asian style salad
This is a way of serving ordinary salad that I like to make and eat either as a condiment or as a starter. I like the tanginess of the vinegar, combined with the sesame. The trick is to use balsamic vinegar since it’s so sweet it makes any extra sugar unnecessary.
You need:
a variety of green leaves or Chinese cabbage
2 tsp balsamic vinegar
1 tsp Japanese soy sauce
1 tsp furikake
How to:
- Rinse and cut the vegetables into smaller pieces.
- Mix the ingredients for the dressing.
- Mix it well (I usually put it all into a plastic container and shake it).
- Let it rest for about five minutes.
Enjoy!
update
So, I’ve been absent lately. I have been so busy that I just haven’t had time to post – or even cook. Hello, fast food!
But that is a thing of the past. This is the first day of the rest of my life and all that, and in the future I’ll try to manage at least one post a week. That’s a promise.
With that said, I have another confession to make. I’m no longer 100% vegetarian. I still eat vegetarian as much as I can, but I’ve slipped into eating meat at least a couple of times a week. This means that this site won’t be 100% vegetarian either. I’ll try to mark the recipes that are clearly though.
So, not that I expect anyone missed me, but I’m back!
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.
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!
