Daring Cooks Augusti: Pierogi

Woohoo, the Deer Eaters are finally Daring Cooks again. Sorry about neglecting the blog so much lately, there simply has been too much other stuff going on. And what better way is there to finally be back in the Daring business, than to totally misread the challenge?

The August 2010 Daring Cooks’ Challenge was hosted by LizG of Bits n’ Bites and Anula of Anula’s Kitchen. They chose to challenge Daring Cooks to make pierogi from scratch and an optional challenge to provide one filling that best represents their locale.

For some reason (and I can't understand why, because it's all there, right in the first few paragraphs of the challenge presentation post on the private Daring Cooks' forum) I misunderstood the challenge. Not going to elaborate on why and how, but the fact is that we didn't make the challenge recipe. Sorry about that! We did, however, make pierogi. Two different kinds. I hope that makes up for misreading the challenge.



First up, Karelian pierogi, a Finnish specialty. We made these because they're delicious and because Markus is half Finnish, so that kind of represents his locale, or something. Anyway, maybe they're not pierogi in the challenge sense of the word (Wikipedia calls them Karelian pasties) but let's not dwell on that. These pierogi are made from a thin rye crust and filled with rice porridge. I know I know, it sounds weird and to be honest not very tasty, but trust me, they are good! The hardest part about making Karelian pierogi is cooking the rice porridge - it takes forever and the porridge always get burnt in the bottom of the pot. Luckily, there's a handy solution for that in Swedish grocery stores: ready made rice porridge in sausage form!


No it's not really a sausge, just rice porridge packaged in a plastic tube.
By the way, you can get yellow pea soup packaged the same way.

The next pierogi we made were more traditional, although oven-baked instead of boiled. For that local touch we filled them with ground moose and chantarelles. A note on the recipe, we found these a bit dry, so if you want to make them you might want to add some sort of liquid to the filling.



To see what the other Daring Cooks made, head over to the Daring Kitchen where you can also find the original recipe!


Karelian Pierogi

makes about 20

50 g butter
5 dl rye and wheat flour mix (Sw. rågsikt)
1½ tsp salt
2 dl water

For the rice porridge filling:
1½ dl round grain rice (Sw. grötris)
½ tsp salt
3 dl water
7 dl milk
...or use ready-made rice porridge (Sw. risgrynsgröt)

2 tbsp butter
2 tbsp water

Start with making the filling. Let rice, salt and water simmer under a lid for ten minutes without stirring. Add the milk, stir and bring to a boil. Simmer very slowly under a lid for about 40 minutes. Watch closely so it doesn't burn! Transfer to a bowl and let cool.
OR, as I said, skip this step and use ready-made!

Heat the oven to 175-300°C.

Cut the butter into small cubes, add the flour and use you fingers to make a crumbly dough. Add salt and water and work into a uniform dough. If it's to loose, add more flour, if it's too hard, add more water. Spread some flour over your work surface, and roll the dough out into a long roll. Cut it into about 20 pieces. Use a rolling pin to turn each piece into an thin oval. Put a heap of rice porridge in the middle and fold up the edges around it (see picture). Transfer to a parchment-covered baking sheet. Put in the oven for about 10 minutes, lower the heat if it looks like they get done too fast.

Melt the butter, add the water and heat. Brush the piergoi with melted butter as soon as they are out of the oven. Let them cool covered with a cloth (although I think they are best eaten warm).



Pierogi with moose and chantarelle filling

makes about 12

25 g fresh yeast
1 tsp salt
3 dl luke warm water
2 tbsp oil
1 egg
9 dl flour

For the filling:
2 yellow onions (medium sized)
Oil and butter
100 g fresh chanterelles
500 g ground moose
2 tbsp tomato puré
1 tbsp concentrated vegetable stock
salt
black pepper
1 egg for the egg wash

Crumble the yeast into a big bowl, add salt and some of the water and stir to dissolve. Add the rest of the water, oil, egg and finally the flour. Work into a dough and let it rest for about 30 minutes while you make the filling.

Finely chop the onions. Cut down the chanterelles into smaller pieces. Heat oil and butter in a pan and fry the onions and chanterelles until lightly browned. Transfer to a bowl. Add a little more oil and butter and brown the ground meat. Add the onions and chanterelles, tomato puré and vegetable stock. Season with salt and pepper. Let the filling cool.

Heat the oven to 225°C. Knead the dough a little and roll it out into 12 large ovals. Put 3-4 tbsp of filling on the middle of the dough. Brush the edges lighly with water to make the dough stick together, fold the dough over the filling and press down with a fork to seal and make a decorative pattern around the edges. Transfer to parchment covered baking sheets and let the pierogi rest for about 25 minutes. Brush with egg wash. Bake in the middle of the oven for about 15 minutes. Let the pierogi cool under a cloth. They freeze really well, just heat them a little in the oven before eating.

