Saturday 21 September 2013

Starting afresh, and something sweet and seasonal

Yep. I was right. What I said here, and then some. Life, unfortunately, has had the better of me for months now, and I am only getting the energy to blog now. A quick recap before getting on to more important stuff. Wedding in Belgrade, days in beautiful Vienna, a broken heart but the perfect break-up, a birthday, Scotland having a hot summer, climbing bonanza here, lazy days in Sweden, back for the Fringe, a job interview, a job offer, another weekend in Stockholm, back for an appointment with a solicitor. And here we are, 21 September and I have worked my last day amongst the mathematicians and on Monday I shall take on the social scientists of Scotland instead. I am no longer a house owner. I am happy.

I have a recipe I'm working on, and a bit of a tirade on how a perfect dough feels clammy, but I need to test the recipe a bit further before letting it loose on the internet. In the meantime I thought I'd share a seasonal recipe instead. We are really coming into apple season in the UK and I, for one, intend to make the most of this. I baked this subtly apple-flavoured loaf last week and my (as of two days ago) former colleagues were asking for the recipe.

This post is dedicated to the bunch of people I have worked with for the last five years. Thank you for the laughs and tears, for your support and for your cheese scones. You rock.

Apple loaf. Photo: Helene Frössling


A sweet apple loaf

100 g butter (at room temperature)
200 g granulated or caster sugar
2 medium eggs
175 g plain flour
1.5 tsp baking powder
1 tsp ground cinnamon, plus a bit more for dusting
1/2 tsp vanilla essence
100 ml apple juice (not from concentrate)
1 large organic apple
"Pearl sugar"

Turn the oven to 170 degrees. Line a loaf tin with baking paper.

In a large bowl and using a hand-held electric whisk, cream the butter for a minute or so, then add the sugar and continue creaming for a couple of minutes until fluffy. In a smaller bowl mix the flour and baking powder with the cinnamon. Into the butter and sugar mix, add the eggs one at a time, incorporating the first one fully before adding the next one. If the mixture separates, add a spoonful of the flour after each egg. Swap from the electric whisk to a spatula. Mix the apple juice with the vanilla essence in a small bowl or measuring jug. Into the main mix add a third of the flour stirring it in fully, then half the apple juice, stirring again. Repeat the addition of flour, then the last of the apple juice, then the last of the flour. Finally, stir in the grated apple. Spoon the mix into the loaf tin, smoothing it down fully, and then across the top dust some cinnamon and, if you have any pearl sugar sprinkle some of that over the cinnamon. If you don't have pearl sugar, perhaps try demerara sugar?

Bake on the middle shelf for 35-40 min or until an inserted skewer comes out clean. Leave to cool somewhat in the tin before taking it out and letting it cool fully on a plate. It'll have a lovely toffee-ish smell.

Friday 10 May 2013

A long time since last, and granola revisited

Apologies. I've not been good at updating. I guess blogging regularly is a skill, and a time-consuming one at that.

It has been a very busy spring. There have been travels, and weddings, and planning for more travels, and spending time with family, and meeting with friends, and making new friends. There have been windy days, and still days (though not many). There hasn't been many sunny days, come to think of it. But those which we have had have been cherished and enjoyed.

When I am busy I don't tend to experiment with new recipes. Well, actually, I do, but they aren't recipes for sharing. They are concoctions, they are the results of emptying the vegetable drawer in the fridge or doing the supermarket shop late at night when foods are reduced down to nothing. They are a way to unwind my mind and to nourish myself. But they are not recipes to be shared. When things really get busy, it is time to revisit old friends. By that I mean the recipes that are so deeply ingrained in you that you could cook them while asleep.

