Chimichurri tomato salad with halloumi

It's been a while since my last post. It wasn't supposed to be that long... Life got a bit hectic this week. All good hectic, but no time for crafting, cooking or blogging. I saw friends, did pilates, and I can't even remember what I did on Tuesday and why I didn't have time to blog then, but it was something I'm sure. I was so tired last night I couldn't even be bothered to plan the weekend's cooking so we are going to have roast chicken this weekend. Again. Sigh. I am a failure as a food blogger! However, this morning I had a browse through the blogosphere and found this amazing recipe for chimichurri tomato salad on Tartelette. It looked so amazing that I had to try it out immediately!

Our own tomato season is still far away, although the tomato plants in the greenhouse are growing at lighting speed and a few flowers have already been spotted. Luckily the tomatoes in the grocery store have started to look red instead of that pale orange-y colour they have been all winter. So I bought myself a bunch of tomatoes and picked the herbs for the chimichurri right out of my own garden for this refreshing salad which is exploding with taste. The original recipe consists of the salad served with battered halloumi. I thougth I would keep it a bit healthier and just serve the halloumi lightly grilled without the panko crust, but hop over to the original blog post for a look for the crusted alternative.

Chimichurri tomato salad with halloumi (serves 2 as main or 4 as appetizer):
For the chimichurri:
1 cup parsley
1 tsp sea salt
1/2 tsp black pepper
4 cloves of garlic
1/3 cup chives
juice of one lemon
1/4 cup olive oil

For the salad:
1 lb (450 g) tomatoes
1/4 to 1/3 cup chimichurri
1/2 red onion
1 cup micro greens
1 lb (450 g) halloumi

The howto:
Take all the ingredients for the chimichurri and blitz them in a food processor until finely chopped. For the salad, slice the tomatoes and finely slice the onion. Mix all ingredients apart from the halloumi. Slice the halloumi into thick slices and pan fry over medium heat for a few minutes per side until it has turned golden. Serve immediately.

The verdict:
This is a super easy and quick salad. I think the chimichurri which is exploding with flavours from the parsley, chives and garlic goes really well with the salty halloumi. I served the salad with a bit of bacon on the side as well to appease the meat-eater in the house (and we had a few slices of bacon which needed using up so I thought why not). I was afraid that the combination of the salty bacon and halloumi would be to much, but it was well balanced by the strong flavours of the chimichurri and the sweet tomatoes. I can't wait to make this from my own tomatoes, which will be even more sweeter than the store bought ones. 

I have to admit, the measures in the recipe above are directly from the Tartlette recipe. When I made my salad, I couldn't be bothered to measure anything, just used what I thought would be a good amount of the ingredients and made a serving for two (I used 3 big red tomatoes and 4 medium sized yellow tomatoes, 2 cloves of garlic, 125 g halloumi and the rest of the ingredients to taste). If you have any chimichurri left after making the salad, it keeps for a day or two in the fridge and goes great with grilled beef

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When tzatziki met potato salad

I was ecstatic earlier in the week when I thought we would possibly be moving in a couple of weeks. Well, I was wrong as usual and seems like the move will happen either the last weekend of July or first weekend of August. I simply cannot understand how everything can take so long, and I don't have the patience for all these delays. I need to get into a proper home, this bachelor pad is driving me mad. And I do realise these are first world problems, I should be happy to have a job and a roof over my head. But I can't really bake anything properly here as most of my kitchen stuff is packed in boxes and there is no room to unpack the boxes. And I'm going crazy as there is no space for crafting. I swear, once I get my craft room up and running I will be spending every spare moment in there. I have so many new stamp sets to try out, not to mention my Tim Holtz Distress paints which I ordered in late May as a birthday present to myself, and still haven't been able to try out. 

