Christmas cookies

What better way to spend a Saturday afternoon than baking Christmas cookies with friends?

Plain cookies with lemon glazing or without, stuck together with jelly or not, Austrian Vanillekipferln, chewy Zimtsterne and ginger cookies.

I would write up the last recipe but it’s my grandmother’s…so shh!

Japanese Eggplant Carbonara

I did not get a picture of my favourite dish from the restaurant in my previous post. But that does not mean that I did not vow to recreate the mix of flavours at my earliest convenience!
The original dish was with fish roe, but I decided to replace it with eggplant for a more vegetarian twist on it. It worked pretty well, although I might try pureeing the eggplant next time instead of frying it up. (I know there’s vegetarian roe… er… but no. There’s no point in even buying that.)

“Japanese Carbonara” with eggplant
(2 portions)
Spaghetti enough for 2 people (depending on your preferred portion size)
1/8l cream
2 egg yolks
1/3-1/2 eggplant (depending on the size of your eggplant)
A small piece of leek or a spring onion, very thinly sliced
Nori, cut into thin strips (I used egg furikake with nori)
(optional) Parsley for decoration

Slice the eggplant and salt it, set to drain for at least 15 minutes.
Pat dry and cut into small pieces, fry with a little salt in neutral oil. (You could use smoked salt to add a little smokyness, I used a few crumbs of smoked chili instead for some extra zing!)
At this point you can also start boiling the pasta al dente in a big pot of salted water.
When the pasta and the eggplant are done (this should ideally coincide in time), drain the pasta, toss it with the cream and arrange on two plates. Arrange the eggplant, leek/spring onion, parsley and egg yolks on top. Sprinkle over the nori and done!

Eat with chopsticks if you can, stirring in the yolk at the table.

I’m submitting this to Presto Pasta Nights hosted this week on The Life & Loves of Grumpy’s Honey Bunch.

Restaurant review – Spaghetti Goemon, Shanghai

On a recent visit to Shanghai we got to try a strange combination of flavours – a Japanese spaghetti restaurant in China.
This chain, originally from Japan, has spread to China and Singapore, serving spaghetti in both Japanese, Chinese and original Italian style.
The idea is “spaghetti with chopsticks” and even though we tried it at random we were quite positively surprised by the quality and taste of the food.

The spaghetti are served on beautiful blue-patterned plates and the portion size is Eastern style – about one and a half portions are enough for a Western stomach. We bought three dishes and shared the last, which also gave us the possibility to sample both a Western, Japanese and Shanghainese flavour pasta dish.
My favourite was the Japanese “Carbonara” with fish eggs, nori and egg. There was a little much cream in it but the flavour was fantastic! This is definitely one to recreate at home.
The picture shows a similar dish with added clams (Spaghetti Vongole being another of my all-time Italian favourites) and the Italian dish, spaghetti with eggplants. Hardcore Vegetarians beware though, as I suspect even the vegetarian dishes to be made on a meat broth basis in China’s cavalier attitude to Vegetarianism in general.

Eating pasta with chopsticks is fun! The Chinese bolognese is not vegetarian but I was assured it tasted great (and it did smell great!).
One little problem is that the menu is in Chinese and Japanese only, though there are pictures and the dishes are on display outside the restaurant as well. I still got to practice my katakana skills as the personnel was very nice but not extremely good at English.

Spaghetti Goemon
169 Wujiang Lu
Jingan district, Shanghai
(near Metro station Nanjing Road West)

Today’s freshness

Greek salad with herbs, bell peppers and tomatoes from the windowsill, feta, cucumber, and black olives.

Bento #352

Red Couscous salad with cucumber, onion and parsley, fried halloumi pieces on more parsley and watermelon for dessert.

This is my own box. Somehow it was hard to photograph it tonight.

Bento #351

Vegetarian Burritos stuffed with beans, nuts and chili, brown rice, some homegrown herbs and rucola and two strawberries for dessert.
This should get me through Friday!

PS: I added a recipe to yesterday’s post since I had a few people mentioning they never had mushroom pie. Here you go then!

Bento #350

Is this a real pie? Is this just fantasy?
Caught in a hunger dream, got no key for the pantry!
Open your eyes, just grab a slice and see…
I’m a poor Hobbit, I need pie regularly…
A little apple pie, cherry pie, mushroom pie, berry pie…
Any flavour really, it doesn’t really matter, to me, to me.

Um, I mean with summer almost gone and having let myself go a little by eating out way too much, I thought I’d get back into making bentos. Also, Chanterelles are in season again! Yay!
So I made a bunch of mushroom pie for freezing, and loaded up the lunchbox with some mixed lettuces, cherry tomatoes and a nasturtium flower.

Edit: Since so many asked, here’s the recipe I used (I mostly just winged it but here we go). It’s such a common thing to get here in Sweden I never thought anyone would be interested!

I made 2 big and one small pie, but I will adjust the sizes to about what I used for one of the big ones.
1 pie crust (I made my usual graham pie crust, in a pan about 24cm in diameter and 3cm high)
1 big handful (ca. 70g?) of mushrooms, cut into not-too-small pieces
1/2 (small) red onion, chopped
2 eggs
Olive oil or butter, dash of white wine, parsley, garlic, salt, pepper
Start with preheating the oven to 200 degrees Celsius (or if you have just blind baked your pie crusts, it will still be warm).
I asked the BF if I should pre-fry the stuffing and he enthusiastically agreed. Fried mushrooms just taste better! Also, they will no longer lose water when they are stuffed in the pie.
So I started with glazing the red onion in a pan with the butter and a little garlic, then added the mushrooms, parsley, salt and pepper. When they started to let out their water, I added the dash of white wine, took them off the heat and stirred in the eggs, then poured the whole mixture into the pie shell. It took about 15-20 minutes to bake in the oven at 200 degrees Celsius. Since it starts out warm this is quite quick!

“Ode to a stolen pie” is by me, made for a RP character.

Bento #349

Some leftovers from Dinner: A mushroom and a piece of zucchini stuffed with risotto, tamagoyaki, homegrown rucola, radish and an edible flower. The bottle holds vinegar for the salad.

Status update from the windowsill, part 2

When just randomly picking a bunch of lettuces, herbs and veg from my windowsill looks this good…

…it calls for a nice salad with mozzarella, balsamico vinaigrette and a lovely glass of white wine to round it off, right?

Yum.

Springy tomato soup

A lovely and spring-y tomato soup, full of flavour and goodness. Makes 2 portions as a light summery main dish.

1 packet (500ml) of pureed tomatoes
1 vegetable bouillon cube
1 Tsp. tomato concentrate
1 clove garlic
1 Tsp. olive oil
salt, pepper, chili flakes (optional), herbs (I used fresh small-leaf basil)
1 ball mozzarella, sliced (keep some slices for decoration)

Warm the olive oil in a wide skillet. Add garlic and chili flakes and fry for a minute, without burning the garlic. Add tomato concentrate and the bouillon cube and fry as well.
Add the pureed tomato in installments, allowing the sauce to boil down and thicken between additions. Finally, add spices and water to desired soup consistency (or keep thick if you want a sauce), boil up and stir down half the mozzarella.
When the mozzarella has melted, dish out into soup bowls and decorate with some slices of mozzarella and basil leaves.