The latest of my trips was to London for the Early May bank holiday weekend. My boyfriend is spending a couple of months in Vienna for work, and we had decided to meet up in London (where he used to live) to get to spend some time together, and for me to meet some of his close friends. It was a great weekend. At quite a late hour on Sunday, in a pub in Stockwell while attending a brilliant club night, I ended up in conversation with some of the crowd about granola. I extolled on the virtues of making your own granola (hopefully not to the extent of leaving these people with an impression of their mate's newish girlfriend being a bit loopy), and it struck me that the recipe I was talking about was not the one I had posted on the blog previously. You see, after the previous granola post I re-visited the recipe since a friend mentioned using apple juice instead of honey. Delicious magazine had written on the topic. It didn't take much experimentation to tweak it a bit to my liking. I made notes about how this granola was made, then ran out of time to post it between the travels, and weddings, and travel planning, and family time and all that. Lo and behold - when I return from the weekend in London I find my granola notes on my desk at work. Sometimes it's a really good things that we don't have a clean desk policy here.. So, this recipe really is for my boyfriend's friends in London, although everyone should try it. Give it a go, it's easy!

Breakfast: yoghurt, granola, fruit. Photo: Helene Frössling


Lean, mean granola

350 g jumbo oats
200 g seeds (sunflower, pumpkin, hemp, linseed..)
150 g nuts (walnuts, hazelnuts, macadamias, pecans, pistachios..), chopped into smaller pieces

200 g dried fruits (raisins, sultanas, cranberries, chopped dried figs...)

150 ml apple juice
90 ml maple syrup
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon

Preheat your oven to 140 degrees, and line two or three baking trays with baking paper. Use baking trays with rims - baking sheets without rims are likely to cause a headache.

In a large bowl mix the oats, seeds and chopped nuts. In a small saucepan, gently heat the apple juice with the maple syrup, vanilla and cinnamon. The cinnamon will most likely start off coating the surface but you want to do your best to stir it in. You are only looking to heat it a bit, to enable the ingredients to mix. Fold the warm liquid into the oat, nut and seeds mixture, trying to gently coat all of it without mashing anything. Spread the granola over the lined baking trays and put these in the pre-heated oven. To toast the granola will take around 40 minutes, but you should ideally gently turn the granola every 10 minutes or so, and perhaps shift the trays around as well. Once the granola is golden, remove the trays from the oven and combine onto one tray, then scatter the fruit over the still-hot granola. Allow to cool on the tray before storing in an airtight container.

A note of advice - this can become fairly expensive to make if you buy the nuts, seeds and fruits at full prices. I always keep an eye out for special offers so I can keep a stock of these supplies in the house. 

Monday 18 March 2013

A new tool, and a brunch bruschetta

Do you remember those novelty t-shirts that were common before low-cost carriers carried us all everywhere all the time? Before social media gave a platform for holiday bragging? Back in those days our method for showing off about our travels was the print "My [insert relation] went to [insert geographic location, preferably mainstream] and all I got was this lousy t-shirt". Well, how's this one for a real-life retro-but-modern feel: my boyfriend went to San Francisco and came home bearing me a brand new iPad mini. Total and utter surprise on my part, I can tell you! And this is my first attempt to blog on it.

Since my boyfriend and I only had one weekend together in March due to travels aplenty, we spent most of it together. We are both big fans of breakfast in general, and at the weekend especially a cooked one. Yesterday I came up with a new recipe for his unsuspecting taste buds to wrap themselves around. As in my habit it was constructed out of what happened to be in my fridge: mushrooms, spinach, eggs, chorizo. In some ways it is a variation on classic cooked British breakfasts, but simultaneously it has continental vibes. I think of it as a breakfast bruschetta.



Breakfast bruschetta for two hungry people

250 g chestnut mushrooms
60 g chorizo (air dried)
100 g fresh spinach
2 ripe tomatoes
4 fresh welfare eggs
4 slices of bread

Clean the mushrooms and quarter them. Cut the chorizo into little cubes. Heat a large frying pan and add the mushrooms. Keep the pan on a hot flame for a couple of minutes, then turn down the heat and add the chorizo. Cook for another couple of minutes, until the chorizo is cooked. Cut the tomatoes into quarters, and add them for a minute or two. Add the spinach leaves and cover with a lid for a couple of minutes until the spinach has wilted. Season if you think it's necessary; I find that it's not needed.