Another thing I will be happy to get rid of is the grocery store around the corner. Admittedly, it's super handy to be able to pop by whenever you need something, but at the same time, it is way too easy to stop by and get something when you get a craving. Last week, we had the fridge full of proper food but it was too hot to eat warm food, so instead I just popped by the grocery store every evening to get some bread and then ate way too much bread for supper. Not good! Moving out to the middle of nowhere should at least stop me from doing that! Today it's really warm again, not that I'm complaining (too much), but I couldn't bear the thought of warm food so I whipped up this refreshing and really easy summery salad. It's the love child of a one night stand between tzatziki and a potato salad.

Tzatziki potato salad (serves 2):
4 potatoes
1/2 cucumber
1/3 small onion (or a few scallions)
3-4 tbsp greek yoghurt
a handful of mint leaves
a pinch of salt
(garlic)

The howto:
Peel potatoes and chop into bite size cubes. Boil until soft but still firm. Let cool. Cut cucumber into thin strips (I slice first and then cut the slices into strips) and finely chop onion or scallions and garlic if you are using it. Also finely chop the mint. Mix all ingredients. Serve with a thick slice of garlic bread, I also added tinned tuna and a hard boiled egg to make a meal out of it. 

The verdict:
This salad was pretty much created because I felt eating tzatziki for lunch all on it's own was somehow wrong. Adding potatoes not only made it feel more like an acceptable meal, it also made it a bit more man-friendly and the culinary consultant seemed happy with the meal. I loved the salad, the yoghurt and mint make it so fresh and summery. Apart from the time it took to boil the potatoes, throwing this salad together took no more than a few minutes. I didn't add any garlic to the salad, as I was serving the meal with a slice of roasted garlic bread, which in itself is really garlic-y. But if you are serving the salad with regular bread, a clove of finely chopped garlic is a great addition.

Steak ciabatta

Cooking hasn't been very strongly on the menu lately (if you excuse my pun). I spent last week unemployed. Well, if you can call a week of vacation between jobs unemployment. I spent my week cleaning out my old apartment and then cleaning the Culinary Consultant's bachelor pad. And more often then not, while scrubbing walls/floors/bathtubs/sinks (you get the drift) I felt like moving in together might not have been the best decision. And I'm still worried about the exponential increase in housekeeping and gardening time when we move into the new place. But worrying about it won't help. And this week has been a bit easier as I haven't had any time to either clean or worry. First week at the new job. Immediately on the first day there was so much to do. So much new things to learn. I hardly notice when lunch-time comes around. I was worried that after my last job which was moving at the pace of a snail in glue, I wouldn't be capable of working ever again. But seems like the more there is to do, the more I get done. And I realise it's still early days, and I'm getting away easily working on only one project, I am looking forward to really getting my claws into the work.

Possibly the most monumental change is still coming. I have realised this week there is now way I can keep going to my old gym. I was determined to make it work somehow, but after not getting home before nine pm any night that I have been going to the gym, I have realised that I simply have to give it up. I can't spend several hours a day travelling to or from the gym. I am devastated about having to give up my instructors, they are just the best in the world. It is a bit of a comfort that the new gym will have significantly lower membership fees than my current one. And a really cool spa with different saunas, foot baths and scented showers (yes, I was like 'wooot?' too!). So maybe it will work out (again, sic). 

In the spirit of I have hardly spent any time awake at home this week, this isn't really a recipe. It's more like a quickie dinner idea. It turned out rather delicious so I felt I shouldn't keep it from you. 

Steak and pesto ciabatta (serves 2-3):
1 ciabatta (I used one with olives)
3 tbsp tomato pesto (or any other pesto you happen to have around)
6 cherry tomatoes
2 tbsp mayo (I used 1 tbsp herb and garlic mayo and 1 tbsp regular)
1 gigantic rump steak the size of your ciabatta
butter and olive oil for cooking the steak
salt and pepper for seasoning

The howto:
Heat your frying pan until really hot. Add butter and olive oil onto the pan, and add the steak. Cook for one minute, turn and cook for another minute. Season. Wrap in foil and let rest for five minutes. While the steak is resting, half the ciabatta lengthwise and add pesto and tomatoes to one side and mayo to the other. Add the meat (I poured the cooking juices onto the ciabatta as well). Cut into slices and enjoy immediately.

