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!

Smörgåstårta

I know: that's a lot of weird looking characters in the title... must be something Swedish. Why, yes it is! There are a few modern Swedish loan words in the English language, ombudsman is one of them, and smorgasbord is another. The “Smörgåstårta” is closely related to the smörgåsbord (as we write it, since we have three more letters than you do). It's basically a cake topped with a smorgasbord!

Naturally you don't want to make it a regular cake (spongecake and whipped cream/fondant), since you're topping it with savory stuff, so the base takes some creativity to work.

Looking back at the word “smörgåsbord” it's actually a compound consisting of “smörgås” (open top sandwich), and “bord” (table). I guess the original meaning is a large variety of toppings for an open top sandwich served on a separate table. The word “smörgåstårta” is also a compound consisting of “smörgås” (again) and “tårta” (cake, etymologically the same word as tort). This holds the key to making the cake base: bread!

Rather than baking the bread ourselves, we brought two large loves of toast bread, cut them down to even squares, and assembled them to form a large sheet cake. To “glue” the layers of bread together we used a filling made of spiced cheese and crayfish. The spiced cheese is a bit of a specialty (I doubt you can find anything similar if you don't know where Boxholm is located), but it's basically regular cheese that has been aged with caraway and cloves.

The sheet cake (we ended up with three layers) is covered in a mix of mayonnaise and crème fraîche, and then decorated with whatever you want on it.

Smörgåstårta
A lot of sliced toast bread
Mayonnaise
Crème Fraîche

Spiced cheese and crayfish filling
150 g crayfish tails
50 g aged spiced cheese, grated
1 tbsp dill, finely chopped
1 tbsp mayonnaise
1 tbsp crème fraîche
1 tsp dijon mustard
½ tsp caraway seeds, ground (use a mortar and pestle)

Garnish
Shrimps
Ham (rolls)
Cucumber
Grapes
Smoked salmon
Roe
Lemon slices
... you can basically have whatever you like/think looks tasty.



This post is horribly late, I had some trouble finding the recipe for this write-up. We enjoyed it on Jenny's birthday more than a month ago... If you ever have the chance to try this Swedish delicacy, do not hesitate, it is truly delicious!

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!

Räkmacka

The “räckmacka” holds a special place among the Swedish traditional dishes. It is frequently associated with the high-but-not-top life, and has of late slipped into the not-quite-every-day luxury segment of the middle class. The word “räckmacka” is decomposed into “räk-” and “macka” which means “shrimp“ (as first element in a compound, otherwise it's “räka”) and “open top sandwich” respectively. This pretty much says it all, without giving away the vast quantities of mayonnaise that's usually associated with it. There's also usually some egg on it, but since I don't like egg, we tend to keep it simple.

So, for this you need:
2 rounds of semi-sweet Wheat Bread
Mayonnaise
~750g Shrimp (unpeeled)
2 slices of Lemon
4 small paper-and-toothpick Swedish flags (optional)
6 twigs of Dill

Our rounds of bread were a bit to large, so we had to cut them down. They should be about the size of a side plate. Peel the shrimps (or buy them peeled, but since they are the main source of flavor, I went for the masochistic path). Use a pastry bag to cover the whole of the bread with mayonnaise, and then arrange the shrimps so that they form a mountain and hide the mayonnaise pastry bag work. Cut two slices of lemon and arrange them artistically on top of the shrimp mountain. decorate with the flags and the dill.

The beauty of a räkmacka is fairly well measured by the height, and no ones going to notice if there's some extra mayo in the middle (wink, wink)...

If the directions were unclear, just look at the picture... I haven't got time to write a thousand words... :-)


Two beautiful räckmackor (plural form). Probably the best way to enjoy shrimp!

P.S. Oh, this was really written by me (Markus), but Jenny started the post by uploading the pictures, so she's probably listed as author. D.S.

Lunch sandwich

I've mentioned before that I'm bad at eating lunch because I work from home and tend to forget about it. I'm trying to get better though, and this was today's meal. I used to make this a lot before we went to Hong Kong but since we came back to Sweden I guess I've forgotten about it, until today. It's one of those things for which there is really no recipe, but I'll tell you how I went about it.



Mushroom-apple cheese melt sandwich

Put the oven to 175°C. Take a rather large piece of bread, today I used a darker sort of mini baguette which I sliced in two. Heat some oil or butter in a pan. While the butter melts, take a handful of mushrooms and quarter them. Also take a small apple and dice that, you want dice about the same size as you mushroom quarters. If you want to you could chop up an onion finely too, I didn't today. Toss the mushrooms and apples (and onion) in the pan and fry until the mushrooms are going soft. Season with salt, pepper and some paprika powder (it goes well with the mushrooms). Then add a couple of hefty tablespoons of crème fraiche. Now in Sweden there are all kinds of flavoured crème fraiche varieties. The one I used today is flavoured with porcini mushrooms (accounting for like 5% of the volume of crème fraiche, but hey, it's something, and it was actual dried porcinis, not artificial flavouring), thyme and lemon. I've used other varieties of flavoured crème fraiche before, like French herbs, mustard/tarragon, or even chili/paprika (then I usually toss some spicy sausage in as well), and you can use plain crème fraiche too, but then you probably want to add some more spices. Anyway, a couple of tablespoons of crème fraiche goes into the pan; stir around so that it melts a bit. Then you just transfer the mushroom-apple sauce on to the bread slices, that you have placed on some sort of oven proof dish. I prefer a snug fitting pan, cause then it's easy to scoop up any sauce that falls off the bread. Finally, grate some cheese on top. I prefer a flavourful cheese, like cheddar. Today I used parmesan because that's what was in the fridge. Mozarella would work too. Put in the oven for about 10 minutes, until the cheese are melting and getting a golden colour. Since we had fresh thyme at home (thyme is my favourite herb) I topped the sandwich with a couple of sprigs before eating. Happy lunch!