14/07/2013

spicy carrot and coriander soup.

on thursday, i endured the two and-a-half hour ordeal of getting my wisdom teeth out. since thursday, i have endured the more protracted and arguably more painful ordeal of eating post-wisdom tooth extraction. the challenges associated with this are manifold:

1) my mouth hurts

2) i have stitches poking out everywhere, triggering horrific flashbacks to the four years I spent as a gawky adolescent with braces.

as such, i have temporarily embraced a liquid diet (sadly, not the fun, boozy kind). unfortunately, this has itself wrought further challenges:

3) i cannot watch masterchef without twinges of jealousy and grief

4) my friends (‘friends’) persist in snapchatting me photos of their delicious-looking food.

however, this soup – adapted somewhat from this recipe – proves that one does not have to forgo deliciousness even if one’s current tolerance for solids is akin to that of the very young and the very infirm. it is also easy to make, which is fortunate because:

5) panadeine forte has addled my wits for the time being.

this recipe makes about two servings.

ingredients

300 grams carrots

1 small brown onion

500 mls vegetable stock

two large cloves of garlic

one large (tablespoon-sized) piece of fresh ginger

one small red chilli

1 tablespoon fresh coriander

1 teaspoon cumin

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1 teaspoon paprika

½ teaspoon cardamom

½ teaspoon cayenne pepper (you can leave this out if you’re a wuss)

natural yoghurt, to serve

crusty bread, to serve

fresh coriander, to serve

method

peel and chop the carrots. dice the onion, garlic, ginger and chilli.
in a saucepan, sauté the onion, garlic, ginger and chilli together in olive oil. once the onion has started to soften, add the spices.
once the onion is translucent, throw in the carrots. add the vegetable stock and cover. turn the heat down and leave for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally.
after 30 minutes, the carrot should be soft. use a stick blender to pulverize the contents of the saucepan.
lo and behold, you now have soup. serve immediately with a large dollop of yoghurt and some delicious crusty bread (if you, unlike me, are capable of eating it. no no, I’m not bitter at all).

08/07/2013

sweet potato chilli burritos.

sadly my time in sverige has come to an end (incidentally, “end” in svenska is “slut”, which you will find amusing if your sense of humour is as developmentally delayed as mine).

this means “final sale” in english. what did you think it meant? dirty bastards.

not so sadly, this means that i now have access to a kitchen that is not shared by twelve people (all with varying degrees of filthiness) and more specifically, is not shared by one particularly filthy individual who would routinely throw away entire garbage bags of utensils instead of washing them. never again will I have to stir gnocchi with a potato peeler, or attempt to boil pasta in a shallow frypan.

despite this, when my family asked me to make dinner the other night, i decided to treat them to a taste of the student life. this chilli is cheap, delicious and freezes super well (it makes about five to seven serves, depending on how hungry you are). i’ve adapted it from this jamie oliver recipe. i am sure that jamie’s chilli is superior to mine, given that he is jamie oliver and i am not. however, jamie insists that you take forty minutes to roast the sweet potato before you can proceed with the rest of the recipe (i imagine him cooing lovingly at the oven whilst waiting for the potatoes to turn a delicate golden hue). sorry jamie, but I am in possession of both a microwave and a life.

…i didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.

on a tangentially related note, this handy video tutorial is useful if you want to learn some more swedish phrases that are amusing and/or dirty in english.

apropos of nothing, here is a swedish road sign.

ingredients

1 large sweet potato

1 red capsicum

400g kidney beans

1 small tin of corn

1 small brown onion

1 tomato

1 red chili

2 cloves garlic

2 teaspoons of cumin

1 heaped tablespoon of cinnamon

quarter of a cup of fresh coriander

apple cider vinegar, to taste

tabasco, to taste

to serve

soft tortillas

sour cream or crème fraîche

avocado

half a small lime

cheddar cheese, grated

method

peel and dice the sweet potato. throw it into a microwave safe dish with enough water to cover and the lid cracked. microwave for ten minutes.
whilst this is happening, dice the onion, garlic, chili, tomato and coriander. slice the capsicum into bite-size strips.
sauté the onion, garlic, and chili in a large saucepan. once the onion is on its way to being cooked, add the coriander, cinnamon and cumin.
by this point the sweet potato should be done (it should be quite soft; stick a fork in it to check). drain away the water and add it to the saucepan.
the sweet potato should be disintegrating into something akin to baby food. delicious! drain and rinse the kidney beans and corn and add them to the pot. throw in the capsicum and tomato as well.
taste and season as necessary. add the apple cider vinegar (this isn’t strictly necessary, but will help brighten the flavours if you feel like some acidity is in order). add the tabasco if you aren’t a wimp.
warm the tortillas. dice the avocado and stir through some lime juice. assemble burrito. eat burrito.

it looks like baby food but it actually tastes like sunshine.

