Paper Chef 49: Prawns meet Peppery Passionate Pinaple

It's Paper Chef time again! I know, we haven't been doing this much lately (feels like forever since last time), but now we're back on track!

This months challenge is brought to us by Cath of ShowFood Chef, and with only a few days 'till Valentine's day it time to get jiggy with it, the ingredients for this month are prawns, fennel, sweet peppers and... passion, smoking hot and with a carte blanche in terms of interpretation!

Now, let's get the boring stuff out of the way so we can focus on the hawt stuff! We're making a prawn burger... it's like a crab-cake-in-a-bun, only with shrimp instead of crab. Well throw in the fennel and bell peppers for seasoning. After two tries, this is the recipe:

Prawn burgers
(makes three large or four smaller)

250 g Shrimp
75 g Fennel
75 g Red bell peppers (for keeping with this month's theme)
15 g Bread crumbs
1 tbsp Rice flour
1 Egg
Salt and Pepper to taste

If you're living in Sweden and can come by frozen peeled shrimp practically for free, thaw and pat them dry, if you live somewhere where you get good quality fresh prawns, dice them. Dice the fennel and bell peppers and add it all to a food processor. Give it a few spins, don't over do it (you could probably get away with a knife and hard labor instead). Add the bread crumbs, rice flour and egg and combine thoroughly. I don't think it's a good idea to actually add salt and pepper and then taste the batter, so just add whatever amount seems appropriate to you (that's how I usually do it when it says “to taste”, unless it sits on the stove). Let it rest for a while. Heat a frying pan with some butter (or oil if you are so inclined), shape the batter into patties and fry until golden brown on both sides. This is the tricky bit since they have a tendency to fall apart, but perfectly manageable.

Sandwich between two halves of a bun of your choice (we typically go for some roll rather than ready-made burger buns)... voilà!



In retrospect, some fresh red chili would have added a nice tang to this. I guess third time's a charm, but that will have to wait for another post.

That's the “prawns” bit of the title, now for the Peppery Passionate Pineapple!

This is a real killer salsaish thingy we made for the burgers that really elevate them to new culinary heights. For enough to the above recipe, combine

2 slices Fresh Pineapple, diced
2 Passion fruits, the gooey innards
2 tsp Peruvian Pepper, lightly crushed
1 tbsp White Crema di Balsamico (reduced white balsamic vinegar)
1 tbsp Crude (or Muscovado) Sugar

in a sauce pan and bring to a boil. Let it simmer while frying the burgers.



Mmm, mmm! Makes you want to rip out the spoon and gobble it down to the last gooey slurp! Perfect for that Valentine's Day's atmosphere!

Paper Chef 47: And the winner is...

It was my great pleasure to be the judge (and ingredient picker) for Paper Chef this month. We've got four great entries, turning my picks of mustard, thyme, saffron and ham into something delicious!

First up, we have Pauline, who made Ham and cheese croquetas with salad and mustard dip. I would love to bite into one of these crunchy, cheesy and fried delicious little things!



Next up is Ilva of Lucullian Delights who created a scrumptious Saffron breaded ham with a mustard seed, thyme and pecorino filling. This sounds like a perfect lunch sandwich, and I like the use of mustard seeds.



Our next contestant is Bron Marshall who made Little ham, cranberry and saffron rice stuffing cakes. These are very creative and it looks like a perfect side dish, or just a tasty little something to snack on.



Last, but of course not least, is Karen of Prospect: The Pantry, who made a beautiful and mouth watering assortment of appetizers. A plate of tapas to share with family and friends sounds just perfect for the holidays!



You can imagine that this was not an easy one, with four such diverse and delicious dishes (alliterations are fun!). But I have to make a choice, so... (drumroll, please)

A big congratulations to the next Paper Chef:
Ilva of Lucullian Delights!

Who can resist that hearty, delicious looking sandwich? Not me! So Ilva, it is my honor to pass the virtual Paper Chef hat to you. See you next month, and until then: happy holidays!

