Pimp My Salad

In many ways the BYO food-party is a great invention. It's economic, eclectic and sometimes it's even exciting. But, and here's the catch, far too often "I'll bring a salad" really does just mean that someone will bring a salad. Salad. As in lettuce, tomatoes, cucumber and maybe even some tinned corn. Yawn! There's just no excuse for that. Throwing together a great salad is the easiest thing in the world and it doesn't even take a recipe. Just round up your favourite fruit and vegetables, slice them up nicely and bam! You've got a money shot.

Still, I know that the creative juices don't always come a-flowin' when we want them to and that's why I've jotted down a few ways for you to pimp up your fresh salad:

FRUIT
There's no end to the delight an unexpected slice of melon or apple will bring to an otherwise boring assembly of veggies. I personally prefer apples because I always seem to have them lying around the kitchen (and I like the crunch), but melons, strawberries, apricots, nectarines, plums, pink grape, oranges, grapes etc. are great too. And don't underestimate the power of colourplay on the plate. It does wonders for the appetite.

SEEDS & NUTS
I always love balancing the crunch and juice of the vegetables, the sweetness and tangy-ness of the fruit with a nutty touch. Whether it be in the shape of peeled and roasted almonds, soy-salted sunflower seeds or just plain sesame seeds, it's all good. Plus, if you have roasted them and toss them into the salad bowl shortly before serving it, the heat from the nuts tend to bring out the other flavours in the salad. Very Jamie Oliver.

HERBS
Especially in summer salads fresh dill, basil, coriander, mint, chives etc. can bring some delicate and more complex flavours to the mixture. Dill is great with apples and celery, coriander in just about everything and basil is lovely with sweet ingredients. For the dry kind, crushed rose pepper works well with grapes and dried rosemary/Provence spices are great for a salad with chunks of roasted chicken. Naturally, any salad needs a slight touch of salt and pepper too.

JUICES
Finally, you've assembled the perfect salad and just want it all to blend together. I would recommend that you go slow on the oils and hit the more fruity or acidy liquids. They tend to keep the salad fresh for longer and you don't get that greasy feeling afterwards. A tablespoon of elderflower cordial or some white balsamic vinegar makes for a delicious "blender", but you can experiment with any number of juices from apples, oranges, lime fruit, raspberries, red currants etc.

Obviously this is just the tip of the iceberg. I haven't even begun talking about real dressings and salads with meat or yogurt/other kinds of "coating". That'll have to wait for another time. Until then, chop along and bring a salad that's pleasing to the eye and the imagination, as well as the palate.

Cooking For a Reception

On the occasion of my recent book release (the travel guide some of you might remember me chatting about last summer), I couldn't help but invite just about everyone I know on Earth to a reception. Much to my surprise the usual statistic of about 60 % yes-sayers didn't pull through and nearly everyone said yes yes yes. Lo and behold, T and I suddenly had about 50 people on our hands who, thanks to the weather gods, could do their small talking in the blooming court yard in front of our apartment. But what to do about the food, we wondered? We seriously loathe the usual cheese squares with tooth picks and carrot sticks really don't do the trick for us either. That's why we embarked on a nitty gritty journey through about 120 delicate nibbles-on-a-stick and for my part, about 80 tiny cakes. Above from the left are tiny luxury brownies, made on a recipe for the Italian Chocolate Cake also pictured here on my blog. And that's really a big part of my best trick: Many recipes for large cakes can be made into finger-size cakes or muffins without any big changes to the recipes except from the baking time. In this case I took a cake recipe that I usually bake in a round cake tray and poured the finished mixture in a large square baking tray with an adjustable metal frame around it to make it fit to the amount perfectly. After baking it I simply measured and divided it into equally sized "brownies" and that was it. The best part is that with our new freezer, I could bake the whole lot a week in advance and then freeze them. The flavour only gets better from setting for a while. Win-win, as I see it.

As for the cakes, the mini-muffins to the right (above), they are miniatures of the apple-maccaroon cake pictured here on my blog. The only difference is that I pipmed them up a bit using hard and slightly tangy plums instead of apples, because the marcipan-like flavour of the macaroons goes perfectly with the plumness of the fruit.