The best broccoli

This is an amazingly good broccoli dish that originates from Ina Garten, aka The Barefoot Contessa. I found it over at Amateur Gourmet. Ina Garten seems to be a big name in cooking over in the States, but none of her books is available in Swedish as far as I know.

This is a (for me) completely new way of cooking broccoli: roasting it in the oven, which makes it crunchy and flavorful. None of the off-putting squishyness of over-cooked broccoli, just good, concentrated flavor. The lemon juice, garlic and parmesan doesn't make things worse...

The first time I made this, I stayed close to the original. This time I needed to get rid of a big bunch of broccoli (I'm working elsewhere the coming week, and the only place that broccoli might go while I'm gone is into the trash, which is a waste, so I'm making lunch boxes), but I didn't have any pine nuts or basil, so I skipped those. It was good anyway.

I persuaded Markus to try a small piece, but he didn't like broccoli even in this fashion. Sigh. Well, more for me!

PS. Sorry for the crappy picture, I took it straight into the lunch box in bad lighting.



The best roasted broccoli
adapted from Ina Garten and the Amateur Gourmet

A big bunch of broccoli
3 tbsp olive oil
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
2 garlic cloves, peeled and sliced
Juice from ½ small lemon
1 tbsp olive oil
½ dl freshly grated parmesan
(2 tbsp toasted pine nuts)
(2 tbsp fresh basil, julienned)

Heat the oven to 125°C. Cut the broccoli into florets, not too small. Place them on a cookie sheet covered with parchment or foil. Toss with olive oil, salt, pepper and garlic. Place in the oven for 20-25 minutes until the top of some florets are browned. I only left mine in for about 15 minutes (unreliable oven), so watch them carefully so they don't get too roasted.
Remove from the oven, add lemon juice, olive oil and parmesan (plus pine nuts and basil, if using). Toss around a bit and enjoy!

Tartelettes with Brunost

Unless your Norwegian, you're probably sitting in front of the computer now, rubbing your head and wondering what on earth "brunost" is. Well, it's a Norwegian whey cheese, made primarily from goat milk. In Swedish, it's called mesost. Wikipedia tells me that it's sold under the name gjetost in the States.

The flavor is kind of sweet with notes of toffee and vanilla, but still a bit sharp. The ones made with more, or only, goat milk has a more distinct flavor, while those with a mix of cow and goat milk are milder.

We had a bit of brunost laying in the fridge since Markus' Paper Chef adventure. I got the idea of making small quiches/tartelettes with it, and the result was really delicious. I got four tartelettes with a diameter of about 12 centimeters using this recipe. They can be eaten both warm and cold. If you want something to serve with it, I think smoked meat would work really well, especially moose or rain deer. You could use this recipe to make other sorts of cheese quiches (the original recipe uses Swedish classic cheese Västerbotten).



Tartelettes with Brunost

Makes four tartelettes

60 g cold butter, cut in cubes
1½ dl flour
1½ tbsp ice-cold water
100 g brunost (Norwegian goat whey cheese)
1½ dl milk
2 eggs
Salt
Black pepper

Heat the oven to 225°C. Mix the butter and flour, add the water and work quickly into a uniform dough (I used a mixer, but you can do it with your fingers). Press the dough into four tartelette tins (diameter of about 15 cm). You could also make one big quiche. Punch the pressed out dough a little with a fork to keep them from puffing up too much in the oven, or use pie weights if you have those. Blind bake for five minutes. Remove from oven. Grate the cheese and put a quarter of it in each tartelette. Whip the milk, eggs, salt and pepper lightly with a fork. Pour the mixture over the tartelettes. Bake for about 15 minutes, until they are set and the top is a nice golden brown color.

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!

Chicken Parmigiana, and a versatile sauce

This dinner was a result of me craving the Chicken Parmigiana I saw over at The Pioneer Woman Cooks, and Markus wanting to make a roasted vegetable sauce that he had seen on a food show on Swedish TV. So, we simply used the vegetable sauce instead of tomato sauce for the chicken.

The roasted vegetable sauce is easy to make, spreads a wonderful smell in your kitchen, and is extremely versatile. You can use other vegetables, and feel free to tamper with the amounts. It can be served on its own with pasta, used as a flavoring in casseroles, stews and paellas, or as a base for soup. You don't need all the sauce for the chicken here, so you will have some left-overs to experiment with. The sauce can be frozen.