Paper Chef 47: The (Christmas) ingredients!

As the winner of last month's Paper Chef challenge, it is my honor to pick the ingredients for Paper Chef 47: the Christmas edition! For December's ingredient list, PCers around the world were asked to suggest ingredients that they associate with Christmas. As Paper Chef is a global event, and Christmas means different thing to different people around the world, the list was very diverse.

I had to use something suitable to pick out my three random ingredients, and the choice was obvious: a sparkly Santa's hat!



So, all the ingredients went into the hat (well, not the ingredients themselves, that would have been messy!).



And then it was time to pick!



Holding the hat, sticking my hand into it to pick out pieces of paper, and taking pictures at the same time required a few more arms than I have.
But the first ingredient to come out of Santa's hat is...



Mustard!

And the second:



Thyme!

And the last random ingredient is:



Saffron!
Delicious flavors, but nothing much substantial. So now that it's time to pick the ingredient of my choice, I will go with:



Ham!

This will be an interesting challenge! I think the possibilities are endless with this one. By the way, you can use any type of ham you want to: boiled, grilled, cured, smoked...

Now you have until next Tuesday, December 8th, to create something from these ingredients. Then the entries will be presented and I will get to select the winner. To read up on how to participate in Paper Chef, go to the rules and regulations. Have fun everyone!

I won!

Yay! My Chèvre mousse with beetroot, deep fried pasta and peanut butter caramel, has been selected as the winner of Paper Chef 46 by this month's judge, Dale of Home on the Range. Thanks Dale for picking me as the winner!

This means that I will get to pick the ingredients and be the judge for for Paper Chef 47, which takes place 2-8 December. To read up on how to participate, head over to the Paper Chef blogs for the rules and regulations. I will present the ingredients - three random, one of my choice - here on December 2nd. Then you have until the following Wednesday to create something from the four ingredients. Hope that many of you will participate, it's really fun!

Paper Chef 46: Markus' entry

This months Paper Chef was a real challenge, as Jenny has already pointed out. The ingredients just wont combine nicely! You start off with the given pairing of beetroot and goat cheese, and go further and further away until you actually find something that go with peanut butter, but by the time you get there it just doesn't go all that well with beetroot anymore... Try as we may, neither of us liked the others far out ideas (any idea where peanut butter and goat cheese seems to enjoy each other's company can be considered far out, however slim the chances of the get-along), and thus the idea of a “cook-off” was born!

My thought drifted towards some Thai-fusion-thingy (as Jamie Oliver succinctly phrased it on TV once), and a kind of Satay-y thing would incorporate the peanut butter in a natural way. For Satay sauce we tend to get Chicken skewers here in Sweden (I have no idea how Thai that actually is, but not too far off I think), so beetroot skewers would be the obvious way to incorporate the beetroot. This leaves the goat cheese and the pasta. The pasta was lamely incorporated as the staple food for the dish, but the goat cheese proved more difficult. There's no whey (pun intended) that would fit! Unless the whole French presupposition that goat cheese equals Chèvre was abandoned in favor of whey cheese! In Norway they make an excellent “Brunost” (brown cheese), which is a whey cheese made of primarily goat milk (at least the one I used). They taste quite strongly and a bit sweet, making them potentially agreeable to the company of peanut butter.

As the Brunost Satay started cooking and going stiff, I needed to add some liquid, and foolishly added lemon juice to cut it. As I myself (if less stressed) could have figured out, the dairy started curdling instead, making this the stiffest “sauce” in History (that's right, history with a capital H). Made it taste good though, but would probably have been better with lime, added after it had cooled down. Anyhow, that's how I made it, so that's how I'll report it!

The making of the rest was rather uneventful (turns out deep frying beetroot doesn't change it that much), and the final dish turned out to be (drum roll please...)

~~~
Deep fried Beetroot Skewers
with Brunost Satay
on a bed of Pasta
~~~

Recipes towards the end of the post. The verdict was mixed, but on the whole I'm pleased with the outcome, I kept it minimalistic, not adding very much to the four challenge ingredients, and actually making something edible (only regret cheating with the goat cheese...) Oh, and it wasn't very photogenic either, so only one picture this time (hopefully the Satay doesn't look too much like it's future self in it).



