Type: Main course

Aunt Humla’s Greek Beans

(I give these five meow meow beans)

This reminds me of when Hanna used to make hummus, when we lived with my brother in Lidingö. When the hummus came out particularly good, Olov asked “what do you put in this, drugs?”.

I can’t tell you why these beans are so goddamn good. I’m not even especially confident you’ll feel the same. But I like them sooooo much I don’t care.

So my aunt isn’t really Greek, or well, in spirit I guess. She had two kids with a Greek man and I’ll just tell you: it’s not a bad food culture to hitch your wagon to. I’m gonna squeeze some more recipes out of her, especially the moussaka, which is I mean… maybe the best food you can put into your body. It’s ridiculous.

But anyway. I found the beans a bit hard to pair with a vegetarian option, besides the obvious (tzatziki and greek salad). The beans are extremely good with barbecued meat, so I wanted to find something similar-ish. I think it’s a good idea to go fairly salty, since the beans themselves are pretty sweet. This time I went with portobellos fried for a loooong time in butter, with a splash of soy in the end and som salt and pepper. Perfect. Really good. Do that. Ok, so let’s go, and thank you Humla, for all the food đŸ™đŸ»đŸ˜‹

Created with Sketch. 2 hours + soaking of the beans Created with Sketch. 10

Ingredients

  • 500 gwhite beans (large, dry)
  • 400 gcrushed tomatoes
  • 250 golive oil
  • 25 g(1-2 table spoons) of tomato purĂ©
  • 15 gsalt
  • 2 large carrots (or 3 smaller)
  • 2 tomatoes (or 3 smaller)
  • 2 yellow onions (or 3 smaller)
  • 2 sticks of celery
  • 1 bouillon cube or equivalent amount of condensed broth meant for circa 0.5 L of water
  • Some peppercorns
  • A couple of bay leaves
  • Fresh parsley

Directions

So this is easy, but takes a bit of time, but it’s mostly waiting on things so you have plenty of time to prepare the mushrooms and sides or whatever.

In preparation, soak the dry white beans for at least 3-4 hours, preferably over night, in plenty of cold water.

  1. Bring 2.5 liters of water to a boil. Add 10 (to 15) g of salt and the soaked beans (sift away the soaking water first of course). Chop the onions (2-3) into big slices and add them as well. Boil/simmer for 45 minutes. Oh, also: if you wanna do the mushrooms, now’s the time! Just put 5 portobello mushrooms in a pan with 50 g of butter, let them sizzle away on low heat for 2 hours, flipping them occasionally. Finish with a splash of soy, some salt and pepper and serve them in thin slices!
  2. While they’re boiling away. Chop up the celery, carrots and tomatoes. When 45 minutes have passed, throw them in as well.
  3. Add the crushed tomato (400 g). Also add the olive oil (250 g/ml), the pepper corns (10-15), the bouillon cube (or substitute), the bay leaves (a couple) and the tomato paste (25 g/ 1-2 tablespoons. There has been some translation issues with tomato stuff, so: this is what I mean with tomato paste). Let it boil for another 30 minutes.
  4. While waiting, turn the oven to 175 degrees C. After the 30 minutes of boiling, pour everything in a deep oven tray and sprinkle it with chopped parsley. Put it in the oven for 45 minutes (+/- 10 min depending on the oven).
  5. To be done, it should “set” a bit. If you stir it a bit, it should be thick but absolutely not dry (then you’ll need to add water) and also not runny. You’ll get it.
  6. As with many foods, now you have to wait. I’d say for at least 30 minutes before eating. This really is better when not piping hot. Actually, it doesn’t even has to be hot at all. But the upside of this is that you can use the time to make a sweet ass tzatziki (3-4 dl greek, firm yogurt, 1 grated cucumber with the juice squeezed out of it, 2 cloves of garlic, salt, pepper, vinegar and lots of olive oil) and a greek salad!

 

So that’s it. It’s also excellent to save in the fridge for days and days so don’t worry about the ten portions. They’ll come in handy!

 

Red Lentil Fritters

(or are they actually burgers đŸ€”)

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

Spaghetti alla Puttanesca

(summer is here, bitch!)

Here is a very napolitan pasta dish, very very simple, and yet unexpectedly flavorful. Despite being a very common recipe in my region and all over the south of Italy, credit for this specific version goes to my uncle Antonio, Zio Antonio. The thing is, my mom always cooked this pasta, but it was never that special or good, so I didn’t think much of it. Things changed when I had Puttanesca at Zio Antonio & Pupa’s place, and the recipe was presented to me under a brand new light. Zio Antonio’s trick was simple enough: exaggerate. A lot of tomatoes, a lot of olives and capers, a LOT of basil and parsley. The sauce must be rich!

Puttanesca comes from “puttana”, which is a bit of a bad word to say prostitute. The stories of why this recipe is called so are very many and not that interesting, so I’ll skip that. It’s a very summery dish, very quick, very easy. But you’ll need two key ingredients that might not be so common outside of Italy: anchovies and salt-preserved capers. I can find both of them here in Sweden, so I’m sure you’ll manage. I’ll talk about them and other ingredients in a special note* to the directions for the recipe.

Created with Sketch. 20 minutes Created with Sketch. 4 servings

Ingredients

  • 3 tablespoon of olive oil
  • 1 clove of garlic, halved
  • 4 anchovies (preserved in oil)
  • 30 grsalted capers
  • 100 grolives (kalamata or di Gaeta are perfect)
  • 2 cansof cherry tomatoes (or 1 kg fresh if in season)
  • A lot of fresh basil and parsley
  • Hot chili flakes to taste
  • 400 grof spahetti

Directions

*Note about ingredients:

  • Anchovies, or Alici sott’ Olio in italian (in Sweden called sardeller), are cured in salt, and preserved in oil: this tiny fishes are an umami bomb, and  the base for this recipe: one per person is ideal, but feel free to exaggerate.
  • Capers everybody knows what they are, but here you want those preserved in salt. Not water, not vinegar, but SALT: this is very important, the capers, very flavorful little things, contribute a lot to the dish, and you don’t want no vinegar taste in there.
  • Olives: ideally you should use “Olive di Gaeta”, but good luck finding them. However, greek Kalamata olives are really really good for this recipe (I suspect they’re are done pretty much like the Gaeta variety). Don’t use those very black olives, they’re not for this.
  • Tomatoes: if in season, use fresh cherry tomatoes or datterini: but make sure they are good and sweet and rich in taste. Otherwise, canned cherry tomatoes work perfectly.
  • Pasta: my favorite for this dish is vermicelli, a type of thicker spaghetti. But spaghetti, linguine and even bucatini will work nicely.

But let’s cook!

  1. Add the olive oil with the garlic to a tall pan (or a pot) on medium-high, and let the garlic take some color. When the oil is sizzling add the anchovies and with the back of a spoon crash them until they dissolve in the oil.

  2. Quickly de-salt the capers under hot running water, wash the olives a little as well, and add everything to the pan. Stir for 30 seconds then add the tomatoes. Add a little pepper, and hot chili flakes if that is of your liking (do not exaggerate).

  3. Let it cook for 10 minutes on medium (or 15/20 if you’re using fresh tomatoes), after which add half of the parsley and basil finely chopped. The salt from the anchovies and the capers should be more than enough for the sauce, but just in case, taste it and see if you need to add some. Off the fire, add 1 dl of pasta water to the sauce.
  4. Cook pasta by the law as you should know by now, al dente, and AS SOON AS the pasta is drained (don’t wait, PLEASE), throw it in the sauce pan and mix well on medium-low for 2 minutes. Also eat as soon as possible, don’t let it cool down.

Pumpkin Pasta

(yes, you read it right, pumpkin)

The problem with italian food abroad is that it’s almost always wrong. I guess it’s pretty much the same for every other cuisine, but still, it’s quite a pity. Above all, pasta is usually very wrong: the idea non-italians have of it is so limited and incorrect. I’m not talking only of the well-known problem with Fettuccine Alfredo or the many ways Carbonara is ruined worldwide. The bigger problem for me is that the abroad menus are so limited compared to the vast regional diversity of pasta recipes that exist across Italy. One of the limits that I find more troubling is the complete lack of one entire category of pasta recipes, namely the so called “minestra” which is pasta cooked in a soup, as opposed to the other way you would normally cook your pasta: by itself in water before you add the sauce.  Usually very wintery dishes, minestre (plural for minestra) combine pasta with what you might find strange pairings. Things like potatoes, peas, beans, lentils, cauliflower, and yes, you read the title, pumpkin. Minestre can be both very soupy or quite dense, and this can differ a lot even from neighborhood to neighborhood in the same small town. I usually stay on the dense side, as is also the case with this one.

Created with Sketch. 45 minutes Created with Sketch. 2-3 portions

Ingredients

  • 2 tablespoons of olive oil
  • 350 grof pumpkin (any pumpkin will work)
  • 2 small floury potatoes
  • 1 stalk of celery
  • half a onion
  • parmigiano to taste
  • gorgonzola cheese to taste
  • 300 grof pasta* (see note)

Directions

All the most common edible pumpkins will work for the recipe, but my favourite is a butternut squash. Also, Gorgonzola in the end gives the recipe a nice extra touch of fancy flavour, but the recipe works perfectly without.

*about the pasta shape for this recipe: my favourite is casarecce (as in picture), but it’s perfect to use any half-short holed shape, like tubetti, tufoli, ditali or maybe the very good mafaldine (cut in small pieces), or one of my all time favourite pasta mista (mixed pasta, a mix of leftovers). Please don’t make wierd pairings like spaghetti or linguine.

  1. Finely dice the onion and celery, and sauté them with the olive oil for 5-8 minutes on medium heat.
  2. Meanwhile, peel the squash, remove seeds, and chop it into small cubes, about 1 cm. Same thing for the potatoes. Add everything to the pot and stir often so it doesn’t burn. Keep sautĂ©ing everything for 5 minutes.
  3. Add some boiling water, just enough to cover the pumpkin, and keep it on medium/high for 15-20 minutes stirring occasionally, adding some more boiling water if it evaporates fast. Also add salt and pepper.
  4. After about 20 minutes the pumpkin should start to be nice and tender; use a smasher, or any other tool (a fork should also work). and start smashing the pumpkin and potatoes in a coarse puree. You can of course use an immersion blender, but I prefer when in the final dish there are still some small pieces of soft pumpkin here and there.
  5. Now add the pasta, and here comes the tricky part: add enough water to cook your pasta in. You have to consider that some of the water is going to evaporate, and some is going into the pasta (cooking pasta is basically re-hydraitation), so you have to add enough water to cover all the pasta, but not too much, as this will make the end result too soupy. The best thing, before you’ve gained more experience, is to start with as little water as is needed to cover the pasta, and then keep adding some more if things get too dry. Just keep stirring often and check that you have enough liquid. During this all process, you’ll also have to adjust salt.
  6. When after about 10 minutes the pasta is cooked (and hopefully the pumpkin is nice and creamy and not too liquid), remove from the stove and add parmigiano and, if you fancy it, gorgonzola, and keep stirring until all the cheese has melted.
  7. Serve it with some extra parmigano and finely chopped parsley, or my favorite: rosemary.

 

Tomato and Aubergine Lasagna

(definitely not Italian, Italian food)

So I’m Swedish. That’s important, because I don’t want you to think you’re getting a traditional bonafide Italian lasagna. This is a Swedish lasagna. So, to Danilos big big disappointment I don’t make the pasta sheets myself, I don’t pre-boil them, I don’t… I’m not Italian ok?

I’ve been trying to find a vegetarian lasagna recipe that is – not similar to – but equally great as the meat lasagna I’ve grown up with and really love. I stopped trying to mimic the meat version a long time ago, partly because, well the meat substitutes no matter what the hype says are… well crap. Ok, maybe not crap. Some of them are quite good but all of them are very far from imitating meat. So for me, a soy, quorn, impossible meat whatever lasagna is always a sad reminder of what could have been.

Instead I’ve been making a tomato version more and more. It really clicked when I added the fried aubergine (as already established, tomato and aubergine make good bedfellows) and I think it took another not insignificant step forward by adding kale.

This is it. The lasagna I make because I can’t have meat lasagna that often because my wife is a vegetarian. It’s pretty good.

Created with Sketch. 2 hours Created with Sketch. 8

Ingredients

  • General stuff
  • Salt, sugar, pepper and vinegar (weights in the description)
  • 2 aubergines
  • Rapeseed oil for deep frying / pan frying the aubergine slices
  • Olive oil for frying
  • 300 glasagna tiles
  • For the tomato & kale sauce
  • 500 gtomato sauce
  • 500 gcrushed tomatoes
  • 100 gkale
  • 1 yellow onion
  • 1 clove of garlic
  • For the bĂ©chamel sauce
  • 25 gbutter
  • 1 lmilk
  • 100 gflour
  • 100 gParmigiano cheese
  • 100 gadditional cheese of your choice

Directions

  1. Heat up some olive oil in a big pan with a clove of garlic. Cut away the thicker parts of the kale stems, slice the kale and put it into the pan.
  2. Chop 1/2 yellow onion and add to the pan.
    Kale
  3. After about 5 minutes, add the tomato (500 g tomato sauce + 500 g crushed tomatoes) and the salt (10 g / 1.7 tsp), sugar (10 g / 1.8 tsp), vinegar (15 g/ 15 ml) and some white pepper. Let this simmer on low heat for 20 minutes. Meanwhile…
  4. BĂ©chamel. Put the butter (25 g) in a pot on medium heat. Finely chop 1/2 yellow onion and fry it in the butter until soft.
  5. Mix flour (70 g/ ca 1.2 dl), salt (7 g / 1 tsp) and white pepper in a bowl. Add 3 dl of milk and whisk until smooth.