The verdict:
Well, this isn't exactly haute cuisine. But it's quick, easy and rather tasty. Nothing like a big slab of red meat every once in a while when you drag yourself home exhausted after the gym. And after paying quite a lot for my slab of meat, I was very relieved I managed to cook it to a perfect medium. I don't have the best track record of cooking meat. But this time I had really good advice from the nice gentleman at the meat counter at Waitrose. We got to chatting, and turns out he used to live in Helsinki for a while! It's a small world after all.

Balsamic chicken

I know I have been the world's worst blogger lately. Life just has an awful way of getting in the way with the things I want to do. I am hoping that some of the things that have been taking up so much of my time will be resolved after next week, in fact I'm keeping all my fingers and toes crossed. I cooked something on Friday, but after a little misunderstanding on dinner timing with the Culinary Consultant, I was so hungry by the time I took it all out of the oven that I forgot to take pictures. Major fail as well, as it was really delicious. Sundried tomato and cream cheese stuffed chicken fillets wrapped in bacon, and served with a tomato and mushroom sauce and garlic and cream potatoes. At least that gives me a chance to recreate that meal another time.

So for now, there will be nothing too exciting, just something I whipped up a while ago. I'm continuing on my theme of Ugly Food. But when you see the list of ingredients for this dish, you understand there was no way to make it pretty. But again, you have to look beyond appearances. If you could only have experienced the scent drifting from my oven and spreading all over my tiny flat. And if you would have been there when I bit into my first bite of this chicken, you would understand why those horrible ugly lumps of chicken meat have made it to the blog.

There are two highlights during my day at work. The ultimate highlight is leaving the place, obviously, but a close second is lunchtime. I get together with my friends, and we forget all about work for a while and just chat about something fun or silly. That's one of the advantages of speaking a foreign language, you can talk about the most inappropriate things at lunch and don't have to worry about anyone overhearing. 

Food-wise my lunch is not exactly a culinary highlight. My usual lunch is very boring. Chicken salad. It consists of a few big handfuls of baby spinach, half a cucumber, ten cherry tomatoes, a sweet pepper and a chicken fillet. Thats 320 calories right there, in the bag. Usually I just bake the chicken fillet in the oven with a dash of garlic pepper on top. That gets boring very quickly. Sometimes I do go crazy and mix it up a bit. Tuna instead of chicken, maybe with a hard boiled egg on the side. Sometimes I add some beans. Or, if I really want to make it special, I add a tablespoon of dressing. 

I was trying to find new low carb food inspiration, so I was browsing through my old Bootcamp recipe book. It's full of great, healthy recipes and this was one of them. I wasn't quite convinced when I read the list of ingredients but decided to give it a go anyways. Well, to be quite honest, this isn't much of a recipe, it's just a really yummy marinade. It takes all of about a minute of your time. 

Balsamic chicken (serves 4):
4 chicken fillets
3 tbsp balsamic vinegar
1 tsp honey
1 tsp Dijon mustard
1 tsp oregano (dried)

The howto:
Mix all the ingredients (except the chicken fillets) together. Coat the chicken fillets with the marinade, and leave over night in the fridge. Cook in 200 degrees C for 20-25 minutes, or until juices run clear (cooking time depends on the size of the fillets, but be sure not to overcook them, as that makes them dry).

I like to use a Lock&Lock plastic container for the marinade. It's totally liquid and smell proof, and its easy to just chuck everything in there, close the lid tightly and give it a good shake to distribute the marinade evenly. You could also use one of those big ziplock bags, but first of all I don't trust the seal to actually stay sealed all through the process, and even more importantly, I don't want to use anything disposable if I can avoid it. 

