Exactly What I Needed

So tonight I threw together a pasta, quite simple, really almost no work. And it turned out to be exactly what I wanted tonight. Somehow fresh tasting, and still interesting enough to make it feel like a splendid meal. The chives I grew on the balcony last summer have survived, and I managed to find some fresh aragula lettuce. Yummy!

Yesterday I had dinner at a friends house, which included asparagus and some salsicca that was oh sooo tasty. I wonder if I will regret not going to the right store when getting some sausages to go with the risotto I was planning for tomorrow, when my mother will be visiting. Let's hope the ones I have will do.

And, the lentil soup I made on Monday by the way : It was extremely simple. Some minced onion (one small) and pancetta (four slices) sauted in a little oil. Vegetable stock (or should it be broth, I'm uncertain of the difference of those words in English? anyway, about 750 ml, a little more than 3 cups) and lentils (200 grams, about 7 oz) added, together with salt, a little pepper and few crumbled leaves of fresh thyme. Cooked until lentils where nice and soft and served with a little lemon juice and grilled pancetta. Be carefull not to throw all the grilled pancetta on the kitchen floor, pancetta is quite fatty and you will immediately need to clean the floor (speaking from experience). :)

A Decadent Saturday, and A Somewhat More Austere Monday

It seems as if I'm eaten at other peoples homes more than at my own place lately... And even though it's not entirely true, since I don't bring I do get less pictures to put here. I also was totally amazingly lazy duringn the weekend, and except for this one meal from Saturday afternoon I didn't really make anything I could even think of putting here, even though I'm trying to keep my ambitions for what's allowed here not too high. The idea of putting my dinners here was to motivate me to cook anything at all right now, remember? But this, on the other hand, was extremely good. So maybe that makes up for it? I don't buy meat for myself that often, but since I was doing my shoping downtown in a store that has very good meat from a farmm just outside town, I couldn't really resist. And polenta with blue cheese doesn't make it worse, don't you think?

Today though, after a lazy weekend, I went for something a bitmore healthy... Lentils, and pancetta soup with garlic toast, though I managed to burn the toasts a bit. And I don't want to talk about the pancetta... Really, I managed to get a first batch all over the kitchen table when I tried to turn them to grill the other side. I think some cleaning godess heard my secret thought about that I could maybe get away with not cleaning the kitchen floor until later in the week. But it made me feel a lot better about being lazy all weekend. Both the cleaning and the soup. And I can have lunch from the leftovers tomorrow. :)

My Favourite Potato Salad

This potato salad was first made for me by my Bulgarian roommate Petya in Prague. She made it when she had recieved a care package, containing among other things Bulgarian goat cheese from her mother. She was a bit homesick at times, and I think this warm salad reminded her of food from home. And it's one of the best potato salads I've ever had, so I make it every now and then. It was March when she made it there, so it was made from winter potatoes. I don't think I had had potato salad that wasn't made from new potatoes before, but this works fine, at least tastewise. It looks a bit mushy though. And I had no Bulgarian goat cheese, so I used some lebneh that I found at a local ethnic store some time ago, which made it even mushier, but still tasty. I don't know if I mentioned it yesterday, but I finally had time enough to make some bread to. I used it for the toast. And then, now I just finished my dessert. Sometimes there's nothing like a cup of hot chocolate.

To Get A Lot Out Of A Little

The title refers to getting a lot of dinner out of relatively little work. And I'd say that's certainly what I did. I made some soup tonight, but the sallad was just using up leftover beans and adding some tomato. The soup was great though, made from a vegetable I had no idea what the English name for was, but according to wikipedia it seems to be called sunchoke or Jerusalem artichoke. Anyway, under it's Swedish name (jordärtsskocka) I have gladly used it for a long time. It's great in a potato gratin, or roasted, but it might be even better pureed in a creamy soup.
You see, spring hasn't really started yet up here. The birches are just beginning to look faintly green. On Saturday I went to a barbecue at some friends place, and they had actually sown some carrots about a week ago (so, still long time before anything is up really), but they have a very well protected place to keep them with a good micro climate. I'm considering sowing the coming weekend in my community garden. But from this part of the country there is still really -nothing- that has been growing this year. Sunchokes, on the other hand, can be harvested throughout winter when the ground isn't frozen. (At least I think so?) So while I read about a lot of people starting to use spring ingredients, that's not for me yet. If anyone is interested, the season for local strawberries up here is in July... On the other hand, the sun just dissapeared behind another building from my northern window. So, when season is here, it's here for real :)

