Returning tomorrow

It's been slow lately on the updating but I'll be back tomorrow on Monday, uploading quite a few pictures and recipes. Until then, peace!

Reindeer for birthday!

We have some kind of a tradition that on special days we eat reindeer. Well today it was my birthday and also celebrated our anniversary which was on Wednesday.

On the menu there was filet of reindeer, mashed potatoes with carrots, mixed vegetables and berry sauce.

For the sauce I used half a liter of good beef stock, 25g bacon, salt, pepper, a little bit of garlic, 4 berries jam, cream and cornflour to thicken everything up.
All you need is to fry the bacon, add stock and let it simmer until it has reduced into half. Then you remove the bacon, spice it up and add good amount of jam so it's not too sweet. Heat it up, thicken it up, check the taste and add a little bit of cream to give it a good taste.

I had carrots with potatoes which I boiled in salted water, mashed and added warm milk which I heated up with some butter and salt.

Reindeer is really tasty meat, tastes like game without being game.

Barbecue steak and French fries

Another lazy day for us so my boyfriend decided he wanted steak.

We got 2 steaks and grilled them on our new grillpan, made some French fries and green beans on the side too. Sauce was from a jar.

Quick and tasty that's for sure!

Pannenkoeken - Dutch pancakes

This is VERY Dutch, pancakes. I didn't feel like cooking today at all, so thought pancakes is a nice option for dinner.

We're cheating and using this ready made-mix, all u need to add is egg and milk. And I always add some sugar and salt too. Today we had pancakes with bacon, just mix everything up, put bacon on the pan and let it get brown, then add the dough, flip it around after few minutes and there you go. And of course, sprinkle some icing sugar over it.

You can easily use anything, apples, ham, cheese, you name it, you can use it. I usually eat just the basic one without anything fancy but sometimes I feel like ham or bacon, usually nothing sweet though.

Testing out new grillpan

It was our 2nd relationship anniversary on wednesday and I got my boyfriend a grillpan. Well, naturally it was for both of us but it was a great excuse finally buy it.

On Thursday I decided we'll try it out so I made a marinade out of pineapple juice, laos, ketjap manis, salt, pepper, coriander and garlic. I let 2 filets of chicken rest in the marinade over night and then just fried them on the pan.
On the side I fried potatoe slices which I boiled in water for a little while before putting them on the pan. Sauce was the marinade thickened with cornflour.

Chicken soup

It's been a long time since I made soup like this. Wasn't sure if it was going to turn out nicely but it did and I'm happy about that.

1 chicken filet
300g soup vegetables
2tbsp spreadable cheese (I used sambal flavoured one)
salt, pepper, laos, coriander, garlic
water

Boil water and put the chicken in, let simmer until cooked. Remove chicken from the pot and add vegetables in the water and cook until overcooked. Meanwhile cube or strip the chicken.
Once the vegetables are soft, puree them in a blender, pour back in the pot and add spices and cheese, let it melt. Then add the chicken and heat up. Serve with fresh bread.

Very simple recipe and it's enough for atleast 2 people.

Meat sauce with a stroganoff twist

I felt like having something really typical Finnish, stuff we eat normally at home when everybody has gotten home from work or school. We sit by a dining table and talk about what has happened to everybody during the day.

This is pretty simple dish to cook. Any kind of meat will do, also pork goes well with the rest of the ingredients. I don't really have any certain amounts for everything since I just go by the flow and use hand measurements but I'll do my best.

500g beef cut in strips or cubes
50g bacon
5 dl water
3 medium sized gherkins
2tbsp mustard (Dijon)
salt, pepper, ketjap asin(salty soy sauce)
maizena (cornflour) and water for thickening

Get a pot and add bacon in it and stir until it gets nice and brown, then add pieces of beef and fry until they're brown too. Spice the meat with salt and pepper. Then add water, let it boil and turn on lower heat and let simmer for about an hour. Meanwhile dice the gherkins and then add them with meat. Once meat is tender, add mustard. Keep stirring until smooth, then add maizena in the water and thicken the sauce as thick as you wish. Last add the soy sauce to give the sauce nice colour. Serve with boiled potatoes and vegetables.

The picture isn't any good but we were hungry and already started mushing up the potatoes before took the picture. Also I forgot to get any vegetables so we just had really plain meal but it sure was really tasty.