The verdict:
I really liked the sweetness of the honey and the balsamic in this recipe. But then again, I absolutely love sweet flavours in food. I very rarely add any sugar (or honey, syrup etc) in my food, as I don't want to get used to cooking my food too sweet. But sometimes it's really nice to treat yourself a little. And this chicken certainly made my lunch salad much more enjoyable. I like it that it's really quick and still gives great flavour, and you can cook a big bunch of fillets ahead of time, freeze them individually and then always have chicken available to pop into the lunch box.


Card of the day:
This time the card of the day is a very simple one. I made it to try out a new stamp I bought a while ago. The stamp (called Thistle) is just one of those HobbyCraft stamps that are sold individually, and while they are clearly not the most high quality stamps out there, they are perfect when you are just starting out your papercrafting hobby as you don't have to break the bank to get a few stamps to create variability in your projects. I used VersaColor, which is very handy as it comes in small pads, again allowing the buildup of several different colours without going bankrupt. Here I used Cyan (19), Turquoise (20) and Violet (17) onto HobbyCraft ivory cardstock. I then heat embossed with Ranger super fine detail clear embossing powder. The sentiment is from HobbyCraft Clear Stamps General Sentiments 21 pk, and the little fuzzball is from the Kanban clear stam set Flower Scrolls. I finished by sponging on some TIm Holtz Distress ink Broken China onto the edges, attached the sentiment with dimensionals and snailed it all onto C6 Kraft card from Craft UK Limited. The finishing touch was a spray of Perfect Pearls mist. Click here for a video of the amazing Tim showing you how to make your own mist. I used the colour Perfect Pearl which is a clear colour. You can really see the lovely shiny sparkle on the card. I think the card turned out quite good, and it's a good example you don't necessarily need all the bells and whistles out there to make a pretty card. Not to say I wouldn't like all the bells and whistles... But stamping is fun, and making a card doesn't have to take more than a few minutes.

Friday quickie - cheese and puff pastry wheels

This is one from the archives. I was actually preparing another post, but got distracted, so I thought I might as well finally get this one posted as it has been waiting for it's turn for such a long time. It's a true Friday quickie. It's so quick it's technically not a recipe at all. And it might not have been the healthiest recipe ever. But oh so good...

I was writing up a post about soft pretzels, and fear not, it's still coming. But after getting halfway through writing that post, for some obscure reason I decided to finally get back to tweeting again. That turned out to be a bit of a project, as I had to have my password reset for my twitter account. My last tweet was from June last year, you can't expect me to remember what my password could have been. When I finally figured out my twitter username (@pinkunicornfood by the way, please feel free to stop by and say hi, I feel so lonely out there in twitterspace), I realised I had connected that account to a really old email I no longer use. So I tried to swap it to my unicornmail, but Twitter told me that email was already linked to another account. Which I thought was odd, since my other twitter account is linked to my main email account. After a bit of detective work I figured out that my unicornmail was actually linked up to a third twitter account, a really ancient one I set up ages ago when I first tried out twitter. I haven't used it for a few years at least. So I realised I have three twitter accounts (but a total of six or so tweets between all of the accounts...) and three emails. I needed to swap the emails around, but because twitter won't let you make up a fake email address, I actually had to go and create a fourth email for myself so that I could switch the really old twitter account to that new email address which I have no intention of ever using. Then I was finally able to swap my food twitter account over to my unicornmail. This whole thing is getting slightly ridiculous, with so many accounts and passwords to remember. And on top of that there are all the gazillions of passwords to remember for work. I'm all for some sort of fingerprint or retinal scan or DNA based identification method to grant access to all the electronic devices and accounts we use. That way we wouldn't have to remember a thing. That would just be so convenient. Do you have some great tips how to remember your various passwords?