Deep fried Beetroot Skewers
1 Beetroot
Oil to deep fry in

Boil the beetroot for 45 minutes, peel and cut into thumb sized pieces. Heat the oil and deep fry the beetroot pieces for about 4 minutes. Skewer (can I use that as a verb? Please?) them.

Brunost Satay
½ Onion
2 tbsp Peanut Butter
60 g Brunost (Norwegian Whey Goat Cheese)
½ Lemon (juice from)
pinch of Chili Powder
pinch of Ground Cardamom
Butter to fry in

Finley chop the onion and fry it. Add the spices and let it get some color before adding the peanut butter and cheese. Stir vigorously to combine, then add the lemon juice.

Please don't make me write out the recipe for boiling pasta...

Paper Chef 46: Jenny's entry

This month's Paper Chef was a real challenge. When I went over to last month's winner, Dale of Home of the Range, and saw the first three ingredients - pasta, chèvre, and beetroots - I said to myself "heh, this will be a breeze!". Then I saw the last one. Peanut butter. Beetroots and chèvre works together like bread and butter, pasta goes with almost everything, but there was no clear way in which to add peanut butter to that mix.

Markus and I couldn't agree on what to cook with these ingredients, so when Markus suggested we do one dish each in a sort of cook-off, I jumped on that. After a lot of thinking, I came up with some sort of starter/cheese course.



Chèvre mousse with beetroot, deep fried pasta and peanut butter caramel

50 g chèvre without rind
2 tsp mascarpone

1½ tbsp honey
1 tsp red wine vinegar
1 tsp Dutch style peanut butter

½ beetroot, boiled
A small bunch of fresh tagliolini
Vegetable oil for deep frying

Mash up the chèvre, add the mascarpone and stir until smooth. Cover and refrigerate.
Heat the oil. Fry the pasta for a minute or so until it's lightly brown and blistered. Place on a paper towel to get rid of excess oil.
Put honey and vinegar in a pot and boil carefully until the mixture is a bit reduced. Add the peanut butter, stir well and bring to a boil. Remove from the heat. The caramel will harden quite quickly, but you can soften it on the stove again if needed.
Cut the beetroot in small cubes. Form an egg of chèvre mousse using two table spoons. Place on a plate, decorate with beetroot cubes, small dots of caramel and the fried pasta bundle.

The verdict
On their own, the elements of this dish were good. However, the chèvre mousse and the beetroot weirdly didn't go that well together. It wasn't bad, it was just that the chèvre overpowered the beetroot. In hindsight, it would have been better to bake the chèvre in the oven to make it softer and sweeter, maybe with the peanut caramel drizzled on top. The caramel itself wasn't bad either, but I think that it should have been a lot runnier, because the chewy texture didn't work that well with this. The deep fried pasta was cool though, crunchy and kind of reminded us of grissini. So, all in all not a home-run, but with some adjustments this has the potential to be a really cool dish. In a few days, all the other participants' dishes will be posted on the PC website, and then Dale will select the winner. It will be really interesting to see what all the other Paper Chefs have come up with, cause this was quite a tough one!

Paper Chef 44: Fall is upon us

It's time for Paper Chef again, and this time the four ingredients were chosen by Deeba Rajpal of Passionate about Baking. The three randomly selected ingredients turned out to be ricotta, ginger and dark chocolate, and the fourth one was fall... as in autumn. Never seen that one in the supermarket! Fortunately it should be read metaphorically, so we are all encouraged to brain storm ingredients we associate with the season currently upon the northern hemisphere.

Residing in a country that's mostly populated by pine and spruce (Sweden), the mushrooms growing under them is a given fall-lly ingredient, particularly chanterelle. That will be our fourth ingredient!

