Lentils!!

Here one of my prefered meals; lentils!!

Normally beans are so diverese, so many kinds, can be cooked in so many different ways that I don't think anyone has tasted all. The problem with the beans, if you don't want to buy them from a can, which some of them are really good for salads or for vege burgers, etc is that they need to be in water overnight or cook for hours.

The recipe is quite easy and fast, you don't need to put the lentils with water overnight or cook them for hours. The type of lentils I like best it is called the brown/spanish pardina.

This type of lentils is, as you can see, brown but smaller than usual, which I find much more tastefull and after cooking doesn't break and holds it's shape. I belive you can find them anywhere, I've seen them outside Spain, in Finland you can find them easy at Arabic/Asian supermarkets.

So let's get started with the ingredients:

- Lentils (pardina type)

- Vegetables (onions, carrots, garlic, red pepper, zucchini, etc)

- If you want to make a non vegetarian version you can add some pork ribs, chopped, and the absolute best is if you have some jamon iberico bone piece

- Bay laurel

- Vegetables broth cube

- Rice

So, the receipt is easy and prety straight forward; chop the vegetables in chunky pieces and put them to saute with little bit olive oil salt and pepper with the bay laurel.

Once the onion are little bit brownish add the lentils and the water. Keep in mind that lentils will double or even triple the volume, add the broth cube, and let them boil easy for 30 min.

You might have to add more water by time to time, keep in mind to add salt too. The lentils are recomended to be cooked for 1 hour, so know when they are half done, add couple of handfull of rice, and few nails of garlic.

By 45 min, 1h will be ready. Always with this kind of "stews" taste better the day after. Hope you like it!

Banana-quark crepes

Here's another Finnish recipe, banana quark pancakes! Actually they are more like crepes not traditional pancakes. If you feel for something sweet but also healthy, this is for you! Quark has lots of protein and this recipe includes only a bit of flour.

Ingredients we used today:

2 eggs

250 grams fat free quark

2 dl organic flour

0,5 dl sugar

a tea spoon vanilla sugar

a tea spoon salt

half tea spoon cardamom powder

1 banana

~3 dl fat free milk

 

On top:

Canadian maple syrup

home made blueberry jam

First mix eggs, spices and quark together, then add flour and milk until the dough is liquid enough. Then smash a banana with a fork and mix all together.

We added even more milk after the dough looking like this

Fry small crepes on a pan, don't make them too big since it's hard to turn them around. Quark and banana makes them broken quite easily so be gentle! These crepes have very different texture than normal pancakes/flour crepes because of the unusual ingredients.

Enjoy banana quark crepes with whipped cream, jam, sugar etc you prefer! We had tonight blueberry jam and maple syrup. Some weeks ago we picked the blueberries near home in a national park and made jam, maybe we make another post about that later!

Finnish pride - salmon!

Good morning!

Today I'm going to show you how to make very typical Finnish food, salmon! Salmon is here in Finland quite cheap and very very delicious. You can buy it as whole, raw, cold smoked, hot smoked, salted, spiced etc... This one here is basic raw filet. 

So, this dinner included carrot, potatoes, onion and dill (under the salmon), salmon filet and as a side dish some zucchini with feta cheese. 

First we boiled couple of potatoes with couple of carrots (all peeled), when they were ready we fried them with some chopped onion (1-2) and some garlic (there's not a food where you can't use garlic!). After frying the veggies they are soft and done, just add some salt and black pepper and whatever spices you like. 

The side dish was made in the oven. We made some very thin zucchini "filets" with a traditional Finnish cheese cutter. Then put them in the oven in 200 C with garlic, good olive oil and salt on top, until they look crispy and done - don't burn them! Zucchini here is rolled around itself and there's good quality feta on top.

Then the best part, fish! Salmon doesn't need much spices, its normal taste is so delicious. Normally we put salt and black pepper, sometimes dill and chopped garlic. Fry salmon filet on a hot pan, couple of minutes per side. Salmon is quite oily fish (it's healthy!) but just in case, put a drop of olive oil on the pan first. Here we go! This meal is very easy, quite fast and soooo delicious! Hyvää ruokahalua!