    Add the rest of the milk (7 dl) while whisking.
  6. Add the milk-mix to the pan (with the chopped and softened onion). Heat it up on medium to high heat while stirring with a flat-bottomed wooden spoon or a spatula.
  7. When the milk starts to thicken, lower the heat to avoid burning the bottom of the pan and add the parmigiano cheese while continuing to stir. When the cheese has melted into the sauce (couple of minutes), take it off the stove to cool.
  8. Slice the aubergines (2) into 0.5 – 1 cm thick slices and coat them with flour.
  9. Deep fry the aubergine slices (or fry them in a pan with plenty of oil).
  10. Put the oven to 220 C.
  11. Now you’re ready to assemble. Start with a layer of bĂ©chamel sauce in the bottom of a quite deep oven tray.
  12. Then add 1) lasagna tiles, 2) tomato & kale- sauce, 3) grated cheese, 4) fried aubergine slices with a sprinkle of salt, 5) bĂ©chamel sauce, 6) repeat until you’re out of stuff. Save a bit of the bĂ©chamel sauce for the top.


  13. Top it off with a layer of béchamel sauce and put it in the oven for ca 25 min or what the lasagna tiles require.

So here comes the really tricky part. Don’t eat it for at least 45 minutes. It’s so much better when the whole thing has had time to really set, and furthermore: this type of food shouldn’t be piping hot when you’re ingesting it, right? I say… it should be around… 50 C. You say, yes?

 

Black Bean and Portabello Burgers

(lean, mean, bean-machine)

These ones are real companions in our household. When I don’t quite know what to make, I often think: “Eeh, I’ll just do some black bean burgers”. They’re good with oven baked potatoes and bearnaise sauce. They’re great with mashed potatoes and roasted garlic and mushroom sauce (as in the pictures). They’re really good as just… hamburger burgers as well actually.

The black beans, combined with the umami heavy confit onion and portobello mushrooms, give them a really rich and deep taste. Using bread is really good for consistency and the cheese is… well cheese is pretty great.

I like using soy as it together with the rest gives some meaty tones, but I get that that might not be for everyone (to make it more like meat I mean). But from this base-recipe you can basically do whatever. Fresh herbs, chili, spices, you go wild!

Created with Sketch. 1.5 hours Created with Sketch. 6

Ingredients

  • 760 gof black beans (boiled and in liquid, weight including the liquid)
  • 2 (or 3) portabello mushrooms
  • 4 eggs (a bit depending on the size)
  • 100 gcheese (e.g. Gouda cheese)
  • 2 small carrots (80 g)
  • 1.5 yellow onions
  • 3 slices of bread
  • Some tomato purĂ©, mustard, soy sauce, salt and pepper
  • 75 gbutter
  • 3 dloil (rapeseed)

Directions

  1. Start by making the confit onion (which is onion boiled for a long time in oil). Chop the onion (1 yellow onion) into sizes of about 1/4 onion rings. Heat up oil enough to cover the onions (3 dl) to low/medium temperature and let the onion simmer in the oil for about 30 minutes.
  2. While the onion is cooking, chop the portobello mushrooms and put them in a pan with a generous amount of butter (50g), on medium heat. After ca 5 minutes, take the heat down to low, add salt, pepper and the tomato puré (1 tablespoon) and mustard (1 tablespoon). Stir and leave on low heat for 20-30 minutes (turn the mushrooms over now and again).
  3. Tear the bread into small pieces (3 slices in pieces about 1 cm x 1 cm), crack the eggs (4) and stir the eggs and the torn bread together.
  4. Sift away the fluid from the beans and put them in a bowl. Finely chop 1/2 yellow onion, finely grate a carrot (and squeeze out some of the the juice) and mix both in with the beans. Mix together with whatever but not with an immersion blender or mixer. Take a fork or something and stir until some beans have become squished but some are still whole-ish.
  5. Grate the cheese (100 g) and put it in to the mix. Sift away the oil from the confit onion and add the onion and the fried mushrooms.
  6. Now, the trick is to get the texture just right, by adding bread crumbs and/or flour/ potato flour. You should be able to form semi-firm, semi-sticky balls from the mix, but if there’s too much flour/bread/bread crumbs, the burgers get too dry when cooked. Personally, I more often make the mistake of making the mix to firm so try to err on the side of a looser, stickier mixture. More breadcrumbs can always be added in later. When I did these ones I didn’t use any breadcrumbs (or flour) other than the coating (see list item 9).
  7. Use salt, pepper and soy until the mix is to your taste. I usually put a bit of vinegar in the mix, but then again: I fucking love vinegar.
  8. So now the base mixture is done. If you have the time, let it set in the fridge for an hour or so.
  9. Make balls from the mixture and cover them in bread crumbs. Heat up the remaining butter (25 g) and some rapeseed oil to medium-high heat in a pan. Put the balls in the pan and gently push down on them with a spatula. If the consistency is right they should flatten easily (they should flatten slightly but not all the way under their own weight). Fry for about 5 minutes on each side. And you’re done!


These are best about five minutes off the stove, when they’ve settled a bit (become a bit firmer) but are still warm. Fry them the last thing you do before serving up the food.

Lemon Risotto

(the unexpected risotto)

It was probably early two thousands, and together with a friend we managed to crash a fancy graduate lunch in a fancy restaurant in Napoli (Zi Teresa), that was only intended for the close family and teachers of this other friend of ours. The family was clearly not super happy about our presence, but we made friends with a couple of teachers. For the first time I had Lemon Risotto. It was good, but not exceptional. While we were dining, and commenting on it, the very Professor that discussed my friend’s thesis, leaned towards me, and in a complicit tone said: this one is made with butter, which together with the lemon gives it a bit too much of a cream cheese feeling. You should try with an egg yolk instead, it’s much better.

The professor was absolutely right, and I never had the chance to thank him, so here we go: thank you professor, that was a good tip.

Created with Sketch. 30 min cooking + 30 for making the vegetable stock Created with Sketch. 2

Ingredients

  • for the vegetable stock
  • 1 potato
  • 1 stick of celery
  • 1 onion
  • 1 carrot
  • for the risotto
  • 1 onion
  • olive oil to taste
  • 160 grCarnaroli rice
  • 150 grwhite wine
  • 1 lemon
  • 1 egg yolk
  • parmigiano to taste

Directions

Preliminary notes:

  • in a perfect world everybody should be able to have access to the Amalfi coast lemons, the most beautiful and intense lemons ever, but since most of you readers don’t live in the south of Italy, well, I’m sorry. Try to find the most beautiful and fresh and expensive lemon, because lemon is key here.
  • you can choose to use or not use the parmigiano in the end, I like both versions.

  1. Start by making the vegetable stock: throw one potato (peeled and halved), one stick of celery, one onion (peeled and halved) and one carrot in a pot of salted water, and let it cook for 30 min. You can do this in advance, but the stock must be hot when you start making the actual risotto.
  2. In a different pot on medium/high heat, pour a couple of tablespoons off olive oil, add the onion finely diced, and let it sauté for 5 minutes.
  3. Add the rice and stir it continuously. Let it toast for a couple of minutes, the rice will develop a hard surface, which will slow down the cooking process a bit, adding to the final creamyness. Add the white wine and keep stirring until it evaporates.
  4. Finely grate the peal of the lemon, and then squeeze out the juice. Add half of the peel and half of the juice to the pot, stirring again and again.
  5. Now you can start adding the broth: again, stirring the rice continuously, add a first ladle of stock and keep stirring until the stock is consumed: you have to be quick with the next ladle of broth or you will burn everything.
  6. Repeat point .5 until the rice is cooked, about 15/20 minutes in total. It’s important that the final risotto is on the firm side. Please don’t all a lot of stock all together, we want the starch to come out of those grains a little at the time to make the risotto more creamy.
  7. Take the pot off the heat and finally add the rest of the lemon peel and juice, the parmigiano (if you want to), and the egg yolk: be very quick to stir in the egg yolk. If you let it sit there for too long without stirring, you will end up with an unpleasant taste of cooked egg.
  8. Feel free to add some black pepper, freshly chopped parsley, and some more greated lemon peel.

 

Salmon Pudding

(don't worry, it's not a fish dessert)

This is a real Swedish classic. As in Britain, also in Sweden a “pudding” can be both a dessert and a savory dish (unlike in Britain it can also mean an attractive person). This is… kind of a gratin I guess? There’s another traditional thing in Sweden called Cabbage pudding (coming on the blog sometime in the future), which is completely different from Salmon pudding so the Swedish word for savory “pudding” doesn’t mean much more than “stuff put together in an oven shape”, at least not to my knowledge. As you never now how traditional something you perceive as traditional really is, I did some light googling to get a sense of the history and it does seem to have been around quite a while. It is mentioned in the early 19th century, thou I would guess the recipe has gone through some changes since then. Presumably lemon wasn’t something that people had in general. On the other hand, maybe Salmon pudding wasn’t something ordinary people had? The good news is that all you ordinary people can have it now!

As it turns out, it’s also perfectly adapted to modern society as it’s an ideal lunch box meal. Easy to divvy up in pieces, well suited to be reheated in a microwave and you know…. ridiculously good, which is a big plus in my book.

It’s also one of these dishes that almost makes itself. Yes, there’s a bit of light seasoning but for the most part, the flavors come from the ingredients themselves and there’s not many of those. The only real hassle is slicing the potatoes and the onion which is why you should really have a kitchen mandolin handy.

Let’s get to it!

Special Equipment

  • Kitchen mandolin
Created with Sketch. 2 hours Created with Sketch. 8

Ingredients

  • 1 kgpotatoes (low starch)
  • 500 gcold smoked salmon
  • 2 yellow onions
  • 1 pot of dill
  • 6 normal sized eggs
  • 3 dlmilk
  • 3 dlcream
  • 350 gbutter
  • Some salt and black pepper

Directions

  1. Put the oven on 225 C.
  2. Smear the bottom of an oven pan with butter (50 g). Thinly slice potatoes and onion (preferably with a mandolin) and spread across the bottom. Sprinkle the surface with salt and black pepper. It’s hard to give any exact measure regarding the salt. It depends on how salt the salmon is, but it shouldn’t be a lot.
  3. Add a layer of salmon, then another layer of potato, onion and dill. Another sprinkle of salt and pepper (for each layer of potato). Repeat until you’re out of stuff.

  4. Mix the eggs (6), the milk (3 dl) and the cream (3 dl) in a bowl. Add a teaspoon of salt and a couple of dashes of black pepper, then pour the mix over the layers of potato, onion and salmon.
  5. Finish by spreading the surface with flakes of butter (100 g), more dill, the juice from 1/2 a lemon and another light sprinkle of salt.
  6. Put the pan into the oven for about 40-45 minutes (225 C). When it’s done the potatoes should have some firmness left and the top of the pudding should be ever so slightly burnt.
  7. Serve with clarified butter (200 g), some fresh dill and a slice of lemon.


This is actually a sort of summer dish, probably because of the fresh dill, but don’t let that stop you!

Pancakes

(Fluffy McFluff Face)

American style pancakes are our Saturday breakfast beloved routine, so much beloved that I often want to go to bed early on Friday night so the morning comes faster. There is a lot of fuss and strange recipes to achieve fluffy pancakes, but I donÂŽt think itÂŽs that difficult really. This recipe is the product of years of little tweaks and adjustments, and now is probably close to perfection, and itÂŽs very easy. You won’t have to use weird coconut oil, or whip the egg-white separately, or align the flux-capacitor before hitting 88 miles per hour. No, just put all the ingredients in a bowl, mix them for 30 seconds, and you’re done. ONLY if you feel fancy, add a tablespoon of ricotta for extra creamy – but still fluffy! – consistency (I love it).

Special Equipment

  • hand mixer
  • good non-stick pan
  • plastic spatula
Created with Sketch. 10 minutes Created with Sketch. about 10

Ingredients

  • 130 gbread flour
  • 1 egg
  • 1 tablespoonnatural oil
  • 170 mlmilk
  • 2 teaspoonssugar
  • 2 teaspoonsbaking powder
  • 1 pinchsalt
  • 1 tablespoonricotta (optional)

Directions

The only tricky part of pancakes is the batter consistency, that has to be just right, not too thick and not too runny, thick BUT able to run slowly and nicely off of the spoon. The amount of milk in this recipe works perfectly, but since different flours absorb liquids differently, you never know. I actually don’t measure milk, I add it a little at the time, until I reach the desired consistency. Once again, experience is key. If you use a good frying pan, unscratched, you won’t need to grease the pan to cook the pancakes; otherwise, a flake of butter will do the trick.

 

  1. Put your best non-stick frying-pan on medium-high (if the pan is good, no butter is needed to grease it).
  2. Put all the ingredients together in a bowl, mix them but not too well, I feel like the pancakes come even fluffier when the mix is not super smooth but still a little bit lumpy. Quite soon the batter will start bubbling a little thanks to the baking powder action.
  3. Scoop the batter in the frying pan (a 24 cm frying pan will accommodate three 10 cm pancakes) with a small ladle, or a big spoon, or a 1/2 dl measure: using something that can contain just the right amount of batter will help achieving evenly-sized pancakes.
  4. After about 20 seconds, bubbles will start appearing on the surface of the pancakes: it’s time to flip them! Use a good plastic spatula, and with a gentle but firm wrist movement, you’ll do it (again, it takes some experience): the pancake should have that kind of golden/brown color; if not, adjust heat and cooking time accordingly. After 20/30 more seconds, the first batch is ready and you can pile your pancakes on a plate.
  5. Continue until you run out of batter, and the pancake tower is ready to go to the breakfast table.

Pancakes are of course best served still warm. My absolute favorite way of eating them is with plenty of butter, bacon and maple syrup. But of course you can use fruit, honey, whipped cream, why not ice-cream. I mean, you do you.

Cod, potato, green peas and hollandaise

(cod wonder)

Sometimes… most of the time..? All the time?! No, probably most of the time, the simple stuff is the best. Cod, potatoes, butter sauce. That’s perfect, isn’t it? I think so. I’m going to complicate stuff a bit (duh) but the basis of this dish is really simple. A few ingredients and very straight forward flavors.

We eat a lot of fish in Sweden and cod is kind of the king of the fishes. Or something. I tried to find the translation for this specific part of the cod (the back fillet) but I… well I failed. Maybe the English-speaking world does not make the distinction?

In this recipe I’m cooking the fish with the sous vide technique but it’s brilliant pan fried as well. It’s just a little bit easier to get it just right when using sous vide. Btw, I use the ANOVA sous vide machine, which I can really recommend.

