, tangy and creamy and intensely almond-y.

Pea Soup

1 kg (2 pounds) dried green peas (in Sweden they use yellow peas, so I'm sure you'd be OK with either)
5 l (1¼ gallons) water
1 kg (2 pounds) smoked pork shank (ask your butcher to cut it in two)
2 large onions
2 tsp dried marjoram
black pepper
hot mustard to taste
salt (depending on how salty your meat was)

Rinse the peas and soak them overnight in plenty of water. Transfer (with the soaking water) to a large pot and bring to a boil. Peel the onions and cut them into chunks. Add the rest of the water and the pork, onions and marjoram and let simmer on a low heat for about two to three hours, until the peas go all mushy and start clouding and thickening the water.

Either I screwed up with the water or the recipe calls for way too much of it - this is supposed to be very thick and goopy. I wound up having to separate solids from the liquid for a while and reduce the latter by a good half or so, which was a bit of a pain. Next time I'll be conservative with the water and just add more as the peas soak it up.

Remove the pork shank from the pot and scrape the meat from the bone. Shred the meat into small pieces and place back in the pot. Season with hot mustard and pepper (and salt, if needed) to taste.

This is at its best made the day before and slowly reheated. It's served piping hot, with everyone adding more hot mustard and, in our family, garnishing with a dollop of smetana (sour cream).

Shrove Buns

makes 12 smallish buns, recipe from HBL 28/2/2006

for the buns:
50 g (1¾ oz) fresh yeast
200 ml (6¾ fl oz) milk
100 g (3½ oz) butter
4 tbsp sugar
1 tsp ground cardamom
1 egg
450 g (1 pound) flour

+ 1 egg, lightly whipped

for the filling:
about 4-5 tbsp half-and-half
1-2 tbsp melted butter
grated peel from ½ a lemon
250 g (9 oz) almond paste
1-2 drops bitter almond

whipped cream

to serve:
plenty of hot milk

To make the buns: in a large bowl, dissolve the yeast in a few tbsp of milk. Melt the butter and pour in the rest of the milk. When the milk-butter mixture is lukewarm, add it to the yeast along with the cardamom, sugar, and egg. Mix in half the flour and work to a smooth, goopy dough. Let rest for a minute or two, then work in the rest of the flour in batches, kneading (or working with the dough hook in a mixer) until you have a shiny, springy dough. (You probably won't need all the flour - this is supposed to be a fairly loose dough.) Cover with a kitchen towel and let rise until doubled, about 40-60 minutes.

Gently press down the dough, kneading a few times, and cut into twelve pieces. Form each piece into a smooth, round bun (this is the part that gives me hives) and let rise for another 20 minutes or so on a baking sheet. Brush with lightly whipped egg and bake at 225°C for about 15 minutes. Cool on racks.

Once the buns are cooled, cut off about a third of the top and scrape off a bit of the bottom part. Take the scraped-out filling and mix it with the almond paste (easier if you've shredded it), lemon peel, bitter almond and enough butter and cream to form a soft paste.

Fill the bottom parts with almond mixture and pipe some whipped cream around the edges of the bun. Top with the caps you cut off earlier and dust with icing sugar.

Can be eaten as such or in a deep bowl with almost-boiling milk poured on top.

New Tricks for the New Year

2007-02-19T22:27:00.001+02:00

I've never been good with meat. (Except chicken. I'm good at chicken. Unfortunately, this is probably more because of the easiness of chicken than any lurking prowess in me.) Usually I labor for hours and wind up with something bland (hello, pork roast of doom), or dry, or just stringy as hell. Regardless, I have decided to forge on and Improve Myself in spite of genetic discouragements - my mother isn't good with meat, either. (I can't believe I just said that in public. Hej mamma!)

I think we were all pretty astonished to find ourselves seeing in the Lunar New Year with tender, flavorful, succulent morsels of twice-cooked five-spice lamb (recipe at Epicurious). No-one more so than I, knowing that this wasn't the lamb shanks called for in the recipe, but a large hunk of unspecified mutton. Apparently if you cook anything for fifteen minutes in a lot of boiling water and then braise it for almost four hours in a mixture of simple syrup, ginger, soy, garlic, chilies and five-spice, it will turn out OK.

(My only gripe here would be that for something containing the word chiles in its title, this isn't very hot. Not everything needs to be, of course, but next time I'll up the chili a bit.)

We also had these pot stickers (first dumplings ever!), but they were all gone by the time I got to the picture-taking stage. As was an alarming amount of the lamb. I think that qualifies as a definite YAY.

Spring Is in the Air...

2007-02-14T22:52:00.000+02:00

...or at least in the wicker basket I keep onions in.

I'm tempted to see how much I can make it grow. On the other hand, the dark ~~hand~~ paw of menace is already looming in the background:

Poor little onion. I don't think it can stand much of a beating - it looks like it's been in the wars already.

Orange Marinated Pork with Pistachio

2007-02-13T00:03:00.000+02:00

This recipe is a bit of a mess, actually. A bit like the photo, really (not sure WHAT I was thinking with the angle, except that my family hasn't quite adjusted to this whole "wait for photographs to be taken before tucking in" thing).

With all those distinctive flavors (orange marmalade! chili pepper! Dijon mustard!) you'd expect it to have some serious kick to it, but as it turned out, not so much. The salad of sweet potatoes, asparagus and chickpeas served with mâche we had to go with it totally stole the show, there. (This will be blogged about when we make it again, because my pictures turned out all sucky.)

The award for most superfluous ingredient (and there's lots to choose from, unfortunately) goes to the pomegranate seeds that just totally disappeared during roasting, leaving no discernible taste to either meat or drippings, although to be perfectly honest, the pomegranate I had wasn't anything to write home about. (Think that could have something to do with it?)