Meanwhile, poach the eggs. If you've never done this, don't be scared! Boil 4-5 cm of water in a wide saucepan, then add a teaspoon or two of white wine vinegar. Crack the eggs one by one into the water, which should be almost at boiling temperature. I find it easier to crack the eggs in advance into separate small bowls, then tip them in. Leave the eggs in the simmering water for around 3 minutes - longer if the eggs are larger or if you prefer them more cooked. Remove the eggs with a suitable tool, like a slotted spoon, onto a warm plate covered in kitchen roll to drain off water.

Toast the bread. To serve, place two slices of toasted bread per plate, ladle over the mushroom-spinach-chorizo-tomato mix and top with two poached eggs. Some cracked black pepper on top works well.



Sunday 10 March 2013

Addicted to beetroot, and beetroot, orange and chocolate muffins

Three or maybe four years ago I tried the amazing combination of chocolate and beetroot for the first time. I have long been a fan of beetroot in most of its incarnations; it is only the cruelest of pickling that I don’t like. Think beetroot carpaccio, think tender wee beetroots roasted and served with butter, think beetroot hummous. The same year, 2009 (or was it 2010?), I saw a recipe for beetroot cake in the comments thread of some article on the Guardian website. I was intrigued and had to try it, turning the recipe into muffins instead. Those muffins were brought to work, perhaps in an attempt to get some feedback or more likely to avoid eating them all myself. My colleague J was so taken with them that she considered asking me to make her a beetroot chocolate wedding cake.

Just before Christmas I heard of a newly started, small artisan chocolatier in Edinburgh called Edward&Irwyn. It was small, and to the outside world it was not much more than a blog. On the last evening I spent with my boyfriend before we both left for our respective family Christmases, he gave me some of the E&I chocolates. One of the two flavours was beetroot, orange and milk chocolate. It was, quite simply, divine.

With J’s return to work after maternity leave (not an easy return due to nursery bugs galore, I must add), and the delicious E&I chocolate in mind, I decided to try to bake something like the muffins I had made before, but denser and moister. If you’ve read other posts of mine recently you might also recall an obsession with a certain recipe by Dan Lepard, so using oil rather than butter was an easy choice. I didn’t have to experiment more than once to find the right mixture. 


Beetroot, orange, chocolate. Photo: Helene Frossling


Chocolate beetroot orange muffins


3 eggs
80 g caster sugar
80 g golden syrup
120 ml vegetable oil
250 g cooked beetroot
zest from one-two oranges
120 g plain flour
60 g cocoa powder (not sweetened!)
1 tsp baking powder

Start by switching on the oven to 180 C, and getting out a 12-hole muffin-tray, and line with cupcake cases. I find metal muffins trays far easier than silicone ones, but we all have different preferences.

Finely grate the cooked beetroot and zest the oranges. In a small bowl mix the plain flour, cocoa powder and baking powder.

In a larger bowl and using a hand-helg electric whisk, mix eggs, sugar and golden syrup until light and a bit fluffy. Mix in the vegetable oil. At this point switch from the electric mixer to a spatula; the rest you want to do with a bit more finesse. Gently fold in the beetroot and orange zest. Once mixed well, fold in the flour mix. Divide between the cupcake cases. The mix will only rise a little bit when baking.

Bake the cupcakes for 20-25 minutes. Let them cool before eating, and eat within a couple of days if you want them at their freshest. I have no idea how long they stay ok, but I think most people wouldn’t find out as the muffins would be long eaten before they go stale. If you want to frost them to make them more like cupcakes I recommend the Hummingbird Bakery Cream Cheese Frosting. If you donb't have their books, Ocado has the recipe. 



Sunday 17 February 2013

Something for the weekend: mango and lime loaf


Ever since The Guardian published the Dan Lepard recipe for olive oil cake I have been a woman somewhat obsessed with exploring the possibilities of this dairy-free cake. It have tried it with orange and cinnamon, with walnuts and coffee, with Earl Grey tea and lemon, with just mixed spice. I find the recipe incredibly versatile and as far as cakes go it is also towards the less unhealthy end of the spectrum. Please do note that I’m not trying to make this into something healthy. It’s just somewhat less bad for you than some other cakes.

