Ingredient: parsnip

Red Lentil Fritters

(or are they actually burgers 🤔)

So we’re going back to my childhood again. Well… maybe not childhood. My mom really wanted to cook nice food for various vegetarian (girl)friends that me and my brothers started bringing home at some point. And nice food to my mom meant no store bought, ready made stuff, no short-cuts, no I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-meat… stuff. You know? Real stuff.

I have no idea where she got these ones from, or if they’re something she more or less came up with herself, but they became a real staple food at home. The base is red lentils but I think what give them their defining character is rather the mix of root vegetables that result in a sweet, earthy taste which I became really fond of.

What’s a bit weird is that despite making them regularly for, well, fucking twenty years, I’ve never really settled on a pairing. Sometimes, it’s roasted potatoes with bearnaise sauce. Other times it’s the wonderfully Swedish “stuvade makaroner”, i.e. macaroni boiled in milk, or perhaps mashed potatoes with browned butter. So you know, throw em in somewhere and see how it feels.

That’s at least what I’m (still) doing (seriously..? Twenty years? TWENTY?! Well. I’m old I guess).

Created with Sketch. 1 hour Created with Sketch. About 10 burgers

Ingredients

  • 130 gred lentils
  • 130 gyellow onion (1 normal sized onion)
  • 130 gcarrot (1 big or 2 smalls carrots)
  • 80 gparsnip (1)
  • 4 eggs
  • 30 gpanko (plus som for coating the burgers before frying)
  • Some salt, pepper and whatever you like in stuff
  • A dollop of tomato purĂ© and/or mustard if you're feeling fancy

Directions

Making these ones are ridiculously easy. The only thing to really learn is how the consistency should feel to make the burgers keep their shape, but not be too compact when fried in the pan. I’ve included pictures and a video to help but as ever, practice makes perfect.

  1. Boil the lentils (130 g) in salted water (or if you like, broth) until they’re soft
  2. Finely chop the onion(s)(130 g) and finely grate the carrot(s)(130 g) and the parsnip(s)(80 g). Squeeze some of the water from the grated carrot. Then put everything in a bowl.
  3. Add the boiled lentils (not the water of course), then mix the eggs in. Finally add the panko (dried bread crumbs), some salt and black pepper and stir everything together. It should look something like this:
  4. If you have the time, let it set for a while in the fridge (overnight is also fine if you end up with un-fried left-overs), this helps with consistency. Make an oversized golfball of burger-mix in your hand and dump it in a bowl of panko/ dried bread crumbs. Cover it with crumbs and place it in a pan with medium hot oil, then gently press down on it with a spatula to make a burger. Fry for 2-3 minutes before flipping. Naturally, you can prepare several breaded over-sized golf balls before putting any in the pan.




Obviously these can be endlessly added to and experimented with, but I wanted to give you the base, the original, first.

I often add feta cheese, fresh herbs (thyme is a good one), as mentioned in the list of ingredients but not in the instructions; mustard and/or tomato puré

The Fresh Fish Soup

(did I mention it's fresh?)

I started to experiment with this recipe last summer, after I spent a weekend in the wilderness of Stockholm’s archipelago, a couple of hours north of the city. It was a nice sunny day, we had a car, we were young, carefree, and most of all we had been driving around aimlessly looking for a place to eat some lunch because we were very very very hungry. Suddenly on our right, a hand-written sign informed us of the existence of a cafĂ© some hundred meters into the middle of the nothingness; yes, Sweden’s countryside is always like this, a never ending beautiful continuing sequence of fields, cafès, forests, water, cafès, loppis (flee markets), cafès…  that goes on for kilometers and kilometers of virtually uninhabitated land – let alone a few cows and a couple of sheep. Anyway the cafè was nice, a bit hippy for my taste (but hey, this is north Stockholm we’re talking about) with a nice garden, flowers, of course organic stuff everywhere, and long story short I ended up ordering fish soup; I must say I was very sceptic, but I was wrong. The soup was very good and completely different from any fish soup I previously had (which was of course a lot more on the mediterranean side of flavours). A couple of ingredients I wouldn’t have associated with fish at all in my previous life, namely lemon and sour-cream, but again, I was dead wrong.

I’ve tried to make it even more fresh, and boy-oh-boy it really worked! This one is really fresh, light, young, happy, fresh, green, lively, energetic, did I mention fresh? Yes, fresh, cheerful, mild, crisp, brisk, etc. etc.

In a perfect world I would use fresh seafood bought from a fisherman that just came back from a night of fishing, and he would charge a few coins really. But hey, this is Sweden and seafood is embarrassingly expensive, so I had to go for the frozen stuff, I hope you can forgive me.

 

Created with Sketch. 1 hour Created with Sketch. 4 servings

Ingredients

  • 250 gsalmon
  • 250 gcod
  • 100 gshrimp
  • 100 gmussels
  • 3 tablespoonolive oil
  • 1 onion
  • 3 clovesgarlic
  • 2 stickscelery
  • 300 gbaby potatoes
  • 2 parsnip
  • 2 carrots
  • 150 mlcrème fraiche
  • halflemon
  • 125 gcherry tomatos
  • 1 avocado

Directions

  1. Start using a big pot, the bigger you have, since we need the ingredients to have space (I should have used a bigger one when I took the photos). Add olive oil and all the vegetables (onions, garlic, parsnip, carrots, potatoes, celery) chopped in nice little dices of about 1,5 x 1,5 cm. Let it go on high for 5 minutes, stirring it frequently. Add 3 dl of boiling water, salt and pepper to taste and let it cook on medium for 5/10 more minutes, or untill the potatoes are half cooked.
  2. Cut the salmon and the cod in big chunks and add it to the soup. Fish filet is very delicate and we don’t want it to fall apart so please be gentle with it.
  3. After 3/4 more minutes add the shrimp and the mussels, and let everything cook for 5 more minutes.
  4. In a separate frying pan quickly fry the halved cherry tomatoes in olive oil and garlic. Add salt and pepper to taste. A couple of minutes on high will do, we don’t want them to become mushy at all.
  5. Now add the creme fraiche to the soup (I’d say 2 dl, but you can use less if you feel like). And the juice of half a lemon.
  6. Assemble the bowl: pour some of the soup, and add as topping the cherry tomatoes, 3-4 slices of avocado, grated lemod peel, and some finely chopped parsley.

For those of you (and I mean mostly my south-european friends) who think this is too wierd, with crème-fraiche and lemon, I guess you can keep these ingredients out. But I really think you should dare to try, because it’s really nice: the acidity of crème-fraiche + lemon in contrast with the round flavour of fish is quite something. And it’s fresh, of course.