last week´s "smörgåsbord"

This week and weekend I´ve been working a lot, same as last week. I´ve come home late every night, didn´t have the time to plan my meals and even less to do any shopping. So, what have I eaten this week? Anything to blog about but the absence of a proper meal?

To start with I´ve had tons of rye crackers (the famous Swedish "knäckebröd"), one day I made Nigellas spaghetti carbonara with white wine and no cream (this is actually my favourite carbonara recipe and recipe is in How To Eat). I´ve had a Greek salad and also I´ve tried to get the most out of a piece of chorizo I´ve had lying around in the fridge for a while. (LOL That sounded really appetizing, didn´t it? )

First time I made this simple salad it was about two weeks ago and I liked it a lot so I made it again. It´s a Jill Dupleix recipe ( can´t really be called a recipe, I guess it´s more an idea) and it comes from her Simple Food. I´m not a real salad-person but I liked this because of the combination of the sweet, sour and spicy. Also, even though it´s "only" a salad but it felt more like a warm meal but lighter.

chorizo and sweet potato salad
Cut 1 large or 2 smallish sweet potatoes and 4 chorizo sausages (it would be fun to know how long that really is.I have a chorizo that is 30 cm long and somehow I don´t think she meant 4 of those...) thickly on the diagonal, brush with oil and grill until sizzling. Whisk 1 tbsp lemon juice and 2 tbsp olive oil with 1 tbsp chopped parsley, then toss with 200 g rocket leaves. Pile the potatoes and sausages on top.
Easy peasy and very tasty.

Another salad I tried was the Orange and Fennel salad from Crazy Water, Pickled Lemons. I must say that I wasn´t too impressed. It looked nice and summery but I don´t think the flavours complemented each other very well and it was just blend.

nice but pricey

I have been waiting for the asparagus season since the end of last summer! I know I should be enjoying the abundance of every season but I loooove asparagus. Leafing through Twelve by Tessa Kiros made me wish I lived in Italy, because down there the season starts already in March. (Actually, leafing through this book is all I´ve done, I just never seem to be inspired to cook anything. So any recommendations are more than welcome.)

After almost three weeks of flirting with those beautiful green shoots, yesterday I decided to buy a bunch of Spanish asparagus. They were a bit pricey but I just couldn´t resist anymore.
I decided to cook the marinated chicken on a bed of caramelized asparagus from an old Aussie delicious magazine.
I made the marinade and the parsley sauce last night and left everything in the fridge over the night and this evening when I came home from work, I just had to pull the chicken out, heat the griddle pan and within 15 minutes I had a delish dinner on the table. This is exactly how it should be all weekdays and my intention is to find recipes for real fast but flavourful food.

The recipe was originally for 4 servings but as this blog is about tea for one, I converted it to suit my needs. Also the marinade uses evo oil fro the marinade but I want that to burn on the griddle pan so I use frying olive oil there instead and evo oil only in for the sauce. I also used more asparagus than the original recipe - and it wouldn´t hurt with still more - since I want to have the veggie as a side, not only as decoration. I guess for many of you this isn´t really new, the lemon, parsley, garlic combination is a well proven one but I can warmly recommend this dish. If you are doubling it, it might still be enough with 1/2 garlic for the parsley sauce.

chicken marinated in lemon & garlic with asparagus
serves 1
by Curtis Stone

25 ml olive oil
zest of 1/2 lemon
1 garlic clove, roughly crushed
1 tsp chopped sage leaves
1 chicken breast fillet
7 thick asparagus spears, trimmed, halved lengthways
10-15g unsalted butter

parsley and lemon sauce

juice of 1/2 lemon
1/2 garlic clove, finely chopped
1 tsp finely chopped flat-leaf parsley
25 ml evo oil

