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. 

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.   

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..