I think I'm suffering from post-birthday depression. Or maybe it's just the miserable weather. Or the fact that the roads were really congested today when I was trying to get home. Or maybe the fact that my crafting mojo is gone and no-where to be found except for a few half-forced cards. I just think it's one of those days, or weeks. But hopefully the sun will return soon along with Mr Mojo and all will be well in the world again. I should be excited about my upcoming holiday, and plan holiday clothes and places to see and things to do. But to be honest, I think both me and Sis are looking forward to a really relaxing holiday with nothing to do but slouch poolside or on the beach, eat too much and read a ridiculous amount of books while going to bed early and sleeping in late. Which brings me to the big question - should I get a Kindle? Usually I read all my books on my iPad, but it's not very good in sunlight. But is it worth getting a Kindle just for a holiday? The Nook is a more reasonable price, but the books are so expensive. Choices, choices... Maybe I'll just go old school and buy paper, but I hate accumulating stuff. Well, at least other than crafting stuff. After having moved from one country to another you have a newfound appreciation for digital books, music and movies. If you could only get digital cookware as well...
Ok, enough rambling, and on to the main star of the show. As usual I wanted to cook something special for our weekend brunch. I had spied this recipe during the week and just had to try it. Anything with an egg in it will get a go in the InvisiblePinkKitchen. This recipe is slightly modified from the original, which can be found on a blog called This Gal Cooks. I added onion and bacon as I happened to have some lying around. I also replaced all the dried herbs with fresh ones from my garden. By the way, just to assure you, we do eat other things beside brunches from time to time in this house. One day I will post a dinner or lunch recipe, just to prove a point... But not next time, next time it's all about baking again (oooh, what a cliffhanger, eh?).
Sausage and sweet potato filled mushroom (serves 2):
1 tbsp olive oil
1/2 red onion
1 small sweet potato
sausage meat from 1 sausage
1 rasher of bacon
1/4 tsp dried thyme
1/4 tsp dried basil
1/4 tsp dried oregano
1/4 tsp black pepper
2 portobello mushrooms with stems removed
1 tbsp olive oil
1/4 tsp salt
1 tbsp grated parmesan
2 eggs
The howto:
Preheat oven to 190 degrees C. Chop the sweet potato into small cubes and slice the bacon. Heat up the olive oil in a frying pan. Add the onion and cook for a few minutes until it starts to soften. Add the sweet potato, sausage and bacon, and cook until cooked through. Break up the sausage while cooking, to the consistency of minced meat. Add the finely chopped herbs and pepper and cook for another few minutes. Take off the heat.
Brush the oil on the top of the mushrooms and sprinkle lightly with salt (can be omitted). Turn the mushrooms around (i.e. tops down) and spoon the filling into the caps. Make a well in the middle of the filling and sprinkle generously with parmesan. Gently crack the egg into the well. Cook in the oven for about 15-20 minutes depending on how runny you like your yolk. Mine were perfect after 15 minutes.
The verdict:
I thought this looked rather good when I saw the recipe, but I wasn't quite sure if it would really work with the sweet potato in there. Well, trust me, it does. It makes a really delicious brunch or lunch. I particularly liked the fact that the mushroom was cooked through, but the egg yolk was still lovely and runny. It was a bit tricky to try and get the egg to stay in the well in the stuffing, make sure to slide the egg into the well very slowly to increase your chance of success.
I actually prepared a good double serving of the filling, and made four mushrooms. Two for brunch and two as sides with dinner the next day (yes, it works for that as well. If you feel too weird to have an egg with dinner, just leave it out). And I still had some stuffing left over, so I took it with me to work for lunch the next day. That is good value from one cooking session and from relatively cheap ingredients as well.