Roasted vegetable sauce

3 yellow onions
8 tomatoes
2 red bell peppers (we used the pointy kind)
1 green chili fruit
1 parsnip
4 small carrots
2 large cloves of garlic
Olive oil
Later:
Vegetable stock (~3 dl)
Salt and pepper to taste

Heat the oven to 175°C.
Take a large oven-proof dish and prep it with either some oil or with parchment paper.
Halve the onions, but keep the skin on. Place them skin up in the dish.
Halve the tomatoes and remove the seeds. Quarter the bell peppers and remove the seeds. Peel the parsnip and carrots and cut in slices. Halve the chili fruit and remove the seeds. Peel the garlic and give it a little crush by pressing down on the cloves with the side of a knife blade. Place all the vegetables together with the onions in the dish. Sprinkle with some olive oil.
Put in the oven for 1-1½ hours, until the veggies are soft and roasted.
Remove the skin from the onions.
Transfer all the vegetables to a mixer fitted with a blade, or to a large bowl or pot. We used a large pot and an immersion blender. Mix/blend until you have a purée. Add vegetable stock until you have the consistency you want (for the chicken below it should be quite saucy). We used water plus concentrated store-bought stock, but homemade vegetable stock would of course be better.
Add salt and pepper to taste.


Tasty, but not photogenic...

Chicken Parmigiana
adapted from The Pioneer Woman Cooks

2 chicken breasts
1 dl flour
Salt and black pepper
2 tbsp butter
2 tbsp olive oil
2 dl freshly grated parmesan cheese
Roasted vegetable sauce (recipe above)

Place each chicken breast in a ziplock bag, or in a normal plastic bag which you tie up very well. You don't want chicken flying about your kitchen. (Yuck.) Anyway, either take one of those meat-hammer thingies, or do as we do and use a rolling pin, and pound the chicken breasts flat. You want then to be ½ centimeter thick or so. Mix the flour, salt and pepper on a plate, and coat the chicken breasts.
Heat the butter and oil in a pan. When it's hot and the butter has melted, you fry the chicken breasts (we had to do them one at the time) until they're nice and golden brown, about 2-3 minutes on each side.
Clean out your pan (or grab another one). Put in however much of the roasted vegetable sauce you think you'll eat. If we would have had some wine (red or white) at home, I would have added a splash of that at this point, so do that if you're so inclined. Bring the sauce to a simmer. Place the chicken on top of the sauce. Sprinkle the parmesan generously on top of the chicken. Place a lid on the pan and simmer until the cheese is melted and the chicken is heated.
We served this with mashed potatoes (made with more cheese!), but obviously pasta works as well. If you have any fresh herbs (parsley, basil) you can sprinkle that on top.
Enjoy!

Carrot soup

No creativity for smalltalk (smallblogging?) today, I'll just get straight to the recipe. This soup, with its vibrant color, creamyness and subtle heat, was the perfect lunch for a gray October Monday. If you want something more substantial with it, I recommend Indian nan bread, especially the cheese variety.

Carrot-Coconut soup

2 large portions

250 g carrots
½ large red onion
A chunk of fresh ginger (about 2 cm)
2 tbsp olive oil
1 tsp cumin
1 tsp ancho chili powder
½ tsp turmeric
4 dl coconut milk
1 dl water
Salt
Pepper
Sesame oil

For serving: fresh cilantro, sour cream, coconut flakes

Peel and slice the carrots, onion and ginger. Heat the oil in a pot, add the vegetables, cumin and ancho chili, and fry, stirring often, for about 5 minutes. Add turmeric, coconut milk and water, and let the soup boil on medium heat for about 10 minutes or until the carrots are soft. Mix the soup until smooth (I use an immersion blender). Add salt and pepper to taste, and also a few drops of sesame oil (I find the flavor and smell of sesame oil to be overpowering, so it's usually just a drop or two for me). Garnish with a sprinkling of coconut flakes, some fresh cilantro and a small dollop of sour cream.

Daring Cooks September: A vegan trip to India

A while ago, Markus and I were chatting about what challenges we would like to see for the Daring Cooks and Bakers. I mentioned that it would be fun to do a vegan challenge, to which Markus reluctantly agreed. I was a vegetarian when we met (but I'm not anymore, Markus says that I came round to the sane side), so I'm very comfortable with vegetarian cooking (and we do eat quite a bit of vegetarian food) but vegan, that's a whole other story - vegan cooking would be a challenge indeed!

Our lovely host for September's Daring Cooks challenge is Debyi of The Healthy Vegan Kitchen. As the name of the blog implies, my wish for a vegan challenge has been granted! She has chosen Indian Dosas as the challenge. A dosa is a pancake/crepe, according to Wikipedia traditionally made with rice and black lentils, where the batter is left to ferment overnight. The fillings can vary: potato curry (masala), chutneys, and ghee, just to name a few.

The recipe Debyi choose is a modernized one, using spelt flour and baking powder. It comes from a cookbook called reFresh by Ruth Tal of the Canadian restaurants Fresh. Besides the dosas, there was also a recipe for curried garbanzos for filling and a coconut curry sauce to be served on top. We were however allowed to vary the filling and the sauce, as long as it was vegan, i.e. completely free of all animal products.

