Daring Cooks May: Enchiladas

Our hosts this month, Barbara of Barbara Bakes and Bunnee of Anna+Food have chosen a delicious Stacked Green Chile & Grilled Chicken Enchilada recipe in celebration of Cinco de Mayo! The recipe, featuring a homemade enchilada sauce was found on www.finecooking.com and written by Robb Walsh.

Good Mexican food is hard to come by in Sweden. Sure, “Tex Mex” is extermely popular and is on the dinner tables of many Swedish families on Friday and Saturday evenings, but it's of course a “Swedified” version and, in my opinion, quite boring. I haven't found any good Mexican restaurants either, but we do have some Taco Bell-copies.

So, the alternative, as always, is to make it yourself. But then you run into problems at the grocery store. Corn tortillas? Yeah, maybe. Anaheim chilies? Errrr, no. Tomatillos? What's that? (Answer here.) As usual, our hosts were aware of the regional limitations of the global Daring Cooks, and provided us with some suggestions for substitutes. Tomatillos are apparently somewhat related to gooseberries. Fresh gooseberries are hard to come by during gooseberry season (unless you have a bush in you garden, or knows someone who does, your only bet is the local farmer's market. I have never seen gooseberries in a grocery store), and in May? Impossible!

So what's two Daring Cooks to do? Well, improvise of course!

We had of course great plans to make our own tortillas and all, but we didn't have time. We did, however, have time for a crazy chicken “grilling” experiment. The recipe says to use a gas grill or medium-hot charcoal, which we didn't have access to. Instead, we brushed the chicken breasts with Liquid Smoke (yay, artificial flavorings!), cooked them in the oven for about 20 minutes, and then Markus went over them with our kitchen torch (the kind you use for brulées). We don't know if the torch thing really did anything to the flavor, but it added some color and was so crazy we just had to do it!



And for the Anaheim peppers? Well, our guess was that they are mainly green and has a bit of a punch in them, so we opted for green bell peppers (for the color), regular red peppers (for the punch), and some jalapeño (for color and punch, turned out to be hard to peel them after roasting, so we ended up not using very much of it, which was probably for the better anyway.)



Oh, and since we were unable to get either tomatillos or gooseberries, we opted for gooseberry jam! Well, what's a daring cook to do?

So, here's the recipe for our gooseberry-pepper salsamathingy

450 g Green bell peppers
40 g Jalapeño
70 g Red chili
1 Onion
2 cloves of Garlic
1 tbsp Chicken stock concentrate
½ dl Water
250 g Gooseberry jam
1 tsp Dried oregano
Salt

Grill, peel and remove the seeds from the green bell peppers, the jalapeño and the red chili. Chop the onion and press the garlic. Mix it all up with a mixer, and stir in the chicken stock, water and seasoning. Taste on your own risk. Since we only had 250 g of Gooseberry jam, we halved the recipe at this time, using only half of the pepper mix.

To assemble the enchiladas, we used store brought corn tortillas, a mixture of Porte Salute, Cheddar and Parmesan cheese and the “grilled” chicken. We started with a thin layer of salsa, then added two layers of tortilla, salsa, chicken and cheese, and topped it all with a layer of tortilla, salsa and cheese.



The enchiladas were cooked for 15 minutes at 225°C, and served with guacamole and cold, Mexican beer – as is becoming of this kind of dish. We later found out that tomatillos are available in Sweden, but only as a prefabricated “Tomatillo & Green Chili Sauce”...



Thank you for a fun and tasty challenge! Make sure to visit the Daring Kitchen for the whole recipe and the other Daring Cooks' creations!

(In the spirit of) Daring Bakers April: Pudding

I constantly rave about how being a Daring Kitchen member lets you try out things you would never have done before. Maybe that is especially true for this month's challenge.

The April 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Esther of The Lilac Kitchen. She challenged everyone to make a traditional British pudding using, if possible, a very traditional British ingredient: suet.

Suet, I learned through this challenge, is a hard, but flaky fat found in the area around the kidneys of a cow or sheep. I've never seen it anywhere here in Sweden, or even heard about it, but I'm sure it would be possible to get some, given you had the time to shop around. We didn't. The challenge said it could be substituted with hard, white vegetable fat or shortening. I'm sure we could have found something suitable, given we had the time to do some research. We didn't. Instead, we went outside the box, and inside the bone.

