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!

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.

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. 

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.