I had a dosa, or thosai as it's called there, when we were in Malaysia last year, so I had some kind of idea what to expect even if the version I had there wasn't vegan. It was filled with potatoes, which was very tasty, so we decided to skip the garbanzos and use a dry potato curry as the filling instead (my own invention; recipe below). At first I was going to make apple chutney as the sauce, because potatoes, apples and curry go great together. But there was a big bowl of plums sitting in the kitchen, so I searched online for plum chutney recipes and found one that sounded appealing. It called for a kilo of plums. I had only six hundred grams, but I figured I would just scale the recipe. So I de-pitted my plums and chopped the onion and found all the spices and got everything going in a big pot on the stove, and then I realized that I had forgotten to scale the amounts and had put in sugar and vinegar for a whole kilo of plums. Well, no panic (ok, a little) - my eyes fell on two tomatoes sitting in a bowl, and I figured that by adding those, I would sort of kind of maybe make up for the 400 missing grams of plums. It worked - the chutney was delicious, with just the right balance of sweet, sour and spice! My additions to the original recipe - besides the tomatoes - are the bayleaf and the raisins. You'll find the recipe at the bottom of this post.

So, on to the dosas themselves. We followed the recipe to the letter, but rather than buying vegan rice or soy milk, we made our own almond milk, using a recipe from the cookbook Kärlek, oliver och timjan by Anna and Fanny Bergenström. (Don't you just love the book's title: "Love, olives and thyme".) This almond milk recipe calls for a small amount of honey. We were unsure of whether honey was vegan, so I googled and it seems like that depends on what vegan you ask. Maybe a vegan reader would like to add your two cents in comments? Anyway, we decided to be the kind of vegans who eat honey. Almond milk recipe below.

Making the dosa batter was problem free, but frying them - oh boy, that was a whole other story. Debyi said that this recipe is virtually oil free, using only a very small amount of cooking spray in a non-stick skillet before frying the first dosa. Well, our non-stick skillet isn't exactly non-stick anymore (we really need a new one). After two dosas that stuck to the pan and just ended up broken and miserable-looking, Markus (who is the official pancake/crepe fryer in our family) said with a hint of desperation: "I need butter!". But no, we didn't go down that route. Instead, we abandoned the "definitely-stick" skillet for a cast iron crepe skillet, that we oiled very well (with vegetable oil, of course). Now it worked better, and towards the end Markus got some quite pretty looking dosas going.

So, how did it all taste? Well, not bad at all! However, the dosas were kind of flavor-less - maybe they got overpowered by the potatoes and chutney? Debyi suggested serving the dosas with rice if you were to have them as a main course, but we skipped the rice and just had the dosa, the potato filling, the chutney and then some coconut flakes on top. And let me tell you: we got so full - total carb overload!

Thank you Debyi for challenging us with this! It was a definite step out of our comfort zone, and even if I can't see myself cooking vegan again, I am glad to have tried it. Make sure to visit the Daring Kitchen for the recipes and to see the other Daring Cooks' creations!


A filled dosa with chutney and coconut flakes.

Dosas

makes 8 pancakes

1 cup (120g) spelt flour (or all-purpose, gluten free flour)
½ tsp salt
½ tsp baking powder
½ tsp curry powder
½ cup (125ml) almond milk (or soy, or rice, etc.)
¾ cup (175ml) water
cooking spray, if needed

Combine the dry ingredients in a bowl, slowly adding the almond milk and water, whisking until smooth. Heat a nonstick skillet over medium heat. Spray your pan with a thin layer of cooking spray, if needed. Ladle 2 tablespoons of batter into the center of your pan in a circular motion until it is a thin, round pancake. When bubbles appear on the surface and it no longer looks wet, flip it over and cook for a few seconds. Remove from heat and repeat with remaining batter.

Almond milk
Note: this makes a bit more than you need for the dosa recipe. I plan to use my leftovers in some kind of milkshake.

25 g almonds, peeled
½ dl + 1 tbsp boiling water
1/4 tsp honey
2 dl cold water

Grind the almonds to a fine powder (an almond mill does the job best). I used an immersion blender to make the almond milk, but a mixer would also work. Add the hot water and honey to the almonds, and mix well. Add the cold water slowly, while the machine is running. The almond milk will keep for 3-4 days in the fridge.

Dry curried potatoes

7 potatoes
1 yellow onion, medium size
1 tsp yellow mustard seed
1 tsp curry
½ tsp cumin
1/4 tsp ground ginger
2 tbsp vegetable oil
Salt

Peel the potatoes and quarter them. Boil them in salted water until they are soft. Heat the oil in a skillet, add the mustard seed and curry and fry for a while. Add the onion and fry until soft. Add the potatoes, cumin and ginger and fry until the potatoes have a little bit of color. Add salt to taste, and maybe more curry.


Plum and tomato chutney, pre-boiling and pre-tomatoes.

