Poached pears with saffron, ginger and vanilla

For dessert when I had my girl´s lunch recently I decided to finally try poaching some pears, inspired by Pille who just had posted about ginger pears. Ginger pears are a real classic here in Sweden as well but I have never made it myself.

My recipe of choice this time was - surprise - one from my cooking guru Anna Bergenström. Here the ginger goes together with vanilla, saffron and spices in a delicious syrup! The recipe is easy and very practical, the pears can be made up to a week in advance! They can also be frozen in their syrup. Just make sure you try if the pears fit in the skillet before you start, and watch the pears carefully so they don´t get overcooked.

Ginger pears with saffron

Serves 6-8

6-8 nice, firm pears
500 ml water and 50 ml sugar
1/2 vanilla pod
about 2 tbsp fresh, peeled, chopped ginger (I think I used a little more)
a 5 cm piece of a cinnamon stick
0.5 grams of saffron, ground with a sugar lump in a mortar
(Then I get confused because the recipe mentions 1/3 lemon in slices but not where to put it! I just skipped it and it was fine)

Boil a syrup from the water, sugar and vanilla pod for about 5 minutes without a lid. Peel the pears but keep the stalks and the little thing on the other end where the flower was. This will prevent the pears from getting all mushy! And it looks pretty.
Put the pears close together in a skillet and pour over the syrup carefully. Add the ginger and cinnamon and let it simmer on very low heat, under a lid, for 20-25 minutes. You may want to turn them over once or twice but be careful! Put the saffron in the last 10 minutes. When the pears are all soft, but not more, let them cool in the syrup. The day after they will have a much more intense yellow colour!

Serve with a dollop of good vanilla ice cream.

Kamut wheat salad

Oh dear dear, over a month since last time I managed to post something here! What a lousy blogger I am, compared to others who just keep writing and writing! But really, it is my blog and I´ll write once a month if I want to... Even if I hope to be more frequent for a while now, being ordered to rest by my doctor! Not much to do other than cooking and taking slow walks. Then in about six weeks The New Foodie will make his/hers entrée into our lives and then we´ll see what happens with everything!

I had some girlfriends over for Sunday lunch a few weeks ago and made lots of big plans of involtini with beef, or some finger food, or maybe a soup? It was a lot of fun to make plans but then my health started to sway and I went for a simple salad instead. No use to cook a large meal for friends if I would have to spend two hours in bed to recover! This meal was ready after just over an hour in the kitchen, plus some dessert preparations the night before (I will save that for a separate post).

Salads are really typical Clivia-meals - easy to prepare, fresh and always appreciated. I love to explore all the different kinds of grains and pasta and rice you can use, and then I just pair it with a good dressing and vegetables and a good bread. Then depending on the guests I serve meat or fish on the side, more veggies and often some different kinds of spread for the bread. This time my guests got home made foccaccia, creamed feta cheese and some salmon. The featured grain was a new product from the store I wanted to try: Kamut wheat. Apparently some grains were found in the Egyptian pyramids and now they grow it again! Very tasty, but maybe hard to find. You could subsitute spelt wheat, or bulgur for example. The recipe is from the back of the Kamut wheat box, we are into trying recipes from boxes right now since A made an excellent chicken curry after reading on the small box for the chicken stock cubes...

Kamut wheat salad
Serves 4

200 ml Kamut wheat, or other kind of whole or cracked wheat
400 ml water
2 carrots
a bunch of sugar snaps, trimmed
some fresh green asparagus
100 ml chopped fresh basil
50 ml chopped flat-leaf parsley
3 spring onions, chopped
100 ml of toasted cashew nuts
Juice from half a lemon
salt flakes and freshly ground black pepper

Dressing:
100 ml olive oil
50 ml apple cider vinegar
1 pressed garlic clove
2 tsp dijon mustard
1 tsp sugar
salt and pepper

Boil the wheat in the water until just soft, about 10 minutes. Rinse in cold water and stir in some olive oil. Put aside. Cut the carrots in nice chunks and boil them until just soft in salted water. Do the same with the asparagus and sugar snaps. Rinse in cold water.
Mix everything for the dressing.
Mix the wheat, veggies, nuts and herbs and arrange in a nice bowl or on a platter. Pour over some dressing and serve the rest on the side. Some olives never go wrong!

