Soup of beans, leek and potato

Ingredients (x2):
400g green beans
1 small onion
1 clove garlic
1 leek
1 big potato
500ml chicken bouillon
1,5 tablespoons olive oil
salt
(croutons or bread)

Preparation:
Chop the onion and garlic and cut the washed leek into rings. Cook these ingredients in a pan with olive oil and add the beans. Cook this mix of vegetables on low heat for 10-15 minutes. Peel the potato and cut it into cubes. Prepare the bouillon by letting a bouillon cube dissolve in water. Add the potato cubes to the rest of the vegetables and pour the bouillon on top. Cook the soup covered, on low heat, for one hour. When an hour has passed, take your immersion blender and give the soup a puré-like composition with it. Add salt according to your taste. Serve the soup with croutons or bread.


The recipe of the bread pictured above can be found here.

Mushroom fusilli

I have usually been doing this dish with tagliatelle, but due to my boyriend's kitchen experiments of one evening, I didn't have tagliatelle left anymore and I opted for fusilli. It was a good choice (these fusilli here are by a Dutch brand and their shape reminds me more or less of worms ;) I have made this with different kinds of mushrooms. Make sure your mushrooms are not poisonous!

Ingredients (x2):
180g tagliatelle, fusilli or another pasta
2 cloves garlic
300 g mushrooms
olive oil
cream (if you want it lighter, use milk instead)
a tiny bit of peperoncino
salt
pepper
parsley (fresh or dried, but preferably fresh)

Preparation:
Start boiling the pasta in abundant salted water. Chop one of the garlic cloves and cut half of the mushrooms into small pieces. Add the chopped galic clove on a pan and heat it, and soon after add the mushrooms you preciously cut into pieces. Fry the garlic and mushrooms for 5 minutes and add the spices (except the parsley) on the pan. During or after this pour the remaining garlic clove and remaining mushrooms together with the parsley into the mixer, and add a bit of olive oil. Mix these ingredients fine with the mixer in order to obtain a puré. Add this puré to the pan where the pieces of mushrooms are. Fry for a for more minutes. At the end add the cream or milk and lower then heat to below medium. Mix the sauce and take a few minutes of time until the sauce becomes more creamy. Pour the water off the pasta and mix it with the sauce. Serve with parmesan cheese.

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.

Salmiakki Swiss roll

Swiss rolls (fi: kääretorttu) are a very common dessert in Finland. The crust can be made brown by cacao powder or it can retain a light colour. The fillings are many and diverse, and this one here is a rarity. A few friends of mine sounded astonished when they heard I was making a salmiakki Swiss roll. Fantasy, however, is a good quality! And since salmiakki (=strong salted liquorice, nh4cl) is inevitably the most fantastic candy in Finland if you ask me, I felt like trying this out! I recommend to use a kind of salmiakki that is easy to cut. Unfortunately I didn't and so I, to avoid excess suffering, left the pieces bigger.

Ingredients:

The dough:
3 eggs
1 dl sugar
½ dl wheat flour
½ dl potato flour
1 tl baking powder
2 tablespoons cacao powder
sugar
bread crumbs
baking paper

The filling:
1,5 dl whipped cream
1,5 dl vanilla flavoured quark (That's Dutch, and it's something like a very thick yoghurt)
salmiakki candies

Preparation:
Cut the salmiakki into pieces. Mix the whipped cream and the quark and add the pieces of salmiakki into it. Put the filling into the fridge to wait for the crust to be ready.
Mix the sugar and the eggs into an airy foam. Mix the flours together and add them carefully into the foam. Pour the dough on baking paper on an oven plate. Bake it in a 225 c oven for 7 minutes.
Take a sheet of baking paper and put it on the table. Dust some sugar on it. Set the crust, on its other side still attached to its baking paper, on the sugared baking paper. Remove the baking paper that was with it in the oven.
Spread the filling you previously prepared on the crust.

Roll the crust into a roll. The result is the best if you let the Swiss roll stay in the fridge overnight and serve it the next day.

Farfalle with soy-tomato-zucchini sauce

Ingredients (x3):
260 g farfalle
1 onion
1 clove garlic
150 g grinded soy
1/3 zucchino
2 tomatoes
4 tablespoons tomato puree
1 tablespoon white vinegar
olive oil
salt
black pepper
parsley

Preparation:
Remove the seeds of the tomatoes and peel them. Start cooking the pasta. Chop the onion and grind the garlic. Heat these two on a pan with olive oil. Pour the grinded soy on them. Cut the zucchino into thin sticks max. 3 cm of length and add it on the pan. Cut into small cubes the tomatoes that you previously peeled. Add the tomato cubes on the pan along with tomato puree. Keep the heat pretty high but not at maximum. Add a tablespoon of white vinegar. Add salt and black pepper according to your taste. Cook on high heat for a couple of more minutes and then let the sauce cook on lower heat for still some minutes.

When the pasta is al dente, pour the water off. Serve the pasta with the sauce and with chopped parsley.

Apple-white chocolate cupcakes

Ingredients (7 cupcakes):

The dough:
75 g margarine or butter
½ dl sugar
1,5 dl wheat flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon vanilla sugar
½ egg

The filling:
1 apple
60 g vanilla chocolate
cinnamon

Short crust pastry on the top:
20 g margarine
0,3 dl sugar
0,5 dl wheat flour

Preparation:
Put the warm margarine and all the other ingredients of the dough into a bowl. Mix them with your hands. Do the same with the short crust pastry ingredients in another bowl. Cut the apple and the white chocolate into small pieces. Form 7 balls out of the dough and settle them on the bottom of the cake cups. Add the pieces of apple and white chocolate into the cake cups. Dust the short cust pastry on top of the cupcakes. Finally add some cinnamon.

Bake in the oven heated to 200'c for about 20-30 minutes.

Serve the cupcakes after having stored them for 1 hour in the fridge.

Potato-bean-tuna salad

Here's a salad recipe that I could think of meeting both in the Finnish as well as in the Northern Italian kitchen. It is served warm and it contains only a little greenery.

Ingredients:
potatoes
tuna fish in water
chives
beans (preferably of different colours)
egg(s)
white vinegar
olive oil
salt
pepper

Preparation:
Peel the potatoes and cut them into cubes. Cook them in water. Cook also the eggs in water. Rinse the chives and cut them in shorter pieces and put them on a plate. Place the readily prepared beans on the plate too. Remove the water of the tuna fish and add the tuna in the form of flakes on the plate. Add the potato cubes. Pour a little vinegar, olive oil, salt and pepper on the salad and mix. Slice the egg into a few pieces and dispose them on the plate.