The Luxury of Travelling For One Meal: Giant Garlic Prawns

Yes, I have done it. Since the sustainability and food miles and all the media about how bad the air traffic is for the planet I have carried a bit of a bad feeling in my conscience. The primary reason for the trip was to experience one more time a pleasure of one single meal and introduce this most pleasurable and hopefully equally unforgettable experience to my friend. I got to know this restaurant during one of the business trips and that evening left a haunting impression in my food memory bank.

The second trip was taken under a considerable risk. I did not know and could not find the name of the restaurant. At that time in the early years of the 21^st century not all searches on the internet gave results. I knew from memory that it was down at the river and they had just one specialty. 

This all happened during the time when Estonia was not yet part of the European Union and Schengen agreement and it was not uncommon to be asked for the reason of the visit by the entry guards at the airports. And so did the border guard at Luxembourg airport. I answered: “Holiday” and the guy in the uniform looked suspicious. It was probably unusual that Luxembourg, a tiny country with a Duke and lots of banking and steel industry and some European Union/European Commission sessions going on, attracted tourists. I wonder if the border guard would have been less or even more baffled if the answer would have been “A meal in the restaurant down by the river that serves big scampis with copious amounts of garlic”?

Garlic Scampis

The air in the restaurant was hazy with the thick smell of garlic like in the past places used to be grey from cigarette smoke, the fact that almost everyone in the restaurant was eating the same thing and the meaty prawns dripping with garlicky oil got me hooked for life. They were brought to the table flaming in the baking dish. Now I have two very clear memories from that place. We have a saying that two will not stay without the third…I am so hoping for that to be true.

I was relieved, to an extent, when I saw that the editor of the Food & Wine Magazine in the May 2012 edition declares that she took a trip to Copenhagen just to eat at Noma. Makes me feel a bit better. I do think this is luxury and am grateful for having been able to do this.

Where have you travelled for the ultimate food experience?

Garlic tiger prawns

Ingredients: (makes 2)

Olive Oil (a few knobs of butter optional)

1 head of garlic

3-4 tiger prawns per person

Sea salt

Wedges of lemon

Crusty bread and/ or fresh green salad

Heat the oven to 230°C. Cut the crust lengthwise with scissors on the back side up until the tail. Then cut the meat lengthwise for 2/3 into the depth to make the butterflies. Crush the cloves of the head of garlic with a pinch of sea salt with the mortar and pestle.

Crushing the garlic with sea salt

Spread garlic on prawn butterflies

Place the prawns in the baking dish and spread the garlic on the prawn butterflies and generously cover with oil.

Bake in the hot oven for ca 10 min. Be careful not to overcook to avoid the prawns become chewy.

Serve with wedges of lemon, crusty bread and a green salad.

Tiger prawns with garlic in oil

The restaurant in Luxembourg is Chez Bacano. They serve steak as well but if you truly love garlic and scampi I recommend you try this flagship dish. If you do not like garlic and scampi I suspect the steak would not taste what you are expecting and the whole garlicky experience may possibly not provide and equally positive unforgettable experience. The atmosphere is casual. Be prepared that you smell garlic in your clothes for some time.

Fresh herbs series: Rosemary and Thin Focaccia

 

Rosemary plant at the market

The slowest growing herb in my herb garden now is rosemary. All ten others have put on between a couple to a dozen centimetres of growth in two weeks but Rose and Mary don’t seem to be doing so well. Perhaps it is just a matter of adjusting to the new environment and I should be more patient. A gardener on a TV show said that patience is the most important thing and sometimes it takes years to see the desired change in your garden. Time will tell.

Despite the immediate growth problems the culinary aspects of the rosemary seem to be in place and that’s what counts. This herb that has been around for centuries and is an irreplaceable ingredient in seasoning Mediterranean lamb dishes deserves to be the protagonist because of its powerful character.

Slow growing rosemary on the left

I was in Edinburgh in Scotland this week and we ate at an Italian restaurant that combined local Scottish ingredients like meat and fish with the Italian ones and served dishes made with Italian techniques.

I am used to season lamb with Rosemary, but the English and now obviously Scottish tradition, calls for mint to go with lamb. (That is unusual for me.) So on the menu there was lamb with mint pesto. The mint pesto was great, I don’t think I detected any rosemary there.

The rosemary made a strong opening entry on thin focaccia bread as we were waiting for our meals. I could have swallowed my tongue. It was soft and fresh and warm with the olive oil and the amount of rosemary was just right to give the focaccia strong enough flavour.