Nigella´s involtini

Getting rid of: cheese, aubergine, raisins


This is, seriously, one of the best meals I made 2007! Nigella Lawson´s Feast is a book I leaf through at least every other week, just to enjoy her excellent writing and compensate myself during hard times for not having time to cook or having parties.
When I came home in late November after a particularly hard day at work I reminded myself that I a) had two large aubergines lying about in the fridge from the veggie box b) should grab the opportunity to make something proper even on a Tuesday. Involtini is maybe not the thing you should attack under these circumstances, but the name kept floating up in my brain all the way home and since I had most of the ingredients I simply jumped to the task. Nigella´s recipes are never scary - that helped! But do make sure you have a sandwich or some nibbles on hand before you start off - this will take you at least an hour! Count in that when you are finished and the involtini has cooled enough to eat you will remember nothing from your hard day at work, it is all obscured behind a joyful time of cooking!

Here is Nigella´s recipe (for those of you who has not yet got the book) with my own tweaks and changes

2-3 large aubergines cut lengthwise in thin slices
1500 grams tomato passata (I used less, see below)
200 grams mozzarella (I used leftover filling)

Filling:
100 grams crumbled feta cheese
100 grams mozzarella
25 grams grated parmesan (I didn´t have any mozzarella in the house so instead I scraped together 225 grams of other mixed cheeses; feta cheese, another excellent salad cheese from Jarseost, and parmesan)
75 grams pine nuts (I used chopped walnuts or almonds if I remember correctly)
50 grams raisins, soaked in hot water for 10 minutes
4 tbsp olive oil
2 tbsp breadcrumbs
1 garlic clove, crushed or finely chopped
zest from 1 lemon
a good pinch of dried mint
2 tpsb parsley
1 egg

Brush the aubergine slices on both sides with olive oil and grill them until soft and nicely patterned, I used my beloved cast iron grill pan for this. Put aside and let it cool.

Mix everything for the filling in a bowl, yes, raisins too. I was soo sceptical to these raisins! I am not a huge fan of Fruit in Food you see, and warm raisins are...yeurgh... But I decided to stick to the recipe the best I could and go with the raisins which really was t-a-s-t-y, surprise surprise. In the meantime I decided to make a cooked tomato sauce instead of just using passata, because I had so many odd aubergine slices and some old onions and whatnot in the fridge. I simply chopped it all up, sautéed in olive oil, poured in a packet of passata and let it boil with some dried thyme, salt, pepper and a pinch of sugar while I made the involtini. Put about a tablespoon of filling on each aubergine slice and roll it up firmly. Put in an ovenproof dish. When all the slices was gone I put the rest of the cheese filling in the tomato sauce and poured it over the involtini, and then baked in 190C oven for 25-30 minutes. The involtini should be served lukewarm according to Nigella, or cold - all but boiling hot from the oven! That way you will be able to really taste everything in these marvellous little rolls.

My new kitchen

This is me, or 2/3 of me, in our new kitchen on Gooseberry road. Since December 8th we live in a small radhus, which means a house connected to other houses in a row, I don´t know the correct term in English for it. We have four rooms and a kitchen and a small toilet and a bathroom and storage room in the front yard and a garden shed in the backyard, and a small pond and a glass room which will come in really handy April-October since it is so well built you can sit there while it is still a little too cold outside, or too hot, since we both have a fan and a heater in there. We also have a grill, and furniture enough to house 12-16 people for a garden party. Very nice!

For now we have to stay indoors though, and work to fit in all our belongings in cupboards and boxes in time for the baby´s arrival in just over three months (yikes, so soon!). Last week I crawled inside the kitchen cabinets to fit in a new basket shelf which you can slide out to reach what´s in it. I have already some problems reaching my own feet and in a month´s time I certainly will not be able to reach, say, a bowl from this cupboard which is very deep and very deep down. After much twiddling around I took the basket shelf and tried to fit it in - bah, the cupboard was 50 cm and the shelf was 60 cm! So I had to crawl back and take away everything and move it to the other cupboard and try not to swear too much, the baby can hear me now. We will have to go back to The Large Swedish Furniture Warehouse and buy a new shelf! Sigh.