Plum and Tomato Chutney
(adapted from this recipe)

600 g plums
1 yellow onion, medium size
2 tomatoes, medium size
1 dl white wine vinegar
2 dl sugar
3 star anise
1 small cinnamon stick
1 bayleaf
10 cloves
3/4 dl raisins

Finely chop the onion. Quarter the plums and remove the pits. Quarter the tomatoes. Put all the ingredients in a pan and let simmer over medium heat for about 1 hour. The chutney should have a marmalade-like consistency (it will thicken further when it cools). Pour in a clean jar and keep in the fridge. It keeps for about a month, and will taste lovely with traditional steaks as well as with curries and couscous.

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!

You say potatoe I say potato

Potato salad. Say that, and most people, at least here in Sweden, will think of stuff out of a plastic jar bought at the local supermarket. Potato salad served with thinly sliced cold roast beef is the staple food of many parties here in Sweden - the kind where you have to serve many people and do it quite cheap. I detest it. Not those kind of parties, and not roast beef and potato salad per se - and great, now I am thinking of Per Se which definitely does not serve potato salad and roast beef, but if they did it would of course be heavenly, and which I would give my left thumb to eat at. Ahem, getting back on track here... No, what I detest is that kind of potato salad where sad, mealy potato pieces are drowned in gluey, artificial-tasting "mayonnaise", shock full of additives for that unnaturally long shelf-life. Yuck. Usually, I prefer potato salad with just potatoes, some capers, red onions, olives, and a vinaigrette. But recently, I tried to make one of those mayonnaise-based potato salads at home and guess what: once again it is proved that home-made is better.

This time we ate it with smoked mackerel, last time it was with grilled chicken. That time we also added some finely chopped leek because we had that at home, but forgot about the mustard. Take away or add what appeals to you, and remember that the measurements aren't that crucial - taste yourself forward. We weighed everything tonight (very chef-y, huh?), but consider this recipe a sketch for your own experiments. The salad can be eaten both warm and cold.


Tasty, but not very photogenic...

Potato salad

4 servings

700 g new potatoes
40 g gherkins (cornichons)
25 g small capers
115 g crème fraîche
40 g mayonnaise
20 g mustard (we used a type of coarse, sweet Swedish mustard, decrease the amount if you use Dijon)
Fresh or frozen dill, to taste
Salt and black pepper, to taste

Cut the potatoes so they are in equal bite sized pieces. No need to peel them if they're new and pretty (I never peel new potatoes). Boil them in salted water until soft. Let them cool slightly while you cut the gherkins in smaller pieces. Mix the potatoes (I leave the peel on) with the gherkins and capers. Carefully mix in he crème fraîche and mayonnaise - you can do this while the potatoes are still warm. Season with mustard, dill, salt and pepper to taste.


Summer dinner: Potato salad, smoked mackerel with various peppers, lovely Swedish organic tomatoes.

Daring Cooks inaugural edition: Zuni's Ricotta Gnocchi

We are very excited to tell you that the Daring Bakers now have a sister group: The Daring Cooks! The premises are exactly the same as for the Daring Bakers, except that this is about cooking rather than baking. Cool huh?! Mark the 14th of every month in your calendars, because that's when the monthly Daring Cooks challenge will be revealed, here and on foodie blogs all over the world!

For this inaugural edition, our hosts are the founders of the Daring Bakers: Lisa of La Mia Cucina and Ivonne of Creampuffs in Venice. They have done a tremendous job these past months with the sparkling new website for the Daring Kitchen and the creation of the Daring Cooks. For the first Daring Cooks challenge they chose Ricotta Gnocchi from the Zuni Cafe Cookbook by Judy Rodgers.

We were sure that gnocchi always includes potatoes, so only by hearing about this challenge we learned something new. After following the discussions on the members-only Daring Kitchen forums, we also learned that it's possible to make your own ricotta! It seemed so simple that we decided to skip the store-bought stuff in a plastic jar, and go at it from scratch. We weren't sorry: we are never buying ricotta again, as making it was dead simple and also much cheaper. We found the ricotta recipe at Eggs on Sunday (it's originally from Gourmet). Seriously, how easy isn't this?!

Homemade ricotta

9½ dl milk
1 dl heavy cream
1/4 tsp coarse salt
1½ tbsp lemon juice

Line a colander with a cheesecloth and set in a large bowl.
Combine milk, cream and salt in a sauce pan. Bring it to a simmer over medium heat, stirring occasionally to prevent it from scalding in the bottom of the pan. When it has reached a steady simmer, add the lemon juice and stir gently, just to blend. Let the mixture sit for about one minute - turn down the heat if needed - it should be simmering, not boiling. When one minute has passed, stir again, and let it sit for another minute or so. The liquid should now have separated into curds and whey. Drain the mixture in the cheesecloth at room temperature for about one hour. Transfer the ricotta to a covered container and store in the fridge. We got about 220 grams of ricotta from this.

See, that wasn't hard, right? And it tasted really nice; I normally don't care for plain ricotta, but this stuff could be eaten with a spoon! Anyway, after making the ricotta, it was time to get to the gnocchi. The recipe itself is very simple, all you need is drained ricotta (the drained part is very important!), eggs, melted butter and finely grated Parmigiano cheese. Flavorings such as herbs and/or lemon zest are optional. For the full recipe and all the how-tos of ricotta gnocchi making, visit our hosts!

