Tuesday 29 November 2011

A Vegetarian Dinner

I am not a vegetarian, but I often make vegetarian food, both because it's good for us and also because vegetables are much cheaper than meat in most places, so it's also good for the pocket book. This three course dinner will take you about two hours to make, but most of this time you are actually waiting for the bread to rise, so you can check what your facebook friends are up to in the mean time. Since I am not a vegetarian, I do add a little bit of meat to the main dish, but it's optional, if you don't want it or don't have it, just skip it.

So let's start with

Wheat Bread

I lot of people don't eat wheat these days, but if you want to have a good-tasting bread to go with dinner (or next morning toasted with marmelade) nothing tastes like wheat bread, and this is both good and very easy to make. You will get four breads from this recipe, which most ovens are big enough to take - and you need no breadpans for it.

If you have a mixer you start with the wet ingedients, if you knead by hand, start with the dry ones.

1 liter (4 cups) of luke warm water from the tap
1 tablespoon salt
1 tablespoon sugar
3-4 tablespoons oil (I use olive oil but any will do)
50 grams of yeast that you crumble into the water (or two packs of dry yeast which you mix in the flour)
3  liters (12 cups) of wheat flour

Knead the bread till all is mixed, but not for longer than that, because the longer you knead wheat bread the "heavier" it becomes and you want it light. Cover the bowl with a clean towel or a piece of plastic and let it rise to double size in a draught free place at "room temperature". Now room temperture can be a lot of things, I have found out, so if you live in a country where one goes in to cool off, put the bowl in the oven, which you set on 50 degrees (or as low as you can get it).
When this has happend, which takes about 1/2-3/4 hour, some times a bit longer, first you put the oven on 200-210 center grades, you pour the dough out on a floored or oiled surface and devide it into four pieces which you shape into breads. The less you fiddle with this, the lighter the bread gets. Place the breads on a baking paper on a baking sheet and put a towel over to rise once more. I normally put this plate on top of the oven, because the heat from it makes perfect temperature for the rising, and when my oven is hot enough, the breads are normally ready to be baked. Put them in the oven (normally a bit lower than the middle, but it depends on the oven) and bake them for 45  minutes to 1 hour. They are done when they are light brown.


First Course: Cold Cucomber Soup


This soup is so easyto make  that it's almost embarrassing to give out the recipe for it, as I have fooled numerous people into thinking that this soupe is high level cooking. It tastes like it.

You need:
A blender or a stick mixer
1 large cucomber
4 table spoons of sour cream
1 bulion cube (or a tea sppon of powder, any kind you like)
2 cloves of garlic (or more if you like it)
Water

Cut the cucomber in smaller pieces, and put them and the rest of the ingredients in the blender. Fill up with water till it's 1 1/2 litres (6 cups)  all together. Whizz til it's smooth, pour it over in a mug and put it in the fridge till serving time. When serving, add some chopped almonds, chopped tomatoes and some chopped chives/leeks to garnish (also optional).

Main Course: Flat Broccoli Souffle

For a souffle you actually need to devide the eggs and whip the whites which you fold into the sauce before you pour it over. Then you also have to have your guests ready at the table and serve the souffle as soon as it is out of the oven. This one is less hazzle and besides it can wait for the guests to get ready and not the other way around. It even tastes good cold the next day if you have leftovers.


You need:
A broccoli (or cawliflower)
a little piece of leek (or onions)
a pice of meat or coldcut (I used an end piece of Serrano ham here, as some places sell the ends of coldcuts and hams out really cheaply)
a couple of handfuls of shredded cheese (I use a strong Swedish kind, but any kind of yellow cheese is fine, use the leftovers you might have, if you have more kinds, the better)
3 table spoons of butter
3 table spoons of flour
some milk
pinch of salt

Cut and shred all into pieces (see picture). Boil water, and when boiling, pour the vegetables in, and as soon as the water is boiling again, take them out with a slotted spoon and pour them into a oven proof dish. Pour the meat over.

Melt the butter, add the flour, and use a bit of the cooking water from the vegetables and a bit of milk to make a thick white sauce. Add the cheese, the eggs (one by one and stir a bit for each egg). Taste it now. The cheese normally adds a bit of salt, but some times you might need a bit extra. Pour the sauce over the vegetables and bake it in the oven at 200 centergrades till it has light brown bubbles on top. With this a salad tastes good.

