egg and noodle salad
A variation on pasta salad with a slight Asian twist. I originally made the egg salad in order to put on sandwiches, but when I tasted it, I realized that it craved noodles instead. An excellent lunch or buffet dish!
You need:
2 hard-boiled eggs, cut unto tiny pieces
1 tbsp mayonnaise
1 tbsp cream cheese
2 tsp sweet and sour sesame soy sauce
2 handfuls of Arugula/rocket leaves, rinsed and ripped into smaller pieces
2 packets of instant noodles
salt, pepper, additional togarashi
How to:
- Mix the mayonniase, the cream cheese and the eggs.
- Add the spices and the soy sauce. Taste with salt, pepper and extra togarashi if you feel the need.
- Boil the noodles and rinse them in cold water.
- Mix the noodles with the mayonnaise/cream cheese and add the Aragula.
Ad that’s it!
potato pancake
Quite frankly, I don’t eat as much potato as I should. It’s an excellent root vegetable; cheap, nutritious, can be bought locally grown almost anywhere… And you can make so many good things with it. Still, I don’t use it much. I think it’s the peeling that keeps me from it. Peeling potatoes isn’t fun and since I’m allergic to raw potato (true!) my hands get red and itchy unless I use kitchen gloves.
Anyway, a while back I had an exchange with a friend about all the good things you can make with potatoes and I brought up the traditional Swedish potato pancake – the råraka! I promised I’d post the recipe here but after I made them, I felt sort of silly. There isn’t really a recipe because it’s just potato!
You need:
3-4 potatoes a person
LOTS of butter
How to:
- Peel the potatoes and grate them finely.
- Salt.
- Then (and this is the trick) let them rest for at least 15 minutes.
- Heat a pan and melt about a tsp of butter. Let it turn golden and turn the heat down.
- Put some grated potato in the pan and flatten it until it’s very thin. It doesn’t matter if it’s full of holes and looks like it won’t stick together – it will. I think it’s the starch that does it.
- Let it fry on a pretty low heat for about seven to ten minutes.
- Turn it and let it fry until golden brown.
- Add a little butter before each pancake or it’ll stick and turn into a potato heap rather than pancake.
You could serve these little suckers with almost anything, instead of say french fries or potato gratin, but the traditional Swedish way is to serve them with salted fatty pork or bacon and lingonberry jam. They’re also excellent topped with fish roe and smetana à la blinis or with smoked salmon or whatever you can think of. Melting a little cheese on top is a nice variation too. As a vegetarian option I tried them with Arugula/rocket leaves and my standard sweet & sour sesame soy sauce. It gave them a very un-Swedish flavor, but turned out to be excellent! As the sauce is quite salty though, you should be quite careful not to overdose it.
sweet and sour sesame soy sauce
This is one of those things I use in and on everything. It’s a nice blend of salty, sweet and sour that adds a touch of Japan to any dish.
You need:
3-4 tbsp of Japanese soy
2 tbsp sugar
1 tbsp rice vinegar
1 tbsp roasted sesame seeds
some togarashi
- Mix the soy, sugar and the vinegar and bring it to boil.
- Let it simmer for about ten minutes.
- Add the sesame and the togarashi and allow to cool.
quick pasta
Maybe size doesn’t matter, but shape sure does. I’m talking about pasta now of course. I’m very particular about what shapes I like and don’t like. Now, you might say that they all taste the same, but quite frankly, that’s not true. The texture is different and so is the ability to catch the sauce you’ll most likely add. Some shapes only goes with certain suaces too.
These curly macs are one of my favorites. They’re called cellentani (at least that’s what Barilla calls them) and unfortunately, my local store only has the integrali kind. I prefer the traditional pure white, fast-carb kind but what do you do if that’s not available? I know what you don’t do – you don’t get farfalli instead (my least favorite kind, blerk)!
Anyway, here’s a way to use left-over pasta (of any shape):
1 portion of pasta
50 g tofu, very finely diced
olive oil
blue cheese, about 1 tbsp
salt, pepperpine nuts (about 1 tbsp)
- Heat the oil until very hot and fry the tofu in it until golden.
- Add the pasta and stir. Keep stirring until the pasta is hot.
- Toss in the pine nuts. Stir.
- Add the blue cheese and let it melt.
- Taste with salt and pepper.
Fake Tarte Flambée
So I haven’t posted in ages. My excuse is sickness (meaning one whole week on nothing but tea and a few nibbles of toast), travels (all over England) and now more sickness (I currently couldn’t tell curry from saffron, that’s the kind of cold I have). But now that I’m back I’m going talk about one of my absolute favorite dishes. It’s versatile, quick and easy and, while admittedly not healthy it’s good. I’m telling you, it’s reee-al good.
It all began a while back when I was travelling through Germany and France with a friend and I discovered the traditional Alsatian Tarte Flambée (in Germany it’s called Flammeküchen, but it’s basically the same dish). It’s sometimes called an Alsatian pizza, something that I’d like to object to as I don’t like pizza. This is nothing like it. Well, yes, you have a flat bread with filling on, but the dough is quite different from pizza – a lot lighter and puffier – and the filling is based on a mix of crème fraiche and fromage blanche, which forms a rich, creamy and yet surprisingly fresh background for whatever you want to add. Traditionally this would be lardons (cubes of fatty bacon) and onions, but the possible variations are endless. For example, I read one recipe with mushrooms, which the author claimed was how it was usually prepared in the rather sizeable Jewish community of pre-WWII Strasbourg.
Anyway, after I returned home I kept getting cravings for this dish so I decided to try to make something similar. Now, I was much too lazy to make real Tarte Flambée dough (but if you want to try it, there are several good recipes on the internet), so I used ready-made puff pastry. And since I don’t have any fromage blanche I made do with Greek yogurt. Being a vegetarian, I’ve also excluded the lardons. My two favourite fillings so far are one with smoked tofu and Chinese chives and then one with potatoes and asparagus.
For the base, you’ll need:
enough puff pastry to cover a baking sheet (rolled thin)
3 tbsp crème fraiche
3 tbsp yogurt
Filling 1:
50 g smoked tofu, cut into tiny cubes
about 1/2 cup chopped mushrooms
Chines chives, cut into 1 – 1 1/2 inch long pieces
asparagus (optional – I used deep frozen) about 4-5
salt, pepper
truffle oil
Filling 2:
1 tsp dill
about 4 potatoes, sliced really thin
asparagus (I used deep frozen) – about 5 -6
salt, pepper, a little olive oil
- If the puff pastry comes already thin, put it on a lined baking sheet. Otherwise, roll it until it is very thin (the easiest way is to put it on the lined baking sheet and roll it there so you don’t have to move it).
- Mix yogurt and crème fraiche. If you make filling 2, add the dill.
- Spread the yogurt/crème fraiche evenly over the pastry.
- For filling 1: Distribute the tofu cubes and the mushrooms evenly. Put the asparagus on top of them (if you go for the asparagus option), and finish by sprinkling the Chinese chives on top. Add salt and pepper, and, finally, drip a little truffle oil over the tarte.
- For filling 2: Put the potato slices on the tarte, slightly overlapping each other, until the whole thing is covered. Add the asparagus, salt and pepper and finish with a little olive oil.
- Bake in the oven at 220 C for app 20 minutes.
Eat while hot. It’s delicious!