Today, after work, I was supposed to clean my apartment. Vacuum, do the dishes, scrub the ladies room. I was going to do laundry and then read a few papers and edit the book chapter I'm writing so that I could finally send it off to my boss (it's only four days late so far...). And above all, I was supposed to eat healthily. I have been trying to be good all week, but on Tuesday I baked chocolate-courgette bread (which I will post about soon), and yesterday I got a lovely lovely parcel from back home with all sorts of goodies I couldn't keep my hands off. Particularly, I got rye bread, which I have been eating for two days now (with butter, of course!) and Dominos. Dominos are the best biscuits ever! They are like Oreos, but much better. And this year there is a new Domino, the Domino Super, which has more of the white creamy dreamy filling than the traditional one. So of course I asked my mum to ship some over ASAP. And they were pretty much gone at the speed of light.
Anyways, when I got home from work (after biking 10 miles, and doing my weekly grocery shopping and cycling home from the store in the pouring rain for 15 minutes) I ate a Domino, two tablespoons of jam straight out of the jar, dates and a piece of banana cake. Dates are evil! Almost as addictive as raisins. I don't know what evil came over me today at the grocery store to make me buy some. I know I can't keep my fingers off them. Sigh. Oh well, after this, surely I cleaned and ate healthily? Oh, are you kidding me. I did pop a sweet potato into the oven, but they take like... forever... to cook. So meanwhile I just whipped up a batch of creamy lemon bars (which I will blog about next, I promise). Not that I made them for me, I'm seeing a friend tomorrow who likes all things lemony. And surely I won't touch them tonight. Of course not! Well I do have to taste a little bit. But not because I would want to, but just to make sure they are good enough to give to someone else. That might or might not require me to sample half of the batch. But it's important to get samples from all over the baking tin, so that I can be assured the pieces from the middle are as good as the ones on the sides. Anyone know where the closest carboholics anonymous meeting is? And do they serve coffee and doughnuts there? Which reminds me, I really want a doughnut pan, there are so many lovely recipes for baked doughnuts on Pinterest, it's driving me doughnuts!
Ok, so that was today's random ramblings over and done with. So, onto todays quickie. It's just something my twisted mind thought up because I had some left over sweet potatoes that needed to be used, as well as an over-ripe avocado. So I thought a nice oven baked sweet potato with tuna-avocado salad can never go wrong. And because I recently made a lovely soup with roasted cauliflower and roasted garlic (once again something for a future post), I thought while I have the oven all fired up, why not roast an onion in there as well to throw in the tuna salad. Of course the avocado turned out to be so over ripe it wasn't edible anymore (which is so annoying as they are crazy expensive). But this crazy concoction still turned out pretty amazing. And it's quick to whip together, the only thing that takes time is to bake the sweet potato. But you can use the time wisely, like I did by baking something. Or maybe even clean if you are a better person than me.
Baked sweet potato with tuna and roasted onion salad (serves 2):
2 sweet potatoes
1 onion
1 tin of tuna
2 hard boiled eggs
1/2 sweet pepper
2 spring onions
(1 avocado)
black pepper
cayenne pepper
salt
dried coriander (or whatever other herbs you like, dill would probably be great too)
fresh basil leaves or some other herb
(possibly some olive oil if you are not using tuna in oil and not adding the avocado)
The howto:
Wrap the sweet potatoes and onion in foil individually, and bake in 175 degrees for an hour. Meanwhile boil the eggs. When sweet potatoes and onion is baked, unwrap the onion, but keep the sweet potatoes wrapped to keep them warm. Make the salad in a food processor. Start by adding the onion, eggs, sweet pepper, spring onions and spices, and grind until smooth. Add tuna and quickly pulse. If you happen to have an avocado which is still the proper avocado colour and does not collapse into itself when you touch it, add it to the salad, and pulse quickly, just enough for everything to be mixed. Serve immediately.
The verdict:
The whole idea with the tuna salad was supposed to be the avocado, as I thought it would bring a nice creaminess without having to add mayo. However, now I will never know. Well at least not until I make it again. Because I certainly will. Just the baked onion and eggs did add quite a bit of creaminess, and I think next time if I add the avocado, I will only use one egg. I could also imagine replacing tuna with chicken would work quite well. Maybe add some curry in that case to the spices. Not too shabby considering that all ingredients are pretty much things I always keep stocked at home anyways. I think my traditional Friday night lentil soup has got some serious competition.