Combine olive oil, lemon zest, garlic, sage and chicken in a shallow dish, cover and refrigerate for at least 2 hours.
For sauce, place ingredients in a screw-top jar and shake to combine. Season to taste, then refrigerate until ready to serve.
Heat griddle pan or barbecue to medium heat and cook chicken over heat for 4-5 minutes. Turn and cook for further 8 minutes or until cooked through. Transfer to a plate and cover loosely with foil and rest for 5 minutes.
Meanwhile, blanch the asparagus in a saucepan of boiling salted water for 30 seconds, then drain well.
Place the butter on the pan and top with the asparagus. Cook over medium-high heat for 1-2 minutes or until asparagus has lightly caramelised, then season to taste.
Carve chicken breast into 3 pieces and place on a serving plate with the asparagus. Drizzle some of the sauce around the plate and serve the remaining sauce separately.

retro cookies

As I mentioned in an earlier post, somehow I always want what I can´t get. Around Christmas last year everybody on nigella.com was posting about and baking Nigella´s Cranberry and White Chocolate Chip Cookies. I wasn´t too interested until it came to my knowledge that the German, Swedish and Norwegian editions of Feast are not complete (at least 15 recipes are missing) and then suddenly I became very greedy. I wanted to know which recipes I was missing out on and I wanted to have them. One of the forummers was kind enough to share the recipe and I decided to try it. To start with, I couldn´t find dried cranberries but my mother came - once again - to my rescue by bringing me around 400g of frozen berries.

Yesterday evening I just felt for something sweet and I came to remember the frozen cranberries. First problem was that I didn´t have any white chocolate and shops has already closed so I had to use milk chocolate. I didn´t defrost the berries as I didn´t want to crush them when folding into the mixture.

The cookies came out nicely but even though I halved the amount of caster sugar, I still find them too sweet. Next time - because it is going to be a next time - I´ll try to use dark chocolate to see how that alters the taste.

When I sat down to play around with the pics I just got the feeling of sitting
in a coffe shop in New England (whishful thinking?) back in the 40ies, 50ies and
that led me to investigate (not too deeply though) when the choc chip cookies
were "invented".
This is what I´ve found:

"Ruth Graves Wakefield was the woman responsible for coming up with the concoction. In 1930, Ruth and her husband Kenneth Wakefield purchased a Cape Cod-style toll house located halfway between Boston and New Bedford, on the outskirts of Whitman, Massachusetts. the Wakefields decided to build on the house's tradition, turning into a lodge and calling it the Toll House Inn. Ruth cooked home-made meals and baked for guests of the inn, and as she improved upon traditional Colonial recipes, her incredible desserts began attracting people from all over New England.One of Ruth's favorite recipes was for Butter Drop Do cookies. As she prepared the batter one day she discovered she had run out of baker's chocolate. She found a semi-sweet chocolate bar that had been given to her by Andrew Nestle, and so she cut it into tiny bits and added them to the dough, expecting them to melt as the cookies baked in the oven. However, the chocolate did not melt. Instead, it held its shape and softened to a delicately creamy texture. Needless to say, the cookies Ruth had created became very popular with guests at the inn, and soon her recipe was published in a Boston newspaper, as well as other papers in the New England area."
For those of you out there who doesn´t own Feast or have a Swedish or other-than-english edition, here is the recipe.

cranberry and white chocolate cookies

140gr flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tbs salt
75gr rolled oats
125gr soft unsalted butter
75gr dark brown sugar
100gr caster sugar (I used 50gr)
1 egg
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
75gr dried cranberries
50gr pecans, chopped
140gr white choc chips

Preheat to the gas mark 4/180c. Measure out the flour, baking powder, salt and rolled oats into a bowl. Put the butter and sugars into another bowl and beat together until creamy-this is obviously easier with an electric mixer of some kind, but you just need to put some muscle into it otherwise-then beat in the egg and vanilla. Beat in the flour, baking powder, salt and oat mixture and then fold in the cranberries, chopped pecan and chocolate chips or white chocolate, chopped into small dice. Set the bowl of biscuit dough in the fridge for 10-15 minutes. Roll tablespoonfuls of dough into a ball with your hands, and then place them on a lined or greased baking sheet and squish the dough balls down with a fork. You may need two baking sheets or be prepared to make these in two batches. Cook for 15 minutes; when ready, the cookies will be tinged a pale gold, but be too soft to lift immediately off the tray, so leave the tray on a cool surface and let them harden for about 5 minutes. Remove with a spatula or whatever to cool fully on a wire rack.