From the forums we had tales of gnocchi refusing to be shaped, disintegrating while cooking and tasting like eggs (the latter is not good in Markus' book). Fortunately, none of this happened to us. The trial gnocchi that we cooked first fell apart a bit when we plated it, but for the rest we followed the advice of a fellow Daring Cook, Audax Artifex, and used boiling rather than simmering water, which resulted in firmer gnocchi.

The sauce was our chance to be creative. We decided to go with mild flavors, as not to overpower the delicate gnocchi. The original recipe comes with a butter-based sauce (as in melted butter+water), and butter is always better so we decided to do a butter-based sauce as well. We wanted something a bit more substantial, and one thing that works well with butter is aubergine - it soaks the butter right up. So thin slices of aubergine went into the pan, together with a big lump of butter, some lemon zest and fresh thyme. After a while the aubergine had soaked up all the butter, so we had to add some more, along with freshly ground black pepper.

We served the gnocchi and the sauce together with grated Parmegiano cheese and toasted pine nuts, plus a twig of fresh thyme for garnishing (its butter-soaked cousins didn't wanna get in front of the camera).

As can be deduced from above, this tasted really good. Just don't make a habit of eating stuff with melted butter on top - we had this for lunch on Saturday, and for dinner we had the mussels in our previous post.... and on Sunday, we rested.

Pasta Express

An easy and tasty pasta dish that let's you have dinner on the table in 15 minutes. The same ingredients, minus the pasta, also makes a mighty good sandwich. I guess you can make cold pasta salad out of this too, but then you probably want to use shorter pasta, like fusili or penne. I don't really like cold pasta so I've never tried it.



Pasta Express

Serves 2

2 portions fresh tagliatelle
A handful of arugula (rocket)
A couple of cherry tomatoes
2 avocados
75 g chévre (goat cheese)
½ dl pine nuts
Olive oil
Freshly ground black pepper

Roast the pine nuts in a hot, dry skillet. Watch closely so you don't burn them! Quarter the cherry tomatoes (or halve them if they are really small). Dice the avocado and the cheese.
Boil the pasta according to the directions on the package. Drain it and toss in some olive oil. Add the veggies and cheese, season with black pepper and mix everything around. Top with the pine nuts before serving. Done!

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!

Kamut, a new discovery

Last week we got red beets in our organic fruit and veggie box. I love beets, Markus not so much, so I get them all by myself! Today I boiled them and made a lunch salad with a stellar flavour combo: red beets, chèvre and honey. I wanted something more substantial in the salad as well, and while browsing the rice and pasta section of our small neighborhood grocery store (overpriced and with a lot of ready-made junk - we live in a student area) I found organic kamut. I had never tried that before and was pleasantly surprised. The nutty flavour worked really well with the other ingredients (speaking of nutty: pine nuts would also be great in this salad) and the texture was pleasant - a bit chewy but not stuck-in-your-teeth grainy. A nice alternative to bulgur, quinoa or couscous. I used just-boiled beets and kamut in my salad, so it was partly warm (I think warm salads feel more filling for some reason), but it would work with cold ingredients as well. I could see a big bowl of this on a buffet table, served with thinly sliced herb-marinated roasted lamb. Mmmmmm.........



Kamut salad with red beets and chevre

1 quite big lunch portion

1 portion of kamut
3 small red beets, boiled
50 g chèvre (goat cheese)
1 handful fresh baby spinach
Honey
Olive oil

Boil the kamut as directed on the package. Slice the beets thinly. Mix kamut, beets and spinach, sprinkle the chevre on top and drizzle a little olive oil and honey over the salad.

Green and blue salad

This salad contains a number of green ingredients and one blue - blue cheese. You want to use a firm blue cheese that crumbles but doesn't get all smeary. We use Swedish Kvibille Gräddädel, but I don't know how internationally available that is. You could either add the cheese as is, or turn it in to a dressing by mixing it with some crème fraiche. Today we opted for the former.

We got a big bowl out of this, enough for the two of us and some leftovers for lunch tomorrow.



Green and blue salad

2 handfuls of mixed greens (we used mostly baby spinach today but aragula/rocket, maché and swiss chard also works. But please, don't use iceberg lettuce.)
1 pear
2 stalks of celery
100 g firm blue cheese
½ dl walnuts

Rinse the greens and put them in a large bowl. Dice the pear, slice the celery and dice/crumble the cheese. Mix everything and top with walnuts. Done!

