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;-)

Blogging Around

This time I won't even bore you with excuses for my absence. Suffice it to say that I'm still going at it in the kitchen and here's what I've been up to lately:

As I mentioned back in December, I had a visit from a good friend in Munich. What I didn't tell you was that she brought me a new cookbook by a fellow foodblogger from Munich. Which again brought me to check out her starting point on the internet: delicious days. Although not exactly stuffed with posts it is very VERY interesting to look at the recipes she does have. Not to mention her photos! The above photo is my version of what you can see here under the heading "How to turn rhubarb pink". It's a little puff pastry tart filled with home made vanilla custard and a slightly tangy compôte of rhubarbs and raspberries. They turned out really great and my initial fear of the store bought puff pastry turning yeasty-bitter and way too thick was put to rest. And even the next day they were very delicious indeed.
Follow the link to find the original recipe. Below are my comments and learnings from her recipe. Do yourself a favour and try it out - you won't regret it! My only let down was the fact that it ended up looking like a very familiar piece of Danish: The "Spandauer" (enjoy the mug-shot) which is a sort of round puff pastry thingy with twisted edges, filled with a stiff custard or marmelade and topped with icing sugar. That sort of made me a little less excited about the new discovery. A bit like the time I made some Spanish tomato marmelade and somebody asked if it was ketchup. Dammit!

First of all, there's waaay too much custard and compôte to fill 10-12 puff pastry cups. I used the store bought kind where you get six little "plates" of dough, of which I used three to make 12 small tarts. Granted, that's 50 grams less dough than the recipe says, but I still have enough filling left over to make another 12 tarts. So either make half the amount of filling or double the amount of puff pastry.

This Year's Model (well, last year's, really)

Just to show you how a "kransekage" looks, when it hasn't been on the floor...(compare to previous New Year's eve-post here).

And while I'm at it: Happy New Year and welcome to 2009! Hopefully it'll be a year filled with heavenly mouthfuls.

'Tis the Season, lah dee dah

Can you believe these shots? I can't, and I was there.
This is how we spent Christmas at my inlaws', including my mother. Or rather, this is what we ate during the holidays. For here in Denmark it is customary to rank food right up there with the gifts, and the older you get, the more "foody" it turns. Judging from endless Thanksgiving specials on just about every tv show from the States we're not the only ones to make holidays all about the food (who could forget those dinners at the Walsh residence, where Brandon would bring a homeless guy to the table and pass him the cornbread like he was Jesus or something?). Anyway, this is a peek into our traditions. The first shot is from Christmas night which we all celebrate on the 24th with a pork roast or a roast duck as in this photo. In my family we used to have turkey because my mother's Australian, but I do like a good duck too. Here it's dressed in the traditional cuff made out of cut, white paper and to top it: A fresh sprig of pine. Served with a Waldorf salad, caramelized potatoes and a sauce that was to die for (made on roquefort cheese, red currant gelly, cream and the tasty drippings from the duck-tray, [drool]).



Yup, that's my mother's hand going for the juicy duck. Can you blame her?

Next day's feast was a Christmas lunch, complete with roast pork, "rullepølse" (the pink thing in slices, a kind of pork roulade with a pepper filling. Sounds strange, but is delish when served with fresh onion rings and mustard), fried, pickled herring and carpaccio (admittedly not a classic in the Danish kitchen, but a classic all the same). Great stuff, I tells ya! And on a side note: How campy is that roaring fire place in the background?! But it warms the heart, doesn't it?

Merry Christmas, or "Glædelig jul" as we say in this country of ours.

Christmas Baking

So this is how it all went down (and I swear we wore our "Nissehuer" all the time!).

Weighing, mixing, stirring, tasting, baking, cooling, tasting, tasting, tasting and finally some impatient photographing in the bad lighting of a dismal December afternoon. My friend Britta and I ended up making the following four things:

* Several trays of ANZAC biscuits - with my Australian grandmother's secret recipe
* Lots and lots of biscotti (see above) with chocolate, almonds and different spices
* Russian apple cake (German link) with cocoa and rum - also made as muffins
* Two chocolate cakes baked with a chocolate truffle "drizzle"

Naturally we were pretty exhausted by the last cookie tray, but then we had to go deliver most of the goods at a Christmas art gallery on the other side of Copenhagen, so we stuffed the bics and cakes in brown paper bags and went away. Only to find that I had gotten the time wrong and the place was going to close for the day half an hour later! Hopefully the goods behaved well on the next day too.

And So I'm Back, From Outta Space

Honey, I can't begin to tell you how great it is to have handed in the third draft of my travel book today. It's finally looking up for our relationship! With the book almost done I finally have a bit more time for producing pictureworthy pastry that can land a place on this blog. Now I can't wait to show you the result of my Christmas cooking on Saturday. My friend Britta is flying in from Munich and we'll be baking and tasting our way through the day, wearing our "nissehuer" with pride as we go along. Until then I'll leave you with my favourite comfort drink ever: Hot and spicy chocolate with a big bouncy dollop of whipped cream and a bit of cinnamon on top. Enjoy!