They say if you wait patiently the perfect one will come along eventually. I was lucky enough to find the perfect baking blog already a while ago, and I've mentioned it several times in previous posts. This is of course the brilliant Kinuskikissa. Last week, I also found the perfect food blog, Kauhaa ja rakkautta (this is a Finnish pun on the saying rauhaa ja rakkautta which means peace and love, whereas kauha means ladle so it translates roughly to ladle and love). Usually, when browsing blogs you get one or two ideas from each, but then pretty much ignore the rest. For these two, I want to cook every single recipe. I can't choose. I browse the blogs for hours, and am starting to feel like I know all recipes by heart. I guess when you find the right one, you just know it in your heart. As an additional bonus, I found an old blog by the same person who writes Kauhaa ja rakkautta, which will keep me drooling long after I tried every recipe in Kauhaa ja rakkautta.
Why do I keep raving on about these Finnish blogs? Maybe I should read some blogs from other countries as well? I do. There are so many great food blogs out there. But like I said, the ones mentioned above just feel different. I'm not sure why that is though. Many, if not most of the recipes in the blogs are not traditional Finnish, but a mix of many different places around the world. But they have been chosen by someone who shares the food culture with me, so maybe they have picked recipes that are particularly well suited for the Finnish palate. Maybe it's easier to imagine how things taste when they are made of ingredients I'm familiar with ever since my childhood (especially true for baking, there are several ingredients I need to have imported from back home if I want to bake something a bit out of the ordinary). I'll probably keep returning to this point every time I cook something using Finnish, imported ingredients. I don't think I am homesick much (apart from missing my family and friends of course) and I don't think the UK is a bad place to live or that the selection of food in the grocery stores would be poor. Not at all, I have discovered many new flavours and ingredients here. But at the end of the day, I love to return to the Finnish food blogs, and often end up cooking things from them, with minor or major modifications.
This little dish is quite simple, but don't let that fool you. It's also not the prettiest dish, but don't let that put you off either. It's quick and easy, and only requires a few minutes of hands on time. It makes a lovely meal on it's own, or as the side for chicken, fish or meat. It has a wonderful, warm flavour to it. As an added bonus, your kitchen will have the lovely scent of coconut milk which feels both exotic and comforting at the same time. The link to the original recipe is here.
Sweet potato and lentil stew (serves 2 or 3):1 onion3-4 garlic clovesa few cm of ginger root1 tsp virgin coconut oil1 large sweet potato (about 200g)2 large tomatoes120 g dried green lentils400 ml coconut milk1 lime2 tsp ground cumin1 tsp turmeric1-2 tsp dried chilli flakes1 tsp black pepper
The howto:Finely chop the onion, garlic and ginger root. Dice sweet potato and tomatoes. Cook the onion, garlic and ginger root in the oil for a few minutes, add tomatoes and sweet potato, and cook another couple of minutes. Add lentils, coconut milk, juice from the lime and the spices. Cook slowly until the lentils are done, but make sure not to overcook so that the lentils stay chewy. If the stew gets too thick, add water, if it's too runny, cook without a lid for the last 15 minutes or so.
According to my estimates, one serving (half of the recipe above) contains approximately 480 kcal (27g fat, 50g carbs, 11g protein). When it comes to coconut milk, I'm going against my principle of never buying reduced fat products and always go for the reduced fat one as I can't justify the extra calories. I need to get over that, I'm sure the full fat coconut milk tastes much better and the extra calories are nothing compared to the hundreds I ingested in the form of cake, fudge and Belgian waffles over the weekend...
The verdict:Like I said earlier, don't let the simplicity of this dish fool you. Or the fact that it looks a bit... green. It tastes lovely, the sweet potato and sweetness of the coconut milk go together perfectly, and cooking it all in coconut oil brings the whole coconuttiness to new level. I really recommend making this from green lentils, as red ones would get overcooked and gooey. If you only have red lentils, make sure to add them later, after already cooking the stew for a while as they usually only need 10 minutes or even less. The red lentils would make a more aesthetically pleasing choice, though. But for me, the most important thing is flavour, not looks.
