Rice and vegetable wok

This comes nowhere near Finnish or Italian cuisine, but however enjoyes the reputation of my favourite food since some months already :) So I'm writing the recipe here both for you and me!

Ingredients (x4):
1 tablespoon olive oil
2-3 carrots
1 red onion
1 bell pepper
4 tomatoes
1 clove garlic
1 teaspoon of dried oregano
2 teaspoons of dried basil
some curry
100-150 grams basmati rice
half a package (or more) of feta cheese

Preparation:
Peel the carrot and cut it into rather thin sticks. Cut the red onion into small cubes. Throw some olive oil on the pan and fry the carrot and red onion for a couple of minutes. Then put the heat rather low while you are cutting other vegetables. Cut the bell pepper into sticks and the tomatoes into (big) cubes. Grind the garlic clove. Add these vegetables onto the pan. Add the oregano and basil too, and mix carefully. Make the heat hotter for some four minutes while mixing the vegetables. Then make the heat low and let the vegetables lie there for the time that you are cooking the rice (but remember to mix every now and then).


Cook the rice in a pan. When you will have poured the water off the tice, dust some curry on the rice and mix. Add more curry until the rice is yellow (but it doesn't need to be deep yellow - it depends on your taste).


Pour the rice on the pan and mix it with the vegetables. Add salt. Let the rice and the veggies accomodate each others' tastes by letting them lie there together on low heat for 10 minutes. Mix every now and then. If you think the wok is getting too dry, add a tiny bit of water.

Cut the feta cheese into cubes and add it into the dish right before serving. You can mix it into the wok or alternatively use it as a topping.

Bell peppers with mushroom-leek and soy fillings

I have been completely absent in this blog for several weeks, and I am really sorry about that! I was working a lot of hours each week, and even if I did make yummy food worth posting here and I even took pics of them, I never got down to updating. Now I want to update more regularly again.

So, here goes. This is the recipe of what I made for lunch today, and it was praised by my bf and he smiled for a long time after the lunch. I think that is enough to describe how delicious it turned out!

Bell peppers with mushroom-leek and soy fillings

Ingredients (for 2-3 people):

3 bell peppers (any colour you like)

filling #1:

2,25 dl cooked rice
3,5 dl table mushrooms
1,5 tablespoons butter or margarine
½ a small leek
1,5 dl grated cheese
paprika spice
pepper

filling #2:

1,5 dl cooked rice
150 g grinded soy
1 small onion
pepper
aromatic salt OR salt + half a grinded vegetarian bouillon cube
1,5 dl grated cheese

Preparation:

Cut the bell peppers in halves horizontally. Remove their insides and wash them. Cook the bell peppers in salted water for 8 minutes. When cooked, remove the water from the pan and let the bell peppers vapour.

Prepare the filling #1: Cut the mushrooms into small pieces. Heat the butter in the pan and add the mushrooms into the pan. Fry the mushrooms for 5 minutes. Chop the leek finely and add it into the pan.

When they both look good and and the leek has become more yellow, add this mushroom-leek-mix into the rice. Spice it up and add one dl of grated cheese. Mix.

Prepare the filling #2: Fry the grinded soy on a pan and add the finely chopped onion into it. Add spices. The spicing can be rather abundant. Mix the grinded soy + onion with the rice. Add 1/4 dl of grated cheese into the mix.


Place the bell pepper halves into an oven mould and fill them with the fillings. Add what remains of the grated cheese on the filled bell peppers.

Bake them in an oven heated to 200'c for half an hour.

Karelian pastries

These are pastries very popular in Finland. This recipe is for those with the most common filling, the one with rice (other types of fillings for them include potato or carrot). Karelian pastries are part of the food tradition of the Eastern Finnish region Karelia that Finland ceded to the Soviet Union in WW2. Karelian refugees spread the tradition of their cuisine, including this pastry, to the rest of Finland in the post-war period. Besides Finland it is eaten also in Northern Russia. They are usually served with egg butter.

Ingredients (20 pastries):

Rye crust
3 dl water
1 teaspoon salt
2 dl wheat flour
around 4 dl rye flour (you're lucky if you find it outside Finland)

Rice porridge filling
1 l milk
3 dl porridge rice
2 dl water
2 teaspoons salt
optionally, a pat of butter

Egg butter (which you apply on the ready pastries)
3-4 eggs
butter

Preparation:

Prepare the rice filling first: Boil water, add salt and the porridge rice. Add the milk and cook for an hour on rather low heat. In case the rice you use requires less time, add less milk respectively.

Then, prepare the dough: First mix water, salt and wheat flour. Then add into them the rye flour. The dough can remain pretty humid, as long as you can work with it.

Cut pieces of the dough and start rolling them out. In Finland we use a special kind of rolling pin for this (pictured above), doing a circular motion with it. You can however even do with a normal roll, as long as the crust for each separate pastry will be around 2-3mm thin and of a round or oval shape. Place a tablespoonful of rice porridge on each of the flat crusts. Once you've done that, start closing the pastries with the edges of the crust, using your index and thumb of both hands on respective sides of the pastry. This will give the pastries their final shape.

Bake the pastries in an oven heated to 210 c for around 15 minutes. Once you have taken them out of the oven, apply some milk on them with a brush. It is good to let them rest for a few minutes before eating.

(The crust of my pastries got thicker in the oven because we didn't find plain rye flour here in Holland, only a "bread mix" with a lot of yeast. Better than nothing, but yeast really does not belong to karjalanpiirakat.)

Prepare the egg butter: Cook the eggs for 10 minutes. Peel the eggs and add a couple of tablespoons of butter on them. Crush it all together with a fork. Add the egg butter on the pastries.


Enjoy!


We had a pretty Finnish night, since all the evening I had been feeling psyched about that I was going to make karjalanpiirakat, and as I made them and as we ate them, we watched Pasila with English subtitles (a cartoon for adults about a police station and all the great personalities around it)