We made marrow pudding!

We figured this would count as being “in the spirit of the challenge” – it is a British pudding, made with a somewhat unusual animal product. The only thing that doesn't meet the requirements is that it's baked, not steamed.

The recipe comes from our dessert guru Jan Hedh. I've looked at the picture of the English marrow pudding in his book Deserter many times and thought that “hey, that looks good, but I'll never make it”. Well thanks to the Daring Bakers, we have! And it tasted lovely!

Esther, sorry for not making your challenge recipe, but thank you for giving us this opportunity to try something completely new!

Jan Hedh's English marrow pudding
from the book Desserter

8-10 portions (we halved the recipe)

200 g ox marrow
1½ dl cream
200 g eggs (about 4)
80 g sugar
10 g vanilla sugar
2 ml salt
200 g white bread, crust removed
200 g corinths
4 tbsp dark rum
Butter and sugar for the pan
4 tbsp dark rum for flambéeing
Caramel sauce for serving (recipe below)

Day 1:
Soak the marrow in cold water overnight. Change the water a few times.
Mix cream, eggs. sugar, vanilla sugar and salt. Pour the mixture over the bread. Let it stand overnight to swell.
Soak the corinths in the rum overnight.


It's hard to believe that this soaking goo can turn out so delicious! Thankfully, Sweden is a BSE-free zone, otherwise we wouldn't dare to eat this stuff cooked or not.

Day 2:
Set the oven to 175°C.
Drain the marrow and chop it finely. Mix with the bread mixture and the rum-soaked corinths. Use your hands to combine everything well.
Coat an ovenproof dish (about 1½ liters), preferably one with a lid, with the butter and sugar. Place the pudding mix in the dish and cover with wax paper, cut out to fit the dish. Cover with a lid or with aluminum foil.
Bake for one hour.
Remove from the oven and let the pudding rest for 30 minutes.
Remove it from the pan and place on a heat proof dish.
Heat the rum carefully and pour it over the pudding. Set on fire (be careful, of course!), and serve the pudding in flames together with a caramel sauce.


Fresh out of the oven

Caramel sauce
120 g sugar
1 tsp lemon juice
3 dl cream

Boil sugar and lemon juice, stirring constantly until you have a light brown caramel.
Add the cream, a little at the time, and boil until the caramel is dissolved.
The sauce will keep about 5 days in the fridge.


Marrow pudding flaming in the spirit of Captain Morgan ('s dark rum). Flambeing can really bring out a lot of different colors!

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.

Daring Cooks February: Mezze

The 2010 February Daring Cooks challenge was hosted by Michele of Veggie Num Nums. Michele chose to challenge everyone to make mezze based on various recipes from Claudia Roden, Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid.

This was a really creative challenge with only two mandatory parts: pita bread and hummus. Then it was up to the Daring Cooks to fill their mezze tables with tabbouleh, falafel, baba ganouj, lebneh, feta cheese, olives and whatever else Middle Eastern finger food they could think of. Fun!

I recently had a fabulous mezze meal at a Lebanese restaurant in Stockholm, and was looking forward to being inspired for the Daring Cooks challenge. But come the day of mezze making, I wasn't in the mood for tons of little dishes (going to the Middle Eastern supermarket and buying their ready-made stuff felt like cheating) and then there was the usual time constraints resulting from the usual procrastination, so I ended up a bit outside the box. But still, I hope, within the spirit of the challenge. My not-so-mezze mezze table ended up consisting of:

• Tunsian lamb tagine with dried fruit
• Orange salad with feta cheese and mint
• Pita bread
• Hummus

Let's start with the mandatory parts of the challenge, the pita bread and the hummus. The pita bread was easy to make, even if it took quite some time to roll it all out and bake it. It tasted real nice and I'm happy to have a reliable pita bread recipe now. The recipe makes a lot though, we got about 20 (more or less) round breads measuring about 15 cm in diameter. Next time I'll quarter the recipe if making just for the two of us.

I have to admit I took some liberties with the hummus (sorry!). When I worked in the kitchen at Kibbutz Hamaapil in Israel, I made loads of hummus and learned that tahine is not a necessary ingredient. What is necessary, however, is olive oil. So I omitted the tahine, added olive oil and also ended up forgetting the garlic. (Oups.) I served the hummus like we always did at Hamaapil: drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with paprika powder.

