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.
Baked Potato Halves w Cheese and Chives
When I was making this dish I as reminded of a book I haven’t read in years and years – and I realized just how much that particular book is to blame for my food obsession. You see, when I was a child my mother would read the entire Little House on the Prairie-series to me and my older sister at least once a year. She claims I was just three the first time and I don’t know how much I actually understood of them that first time, but be as that may – over the year’s they’ve seeped in to my subconscious until they almost seem like memories, not of books read, but of events taking place.
Anyway, Farmer Boy was always one of my favorites. Leafing through it just now I realized that it’s one of the most sensual books I’ve read. There’s constant eating going on and it’s described in great detail – spicy, soft apple pie, crunchy pork and thick, rich cream. I still remember trying to feel all those flavors in my mouth as my mother read to me. Laura Ingalls Wilder is definitely partly to blame for this blog!
What brought the book to mind today was the incident when little Almanzo is baking potatoes in the open fire out in the cold and one of them explodes and almost blinds him. That story has served to make me a bit wary of hot, baked potatoes and you should be too. Otherwise I suggest you pick up Farmer Boy right now!
This dish doesn’t necessarily have to be made with a hot potato though. In fact, it’s perfect for when you have left over baked potatoes. If you’re lucky enough to have that, skip to step 2.
You need (per person):
1 Russet potato
3 tbsp crème fraiche (you might use sour cream instead but crème fraiche is thicker and fatter)
3 tbsp grated sharp cheddar cheese
3 tbsp chopped chives
salt and pepper to taste
Step 1:
- Wash the potato and make some holes in it using a fork (so as not to explode as poor Almanzo’s did).
- Bake it in the oven at 200 °C (400 °F) for about 40 – 60 minutes depending on size and shape. The important thing is that it’s soft all the way through on the inside.
- Let it cool somewhat. Don’t turn off the oven!
Step 2:
- Mix all the ingredients for the filling.
- Cut the potato in halves.
- Hollow the halves using a spoon so that you only leave a little (1/3 inch or so) potato lining the skin.
- Mash the potato you’ve removed with the filling and put it back into the potato halves. Since you’ve added some stuff, there’ll be more stuffing than fits into the potato, but that’s as it should be. Just spread it evenly over the potato.
- Put it back into a pre-heated oven at 200 °C (400 °F) and let hem bake for about 30 minutes.
Enjoy!
Brussels Sprouts w Lemon
Brussels sprouts are really cute. They look like tiny little heads of cabbage and often when I see them in the store, they’re just begging to be brought home. But when I do, I often find myself at a loss with what to actually do with them. I often end up just slicing them and putting them in a salad.
But today I decided to cook them and butter is always a good bet when Brussels sprouts are concerned. Match the butter with a bit of lemon and add a hint of chili and you have a pretty awesome dish, to be eaten along with couscous like I did or as a side dish. If you are a meat eater, I think it’d go very well with chicken.
You need:
250 g Brussels sprouts
25 gr butter
the juice of 1/2 lemon
1 chili, chopped
a pinch of salt
- Rinse and clean the sprouts and cut them in halves.
- Mash the butter with the lemon juice, the chili and the salt. Don’t worry if it doesn’t mix that well, it’ll all come together once the butter has melted anyway.
- Put the Brussels sprouts in an oven-proof dish of appropriate size (i.e. not too big).
- Spread the butter on top of the sprouts.
- Put in a preheated oven at 220 °C (425 °F) for app 20-25 min. Stir occasionally so that all the sprouts get baked in the butter. Make sure it doesn’t burn.
If you want, you can add a little extra butter before serving. Enjoy!
Kale w Cream and Garlic
This is very similar to a traditional Christmas dish from the south of Sweden, served along with ham for Christmas dinner. Being native Stockholmers, my family never makes it for Christmas though, but I love this variation of it with pasta. All sorts of cabbage tend to be underrated – which is a pity because treated the right way (aka not just boiled until mushy), cabbage is actually very good. And kale is actually a fabulous vegetable. It’s very high in beta carotene, vitamin K, vitamin A, vitamin C, lutein and zeaxanthin and reasonably rich in calcium. Not to mention full of fibres, very tasty and quite pretty (at least until cooked).