So what’s the deal with sous vide? Well, it’s pretty straight forward. Vacuum seal something in a plastic bag with some spices and/or butter or whatever you think might be good. Then put the bag(s) in a temperature controlled water bath at the exakt temperature you want your meat/fish/veggie/whatever to be cooked at, and leave it in there for a long time (as compared to the cooking time using more “traditional” techniques). I think it’s pretty rare to get well prepared fish at “not-high-end”- restaurants, and actually also at many higher end restaurants. Why? It’s almost always overcooked. Dry, overcooked fish is… I mean, it’s not horrible or gross or whatever but it’s just such a waste, right?  When it’s juuuust right, it’s almost falling apart, it’s cooked through but only just so and it’s brilliant. When you’ve had that perfect thing, the overcooked one is such a sad reminder of what could have been. With sous vide, it’s so easy to get it just as you want it and basically impossible to fail. So you should really try it.

Special Equipment

  • Sous vide machine
  • Vacuum sealer
Created with Sketch. 1 hour for the cooking. Simple preparations to be made a couple of hours before cooking starts. Created with Sketch. 6 portions

Ingredients

  • 900 gcod (back) fillet
  • 2000 gsmall (low starch) potatoes
  • 300 ggreen peas
  • 300 gbutter
  • 5 egg yolks
  • 1 lemons (possibly two if they're small)
  • Cayenne pepper
  • Quite some salt
  • Some white pepper

Directions

  1. Firstly, we’re gonna prepare the fish. Brining is something that you should do with almost anything fish, poultry or pork. It’s basically letting the meat soak in salt water for a time before cooking. It gives the meat extra moisture and a natural saltiness that is very nice. So: dissolve about 50-60 grams of salt in 300 grams of water in a pot. When dissolved, add 700 grams of ice-cold water to the solution and put in a bowl. Add the fish to the salt water and put in the fridge for a couple of hours (or what time you have)
  2. Fill up a pot with cold water, add the potatoes and A LOT of salt. About 100 g. Seriously. Put it on high heat under a lid. When it boils, turn the stove off and leave the potatoes (under lid) in the boiling warm water. This is a pretty good trick when making potatoes. They come out just right (but check after a while anyway, I wouldn’t want overcooked anything on my conscience after that rant in the intro).
  3. Turn the oven to max.
  4. Set the sous vide machine to 47 or 48 degrees C and 45 minutes.
  5. Take the fish out of the brine. Rinse off the salt water and dry the fillets with some kitchen paper.
  6. Vacuum seal the fillets. Add som spices to the vacuum bag if you want!
  7. Put the bags in the sous vide machine (when it’s at temperature of course).
  8. Now, let’s make hollandaise! Bring a pot of water to a simmer. When it’s simmering put the stove on the lowest heat setting.
  9. Cut the 250 grams of the butter into about 2 cm x 2 cm big cubes.
  10. Mix 30 ml (2 tablespoons) of lemon juice with the egg yolks in a bowl. Put the bowl over the simmering water and heat the mixture while whisking. Use a metal bowl or at least something that can transmit heat. If you use a thick ceramic bowl the yolk/lemon mixture is probably not gonna get hot enough.
  11. When the egg/lemon mixture starts thickening, drop in a butter cube while continuing to stir/ whisk (if the egg/lemon mix thickens very quickly or becomes very thick, take the bowl off the water bath). When the cube has dissolved, drop another one in. Continue until you run out of butter. I use this technique instead of melting the butter first and then pouring it in to the yoke, as I think it’s easier to avoid the sauce breaking doing it this way.
  12. Add cayenne pepper, white pepper and possibly lemon and salt, to you liking. Note that you can’t refrigerate butter sauces. The butter sets and can’t be reheated without breaking.
  13. Pour away the salt water from the potatoes and put them in the oven with som rapeseed oil for 10-15 minutes. Don’t rinse the potatoes. The salty water stuck to the skin will give it the perfect saltiness (i.e.: no need to add any salt when taking them out of the oven)
  14. Put the remaining butter (50 grams) in a pan. Heat the butter in the pan until it starts to brown.  Take the cod out of the vacuum bags and fry them for 10-15 seconds on each side. Be careful, the fillets can be very brittle.
  15. Boil the peas.
  16. Serve with fresh herbs, some fried kale, a squeeze of lemon or something… else?

A couple of notes.

If you use frozen fish (I did), be sure to thaw it gently. The meat easily becomes a bit thready and chewy if not treated carefully.

Why low starch potatoes? Well, low starch potatoes keep their shape better when cooked and therefore fits well for this recipe (I think).

Why all the salt? First of all: It’s not to make it taste very salty. It just gets…. tastier. A bit salty, yes, but not at all over the top (promise). I thiiiink it’s due to osmosis. The salty water is pulled in to the potato due to the higher ion-concentration in the water as compared to the water in the cells in the potato. The salt water adds moisture and saltiness to the potato, much like brining (it is basically brining).

So that’s what I think, but the internet gives… differing explanations. Some say it (the better taste) is due to the potatoes being cooked at a higher temperature (the salt raises the boiling point of the water), but this seems implausible to me as the temperature is very marginally higher. Some do say osmosis but that also doesn’t seem quite open and shut.

I have been planning on writing something about potatoes on the blog, primarily about this. Let’s hope I get to it soon. Oh, and I you know something about this potato stuff, do get in touch.

In the meantime? Get good at making cod and hollandaise. You’re in for a lifetime of tasty joy!

Bouillabaisse with Aioli

(it's French soup!)

Bouillabaisse is a French soup. I know, fancy! That is the extent of my knowledge about Bouillabaisse. It is very, very good though. I’m just saying that there might be stuff in the recipe that is deeply disturbing for those of you with a profound historical and cultural connection to Bouillabaisse. If that is the case, I hope you will be able to enjoy it anyway. Hopefully it won’t be like for those dudes who thought that the new(ish) Ghostbusters movie ruined their childhood because it cast women. But maybe it will? Maybe someone’s childhood will be ruined because I am suggesting you to put some crushed tomatoes in a Bouillabaisse? Food and words are powerful things.

A little bit about the actual recipe. Three things are vitally important. 1) Do your own broth. 2) Don’t overcook the fish. I will get to how how to avoid overcooking in the instructions. And 3) … ok, two things are vitally important.

The base of the soup is as it is with most soups; a great broth. I really like shellfish broth, so I often use one made from shrimp shells, but any seafood-based broth is good. Besides the broth, what gives the soup its character is the mix of fennel, orange, saffron and white wine. I also think tomato goes really well with all this which is why I put some crushed tomatoes and tomato puré in mine.

It is really quite spectacular. I don’t mean my version but just… in general. Bouillabaisse is quite spectacular. To the instructions!

Created with Sketch. Roughly 2-3 hours Created with Sketch. 5

Ingredients

  • For the soup
  • 50 gceleriac
  • 120 gfennel
  • 150 gonion (one large onion)
  • 60 gcarrot (one or two depending on the size)
  • 200 gcrushed tomatoes
  • 300 gwhite wine
  • 25 gbutter
  • 0.5 gsaffron
  • 10 gtomato purĂ© (a spoon full)
  • The juice from one orange (should be 0.5-1 dl juice)
  • The peel from 1/2 an orange
  • 300 gcod
  • 300 gsalmon
  • 200 gshrimp
  • For the aioli
  • 2 egg yolks (30-40g)
  • 200 grapeseed oil (2 dl)
  • 10 gmustard
  • 1 clove of garlic
  • Some vinegar, salt and pepper to taste
  • For the broth
  • The shells from the shrimp
  • 2 large onions
  • 2 carrots
  • Some celeriac
  • Some fennel
  • A couple of bay leaves, salt and pepper to taste

Directions


So. Lot’s of ingredients but I promise: not complicated at all.

  1. Brine the fish. This is very optional but I really think brining is great for fish. What’s brining? Well it’s simply putting something in salty water. This gives more juice to the fish (or meat) and a nice natural saltiness. Dissolve 50-60 g of salt in 1000g (1L) of water and let it cool down (use 1/3 or something of the water to dissolve the salt by heating it on the stove, then mix that with cold water). Cut the fish into pieces (approximately 3 x 3 cm) and put it into the brine. Put it in the fridge.
  2. Put the oven on 250 C and peel the shrimp (save the peeled shrimp for later). Spread the shells across an oven plate and put it into the oven for about 10 minutes. The shells should become white, not burnt.
  3. Bring two (2) liters of water to a boil. Cut the veggies into pieces and put them in. Add the grilled shrimp shells.
  4. Put the bay leaves in with som pepper and let the broth simmer for at least an hour, more if you have the time. It should reduce to half the initial volume. Salt to taste at the end (if the broth is nice and salty in the beginning it will be horribly over-salty when reduced).
  5. Pour the broth through a sift to remove the veggies, pepper corns (if you’re using that) and bay leaves.
  6. When the broth is finished, chop the celeriac, carrot and fennel into small cubes and finely chop the onion (note: not the cooked vegetables from the broth).
  7. Put the butter  and some oil in a big pot on medium/ high heat. Fry the chopped up vegetables for 10 minutes. After 5 minutes, put in half of the saffron, all of the tomato puré (10 g/ a spoon full), the peel from half an orange and stir.
  8. Pour in the broth, the wine, the juice from the orange, the crushed tomatoes (200 g) and bring to a simmer.
  9. Put in the other half of the saffron and add salt and pepper to taste. This is the finished product so taste and adjust a lot of times. Use salt/ sugar/ vinegar to get the balance exactly as you want it.
  10. Now turn the stove off, put a lid on the soup and let it rest on the (now off) stove plate.
  11. Make the Aioli. Aioli is mayonnaise with some garlic so it’s real easy (here’s our recipe for plain ol’ mayo including video). Mix the egg yolks with the mustard, some vinegar, salt, pepper and one finely chopped (or pressed) clove of garlic.
  12. Whisk intensely (or use an electric mixer, immersion blender or other appropriate machine) while carefully (ok, not that carefully) pouring the oil into the mix. As always, balance with salt/ pepper/ vinegar or lemon, at the end. If you’re only whisking by hand, the Aioli will be a bit “fluffier”or less dense, than if you do it with a kitchen mixer or immersion blender. I like the consistency you get with an immersion blender.
  13. Now take the fish (in brine) out of the fridge and sift away the brine.
  14. Put the fish and peeled shrimp into the soup and let that rest for about 5 minutes. The after heat from the soup will cook the fish perfectly. Just to be completely clear: you DO NOT need to cook the fish in boiling/ simmering soup, the after heat is enough. The soup is still 80-90 C and fish like cod and salmon is best when around 50 C in the center of the pieces.
  15. Serve with a generous dollop of the Aioli, some bread and a bit of fresh herbs.

I really love this dish. And it’s really nice if you’re hosting a dinner party. If you prepare the broth, the fish (by putting it in brine, which you can do the night before if you want) and Aioli beforehand, you can really do this from start to finish in less than 30 minutes.

Bon appétit!

Duck Breast with Orange Sauce

(ducktales)

I’ve kinda always been baffled by how much chicken breast Swedes eat. Chicken is great and all, I mean… except for the breast. It is always, ALWAYS overcooked which makes it papery dry, flavorless and completely uninteresting. It can be great, but that really demands a pretty good chef I feel.

So wasn’t this supposed to be about duck? Well yes. Since I’ve started eating duck more frequently I’ve been equally baffled, but the other way around. Basically, no one is eating duck, but compared to the bland chicken, the duck breast is amazing! How to describe it…? It has a certain gamey (duckey) flavor that I guess some people do not like. It’s very meaty as bird meats go and the breast is very tender and juicy. Kind of a mix of dear and chicken maybe, with more fat (from the skin).

Anyway, more people should eat duck is what I’m trying to say. And stop eating so much chicken breast, it really is settling for mediocrity.

This recipe uses a mix of pan frying and sous vide cooking. The pan-frying gives wonderfully crispy skin and the sous vide ensures just perfect meat. Sous vide is a great technique when you’re cooking meat and you really want it to come out a certain way (and really… when don’t you want that?). A sous vide machine is basically a water bath with a thermostat and a timer. It allows you to immerse the meat (sealed in a vacuum bag) in water at an exact temperature for an extended time. So instead of cooking the meat at a high temperature (e.g. against the bottom of a frying pan) and trying to time it so that the core of the meat is juuuuust right, with sous vide, you cook the meat at the temperature at which you prefer the meat to be eaten at, but for a long time. Thus the meat comes out perfectly throughout the entire piece, instead of being overcooked at the surface and perfect in the center.

It’s pretty easy to achieve kinda almost the same great result with only pan-frying, keeping tabs on the core meat temperature with a cooking thermometer.

The duck and orange sauce is a classic coupling and fit really well together. I haven’t found a side that I fell really completes the dish though. This time I went for roasted potatoes, orange braised fennel and fried kale. I really liked the fennel and kale but kinda botched the potatoes, which put me of them as a concept a bit. If you have a favorite side dish to go with duck, please let me know, I’m on the hunt for a favorite 🙂

Special Equipment

  • A sous vide apparatus
  • A vacum sealer
Created with Sketch. 3 hours (of which 2-2.5 hours is waiting) Created with Sketch. 5

Ingredients

  • For the duck
  • 700 gduck breast (usually two pieces)
  • 50 gbutter
  • 50 gsalt
  • Some rapeseed oil for frying
  • For the sauce
  • 300 gorange juice, preferably fresh pressed (circa 5 oranges)
  • 100 gwhite wine
  • 200 gvegetable broth
  • 25 gsugar (2 table spoons)
  • 15 gcorn starch (1.5 tables spoons)
  • A bit of butter

Directions

  1. If you have the time: put the breasts in brine overnight, or a couple of hours before starting to cook, if that’s what you have. Dissolve 50-60 g of salt (ca 1/2 dl) in 1000 g (1L). Let the solution cool and then put the meat in the brine (the salty water). Brineing makes the meat more juicy and gives it a nice saltiness.
  2. Make broth. Cut some carrots, onion and fennel and put in boiling water. Add salt, pepper and bay leaves and let boil for at least two hours.
  3. Cut slices across the skin of the breasts with a sharp knife. This will make the skin more crispy when you fry it. Some might say you should “clean” the meat from tendons and stuff (on the “inside” of the breast/ the non-skin-side), but I really don’t mind them so I usually don’t.
  4. Put the butter in a pan on high heat with a sip of rapeseed oil. When the butter starts to brown, fry the breasts skin side down for about two minutes, while continuously scooping the butter from the pan and pouring it over the meat. Take the meat from the pan but do not throw away the butter, you’ll use it later.