Bami Goreng

It's been awhile since we had noodles with the dinner. This is Indonesian fried noodles, kind of a leftover food. You use vegetables, chicken or pork, shrimps or eggs, as you wish.

This time I had pieces of chicken which I marinaded in ketjap, with some ginger, sambal oelek, coriander and laos.
I put noodles to boil and meanwhile fried the chicken in a wok without oil and then added some vegetablemix with cabbage, leek, paprika, beansprouts and carrots. When noodles were done I rinsed them under cold water, tore them up a little bit and added in the wok, mixed well and added a bit more ketjap and sambal.
Then just put everything on a plate, spread over some leftover peanut sauce from saturday and sprinkled a bit of fried onions over.

Very tasty dish which doesn't take long to cook.

Filled chicken rolls

It's Sunday and time for something bit more special. I haven't had the passion for cooking for a while, probably because my work has tired me out but today I really felt like cooking.

We eat a lot of chicken but I felt like trying something new out. Rice with peas and fried vegetables is what we usually have too but the chicken is very different than normally.

I had 2 filets of chicken which I hammered thin and spiced up with just a little bit of salt and pepper. Then spread a layer of sambal flavoured fresh cheese and then couple of slices of gherkin. Then just rolled them up and wrapped slices of bacon around them and then fried them in a pan.

Even though I say it myself, it was really delicious. Have to try it again some other time, maybe if we ever get guests over ;)

Lazy day Gourmet

I had a bad day at work today and I had all these plans for dinner tonight but had no energy left for it. So we decided to do this very Dutch thing, frying pieces of meat and vegetables on little pans in the livingroom. We have these little burners filled with spirit and then u put them under that little cage and then the pans on top, some butter or oil in and there you go.

Today we had some mince meat, chicken filet, both marinated and natural and pork filets cut in thin slices, small sausages and some bacon as meat, salad and baguette on the side. We also had some sauces to dip the meat in, garlic sauce and whisky sauce for my boyfriend. And of course, home-made peanut sauce.

Titanic

We went for a holiday in Hungary mid-September and ended up going to this one restaurant quite a few times since the food there was just excellent. I wanted to have a cocktail as a dessert one night and chose this one. I had no idea what it would be like since the recipe was in Hungarian, I only knew which alcohols it contains.

2cl Blue Curacao
2cl Bols Misty Peach
2cl Malibu
2cl cream
1dl pineapple juice
whipped cream
ice

Add everything else except ice in the shaker and give it a good shake. Put ice in a glass and pour everything in. Add a good amount of whipped cream and enjoy.

Some wannabe-Indonesian beef

OK, when I try to cook Indonesian dishes it always goes wrong at some point and I end up making part of it more in Western way. But as long as food tastes good and looks atleast OK, I'm fine with it.

I was thinking the other day that we hadn't eaten beef for a long time and went looking for a nice beef recipe when I tumbled against this one:

450 grams round steak
6 Granny Smith apples
6 tbsp olive oil
6 chives
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 tsp Sambal Oelek
9 tbsp Ketjap Manis
2 tsp ginger powder
2 tbsp dry sherry
salt

Slice the meat in thin strips and mix in a bowl with about 2 tbsp of ketjap and leave it alone for about 15-20 minutes. Meanwhile peel and cube apples, crush garlic and chop up chives.
Heat oil in the wok, add meat and stir fry it until brown. Then move it to another bowl and set aside, make sure it stays warm.
Now add sambal, chives, crushed garlic and apples in the wok and fry couple of minutes, then add rest of the ketjap, ginger and sherry. Let it simmer for a couple of minutes and add the meat in, heat it up thoroughly. Serve it with rice.

I chose to serve it with some fried rice, nasi. I just boiled the rice and rinsed it under cold water.
Then added some green beans and peas in the wok, spiced it up with curry and ketjap and added the rice, mixed well and there you go.

I have cooked beef with apples before and was really happy how it turned out to be. The apples and sherry go along very well.