14/04/2013

bastardised borscht.

last year, my boyfriend and i spent some time gallivanting around eastern europe. the gallivanting, as it were, came to an abrupt halt in dresden. dresden, we quickly learned, is beautiful and boring and full of old people. you do not gallivant in dresden. there is no fun in dresden.

i’m grateful for the cultural experience and all, but one can only spend so long appreciating the architecture. particularly when all of the architecture that is of actual aesthetic value and not a corporeal manifestation of ddr-era weltschmerz is centred within a 2-kilometre radius.

as we discovered after many fruitless hours trawling urbanspoon (which, perhaps tellingly, returns search results for both “dresden, tennessee” and “dresden, ohio” but not the city after which they were ostensibly named), plus several unforgivably awful meals, dresden’s dining scene is apparently a casualty of its geriatric population. the food is stodgy and bland; the worst kind of ‘traditional’. almost as unpalatable was the incredible degree of kitsch that accompanied every meal.

we ate here. seriously.

as such, it was a stroke of extraordinary good luck to stumble upon raskolnikoff, a gloriously grungy underground café in a building that was once the haunt of the dresden’s cold-war era bohemian set. it is thus perhaps fitting that this was where i first fell hammer-over-sickle in love with borscht.

raskolnikoff.

i know. i just subjected you to this wanky protracted travel story purely so that I could tell you that the borscht at this one restaurant was good. i am the worst kind of person.

anyway. the thing about meals that are traditional to some particular cuisine is that people get really defensive about the proper way to make them. it is time for a confession, dear readers. this recipe was not passed down to me by anyone’s dead great-great-great whatever. i knocked it together like i do most of my recipes: pulling up a couple of versions on google, picking out the bits i like the sound of, and revising the method to require as little time and effort possible. somewhere, hundreds of thousands of babushkas are turning in their graves right now. but this borscht is really, really good. i promise.

figure one: babushka turning in sepulchrum.

it also freezes well – it will lose a little flavor upon reheating, but that’s nothing a splash of balsamic and a pinch of salt won’t fix. you will probably want to freeze some, because this recipe produces a pretty generous amount. perhaps i was exaggerating slightly when i proclaimed to my facebook that i had just made “enough borscht to feed the entire ussr,” but it makes at least around five serves.

because this post hasn’t yet contained quite enough meandering wank, here is a beatles song that is of tangental relevance. you should listen to it while you make your borscht.

ingredients.

1 leek

1 small onion

3 cloves garlic

2 medium-sized beetroots

2 stalks celery

3 tablespoons balsamic vinegar

1 tablespoon apple cider vinegar

1 cube beef stock

1 lemon

crème fraîche, to serve

method.

1. peel your beetroot and chop it into something resembling julienne strips; albeit rather fat and (if you, like me, struggle with basic motor skills) roughly-hewn julienne strips. yes, this is the best descriptor I could come up with

2. put the beetroot in a microwaveable bowl and cover with water. throw this in the microwave for 15 minutes. this is an ancient technique passed down through generations of handkerchief-wearing peasant women. take a moment to revel in the authenticity.

3. chop the onion, leek and garlic. in a frying pan, sauté in two tablespoons of butter.

4. whilst this is happening, take a moment to make up your stock, using one stock cube in about two cups worth of boiling water. If you really have your shit together, you might even have two cups worth of home-made stock on hand, which I imagine would be preferable.

5. chop the celery and add to the frying pan.

6. at this point, the beetroot should be done (it should obviously be cooked, but should have a bit of bite still left to it). if this is the case, transfer the contents of the frying pan to a saucepan, adding the beetroot (including the water in which it was microwaved) and the stock.

7. bring to a simmer and add the apple cider and balsamic vinegars. squeeze in the juice of one lemon. season with salt and pepper, to taste.

8. serve with a dollop of crème fraîche.