The recipe for the Tunisian lamb tagine with dried fruit comes from the lovely book Citrusköket (the Citrus Kitchen) by Caroline Hofberg. I've made a few changes to the original recipe. It's a lovely, warm, spicy and fragrant stew that you can serve with couscous or bulgur, but we just ate it with pita bread and some thick yoghurt.

As a side dish I made a small salad with oranges, feta cheese and mint. These flavors work really well together and the colors are lovely.

Thank you Michele for a fun and creative challenge! Wanna see the other Daring Cooks creations and all of the recipes? Visit the Daring Kitchen where you will find the recipe archive and the blogroll. Our lovely host Michele has posted a lot of great mezze recipes on her website.

Tunisian lamb tagine with dried fruit
(adapted from Citrusköket by Caroline Hofberg)

500 g boneless lamb shoulder
100 g dried apricots
100 g dried figs
3/4 dl almonds, peeled
1 tsp cumin
1 tsp coriander seeds
1 orange
1 small yellow onion
2 garlic cloves
½ g saffron
2 tsp paprika powder
1 cinnamon stick
1½ tbsp freshly grated ginger
1½ tbsp concentrated vegetable stock
5 dl water
1 tbsp cornstarch (Maizena)
1 tsp harissa

1. Soak the dried apricots and figs in hot water.
2. Roast the almonds in a dry pan until they get a little bit of color. Set aside until later. In the same pan, toast the cumin and coriander seeds and set aside.
3. Peel the orange with a potato peeler (you want quite long bits of peel with as little of the bitter white stuff as possible). Juice the orange. Set aside peel and juice.
4. Chop the onion and garlic finely.
5. Cut the lamb shoulder into cubes about 3×3 cm. Fry them in some olive oil until they are a nice brown color.
6. In a large pot, fry the onion and ginger carefully so that it becomes soft but doesn't get any color. Add the toasted cumin and coriander seeds, saffron, paprika, the cinnamon stick and the grated ginger. Fry for about a minute, stirring constantly.
7. Add the meat and stock, water, orange peel and juice. Boil over low heat for 1–1½ hours.
8. Drain the apricots and figs, cut them in smaller pieces and add them to the pot. Boil for another 20 minutes.
9. Remove about ½–1 dl of the liquid from the pot and use it to dissolve the cornstarch. Pour it back, stir well and let the tagine thicken for about 5 minutes. Season with harissa. Add the almonds right before serving.

Orange salad with feta and mint

Cut a couple of oranges into fillets (segments without any white peel). For two, I used two small blood oranges and a larger regular orange. Crumble up some good feta cheese and sprinkle on top of the oranges. Drizzle with a little extra virgin olive oil, season with freshly ground black pepper, and, for the final touch, add some fresh mint leaves.



Pita Bread

Recipe adapted from Flatbreads & Flavors by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid
Prep time: 20 minutes to make, 90 minutes to rise and about 45 minutes to cook

2 tsp regular dry yeast (12.1 grams)
2½ cups lukewarm water (591 grams)
5-6 cups all-purpose flour (may use a combination of 50% whole wheat and 50% all-purpose, or a combination of alternative flours for gluten free pita) (497-596 grams)
1 tbsp table salt (15 grams)
2 tbsp olive oil (29 ml)

1. In a large bread bowl, sprinkle the yeast over the warm water. Stir to dissolve. Stir in 3 cups flour, a cup at a time, and then stir 100 times, about 1 minute, in the same direction to activate the gluten. Let this sponge rest for at least 10 minutes, or as long as 2 hours.
2. Sprinkle the salt over the sponge and stir in the olive oil. Mix well. Add more flour, a cup at a time, until the dough is too stiff to stir. Turn it out onto a lightly floured surface and knead for 8 to 10 minutes, until smooth and elastic. Rinse out the bowl, dry, and lightly oil. Return the dough to the bowl and cover with plastic wrap. Let rise until at least doubled in size, approximately 1½ hours.
3. Place a pizza stone, or two small baking sheets, on the bottom rack of your oven, leaving a 1-inch gap all around between the stone or sheets and the oven walls to allow heat to circulate. Preheat the oven to 450F (230C).
4. Gently punch down the dough. Divide the dough in half, and then set half aside, covered, while you work with the rest. Divide the other half into 8 equal pieces and flatten each piece with lightly floured hands. Roll out each piece to a circle 8 to 9 inches in diameter and less than 1/4 inch thick. Keep the rolled-out breads covered until ready to bake, but do not stack.
5. Place 2 breads, or more if your oven is large enough, on the stone or baking sheets, and bake for 2 to 3 minutes, or until each bread has gone into a full balloon. If for some reason your bread doesn't puff up, don't worry it should still taste delicious. Wrap the baked breads together in a large kitchen towel to keep them warm and soft while you bake the remaining rolled-out breads. Then repeat with the rest of the dough.