mastika ice cream

Falling Cloudberries is one of the most beautiful cookbooks I´ve ever seen. I love everything about it: the recipes, the photography but even the quality of the paper is first class. The moment I open the book I am transferred to the places presented in it. Needless to say, my favourites are Greece and Cyprus and I have cooked most recipes from these two chapters. I love the Moussaka, although I prefer it with a bit more cinnamon, the Spanakopita where I would use a bit more Feta, the Pork in Red Wine with Dried Coriander Seeds. Oh, and not to forget the wonderfully smooth Buttermilk Pudding with Watermelon and Rose Petal Jam, I can really recommend it with or without the jam.
A few weeks ago I made the Yoghurt & Semolina Cake and Tessa recommends to serve it with the not-too-sweet mastika ice cream. The cake was delicious without the ice cream and I don´t even think I would have liked it with something that has such a distinct flavour - as it turned out - this ice cream has.


To come across mastic wasn´t an easy task, but fortunately I could locate a Greek grocery shop in the same city my mother lives and so she picked some up for me. It came in a tiny plastic bag and looked like small crystals. According to Wikipedia, the mastika is the resin of the mastic tree (Pistacia lentiscus) indigenous to the Mediterranean islands.
"The mastic tree thrives especially well in the southern part of the island of Chios, due to the mild climate and characteristics of the soil. Mastic trees found elsewhere, even in other parts of Chios, do not produce mastic gum. The plant itself is known for its lemony balsam-like smell, which can permeate the air of the 'Mastichochoria', the villages on Chios that produce mastic gum. Interestingly, the ancient Egyptians used mastic gum, imported from Chios, in the incense they burned as a tonic for exhaustion and to restore mental clarity. Many modern researchers have confirmed some of the traditional uses of mastic gum, including its roles in oral health and healthy digestive functioning."

This is a very simple ice cream recipe, no custard making involved. The recipe calls for mastic, milk, sugar and pouring cream. In Sweden we have coffee cream, cooking cream, "in-between-cream" or whipping cream with fat contents of 12%, 15%, 27% and 40% respectively. I figured pouring cream would be one of the low-fat ones but I decided to go with whipping cream. I don´t have an ice cream machine and very often the sorbets turn out as granitas, even though I´m whisking vigorously with an electric handwhisker. (I found this new brand of cream the other day and as I´m crazy about nice labels and packaging, I just had to buy it. This is soooo cute!)
After mixing all the ingredients I had to have a taste! Well, how should I put this? It was a very unfamiliar flavour to me so I couldn´t really decide how I liked it. I let it cool slightly and then tried again. Umm, still that hmm... interesting taste. After several spoonfuls I decided to divide the mixture, keep one part as it was and add some flavour to the other. Tessa suggests the addition of a few drops of rose water or liqueur, so I went with the rose water. I added 1 tsp to half the mixture, tried it but there was still something missing. I remembered seeing a mastika ice cream recipe by another chef but I just couldn´t recall who or where it was. What I think I remembered was that the flavouring there was rose water and cardamom, so I went with it. To be able to tell the difference between the two flavours easier, I added some purple food colouring to the rose water one. I would have preferred a pink one but I didn´t have any. I put it in the freezer and whisked it every hour, but it took three hours until it started freezing.
Finally the big moment came (drumrolls, please) it was time to try it. The verdict of the jury is as follows:
The mastika ice cream might be very good but I just couldn´t get used to the taste. The rose water flavoured was a much nicer. It was milder and a lot more enjoyable.
The texture however was nice, not too fat, not too icy, so what I would definitely try next time is something I read about on Ilana´s blog I love risotto, namely the coconut ice cream. Mmmm, looking forward to it and in the mean time, I´ll just have one more bowl of my very nice (not) mastika ice cream.

Some leftover mastic, anyone?