Tomatoe Salad

1/2 tomatoe per person in thin slices
chopped onion/leeks/chives
2 table spoons of lemon or lime juice
1 table spoon of Worstershiresauce or a little pinch of bulion powder (both optional but it tastes good with the tomatoes)
6 table spoons of olive oil
a pinch of sugar (which bring the flavour of the tomatoes out)
salt/pepper

I don't think I need to tell anybody how to do this. Except that this salad also taste better if you leave it at room temperature for an hour or so before you eat it.

Dessert: Sliced Oranges with Greek Yougurt

My grandmother used to make this dessert for Christmas. It was in the days before Norway found oil and we were poor and only got oranges for Christmas. And even if one can get oranges all the time now, I still think they taste better in the winter, so this is an easy and healthy dessert with lots of vitamine C, and when I use Greek Yougurt on top of it, and not whipped cream (as my grandma), it is actually quite healthy also.

You need:
1/2 orange per person
sugar
chopped almonds
Greek yougurt (you can use Turkish or French if you prefer that, but these days I think the Greeks need us to buy stuff from them)

Peel the orange with a sharp knife (see pictures) and make sure to remove the white as well. Then cut the organges in thin slices. Sugar it to taste, about a tea spoon per orange is normally enough but it's a matter of taste.  Spread the chopped almonds over and serve with Greek yougurt that you might want to sweeten a bit with either honey, sugar or artificial sweetener. And this desert also, is better about an hour on the kitchen counter, as the sugar blends with the orange juice and turns into syrup.



P:S:

These pictures are taken an afternoon at the end of November in Norway, and as you can see from the picture below, it's pitch dark here by 4 in the afternoon. Espen, the photographer, has not used any other light than the flash on his camera, which is why the lighting on some of these pictures are not quite as he had planned. I bet you know what we mean, though!



Saturday 12 November 2011

Salads - Winter Types

Salads are good for us because we get som many different vegetables and stuff into us at the same time, and if we do it right, it's healthy and it tastes good too, which is something the girls have found out long time ago, so this is a Real Man's salad, just to show you how good a healthy dish can be.

Per person
1 egg cooked 8 minutes, per person
1/2 onion any color and sliced through the stem in narrow boats that hang together at the stem (but if they don't, consider it a fly on life's ass - it doesen't matter).
1 slice of bacon per person (or a slice of salami, pepperoni, ham, whatever you have of coldcut leftovers)
nuts, pine nuts or walnuts are best (optional)
spianach/ruccola either/or or both or any other very green sort of lettuce
oilves (optional)
frozen green peas (optional)
Feta cheese (optional)
shredded cheese, Parmesan is best, but any will do

Heat 3-4 tablesppons of oilive oil in a frying pan (be a bit generous, this oil will be used for salad dressing). Fry fist the bacon crispy on both sides and put them on a paper towel, then the onions till they are caramelised (which means turns light brow) and the nuts and fry it all a bit.

While this happens, wash and pour the spinach in a bowl and sprinkle the other vegetables over.

Take the pan away from the heat and check how much oil you have for the salat, if it looks little, add some more and then add some Balsamic vinegar, a little at the time and taste every time after you have stired it together, till you like the taste. Pour it over the spinach and mix well. Garnish with the eggs, crisp bacon and the two kinds of cheeses. You can eat it right away, but it's actually best after about 10 minutes when the dressing has soaked well into the thick spinach leaves.

And if you have this salad on Monday, you will had got so many antioxidants and vitamins in you that you probably can eat junk food on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday....

Wednesday 9 November 2011

Fishballs Bombay

My mother used to make this this dish, and when she did, we sort of looked at each other and though "fishballs in India???" because we thought that the Norwegians had invented the fishballs and that they probably never had heard of it in India. Then my Indian friend, Sheila, cooked me a meal in London, and guess what? The main ingredient was fishballs, and not only that, they were Chinese, so they obviously have fishballs all over the place.... although when that is said and having tasted the Chinese ones, which could have been made from flower in comparison to ours, I say - and I am not the least bit biased - ours are better and they contain nothing but fish! And if you have a choice of Norwegian fishballs, go for the ones from VesterĂ¥len, they are our best.

For 4-5 people you need:
1 litre tin of fish balls
2 tablespoons of butter
2 tablespoons of wheat flower
curry
salt

rice
raisins
shredded coconut
peanuts
organge peeled and cut in thin slices or small cubes (how much of each of these is optional)

carrots (1/2-1 per person)
apples (1/4-1/2 per person)
ginger (1 teapoon shredded)
horseraddich (1 teasspoon shredded)
lemon juice (juice of half a lemon)
oil (soy, sunflower or other flavour-weak oil) twice as much as lemon juice
sugar or sweetener

Start by making the salad: Shred carrots and apples (as much as you like/have) and a little bit of horseraddich, and make a dressing of lemon juice, oil, ginger and sweetener (Taste it, it's supposed to taste very sweet and very sour, but good, you are supposed to like it). Pour it over, mix the salad well and put it in the fridge. Carrots contain a lot of vitamine A, which is good for the eyes and the lungs (eat carrots if you smoke), but they are only dissolvable in oil, so now the salad is sitting there getting healthier, so to speak....