Hummus

Recipe adapted from The New Book of Middle Eastern Food by Claudia Roden
Prep Time: Hummus can be made in about 15 minutes once the beans are cooked. If you’re using dried beans you need to soak them overnight and then cook them the next day which takes about 90 minutes.

1½ cups dried chickpeas, soaked in cold water overnight (or substitute well drained canned chickpeas and omit the cooking) (301 grams)
2-2½ lemons, juiced (89ml)
2-3 garlic cloves, peeled and crushed
a big pinch of salt
4 tbsp tahini (sesame paste) OR use peanut butter or any other nut butter—feel free to experiment) (45 grams)
additional flavorings (optional) I would use about 1/3 cup or a few ounces to start, and add more to taste. You can use sun-dried tomatoes, olives, roasted peppers etc.

1. Drain and boil the soaked chickpeas in fresh water for about 1 ½ hours, or until tender. Drain, but reserve the cooking liquid.
2. Puree the beans in a food processor (or you can use a potato masher) adding the cooking water as needed until you have a smooth paste.
3. Add the rest of the ingredients and mix well. Adjust the seasonings to taste.

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!

Daring Cooks January: Satay

It's a new year, both calender-wise and for us deer eaters: we just celebrated one year of food blogging! The highlight of this blogging year has definitely been the Daring Kitchen challenges. In the past twelve months, we have mastered the art of sushi making (ok, "mastered the art" might be a slight exaggeration if you ask a true Japanese sushi chef, but we're proud of ourselves, so there!); realized that if you find a macaron recipe that works for you, you should stick with it; we have turned disappointments around, ventured into vegan territory, put the pasta machine to use in two challenges, and even done molecular gastronomy à la Grant Achatz and Alinea.
In short: we have learned a lot, we have been challenged, and we have had loads of fun as members of this awesome community of food bloggers from all corners of the planet.

Enough with the retrospective, onwards to this month's challenge:

The January 2010 DC challenge was hosted by Cuppy of Cuppylicious and she chose a delicious Thai-inspired recipe for Pork Satay from the book 1000 Recipes by Martha Day.

Yay, we love satay! We have made it a couple of times at home but never really found a perfect recipe for the peanut sauce. This challenge was very easy (although you could make it more involved by for example making additional sauces or doing more types of satay using pork, chicken, veggies, tofu etc.). As we did this the very last minute (sounds familiar....?) and were both tired and hungry, we were happy that it was uncomplicated and didn't take much time. I made the marinade in the morning (chucked everything into the food processor - whiiiiiirl, and done!), stuck the chicken in the fridge during the day, and in the evening we had dinner on the table in about 40 minutes, the rice taking the longest to make.

This marinade is a real find, it made the chicken super-tender and super-tasty. It will definitely be put to use during the BBQ season (which feels far far away now - we have lots of snow and temperatures of about 10-15 below Celsius (5-14°F) - shudder!). The peanut sauce was good, but still not the satay sauce we're looking for. I guess the quest continues... It was really easy to make, and quite close to the satay sauce we've had in Malaysia and Indonesia, but there's something missing from all the recipes we have tried. Any ideas?

Thank you Cuppy for a nice challenge! I wouldn't call it challenging, but it was tasty, easy and we will definitely make it again. For the full recipe, go to Cuppy's blog or to the Daring Kitchen recipe archive.