Here’s how to:
About 300 g kale
1 tbsp butter
1 clove of garlic, chopped
1 cup vegetable broth (strong)
1/2 cup cream
2 tbsp pasta water
salt, pepper
- Tear the kale leaves from the stems and rip it into pieces – not to small. Through away the stems.
- Heat some butter in a pot and and when it’s golden toss the garlic and the kale into it. Turn down the heat. Let the kale soften a little. Keep stirring and make sure it doesn’t burn, but it should turn slightly gold brown in places.
- After about 5 minutes, pour the broth onto it and put on a lid. Allow to simmer for about 20 minutes.
- Drain the cabbage and put it back into the pot. Add the cream and the pasta water and heat it until it’s on the verge of boiling.
- Take it off the heat and taste with salt and pepper.
Serve with pasta and if you wish, a little Parmesan and/or pine nuts.
Carrot Variation
After eating a lot of heavy Christmas food I felt I needed something light; something crunchy and preferably sour and spicy. But I didn’t really want to go out either – I wanted to stay inside where it’s warm and cosy and I had my Christmas books and my furry slippers. And to be perfectly honest I didn’t really want to have to work to hard either.
Luckily, I had carrots, cilantro and some beautiful chilies that I bought right before Christmas for no other reason than that they were pretty.
So the result was a variation on a recipe I’ve posted before. The last one was inspired by Middle Eastern food, but with very few modifications I ended up with something that was very close to Thai food. And it was spicy, slightly sour and full of carotene so I was perfectly happy.
Here’s how to (for one person):
2 carrots
1 clove of garlic
1/2 – 1 chili (depending on how hot it is and how spicy you want it)
1 – 2 tsp tahini
the juice from 1/2 lemon
a pinch of brown sugar
a pinch of salt
some cilantro/coriander leaves
a little olive oil
1 tbsp peanut, chopped or crushed
- Peel and grate the carrots.
- Chop the garlic and chili very finely.
- Heat a little oil and fry them until the garlic turns golden around the edges.
- Put in the carrots and add lemon juice and tahini. Stir until carrots are softish – they should retain a slight crispiness.
- Taste with some salt and a little sugar.
- Chop the cilantro and sprinkle it over the food (or simply cut it with a pair of scissors over it; that’s my way of doing it).
- Finish by spreading the peanuts over the dish.
Serve with rice.
Creamy Eggplant Sauce
When my little sister was a child, we asked her about the things she disliked most in the world and she scrounged up her face and thought long and hard. Then she ventured: “War and eggplant”.
Luckily, she’s reconsidered as she’s grown older (about eggplant I mean, not about war). I say luckily, because eggplant is a favourite of mine. It’s one of the most beautiful fruits or vegetables produced by nature, it’s cheap, versatile – and they always have it at my local store. The latter is not the least important factor when deciding what to have for dinner.
My favourite way of cooking eggplant is to grill it and then chop it – like you do in a Greek melitsanosalata or a baba ganouj. This produces a rich and creamy sauce that can be used on pasta, with bread or as dipping sauce for virtually anything.
Of course, once you take it out of the oven it’s not so pretty anymore…
In this case, I made a variety that is meant to be served with spaghetti, but it would make a good side dish with grilled meat too, if that’s your fancy. The good thing about this dish is that it’s excellent to make in advance. In fact, it’s designed to be made in advance and just heated in time for dinner.
You’ll need:
1 middle-sized eggplant
5 cherry tomatoes or 1 regular (if you use the regular, remove the seeds before using it)
3 tbsp crème fraiche (yes, low fat is OK)
1 clove of garlic (chopped)
15 green olives stuffed with lemon
1 tsp forest spice blend
1/2 tsp dried chili flakes
a handful of roaste pine nuts (optional)
- Heat the oven to about 220 °C ( 425 °F).
- Clean the eggplant and cut away the top. Prick it with a fork a few times.
- Let it roast for 30 – 40 minutes, until it’s soft (like in the picture above).
- Let it cool.
- Put it in a food processor along with the spices, the olives, the tomatoes and the crème fraiche and blend it until almost smooth (there should still little ‘chewiness’ to it).
- Put it in the refrigerator and just heat it in the microwave before serving it with pasta.
- A few roasted pine nuts sprinkled on top of the dish will make it perfect!