But to make a long story short: I really like this kitchen even if we have slightly less space in it. It is what we call a parallell kitchen, stove and washing on one side and fridge and another working space on the other. When I am at the stove and need something from the fridge I simply turn on my heel and get it in two seconds instead of having to run some metres to the right and squeeze myself in between the kitchen table and the fridge (which also was smaller). This is so so much more practical! When you have all the shelves in place, mind. And above all, the eating area is just outside the kitchen and opens up into the living room - equals lots and lots of space for having lots of friends over who never again will have to hear the phrase "oh could you get up, I have to get something from the fridge".

Last year - I dared...nothing?

Hahaha, I just re-read my foodie resolutions for 2007 with a grin on my face. What has become of them? Absolutely nothing! But since I am good at forgiving myself for things I did (or did not) that didn´t harm anyone anyway I am simply putting them up again for 2008! Isn´t that neat? Some of them will be easy, some of them not. But then there is always 2009!

1. I will make my own pasta
2. I will take a class in how to handle and cook fresh fish
3. I will make sausages from scratch (that will have to wait until Christmas)
4. I will make sourdough bread
5. I will make wine leaf dolmadas
6. I will make pear preserves with ginger and lingonberries this autumn
7. (new) I will not feed my baby food from a jar unless it is an emergency

And I have made other things this year, really! I have further explored Lithuanian and Estonian cuisine, I have ordered veggie boxes, I made my own red cabbage for Christmas for the first time, I have become a cooking teacher... And above all I lost my job, got a new one, became pregnant and bought a house and moved. Christ, 2007 has been busy! Not sausage-making, though.

Tomato-fennel-beer soup

Getting rid of: fennel, crushed tomato, Estonian beer

So, it is official: in April next year a new baby foodie will be born! That means that I for example don´t drink alcohol anymore, and I am not allowed (sigh) to eat parma ham and cold-smoked salmon and other favourite things. But lucky me, I have lots of other favourites to enjoy while waiting, and some of the Estonian beer we bought a large quantity of this summer before we knew about my pregnancy can be used in, for example, this delicious soup!

Since I stopped working in Stockholm I don´t buy as much food magazines anymore which is very good because of a) my economy and b) I already have loads of magazines to read and re-read. But recently, after a particularly hard day at work, I treated myself to the latest issue of Laga Lätt, a fairly new and very inspiring Swedish food mag. The title is a play with words, the Swedish Lätt means both easy and light - and so are the recipes!
I had all the ingredients on hand and the preparation took just 20 minutes, then I had a warming and a little different tomato soup in a bowl, sitting on the couch in front of the TV...

Tomato and fennel soup
Serves 4

2 yellow onions (personally I think that one is more than enough in all recipes but...)
2 small or 1 large fennel
2 cloves of garlic (also here too much for me but that really is a matter of taste!)
canola or olive oil for frying
400 ml water
2 tbsp concentrated fish or veg stock (I used a cube, crumbled up in the hot soup)
300 ml beer
500 grams crushed tomatoes or passata
1 tsp sugar
salt and pepper

Chop the onion finely, finely slice the fennel. Press the garlic. Fry it all in a little oil until soft and shiny. Add water, stock, beer and tomato and let simmer for 10 minutes. Spice to taste with sugar, salt and pepper. Serve with a dollop of sourcream or creme fraiche, and a couple of sandwiches.

Astrid Lindgren 100 years

Off topic today: it is world famous author Astrid Lindgren´s 100th birthday today. Even though she passed away a few years ago she will live forever through all her wonderful books! I have read almost everything and cannot really mention a favourite - maybe Emil, and the Bullerby kids. And Ronja!

Oooh, it is not so off topic after all - today very conviniently also is the day of the cheesecake and I am sure Astrid has had a lot of cheesecake in her life, growing up in the same region as me: Småland.

Happy birthday Astrid!