Now to the fishballs. Melt the butter in a big enough sacepan (a teflon pan will make the dishes easier), add the butter and curry (optional, I normally take about 1 teaspoon at this stage and add more later if it's not hot enough), then the flower, and then gradually stir in the liquid from the fishball tin till it makes a sauce as thick as you like it. Let the sauce boil up each time before you add more liquid and you will always know how thick the sauce will be. Normally it needs a bit more liquid than what's in the tin, so add a bit of milk. Taste off the sauce with salt or pepper (or a fish builion cube instead of the salt) and add the fishballs. Leave it to simmer while you cook the rice, and all the dishes for this meal should be done at the same time. Sprinckle, raisins, peanuts, shredded coconut and pieces of oranges over the dish before serving. And if you don't do the dishes right away, make sure to fill the pans with water, as both rice and fishsauce turn into glue if left unattended to over night - I say no more!

I am not sure anybody in India ever had a dish like this, but it sure taste good in Norway in the winter - and fishballs are still quite affordable.....




Tomato Soup

I use this soup to show young people how stupid it is to buy a pack of this or a pack of that, which supposedly should make your life easier, but instead cost more, has less nourishment, and takes longer. This soup takes 5 minutes.

You need:
1 tablespoon of wheat flower
1 tablesppon of butter
1 heaped tablespoon of tomato paste
1 heaped teaspoon of builion powder - any kind (or a cube or two)
1 liter (4 cups) of water

In a saucepan mix together the butter, flower and tomato paste while stiring. Add the water gradually and let the soup come to a boil. Taste it and check the color. You want it really red, so add some more tomato paste if it is not, and if you want it saltier, add some more builion. Ready to serve....(the pack of soup mix, will still need to boil for another 5 minutes)!

You can put pasta in it and let it boil in the soup till it's done or you can put croutons on top. Cut slices of bread (it can be stale) into cubes and fry them in olive oil till they are light brown. Let them drip off on a piece of paper towel and season them with a bit of salt and some garlic powder, or you can chop some garlic and fry it with the bread.

Traditional Norwegian Cod Dinner

Supposedly we Norwegians are so healthy and live so long because we eat so much cod (and have a teaspoon of cod liver oil every day in all months with R in them), and before we found the oil, we wouldn't have survived without the cod, and thanks to the cod we also got the oil. It happened like this.

When EU was formed, Norway got really worried that Spanish and Italian fishermen should come all the way up here and fish "our" fish, and sent negotiators to Brussels to talk our case. And after months of negotiating, EU agreed that the part of the North Sea, which is the continental shelf Norway is located on, should all belong to Norway. So Norway became a very big country, although most of it is under water. Nobody knew that oil would be found on this enlarged part of Norway till ten years later, and I am not so sure EU would have been as generous if they had known that, after all most of the oil is found closer to both the Netherlands and UK.

But we saved the cod, which is still not extinct in the Norwegian waters, and we still eat and sell a lot of it. Most of what we sell, we sell dried, and Christmas would not be the same in places like Portugal and Brazil unless they have cod from Norway, which they call Baccalao and make wonderful dishes out of. We here, however, prefer the fish so fresh that it taste more like cream than fish, and how we get and keep the fish so fresh is by freezing it practically as soon as it is caught - litterally, which you can see in this video that my friend and fishmonger Daniel has taken on board a cod trawler.

"Of women and sardines, the small is the preferrable", we say, but when it comes to cod, the bigger the better. The bigger it is, the more the consistancy becomes like meat, and some of the best cod we get, we call skrei, and which is the fish that comes down from the arctic to the coast of Norway some time in February, where it is fished and dried around the Lofoten islands a bit north of the middle of Norway. So if you buy cod, look for the thick pieces as they normally come from a big cod. And here is what you do if you want to make the most common meal in Norway when I grew up, although these days we serve it as party food, because even here good fish has become expensive.

