Peanut Butter Chocolate Cookies
One of my friends is amazed how I can have chocolate around the house and not eat all of it. I don’t know, I always have chocolate at home but somehow I’m rarely in the mood for it. So today, when I felt like baking, I found some dark Lindt chocolate I’d forgotten about. Further investigation revealed some organic peanut butter, so I decided to make something using those two ingredients.
Since I didn’t have a recipe to match, I improvised by combining a few different recipes. They were made in sort of a hurry and they’ll never win any awards for good looks, but they were, well, to put it mildly, very good.
about 25 cookies:
50 g butter (at room temperature)
1 1/5 dl ( 2/3 cup) crunchy peanut butter
1 1/5 dl ( 2/3 cup) brown sugar (I used light brown muscovado)
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla sugar/vanilla essence
3 dl (1 1/4 cup) flour
1 tsp baking powder
chopped chocolate or chocolate chips (I used 100 g of Lindt’s 65 % Madagascar Dark Chocolate)
- Put the butter, the peanut butter, the sugar, the vanilla and the egg in a food processor and mix it until smooth.
- Add the flour and baking powder.
- Put in the chocolate bits/chips and form little knobs, about an inch in size.
- Put them on a greased baking sheet and press them flat.
- Bake in a pre-heated oven at 200 °C (400 °F) for about 10 minutes.
- Remove from baking sheet to cool on wire racks.
Enjoy!
Spinach w Yogurt
I realize this may not sound entirely appetizing, but give this Indian side dish a chance and you’ll be surprised at how good something so simple can be.
It’s been a staple dish in my kitchen for years, and I actually don’t know where I learned how to make it. A cookbook? A friend? Either way, I have made some modifications to it, so I guess I can call the recipe my own.
You need:
1 tsp mustard seeds
1 tsp kalonji
1 – 2 bird’s eye chilies (depending on how hot they are)
250 g of spinach (if deep-frozen – which I usually use – then defrosted, you’re not going to heat it)
3 dl (slightly more than a cup) yogurt (Turkish, Greek or whatever – it should be thick and contain about 8-10 % fat)
salt
- Heat a pan until it’s really hot. Put the mustard seed and kalonji in it and roast them. It’ll only take about 30 s to a minute. Put them in a mortar and crush them.
- Chop the chili very finely.
- Mix chili, spices and spinach, adding a little salt to taste. Put it in the fridge for 10 minutes to allow the flavors to settle.
Serve it as a side dish. It goes very well with something rice-based, like a vegetable biryani.
Carrot Coconut Noodle Soup
Yesterday I improvised something that was certainly altogether an invention of my own. I don’t have a picture of this, because I cooked it at my mother’s place, and she doesn’t know about my blog and might have thought it slightly strange if I started taking pictures of my dinner…
The look, I can still tell you, was very Halloweenish (aka orange) so it was most fitting for the season. And it was actually good – at least my mother said so.
Here’s how to make it (it’ll feed 4 at least):
about 500 g of carrots
1 onion
about 1 liter of vegetable broth
1 1/2 tbsp red curry paste
rice noodles (I don’t know what they’re called, but I mean the kind you’d use in a Thai noodle soup – the flat kind)
400 g coconut milk (can or from powder)
juice from 1 lime
thai fish sauce (may not be vegetarian, but I used it anyway – you can’t substitute the taste for anything else. If you must, try adding more salt instead)
chopped peanuts
chopped fresh coriander
- Peel the carrots and cut them into pieces. Chop the onion.
- Heat a little oil in a big pot and fry the onion, until it’s golden and slightly soft. Add carrots and broth.
- Boil until the carrots are soft.
- Mix the soup until smooth, using a stick blender.
- Add the curry paste and the noodles. For some reason, it takes longer for them to get ready when you boil them in a thick soup like this, so be prepared to taste them to see when they’re ready – don’t trust the timer!
- When they’re almost ready, add the coconut milk and bring it to boil.
- Taste with lime and fish sauce.
- Spread some chopped peanuts and coriander over it before serving.
