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.

Read Full Post »

Bento #342 – roasted veggie bolognese

The main attraction of this bento is spaghetti with a roasted vegetable “bolognese” sauce, parmesan and some chopped fresh herbs.
Sides are mixed lettuce (and some basil leaves) from the windowsill, carrot flowers, a radish, babybel cheese and another easter candy.
(Another great thing about easter, all the candy on sale afterwards!)

The vegetarian spaghetti sauce was quite simple to make! Basically it was born out of what I had in the fridge, but that doesn’t mean it necessarily needs refining.
To begin with, I took:
1 large-ish carrot, cut lengthwise into strips
1-2 pieces of celery, same
1 red onion, cut into 8ths
1 small bellpepper, sliced into strips
4-5 large-ish champignon mushrooms
and some garlic cloves, tossed them with salt, pepper, a tablespoon of olive oil and some dried thyme, and set everything under the broiler to roast.
While it was roasting, I set the tomato sauce base to simmer. That was a teaspoon of butter, some red chili flakes, a 500g packet of pureed tomatoes, a splash or red wine, salt, pepper and a teaspoon of sugar.
When the veggies looked just about done, I pulsed them to a coarse texture in the food processor, mixed with the tomato sauce and done. Simple!

And quite delicious.

Read Full Post »

Bento #287

Monday’s not a good day for making bentos in the evening, so a somewhat less elaborate bento today. There’ll be more penguins later this week, be assured.

Italian flag pasta – tossed with pesto and fried mangold on top, tossed with butter and parmesan on top, and tossed with tomato sauce and more of the same sauce on top. Not quite as Japanesely clean as three-colour rice but fun to make!

Read Full Post »

Bento #261 – more gnocchi

Homemade gnocchi in tomato-bell pepper sauce (the smooth version of the recipe below) with parmesan and a basil leaf in the small container; Feta cubes (have to get some protein into me somehow), homegrown yellow and red cherry tomatoes, broccoli, bell pepper and grated carrots in the big container.
Not the most inspired arrangement… I was tired. But it will be yummy! I’m also bringing a bottle of balsamic vinegar dressing for the veggies and feta but I forgot it until after the photo.

Remember these? When I posted about the gnocchi previously, I wasn’t quite happy with the recipe yet. I have filed on the recipe I had a little and it works better now:

Looks much better! (I left out the parsley this time. It looked good on the photo but really, it didn’t add much to the taste.)
Granted, a better quality potato might have worked even better. But this is Sweden and I have to work with what I have on hand…

To be honest, I was surprised at how simple the recipe actually was. If I had known that before, I would have made gnocchi much sooner! It was actually easier than making pasta.
The main problem, as I had suspected, was that the instructions to quarter the potatoes before boiling had been made for big baking potatoes. The ones I can buy here are small – only 5 cm max on the longest side. When boiling them whole and peeling them afterwards, the dough got much drier and stuck together nicely with half the flour.
The ingredients:
500g mealy potatoes, boiled and peeled
100-150g wheat flour
2 egg yolks
1 Tsp. of olive oil, Salt to taste
Mash the potatoes and make into a sticky dough together with the rest of the ingredients. Roll into finger-thick sausages and cut off gnocchi. Boil in portions in salted water until they start floating. As simple as that!

I still have cherry tomatoes ripening and since they’re so good, they deserved to be used reverently. Luckily, this sauce does them justice.
You will need:
about 2 handfuls of homegrown cherry tomatoes
1 red or yellow bell pepper
1 clove of garlic
olive oil, salt, pepper and basil

Halve the bell pepper and roast skin-side up in the oven/broiler until the skin goes black and bubbly. Cool and remove skin. Cut the rest into thin strips and set aside.
Blanch the cherry tomatoes in hot water and de-skin them (cut a cross in the bottom if they’re not all ripe – mine just popped out of their skins without any help though!). Try not to eat all of them like candy before putting them into the sauce.
In a pan, heat olive oil and garlic. Add the tomatoes and bell pepper and let them melt into a still chunky sauce. Season with salt and cracked pepper.

Serve with julienned basil leaves and Parmesan cheese on or tossed with the pasta of your choice.
It works just as well with spaghetti:

I’m submitting this to Presto Pasta Nights hosted this week by Heather at Girlichef.

Read Full Post »

Bento #260

Annnd here’s today’s bento.

Organic ravioli with ricotta and spinach, tomato and roasted bell pepper sauce, parmesan cheese in the small box.
Two slices of garlic butter baguette (my coworkers are gonna love me for this =.=), green-and-orange-striped bell pepper slices, cherry tomatoes and a Mozart ball chocolate in the big box.
Freckled Basil leaves as decoration.

Read Full Post »

Weekend pasta: Gnocchi!