This time around I figured we should go minimalistic, adding as few other ingredients as possible. Pushing the envelope as far as I could reach, the dish became

~~~
Chanterelle Toast
with Chocolate Ricotta
and Jellied Ginger
~~~

So I just added a slice of toast and some seasoning!

The chocolate ricotta might need some explaining. A while back we discovered that it's not that hard to make your own ricotta. It's basically just milk, cream, salt and lemon! Now what if you dissolved some luxurious dark chocolate in the simmering milk before clotting it? Why you'd get chocolate ricotta, wouldn't you! (Don't answer that, despite the exclamation mark the odds are stacked against this crazy idea!)

So, down crazy lane I went, measuring up 9½ dl milk, 1 dl cream, 130 g dark chocolate and a pinch of sea salt in a large pan on the stove. I also measured up 1½ tbsp of lemon juice to have handy later. After bringing the milk and friends to a steady simmer (stirring occasionally), the lemon juice went in. I stirred it and let it simmer for a minute, then stirred again and again let it simmer for a minute. Since there were no clotting I continued simmering and stirring occasionally, steadily thinking “d**n this, f**k, f**k, f**k, this isn't working” for an unknown amount of time, after which I just tipped it into the cheese cloth and gave up. But then, lo and behold, it actually separated, and in the cheese cloth was a thick creamy, brown pulp, which tasted a whole lot better than that sounded...

Triumphantly I had Jenny agree to the tastiness of the chocolate ricotta!

For the chanterelles you need
100 g Chanterelles
1 Shallot
1½ tbsp Butter
20g Honey
30g Red Wine Vinegar

Finely chop the shallot and dice the chanterelles while a frying pan is heating up with the butter. When the butter quiets, add the shallot and chanterelles. Let them fry for a few minutes. Add the honey and let it be absorbed. Stir like crazy so that it doesn't caramelize on it's own. Add the vinegar (and stand back). Let the vinegar absorb as well before taking it off the heat.

Putting it all together
Toast the toast, and spread the chanterelles on the toast. Mix the chocolate ricotta with chopped jellied ginger (one lump per toast), and spread it over the chanterelles. Enjoy!

(Surviving crazy lane, the enjoy-part was the best!)

“But how” do you ask “shall this be enjoyed? 'Tis not starter nor dessert!” While this is true, we just had it for starters, and it was a lovely prelude to one of our favorite soups!

Paper Chef 43: Trifle of caramelized couscous and baked peaches

After missing last month's challenge, the deer eaters are back in the Paper Chef business! In July it was Sijeleng of Javaholic who did the best cook-up of the ingredients chicken, almonds, corn and fish sauce, and now got to pick the ingredients for Paper Chef #43: couscous, fresh chilies, peaches and rosemary.

Lovely picks! We decided to go sweet this month, and make a desert couscous dish. This took on many transformations in our brain before we settled on this version. First, the idea was to just make sweet couscous (using fruit juice instead of water as liquid for the couscous) to be served with peaches poached with rosemary, chili and maybe some vanilla. But the peaches were too hard for poaching and there was no suitable poaching liquid in the house (simple suryp = too boring), so I decided to bake them instead, and use the chili and rosemary in a honey glaze.

While pondering the creation over loads of laundry, I thought that it could need some sort of added tang and freshness to balance the heat and sweetness. My mind went to plain Turkish yoghurt, and the idea of a trifle was born. A normal trifle has sponge cake, custard, whipped cream and fruit, this one would have sweet couscous, yoghurt and baked peaches - hey, we've taken liberties with falafel before, so why not with trifle now?

Markus came up with the quite brilliant idea of caramelizing the couscous in order to make it less grainy and more crunchy. The end result turned out more yummy than we had hoped for. The caramelized couscous especially was a big hit that I can see us making again. The crunchy, caramel flavored couscous, the smooth and creamy yoghurt and the soft, honey-sweet peaches, still warm from the oven, with the punch of the hot chili and the fresh forest flavor of rosemary. Delicious!