  5. Seal the meat in a vacuum bag and put it in the sous vide machine (I can really recommend this one, it’s great and doesn’t take up a lot of space). If you did not brine the meat, salt both sides before putting into the vacuum bag.
    Cook for at least two hours, three if you have the time, at 54 degrees C (medium rare). Oh, and by the way: you can put whatever in the bag with the meat. If you want more even orange-taste in the dish, put in some orange peel. Like rosemary and thyme? Throw some in there.
  6. Now for the sauce: Grate 1/2 of one orange and squeeze the juice from all of them (circa five oranges should give you 3 dl).
  7. Put the starch in a bowl and pour in the broth (2 dl) while whisking. Add the wine, the orange juice, the peel and the sugar while whisking. Put the mixture in a pan, bring it to a boil and them let it simmer for 20 minutes. This should make for a quite “thin”/ runny sauce. If you like it thicker, add a bit more starch in the beginning.
  8. Add about a table spoon of butter to the sauce and you’re done.
  9. When the meat is done bathing take it out of its bag and put the frying pan (with the melted butter from before) back on the stove on high heat. When the pan is hot, put the breast in, skin side down and repeat step 4: Two minutes on high heat while scooping the melted butter over the meat. Then remove the breasts from the pan and let them rest for five minutes.
  10. Make thin-ish slices. Serve with the sauce and a nice side dish. Bon appetite!

Greek style Chicken with Potato and Tzatziki

(I'm sorry, I can't sing for you)

In the nineties we went to Crete to celebrate my late grandpa’s 70th birthday. We went to a kinda cafĂ©-restaurant-ish place in a village he and my grandma had been to before. They instantly recognized him and after some pleasantries and most likely some customary Raki (booze, usually home-made), we decided to have dinner there that same evening. It wasn’t a big establishment. We had to decide what to eat so they could go kill it in time for dinner. You know, that sorta place. We decided on chicken and came back a couple of hours later. I vividly remember two things about that meal.

One. From the start the waiter was a bit… off I guess I’d say. The second time he came in… was he drunk? The third time, yes, decidedly drunk and now he also started to apologize profusely. He couldn’t sing to us you see, “I’m very sorry, I can’t sing for you… I’m so sorry”. After a while we understood that the village was in mourning. The waiter cried and apologized. No singing.

Quite surreal.

Two. The chicken and rice. Crispy, lemony, wonderfully roasted chicken with some kind of risotto-ish rice. Creamy and lemon-infused. It was all just really, really great.

So, back to Sweden. A bunch of years later, my dad started to make a lemon tasting, greek style chicken thing, but with potato instead of rice. I just assumed that this was a riff on that memorable meal. Turns out, it was from a recipe booklet he got from our part-greek cousins. That doesn’t really matter though. What matters is this: that chicken and potato is the bomb. And, ironically, the star of the show is the potato! Don’t get me wrong, the chicken is great, but I tend to think that roasted chicken can only be that good. The potato though… beyond great.

What’s also great with this dish is that it’s so, so simple. It needs some time in the oven but takes very little time to prepare.

Created with Sketch. 2 hours in total. 30 minutes preparation, circa 1.5 hours of cooking. Created with Sketch. 6-7 people

Ingredients

  • 1 large organic chicken (circa 1.5-2 kg)
  • 1.5 kgpotatoes
  • 2 lemons
  • 100 gbutter
  • 100 gwater (1 dl)
  • 700 gGreek (or Turkish) yogurt
  • 200 gsoured cream (this is a bit complicated, see below)
  • 1 cucumber
  • 2 cloves of garlic
  • 200 golive oil
  • 25 gvinegar (circa 1.5 tbsp)
  • Salt, pepper and oregano

Directions

If you’re feeling ambitious, I’d recommend you to brine the chicken over night. Dissolve approximately 60g of salt per one (1) liter of water. Put the raw chicken in the salt-water (the brine) and let it soak over night in the fridge. As the ion concentration in the brine is higher than the water in the meat, salty water will go into the chicken (osmosis) making it more juicy and naturally a bit salty (well… maybe a bit of a stretch to call it naturally). For pork, chicken (birds in general) and fish this is a really awesome trick.

One more thing. About that soured cream: in Sweden it’s called “grĂ€ddfil” and is very common. The closest international equivalent I’ve found seem to be soured cream but I’ve never actually tried it myself. Note that it isn’t the same thing as creme fraĂźche although that is fairly similar.

GrÀddfil is about 12% fat, soured cream about 18% and creme fraßche is a lot fatter. If in doubt, just use more of the yogurt instead.

So, onwards to the instructions!

  1. Heat the oven to 220 C.
  2. Cut the potatoes into quite thick slices and put them in an oven tray. Pour 100g (1 dl) of olive oil over the potatoes. Turn the potatoes in the oil a couple of times thus that the potato slices are well covered in oil.
  3. Place the chicken on an oven grid and put the grid on top of the tray of potatoes.
  4. Press a lemon worth of lemon juice over the chicken, splash it with some olive oil and distribute 50g of butter across the skin of the chicken. Sprinkle some salt and black pepper over the chicken.
  5. Press the other lemon over the potatoes, pour the water into the oven tray and distribute the remaining 50g of butter amongst the potato slices.
  6. Sprinkle oregano quite generously over everything.
  7. Put into the oven for 30 minutes, then take the whole thing out, turn the potatoes and flip the chicken over (belly up). Put everything back into the oven for about 60 more minutes (depending a bit on the size of the chicken).
  8. Now you’re done with that! Over to the Tzatziki. Put the yogurt and the soured cream in a bowl.
  9. Grate the cucumber and press it to remove excess water. Press the garlic cloves and put the garlic and cucumber in with the yogurt.
  10. Add 100g of olive oil (1 dl) and the vinegar (1.5 tbsp) and mix everything together. Add salt and pepper to taste. Done!

 

Serve with a nice Greek salad and make sure to pour some of the juice from the oven tray over the chicken and potatoes on the plate. The roasted chicken dripping down into the lemon-butter-olive oil makes for a truly great dressing.

I hope I get to that original Crete dish some day. I’ve tried making it a couple of times but haven’t really been able to mimic the rice. In the meantime though? Eat this for christ’s sake.

Dumplings

(bingo, bingo, bingo!)

When I was still in school I lived in Shanghai for a bit. I have… shall we say mixed feelings about China. On the one hand it’s a super cool country, buuuut on the other hand they’re not that great at democracy and individual liberty and stuff. While being there, I wrote a thesis on sports betting and had to enlist my brother to register himself at various bookmakers as this is definitely not something you can do from China. You also can’t use google. Or Facebook. Or many other things we take for granted on the internet. And this is of course only scraping the surface, from the vantage point of a privileged westerner. The Chinese people have more alarming concerns than not being able to use Google. Millions of people being moved to clean up the city for a world expo for example. Or citizens waiting 15 years to be allowed a passport. Stuff like that.

China’s oppressiveness is camouflaged juuuust enough for you to forget that it exists if you don’t pay attention. But if you start looking..? Well, then it’s… it’s pretty bad.

All of this said – I do miss Shanghai. A city full of life and possibility. A place were you can start the evening playing bingo at a luxurious restaurant were a waiter drives the top bingo-prize (an electric scooter) through the restaurant honking at every turn yelling “BINGO, BINGO, BINGO”. Then, you continue a couple of floors up the building, befriend a German billionaire with childhood issues and see the sun go up from his 20 000 € per night suite on the 84th floor of The Bottle Opener.

Nothing remotely similar has happened to me in Stockholm, I’ll tell you that. But Shanghai is really a crazy place, in good ways and in bad ways.

Similar to Stockholm though, Shanghai is a city with great food, both at the high and the low end of the price spectra. You can easily find a good meal for less than two dollars and you can (obviously) spend however much you want.

I miss the weird breakfast street pancakes with the brown, gooey, chili stuff and the crispy cracker. I miss the Hongkong duck at my go-to lunch place. I miss the street side wooks. Most of all though, I miss the dumplings at Ruijin Road. They’re just these simple dumplings in broth for 13 or so RMB (≈2$). But man… I got seriously hooked.

I’ve tried to recreate them with this recipe. They’re close enough to vividly remind me of the real deal, but I know they’re not as good.

They are very good thou! You should try them.

Special Equipment

  • A little "dumpling-maker"- tool is advisable (see pictures below) but not necessary
Created with Sketch. 45 min Created with Sketch. 4-5 people

Ingredients

  • 2 litersof vegetable broth, preferably home made of course
  • 50 dumpling wrappers
  • 500 gminced pork
  • 1 egg
  • 250 gpak choi
  • 1 yellow onion or ca 3 leaks
  • 1 pot of cilantro/ coriander (ca 15 g)
  • 1 fresh chili (ca 15-20 g)
  • 3 cloves of garlic (15 g)
  • 1 tbspgrated fresh ginger (20 g)
  • 1 dlpanko (30 g)
  • 2 tbsprice vinegar (30 g/ml)
  • 2 tbspJapanese style soy, e.g. Kikkoman soy (30 g/ml)
  • 2 tbspsesame oil (30 g/ml)
  • Some salt (ca 5 g) and pepper
  • Sichuan pepper if you have it!

Directions

  1. Make a simple broth. Chop up some onions, carrots and whatever and bring to a boil. Add salt, pepper corns and bay leaves. Simmer for and hour (or more if you have the time) and you’re done.
  2. While the broth is boiling away, you have plenty of time to do everything else. Put the pork in a big bowl. Grate the fresh ginger, press the garlic and chop everything choppable and mix it in with the pork.
  3. Lightly beat the egg and add it to the mix. Add the sesame oil, rice vinegar and soy.
  4. Add the panko and stir everything together thoroughly.
  5. Take an appropriate amount of pork-dumpling-batter and put in a wrapper. Seal with the wrapper tool or if you don’t have it, a plain ol’ fork.



  6. Repeat until you’re out of batter and/ or wrappers. Easy!
  7. Now, you can cook these in different ways. I really like them boiled. The you just sift away the vegetables from the broth, add the dumplings to the boiling broth and cook them for 2-3 minutes.
  8. In Shanghai they quite often “steam-fry” them. Then you put some oil in a pan, heat it up to medium/ high, and add the dumplings to the pan. Then you add just a bit of water to the pan and put a lid on. “Steam-fry” them like this for 4-5 minutes. The bottom becomes fried and a bit crispy, while the top gets steamed. Quite good!
  9. And you can also just regular-steam them. I’ll leave that up to you to figure out.

If you want, dip them in three parts soy (e.g. Kikkoman) mixed with one part rice vinegar and some sriracha, but really, they’re great just as they are. And if you’re of the vegetarian persuasion, replace the pork with mushrooms (e.g. champignon) long fried in butter and I think you’ll be pretty pleased.

It really is surprisingly easy to make dumplings (if you don’t think it’s super easy, if you think it’s super easy you’re right on the money). At least if you don’t make the wrappers yourself. I’m sure that can be fun but I’m very pleased with the ones I can get at my local China-store (those I use are called “Gyoza skins”).

And just to have said what really goes without sayin’. IF you are in Shanghai and find yourself close to Ruijin Road. DO NOT tell me about it. I will be consumed by jealousy.

Bean tacos with fried cheese and guacamole

(definitely not "taco")

A while back, me and my brother went to a lecture by Magnus Nilsson (of FĂ€viken fame). It was fun and strange. He was (supposed to be) promoting his book The Nordic Cookbook but began the lecture by telling us he thought it to be a really bad idea making a book about Nordic cooking. Since there is no “Nordic cooking”. However, he then figured someone else would be tasked to write it if he declined. Which would probably make the book be worse than if he wrote it. So… he wrote it. Then he talked about bread for 20 minutes. Then, it got really strange. He claimed that “taco pie” is one of the most Swedish dishes there is. Crazy, right? Buuuuut…. he just might be on to something. In Sweden, taco is a real mainstay in the weekly family menu. Or well… “taco”. Many times it’s just minced beef fried with a spice mix from Santa Maria, coupled with some creme fraiche, grated cheese, corn, some other vegetables and salsa. It’s not bad I guess. It’s… a rouse, a cheap trick, if you know what I’m saying? It’s good in the way McDonalds can be quite good. You eat it and think “hey, this is really pretty good” but then half an hour later you think “was it thou..?“.

Anyway, nowadays we Swedes put “taco” in lots of places where it doesn’t belong. In pies, on pizza, heck there’s even a taco-semla (semla is a weird-ish dessert we eat on Fat Tuesday, taco-semla is just straight up super weird… Also, the nacho-semla was actually a way bigger deal).

So maybe “taco” is actually really Swedish. We certainly are a bit obsessed with it.

I got turned on to tacos when I got treated to some of the stuff from Jonas Cramby’s cookbook of Mexican food. It was decidedly different from the “taco” I’d had before. Real beefy and spicy and smokey, with loads of coriander and lime. Just great. And as with everything when living with a vegetarian: if you find something that’s wonderful but also made from animals, you try to make a vegetarian version so you can eat it more often. After some experimentation, this recipe quite quickly rose to the top. The wonderfully rich black beans are so good with the garlic and the chili. Guacamole is a perfect match and fried cheese… fried cheese is just food cocaine. About 50% of the time I have fried cheese I think: “there is nothing better than this… there can’t be anything better than this“. If I’m drunk I’m certain of it. And really? I don’t think I’m especially off base here. Top it off with pickled red onion, a generous dash of fresh coriander (cilantro) and lots of lime and you have what for me might have become my favorite taco. Maybe it’s because I don’t make the pulled pork version, or the beef one, or the fish taco as much, but I’m not sure… There’s just something about the beans with the cheese and the…. mmmmm. So good. We have it once a week.