In a lot of my cooking endeavours I am steered by what I happen to have in the house. This time it was a mango so ripe that it practically begged on its somewhat wrinkly knees to be used up. Next to it perched a lime whose zest had started to dry just a little. My trusted guide to many matters culinary, The Flavour Thesaurus by Niki Segnit, did remind me of the magic potency of mixing mango and lime. In light of that, it simply had to be done. The result is a moist cake with a very mild flavour and a tiny bit of crunch to the top.

Mango and lime loaf. Photo: Helene Frossling

Mango and lime loaf

1 VERY ripe mango
1 lime
135g light muscovado
4 large free range eggs
150 ml vegetable oil
200g wholemeal spelt flour
1.5 tsp baking powder

Pre-heat your oven to 180C. Grease a loaf tin and line it with baking paper.

Peel the mango, and chop the flesh into small pieces. Zest the lime, then squeeze out the juice. Using a hand blender or a food processor pulp the mango with the zest and a tablespoon of lime juice. 

In a large bowl and using an electric hand mixer (or, if you feel strong, just a whisk), whisk up the eggs and the sugar. You are looking for a frothy mixture which is lighter in colour than what you started with – 2-3 minutes with the electric mixer should do it. If you are feeling strong and going for it with a whisk, you’re looking at far longer; just focus on the cake and the bulging biceps to come. Mix in the oil, followed by the mashed-up mango.

In a small bowl mix the spelt flour and the baking powder well. Gently fold this into the egg mixture, trying to loose as little air as possible.

Pour the mixture into the loaf tin. Bake in the pre-heated oven for around 50 minutes or until a skewer inserted into the cake comes out clean. Allow to cool in the tin before lifting out. Store wrapped in greaseproof paper in a tin or tupperware box. Stored like this it will keep well for a couple of days, although my boyfriend would probaly let it stretch to a slice per day for up to a week - or until I have to try out the Lepard recipe again.  


Shakshuka, or something like it


The good thing about following food blogs, reading cookery books and watching chefs prance around on TV is inspiration. Having quite a good memory (albeit increasingly unreliably as I dive deeper into my thirties) I can often recall interesting ideas picked up from all these recipes I come across. I don’t tend to spend money on buying the associated books – it is just their ideas I am after. As a cook I tend to be quite bold – to make things up as I go along. This comes in quite handy since I have a tendency of cooking using the ingredients at hand rather than buying ingredients for a specific recipe.

Shakshuka came to me in this way. I vaguely recalled seeing the dish raved about by Yotam Ottolenghi in his Mediterranean Feast series on Channel 4. I also stumbled upon Hemsley and Hemsley’s take on it, “Anytime Eggs”. I always have eggs, tomatoes, onions and garlic in the house, and quite often some greens as well. Cumin and smoked paprika are my staple spices, as will be very clear in this blog. Over a few weekends I ended up trying out different ways of preparing it and have ended up with a dish that is the perfect weekend pick-me-up. By no means of the imagination should this be seen as an authentic version of the dish. I do think anyone who tries it wants to have it again.

The greedy cook/photographer didn't get a chance to snap until  it was almost too late. Photo: Helene Frossling


Perfect breakfast for one VERY hungry person

1-2 tsp olive oil
1 banana shallot, or a couple of smaller shallots
1 garlic clove
4 ripe tomatoes, chopped
1 tsp balsamic vinegar
1 tsp ground cumin
60 g spinach, washed
2 free range eggs

To serve:
Smoked paprika powder, plain yoghurt, fresh dill or mint (chopped), bread.