Trifle of Caramelized Couscous &
Baked Peaches with Chili-Rosemary Honey Glaze

For the caramelized couscous:
1 dl peach-raspberry juice*
1 dl couscous
1 tbsp butter
1 dl brown sugar

Bring the juice to a boil. Stir in the couscous grains, cover with a lid and remove from heat. Let it stand until the liquid is absorbed, about 5 minutes. You can do this part well in advance. For the caramelization, heat up a frying pan, add the butter and let it melt. Add the sugar and give it a good stir. It won't melt like white sugar does (and won't splatter either), you will get more of a soft brown butter mixture. There might be some lumps, but that's no biggie. Add the couscous and stir constantly for a minute or two. Watch carefully so it doesn't burn. Spread the couscous out on a plate (this way it will get more crunchy) and set aside until you are ready to serve.

*The only decent peachy juice the store had was a peach and raspberry blend. If you have plain peach juice, that's what you want to use.

For the baked peaches:
2 peaches
1 tsp butter
1 tbsp fresh rosemary leaves, finely chopped
½ tsp fresh red chili, finely chopped
2 tbsp honey

Halve the peaches and remove the pits. Place them in an oven proof dish, and top each peach half with a a quarter of a teaspoon of butter. Bake in a 225°C oven for about 15 minutes, or until the peaches are going soft. In the meantime, mix the honey with the chopped fresh chili and rosemary. Drizzle the honey over the peaches, and bake for five more minutes.

To assemble:
6 tbsp plain thick Turkish yoghurt

You can get two big deserts out of this (one peach/person) or four smaller ones. Serve in individual transparent bowls or glasses - you want to be able to see the different layers. Layer the trifle starting with couscous in the bottom, then yoghurt and top with a peach half. Repeat if you're making two big deserts. Garnish with a small sprig of rosemary.



Note: the chili made this quite hot, so another idea would be to infuse the honey with a whole piece of chili and a whole rosemary sprig that you fish out before pouring it over the peaches.

Paper Chef 41: Gravad Tuna

It's time for Paper Chef again, the monthly cook-with-four-chosen-ingredients food blog competition! Last month, we were all winners - Bron Marshall gave out awards to all the competitors and we were awarded the finest of all: the Mmm…Now That’s Terrifically Tasty Award for our Thyme Scented Prosciutto-Potato Swirls with Chèvre.

There was also an overall winner: Alison of Local Lemons who got to pick the ingredients for this installation of Paper Chef. She spent some time in Las Vegas, and took the opportunity to use the roulette wheel to pick: Asparagus, Artichokes, and Tuna. Keeping with the Las Vegas theme, Alison picked Vodka as her ingredient of choice.

As our faithful readers might have noted, we're no strangers to using liquor in our cooking, so this was right up our alley! We decided to do a starter, inspired by the traditional Swedish dish gravlax. The "grav" comes from the "cooking" process, and "lax" is just Swedish for salmon. Visitors to IKEA might be familiar with this dish. But it's possible to use the same process on other types of fish, and as this month's Paper Chef called for tuna, that's what we "gravade". (And here we treat you to a free lesson in Swedish verb conjugation!)

Normally the process of "gravning" takes two days, but it's possible to use alcohol as a catalyst, speeding up the process. Luckily for us, one of the ingredients was alcohol! The 2 day process is for a whole side of salmon, but we used carpaccio style tuna slices, speeding up the process to a mere three hours.

For the other ingredients we kept it quite simple, using the artichoke as a flavoring for an aioli, and just steamed the asparagus to keep its fresh taste. We also made grilled bread to go with the dish. This made a quite hefty starter, kind of halfway to a full main course.