Cheese puff pastry wheels:
500 g puff pastry
250 g grated cheddar or other cheese of choice
2 tbsp garlic pachadi, or you could substitute by finely chopping 1-2 cloves of garlic and mixing with 2 tbsp of olive oil

The howto:
Preheat oven to 200 degrees C. Roll out puff pastry to a rectangle. If you roll it out really thin the puffs get more flaky and crunchy, whereas a slightly thicker pastry stays softer (the way I like it, just a bit gooey in the centre) Spread cheese and pachadi (or garlic oil) on top. Roll together like a swiss roll, and cut into chunks. Brush with egg wash or milk and bake until golden on top and cheese is bubbling, about 20-25 minutes.

The verdict:
What is there to say. Wonderfully flaky puff pastry and cheese. Make sure you buy the good, all butter puff pastry because it makes a huge difference. The cheese puffs look so tiny and innocent, but you can't walk past without popping one into your mouth. Then another when you walk past again. And then you are making up excuses to walk past them some more. And then magically they are all just gone. 

These are great to serve as an appetizer or late night snack with some wine and grapes. Endless opportunities for variation by using blue cheese, goat's cheese, feta or whichever cheese strikes your fancy. Best friend made some really tasty cheesy wheels using a strong cheddar with ground black pepper, and they were really tasty. 

Friday quickie: Pan fried fennel and onion

I have so many weird things and oddities when it comes to cooking. Well, to be completely honest, I think I'm just weird in general based on how different my conception of life, love and everything else seems to be to the majority of people on this planet. But without going more into detail about that (because it would take a week long therapy session), the one food weirdness I was specifically referring to in this case is how I love love love when you come across a recipe and realise you have all the ingredients readily available at home. No need to nip of to the store to buy just a little bit of this, a jar of that or a tin of some sorts. 

I also love buying foods that stay good in the fridge for a while. Salads, lettuce and tomatoes all have to be eaten very quickly. But then you have your carrots, sweet potatoes, cabbage, celery. They will nicely keep in the fridge for more than a week, and you can turn to them when you have eaten all your foods which go bad quickly. And this time, in my fridge, I had very little else than a lonely bulb of fennel. I had planned to use it for a soup or stew or whatnot, but because of the great fire of 2012, I forgot all about it. Until I had eaten pretty much everything else from my fridge. And I try not to grocery shop during the week, mostly for practical reasons. First of all, if you only shop once a week (and have to carry everything home for the duration of a 35-40 minute walk from the supermarket) you tend to focus on the essentials, and not grab too many impulse buys. I always try to plan my eating ahead for one week, jut it into my food diary and make a shopping list. This works well if you have the whole weekend free to shop and cook. But that hasn't quite happened in the last... say four months or so. Funny coincidence that.

So there it was, the lonely fennel. The fridge light casting harsh shadows on the triple protruding fingerlike extremities. Poor fennel, feeling lost, alone and forgotten. But fear not! There is a place for you, dear fennel, a reason for your existence. And that place is of course in a pan, with some butter. It took me a while to figure it out, but Google helped me find this recipe from Eatpress. And dear fennel, because I didn't want you to feel lonely, I decided to add an onion to the pan to keep you company.

Pan fried fennel (serves 1-2):
1 bulb of fennel
1 onion
1 tsp oil
1 tsp butter 
2 tbsp balsamic vinegar (I used 12 year aged pomegranate balsamic vinegar)

The howto:
Slice fennel and onion. Heat oil and butter in a pan, and add fennel and onion slices when butter has turned golden. Cook until desired consistency, about five minutes. Move fennel and onion onto a plate, and add balsamic vinegar to the pan. Make sure to scrape off all that butter and burned bits from the pan. Cook the vinegar for a minute or two until it has thickened a bit. Pour on top of the veggies and serve immediately.

The verdict:
I rarely use butter for frying, I always go for vegetable or coconut oil. So this really tasted like restaurant food to me, with the lovely flavour from the butter combining with the sweetness from the balsamic and the aniseed flavour of the fennel. Really simple ingredients, simple and quick to make and tasted absolutely divine. This will be my preferred way to serve fennel.