I got two cooking magazines in the mail yesterday! That would not be so special, but they were sent by my grandma. :)
And they were good – one recipe specifically caught my eye and I had to cook it immediately! I’ve been looking for ways to use some more of my lovely cherry tomatoes, and gnocchi was a challenge I couldn’t resist.

The result: I’m not sure I would recommend the magazine’s method of cooking the potatoes for the gnocchi – the dough got too watery and the gnocchi were quite soft in the end. But the taste was nice, and the sauce, with some changes from my side (I removed several ingredients to keep the taste of the tomatoes more pure) was delicious.

Gnocchi with parsley and tomato-ovenbaked bell pepper, onion and garlic sauce.

Mom – can you print this out and send it to grandma when you get to it, please?

Read Full Post »

Pasta post

Sorta-kinda veggie Milanese, even though the breading is wrong.
Pasta with tomato sauce; the eggplant is baked in the oven topped with olive oil, breadcrumbs, parmesan, parsley, salt and pepper. Next time I think I’m going to have to make the slices a little thicker.

Read Full Post »

More things to do with homegrown tomatoes

Yes… I need to update more often, sorry :(

It’s simple, but here’s the blog post that reminded me to make this more often.

Read Full Post »

Presto pasta nights: Penne with mangold, feta, and onions

This is a dish that I forget about way too often. It’s not that it’s not delicious – it is exceedingly so! – but it’s just not… fancy. There’s nothing involved that makes me think “Yes, this really is haute cuisine” or even “There’s cooking involved”.
And that is sad, because it’s absolutely delicious, wonderful comfort food and easy to make to boot.
So I figured I would write myself a reminder to make it more often by writing the recipe down.

Pasta with mangold, feta and onions

Ingredients:
1/2 big bunch (or 1 small bunch) of mangold (Swiss Chard), or a packet of babyleaf spinach or similar.
1 cup of feta, crumbled roughly
1 red onion
2 cloves of garlic
1 Tsp. olive oil
Salt, pepper
1 large pan with a lid
2 portions pasta (I used Penne here)
Optional: Sundried tomatos, sliced

Cook the pasta.
Slice the garlic. Cut the onions into half moons. Heat the olive oil in a large pan and fry the onions and garlic until the onions start browning – they should taste sweet. We really want them slightly caramelized to contrast with the rest of the dish.
Wash the leafy vegetables. If you’re using mangold, cut it into strips. Smaller stuff can stay whole. Put them into the pan with the onions, stir and put on the lid until the leaves have wilted. Take the lid off, stir to cook a bit more, season with salt and (lots of) crushed black pepper.
Put into the pasta pot with the drained pasta and the crumbled feta. Stir vigorously so that the feta can heat through and combine with the pasta. Optionally, add sliced sundried tomatoes, raisins or pine nuts.

Serve garnished with more crushed pepper.

I’m sharing this dish with Presto Pasta Nights, hosted this time by its creator, the lovely Ruth.

Read Full Post »

Ovenbaked macaroni with eggplant sugo and feta

I haven’t fixed the other photos yet… slow this week. I’ll upload them later.

Just when I wrote about the Carrot and Peanut sugo this week, I happened to find another great vegetarian sugo recipe in a newspaper around here. Since I had the ingredients at home anyway, I thought I’d give it a try – and because I was craving feta, I then transformed it into an oven-baked dish with a feta crust. Yum.

The sugo is made of roasted eggplant, ground roast walnuts and tomato sauce. I personally think the walnuts were a bit strong and am going to use less next time. I think about half a cup would be enough.
I used macaroni because I love them in baked dishes, but the recipe originally served the sugo with spaghetti, which sounds wonderful – it’s a really think and coating sauce!

Eggplant and walnut sugo
1 food processor
1/2 cup walnuts
1 small or 1/2 large eggplant, diced and salted
2 Tsp olive oil (I use garlic and chili flavoured) for frying
crushed tomatoes or tomato concentrate + water
Rosemary, salt, pepper to taste

Roast the walnuts in a dry pan. Transfer to the food processor and grind to fine crumbles. Set aside.
Roast the eggplant in batches, adding more olive oil whenever necessary. I make thin slices so as much surface as possible gets fried, but I hate how eggplant soaks up so much oil. If you want to decrease the amount of fat, you can consider roasting it in the oven instead like I did in an earlier eggplant sugo recipe.
Puree the eggplant in the food processor. If you don’t like it chunky, add some tomato sauce to make it puree more evenly. Return to the pan and add the walnuts and more tomato sauce to desired consistency. Spice to taste and let simmer another few minutes (or until the pasta is done).

I had boiled macaroni in the meanwhile and distributed them to two lasagna forms coated in butter. The sauce went on top, and a layer of crumbled feta on top of that. Some more rosemary on top and off they went to the oven to bake at 250 degrees C until the cheese got a nice crust. YUM!

Read Full Post »