Should you really be any different?

Created with Sketch. Roughly 2 hours Created with Sketch. 5

Ingredients

  • For the bean stew
  • 1 kgblack beans including the liquid , ca 700 g without the liquid
  • 1 yellow onion
  • 4 cloves of garlic, maybe five if they're small
  • 1 chile ancho (dried poblano chile)
  • 1 chipotle (smoked chili)
  • 5 gSriracha
  • 40 gchili sauce
  • 35 gchipotle salsa
  • 330 g/ mlnice beer
  • 0.5 fresh chili
  • 1 lime
  • 5 gsoy
  • 13 g(1 & 2/3 tbsp) cumin
  • 1 g(1 tbsp) oregano
  • 6 g(ca 4/5-1 tsp) salt (or smoked salt!)
  • 3 g(1 tsp) paprika (or smoked paprika!)
  • 6 g(1 tbsp) coriander seeds
  • 0.5 g(1/2 tsp) white pepper
  • 5 mlvinegar
  • For the fried cheese
  • 300 ggouda cheese
  • 100 gpanko
  • 2 eggs
  • 100 gwhite flour
  • For the guacamole
  • 5 ripe avocados
  • 1 lime
  • 50 golive oil
  • Half a pot of fresh coriander
  • Some vinegar
  • Salt and white pepper

Directions

I haven’t included a recipe for the tortilla here. If you want to make it yourself (which I really think you should) I used this one for a long time. It’s good (it’s in Swedish but I think you’ll get it)!

Nowadays I mostly use a simple pizza dough (yeast, water, salt, oil, flour), take about 40 g of the dough, work it to a thin tortilla and fry it in a hot pan for 20-30 seconds on each side.

  1. Begin with the beans. Put a pot or a saucepan, with a generous splash of oil, on medium/high heat. Chop the onion (1) and put them in the pan when the oil gets hot. Turn the heat to medium.
  2. After a couple of minutes, press (or finely chop) and add the garlic (4 cloves). Chop the fresh 1/2 chili and put it into the pan.
  3. Mix the coriander (1 tbsp) seeds in a mortar. Add the oregano (1 tbsp), paprika (1 tsp), cumin (1 & 2/3 tbsp), white pepper (1/2 tsp) salt (4/5 – 1 tsp) and mix further in the mortar.
  4. Sift away the liquid from the beans (700 g excluding the liquid), rinse them a bit under water and add them to the pan, then add the spice mix.
  5. Add chili sauce (40 g), sriracha (5 g), chipotle salsa (35 g), vinegar (5 ml) and soy (5 ml). Stir.
  6. Add the beer (330 g/ml) to the pan as well as about as much water. Put the ancho (1) and the chipotle (1) in with the rest and bring it to a boil. Turn the heat to medium/high. Now you’re almost done! Reduce the mixture to a thick stew. This should take about an hour.
  7. Now for the Guacamole. Split the avocados (5), remove the seed and scoop out the avocado with a spoon. Add salt, juice from 1/2 lime, 1/2 deciliter (50 g) of olive oil, half a pot of fresh coriander, white pepper (I like to have quite a lot of pepper, but I’ll leave it up to you) and a splash of vinegar.

  8. If the avocados are perfectly ripe, all you need to do now is turn the mix over on itself with a spoon continuously for a minute or two to get a wonderful mix of creamy guacamole with large bits of avocado still intact. If the avocados are not completely ripe you’ll have to split them a couple of times with the spoon. However, I recommend to not put it in a mixer. I think it looses something when everything is smashed together completely. Taste and adjust with salt & pepper, add the other half of the lime if you like it limey, and depending on the avocados and the lime: you might want to add some sugar. Done.
  9. And so for the last (amazing) part: the cheese. Cut the cheese (ca 300 g) into sticks and flour them. Remove the superfluous flour.
  10. Gently whisk 2 eggs and about 1/2 deciliter (50 g) of water with a fork. Pour the panko in a big bowl.
  11. Cover the floured cheese sticks with the egg/water whisk and turn them in panko.



  12. When the bean stew starts getting thicker/ more reduced, add the juice from 1/2 of a lime. Taste and adjust the saltiness and add more spice, lime juice and perhaps chili sauce to your liking. When the consistency is appropriate for putting in a soft tortilla bre ad (thick but not dry, definitely not runny), take the pan/pot off the stove to rest for 5 minutes.
  13. Deep fry the panko-covered cheese sticks in 180 C oil until the crust is golden (this takes 60 seconds-ish). Now, make sure this is the very last thing you do and that everything else is prepared for serving. The fried cheese is good for maybe 10 minutes.

 

Put the pieces together. Make sure to add plenty of fresh coriander and a splash of lime juice on top and enjoy. And I almost forgot! Except for the cheese, this is actually vegan. Though fried cheese is just amazing a really great substitute is fried and lightly salted slices of eggplant (and honestly, just adding this to the taco without removing the cheese is also pretty great).

I’ll be back with a pork, beef and a fish taco down the line. Those are also really quite good 🙂

Gnocchi!

(it's pronounced ˈÉČɔkki)

When it comes to fresh pasta I have no doubt that the one you make at home is way better than anything you can buy in a store. And despite what most people think, it’s quite an easy thing to do. This is the first of a series of recipes about fresh pasta and we will start with GNOCCHI (potato gnocchi to be precise) which by the way is pronounced [ˈÉČɔkki] (here’s a You Tube clip, just in case). Gnocchi are easy to make for a simple “chemical” reason: to make the dough, the flour is not mixed with water, therefore gluten doesn’t form. Now gluten is what makes any flour+water dough become elastic and hard to handle when you knead it, so with gnocchi everything is a lot simpler.

Potato gnocchi are essentially made with potatoes and wheat flour, but this is only the start – one can experiment with all kinds of flours and other ingredients, add eggs or some veggies to do a “colored” version (spinach seems to be very popular). I prefere the simple potatoes+flour version better because I like to feel the potato taste. If for example you would use eggs also, you will have to add a lot more flour to reach a good consistency, and the potato taste would be lost. Sad.

You can really use all kinds of potatoes: yellow, white, firm, floury etc. And the amount of flour needed may vary a lot for a number of reasons: type of potatoes used, for how long they are boiled, even how old they are! So you can see that the recipe is not much of a precise one really, but still it’s very easy and fun to do.

For this particular recipe I’m doing the gnocchi in my favourite way. They’re called Gnocchi alla Sorrentina, as they originate from the beautiful town of Sorrento in Italy, about 45 minutes from my hometown (you’re welcome to visit!).

Special Equipment

  • potato press
  • oven-proof bowls
Created with Sketch. 35 min Created with Sketch. 2 servings

Ingredients

  • 350 gpotatoes
  • 150 gall purpose flour
  • 1 pinch of salt
  • for the sauce
  • 1 tbsof oliveoil
  • 1 cloveof garlic
  • 300 gtomato puree (passata)
  • 80 ggrated Parmigiano cheese
  • 125 gof mozzarella

Directions

 

  1. Boil the potatoes, skin and all, until they’re fully cooked.
  2. Use the dedicated potato press to smash the boiled potatoes in a big bowl.
  3. Add the flour and a pinch of salt and mix everything together until the dough looks nice and smooth. You can add a bit more flour if you think the dough is not firm enough. The smashed potatoes are able to incorporate a lot of flour, but we don’t want the dough to be neither too loose, nor to firm. I guess it’s both a matter of how you prefere your gnocchi to be, and also of practice; with time you will be able to “feel” when the consistency is correct.
  4. Cut a small piece of dough and roll it down by hand to a ‘worm’ shape about 1,5 cm wide. With a knife cut the ‘worm’ into 1,5 cm pieces and using two fingers (and some extra flour as the dough will still be a bit sticky) press on the little ‘plug’ while at the same time you roll it back towards you. This will give the gnocco (singular for gnocchi, of course) a bit of a cavity where the sauce will sit nicely. Repeat this operation until you run out of dough. While you roll your gnocchi, arrange them nicely on a large flat surface and sprinkle a little flour over them. (I should mention that this is only one of the possible ways to roll gnocchi, but it’s my favourite). Actually, you know what? To make things easier I made a short explanatory how-to video!
  5. Start your oven grill at this point, you’ll need it later. Also put a big pot of water on the stove and bring it to a boil.
  6. Now for the sauce, it’s really quite simple: add olive oil and a clove of garlic to a sauce pan on medium until the garlic is golden/brown. Add the tomato sauce and salt and pepper to taste, and cook it for 10 minutes on  medium/low.
  7. Cook the gnocchi in salted boiling water just as if you were cooking pasta (in case you’re not very sure, here‘s our how-to article). But gnocchi cook very quickly! When the water is boiling,  add the gnocchi, put the lid back on the pot and in one or two minutes the water will start boiling again and the gnocchi will come up to the surface: ready! You just have to drain the water and put the gnocchi back in the pot.
  8. Now quickly pour 3/4 of the tomato sauce over the gnocchi, add the parmigiano and half of the mozzarella and gently mix everything.
  9. Put the gnocchi in oven-proof bowls, scoop the remaining sauce on top of them,  add the rest of the mozzarella and throw everything under the oven grill for 5/10 minutes or untill the mozzarella starts to become a bit brown

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, cafĂšs, forests, water, cafĂšs, loppis (flee markets), cafĂšs…  that goes on for kilometers and kilometers of virtually uninhabitated land – let alone a few cows and a couple of sheep. Anyway the cafĂš 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 mlcrĂšme 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 crĂšme-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 crĂšme-fraiche + lemon in contrast with the round flavour of fish is quite something. And it’s fresh, of course.

Eggplants Parmigiana

(or one of its variants)

This recipe originates somewhere in the south of Italy sometime around the seventeen hundreds, when eggplants and tomatoes finally made it in the mediterranean cuisine. They both had existed for quite some time (eggplants coming from Asia in the Middle Age, and tomatoes coming from the New World after it was “discovered”), but like everything new, it took some time to be accepted. Napolitans say it originates in Napoli, sicilians say it comes from Sicily, people from the city of Parma, in the north, swear it’s their invention (yeah, sure), but since I come from the Napoli region, then it’s decided, it’s a napolitan recipe, ok? Ok.

Even if it has few basic ingredients (one of wich, the most important, is of course Parmigiano cheese*), it has a lot of variants; probably every family has its own version, and sometimes even in the same family it can be a matter of discussion. For example in my family, my aunt Tettella fries the eggplant slices after being egged and floured. I only flour them. She uses mozarella, I use ricotta. I love her parmigiana, but I think mine is superior of course. My girlfriend, who comes from a parmigiana-free country (Sweden), and is not usually influenced by such trivial things as “love” and “affection” in her judgement, thinks mine is way better. So it’s decided, the recipe you’re about to read makes for the best eggplant Parmigiana ever. Ok? Ok

However, since I have said somewhere here that I’m not a fundamentalist any more, this is some variants you might want to try in your parmigiana making:
– don’t use ricotta but mozzarella instead, or even better provola (which is a kind of smoked mozzarella)
– use both ricotta and mozzarella/provola
– fry the eggplants after being floured/egged/breaded
– fry the eggplants after being egged only
– roast the eggplants for a “lighter” version
– any combination of the above

*when I say Parmigiano cheese, I mean the real thing, please don’t use any of that parmesan crap, do yourself a favour.

Created with Sketch. 1 and a half hours Created with Sketch. 6 servings

Ingredients

  • 4 eggplants (about 1 kg)
  • 250 gricotta
  • 30 gmilk
  • 300 gParmigiano Regiano
  • salt to taste
  • vegetable oil to deep-fry
  • for the tomato sauce
  • 1 lttomato sauce
  • 2 tbsolive oil
  • 1 clovegarlic
  • black pepper to taste
  • salt to taste

Directions

  1. Start by preparing the tomato sauce. As for any tomato-based sauce, heat olive oil with a clove of garlic on medium-high until the garlic gets golden brown. Pour in the raw tomato sauce from the can, plus a couple of tablespoons of water if the tomato is very thick (I usally “wash” the tomato sauce bottle or carton with some water and pour it in the pan with the rest). Add salt and pepper to taste, and let cook on medium-low for 15 minutes.
  2. While the tomato sauce is cooking, slice the eggplants in 2-3 mm slices, put them in a big bowl, cover with water and add abundant salt: this will help to get rid of some of the bitterness eggplants sometimes have (if they’ve been harvested too late, or if they have been sitting in the fridge for a while). You can actually skip this if you are in a hurry, it’s not strictly necessary. I do it only when I have time, because the slices have to sit in the water for at least 30 minutes. It’s important, however, that you rinse the slices, so that the flour will stick to them, as in the next step.
  3. Throw the flour in a big bowl and, one at a time, flour the eggplant slices, shake them well to eliminate excessive flour, and arrange them nicely in a plate ready to fry.
  4. Heat the vegetable oil in a big frying pan at around 150° C, and being very careful, put the floured slices in the hot oil without cramming them too much. Fry the slices turning them every now and again, until they get golden brown. When done, arrange them in a plate lined with absorbent paper or, like I do, in a oil-drainer (these might be hard to find out of italy, however…). It will take some time to fry all the slices, and you will probably need to add some oil after a while. Also, don’t forget to salt the slices when they’re out of the oil.
  5. Prepare the ricotta for the final composition: add some milk to it and mix until it’s easily spreadable. I mean, ricotta is spreadable already in its normal form, but you want it just a bit more liquid than that. Also, grate all the Parmigiano cheese, ready for the “assembly-line”. And, start pre-heating the oven at 180°C.
  6. Now you have the tomato sauce, the spreadable ricotta, the parmigiano, and the fried slices of eggplant. All you have to do is assemble them in layers, just like what you would do for Lasagne. Start with just a little bit of tomato sauce on the bottom of a 20cmx30cm oven plate (use one that is at least 5/6 cm tall), and than it goes like this: one layer of eggplants, a couple of tablespoons of ricotta, well spread on the entire surface, 3 tablespoons of tomatosauce also well spread, 2/3 tablespoons of grated parmigiano. Go on like this until all the ingredients are over, but remember, for the last layer, to skip the ricotta; it will be only eggplants, tomato sauce, Parmigiano.
  7. All you have to do is cook it in the oven for 45 minutes, and, VERY IMPORTANT, let it rest for 45 more minutes after it’s cooked: all the flavours will have time to set, and the consistency will become nice and firm.