You need:
Potatoes (2 medium ones per person and 2 for the pot, as we say)
Carrots (1 per person) sliced
Peas or sweet peas - as much as you like
Butter
Flour
Milk
About 200-250 g (1/2 pound) of cod in pieces per person (frozen is fine, just remember to take it out and put it in the fridge the night before, but if you forget, no problem, treat the frozen pieces like they were not and bake them for 20-25 minutes instead)
Salt
Pepper
Nutmeg

Start with setting the owen on as high as it goes.

Then you put the potatoes to boil. Wash them (but don't peel them, as most of the nourishment of the potatoe is either in the skin or right underneath it), cover them with cold water and let them boil for about 20 minutes, and check with a fork if they are cooked.

While they are boiling do the vegetable stew. Boil the carrots for a minute or so, you still want a bit of bite in them, then sieve off the water and save it. In a saucepan melt about 1 tablespoon of butter (this portion will be enough for 4-5 people if you are more people, take more butter) and stir in 1 tablespoon of wheat flower, then gradually add some of the carrot water and finally a little bit of milk. Taste it off with salt, pepper and a bit of nutmeg. Then add the carrots, and then some frozen peas. And when this is done you start with the fish.

Butter an oven-proof dish, salt and pepper the fish pieces and put them in it. Cover it with aluminum foil and bake it in the oven on as high heat as possible for 10-15 minutes depending on the size of the pieces. The fish is supposed to have turned from translucent to white when it's done. If it seems not to have become all white, leave it for a bit longer, unlike salmon, you can not overcook cod.

All you have to do now, is to melt some butter to go with this meal, and if it's Sunday put some chopped parsley in it (only parsley on Sunday's when I was a kid, and then we even got the potatoes peeled, but then they didn't know that the nourishment was in the peeling). And if you have done this as I told you, everything for this meal should be ready at the same time.

Chocolate Mousse

This chocolate mousse is so easy that it's almost embarrassing to give out the recipe. It tastes just like the kind for which you need real chocolate, three bowls, a boiler and what have you not, but here it is:

You need:
A mixer or a whip
2 1/2 dl (1 cup) of whipping cream
2 tablespoons of cocoa
sugar (or artificial sweeteners for those on low carb) to taste, I normally use 1 tablespoon

Optional but not at all necessary:
vanilla
chopped chocolate
chopped nuts

Pour the 3 ingredients in a bow and mix it till it's stiff. Then leave it for about 10 minutes in the fridge. During this time something chemical happens (I think) because it's like the cocoa melts with the cream and seem to turn it into chocolate. That's it. Hope you like it.

Tuesday 8 November 2011

Mayonaise

For this you need the mixer stick and the plastic container that comes with it. Fill it with

1 egg
juice of half a lemon
1 heaped teaspoon of Dijon mustard
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon pepper
Enough soy oil (or other tasteless oil, such as cannola or sunflower) to make it all 1/2 litre (2 cups)
all the ingredients need to be room tempered

Then put the stick mixer in the bottom of the container a
nd pull it slowly up. If things have gone as planned, your mayo should now be done, but some times it does not get thick. What you do then is to add another egg and do it again, second time it never fails. Stir it a bit with a spoon and taste it, some times you might want a bit more lemon and some times a bit more Dijon mustard, let your tastebuds deside.


If you would like to make aioli, you do the same, except you add a couple of garlic cloves and exchange the soy oil with olive oil (or actually I do half and half, as all oilve oil can make the flavour a bit too strong for my tastebuds). To this you can also add your favourite herbs, such as basil, chives, oregano....whatever you like.

Catchup





which originally came from India, so for those who think it's American junk food - it's not - it's ethnic food and you can therefore eat it and still be cool, and if you make your own, you can still be slim, as this catchup contains no sugar. Bought catchup actually contains 1/3 sugar, and as we know sugar is not good for us, besides it's addictive, so this is also an excellent catchup for small children. One of our sons works in a famous restaurant and have told that the big honcho there says that a good catchup should always start with an H: Heinz or Home made and here is the recipe for the home made:

You need:
A blender or a stick mixer
2 1/2 dl (1 cup) tomato paste. I prefer the thick Turkish kind
1/2 dl (1/4 cup) apple cider vingar
2 1/2 dl (1 cup) oninons (approximately 1 1/2 medium sized onions)
2 cloves of garlic (or more if you like it - garlic is good for us)
1 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon allspice
1/8 teaspoon ground cloves
1/8 teaspoon pepper
1/8 teaspoon cinnamon
artificial sweetener, I use 8 tablets of Natrena that I dissolved in a bit of hot water, but you can make it sweeter or less sweet depending on your taste
water

Put all the ingredinets in a blender (or the cup that comes with the mixer stick) and blend it. Add as much water as you need to make the blender go easily, and even a bit more if the catchup seems to be too thick. That's it. You can of curse put it through a sieve and make it totally smooth, but the fibers of the onions are also good for us, so why bother. The catchup will keep in the fridge for at least three weeks - normally you use it before that.