Peel and slice the shallots thinly. In a small frying pan (approx 20 cm across) heat the olive oil and fry the shallots on a gentle heat until cooked through and beginning to get some colour. Crush the garlic and add to the pan for half a minute before adding the chopped tomatoes, the balsamic, the cumin and a tablespoon or two of water. Cook on a gentle heat until it looks like a somewhat dry tomato sauce. Add the spinach and put a lid on to let the spinach wilt into the mixture for a couple of minutes. Stir and season.  Now make two wells in the tomato and spinach mixture, large enough to hold an egg each. Crack one of the eggs into a cup, remove any errant pieces of shell then tip the egg into one of the wells in the frying pan. Repeat with the second egg. Put a lid on the pan and leave it until the egg white has set, which takes around 5 minutes.

To serve, dollop some yoghurt over the top, scatter with some paprika powder and chopped fresh herbs. Eat straight from the pan using a fork and pieces of bread. Amazing.   


Saturday 16 February 2013

The importance of breakfast, and my homemade granola


I have always been a greedy girl. Those with the patience to follow this blog as its identity becomes clearer will probably quickly realise that food is something I love with a passion. Eating, cooking, sharing; even (annoyingly) at times photographing. Ever since I was a baby I have had fast metabolism and I tend to wake up ravenous. How lucky for me that I grew up in a country where the phrase “breakfast is the most important meal of the day!” was almost as ever present as the Jante Law and Carola.

Breakfast can take many shapes. Some days are perfect for eggs. Perhaps they will be scrambled slowly and served with smoked salmon and chewy bagels. Or there may be poached eggs perched on a bed of fried chanterelle mushrooms (foraged in the forest behind my childhood home) on a toasted thick slice of sourdough bread.

Other days are grain days; the days when bread take centre stage, or when the humble oat shall rock your boat. In the Swedish way I do like my bread in the morning to be more towards an open sandwich than a slice of toast. In the household I grew up in, toast was for those days when the fresh bread had gone a bit stale and was beyond recovery. Fresh bread was eaten with cheese, ham, salad vegetables such as slices cucumber or red pepper. And oats. Oats often end up in porridge; the thick warming mixture made with half and half milk and water, and topped with fresh fruits and seeds. But some mornings there simply isn’t enough time to make porridge, or there isn’t even stale bread to be found for some toast. On those mornings it is good to have made some granola.

I started making granola a couple of years ago, according to a recipe by Yotam Ottolenghi in his first (and eponymous) cookbook. These days I make my own mixture, loosely based on the original recipe but creating a crunchy, nutty, seedy and fruity mix just to my taste. It is divine with cold milk or creamy yoghurt. It is vital to go for jumbo oats here, as porridge oats will disintegrate in the process.

My biscuit tin of homemade granola. Photo: Helene Frossling


Granola

300 g of jumbo rolled oats
150 g chopped nuts of your choice; I like walnuts, almonds and pistachios
150 g seeds of your choice; pumpkin, sunflower, linseed
100 ml of clear honey
100 ml of maple syrup
4 tbsp of oil; I find olive oil too strong so like to go with rapeseed or sunflower oil
3 tbsp water
pinch of salt
250 g dried fruits of your choice; I tend to do raisins, sultanas and figs – the latter cut into small pieces

Preheat your oven to 150 C. Line two or three oven trays with baking paper.

In a bowl mix the oats with chopped nuts. As a guideline to chopping the nuts – just think of how big chunks you would like to eat in your breakfast. Add the seeds.

In a small saucepan gently heat the honey, maple syrup, oil, water and salt until the honey has melted and all is combined. Pour over the oats and stir carefully to mix everything but without breaking up the oats too much. Divide between the baking trays. Bake in the preheated oven for around 40 minutes, gently turning the oats on the trays every ten minutes and also swapping the trays around between shelves. It might seem like a hassle but you want to ensure as even a bake as possible.

When the oats are a golden colour remove from the oven and allow to cool for a few minutes before moving all the granola mix onto either one of the trays or a clean roasting tray. While the mix is still very warm, scatted the fruits on top and mix up.

Once the granola is fully cooled down transfer to storage jars. I like to keep my granola in a biscuit tin lined with baking paper; I like to be able to scoop the granola from there into my bowl. The granola keeps for quite a while but is best eaten within 2 weeks. However, it is so tasty that I doubt anyone can keep it that long..