Rosemary on thin focaccia bread

Ingredients:

1 packet of dry instant yeast (7g)

1 tsp salt

1 tsp sugar

300g (3 cups) flour (or 100g whole grain flour and 200g plain flour)

2dl (1 cup) water

2 tbsp olive oil

More olive oil to drizzle over the dough

Flaky sea salt

Rosemary, only the leaves of 1-2 sprigs

Goat’s cheese cut in slices

1-2 garlic cloves, sliced

Mix the dry ingredients and then add the water, mix everything and half-way add olive oil and mix again all into dough. Use a wooden spoon, a dough mixer or hands and fold for 5 minutes until all ingredients have combined into smooth dough. Form a ball. Lift the ball of dough out of the bowl and drizzle some oil into the bowl and on the dough. This will help to get the dough out of the bowl easier later. Cover the bowl with cling film and a tea towel and leave for 1 – 1.5 hours until the dough has doubled in size.

Focaccia topped with rosemary, goat´s cheese and garlic

Thin focaccia bread made with wholegrain flour

Set the oven to 200ºC and cover a baking tray with baking paper. When the dough is ready place it on the tray and smooth the dough into a thin layer on with your hands. You could roll it as well, but I don’t bother. Go over the dough with wet hands once to give the focaccia a crust when baking. Place the rosemary leaves and the goat’s cheese on the dough, drizzle some olive oil and sprinkle some salt on it. Add the garlic slices either straight away or after 5 minutes baking to avoid garlic getting bitter. Bake for 15-20 minutes. 

Thin focaccia with a crust

Fresh herbs series: Lemon Thyme

At farmers market: Plenty of herbs to choose for balcony gardens

Lemon thyme, one of the over 100 thyme varieties

Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme… and lemon thyme are a few of the herbs that are growing on my balcony this season. I decided to grow my own herbs again for three reasons. Firstly, sometimes when I buy a bunch of herbs I don’t use it all and they wilt and go to waste. Now I can take just as much as necessary. Secondly, it is cheaper and thirdly, the urge of touching a rosemary leaf or a basil leaf or rub a little thyme spring between your fingers and then smell...know that feeling? Besides the colours are equally worth looking at.

I am a bit concerned about how long I can keep them totally healthy because I have seen a couple of small flies on the soil coupled with a slight fear from the past experience that the herbs may get infected by a grey layer of mould or something. But so far so good, the herbs are growing and I am snapping the basil or parsley or today - the lemon thyme.

Lemon Thyme, Zitronenthümian, sidruntüümian, (Lat.Thymus citriodorus)

The lemon thyme not just smells but also tastes a lot like lemon. And because of that it goes well with fish or chicken or other dishes that call for lemon and thyme. I used the lemon thyme to give flavour to poached salmon by placing one swig at the bottom and one swig on top of each portion of salmon with some sea salt and wrapped the salmon individually in the alu foil. Too much thyme will suffocate the taste of the fish, so better not overdo it. The trick is to keep the water just simmering, not to boil and to simmer ca 10-15 minutes to keep the salmon soft. Too much or too long cooking turns the salmon hard and it loses the moist succulence. Drizzle with olive oil and a few drops of lemon or lime juice and serve with some vegetables or fresh salad. (More poached salmon ideas here.)

Poached salmon with a touch of lemon thyme

Thyme and lemon thyme can also be used for herbal infusion tea. Thyme is said to have healing qualities against respiratory sufferings.

I took 3 sprigs per mug of boiling water and let it infuse for ca 10 minutes. Sweeten with some honey if you like sweet drinks, but the lemon thyme has already a strong citrus taste and can be very well enjoyed just simply like that.

Lemon thyme herbal tea

Changes in the food world across two centuries and "kilupirukad" (small salty oily fish pastries)

There are fundamental changes happening in every area of life at a fast pace. The changes around the food and eating burst emotions left and right like a metronome. We find things that never existed before, that are genius and on the other hand see things that make perfect sense disappear or nonsense flourish. Here is a short list of observations that I have lived through or experience at this very moment.