Chicken satay

1/2 small onion, chopped
2 garlic cloves, crushed
1 tbsp ginger root, chopped (optional)
2 tbsp lemon juice 1 tbsp soy sauce
1 tsp ground coriander
1 tsp ground cumin
1/2 tsp ground turmeric
2 tbsp vegetable oil (or peanut or olive oil)
1 tbsp fish sauce (optional, but gives a more authentic Thai flavor)
3 chicken breasts

You could cut the chicken breasts into narrow strips, for skewering and grilling/broiling. We just kept them whole.
Anyhoo, either do the marinade by hand (chop the vegetables really fine) or do the cheater version: dump everything into the food processor and mix until smooth. Place the chicken breasts in a plastic bag, pour in the marinade, mush it around a little, seal well and place in the fridge for 2-12 hours.
Get the chicken out of the marinade. Broil or grill at 290°C/550°F (or pan fry on medium-high) for 8-10 minutes or until the edges just start to char. Flip and cook another 8-10 minutes. We pan fried our chicken, and I didn't bother to wipe of any excess marinade, I just put the chicken into the pan. The marinade did get quite a bit of color quickly, but it wasn't a problem, we just lowered the heat and put a bit of foil over the pan to keep the heat in.

Peanut sauce

3/4 cup coconut milk (180 ml)
4 tbsp peanut butter
1 tbsp lemon juice
1 tbsp soy sauce
1 tsp brown sugar
1/2 tsp ground cumin
1/2 tsp ground coriander
1-2 dried red chilies, chopped

Mix dry ingredients in a small bowl. Add soy sauce and lemon, mix well.
Over low heat, combine coconut milk, peanut butter and your soy-lemon-seasoning mix. Mix well, stir often.
All you’re doing is melting the peanut butter, so make your peanut sauce after you’ve made everything else in your meal, or make ahead of time and reheat.



Serve the satay as an appetizer, side dish or main course. Enjoy!

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!

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.

Spinach pesto

We made the best hamburgers yesterday. First a slice of rustic Italian bread with pumpkin seeds, then a home-made hamburger patty with two slices of Brie cheese melted on top, then a big spoonful of this very tasty but somewhat unorthodox pesto, and then we topped it all with a beautiful red, ripe tomato slice. Very tasty, and very European!

Spinach Pesto

50 g fresh spinach
30 g pine nuts
15 g Grana Padano cheese*
20 g olive oil
Pinch of salt

Rinse the spinach and put it together with the pine nuts in a food processor. Give it a good spin, scraping down the sides a few times. You could also use a mortar and pestle to bash this up, if you wanna be old fashioned. Grate the cheese and mix it in together with the olive oil. The cheese can be more or less salty, and olive oil can have very different flavors (ours tasted like fresh grass) so make sure to taste the pesto before adding the salt. You might want more olive oil or some more cheese as well - taste your way forward. Serve with the burgers explained above, or with pasta.

*This is very similar to Parmigiano Reggiano. Actually the only significant difference seems to be that it is made on the other side of a river - although I'm sure there are some Italians out there ready to correct me on that one... :)

Daring Cooks August: Viva España!

After last month's daring excursion into the field of molecular gastronomy, the Daring Cooks went back to basics this month with a rustic Spanish dish: Rice with mushrooms, cuttlefish and artichokes by José Andrés. Our host is Olga from Las Cosas de Olga and Olga's Recipes.

José Andrés is one of the most important Spanish chefs at the moment, and has trained under Ferran Andria at El Bulli, named the world's best restaurant. He now lives in Washington DC where he owns several restaurants. The recipe Olga chose for us comes from his US TV show Made in Spain. You can watch André make the dish here.

We made a few changes to the recipe. We couldn't find cuttlefish, so we exchanged that for a frozen seafood mix which had squid, octopus, blue mussels, clams, and shrimp. We didn't have the patience for boiling and cleaning fresh artichokes, so we got canned artichoke hearts. Also, no Spanish rice to be found in Uppsala, so we used Italian arborio rice. It's commonly used in risotto and is very good at soaking up flavors, so it was a good substitute. We halved the recipe, except for the sofregit, which will be used in some future concoction.

The optional part of the challenge was allioli, which I guess is a Spanish version of aioli. We were given two recipes, a traditional one with only garlic, olive oil, salt and lemon juice, and a modern one which also has an egg and uses a different method. We made the traditional recipe, using a mortar and pestle to bash the garlic and then slowly mushing in the oil, drop by drop- it's very cool that you can get something akin to mayonnaise from bashed garlic and olive oil. The allioli was very garlic-y! We are playing our yearly croquet championship with a group of friends tomorrow, and joked that we will only have to breathe on the balls and they will roll off! I liked the allioli and nearly finished the spoonful I put on my plate, but putting only a tiny amount of allioli on each bite. Markus found it way too sharp and didn't finish it.