Edit: OK, now (a week later) I have finished this batch of ice cream and I´ve changed my mind. When I finally got used to the taste, I actually started enjoying the flavour.

Edit again: after beeing in Greece this summer, I had mastic ice cream again and I must say that now I love the flavour. Definitely worth making it and being more open when first tasting it than I was...

For those of you who asked for the recipe, here it comes:

Mastica Ice Cream

serves 8

1 flat tsp mastic granules

1 cup superfine sugar

2 cups milk

2 cups heavy whipping cream

Put the mastic with a tsp of the sugar into a grinder and grind to a fine powder. Heat the milk with the remaining sugar and powdered mastic, stirring until it comes to a boil. Remove from heat, let cool a bit whisking now and then, and mix in the cream. Transfer to a bowl, cover and put in the freezer. After an hour remove the bowl from the freezer, give it a whisk and put it back in the freezer again. Whisk again after another couple of hours. When it's nearly firm, give it one last whisk and let it set until it's firm.

Enjoy!

a sicilian love affair

No, I haven´t met a Sicilian prince. I´m just being a drama queen. Today I found a recipe that made me go "mm" while eating. That is a kind of rating for me as the Michelin guide for a gourmet. A short mm is like 2 stars, long mm accompanying every bite is 5 stars.
Several years ago, the first time I saw Nigella Bites, I wasn´t impressed at all. All that mm-ing and finger licking felt a bit vulgar and in my opinion didn´t have anything to do with food. Back then I didn´t enjoy eating either, I thought eating was something you did to survive. Well, times are changing and so do we. Today The Goddess is one of my greatest inspirations and today I understand that food and cooking can be a passion and eating a pleasure.
Two months ago I bought Cucina Siciliana by Clarissa Hyman along with six other cookbooks and I haven´t really had time to explore it properly. I browsed through all seven books the same day but it was like overeating on candy, I couldn´t really enjoy it towards the end. Last weekend I pulled out the book again and started to read. I´ve never heard of Clarissa Hyman before but she has obviously been writing for Food and Travel, Country Living and The Times. I found this and I think it says a lot about what to expect of her books:"It is a way in which to understand different peoples and societies: why they eat, what they eat, how they eat, when they eat all contributes to a picture of a certain society at a certain point in time. That is why I find writing about food eternally fascinating, never boring, always revelatory. You take a slice of bread, for example, and can end up learning about religious practices, superstitions, botanical classifications, farming methods, chemistry or social history. And that's before you even begin to butter it!" - Clarissa Hyman
The book starts with wonderful pictures and the author presenting the geography, history, food-history and culture of Sicily studded with anecdotes about monks and Mafiosos and proverbs that reflect the Sicilian mentality.
The recipe part is divided in sections like Breakfast Pastries and Ices, Lunchtime, Street food and Snacks, Dinner and Basics where she gives recipes for Tomato Pasta, Roast Peppers, Fresh Ricotta to name a few. She is not as chatty as Nigella but every section is introduced with a bit more history and most of the recipes with some story about either ingredients, the market, whom she got the recipe from and under what circumstances. Some of the recipes come from "regular" housemothers, others from restaurant owners and there are even some adaptations from other food writers. After looking through this book, I added her other two books - The Jewish Kitchen and The Spanish Kitchen - to my Amazon wish list.
Today I made the polpette with white wine, lemon and bay leaves. As I already revealed, I loved it! I´m not a big meatball eater but these were so delicious. There wasn´t any serving suggestions and if I´m not totally wrong, Italians don´t often mix proteins with carbs. But hey, these people are not Italian, they are Sicilians! And I am not Italian, and I need carbs to feel that the meal is complete. I haven´t had potatoes for several months because of a stomach condition I had but now it was about time to try it again. I remembered that Nigella has got a mash with potatoes and sweet potatoes in Feast, so I decided to do something like that. I cooked and mashed potatoes, mixed with salt but didn´t want to add milk, butter or olive oil, also I didn´t want it to overpower the meatballs since I didn´t know what to expect taste wise. I just added a few tbsp of the "sauce" that I served the meatballs with and some salt. This meal was a success and it is definitely going to make it to my " Top 10".