Kitchen Therapy

So, I'm back home. Actually, I came back on Monday night, though I wasn't able to enter the appartment until after midnight, due to forgotten keys and security guards taking an hour to come and let me in. It was rather cold here on Monday night, about one degree above freezing. Guess who felt extreeeeemely foolish for forgetting keys? Because of all that, I was rather tired yesterday, and didn't manage to do what I thought, namely make one of those dinner posts I mentioned earlier. But here I am today! I actually got inspired and cooked a bit more seriously than I usually do for myself. And it was tasty. And I even got dessert!
While in France, I bought a book called le Petit Larousse de la Cuisine or something similar (I left the book with D. since it was rather heavy to carry back). I'm planning to use it next time I go there, since even though I can usually cook what I want, I really don't know that many of the ingredients names in French. So I thought, if I have a cookbook I can buy what it tells me, and maybe I'll learn some new words. But, this book also have some preliminary words on how to eat, very fascinating to compare with Swedish recommendations. For example, cheese was, as I understood it recommended to eat after both lunch and dinner, dayly. And dessert. So today, I took this to heart (not the cheese though) and cooked two different courses, and cut up some melon to have for dessert. For someone who usually just throws together some pasta with something to make it taste good when cooking for noone else, this is quite a feat. :)
The photo shows everything together. First some beans fried with onions and sweet pepper, then an improvised rice dish with spinach and hazelnuts and some melon with honey and yoghurt. I know this is no way a gourmet meal, but it was tasty, and the cooking of it really helped me slow down after a rather hectic day back at work.

Cheesecake Pops with the Daring Bakers

First of all, I have to admitt that I'm a convert. I really didn't think much of cheesecake before this last Friday. I have eaten it in cafés occasionaly, but it always seemed somewhat rubbery and not all that interesting. Now I know that it isn't cheesecake I'm not so impressed with, but rather that I did have not very impressing cheesecake. A huge thank you to this months Daring Bakers hostesses, Elle of Feeding My Enthusiasms and Deborah of Taste and Tell, for challenging me to do this! I'm afraid I'm hooked.

Life is terribly busy at the moment, and this in addition to the fact that I feel quite lonely and not really up to baking with D. gone made me think that I wouldn't do this months challenge. But Friday afternoon on my way home I dropped by the grocery store (mainly because I needed to shop something for dinner) and in the end I bought cream cheese and cream (the two ingredients I didn't already have) and made a batch after dinner. I made a tiny batch, dividing the original recipe into five, and then, feeling a bit sorry for myself all alone on a Friday night I ate part of it as soon as it cooled down a bit. (Yum, that's when I realised I've only had bad cheesecake, and felt much better.) Yesterday, I dipped it in chocolate and som chopped pistagios. So, I don't have time for a long post, but this is my afternoon snack yesterday. And yes, I will have to make this again! The recipe, by the way can be found on Deborah's blog, linked above. I know many people had problems with their cheesecake no setting, but I had none at all. On the other hand, I baked my fifth of what was supposed to be one cake for the 45 minutes prescribed... So I can understand that people who went for the whole batch had trouble. Anyway, thank you again to our hostesses, and sorry about my short not very interesting post this month. Too many deadlines... I'll be back in a week with a report from France!

Trying To Find My Mind Again

So, D. left for France little more than a week ago. And here I am, trying to find out how to live on my own again. It's a bit lonely, but I'm getting by. I can't wait until I get to go down south too, to have a look. In the meantime, I try to keep up my interest in cooking. I still need to eat, and I still prefer to eat good. So I try to come up with things that makes me keep cooking interesting stuff. First of all, I'm trying to clean out all weird leftovers in the pantry and fridge. We did clean out the freezer this winter, the last really cold weekend, when we could safely leave everything out on the balcony while defrosting. Now I'll try to get rid of all things that just got forgotten there. I found three kinds of noodles for example. About one million kinds of sauces and stuff. Four kinds of rice (we regularly eat two of them though). So my new rule is that I can only buy stuff that can be used in a dish with something that needs finishing.

My second thought was to try to take photos of my dinners and put here. Not really writing down all the recipes, but putting the picture here, like a dinner dairy. I took a picture tonight, and I'll try to get it up tomorrow. Let's see if I can make a few posts like that.

Anyway, I haven't posted for a long time, so I thought I should. I'll try to be back with something more interesting soon. :)