Friday 25 January 2013

Reciprocal dinners, and estofado del zapatero


A while back, I think in early November, my friends C. and E. suggested a dinner exchange between the three of us. The idea is to take turns cooking a mid-week dinner for the other two; just sharing a meal and a couple of hours of an evening as regularly as we have time for.

Having dinner with friends in the middle of the week is something I would really recommend. Why leave socialising for the weekend? Spending a couple of hours with friends on a Monday means, at least to me, that Tuesday is just a tad bit more fun. It is also interesting how the topics discussed over a dinner after work often has more to do with our day-to-day lives, while weekend dinner parties (with wine) more often go off in a more philosophical direction.

There are some restrictions in the diets of my two friends, meaning that meals tend to have to be vegetarian. I keep an eye out for new ideas, because although I was pescetarian (on a limited budget) for many years I have in my new omnivore diet a craving for more advanced vegetarian dishes than those I used to make. The main dish I plan to serve my friends next time I host the reciprocal dinner is a combination of two different dishes, both from Observer Food Monthly magazine. The theme of the 19 January issue was budget eating, something that suits me very well. Apart from a shockingly bad OFM cover (a closeup of plump, lipsticked lips and some chips of the fancier type), I liked the look of many of the recipes. I was especially caught by the vegetarian chickpea, pumpkin, spinach and walnut estofado by José Pizarro, and the savoury cobbler by Miss South. The idea for estofado del zapatero – my pidgin Spanish translation of estofado cobbler – was born. I should maybe point out that zapatero means cobbler as in the profession rather than the American favourite dessert. Hispanic friends, please forgive me this.

¡Mira el estofado del zapatero! Photo: Helene Frössling


Estofado del zapatero for four

Estofado:
1 small onion
6 garlic cloves
1 stick celery
1 can (400 g) chopped tomatoes
2 tbsp olive oil
1 can (400g) of cannelloni beans
1 medium butternut squash, peeled and cut into 1.5 cm chunks (around 700g of flesh)
600 ml vegetable stock
2 tsp ras-el-hanout (spice mix, can be found in good supermarkets and Middle Eastern shops)
1 tsp ground cumin
60g of fresh spinach leaves

Zapatero:
300g  plain flour
100g porridge oats
4 tsp baking powder
2 tsp mustard powder
4 tsp oil
300 ml yoghurt, plain

Turn on the oven at 200C.

First make a sofrito. Chop the onion and celery into small pieces, and fry over a low heat to soften. Add the crushed garlic towards the end, and let cook without burning for a minute or two. Add the can of tomatoes, making sure to mash any bigger chunks to make a smoother sofrito, and cook on until the juices have disappeared and the sofrito is quite dense. Add the chunks of butternut squash, the spices and the stock, and cook until the squash is tender. Up until this point you can prepare up to a couple of days in advance, and store in an airtight container in the fridge before reheating. You need the dish to be hot before the next step!

The next stage is to add the beans and let them heat through. Add the spinach and put the lid on to let the spinach wilt into the rest of the estofado. Check the seasoning.

The cobbler dough can be made while the butternut squash is cooking. In a large bowl mix the dry ingredients. Stir in the yoghurt and oil to create a dough. The dough should be soft and smooth, not sticky. Flatten out the dough on a lightly floured surface to no more than 1 cm thickness, and using for example a small glass or a cookie cutter make dough discs.

Transfer the estofado into an oven dish; mine measures roughly 25x25x5cm. Smooth out. Cover the top with the dough discs. Bake in the middle of the oven for around 25 minutes or until the discs have risen and are golden brown. Allow the dish to cool slightly for a few minutes before serving with a dressed green salad.



Tip: If you have any dough discs left when the estofado is covered, bake them on a small tray alongside the estofado to make a savoury scone – perfect with wintery soups!

Thursday 24 January 2013

Little joys

It seems that winter (as I have grown up in Sweden knowing it) has arrived to Scotland. On Monday the snow was falling already when I trudged from Morningside towards the office while it was still dark. Ten hours later it was still falling, with only a short mid-afternoon pause as if taking a deep breath like an endurance athlete. At times, through my office window, it seemed that the snow was rising towards the sky rather than falling from it.