Doing the Unmentionable: Serving Fruit Salad For Dessert

Those of you who know me, have probably noticed a certain stubbornness when it comes to desserts. For example T and I have a favourite mock-discussion on the topic of cheese and its, in my opinion false definition as a dessert. It is NOT and never will be a worthy substitute for a sweet treat after an enjoyable meal. And the same goes for fruit. Just plain fruit. What kind of dessert is that? Maybe that kind of thing flies in the tropics where you need something to quench your thirst rather than enhance it, but here, in the cold cold North, we need a good dessert to finish us off before enjoying that post-coital cigarette and early hibernation. So - when I asked my father the other day if he had any requests dessert-wise and he answered: "Something light, we're trying to keep it down you know. Maybe just some bitter chocolate..." I nearly felt like serving some of that un-comfortably dry 99% cocoa-"chocolate" that Lindt does and a glass of water to wash down the Sahara that follows. Well, almost. The point is, I decided on making a bowl of fruit salad that would satisfy his healthy diet as well as my own ambitions. This is how it turned out and I am happy to say, I had more than one portion of it myself:

Dessert Lover's Fruit Salad (serves 4)

Syrup (makes 100 ml. - can be doubled if you like your fruit soaked)

75 ml water

25 ml lime juice

100 grams white sugar (important for the colour)

Half a star anise

Salad

1 pink grape fruit, in fillets (see instructions below)

4 dark purple plums, thinly sliced

250 grams of fresh strawberries, sliced lengthways

10 leaves of basil, chopped
Chopped pistachios

Place the ingredients for the syrup in a saucepan and boil them together until the mixture reaches a runny thickness that resembles cordial - don't allow it to get too sticky. If it does, you can dilute it with a bit of water until you reach the right consistency. Remove the star anise and let it cool in the fridge for a couple of hours or over night. When the syrup has reached fridge temperature (about 5 degrees Celcius) start preparing the fruit. Clean the plums and strawberries and slice them thinly lenghtways. Peel the grape fruit and cut off the remaining skin with a sharp knife until the pulp is bared. Then proceed to slice the fruit towards the centre in each little section. If the sections are very wide, you can make two fillets from each compartment. The finished fillets should be long and flat as pictured above. As this is a very wasteful way of using a grape fruit, make sure you squeeze the remaining juice out of the fruit core and either drink it or pour it over the salad. When the fruit is done, mix it well with the chopped basil and pour a generous amount of syrup over it. Leave it to set for about 30 mins. so the basil can work its perfumed magic on the salad. Sprinkle with pistachios and serve cool, maybe even with a dewy glass of muscat.

Ch-ch-ch-Changes

As you might have noticed, Eye Candy is going through the changes. But instead of becoming barren, I and my new web editor T are trying to pimp it up to a blooming new blog. We can't wait to air the final results. One of the first changes is the name: The name Eye Candy and I sort of grew apart and instead I've started seeing this college guy who's totally into foreign literature and can name at least eight famous painters and stuff. Anyway, from now on, this blog is called

VELBEKOMME

which means "enjoy" or "may you enjoy this" and is something we Danes like to say before embarking on a great meal.

Off To London!

Just a quick note to say that I'll be spending the rest of the week with a friend of mine in London. Hope to return with good pics and new food inspiration, as I've recently heard that there's more to the British cuisine than baked beans on toast and that wretched shepherd's pie (shudder).

Have a great week!