Tzatziki

I let Theo, the Greek, taste this dish also, and he said right away that it tasted like in Greece, but that he wanted to add 2 more tablespoons of yougurt, which we did, and I liked it. His version is more creamy, mine is more cucombery, take you pick. However, if you are on a low carb and use sour cream instead of yougurt, I think it's wise to stick to my version.

And with the Moussaka, Tzatziki tastes really good and adds both another vegetable and some freshness to the Moussaka. You need

2 cucombers
3-4 heaped tablespoons of Turkish or Greek yougurt (I prefer Turkish, the fatty kind - sorry Greeks), or, if you are on a low carb diet, use sour cream instead
2 cloves of garlic
lemon juice
salt
pepper
chopped mint leaves (optional)

Put a clean dish towel over a bowl and shred the cucombers coarsly over the dishtowel in the bowl. Then pick up the towel and squeeze out as much liquid as possible (but save it in a glas). Put the cucombers back in the bowl, press the garlic cloves over, add the yougurt and stir it all together and taste it off with lemon juice, salt and pepper and mint leaves - again, let your tastebuds be your guide. That's it. Hope you all have a nice dinner.

And the cucomber juice is a quick fix if you want to look better in an hour or so. It is a diuretic and will at least remove the bags under your eyes. Add a little bit of lemon juice to it and drink - quickly, it tastes foul....but is good for you!

Moussaka


Our sons have been to Greece, but I have not, and when they came home they told me that I make better moussaka than the Greeks, and when we got a Greek visitor, Theo, I desided to make it and let the Greek give his verdict. He loved it, and told me that it was better than what you get in Greece and he especially loved the cheese topping, so here is my recipe. You will need:

2 large carrots cut in small cubes
3 large stalks of cellery also cut in same size cubes
2 onions cut in same size pieces
2 cloves of garlic
1/2 kg (about a pound) minced meat. If I can get minced lamb I use that, but it's expensive, so I normally use what is on special offer and chicken mince often is, so I mostly use that
1-2 tablespoons for oregano (or more if you like it)
1/2 teaspoon of cumin (Theo, the Greek, was a bit aprehensive when I put that in, as he claimed it was more for Turkish cooking that Greek, but I love Turkish food, so I didn't listen)
1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon
1 heaped tablespoon of ox bulion powder (or a cube or two - taste after the first one), or, if you live in a country that has it, like UK, use lamb bulion powder o
r cube
2-3 heaped tablespoons of tomatoe paste
water
oilive oil
cooked potatoes or, if you can afford it eggpla
nt in slices (how much depends of how much you have, but I normally have enough to make on layer in the dish I am using for it. For this portion, I think I used about 10 boiled potatoes. The reason I had planned to make moussaka, was actually because I had all those potatoes, and when Theo said he would be coming, my choice was easy)

2 tablespoons of butter
2 tablespoons of wheat flower
milk
cheese
2 eggs
salt, pepper, nutmeg
Pour some olive oil in a large pot (use as much as you like, as it is very healthy, but you still get fat from it, so not so much then) and fry the vegetables till they are translucent, then add the spices and the meat and fry while stiring till all the meat has cooked. Then add the tomatoe paste (and a bit of water if it's too thick, you want it like pasta sauce) and the builion cube and taste. I never use salt in sauces like this, so if it's not salt enough for you, add another builion cube. Let all boil for about 10 minutes, while you make the next sauce.

Melt the butter in a small saucepan and add the butter, then add milk a little bit at the time while stiring till you have a thick sauce, take it away from the heat, then add the cheese and the eggs and taste it off with a bit of pepper, salt and nutmeg - again, taste and let your tastebuds be the guide.

Take out two oven proof dishes, I used two large round ones for this. Fill half of the red sauce in each, then a layer of potaoes, then a layer of the white sauce. Bake them in the oven at 200 centergrades for about 20 minutes or till it's bubly and has brown spots on the top. This portion is enough for about 10 people, so if you are less, put one of the dishes in the freezer. When you want to eat this one, put it in a cold oven (otherwise the dish might brake) set it on 200 degrees and bake till it has brown spots on top. It takes about 45 minutes.

And with this dish, Tzatziki tastes very good, and that is another of my Greek recipes, now approved by Theo, the Greek!