You won’t believe it but in Italy this thing is considered a side dish, something you eat after a big bowl of pasta, a steak, and why not some green salad. I really think it’s a complete dish though, it has everything, and I usually eat it with a side of more Parmigiana. Yep, like two servings. It’s also good to be eaten at room-temperature or straight out-of-the-fridge cold. You can freeze it and then bring it to work in your lunch-box, or save it for those rainy days when you want to treat yourself to something special.

 

Almond balls

(vegetarian meatballs for the people)

We’re an almost exclusively vegetarian household. My girlfriend is vegetarian you see (or actually a recent convert to Pescetarianism, so fish if back on the menu, yeiij!). This has led me to develop a lot of  vegetarian alternatives through the years, which has been really great. I’m not especially fond of the concept of mimicking meat. Soy meat, quorn, oumph, pulled oats, beyond meat… I mean, I get it. If people like it: cool. I’m just sayin’ that the best of that kinda thing I’ve ever had has never been anywhere close to the meat equivalent. Often, they just feel like attempts to create a vessel for heavy spicing.

I like when you try to use unprocessed stuff and make something different but equally great. Like portabello hamburger, or black been tacos, or carrot and parsnip burgers. Or: almond balls. So let me get the irony out of the way. Yes, they look a lot like meatballs. Yes, they kinda taste a bit like meatballs. But they’re not meatballs. And they’re made from scratch.

The challenge when making vegetarian alternatives to burgers or ball-shaped things is consistency. It’s real easy to make something that sticks together if you’re fine with the end result being dry and dense and boring. It’s equally easy to make something juicy that’ll fall apart. I think this recipe strikes a real good balance, but it can take a while to get a hang of the nuances. I got the gist of this recipe from my girlfriends mother (something akin to this Swedish recipe I think), but I’ve tinkered with it quite a lot through the years.

Some of the ingredients are cooked before going into the batter and the balls are boiled in broth before being fried in the pan. All this adds up to a really juicy and rich end result. The consistency can be tricky however. But practice makes perfect so let’s practice!

Special Equipment

  • Kitchen wizard/ Blender/ Immersion blender
Created with Sketch. 60 minutes Created with Sketch. 5-6 servings (or ca 40 almond balls)

Ingredients

  • 150 galmonds
  • 150 gmushrooms (any mushroom really, I use forrest champinjons)
  • 150 ggouda cheese
  • 1.5 yellow onions (about 150g)
  • 100 gcarrots
  • 50 gbutter
  • 25 gChinese soy
  • 40 gbread crumbs
  • 10 gpotato flour (or normal flour)
  • 2 slices of white bread
  • 4 eggs (or 5, depending on the size)
  • 5 gsweet mustard
  • Some sriracha
  • Salt and pepper
  • For the broth
  • 2 yellow onions
  • 2 carrots
  • Bay leaves, salt and pepper

Directions

  1. Put a big pot with 3 liters of water on the stove. Peel and roughly chop 2 onions and 2 large carrots and add them to the pot. Add salt, pepper and bay leaves. Let it come to a boil and then reduce the heat to a simmer. Don’t salt to much as it will reduce somewhat. The end result should be a quite lightly salted broth.
  2. Chop the mushrooms and add them to a pan with ca 2/3 of the butter and some rapeseed oil. Start out on high heat, then lower to low/medium. Add salt, white pepper as well as the mustard and some Sriracha. Let this fry for 10-ish minutes before adding one chopped yellow onion.

  3. While the above is frying on low heat (under a lid if you have it), quickly boil the almonds in water (like a minute). Rinse the almonds under cold water. Now peel the almonds….. I know. Fun. Two things: 1) You can skip it and just use them with the peelings. 2) Alternatively, put the almonds in a colander and take handfuls of almond and squeeze them together over and over. This removes most of the peels and really makes the whole thing a lot more bearable.
  4. Crack the eggs (all four) in a mixer (or in a bowl if you’re using a immersion blender), then add the almonds. Mix to a paste. The consistency varies with the size of the eggs and the type of mixer. If it’s a bit loose, don’t worry. You can either add some more almond now (not too much thou, less than 50g) or adjust the consistency at the end (see instruction number 11). The important thing is the the almonds are properly chopped/blended.


  5. By now, the mushrooms and onion should look something like this.
  6. Add it to the egg-almond-mix and blend it a bit.

  7. Peel and finely grate the carrots. Squeeze out the carrot juice. You can throw away the juice, or save it. Or drink it. Grate the cheese finely. Add the grated carrot and cheese in with the rest and stir.
  8. Rip up the bread into small pieces (or dice it with a bread knife). If the edges of the bread are hard, don’t use them. Put the pieces of bread in with the rest, add the soy sauce, the vinegar, the bread crumbs, the potato flour and some salt and pepper. Stir together.
  9. At this point, you can add whatever. Making these for Christmas? Add som allspice why don’t you? Or maybe som fresh parsley, some chili or basil? Taste and adjust with salt, pepper, soy, vinegar and/or other things to your liking. The level of salt and such should be as you want the end result to taste.
  10. The consistency should now allow you to make quite firm balls from the mix. Like such:
  11. If you think it’s to dry: add another egg. If it’s to loose: add some bread crumbs and/or flour. Roll a lot of balls with a diameter of about 3 cm. “Quite small meatballs” to ball-park it for you.
  12. (You can skip this step and go straight to frying, I commonly do. It does add something thou) Now we’re going to boil the balls in broth before frying them. Sift the broth to remove the onion and carrot pieces. Put a frying pan with some butter and oil on medium/high heat. Bring the sifted broth to a boil and add 10-15 of the almond balls. Let them simmer in the broth for ca 3 minutes before adding them to the frying pan. Be careful as the can be quite fragile. Turn them gently after a minute. Continue to turn them in the pan until brown all around. Repeat.


  13. They’re best as they’ve cooled down a tad but not too much, so eat them promptly!

These are really great as a vegetarian alternative to meatballs but they’re also just awesome in general. We usually have them with what’s on the plate in the first photo: mashed potatoes, sweetened lingonberries and garlic sauce. Mmmmmmm.

Get the hang of the consistency, add some of your favorite flavors and make’ em your own!

Janssons frestelse

(maybe my favorite food... yes, of aaaaaall of the foods)

Well. It’s that time again. Christmas is coming.

I like Christmas I have to say. All in all, it’s mostly quite cosy and nice. There are things I LOVE about Christmas though. And maybe, just maybe, what I love the most is Jansson’s frestelse (sorry, all my family members, you’re a strong second).

According to folk lore it was invented by the opera singer Per Adolf “Pelle” Janzon, that used to treat his guests to beer, schnapps and this type of gratin (Wikipedia tells me the name might be from a movie with the same name. Let’s hope it’s not that boring).

It’s something so unusual as a completely Swedish dish (I don’t even think it’s got an international name) that I really think should be the envy of the world. It doesn’t seem to be though. I think very few people outside of Sweden have ever heard of it. But hey, up here, it’s one of the seminal holiday dishes. It is essential. It is culture. I’m not sure if people really like it that much though..? But I love it and that’s enough for me.

It’s a bit complicated to explain what ‘Jansson’ actually tastes like to non Swedish people. You see, in Sweden there are anchovies, but they’re not like anchovies in the rest of the world, which are usually salty and preserved in oil (they’re called “sardeller” in Sweden). The Swedish version is very sweet, pickled with a whole bunch of spices like cinnamon, bay leaves, allspice, black pepper, sandel wood, clove, cardamom and some version of oregano. And it’s not made from the fish “anchovy” either, but rather sprat. Crazy stuff, right? But it is the bomb. And these “Swedish anchovies” basically make the dish; the savory, sweet, fatty, salty, wonderfully decadent Janssons frestelse. I love everything about them. Even the can they come in is awesome!

In my family we eat (and always have eaten) Jansson’s on 100% of the following holidays: Christmas, Easter, Midsummer, and on 0% of all the other days. Or, well… sometimes my dad can’t help himself and makes it off-season with like twice the anchovies.

It’s also really easy to make, as all the spicing is already in the stuff you put into the gratin. No added spices, easy peasy.

Let’s go!

Created with Sketch. 45 minute preparation, ca 45 minutes in the oven Created with Sketch. 8-12 servings

Ingredients

  • 1.8 kgpotatoes
  • 3 yellow onions
  • 400 (or 500) gcream (40-ish %)
  • 3 (or 2)cans of anchovies (125 g per can, including the liquid)
  • 100 gbutter
  • 25 groe
  • 20 gtomato purĂ©
  • 50 gbread crumbs

Directions

As you might have guessed, I like anchovy. So this recipe does not skimp on the anchovy. For some people this amount can be a bit much. If you think that you’re one of these people, you can skip one of the cans of anchovy and add about 100 g (1 dl) of cream instead.

  1. Put the oven on 225 C. Put a pan with 25 g of butter on medium heat. Chop half of the onions. When the butter starts to sizzle, lower the heat to medium/low and add the chopped onion. Fry until the onion starts to caramelize.
  2. While the onion is frying, peel the potatoes and cut them into sticks.
  3. Finely chop the rest of the onion. Open all three cans of anchovy and drain the pickle-juice into a bowl. Whatever you do: don’t throw it away! This is very important. It really packs a lot of flavor! Chop the anchovy from two of the cans. When the onion in the pan has caramelized somewhat, let it cool down off the stove in a bowl.


    I mean, just look at those… so pretty.
  4. Whisk the pickling juice, the roe and the tomato puré into the cream.

  5. Now you’re all set to put the pieces together. Layer potato sticks – raw and fried onion –  and pieces of anchovy, until you run out of ingredients.
  6. When you’re done with the layering, pour the cream/anchovy pickling juice/tomato purĂ©/roe- mix on top.
  7. Now sprinkle the bread crumbs evenly over the surface.
  8. Distribute the remaining can of anchovy fillets on top of the layer of bread crumbs.
  9. And finally: slice the remaining butter (or better yet, use a cheese grater) and layer it on top of the anchovy fillets. 
  10. Into the oven it goes! It needs about 45 minutes but this is very dependent on the oven, the depth of the oven dish and to some extent the ingredients (like the type of potato). You’ll know it’s done when it’s golden brown, the cream is wonderfully gooey and the potatoes are soft. Check in now and then to time it perfectly. Let it rest out of the oven for at least 30 minutes before eating. As with many recipes, this is probably the most important and hardest part. But the gratin really has to set to let the ingredients meld. It’s also way tastier at something like 60 C than piping hot.

This is normally had at Christmas with tons of things as a part of the Christmas dinner behemoth. But it’s great with just some good ol’ meatballs and an egg.

Happy holidays!

Carbonara For Dummies

(there is hope!)

“I have seen things you people wouldn’t believe. I’ve seen cream, and onions mixed together, and for some reason green peas and bacon. And ketchup, oh my goodness, ketchup! All these things will hopefully be lost in time, like egg whites in a drain”

According to a Peer Reviewed Study conducted by Professor John Rigatoni at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 99.7% of Carbonaras made in the world, are done wrong. Sometimes very wrong, stuff like cream or ketchup. But the reality is that Carbonara is not easy to do well, the very issue is quite tricky, even in Italy.
The dish origins in fact from central Italy, and calls for very few, precise ingredients: pasta (spaghetti or rigatoni), eggs, guanciale (cured pork cheek), pecorino romano cheese, black pepper. Each of these ingredients is essential. If you don’t have one, that’s no Carbonara you’re cooking and no, you can’t use pancetta or bacon instead. Despite being a very basic preparation, people tend to overcook eggs that end up being scrambled, and that’s when you get what I like to call ‘pasta with frittata’: it’s quite disgusting. Instead, a good Carbonara needs a smooth creamy mix of eggs and cheese, the eggs must start to gelatinize, but never to coagulate too much. It’s tricky, it’s very difficult to achieve the right consistency, either you overcook it with the results described, or you undercook and the eggs remain too liquid. So I came up with a method for Dummies that works all the time and I’m very happy to share it with you, so that you can spread the word, and maybe one day all the atrocities and mayhem will stop, and people will not put ketchup on Carbonara any more.

Special Equipment

  • a whisk
Created with Sketch. 30 min Created with Sketch. 2 servings

Ingredients

  • 200 grrigatoni
  • 2 eggs
  • 80 grguanciale
  • 50 grpecorino romano
  • 0.5 teaspoonblack pepper

Directions

 

  1. Start to put a big pot of water on the stove for cooking the pasta, as described in the related article here.
  2. Slice the guanciale in small strips, put them in a frying pan over medium/high without any oil, it’s not necessary: guanciale has a delicious fat/meat ratio of something like 85/15 so really, any extra fat here is redundant. Fry until crispy.
  3. In a metal bowl, or a sauce pan, mix together one full egg (white+yolk), one egg yolk, the grated pecorino cheese, and a lot of ground black pepper. Quantity of black pepper is up to your taste, but the recipe calls for A LOT. Mix it well using a whisk, you want everything to become as smooth as possible.
  4. Now the “for DUMMIES” part.  This is when you have to pay attention to the procedure. Put a small sauce pan with some water on the stove and bring it to a boil, place the bowl with eggs+cheese on top of it, add one tablespoon of pasta cooking water (yes, in the meanwhile you’re cooking the pasta of course).  The pasta cooking water is perfect for this (and for a lot of other pasta dishes) for two reasons: it’ s already salted, and contains the starch released from the pasta itself, that will help the egg sauce to get nice and creamy). Mix it all using the whisk. The steam coming from the boiling water underneath will very slowly help to gelatinize the egg mixture, the process is so slow that you can have full control over it and stop when you feel the consistency is right. If you feel like it’s getting too thick, or start to coagulate too much, remove the bowl from the boiling pot, and maybe add some more cooking water and keep on stirring.
  5. When the pasta is ready, drain it well in a colander, and without further ado, put it in the bowl with the egg mixture, add the fried guanciale, stir it well over the boiling water for one more minute, and quick as a flash serve it. 