30/03/2013

lazy black bean chilli tortillas.

concerns as to animal welfare and sustainability aside, poverty is itself a compelling – and some (ie. i) might say, in the interests of shit-stirring, more legitimate – justification for vegetarianism. by ‘poverty’, i am talking about ‘student poverty’, rather a nebulous concept. for some students, student poverty means forgoing basic things like sleep and protein and sanity, and is an actual problem. for others, student poverty means choosing between meat for dinner a few nights a week or their customary bottle of penfolds koonunga hill shiraz (you can probably make a guess as to which of the two i am subject).

these tortillas, comprising mainly beans and passata, are a cheap, delicious and easy dinner for the student impoverished (they are also vastly more nutritious than ramen). i have adapted the recipe from this one by jamie oliver. i have a bit of a love-hate relationship with jamie. while he is terribly attractive, particularly when moved to tears by his concern for fat children, i often feel like he expects too much from me in terms of our relationshi- i mean, in terms of how much time and effort i am prepared to put into an ordinary weeknight dinner.

how can anyone resist?

to be fair, i generally eat alone (occasionally i am successful in bribing people to keep me company, but free food can only go so far towards making people like you) and thus am disinclined to mess around with side dishes and such.

one important thing to bear in mind, particularly in you are actually vegetarian and not five-nights-a-week vegetarian like me, is that jamie’s recipe includes rice, and is thus going to load you up with more protein. beans on their own do not constitute a complete protein/do not provide you much in the way of protein/or something (all this science is a bit much for the brain of this little arts student). marrying them with rice creates a complete protein, and thus a more nutritional dish. apparently.

ingredients

1 large red chilli

3 cloves garlic

50o grams passata

500 grams kidney beans

500 grams black beans

2 teaspoons coriander (fresh would probably be preferable, but in sweden buying fresh herbs generally means buying them in pots, and if you are me, killing them within a week. so i use dried.)

1 teaspoon smoked paprika

2 teaspoons cumin (i am a huge cumin junkie and would probably use more than this, but ‘dump in all the cumin you own’ would probably not do much for my credibility.)

3 tablespoons balsamic vinegar

tabasco (a.k.a. the nectar of gods) to taste

1 small lime

1 avocado

tortillas, to serve

grated cheddar, to serve

crème frâiche, to serve (were i in australia, i would probably say sour cream instead. but creme fraiche is, for some reason, a big thing in sweden, and thus super readily available. that i don’t know what ‘sour cream’ is på svenska probably doesn’t help.)

method

1. chop the garlic finely. jamie will tell you that it is preferable to use a garlic press. jamie is lying to you. the effort of cleaning gunk out of the corners of the garlic press far exceeds that of just chopping the damn garlic. while you’re at it, de-seed and dice the chilli.

2. in a saucepan, fry the chilli and garlic with the coriander in a few tablespoons of olive oil.

3. after about two minutes, add the passata, paprika, cumin, vinegar and tabasco. once you’ve stirred this through, have a taste. season and adjust as necessary.

4. rinse the kidney beans and black beans and add them to the saucepan. leave to simmer.

5. while the chilli is simmering, dice the avocado and toss with the juice of half a lime. squeeze the other half of the lime into the chili and stir through.

6. grate the cheddar and heat the tortillas.

7. you are now ready to assemble your tortilla. congratulations. it has come to my attention, having eaten tortilla-type dishes in the company of others several times over the past month, that some people think it acceptable to thinly smear their crème frâiche (or sour cream) over their tortilla in a stupid, mincing way, much as one smears margarine over toast. these people are wrong. the crème frâiche must be dolloped on heartily, otherwise it may as well not be there. there is no point in having it if you are just going to smear it to the point of oblivion.

happy gluttony! xx

27/03/2013

tandoori beef curry.

when i was a small child, my grandmother became preoccupied with the task of fattening me up; declaring me “so skinny!” with the plaintive cry in her voice apparently common to grandmothers of the mediterranean region. thus some of the worst memories of my childhood are of glumly forcing down cold pasta under her stern supervision, wheel of fortune blaring in the background.

evenings at baba’s house.

it is thus perhaps perplexing that i am so fond of cooking for other people, but i have somehow managed to dodge the myriad psychological issues that should have stemmed from this repeated trauma. one of my favourite people to cook for is my friend sophie. sophie is excellent to cook for because she is impressed by basically anything i put in front of her. “how did you make this?” she will exclaim, to which the answer is invariably some variation on “chopped things and put them into a pan.”

incidentally, that could sum up the instructions for this recipe. except it involves the use of multiple pots and pans and also marinating. so not really.

ingredients

3 heaped tablespoons tandoori paste

2 cups(ish) natural yoghurt (enough to cover the beef)

2 large onions

3 cloves garlic

1 teaspoon fresh ginger

2 teaspoons garam masala

2 teaspoons sweet paprika

2 teaspoons dried coriander

half cup tomato puree

1 cup frozen peas

two large potatoes

500 grams beef of some description*

rice and naan bread, to serve

* i realise that this is somewhat vague but being a) a novice to buying beef and b) in sweden, where things are in swedish, i cannot really tell you what i put into this except that it was almost certainly beef. i can tell you, thanks to google translate, that it was apparently ‘sailor steak’. i’m going to go out on a limb and guess that this is not remotely helpful to anyone.

method

1. chop your sailor steak and place it in a bowl, covering with the tandoori paste and yoghurt. pop it into the fridge to marinate while you prep the vegetables.

