Shrimp cocktail, Thai style

This was the starter for our Good Friday dinner (us secularized Swedes don't mind indulging on that day. Either.). A huge bunch of salad in our organic fruit and vegetable box, some shrimp in the freezer, the need for something fresh and savory with a punch, and the idea of a Thai style shrimp cocktail was born. To be honest, the original idea was to make fresh spring rolls but with salad leafs instead of rice paper wrappers, but the salad didn't want to roll up neatly so we ended up with something that looked more like burritos. To keep them from unrolling we served them standing up in shot glasses, and then I realized that hey, this is more of a shrimp cocktail than a spring roll.
Whatever it is, it's delicious and was a perfect start for our dinner. It was followed by a Tunisian lamb tagine with apricots and almonds (we've blogged about it here although this time we made a slightly different version) and for dessert an assortment of cheeses (Beaufort, Manchego, a fantastic unpasteurized Brie, and an anonymous but delicious blue cheese of French origin) accompanied by an amazing port.
I don't have any measurements in the recipe, just eyeball it. The Prik Nam Pla, or dipping sauce, is the most important part of this dish, so don't get scared off by the fish sauce and skip it!



In a bowl, mix shrimp (we used frozen and thawed, but fresh is of course better), some julienned carrot, de-seeded cucumber in thin slices, julienned papaya, fresh cilantro and white sesame seeds. Place a spoonful on a salad leaf and roll it up in a fashion that works for you.
Serve with the dipping sauce.



Prik Nam Pla - Thai dipping sauce

2 tbsp fish sauce
2 tbsp fresh lime juice
1 tbsp demerara sugar
½ red chili, finely chopped
2 tbsp cilantro, finely chopped

Mix all the ingredients and let it stand for a while. Taste before serving if you want to add more lime juice. We ended up doubling the amount of lime juice, but that was a tad too much. Wait until the sauce has been standing for a while before tasting it, because the flavors mature and if it's too "fishy" when it's just been made, it might be perfect 20 minutes later.

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!

Honeydew soup

So, I'm back at work, i.e. ten feet from the kitchen, which means that I once again have to supply myself with lunch. This was today's little invention, which took like five minutes to make and about the same time to eat. Which means I should be working right now, if I wasn't writing here. Ah, the joys of procrastination...!

If you don't have prosciutto, I imagine shrimp tossed with some lemon and dill would be tasty too, or maybe some cucumber and feta cheese cut in cubes.

This made a fair sized lunch portion for me; if you serve it as a starter this would make two portions.



Cold honeydew soup

½ honeydew melon
2 tbsp plain thick yoghurt (I used Turkish cause that's what we had in the fridge)
Pinch of salt
Pinch of harissa (or sambal oelek)
1 slice prosciutto ham

Peel the melon, cut it in smaller pieces and toss them in the blender. Puree the melon, add the yoghurt, salt and harissa and blend again. Taste to see if you want more of anything. Pour into a bowl and top with prosciutto cut in small pieces. Done!

I added some flat-leaf parsley too, mostly because I wanted to make the photo look nicer. Ok, only because I wanted to make the photo look nicer, the parsley didn't really add anything flavor-wise.

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.

Fancy lunch

I've never liked cooking for myself. Cooking by myself, yes, but when it's time to eat I prefer the company of at least one other person. But working from home does mean that I have to cook for myself at least once a day. I want my lunch to be easy to make, not too heavy, and preferably "brunchy" - that's why I loved that poached egg bread salad that I made last week. Starting this blog has actually made me better at eating lunch and cooking something - pasta with sauce out of a can, or even worse, deep frozen pizza, isn't really anything to blog about.

Some people probably think I'm crazy for making "fancy" foods for myself in the middle of the day, but I find that I feel better about myself and my situation when I eat something that has got some care and effort in it. And making today's lunch didn't take much more time than it does to bool pasta and heat ready-made sauce. Taking photos of the dish for the blog also means that I get to eat something that not only tastes nice, but also looks (at least minimally) pretty.

I was in the mood for salad today; something sweet, light and sophisticated. And when I found a recipe for grilled peach salad with bresaola and a creamy dressing over at Jamie Oliver's site, I knew what I wanted. I kept my fingers crossed that our small neighbourhood store would have peaches or nectarines, or even plums, because that would work too. Of course they didn't, cause it isn't peach season, but I couldn't get the peach thing out of my mind (have I told you I love peaches? I do.). So I did something I very rarely do: I bought canned peaches. In light syrup. And while I grabbed that can, it suddenly dawned on me what I was going to make with it. It's inspired by Jamie's recipe, but nothing like it. It was however, very good. I should tell you though that it's not really a full lunch, more of a starter or a light bite. Adding salad and serving it with some bread would make it more substantial.



Chèvre gratinated peaches with serrano ham and basil

2 peach halves (if you have fresh one, congratualtions!)
2 thin slices of chèvre (goat cheese)
Olive oil
Black pepper
1 slice serrano ham (prosciutto would work too, or bresaola)
Fresh basil
(Basil vinaigrette)

Slice a small part off the bottom the rounded part of the peach halves, that way they won't wobble around. Place a slice of chèvre on top of each peach. Drizzle a tiny amount of olive oil on top, and finally take a couple of turns on the pepper mill. Place in the oven at 225°C for about 10 minutes, until the cheese have started to melt a little. Place the serrano ham on a plate, and put the peach halves on top. Decorate with some fresh basil. I also made a basil vinaigrette (you can kind of see it in the lower right hand corner of the photo) but it didn't turn out so good so I won't give you the recipe. But do make your own because it really complements the other flavours.

A favorite soup

When we found that we got parsnips in our organic vegetable and fruit box, we immediately knew what to make of them: cream of parsnip soup. The original recipe comes from Arla, a Swedish dairy producer (although I think they're actually Danish now) who gives out little recipe folders for free in grocery stores. This soup is a find from one of those.

The soup works really well as a starter as well as a light lunch or dinner, and it tastes much more refined than you would think when you hear that the main ingredient is parsnips. The pears add a nice sweet fruitiness and the walnuts a nice crunch. We've made some changes to the recipe, like using vermouth and vinegar instead of white wine, and having the walnuts and pears raw rather than roasted as the original says.



Cream of parsnip soup with walnuts and pear

400 grams parsnips
1 onion
½ tbsp butter
5 dl water
1½ tbsp concentrated vegetable stock
1 dl dry vermouth
1 tbsp white wine vinegar
2½ dl light cream (15 % fat)
White pepper
50 grams walnuts
1 pear
2 tbsp finely chopped chives

Peel and dice the parsnips and onion. There's no need for very nice dicing since it's all going to be mixed later. Do make the dice quite small though, it will make them soft quicker. Fry the diced parsnips and onion in the butter. Dissolve the vegetable stock in the water and add that together with the vermouth and vinegar. Let cook slowly until the parsnips are soft, it takes about 10-15 minutes. (You can prepare the soup this far.) Mix the soup completely smooth with a blender. Add the cream and reheat. Add freshly ground white pepper to taste. Chop the walnuts and dice the pear. Mix with the chives. Serve the soup with the walnut-pear "chop" sprinkled on top.