Just to show you that I am a nice person open-minded and all, I tried to do carbonara with bacon. It was fit to be consumed as food (this is the definition of “eatable”, I like it!) but it was no carbonara really.

It all comes down to how guanciale and bacon are made: the curing processes are in fact very different. Guanciale is cured for three months, hanged in dry cold rooms after being dry-rubbed with abundant salt, pepper, garlic and rosemary. Bacon is brine-cured for a few days in salty water only, and then cold-smoked (at least, most of the time). Plus guanciale has a very different fat-meat ratio, as we have seen. All this is very important for the final taste: the delicate spiced flavours of crunchy guanciale are paramount in the final dish, while bacon’s smokyness is a very big NO-NO.

EXTRA TIP: If you’re cooking this for more than two people,  you will need to use more eggs of course. Try always to keep the eggyolk-eggwhite ratio 2:1. Or even 3:1 if you’re making a lot of it.

Black Bean Moussaka

(greek goodness)

Well it’s not just Greek though right? It’s middle eastern, Turkish, Greek kinda. But you know what I mean. Anyway, this might be my favourite vegetarian dish.

Now, some might question why I’m posting a vegetarian version, instead of the meaty original, so let me just clarify: I absolutely adore the meat version. My cousins father was Greek, so a lot of the food in their mother’s (my aunts) house have always been very Greek.

The moussakas I’ve had there have been just… bonkers good.

So why the black beans? Well, my girlfriend is vegetarian and I just couldn’t stand not having moussaka frequently. Necessity is the mother of invention and all that. But then, I just started liking it so much I’m not even sure which one I prefer any more…

So what’s the deal with moussaka anyway? As with many dishes it’s not one single thing. The corner stones of a great moussaka are the spicing, heavy with all-spice and possibly cinnamon (I say yes to cinnamon btw. My aunt says fuck no, so… don’t say no, say maybe, maybe, maybe, as a famous Swedish song goes), fried egg plant, and a creamy, egg-infused bĂ©chamel sauce with plenty of parmigiano!

A couple of things are, according to myself, crucially important.

  1. Deep frying the egg plant (and the potato if you choose to include it).
  2. Ample amounts of parmigiano in the béchamel.
  3. Lots of eggs in the béchamel.
  4. Daring to spice the bean stew. I think beans need heavier spicing than meat, so go for it.

Just stick to these and you’ll be ok. And the moussaka will be a lot more than ok.

Special Equipment

  • Deep fryer (you can manage without a dedicated fryer, but it's a bit tedious)
  • Kitchen thermometer
Created with Sketch. 3 hours Created with Sketch. 8 servings

Ingredients

  • For the bean stew
  • 500 grwater soaked black beans (excluding the weight of the water)
  • 1 yellow onion
  • 100 grchampignons
  • 2 clovesof garlic
  • 33 clbeer
  • 1 dlred wine
  • 6 grallspice
  • 3 grpaprika powder (smoked if you have it!)
  • 3 grkoriander seeds
  • 3 grcinnamon
  • 1 grblack pepper
  • 50 grchili sauce
  • 25 grsoy sauce (Japanese style, e.g. Kikkoman)
  • 10 grsriracha
  • Vinegar to taste
  • For the layers
  • 700 grpotato (7-9 medium sized potatoes)
  • 800 graubergines (two big ones)
  • For the egg-bĂ©chamel
  • 700 gmilk
  • 70 gflour
  • 40 gbutter
  • 1 yellow onion
  • 100 gparmigiano cheese
  • 5 eggs
  • 3 bay leaves
  • 5 piecesof clove
  • 6 gsalt
  • White peppar to taste

Directions

  1. Chop the mushroom and fry them with som oil in a pan on medium heat. While the mushroom are frying, finely chop the yellow onion and the garlic cloves. Add the onion chop when the mushroom have some color.
  2. Mix all of the spices (and salt) in a mortar. Add them into the pan with the black beans when the yellow onion starts to look a bit transparent. After a couple of minutes, also add the sriracha, soy, chili sauce, beer, wine and 3-4 deciliters of hot water.
  3. Let the mixture reduce on low to medium heat. Stir occasionally. When the consistency is gooey (not watery) but not dry, the bean stew is done! Balance the taste with vinegar and additional spicing to your liking.
  4. Do the bĂ©chamel while the bean stew is reducing. Start by putting a big pot on medium heat and adding in the butter. Finely chop the yellow onion and add it to the pot when it’s hot and the butter is sizzling.
  5. Put the flour in a bowl. Whisk about 30% of the milk into the flour, until no flour-lumps remain. Add the rest of the milk while stirring/whisking.
  6. Add the salt, som white pepper, the bay leaves and the clove. When the onion in the pot has softened, pour the milk-mix into the pan.
  7. Turn up the heat. Stir the bottom of the pan continuously with a flat wooden spoon. When the mixture starts thickening, lower the heat to low/medium heat and continue to stir. Grate the parmigiano.
  8. After a couple of minutes on low/medium heat (the mixture should simmer ever so slightly), add the parmigiano. When the cheese has melted into the sauce, take it of the stove and let it rest for 10-15 min.
  9. When the sauce has cooled down a bit of the stove, mix in the 5 eggs.
  10. Find and remove the bay leaves and clove and you’re done!
  11. Now for the tedious part – deep frying the aubergine & potato. Start by cutting the aubergine and potatoes into slices about 0.5 – 1 cm thick.
  12. Heat up a big pot of rapeseed oil (alt. sunflower oil) to 180 C. Make sure to have a thermometer to keep tabs on the temperature. Fry in batches. If you put to much in at the same time, the oil can boil over and/ or drop in temperature too much. When the potatoes/aubergine are golden, take them out of the oil and let them drip in a sieve or put them on paper towels. Wait for the temperature to get back to 180 C before starting a new batch.
  13. When done deep frying, salt the potato and aubergine slices. The level of saltiness should be about the sam as if you would eat them separately (maybe just a hair less). Turn the oven to 200 C.
  14. Cover the bottom of a deep (10-ish cm) oven dish with aubergine and potato slices. Spread a thin-ish layer of bean stew on top of this and then do another layer of aubergine and potato. Continue until you run out of ingredients.

  15. Finally, pour the egg-béchamel on top of all of it.
  16. Bake in the oven on 200 C for circa 30 minutes.
  17. Emerge perfection!
  18. So… now for the, by far, hardest part of this recipe.
    You have to leave the moussaka to rest for about 45 minutes out of the oven before eating. I mean… you really don’t have to, but I IMPLORE you. It is so much better lukewarm than piping hot and there is quite a lot of oil in this one so it stays hot for a good while. So plan for it to rest, you’ll not regret it!

Serve with a nice Greek sallad or maybe even some Tsatsiki!

Italian Meatballs

(now with 50% meat!)

Polpette (italian for meatballs) are probably the reason why, sometime in the future, a war between America and Italy will start. This is what will happen: a random american tourist sitting at a restaurant table somewhere in Italy will order Spaghetti with Meatballs. The waiter, having to explain for the millionth time that Spaghetti with Meatballs is not an Italian dish, will loose his brains and kill the american, burn his flag (american tourists always go around with an american flag), and nuke the closest McDonald’s just because.
Well it’s true, Spaghetti with Meatballs is not an Italian dish. Maybe, just maybe, in some very small town in a very small region of Italy someone eat them, but that’s it. Apart from that, they don’t really exist. It seems to be an Italian-American thing. I can imagine how it happened: this Italian immigrant started a restaurant let’s say in New York, and cooked polpette (Italian for meatballs), but some client argued that “Hey, paisĂ , where’s my pasta?”, because of course Italy equals pasta, and the immigrant had to start putting meatballs on pasta.

But you know what? Feel free to eat them as you like, I will probably stick to the rule, mostly for romantic reasons: when I was a kid my Aunt Maddalena cooked for me the best meatballs ever, and she had a secret for her meatballs: a lot of bread! Probably more bread than meat, maybe because Zia Maddalena didn’t have a lot of money to buy meat, or most likely because with a lot of bread the meatballs came out soft and flavourfull. So here’s my recipe for Meatballs in tomato sauce. Again, you do as you feel like, but please be advised: waiters in Italy get angry easily.

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

Ingredients

  • 350 gground beef (not too fine, please)
  • 3 slicesof 4/5 days old bread
  • 1 clovesgarlic, finely minced
  • 3 tablespoonfinely minced fresh parsley
  • Salt and pepper, to taste
  • 1 tablespoongrated Parmigiano cheese
  • 1 egg
  • Grated bread for the "coating"
  • A lot of vegetable oil for frying
  • 750 gramsgood quality tomato sauce
  • 2 tablespoonsolive oil
  • 1 clovegarlic
  • Salt and pepper to taste

Directions

  1. You want to use good bread for this: possibly not soft toast bread, or baguette, or any other light bread. You want some bread whose inside part (in italian is called mollica) is firm, and heavy and moist, possibly with big holes from the raising process. And the bread has to be a bit old, at least 3/4 days. You take the 3 slices (crust and everything) and rinse them under running water; then you squeeze them well so the excess water goes away.
  2. Now just mix all the ingredients together well (bread, meat, minced garlic, parmigiano, parsely, egg, salt and pepper) so that the bread and meat are well mixed evenly, and shape the meatballs. I like to weight them (≃ 60 gr. each) so I’m sure they’re the same size (which means they will also cook evenly).
  3. Now you can coat them with grated bread: the egg in the mix should be enough fot the bread to stick to the balls, but if you feel you need more “glue” you can whip an extra egg, dip the meatballs in it, then bread them.
  4. Now you can fry them, even deep-fry them if you prefer, in a lot of vegetable oil (canola or peanut oil will be perfect) for 7/10 minutes or until the surface of the meatballs obtain a nice orange/brown/gold color.
  5. On the side prepare the tomato sauce: olive oil and garlic on medium heat until the garlic turns gold/brown. At this point add the tomato sauce and salt and pepper and let cook for 10 minutes.
  6. Add the meatballs (use a deep pan, so the meatballs will be covered with tomato sauce) and let cook for 10 more minutes.

After some research, I came to the conclusion that Italy is the only place where the traditional meal is divided in primo-secondo-contorno-frutta.
Primo is usually a pasta dish, or it can be a risotto or rice soup dish.
Secondo is fish or meat or some elaborated eggs or cheese or vegetable dish.
Contorno is a side dish: it can be a salad, some simple steamed greens, or other simply cooked vegetables.
Frutta is of course fresh fruit, usually one piece.
Especially for lunch, this is what you get at an italian table. Probably not in the big cities where the labour market of the globalized times has changed habits, but for the majority of suburban Italy it’s still like this (i.e. my parents’ lunch)

My point here is, Italian meatballs are a secondo, and probably in the globalized world we live in today, they don’t make a lot of sense as a stand-alone dish. They need some contorno to accompany them. I would recommend some simple fried diced eggplants, or some good aged cheese.

Swedish Meatballs

(originally from Turkey or something of course)

We’re not getting around the most Swedish of the Swedish foods right? Nope. As a Swede I don’t have that strong of a bond to meatballs. I mean, they’re pretty great and all but I eat them on holidays like Christmas and sometimes I make’em at home (but really, it’s quite rare). I think my most common interaction with the little suckers is when I spend time with my girlfriend’s nephews because listen: “Mamma Scans köttbullar” is the bleeding bedrock of any household that includes kids. Back in the day I ate those type of meatballs as well (not that much though). They weren’t that great really. Lately though, I personally think they (“Mamma Scans”) have improved somewhat. But whatever, let’s get on with it.

In my opinion, Swedish meatballs should be made with quite a lot of onion, some sweetness and above all have a really smooth taste. The smoothness comes from a mix of cream/milk, egg and bread of different types. Some recipes use potato (grated, either boiled or raw) which plays a similar role. A friend told me that his grandpa, who in his family is the often challenged but ever undisputed champion of meatballing, put potato purĂ©e in his. Not mashed potato, potato purĂ©e, the finished product. Top marks for ambition and originality (btw: I imagine that’s a pretty good idea actually).

Anyway, here’s how I make mine.

Ingredients

  • 500 gof minced meat. Use a mix of pork and beef. 70/30 or 60/40 beef/pork is good.
  • 1.5 yellow onions
  • 1 egg
  • 50 gmilk
  • 50 gcream
  • 1 sliceof white bread
  • 15 gbreadcrumbs (preferably the Asian variety "Panko")
  • 50 gbutter
  • 7 gof vinegar
  • 7 gof sweet mustard (can be substituted for the Swedish speciality "pickled sprats", most famously used in the holiday dish "Jansons Frestelse")
  • Some salt, white pepper and sugar (just a sprinkle of sugar)
  • Some allspice (if you like that sorta thing)

Directions

  1. Chop one onion roughly and fry them on medium to low heat in a pan with half the butter until golden.
  2. While the onion in the pan is frying, grate or finely chop the remaining half onion.
  3. Tear the bread into small pieces.
  4. Put everything in a bowl, including the fried onion with the residual butter from the pan. Mix with your hands or with a fork.
  5. If the mixture seems too loose/wet you can add some more bread crumbs but be careful to not make the mixture too firm.
  6. Taste and adjust with salt/pepper/sugar/vinegar.
  7. Roll the mixture into balls with a diameter of about 3 cm.
  8. Fry ’em on medium heat in a healthy amount of butter (the other half of the 50 grams) and some oil.

 

It’s all a bit confusing as a Swede – the talk about Swedish meatballs. But, it’s really good, especially with some killer mashed potatoes, chanterelle sauce and lingonberries or maybe pickled cucumbers. Mmmmm. So make ’em for gods sake. What could go wrong?