The gravad tuna was just lovely - flavorful and translucent. The asparagus complemented the dish well with its fresh and springy taste. The artichoke aioli was a hit with the tuna, and we'll definitely make that one again as a dipping sauce or together with grilled meat.

~~~
Gravad Tuna
with Asparagus
and Artichoke Aioli
~~~

Gravad tuna
225 g tuna fish in very thin slices (we had three slices)
1 tbsp salt
1 tbsp sugar
½ tsp white pepper
2 cl vodka
2 tbsp dill (we used frozen)

Mix the salt, sugar and pepper. Rub the mixture into both sides of the tuna slices. Place them on a big plate, pour over the vodka and put the dill on top. Cover with plastic film and place in the fridge for at least three hours, turning the slices over halfway through.

Artichoke Aioli
2 artichoke hearts, grilled and stored in oil and garlic
2 tbsp mayonnaise

Mix the ingredients into a paste. This had enough garlic in it to qualify as an aioli, but if not add more garlic.

Assembly:
Steam the asparagus for about 10 minutes. If you don't have a steamer, you could also boil it in lightly salted water.

Cut some Italian style bread in 1" slices and cut each slice in half lengthtwise. Pour some oil on top (we used cold pressed rape seed oil) and add some coarse sea salt. Grill in the oven at 175°C until the bread is golden brown (we grilled it at 225°C which was too much, so 175°C is our best guess...).

Place a slice of tuna on a plate, and put some asparagus on top. Serve with the artichoke aioli in a glass on the side with the bread on top.

Paper chef 40: Prosciutto, potatoes and thyme on Mother's Day

We really liked participating in Paper Chef for the first time last month, and of course wanted to have another go this month. The ingredient list did contain some intimidating stuff (trotters, kidneys) and other things we don't even know what it is (broccolini?) but we said that even if the picks were tuna, kidneys and blood oranges, we would have a go.

We were almost a bit disappointed when last month's winner, Bron Marshall, announced that the random picks for Paper Chef #4o was prosciutto, floury potatoes and thyme. Instead of picking a fourth ingredient, Bron picked a theme: Mother's Day (as Sunday apparently was Mother's Day in the US; it is another day in Sweden).

Actually the common-ness of the ingredients, and the fact that they go so well together, made coming up with something creative harder than we would have thought. In the end we went down a fairly common route: the most daring part of our entry is the sauce. It did taste very nice, and I'm sure my mom would eat this happily, mother's day or not. Our make-believe Mother's day main course ended up being (drum roll please):

Lamb patties
with Thyme Scented Prosciutto-Potato Swirls with Chèvre
and Spiced Red Wine Gravy

Savory gravy covered lamb patty... *drool*

Makes 3 servings

For the lamb patties:
500 g ground lamb
1 egg yolk
2 slices of prosciutto, cut in small pieces
1½ tsp dried thyme
Salt & Black pepper

For the Prosciutto-Potato Swirls:
500 g floury potatoes
100 g chèvre
1 dl milk
2 tbsp fresh thyme leaves
25 g butter
Salt & White pepper
Thin prosciutto slices

Sauce: see below

Mix the ingredients for the lamb patties and refrigerate. Set the oven to 175°C. Peel the potatoes and boil until soft. Add chèvre, milk and butter and mash the potatoes. Season with salt, pepper and fresh thyme. Place a slice of prosciutto on a flat surface. Cover it in a 1 cm layer of mashed potatoes, and then roll it up. Continue until you're out of either prosciutto or mashed potatoes. Place the prosciutto-potato rolls, standing up (press them down slightly to make them stand), in a lightly oiled pan. Bake in the oven for about 20 minutes. While they're cooking, fry the lamb.

Get the mixture for the lamb patties out of the fridge. Shape it into 3 patties. We make the patties by putting a third of the lamb mixture between two parchment covered flat plates and press them silly. This makes nice, fairly round, almost 1 cm thick patties, which will contract a good amount when fried. Fry in butter on medium-high heat. Keep the patties warm while making the sauce.