meatballs with white wine, lemon and bay leaves
250g minced beef
50g grated Parmesan
50g dried breadcrumbs
4 tbs fresh parsley, chopped
Zest of 1/2 lemon
Salt
1 medium egg
25g plain flour (I used spelt)
4 bay leaves, torn
Olive oil
1 glass of white wine
Hot water
Juice of 1/2 lemon
Lemon slices and bay leaves, to decorate

Place minced meat,cheese, breadcrumbs, parsley, lemon zest and salt in a bowl and mix together with the egg.
Form the mixture into small balls, each about the size of a plum (some Sicilian cooks dip their hands in white wine before they roll out the polpette). Gently roll in the flour until lightly coated all over.
Heat a thin layer of oil in a pan large enough to take all the meatballs without over-crowding. Fry the meatballs over a medium heat for about 10 minutes until nicely browned on both sides. Give them a gentle shake now and then to make sure they're not sticking either to the pan or each other.
Add the wine, turn the heat up a bit, shake the pan so the wine distributes itself fairly evenly and let the alcohol burn off for a few minutes. Then pour in enough hot water to just cover the meatballs. Add the bay leaves. Leave to bubble away over a gentle to medium heat until the sauce is well reduced and starting to become syrupy.
Add the lemon juice and cook a few minutes more.
Remove the meatballs with a slotted spoon. Place in a serving dish - spoon over some of the sticky pan juices if wished - and decorate with whole bay leaves and wafer-thin slices of lemon.

Note: It took a bit longer for the sauce to thicken, it might have been that I used spelt instead of plain flour (although I´ve used less water), so I removed the meatballs a bit earlier, let the sauce simmer for a while and then put the meatballs back and let them be warm.

thai-style curried fish

Today I´m - thank God - not in a philosophical mood. Today I will tell you strictly about my lunch. My freezer is packed with vegetables and fish and meat and ice-cream so I thought it would be nice to make some place in there. Also, it wouldn´t hurt to use some food up so that I could stuff the freezer with fresh things again. It must be my eastern European upbringing that makes me such a hoarder but I don´t feel good until both my freezer and my fridge are full. The fact that I´m single and don´t eat that much doesn´t even cross my mind.
So yesterday I pulled out some nice plaice fillets with two different recipes in mind. The first one I´ve found in Tessa Kiros´ Falling Cloudberries and the other one in an old issue of delicious. Since Tessa´s recipe is an oven baked story, I didn´t want to start the oven only for one portion. Anyway, I decided to go with the delicious.recipe. I tinkered a bit with the recipe, halved the fish and reduced the sauce with one quarter but kept the amount of vegetables.
I see people with chronic complaints on a daily basis and very often one of the main problems is a very low ph value. I don´t want to become obsessed about my food but there are many shortcuts that you can use. Both zucchini and carrots are basic (as in ph) so those are good vegetables to eat more of. Also I substituted caster sugar with brown sugar.


thai-style curried fish

Ingredients (serves 2)
1 tbs vegetable oil
2 carrots, cut into wafer-thin strips
1 zucchini, cut into wafer-thin strips
1-2 tbs Thai red curry paste
1 tsp caster sugar
1 tsp fish sauce
200 ml coconut milk
2 quite large boneless fish fillets
Coriander leaves, to garnish
Pearl barley, to serve

Method
Heat oil in a fry pan. Stir-fry vegetables for 1-2 minutes, then set aside. Add curry paste to pan, stir for 30 seconds. Add sugar, fish sauce, coconut milk and fish, then simmer for 3-4 minutes until cooked. Return vegetables to the pan to warm through. Garnish with coriander and serve with rice.