On days like that day, when winter seems dark, cold and miserable, it is good to think about the little things that bring joy to the proceedings.

  • Unfolding the paper wrapper and slowly peeling the first blood orange of the season, eager to see just how ”bloody” it is.*  
  • Having a banana and blueberry pancake (made by the boyfriend) for breakfast, on a weekday, and enjoying it in bed with a mug of strong coffee on the side and Radio 4 news in the background.
  • Keeping my hands warm in the pair of thick wool mittens I knitted; the ones for which I got the pattern wrong and ended up creating a whole new design.
  • Putting back the colourful table cloth on my horrible kitchen table, and placing colourful cut flowers and bowls of fruit across it.

 Yes, sometimes it is good to look at the little joys and forget about those big problems for a day. It seems that the snow may still be falling at the end of it anyway.




* To avoid any Breaking Bad-esque suspense - it wasn't. The first blood orange of the season was more Disney than Django.

Wednesday 16 January 2013

Glamping, and a bowl of hot chilli


My boyfriend and I returned to Edinburgh from our respective family Christmases to true Scottish Hogmanay celebrations. Spending the last days of 2012 together with friends, and seeing in 2013 in the crowds on the Meadows, we were keen to have a few days just for ourselves. The search for somewhere to go began early in December and we ended up with a destination in the north of England, two hours’ drive from the Scottish capital. The area, Kielder Forest & Water, attracted with its remoteness, natural beauty and of course, the observatory. We found our haven at Wild Northumbrian, tucked away by Greenhaugh some 15 min drive from the actual Kielder Water, and stayed without electricity or running water in the secluded Merle Yurt. I have not done much camping in my life, while my boyfriend has camped a lot so this glamping weekend was a way of getting me into the camping spirit. It worked.

Knowing we would only have a wood-burning stove and a twin gas camping stove for cooking, we thought we would bring a couple of meals that just needed heating. I prepared a chilli to take along, which we ate by candlelight before going to an event at Kielder Observatory. The event, Shooting Stars, with the purpose of looking at the meteor shower of the Quadrantides, had to in the light of the atrocious weather conditions be changed to be a general lecture on astronomy.

I cook my chilli slowly and preferably in the oven. I like it smoky, rich and with a lot of chilli heat; those who are a bit careful with their heat may wish to add smaller quantities. For smokiness I use smoked chilli, smoked paprika and smoked bacon. No half measures here!

This is how I make it.

Two bowls of chilli, enjoyed by candlelight. Photo: Helene Frössling


Smoky chilli with beans for three hungry (or four modest) people

1 red pepper
1-2 smoked chilis of chipotle type (I get mine by online order from South Devon Chilli Farm)
One mug of hot coffee, around 250ml (not instant coffee!)
1 onion
2 rashers of smoked streaky bacon
1 tsp vegetable oil
1 garlic clove
1-2 fresh red chilli pepper
1 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp hot chilli powder
1 tsp smoked paprika
400 g minced beef, lean if you can find it
2 can of tinned tomatos, 400g each
1 tsp muscovado sugar
1 can of black-eyed beans

Turn on the grill. Rehydrate your dried chilis by submerging them in the hot coffee for 20 minutes or so.

Half the red pepper and remove seeds and stalk. Place with skin-side up on a baking tray and place under the grill until the skins blacken. Remove from the grill/oven and place in a bowl covered with cling-film for five minutes. Peel off the blackened skins and chop the peppers. Adjust your oven to 160C, remembering to switch the grill off.