Alternative Fish & Chips

(don't call it Cod)

Sometimes I feel like the Nordic Countries , when it comes to food, have these “gold-mine” products and they don’t even realize it, let alone make good use of it (or any use, sometimes). Take BaccalĂ , or Salted Cod, possibly my favorite fish: Norway is the biggest producer of this delicious stuff, and Norwegians don’t even know what it is, I asked! Swedes and Danes same thing, Finnish I don’t really care… Anyway, BaccalĂ  is nothing else than Cod preserved in a lot of salt, so much so that it gets completely dry and hard and smells quite weird. Then you leave it in cold water for a couple of days and the magic happens: the salt melts, the water hydrates the fish again, and the Cod is back in all its white, tender magnificence, plus a delicious salty aftertaste and aroma. For some reasons Norway produces it, and then only sells it to Portugal, Italy and Spain: it’s an export-only product, which is insane.

In Italy BaccalĂ  is cooked in a number of ways, but my favourite is deep-fried after being floured well. But to make things interesting I thought to give it the fish&chips treatment (or my personal version of it), with a proper beer and flour batter. I’m sure that if Britons realize that such thing as salted cod exist, they will ask themselves “why didn’t we think about this before!”. Because of course is way superior: the fish has this very peculiar salt taste (without being salty, unless you don’t desalt it enough), and a bit of a chewy consistency from the drying/re-hydrating process that is just a perfect combination. Of course if you don’t live in Italy, or Portugal, or Spain, you won’t be able to find it easily, but around Christmas I spotted it in one of the fancy markets in Stockholm, and at a price that wasn’t completely unreasonable, which means there’s hope for everybody.

To make the recipe really “alternative fish&chips” here I propose sweet potatoes fries as a side; sweet potatoes fries are one of my ongoing experiments, trying to achive an as-crispy-as-possible fry, given that sweet potatoes will always remain a bit mushy because they just won’t behave, with all their high moisture and low starch ratio. But I’m getting closer…

Special Equipment

  • kitchen thermometer

Ingredients

  • 250 gdesalted BaccalĂ  (I guess you can use Cod if you really can't find the real deal)
  • for the batter:
  • 100 gflour
  • 1 cancold beer
  • 1/2 teaspoonground black pepper
  • 1 teaspoondry parsley
  • 1 teaspoongarlic powder
  • 1/2 teaspoonCayenne pepper
  • saltto taste
  • vegetable oilfor deep-frying
  • for the fries:
  • 1 sweet potato

Directions

A couple of things that you might want to know before you start this recipe. The fish should be at room temperature before cooking it, especially since we’re deep-frying it, or it won’t get cooked evenly.
Do not use a lager beer if possible, better be something with a good structure, possibly hoppy but not too bitter; and use it very cold, this is important for the final crispiness of the crust.

  1. If you’re using Cod, because of course you’re a very lazy person and you can’t be bothered to go out and find some BaccalĂ  at your local market, then you can jump to step #2. Otherwise you might need to desalt the fish (you can also find it already desalted, but it’s always good to know how to do it). It’s quite simple: first you wash the BaccalĂ  under running water to get rid of the excess salt, than with a good knife you cut it into portion-pieces, finally you just leave it in a bowl of abundant cold water for 24 hours, changing the water once every 8 hours; if it’s a very thick piece, you might need a bit more time. You can actually taste the raw fish to check if it’s still too salty or not.
  2. Prepare the batter. Mix the flour, the spices and the beer; add the beer a little at the time until the batter reaches the correct consistency, not too liquid and not to thick (mix it well, you want to eliminate any flour lumps). You can of course drink the beer left while you procede with the recipe.
  3. In a deep pan, or in a fryer, or in a wok (this is my weapon of choice usually) heat an abundant amount of oil (we want to deep-fry here!) to a temperature between 170° and 190°. Use you kitchen thermometer for this, it’s very important that the oil is not too hot (if it goes over the smoking point it will burn everything, plus is very bad for your health) or not enough (in which case the fish will become like a sponge for the oil). Dry the fish with a paper towel and gently immerse it into the batter coating it well, and very carefully lower it in the hot oil, one piece at the time. It will only need to cook for 4 or 5 minutes, until it gets a nice golden and crisp crust.
  4. And the sweet potatoes! Well let’s do it  the simple way for now. Just cut the potatoes in typical fries wedges, and fry them in the same oil you used for the fish, making sure the oil temperature stays around 160° C. The potatoes will reach a nice golden-brown color in 5/7 minutes. Make sure to eat them as soon as they’re ready, to keep some of the hard-to-maintain crispiness.

Shrimp and Saffron Risotto

(let's try this without the ketchup)

Risotto is just the best thing. I know that now. However, when I was younger (probably well in to my twenties actually) I thought risotto was
 something other than it is. At home, it was more akin to fried rice, with some chopped ham or chicken and quite commonly: a mix of peas, corn and paprika (this one!). In the school diner risotto was a weird, gooey meat ragu type thing with rice in it, that for some reason always tasted aggressively sweet. Like really ketchupy sweet. Most likely explained by them putting a LOT of ketchup into it. Actually… thinking about it: growing up, the combination rice and ketchup was a strangely frequent occurrence.

So let’s just get some things straight about what risotto actually is. It’s rice, and it can be any type of rice. Most commonly though, it’s a type with quite large grains that release starch when cooked in a way that creates a wonderfully creamy texture. It’s broth, it’s wine (usually white) and almost always cheese (usually parmigiano). So what’s up with that rice? Well, it has to do with the chemical composition of the starch. Here’s some science stuff from Serious Eats:

“Rice contains two molecules that make up its starch content, amylose, and amylopectin. Generally speaking, rices with a higher proportion of amylopectin to amylose will tend to soften more completely and thicken their sauce more strongly. All risotto starts with a short- to medium-grain form of rice high in amylopectin. It’s the exact ratio of amylose to amylopectin that determine the final texture of your rice and sauce.”

In Sweden, you tend to see three type of grains meant for risotto: Arborio, Carnaroli and Avorio. Arborio has the largest grain and creates the most creamy result. Carnaroli gets you a firmer result and Avorio even more so (I tend to really like Avorio). Obviously, what dish you’re preparing can guide the type of rice, but make sure to try them all to see which you like best in various situations.

This is my favorite kind of run-of-the-mill risotto recipe and it’s real easy to make.

Ingredients

  • For the risotto (including shrimp and garnish)
  • 330 grisotto rice (in this recipe, I use Arborio)
  • 0.3 lwhite wine (3 dl)
  • 80 gparmigiano reggiano
  • 1 lshrimp broth
  • 800 gunpeeled shrimp
  • 1 handfulfresh parsley
  • 1 yellow onions
  • 0.5 gsaffron
  • 50 gbutter
  • 30 golive oil
  • For the broth
  • salt and white pepper corns
  • roasted shrimp shells
  • 3 yellow onions
  • 3 bay leaves

Directions

This recipe is for 4-5 people. Generally, some 80 g of rice equals a big portion. From start to finish this should take circa 1 hour and 30 min, if you’re starting from scratch.

A couple of things are really important when making risotto in general and this one specifically.

The first, and this is imperative, non-negotiable: do the broth yourself. This is just how I feel. Sure, in a pinch you can maaaaybe use one of those reduced broth-on-a-bottle things but never ever use broth cubes to make risotto. Never. They have an aftertaste, an off-flavor that’s really noticeable. So that’s what I think.

Secondly, always buy shrimp with the shells (frozen are fine) and do not rinse the shrimp with water after you’ve pealed them as that just flushes so much taste down the drain.

And hey, one more note: use a nice dry wine, not to sweet.

So about those shrimp:

  1. Preheat the oven to 250 degrees C. Put a big pot of water on the stove. While you wait on the oven to get warm and the water to come to a boil: peel the shrimp.
  2. Spread the shrimp shells (not the shrimp) on an oven pan and when the oven is ready, roast the shells until pinkish white (about 10 min). Image is showing the shells before roasting, sorry about that… I’ll try to remember to update it in the future.
  3. Peel three of the yellow onions, cut them into quarters and put them in the boiling water with the bay leaves, some salt, pepper corns and when they’re ready: the roasted shrimp shells. Why roast the shells you ask? Well, it gets yummier. But why? I’m embarrassed to say: I’m not quite sure and haven’t been able to find anything really useful about it either (please tell me if you know). Let this mix simmer for at least some 30 minutes or so. And by the way, you can put other stuff in the broth. Celery, parsnip, carrots? Go to town!
  4. While waiting on the broth (there’s a whole thing on what’s important when making broth. We’ll do a thing about it at some point I’m sure),  put some butter and olive oil in a pan and take it up to medium heat. Dice the last onion finely (not important that it’s that fine) and put it in the hot pan.
  5. When the onion has turned clear, add the rice.
  6. After a couple of minutes raise the heat somewhat (to 8-9 on a 12-point-scale) and then pour the wine into the pan.
  7. Taste the broth to make sure that it’s salty, shrimpy sweet. It should a bit less salt than you want the end product to be (you can always adjust the salt level upwards later. Too much salt however? Well… you’re kinda stuck with that).
  8. Add a couple of deciliters of broth and start stirring continuously. Why are we stirring? Well, it’s to dissolve the starch into the liquid, allowing for the creamy end result. You don’t have to stir all the time though, but make sure to do it regularly. Adjust the heat to create a light simmer in the pan.
  9. So I listed 1L of broth in the ingredients list but I don’t find it very useful to give an exact volume. It differs with the grain type, the brand and how much you stir. The important part is to continuously add scoops of broth until the rice is almost done. This should take about 20 minutes. Taste both the liquid and the rice when you’re getting close to the 20 minute mark.
  10.  When the rice is just about done, i.e still a bit hard but almost eatable, you should try to adjust the consistency to be runny, quite a lot runnier than you want the end product to be (it will set due to after-heat and further stirring). Grate the parmigiano, put it in with the rest and stir.
  11.  Add the rest of the butter in cubes (should be about 30 g left) and finally: the saffron. Take the pan off the heat and stir.
  12. So this is really the practice-makes-perfect part of the whole shabang. The consistency should at this point still be less firm than how you want to serve the risotto and the rice should be ever so slightly more al dente than how you want it to be eaten. It continues to cook when resting off the stove, which it should do for about 10 minutes. Stir it every couple of minutes. Regarding the consistency I think (and this is mostly a preference thing) that the end result should be such that when you put a scoop of the risotto on the plate, it slowly expands out towards the edges of the plate under the weight of its own pressure. If you (after letting it rest) think that it’s to firm, just add some broth and stir.
  13. Heat a pan to medium/high heat with olive oil. Put one or a couple of garlic cloves in with the oil for a bit. Quickly fry the peeled shrimp (about 30 seconds) and take the pan of the stove. Do this in batches if the shrimp fill up the pan. You want them to be fried, not boiled and too much shrimp = too much water in the pan = boiled shrimp.
  14. Put some risotto on a plate. If you want it to spread nicely over the plate you can punch the underside plate with your palm a couple of times.
  15. Top it off with the fried shrimp, a splash of lemon juice, some black pepper and chopped fresh parsley. Fucking awesome.

…and then put a generous amount of parmigiano on top right, YES! Right..? Nope. Sorry.

I have conferred with my Italian colleague and: no parmigiano on seafood. The gods’ll get piiiiissed.

But hey, maybe you’re just not that religious? You do you.

Penne Rigate with Zucchini Cream

(can't you feel the SPRING?)

Nothing says spring like zucchini and little cherry tomatoes, but since in this country (Sweden) “seasonal“ doesn’t really mean much (unless you want to eat potatoes and cabbage all winter), we’re making this pasta dish in autumn, or whenever you happen to read this recipe.
This is definitively the pasta dish that most people have asked me to cook, over and over again, or asked for the recipe, or talked about, and the reason is simple: it’s really good, and fresh, and light.
It’s done with ricotta, one of those ingredients that people really should use more and for a number of reasons, at least three; 1) it’s light and fresh (technically it’s not even a cheese, as it is in fact a by-product of the cheesemaking process: it’s made from whey, which is what’s left of the milk once the fat has coagulated into cheese); 2) it doesn’t have a strong taste, so it doesn’t cover the other ingredients; 3) therefore it is perfect to make creamy sauces that don’t end up being heavy and greasy (this would happen if you use cream or butter or a creamy cheese instead). Extra points: it’s beautiful to look at, once you arrange it nicely on the plate.

Special Equipment

  • immersion blender
Created with Sketch. 30 min Created with Sketch. 2 servings

Ingredients

  • 1 zucchini (about 400 gr)
  • 100 gricotta
  • 30 gparmigiano in flakes
  • 8 cherry tomatoes
  • 4 tbspolive oil
  • 1 clovegarlic
  • basil
  • salt and pepper to taste
  • for the pasta
  • 200 gpenne rigate (any other similar furrowed pasta)
  • 2 ltwater
  • 15 gsalt

Directions

  1.  Start by placing the pot of water on the stove on high temperature, read carefully here how to cook pasta properly, or everything else will be worthless!
  2. You start like almost every italian pasta sauce, with a clove of garlic in olive oil on medium fire, for as long as it take for the garlic to become gold/brown (but don’t make it burn!).
  3. Add the zucchini, in slices or cubes, add salt and pepper to taste and let it cook for about 10/15 minutes, stirring every now and again: you want the zucchini to become soft from cooking, this will “wake up” their sweet taste.
  4. At this point the water should be boiling, so you can throw in the salt and the pasta.
  5. Take the zucchini out of the frying pan (leave the garlic and most of the olive oil) and throw them in a tall container together with the ricotta, parmigiano, one spoon of olive oil, one spoon of the pasta cooking water, 3/4 leaves of basil. Mix everything together with an immersion blender: the sauce mustn’t be too thick, add a bit more water if necessary (but not too liquid either!).
  6. Put the frying pan on the stove again at medium/high with the garlic and olive oil (add some if it looks too little), and stir-fry the cherry tomato halves adding salt and pepper: you don’t want the tomatoes to loose their nice shape or to cook too much and become too soft, so 2/3 minutes should be enough.
  7. Drain the pasta in the colander, put it back in the pot and quick as a bolt of lightening throw in the ricotta/zucchini cream, stirring it all together so the pasta is well covered in the creamy sauce. Divide it on two plates and garnish them with the tomato halves, parmigiano flakes, and a couple of basil leaves.
    And buon appetito!