Persian Pasta
I’m calling this Persian because it has pistachio nuts and saffron, both of which I associate with Persian food. I feel a bit bad about using ingredients that certainly aren’t anywhere near local, but if you live somewhere where they grow pistachio nuts (like California, that’s where mine came from), you can use the recipe with a slightly clearer conscious. And the least the beet roots were local, and the sultanas were organic…. And the effect of the golden spaghetti, the deep red beets and the greenish pistachio nuts was very technicolor.
To serve two:
Enough spaghetti for two (I used capellini, which is extra thin spaghetti)
0,5 g saffron
3-4 tbsp sultanas
3 tbsp chopped pistachio nuts
2 raw beet roots, peeled and grated
1 dl (1/2 cup) yogurt (Greek, Turkish etc. – you know, the fat, really thick kind)
50 g feta cheese
1 clove garlic
Salt, pepper
- Mash the feta cheese and blend it into the yogurt along with garlic. Add salt and pepper to taste. Put in the refrigerator for at least ten minutes.
- Boil the water for the spaghetti. Once it’s hot, add the saffron before adding the spaghetti. When straining it, make sure you keep a little (just a few tablespoons) of the water.
- Add the sultanas and the pistachio nuts (if you want, you can save some for decoration) and stir.
- Meanwhile, heat a little oil in a pan and fry the beet root until soft. Add salt and pepper.
- Put the spaghetti on a plate, put the beet roots over it and top with the yogurt sauce. Sprinkle some pistachio nuts on top if you want to.
Mint Chocolate Cupcakes
I’m going through a phase of frantic baking right now. Tonight, I made these because a friend talked about making something like this once and I thought the idea sounded very tasty. It was. Dangerously so.
To make ten cupcakes you’ll need:
150 g butter
2 dl (4/5 cup) sugar
2 eggs
2 tsp unsweetened cocoa powder
1 tsp of vanilla essence/vanilla sugar (I make my own vanilla sugar, by putting a vanilla pod in a jar with sugar)
1/2 dl (3 1/2 tbsp) milk
3 dl (1 1/4 cup) flour
1 tsp baking powder
10 + 10 After Eights
- Beat the eggs with sugar and add the eggs, one by one.
- Add vanilla and milk.
- Mix with flour, cocoa powder, and baking powder.
- Put some of the cake mixture in every muffin cup and then put one After Eight in every cup. Like this
- Then cover the chocolate with the remaining mixture and put them in the oven for about 15 minutes at 200 °C.
- When they’re done, put one (but of course, two or three will be even better) After Eight on every muffin and put them back into the hot oven for about a minute, just so that the After Eights will melt.
- Quickly smooth the chocolate over the muffin so that it gets a layer of After Eight frosting.
Let cool.
Enjoy!
Spaghetti Polonaise
When I was a child, my mother would sometimes make Cauliflower Polonaise. It was something I dreaded. Boring boiled cauliflower with a few measly scraps of delicious fried breadcrumbs and pieces of hard-boiled egg. I would eat the topping and then I would push the cauliflower around the plate, hoping Mom would say the magic word that would release me from the torment. In fact, I used to imagine she’d made the whole dish up as some sort of cruel joke, but a quick search for “cauliflower polonaise” will show you that it was actually designed by some French mother back in the dawn of time who must have had very naughty children.
Anyway, today I have a different attitude to cauliflower, especially if roasted in the oven. That brings out a certain sweetness in them that is quite delicious. So therefor I decided to see if I could maybe use Mom’s old recipe as the base for a pasta dish with cauliflower.
You’ll need:
500 g of cauliflower, cut into small pieces
bread crumbs
2 hard-boiled eggs
spaghetti to serve two
olive oil
salt, pepper
- Put the cauliflower in an oven-proof dish and pour a little olive oil over it. Add salt and pepper. Put it in the oven at about 225 °C (425 °F) and let it roast for about 15 minutes.
- Cut the eggs into tiny pieces and heat a little oil in a pan and fry the bread crumbs. Add the eggs and a little salt and pepper. Stir.
- Mix the cauliflower and the spaghetti. Top with the bread crumb/egg mix.
And yes, it was a lot better than Mom’s version. 