Beet Root Gnocchi

Well howdy partner! Boy are you in for a treat today. This is one of those experiments that paid off straight away, and mind you, I could fill a book with my less fortunate trial-and-errors. This is my spin on a recipe for pumpkin gnocchi from Delicious:Days. It looked so juicy that I had to wipe off the drool from my keyboard after reading it. Only, when I looked for pumpkins at my local green grocer there were none in sight. But then something brownish red entered the corner of my eye: Good old sturdy beet roots. And with a little afterthought, I ended up buying two big fellas for my gnocchi. I couldn't get over the sheer daring of it all. But what can I say, I'm a kitchen rebel with a very good cause indeed. Well. As for the recipe, I won't be writing it here as you can see it with the link above.
What I will tell you though, are the few changes I made to the recipe. As it says in the original "script", wash, peel and slice the beets to thin slivers. Cook them in the oven as stated in the recipe, but be prepared to wait about 20 min. longer for them to soften. I ended up throwing the beets in a chopper-thingy and putting the tiny bits of beets back into the oven to speed up the process. When they were finally soft enough to sort of purée (it was more like 230 grams of sticky paste), I added the rest of the ingredients (egg yolk, salt, pepper, but no nutmeg) and stirred until it became sticky and shiny. Even though I didn't have the 450 grams of vegetable purée the recipe asked for, it still needed a whole egg yolk. As for the flower, 50 grams were plenty for this mixture. Then I rolled it, cut it into individual gnocchi. Cute and fluffy little dumplings of sweetness. Nice. And even though there was quite a lot of flower on them, they cleaned up real nice as they say Hollywood.

Despite the slight resemblance to raw tuna or bits of meat, they were absolutely heavenly with the sage butter (also in the recipe mentioned above), plenty of flaky sea salt and parmesan cheese to counter the sweetness of the beets. Actually, I was so pleasantly surprised by the outcome, that I had to call T and let him in on my delight.

Now go on, give it a try in your own kitchen. It's totally worth the flowery mess.

Healthy But Interesting Spring Rolls (Tutorial)

This is a turning point in history. Yes, today's the day when the first ever tutorial enters these pages. But please don't hold these photos against me - it's kinda tricky juggling a camera, good setups, lighting and food prep with sticky fingers (and I don't mean the album). Anyway, here goes nothing:

In my sugar-and-cream loving mind, "healthy" and "interesting" have always seemed mutually exclusive. But there has been the occasional exception and today will be a celebration of one of them: Happy-crunchy Vietnam-style spring rolls with raw vegetables.

Vietnam-Style Spring Rolls (serves two people ~ 15 rolls)

1 large carrot, julienne (see picture below)
1 celery stick, thinly sliced
1 big handful of mint leaves, chopped
1 big handful of cilantro, chopped
1/4 fennel, finely chopped
1/2 spring onion, finely chopped
1 red snack pepper, finely chopped
1-2 tsp black sesame seeds
1/2 lime, juiced
White balsamic vinegar or rice vinegar
Soy sauce
Sesame oil
15 sheets of round rice paper (22 cm - see picture below)



Start preparing all of the vegetables and make sure they are all nice and thinly sliced. You want the filling to be as easy to arrange as possible. Regarding the carrots, by all means cut them julienne style by hand, but I prefer using a julienne-peeler as in this photo. It saves soo much time and agony and gives that evenly shaped Asian look.

As soon as the carrots are done, drizzle them with the lime juice to prevent them from turning brown. When the rest of the vegetables are done, sprinkle the sesame seeds into the mixture and season it with vinegar, soy sauce and sesame oil. Mix it again. The result should look a bit like this:

Now it's time for the fun part: Rolling the rolls, weeha!

Take one sheet of rice paper and soak it in luke warm water for a couple of minutes, or until soft and dangly. Spread it out onto a clean tea towel and pat it dry. Place about a tablespoon of the salad just slightly below the middle of the rice paper:


Fold the front half over the salad and try to prevent "air bubbles" under the paper (I'm not perfect there but hey, we're all learning). Then proceed to fold one side over the middle, creating a straight line going away from you



Fold it as tightly against the salad as possible so you don't end up with saggy rolls that won't dip into the soy sauce afterwards. Again, try to avoid any air stuck under the paper. Fold the other side tightly over the first. Then roll it firmly to the end of the paper:


And voilà, your very own healthy and interesting spring rolls to serve with soy sauce and sliced/roasted pork chops as below or any other way you like. Enjoy!


And that concludes this week's lesson. Now get back to doing whatever you were doing and let me crunch up those rolls by myself;-)