Cabbage conundrum

One of the vegetables we got in our organic box this week was point cabbage. Point cabbage is a form of white cabbage, which is hard to believe since it's green, pointed instead of round, and with very loose leaves. I almost never use cabbage other than for cole slaw, so I had no idea what to do with it. One idea was to make traditional Swedish stuffed cabbage which is filled with rice and ground pork, which I have never made myself and haven't eaten for years, but remember liking it as a child. (I had quite odd tastes, disliking pancakes and hot dogs but happily munching down stuffed cabbage, pickled herring and gorgonzola cheese.) After much googling and cookbook page-turning, I decided to go for something lighter and quicker. I found a recipe for vegetarian stuffed cabbage with goat cheese (chevre) but the pearl-barley and carrots didn't appeal to me, so instead, I went for a combination of tomatoes, Swiss chard and chevre.

I had no idea how this would turn out, but if I may say so myself, it was a success. The cabbage was very mild and had nothing in common with those awful cabbage dishes (cabbage stew, anyone?) that I was served in school. While not rough, it still had a nice crispiness. Plus it smelled good; not at all like an old gym locker which cooked cabbage sometimes does. (Ending a food post with talk about old gym lookers is probably not the best of ideas, but there you go.)

Stuffed point cabbage with chevre, Swiss chard and tomatoes

Makes about 10 cabbage rolls

1 head of point cabbage
1 tbsp butter
1 garlic clove, finely chopped
150 grams Swiss chard
1 can of whole tomatoes (400 grams)
100 grams goat cheese (chevre)
Salt and black pepper
Olive oil

Start with the stuffing. Mix the butter and the chopped garlic and let it melt in a heated pan. Devour the wonderful smell. Add the Swiss chard and let it get all soft and gooey in the garlic-butter (don't you just love my very sophisticated kitchen terminology?). From all of the Swiss chard you see in the picture below, you should end up with a something much sadder looking at the bottom of your pan.


Swiss chard pre-heating and gooeyness.

Drain most of the liquid from the tomatoes and add them to the pan. Mush the tomatoes up a bit and let the chard-tomato mixture get hot. Remove from the heat and crumble over the chevre. Stir, season with salt and freshly ground black pepper and set aside while dealing with the cabbage.

Get out a pot big enough to fit your entire cabbage head. Bring water to a boil and blanche the whole cabbage (do not remove the leaves) for a few minutes. Let the cabbage cool in ice water. Remove the leaves from the cabbage head and dry them well. You probably want to avoid using the rough inner leaves. Distribute the filling equally on to the leaves; you want about one tablespoon of filling per leaf. See picture below.


The blob there on the cabbage leaf might look like something from a bad SF-movie, but I assure you that it tastes very nice.

Fold the leaves into neat little packages. Place them in an oven-proof dish, poor a little olive oil on top and cook at 200 degrees C for about 10 minutes.

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.

“Swedish” pancakes

Today is Thursday, and on such an occasion the traditional Swedish food to be had is pea soup and pancakes (if possible accompanied by a glass of punsch). It's not a very strictly observed tradition, but sometimes it's nice to have it. As pea soup is a fairly time consuming dish, we tend to stay with just the pancakes, so that will be today's recipe.

In Sweden we have two different kinds of pancakes, neither of which looks like the American ones. The one we made for dinner today is the thin ones (the thick ones aren't really traditional Thursday's food). The reason I'm writing the story is that pancakes are sort of my territory... once upon a time when we hadn't know each other for very long, I proposed that we have pancakes for dinner, Jenny, having grown up on school cafeteria pancakes, was understandably reluctant. I offered to make them the way it's been handed down to me from my father (in my world, making pancakes is a curiously masculine activity), and she agreed (having abstained from pancakes for a long time, she thought it time to give it a try). Long story short, I made pancakes, Jenny now likes pancakes (at least the ones I make), and we're married (although that hopefully doesn't have much to do with the pancakes).

So, to make the pancakes you need, for every egg:
1 dl flour
2 dl milk
~5-10 g butter
salt

To serve two, use three eggs if you're not really hungry and four if you are. The butter usually amounts to a hefty dollop, so I'm just guessing on the weight of it.

Start by heating up a frying pan and put the butter in it to melt (some will stay in the pan, so again, the exact amount of butter is iffy). Beat all the flour and half the milk into a thick, smooth batter (add some more of the milk if it's too heavy to beat). Add the eggs and the melted butter. Beat it smooth. Add the rest of the milk and salt and whisk it.

Pour the batter into the pan so it covers about ½ of the pan's area. Swivel and turn the pan until it's evenly coated, or until the batter sets (whichever comes first, the batter sets fast). Keep an eye on it until the underside is a lovely light leathery tan, and/or small craters start to appear on the surface. Flip it and let it get some color on the other side as well. Repeat until out of batter.


Stack of thin pancakes

Since it takes a long time to make these (I spent more than ½ an hour today making four eggs worth of pancakes), you can entertain yourself by learning how to flip them without a turner. It's entirely possible to throw them into the air from the pan and catch them with their bellies up, and fun too!