Oliebollen

This is really delicious deepfry baking, typically eaten at New Year but they're already selling them in these cute booths. It's a lot like a doughtnut but in a form of a ball. You can get them plain or filled with stuff like raisins, pieces of apple or nuts. You can also buy the readymade flourmix but last year I wanted to make it all from the beginning.

for 25 oliebollen:

500g flour
1tsp salt
30g fresh yeast or 15g dry yeast
4,5dl milk
1tsp sugar
(50g raisins, 1 apple, 50g crushed walnuts)
oil for deepfrying
icing sugar

Mix flour and salt in a big bowl. Add yeast in handwarm milk and add sugar when yeast has dissolved. Make a hole in the flourmix and add the yeastmix little by little, mixing everything together until you have smooth paste. If you want to raisins or nuts, add them now and mix well. Cover the bowl with plastic foil and place it in warm place for atleast half an hour.

Heat the oil until 160 Celsius. Take 2 spoons and dip them in oil and a mix a ball from the dough. Drop them in the oil and let them stay for about 6 minutes, until they're goldenbrown and firm. Take them out of the oil and rest them on kitchen paper. Cover them with icing sugar.

Chicken Cordon Bleu - sort of

This is really simple way to prepare your chicken filet in a bit more posh way.

Just slice the filet open from the side into a pocket and rub some spices in and out. I used salt, pepper, curry and laos. Then rip up some slices of ham and stuff in. If you want you can close the pocket with a toothpick and remove it before you put it on the plate. Put a pan on the heat, add some oil and fry the filet.

On the side there is green beans with bacon and just normal boiled rice, spiced up with some curry.

Fried eggs á la Netherlands

This is very typical Dutch dish. I mostly eat it for dinner because I don't usually eat such "heavy" lunches. It's called uitsmijter and it's basically just normal toasted bread with some cheese, fried ham and eggs on it. For me as a Finn it seems more like a breakfast but in here they eat it for lunch. But when I eat it, it's always for dinner since I try not to eat too heavy at lunch.

Something Finnish

Something's typical Finnish in this post. Peasoup, althought they say it's Swedish, we eat it alot in Finland. And, it's one of my favourite foods. Very simple to make and. It's kind of the same thing as Dutch erwtensoep but in Finland we don't add potatoes or leeks or sausage in it.

Here's a recipe for hernekeitto, as we call it in Finland:


2,5 liters water
500g dried peas
500g of smoked pork bones
(2 onions)
3 carrots
½ tbl pepper
1 tbl marjoram
1 tbl salt (unless you use salty meat)

Soak peas in water over night. Next day, rinse peas in fresh water and strain them. Add the water in pan with the meat and let it simmer slowly for about 3 hours.
Remove the meat from the bones and chop into smaller pieces. Grate the carrot. Add meat, carrots, pepper, marjoram and salt in the pan and let it simmer for another 30 minutes.
Serve hot and with a small amount of mustard (if you do this in Finland, don't use Turun Sinappi, it's Swedish so it's not good for this ;))

I used minced meat when I took the picture, it works just as swell as loin of pork. It won't take as long to cook but you get the more authentic flavour if you use pork.

Something I couldn't live without

Since I'm one of the unfortunate people who don't own an oven, I have to look for new ways to prepare some ovendishes. This steamer is my boyfriend's, originally given to him by his godfather and it's from Indonesia. It's really useful when you want to make these little packets of chicken with vegetables and rice.
You just fry some chicken and boil some rice and layer them on a tinfoil alongside with some fresh vegetables and then add some nice mix of sauce, for example ketjap manis, laos powder, coriander powder, salt and pepper. Then you just wrap everything up and put in a steamer, put on gas, let water boil and let simmer for about 20 minutes and there you go, lovely dish which I would normally cook in an oven.

Don't mind the cat on the 2nd picture, she had to butt in. That's Ramah, one of my 2 cats.

First Dutch dish at home

I'm Finnish but been living in Holland for over a year now with my Dutch boyfriend and today for the first time we actually ate something really typical Dutch food.
My boyfriend is partially Indonesian which means we mostly eat Indonesian dishes such as nasi and bami goreng, rendang, saté ayam etc.
But today was different. We had gehaktball met gebakken aardappels en sperziebonen. Big meatball with fried potatoes and green beans. Very tasty indeed, with a little kick which is always a good thing.

You can buy those meatballs in supermarkets but this one is homemade like most of the food we prepare.

First post ever

OK, it was about time I start my own food blog. I've been thinking about it for a long time and now I felt I should do it.

I'm going to post recipes and pictures of the dishes I'm going to prepare or consume. I'm also going to write reviews of the restaurant I'm going to visit.

Be gentle with me, I'm new to this.