gnocchi gratin

I think I’ve mentioned before that I love gnocchi. The other day I decided to try something new with them – putting them in a gratin. The results were quite good. I mean, it won’t win any prizes for good looks, but it tasted great and was really easy to make.

You need:

250 g gnocchi (Italian pasta/potato dumplings)

2/3 cup cottage cheese

50 g feta cheese

100 g of frozen spinach

1 clove of garlic, crushed

1 tsp forest spice blend

salt, pepper

How to:

1. Defrost the spinach.
2. Mix the cheeses, the spinach, the garlic and the spices using a food processor.
3. Put the gnocchi in a bowl and pour the cheese mix on top. Stir until it is thoroughly blended.
4. Put it in a oven-proof dish and bake it at 200 °C (400 °F ) for 20 – 25 minutes.

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 I originally made the egg salad in order to put on sandwiches, but when I tasted it, I realized that it craved noodles instead.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:

1. Mix the mayonniase, the cream cheese and the eggs.
2. Add the spices and the soy sauce. Taste with salt, pepper and extra togarashi if you feel the need.
3. Boil the noodles and rinse them in cold water.
4. 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:

1. Peel the potatoes and grate them finely.
2. Salt.
3. Then (and this is the trick) let them rest for at least 15 minutes.
4. Heat a pan and melt about a tsp of butter. Let it turn golden and turn the heat down.
5. 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.
6. Let it fry on a pretty low heat for about seven to ten minutes.
7. Turn it and let it fry until golden brown.
8. 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

1. 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).
2. Mix yogurt and crème fraiche. If you make filling 2, add the dill.
3. Spread the yogurt/crème fraiche evenly over the pastry.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. Bake in the oven at 220 C for app 20 minutes.

Eat while hot. It’s delicious!

Creamy Carrot Soup

I like soups because they’ll warm you on a cold day, they don’t take too long to cook and you don’t get a lot of dirty dishes making them. See, I have no dishwasher. I have never had a dishwasher in my life. And I hate doing the dishes, so living in a place big enough for me to squeeze in a dishwasher is on my top three Things To Do Before I Die (I like to make my goals big and hard to achieve).

Anyway, here’s another one I made up the other day when the wind and snow was blowing and I was really hungry.

You need:

3 – 4 carrots (depending on size)

1/2 onion, chopped

0,5 litre (about two cups) vegetable stock

the juice of 1 orange

1 tsp red curry paste

1/2 cup of whipped cream

a little oil

salt, pepper

1. Peel the carrots and cut them into pieces, about 1 1/2 inch long.
2. Heat the oil and let the onions slowly turn golden. Meanwhile, bring the stock to boil.
3. Add the orange juice, the carrots and onion to the stock and let them boil until the carrots are soft (about 15 minutes).
4. Add the curry paste.
5. Remove from heat and blnd until smooth, using a stick-blender. Add the cream and blend it into the soup. Taste with salt and pepper. If needed heat it (but don’t let it boil; you want to keep the fluffy frothiness of the cream).

Serve!

Mango Coconut Sauce

I had all this deep-frozen mango and then I saw a bottle of “Coconut Sweet Chili Sauce” in the store and presto! This idea was born, right there in front of the soy sauce shelf. Perhaps to call it a Mango Coconut Chutney would be more appropriate, I don’t know. Either way, it would go well as an accompaniment to most Asian dishes, especially curries.

You need:

1 onion, chopped

2 cloves of garlic, chopped

6 chillies, chopped

1 cup desiccated grated coconut

300 g of mango, cut into 1/2 inch pieces (I used deep frozen)

3 inches of lemon grass, chopped

2 tsp tamarind paste

2 tbsp rice vinegar

2 tbsp fish sauce

2 tbsp sugar

1 cup water

1/2 tbsp of chopped/grated kaffir lime leaves

oil for frying

1. Sweat the onion and garlic for about 5 minutes in a little oil.
2. Add the coconut and let it turn a little golden.
3. Add all the ingredients except the kaffir lime.
4. Let it simmer until it’s a thick, smooth stew, app 40 minutes. Stir every now and then so it doesn’t burn.
5. Add the kaffir lime and let it simmer for another 5 – 10 minutes.
6. Taste with salt and sugar.