The dish was easy to make, and we will definitely be making some variation of this in the future - I can see a lot of creativity in terms of ingredients: fish and seafood, chicken, vegetarian or Spanish sausage. We sometimes make paella, normally with a combination of seafood, chicken and chorizo, and we will probably adopt this method of cooking for future paella experiments. To make the vegetables separately as a sofregit was really nice - the flavor was better and the dish didn't get watery from the tomatoes. It was very tasty, and since we for some reason made this at the very last minute (just like last month's Daring Baker's challenge) we were very glad that it was easy and straightforward to make. Thank you Olga for a great challenge!

Wanna see the other Daring Cooks creations (or maybe become a Daring Cook or Baker yourself?!)? Go to the Daring Kitchen and the recipe archive! Our lovely host Olga blogs about the challenge in English and in Spanish.


Dinner is ready! Don't you just love our kitteh table table runner?!

Rice with mushrooms, cuttlefish and artichokes (Arroz marinero con setas, sepia y alcachofas)

4 servings

4 Artichokes (you can use jarred or freezed if fresh are not available)
12 Mushrooms (button or Portobello)
1 or 2 Bay leaves (optional but highly recommended)
1 glass of white wine
2 Cuttlefish (you can use freezed cuttlefish or squid if you don’t find it fresh)
“Sofregit” (see recipe below)
300 gr (2 cups) Short grain rice (Spanish types Calasparra or Montsant are preferred, but you can choose any other short grain. This kind of rice absorbs flavor very well) – about 75 gr per person ( ½ cup per person) Please read this for more info on suitable rices.
Water or Fish Stock (use 1 ½ cup of liquid per ½ cup of rice)
Saffron threads (if you can’t find it or afford to buy it, you can substitute it for turmeric or yellow coloring powder)


Cut the cuttlefish in little strips.
Add 1 or 2 tablespoon of olive oil in a frying pan and put the cuttlefish in the pan.
If you use fresh artichokes, clean them as shown in the video in tip #7. Cut artichokes in eights.
Clean the mushrooms and cut them in fourths.
Add a bay leaf to the cuttlefish and add also the artichokes and the mushrooms.
Sauté until we get a golden color in the artichokes.
Put a touch of white wine so all the solids in the bottom of the get mixed, getting a more flavorful dish.
Add a couple or three tablespoons of sofregit and mix to make sure everything gets impregnated with the sofregit.
Add all the liquid and bring it to boil.
Add all the rice. Let boil for about 5 minutes in heavy heat.
Add some saffron thread to enrich the dish with its flavor and color. Stir a little bit so the rice and the other ingredients get the entire flavor. If you’re using turmeric or yellow coloring, use only 1/4 teaspoon.
Turn to low heat and boil for another 8 minutes (or until rice is a little softer than “al dente”)
Put the pan away from heat and let the rice stand a couple of minutes.
Serve with allioli (see below).


Tentacled goodness!

Sofregit

2 tablespoons of olive oil
5 big red ripe tomatoes, chopped
2 small onions, chopped
1 green pepper, chopped (optional)
4 or 5 garlic cloves, chopped
1 cup of button or Portobello mushrooms, chopped (optional)
1 Bay leaf
Salt
Touch of ground cumin
Touch of dried oregano

Put all the ingredients together in a frying pan and sauté slowly until all vegetables are soft.
Taste and salt if necessary (maybe it’s not!)

Allioli - traditional recipe

4 garlic cloves, peeled
Pinch of salt
Fresh lemon juice (some drops)
Extra-virgin olive oil (Spanish preferred but not essential)

Place the garlic in a mortar along with the salt.
Using a pestle, smash the garlic cloves to a smooth paste. (The salt stops the garlic from slipping at the bottom of the mortar as you pound it down.)
Add the lemon juice to the garlic.
Drop by drop; pour the olive oil into the mortar slowly as you continue to crush the paste with your pestle.
Keep turning your pestle in a slow, continuous circular motion in the mortar. The drip needs to be slow and steady. Make sure the paste soaks up the olive oil as you go.
Keep adding the oil, drop by drop, until you have the consistency of a very thick mayonnaise. If your allioli gets too dense, add water to thin it out. This takes time—around 20 minutes of slow motion around the mortar—to create a dense, rich sauce.