Finely chop the onion and cut the bacon rashers into fine strips. In a cast-iron casserole over a medium heat fry the chopped onion and the bacon for 3-5 minutes until the onion is soft. Chop the garlic and fresh chilli(s) and add to the casserole, and cook for another minute. Now add in the minced beef, the smoked paprika, cumin and chilli powder, and stir regularly to cook through. Take the rehydrated chilis from the coffee and add around 100 ml of the by now luke-warm coffee to the casserole. Let it bubble away for a couple of minutes. Coarsely chop the rehydrated chilli and stir in together with the roasted pepper, canned tomatoes and sugar. Bring it back up to a simmer, then put on the lid and place in the oven. Check the progress every 20 min or so, stirring in more of the chilli coffee if it appears dry. If you want a leaner chilli, take the opportunity to skim off any fat on the surface every time you check on progress. After 1 h 20 min, drain the can of beans and add to the casserole, check the liquid level and return to the oven for 20-30 minutes.

Season with lemon or lime juice, salt and pepper.

Serve with your favourite sides: brown rice, tortillas, corn chips, soured cream.. I recommend crunchy iceberg lettuce leaves for scooping up hot chilli and adding a cooling factor. This chilli improves by being stored in a food container in the fridge for one or two days and reheated. 

Sunday 13 January 2013

Christmas nuts, and a recipe for the use of the same


I grew up in a household where we did not eat nuts. Both my parents were allergic to nuts and there was a suspicion that my sister and I would also develop nut allergy if we ate them so there was to be no nuts in the house. I never really spent much time thinking about this – it was just the way things were, and in Sweden in the 1980s and 1990s it was actually not too hard to avoid them.

My paternal grandparents (“farmor och farfar”) always had a bowl of nuts out at Christmas time. I should perhaps not say bowl – it was a low and wide breadbasket, woven from strands of birch bark and rendered a dark colour from much use and love. A mix of nuts would be laid out in this bowl, to be munched by my not-so nut allergic cousins. I did find it fascinating to see when others grabbed the nut-cracker and cracked the shell of some of those nuts. My young self observed that there always seemed to be mainly hazelnuts left, their shiny exterior almost reflecting each other like moist pebbles in the sea surf. But despite my fascination I never touched the nuts.

It is only in the last two or three years, since farmor and farfar have passed away, that nuts have become something of importance for me to have in my own home at Christmas time. I buy the nuts, and with a vintage nut cracker picked up at a flea market in Sweden a few summers ago I display those nuts on my sideboard, or with bowls of citrus fruit and chocolates on the coffee table. The only thing is that although I now eat nuts, I never seem to get stuck in with cracking them, despite having ample supply. Now that Christmas is long past I came up with a recipe for using up some of the left-over nuts.

Linguine, and brightly coloured walnut and rocket pesto. Photo: Helene Frössling


Walnut and rocket pesto for two

10-12 walnuts in their shells, or around 70 g of ready-shelled ones
50 g of rocket
50 ml rapeseed oil (cold pressed)
one small garlic clove
a lemon, for squeezing

Crack and shell the walnuts left from Christmas. Toast in a dry frying pan over a medium heat for a few minutes, taking care to not burn the nuts. If you can be bothered, rub off the skins while the nuts are still warm. I personally think it is worth the effort as the skins can be a bit bitter.

In a mini chopper, chop up around 50g of fresh rocket. Add the toasted walnuts, and chop more until it is coarsely chopped and mixed. Add in around 50ml of rapeseed oil, a crushed garlic clove, and a squirt or two of fresh lemon juice (say from half a small lemon). Taste to see if you need to adjust any of the quantities. There shouldn’t be a need to season.

To serve, cook pasta according to instructions. I like linguine for its ribbony-ness and twirlability, but do pick your pasta of choice. When the pasta is almost done, reserve some of the cooking liquid – around 100ml or so. Drain pasta quickly in a colander, and return to the saucepan straight away – the more of the cooking liquid that comes along the better. Slowly stir in the walnut and rocket pesto, and add a little of the cooking liquid to loosen up. Sprinkle over finely grated parmigiano reggiano (I prefer freshly grated there and then, but if you are of the type that like to buy ready-grated, use that. Just stay way from the powdery, dried stuff!) and stir a little bit more. Dish up the pasta on warmed plates or in bowls, and sprinkle over more grated parmigiano reggiano cheese, a little drizzle of rapeseed oil and a turn or two on the peppermill.