Still, it's not like it was a TOTAL disaster, so here is the recipe:

Orange-Marinated Pork with Pistachios (and some other bits and bobs)

adapted from Kodin Kuvalehti

for the marinade:
100 ml orange marmalade
2 tbsp olive oil
3 tbsp brown sugar
1 tsp salt
2 tsp crushed chili flakes
2 tbsp Dijon mustard
2 tbsp lemon juice
100 ml chopped mint
1 cinnamon stick

top loin or neck of pork, about 2,5 kg (ours was a lot smaller)
pomegranate seeds, pistachio nuts and sliced oranges

Whizz together the ingredients for the marinade in a food processor, rub into meat. Marinate in the fridge overnight. Let sit at room temperature for a few hours before roasting.

Stud the meat with pomegranate seeds, pistachio nuts and orange slices (this is where the mess came in). Roast, fatty side up, at 225°C for 20 minutes, then at 175°C until internal temperature reaches 70°C, about an hour and a half. (The recipe called for an internal temperature of 85°C which I'm choosing to call a typo and not a deliberate attempt to sweat out everything that is enjoyable about meat. Ahem.) Take out of the oven, cover with tinfoil and let rest for about ten minutes before serving. Drizzle with pan juices.

Spicy Swirl Cake with Apples and Berries

2007-02-12T19:41:00.000+02:00

Yeast-based, cardamom-flavored sweet buns are a mainstay of Finnish (and Scandinavian) baking. There's even the concept of "coffee buns" (kahvipulla), which are rarely (if ever) coffee-flavored, just something to be served with afternoon coffee. Sometimes they're made plain, sprinkled with almond flakes or nib sugar, other times they're studded with a "butter eye." For St Lucia (December 13th) and Christmas, the dough is flavored with saffron (lussekatter in Swedish), and on Shrove Tuesday the plain buns are filled with almond paste or, if you're an ungodly infidel with execrable taste, jam, and whipped cream (laskiaispulla/fastlagsbulle in Finland, semla in Sweden).

Personally, I rather hate making buns, because I can never make them as round and pretty as I think they should be. I have issues. But that's why we were gifted with cinnamon swirls ("korvapuusti" - literally "cuff on the ear"), for which you just have to roll out the dough, spread it with spiced butter-sugar mixture, roll it into a log, and cut into pieces.

For whatever reason, someone decided that baking a lot of cinnamon swirls close to each other, so they melt together, would make it a Boston Cake (Bostonkakku). Go figure. Your basic Boston Cake has a filling of sugar, butter (or margarine), cinnamon, and sometimes almonds or hazelnuts. Here it's been given some oomph with shredded apples and lingonberries (use frozen cranberries or redcurrants if you live in a part of the world where lingonberries aren't available) as well as some ground cloves and ginger. It's really the extra spices that make this cake - it's very far from the ordinary mild-mannered buns I'm used to.

Spicy Boston Cake with Apples, Lingonberries and Pecans

adapted from Glorian ruoka & viini 1/06

for the dough
300 ml milk (the original called for oat milk)
25 g fresh yeast
~800 ml all-purpose flour
&dec34; tsp salt
100 ml sugar
2 tsp ground cardamom
100 g butter at room temperature

for the filling
100 g butter at room temperature
150 ml light muscovado sugar
1 tbsp cinnamon
½ tsp ground ginger
¼ tsp ground cloves
150 ml chopped pecans (toasted for a more pronounced nutty flavor)
1 tart apple, type Granny Smith, coarsely shredded
200 ml frozen lingonberries

1 egg, lightly beaten

for the icing
200 ml icing sugar
1 tbsp or so of undiluted, unsweetened berry juice - I used cranberry

Heat the milk to 37°C (finger-warm) and crumble in the yeast. Stir until the yeast has dissolved.

In a mixing bowl, sift together salt, sugar, cardamom and 400 ml of the flour, then blend in the milk. Stir until you have a gruel-like consistency, then work in the butter (this is easiest with a mixer with dough hooks, but it's nice and squishy by hand and I hate cleaning the mixer more than washing my hands, so). Knead in the rest of the flour (start off with a bit less than 4 dl and add as needed) until you have a nice elastic dough. (I know, I know! You get a feel for it. As a rule, you can't really overwork the dough if you do it by hand. In a mixer it's ready when it pulls away from the sides of the bowl.)

Cover with a kitchen towel or cling film and let stand until the dough's doubled in size, about an hour.

Punch down the dough gently and let rest for a few minutes while you prepare the filling. (Cream together the sugar and butter and mix in the spices.) On a lightly floured surface roll out the dough to a 30*40 cm rectangle.

Spread the rectangle with butter-sugar mixture, then sprinkle over the nuts, berries and apple, making sure to get filling right up to the edges. Beginning on the longer side, roll up to a log.

Cut the log into 6-cm-thick slices and arrange in a buttered, floured pan (about 25 cm in diameter), cut-side up. They'll rise and spread quite a bit, so you need to give them a bit of space. Cover with a kitchen towel and let rise for half an hour.

Brush with the egg and bake at 200°C for about 25 minutes, until nice and golden.

Let the cake cool completely (here is where the super cool weather we've been having came in handy) and remove from the tin. Mix the icing sugar with enough juice to make a fairly thick icing, and drizzle over the cake.

This actually works better if you let it stand overnight, as the whole thing comes together and becomes more sticky and yum.

A note on measurements: I'll probably be posting some recipes in imperial units and others in metric, depending on the original source. Most of my measuring cups have scales for both ml and cups, but if yours don't, Google is your friend and will ensure that you lose all ability to calculate conversions in your head. If you had any to begin with, that is, which I certainly didn't.