The first one is usually quite unhealthy, having soaked up all the excess butter in the pan, but I really like it anyway, and consider it chef's privilege. The second one is good for gauging the salinity. Add some salt if necessary, the rest of the batch is still to be made.

The traditional condiments for pancakes is whipped cream and jam, but maple syrup, fresh berries, fruit and honey works as well. just pour some in the middle and roll it up like a crepe. Come to think of it, they probably have more in common with crepes than pancakes... but the Swedish word “pannkaka” literally translates into pancake, so I'm going to stay with it. If there's leftovers you can use them as crepes. Just make some nice filling, roll them up and bake them in the oven with some grated cheese on top.

Pie or quiche?

I have never really understood the difference between pie and quiche in English. As far as I have heard it used, "pie" is only used for the sweet kind (apple, cherry...) while "quiche" is used for the savory kind (salmon, crab, ham and cheese...). Is that a correct observation? In Swedish, "paj" (pronounced almost like pie) is used for both kinds, although you can say quiche in Swedish for the savory kind. However, I have read that "quiche" is a special kind of pie from the Lorrain district in France, filled with cheese and ham. So talking about for example a salmon quiche would be incorrect, then.

Anyway, today's dinner was a pie - or was it a quiche? - filled with feta cheese, olives and tomatoes from the organic fruit and vegetable box we have started subscribing to. We got the first delivery today, and besides the tomatoes there were also Hass avocadoes, parsnips, red peppers, fennel, Moro blood oranges, Conference pears and bananas. Really lovely stuff!

(PS. Once again, sorry about the poor quality photo. I look at the photos on other food blogs with envy and shame. I really need to get me some decent lightening.)



Pie with tomatoes, olives and feta cheese

For the pie crust:
3 dl flour
150 grams butter
1-2 tbsp ice cold water
Pinch of salt

For the filling:
2 tomatoes
200 grams feta cheese
2 handfuls of olives
1 egg
½ dl milk
1½ dl grated cheese
Salt, black pepper and paprika

The dough is easiest to make in a food processor. Put in the flour and the salt, and add the butter in cubes. Pulse the machine until grainy. Add the water and pulse just until a coherent dough is beginning to form. Do not overwork it, then the crust won't be flaky and crispy. Put the dough in plastic wrap and refrigerate. It's best to let it cool for at least a few hours, but I just put it in the fridge while preparing the filling. (Yeah, not planning ahead again...)
Set your oven to 200 degrees C. Roll out the dough and place it in a pie dish. Bake the crust (without the filling) for 10 minutes. This way, the crust won't get soggy from the filling. If you have pie weights (I don't) you probably want to use those, because otherwise it can get quite "bubbly".
Slice the tomatoes, not too thinly. Cut the feta cheese in small cubes. Pit the olives. Whisk together the egg and milk with a fork, season with salt, pepper and paprika. Put the tomatoes, feta and olives in the pre-baked pie crust. Pour over the milk and egg mixture, and put the grated cheese on top. Bake for about 20 minutes at 200 degrees. A salad with some aragula (rocket) would be good with this.

Hunger strikes

The origin of this dinner is our friend Hanna, who once treated us to some awesome canneloni with mushrooms and ricotta cheese. We have tried to recreate it many times since, but like with all recipes of this kind - that is, the kind that doesn't really have a recipe - we've added and subtracted stuff and it probably bears no resemblance to the original by now. Sometimes, we add some leftover shredded chicken, sometimes, we use creme fraiche instead of ricotta, and this time, we added some gorgonzola cheese.

We were really really hungry while shopping for this, and even more hungry when making it, so we forgot that you really should pour some kind of sauce over the whole deal before baking it. Cream based or tomato based, whatever you think would work. Otherwise it really gets too dry, and I am not a fan of crunchy pasta. There should be a law that says that lasagna should have so much cheese on top that the top layer can't get hard and crunchy.

So, view this recipe as a draft. And sorry, no picture this time. We were too hungry, and frankly, this dish isn't very photogenic.

Canneloni with mushrooms, gorgonzola and spinach

serves 2 very hungry people

Fresh lasagna platters (cut to appropriate size if needed)
1 small onion
200 grams mushrooms (we used forest mushrooms)
50 grams gorgonzola cheese
1½ dl ricotta cheese
A handful of fresh spinach
Salt and black pepper

Grated cheese for topping
(Sauce of some kind to pour on top)

Fry the mushrooms and onions in some butter or oil. In a bowl, mix together the cheeses. Stir in the mushrooms and onions. Add in the spinach (you might want to tear it down a bit if the leaves are too big). Season with salt and black pepper (but remember that gorgonzola cheese is quite salty). Now get your lasagna platters, add a spoonful or so of the filling at one end and roll it up. Continue until you are out of either platters or filling. If you run out of lasagna platters, just put the rest of the filling on top of the canneloni. Now pour over whatever sauce you think would be good with this (unless you like your cannelonis crunchy. Weirdo.). Put some grated cheese on top, and bake in the oven for about 20 minutes.