End of the last century: Estonia
Few cookbooks
Every household had at least one handwritten recipe notebook
Simple food… still my favourite
Eaters were much closer to food production (neighbours helping neighbours at potato harvest, own food grown on allotments)
Less packaged food, often food was weighed in the shop according to your order, often packed in paper, very little plastic packaging
People carried a shopping bag, plastic bags were expensive and even not available

Less allergies
Less food regulatory laws (I used to walk by a bread factory that had its windows open to the street, the smell coming out was heaven. Loaves of bread used to be sold unpacked in shops. Nobody died of dysentery coming from the bread they had bought that wasn’t individually packed)
Less E-ingredients, the big money wasn´t in the food research
Shorter life expectancy
A lot of food was very local

Recycling of milk bottles, cream and mayo jars, other bottles (there wasn’t much other packaging to recycle)
Deficit of exotic fruit, coffee, other ingredients (eg to cook a Thai curry at home in 1990 was unthinkable)

Home made jams was a common way of preserving

Estonians loved “Tallinna kilu”, small oily fish spiced and preserved in cans (see photo)

Tallinna kilud have stood the test of time

21^st century: Estonia, Switzerland, Europe
More packaged foods
Fashionable to take a plastic bag each time – fortunately this trend is reversing
Less knowledge about where food is grown or how –  fewer children have seen, let alone touched, an animal whose produce they eat, TV programs showing children guessing how peas, cabbage, brussel sprouts etc grow… a tragic comedy
Better agriculture
New varieties of produce are higher yielding and stay fresh longer (sometimes at the expense of smell or taste)

Hydroponicly grown strawberries flown across Europe in March
More allergies
People live longer (combined with progress in medicine)
Long aisles of ready made meals

Food wasting increases massively

Smart mobile phones – internet saves the work of writing down the ingredient list
Food magazines have a booklet with shopping list for ingredients
Thousands of food blogs
El Bulli, Heston Blumenthal, molecular cuisine
Nordic chefs winning the French culinary competitions
Frozen food, big freezers at home allow storing fresh food, great to have fresh berries from your own garden in winter

Celebrities´cookbooks

Celebrity chefs acting on TV People talk about food miles, local, seasonal food
Estonians love “Tallinna kilu”, small oily fish spiced and preserved in cans. “Tallinna kilu” is awarded “Recognised Estonian Taste” Award in 2001, 2003, 2008.

The fillets of "kilu", little anchovies type oily fish, is canned with salt and spices

Go figure what will happen in the future. On one hand there are propelling new techniques, the unimaginable has become a reality, on the other hand the old common sense of eating what the nature provides with the farmers´ wisdom and the mothers´ common sense of eating a variety of foods is fighting for existence while the blasts of new diets of the month in the media feature one or the other “magic” ingredient or nutritional nebula.

For sure the changes and the extremes will continue. In one way or the other the world will keep a balance.

Future: the world
People live even longer
Genetically modified food will feed the billions
People will migrate for water, flee the famine
Better (=less) usage of water in agriculture
Better fertilisers
Globalisation - more imports of non-local ingredients, fruits and veg
More eating seasonal produce – the sustainability mentality will continue
Growing vegetables vertically, on small space (eg on roofs), on hydroponics
Food blogs will stay for a while
Recipes on Internet, printed books will become rare
Cooking lessons - part of survival education at schools
More people can afford a fridge

Households producing energy, connected to the grid, kitchen appliances using less energy
Asia going through the bad western diet fashion of more fat and sugar as more business is done in Asia and people demand/can afford new, more expensive ingredients

Fast food and slow food revolution

Estonians will love “Tallinna kilu”, small oily fish spiced and preserved in cans

Kilupirukad: small oily fish pastries or empanadas

These pastries or small pies are made with small oily fish that we Estonians call “kilu”. They resemble canned anchovies. Both are quite salty, however “kilu” are softer than the anchovies and mostly canned as whole fish. One can also buy fillets, if you don’t want to spend time cleaning the fish off the heads and backbones.

Ingredients:

Puff pastry (ca 25x 40 cm)

12 fillets of “kilu” or anchovies

12 leaves of parsley

4 boiled eggs, cut in quarters

1 egg, beaten

Fold "kilu" or anchovis fillets with egg in puff pastry. Add dill or parsley for taste.

Heat the oven to 200°C.

Take a sheet of puff pastry and cut it into squares of 10 x 10 cm. place a fillet of fish, a leaf of parsley or some chopped dill, a quarter of a boiled egg in the middle and fold the diagonal edges across. Brush each pie with some beaten egg.

Cook in the oven for 20 minutes until golden.

Golden fish pies: Estonian Kilupirukad