For the sauce, we used some left over spiced red wine that we had saved after making figs poached in red wine for one of our creations for last month's Daring Bakers challenge (scroll down for the saffron cheesecake with poached fig). We had saved the wine which was spiced with a small cinnamon stick, a star anise, some sugar and one black peppercorn. It had been sitting in the fridge for a couple of weeks, so it had really gotten a lot of flavor from the spices, and it smelled so much like Christmas - lovely! To make the sauce, we simply poured the spiced red wine into the pan where we had fried the lamb patties. We added more red wine, a splash of soy and few drops of Worcestershire sauce. We let it reduce for a while and then strained it.

The potato swirls worked like a charm, the salty flavor of the prosciutto complemented the mashed potato beautifully, and the fresh thyme provided a good link to the lamb meat. The spiced wine sauce worked surprisingly well with its warm and Christmasy flavors. It was a bit sweet, which went well with the salty and cheesy prosciutto-potato swirls. All in all a splendid combination.


Thyme Scented Prosciutto-Potato Swirls with Chèvre. Yum!

Paper Chef 39: Salmon and bulgur falafel with artichokes and blackberry butter

This is our first time ever participating in the food blog event called Paper Chef! The rules are simple: you are given four ingredients, and out of those you have to create something delicious. Three ingredients are randomly chosen from a suggested ingredient list, and the fourth is picked by last month's winner. In addition to picking the ingredients, last month's winner also gets to be the judge of this month's Paper Chef. Sounds cool, huh?! For all the details, and to read up on past Paper Chef challenges, go to the Paper Chef blog.

I have looked at some past months' ingredient picks, and compared to some of them - fig, mint, anchovy, and polenta or dried chili pepper, barley, vanilla pod and beef, this month looked very easy to me! Last month's winner Adrienne of Hungry Bruno picked artichokes, blackberries, bulgur (bulgar) and salmon (the first three being random and the salmon being her pick).

It didn't take us long to figure out what to do with these four ingredients. Our recipe isn't the healthiest (it's deep fried stuff with a butter dipping sauce, people...!), but if we may say so ourselves it turned out really well. Yeah, we know it's not real falafel, but we had to call it something and it sounds better than "salmon balls", right?!

It has been great fun doing the Paper Chef challenge for the first time and I hope that we will participate often in the future!



Salmon and bulgur falafel with artichokes and blackberry butter

Makes about 15 "falafels"

For the salmon and bulgur falafel:
2 dl water
Pinch of salt
1 dl bulgur
500 g salmon
1 egg
Pinch of salt
Pinch of black pepper

For deep frying:
Flour
Eggs
Breadcrumbs
Neutral cooking oil

For the blackberry butter:
4 dl frozen blackberries
½ dl water
1 tbsp sugar
100 g butter

For the artichokes:
Artichokes (one per person)
Salt
Water for boiling

Making it all:

1. Bring the salted water for the bulgur to a boil. Add the bulgur, lower the heat and cook for approximately 8 minutes. Set aside.
2. Clean and dice the salmon. Put it in a food processor and mix using the pulse button until it's coarsely chopped. Mix salmon, bulgur and egg in a bowl, season with salt and pepper and put it in the fridge.
3. Bring salted water to a boil in a pot big enough for the artichokes. Boil for 40-50 minutes depending on size. Strain and rinse immediately with cold water. Set aside for later.
   
4. Bring the blackberries, water and sugar to a boil. Let it reduce for 5-10 minutes. Pass it through a strainer and set the puré aside for later.
   
5. Melt the butter and put it aside.
6. Prepare three plates, one with flour, one with lighly whisked egg and one with breadcrumbs. Keep these ingredients at hand because you will probably run out before having done all the salmon falafels.
   
7. Heat the oil to 190°C.
   
8. Get the salmon-bulgar mix out of the fridge and roll it into meatball sized balls. Roll them first in flour, then in egg and last in breadcrumbs. Deep fry a couple at the time until they are golden brown.
   
9. Clarify the butter. Put the blackberry puré in a bowl and layer the butter on top. This is purely for show - when you dip it will mix together anyway, but it looks nice!
10. Serve the salmon-bulgur falafel and artichokes as finger food with the blackberry butter as dipping sauce.