I decided to serve the fish with pearl barley instead of the steamed rice. I love basmati rice but barley has got a very low GI index with slow carbohydrates. I started to think about things like this for several months ago, when I noticed that my abdomen would swell like a balloon after the meals. After dieting for a while I realised that my worse enemies were my beloved potatoes, pasta and rice, the common denominator being the high starch content and all of them having high GI indexes).
This was a nice meal but I would have preferred it a bit more spicy.

productive self-pity

Yaaaay! Spring has come! It´s time to fall in love!

Spring is the time for hope, new beginnings, a fresh start. Since I haven´t been able to locate a subject for my spring ardour, I was sitting in front of my computer on a sunny Sunday morning, all alone, no one to cook a nice breakfast for and I was bored. I have already checked my mail - twice - checked the usual forums where I occasionally participate (yes, most often I´m just lurking) but I found nothing to lift my spirits. I was feeling sorry for myself, thinking about how unfair the world is. What do you mean global warming? Or people who doesn´t have food or water for the day? No, no, I´m talking serious stuff here. It is sooooo unfair that Mr Right hasn´t knocked on my door yet. And, sadly enough, I´m not too interested in Mr Right-nows.
Right, so I was bored to tears. I went to ebay and searched for cookbooks that have been on my wish list for months, actually found three of them, I´ll tell you more about them if I win the bids. Then I started to check out all the food blogs I visit daily, for possible updates and that was when it happened. I suddenly noticed the button on the top of the site: "start new Blog". I heard a loud "reeeeetsch" sound in my head (that was my consciousness splitting) and I heard a new voice in my head: "Must start blog. Must start blog." No, I thought, this is crazy. Me? "Must start blog! Must start blog!"- I heard again, louder this time. Ooookaaay but what for? What am I going to blog about? Sleep, eat, work, sleep, eat, work?
This stirred up a flood of thoughts and made me think of another conversation that I ´ve had not so long ago - this time with a real person - about blogs. (BTW, he is over here trying to save the world and spread some light with his music)

So, why do we blog? Why don´t we see people and talk to them? Yeah, yeah, I´m aware of the fact that this way you can make friends all over the planet in no time at all but don´t we miss the personal contact? And is it possible for the new to coexist with the old? Or does the old have to die to create a breeding bed for the new?
Do we blog because of our egos, our need to show off? Or should I put it in another way? We might do this because we need to find an outlet for our creativity? Like to cook, like to take photos= start a food blog? Or do we just simply need to share our successes and failures, the events of the day with someone?
OK, who has got some answers? I´ll make you a strawberry smoothie if you give me some nice, not too uncomfortable answers :)

Here you go! I have blitzed a big handful of fresh strawberries, 1 tsp brown sugar, 250 ml plain yogurt and 1 tsp rose water to bring out the strawberry flavour. Yum!
I remember my grandmother telling me about how different things were in her youth. She lived in a small village in Transylvania without electricity or any asphalted streets. But she was happy. Never bored. Never contemplating the meaning of life or whether the grass was greener on the other side. I´m not saying that all those things are wrong, I just wonder why we feel like we do today, why so many people are compensating an unhappy life by eating too much, drinking too much, buying too much stuff without needing it? Oh, I almost forgot, must see how it goes with my bidding on ebay! I really need a new cookbook!

Back to my granny. Back then, it wasn´t too unusual not being able to read and write. When someone in the neighbourhood received a letter, they came to my granny and she read it for them. She told me about those long, cold winter evenings when she used to read aloud for the neighbours. These were pleasant but unpretentious gatherings, where my granny sat on the table and read one chapter from some novel every evening and afterwards the women were chatting and the men playing cards. There was also tea, made on herbs they were gathering in springtime in the outskirts of the village or the meadow. Every evening it was someone bringing a cake or cookies for the tea. There were times in the 30ies when they didn´t have food because of the drought. Then they would only have tea. But they went on with their gatherings and I do believe that it was like SPA for their souls.
Perhaps the key was that people were dependent of each other. Today we manage to do everything by ourselves and we take a pride in it. It is a good thing, of course but at the same time it is easier to just turn your back on others with an " I don´t need you!" Need? But what about love ? What about it? Looks like every road leads to Rome :)

Spring has come! It´s time to fall in love! Or start a blog.