Fideuà

Hei!

Here we come again with another typical catalan dish, fideua. This dish, is really simple and doesn't need much ingredients.

- Shrimps

- Squid

- Clams

- Garlic

- Onion

- Tomato

- Fish broth

- "Fideus"

What fideus are? Fideus are a kind of pasta, like spaghetti, but much thinner and much shorter.

Source: http://cambresbuides.blogspot.fi/2008/01/pensaments-inconnexes-xii.html

To make fideua is mandatory to use this type of pasta, you might not find it as thin as this one, doesn't matter, here in Finland I use this:

OK, let's start with the preparation, keep in mind, that all the time you are using the same pan, so if you can have a "paellera" is perfect, otherwise try to find the biggest pan you can use, because we want the meal to be cooked in a big surface but not too thick.

So, first, saute the peeled shrimps with little bit olive oil, salt and pepper. You don't want to cook them much, cause later will be cooked again with the broth, when ready reserve them aside. Same thing with the squid, which has been cut in little pieces or rings first. Reserve it aside too.

Chop really small a small onion and a small tomato and fry it, add couple chopped garlic nails, if you are as garlic addict as we are, put few more. Add as well one leave of laurel. Ok you are in the point where the "sofregit" (the mix of onion, tomato and garlic) is becoming ready so it is the time to put strong fire on and add the "fideus". You might want to add a bit more of olive oil, and the objective is, without stopping stirring, to give a nice toasted colour to the "fideus" (like in the first pic).

Once the colour of the "fideus" is mostly brownish, add the HOT fish broth, how much? I would say around double the volume of "fideus", but save some just in case you need more. I never know how much it is, but i have like a rule, always cover by half a centimetre the "fideus".

When the "fideus" are cooking and the broth is by the "fideus" level, add the shrimps, squid and clams, and then let it cook till the broth i almost gone.

Don't serve it right away, once you think is ready, let it rest for couple of minutes.

You can eat it with little bit of "all i oli". In here I added some chopper roast red peppers but didn't have clams. Hope you like it!

Escalivada

Being today 11-9, Catalan national day, going to show you how to make THE MOST traditional Catalan dish ESCALIVADA

Actually it is not a main dish, but a side dish or a base to make many other meals, but the base is always the same.

It is prety easy, you don´t need to be Gordon Ramsey as to make escalivada, ingredients:

- Red peppers

- Eggplant

- Onion

- Garlic

Onion and garlic are not mandatory, but beeing a garlic addict as we are, we cook it as many ways as we can imagine. About the red peppers, just make sure you can get some nice, fresh and thick red peppers, otherwise if they don´t have much "meat" they will, most likely, burn.

As to prepare the red peppers and eggplant rinse it with water and chop off the green part of the eggplant and put it to an oven tray, we did put aluminum folio as to be easier to clean later. Then put it to the oven at 200-250°C for about 30-45 min. Depending on the size of the vegetables it might take longer, so keep an eye on them.

Once they are soft, take them out of the oven and let them cool, if would be much easier to peel the vegetables. The red peppers are really easy to peel and to remove the seeds.

As you can see, there is a lot of food out of one eggplant and 2kg of red peppers, we did so much red peppers cause we found them really cheap, otherwise the typical way to do it its having 50/50 each.  With this you can eat it right away, put it in fridge and eat in in couple of days, or putting in small freezing bags and eat it whenever you want.

So, how to eat escalivada, as we say earlier, there is many dishes in catalan cooking where escalivada is one key ingredient, we might post some in the future, but my preferred way to eat those is the eggplant little bit hot, with some maldon salt and a blast of good olive oil. As for red peppers, i recommend, as a side dish for a big steak, fry few garlic nails with little bit of this red pepper.

Hope you like it, and have a nice Catalan day!

Welcome!

Hey all!

Welcome to our brand new blog - this is all about food!

We are a couple from Catalunya and Finland. Our passion is to cook, eat and enjoy life.