2. peel and chop the potatoes. place them in a microwave safe bowl with enough water to cover and pop them in the microwave for fifteen minutes (this will soften them more quickly than just throwing them into the main saucepan).

3. fry the garlic, ginger and onions (which you have hopefully had the foresight to chop) in a large saucepan. once the onions are translucent, add the garam masala and parika.

4. while this continues to fry, quickly brown the beef in a separate pan. once this is done, take it off the heat and set aside.

5. add the tomato puree and coriander to the onion mix.

6. in a separate saucepan add the peas with enough water to cover. bring to the boil.

7. after a few minutes, check that the peas are suitably defrosted. if so, drain them and add them to the main saucepan. at this point the potatoes should also be more or less done: add these to the saucepan as well.

8. finally, add the beef (and yoghurt mixture) to the main pan. leave it for just long enough to heat through, lest you overcook the beef like i did. don’t stress too much if you do though, sophie won’t notice.

quality photography brought to you by my iphone.

quality photography courtesy of my iphone.

19/03/2013

greek yoghurt blueberry pancakes.

i am eating pancakes for dinner. pathetic, i know. in my defence, dear reader, i am in sweden. it is currently negative seven degrees outside, and it is probably snowing. it is dark out, and though the nearest grocery store is but 500 meters away, reaching it involves negotiating a steep and permanently icy hill, a process that has seen me injured more times than i care to mention.

dear reader, i am not in the mood.

were i reasonably competent adult, it might have occurred to me to go out and purchase groceries for dinner at some point before dinner was desired. alas, i am not and i did not. hence i am eating pancakes for dinner.

however, these are not just any pancakes. these pancakes are glorious. they are transcendent. okay, perhaps i’m overselling them a little, but they are still particularly good pancakes. in seriousness, these are nice because they are markedly more substantial (as an arts student, i can tell you that the scientific term is ‘protein-y’) than your usual egg-flour-milk pancakes.

i’ve adapted this recipe from ambitious kitchen, simplifying it a little (obviously my ambition leaves a little to be desired). the pancakes i made following the original were a little dense and heavy for my liking: i found that reducing the eggs made a huge improvement.

ingredients

1 cup of flour

1 cup of greek yoghurt

1 egg

two teaspoons of baking powder (‘bakpulver’, if you are an english-speaker lost and frightened in a swedish supermarket)

a splash of milk

a handful of blueberries

honey, to taste

method

1. spend far too long searching for greek yoghurt. eventually discover that the swedes apparently like to segregate their dairy products: the greek yoghurt is not, as logic might have dictated, next to the regular yoghurt and other dairy products. rather, it lives in its own section (apparently ‘yoghurts which self-identify as ethnically or culturally diverse’) with the turkish yoghurt and the icelandic yoghurt.

2. once you have acquired your groceries and have returned to the squalor that is your shared student kitchen, try and find a bowl (or at least some sort of vessel) that isn’t too filthy.

my mother will die when she sees this.

put in the flour, baking powder, greek yoghurt, honey, and egg (it helps if you crack the egg first). stir with a fork (or a whisk, if you have such luxuries!) until this is nicely combined. i realise i might seem to be handholding you excessively through what is a fairly rudimentary step, but the batter will be quite thick – really more like a dough – and you might freak out a bit.

3. do not freak out. add a splash of milk instead. not too much milk! you want this batter to be quite thick.

4. once you’re happy with your batter, throw in your blueberries and stir them in.

4. fry a little butter (i will not try to dictate to you at what heat to do this at. if cooking in a shitty kitchen has taught me anything, it’s that cooktops are idiosyncratic). ladle in some batter. i trust you can figure out what to do from here.

no instagram filter can mask hw ugly this plate is. also, note the plastic fork. our cutlery keeps going inexplicably missing.

no instagram filter can mask how ugly this plate is. also, note the plastic fork. our cutlery keeps going inexplicably missing.

these are particularly nice served with fresh berries and some honey. in sweden, you will probably need to sell your soul or your firstborn to acquire the former (in my first week here, having gone drastically overbudget, i went through my receipts and found that i had accidentally spent $30AUD on raspberries). frankly, the berries are probably still better value.

happy gluttony! xx