José on the allioli recipe:

It's hard to think that, when you start crushing the garlic, it will ever turn into something as dense and smooth as allioli. But don't give up. It's worth the extra time and effort to see the oil and garlic come together before your eyes. Just make sure you're adding the olive oil slowly, drop by drop. Keep moving the pestle around the mortar in a circular motion and keep dreaming of the thick, creamy sauce at the end of it all.

---

Previously completed challenges:
July 2009: Skate, traditional flavors powdered
June 2009: Chinese dumplings (part one and two)
May 2009: Zuni's Ricotta Gnocchi

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!

Swedish meatballs

There's been somewhat of a lacking in the “traditional Swedish” section lately, so we figured it's time to make up for that by presenting the most Swedish thing in the world (as far as food stuff goes anyway, there's always the “Dala-horse”, moose-warning traffic signs and the ever present IKEA department stores): meatballs! So, here's our recipe for Swedish meatballs with traditional condiments. No matter what your local IKEA restaurant tries to sell you, meatballs are eaten with lingonberries (usually in jam form), potatoes (mashed, boiled or whatever) and “brown sauce”.

Today we're making lingonberry jam, mashed potatoes, meatballs and rosemary/juniper infused brown sauce. And yes, the last thingy is experimental, we planned to make green pepper brown sauce, but were out of green pepper.

For the mashed potatoes, all you have to do is boil the potatoes, mash them up and add some dairy product (we used plain milk) and butter. Work it smooth, and season with (a lot of) salt, white pepper and a pinch of nutmeg.

For the lingonberries we used frozen ones which we brought to a boil with a splash of water and some sugar (use whatever amount you like, but beware of the extremely tart flavor of the berries). Let it reduce somewhat and you're done. This can be done well in advance, since it's supposed to be cold anyway.

For the tricky part, the meatballs and sauce, you need:

Meatballs
500 g Ground meat (we used a 20/80 mix of pork and beef)
1 Onion
Salt
Black Pepper
Whatever spices you fancy (we used Paprika powder and Cumin)
Butter to fry in

Rosemary and juniper infused Brown sauce
~2 dl Milk
some Rosemary twigs
3 Dried juniper berries
1 Black Pepper Corn
1 tbsp Flour
1 dl Milk
dash Soy Sauce
dash Worcestershire Sauce

Finley chop the onion and combine all the meatball ingredients in a bowl. Put it in the fridge, it's easier to handle when cold.

Bring the 2 dl of milk to a simmer with the rosemary twigs, juniper berries and black pepper corn. Let it simmer for a few minutes and then let it cool slowly.

Heat a frying pan with butter (on our stove we use heat 5 out of 6). Bring out your bowl of meat from the fridge and start rolling small balls of meat and drop them into the pan. If you don't feel fast enough, roll them all before putting any of them in the pan. Fry until they're cooked through and remove them from the pan while making the sauce.

Mix the 1 dl Milk and the flour. Pour it over the fat left in the pan. The brownness of the brown sauce depends on how long you fry it before adding the infused milk, but we usually don't let it fry too long (never really figured out how to get the coloring this way), but instead add a dash of soy sauce to brown things up. Let it emulsify to a thick sauce. Add any other spices you fancy (we used Worcestershire sauce, but you can use anything really).

”Smaklig måltid!“
(Bon apetit)


Traditional Swedish meatballs

Now the sauce wasn't that big of a hit, it tasted good, but maybe not all that extra good compared to the work of infusing and everything. We basically just had a few twigs of rosemary left over and decided to roll with it. All of this is really on a hunch kind of cooking, but then again, the particulars aren't all that important in traditional cooking anyway. :-)

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.

Sunday dinner

A little late, but here at last: our Sunday dinner. Jenny is having a hectic time right now, and is scarcely home at all, she was however home between Sunday lunch and Monday morning! Perfect time for a nice wine and dine to catch up on our missed V-day.

We had a little talk before, and settled on lamb, and we also had to make something of the Scorzonera hispanica we got in our organic box this Wednesday (the English language seems to have a lot of names for this plant, among my favorites are black oyster root, serpent root and viper's grass). The leaflet that came with the box stated that it could be gratinated almost like potatoes, so we settled on potato and serpent root gratin. The menu ended up being:

Fillet of Lamb
with Red Onion Confit, Thyme-pesto Ricotta
&
Potato and Serpent Root Gratin
~~~
Penfold's Bin 28

It turned out really nice, and we had a nice evening with good food, wine and company. The combination of the Red Onion Confit and the Thyme-pesto Ricotta was really surprisingly harmonic. Thyme was sort of a theme, and it always works with lamb, just like a good expensive Australian wine (it's curious how beverages from different countries go so well with the local staple foods). We also had dessert, but that's in a later post.


Meet the meat, real close up.

The recipe was more or less made on a hunch, so a lot of the measures are a bit iffy, but we do our best to estimate! This serves the usual three (Jenny, me and me tomorrow).

Fillet of Lamb
2–3 fillets of lamb (we had three, totaling ~450 g... it's not a very large animal)
Some fresh thyme
~4 tbsp Red Wine Vinegar
~4 tbsp Oil
1 large Garlic Clove
Salt
Pepper

Clean the fillets and put them in a plastic bag. Pour the vinegar and oil over. Give the garlic clove a good beating so it raptures (put the blade of a knife over it and the put your weight on the blade) and throw it in. Throw in the thyme and add salt and pepper to taste. Don't actually taste it, but try to estimate how much you need – for us it's usually “three or four turns on the mill”). Seal the bag and massage it for a while, then put it in the fridge for a few hours.

Take out the fillets and brush of as much as possible of the other stuff. Fry them in a hot pan with butter until they get a nice coloring all around. Heat the oven to 200°C and put them in for about 15 minutes, they're supposed to have an inner temperature of ~55–60°C, or feel like the tip of your nose when you poke it (red inside) or harder. There's some oven synergy to be had with the gratin, they don't mind sharing. Make sure they're done a few minutes before serving so they have time to rest.

Red Onion Confit
2–3 Red Onions (we had 3 medium ones, but threw some of it away)
½ dl Water
2 tbsp Jelling sugar
4 tbsp Red Wine Vinegar /EDIT: Sorry, it's supposed to be Apple Cider Vinegar /
Salt
Pepper

Chop the onion coarsely and put in a kettle. Add the water and vinegar and bring to a boil. Add the rest and let it reduce to something jam-like. If you want to, add some red food coloring (I did as soon as Jenny hit the shower... :-) ).

Thyme-pesto Ricotta
2 tbsp fresh Thyme leaves
2 tbsp Pine nuts
3 tbsp Ricotta
Lemon zest
Salt

OK, I wont try this one again in a hurry. I thought it would be nice to make a kind of pesto with thyme instead of basil... turns out thyme has a lot smaller leaves, and is a real pain in the butt to pluck, but I did manage, and although I'm not sorry in retrospect, I'll probably never try it again.

So, pluck the leaves of fresh thyme. Chop the thyme, pine nuts and lemon zest (at this point you would add oil to make pesto). Mix it with ricotta and add salt to taste.

Potato and Serpent Root Gratin
~8 Potatoes
~3 Serpent roots
½ Leek (or an onion if you want)
some Cheese (we used a piece of Cheddar the size of a potato)
3 dl Cream
some Milk
Salt
Pepper

This is really just a potato gratin with some of the potatoes substituted by serpent root.

Clean, peel and slice the potatoes, serpent roots and leek. Grate the cheese. Chuck it all in an oven pot. The amount of salt should be “add until you are ashamed of yourself, and then some more” – it's really hard to have to much salt in a potato gratin. Add pepper to taste. Get down and dirty mixing it all with your hands (yes, if you want to get it really mixed there's no clean way). Add the cream and then top up with milk until the “top layer” isn't covered (but all the rest is). Bake it in the oven at 200°C for 40–50 minutes.

We didn't quite get it the way we like, we failed to mix in the cheese which stayed on top, and we had to much milk. The serpent root was a little too al dente as well, so maybe you really should try to bake it for an hour, or maybe pre-boil the roots. Or maybe you should bake it at 175°C instead, but then the meat wont like it, and we only have one oven... anyhow, it worked out quite nice anyway.