Potato and asparagus salad with fresh garlic sauce

The farmer´s market is getting busier and more colourful as the summer advances.
Strawberries from local farms in Thurgau or Seeland have almost elbowed out the earlier Italian imports. Special stands are put up for local asparagus. Side by side potatoes from the previous crop stored over winter and the half thumb sized new cuties are claiming their space next to radishes, young carrots and various greens.
Early summer is the best time for fresh garlic. At our market it is often an import from neighbouring France.The plump bulbs range from whitish to purple. The elastic skin hides the cloves  so full of juice that it drips when you slice them. The young garlic is a happy companion to new potatoes and other young vegetables.

Potato and asparagus salad with fresh garlic sauce

Ingredients (2 potions)
300g blue potatoes, boiled
300g new yellow potatoes, boiled
300g asparagus (thin stalks)
1 tbsp vegetable oil

Sauce:
1 tsp mustard
1 clove of fresh garlic, chopped
1 egg
2 tbsp lemon juice
3 tbsp rape seed oil
salt and pepper

Fresh dill

Prepare the asparagus by bending or cutting off the hard ends (ca 1-2 cm).
Heat the oil in a grill pan. Place the thin asparagus stalks into the pan and fry ca. 5-7 minutes turning them on all sides. Drain on a kitchen paper.

Tip:
Boil the different colour potatoes separately to preserve the colour. Add 1 teaspoon of vinegar into the salt water when boiling the blue potatoes.

For the sauce fry 1 egg on one side for 1 minute. The egg should still be runny on the surface.
Measure all ingredients into a container and add the half fried egg.
Mix into a smooth sauce with a hand mixer.

Serve warm or cold. Place asparagus and potatoes on a serving platter, spoon the sauce onto the vegetables and sprinkle some chopped fresh dill on top.

Eton mess

Eton mess, a traditional English dessert

Berries are health bombs. They hide a wealth of antioxydants, vitamins and lots of vitally important nutrients. People who like berries know what I am talking about. To people who are still wondering what to do with berries and how to eat them, I would like to recommend a simpler than simple delicious dessert that anyone can make in a few minutes. This dessert is Eton mess.

 

Pick a handful of currants, raspberries or strawberries if you are blessed with a garden of your own or go for a walk in a forest and bend your back to gather wild blueberries, some tangy lingonberries or wild strawberries or venture out to a farmers' market to fetch a box of any berries currently in season. If none of the above seems inviting, a supermarket would be the way out to mix together this dessert. Some of my friends use superlatives to describe this sweet decadent creamy enjoyment.

 

Berries, small health bombs

Strawberries are the traditional ingredient for the original dessert served at Eton college in England.
I had a chance to visit Harper Adams Univeristy, also in England and there I ate Eton mess with cooked mixed berries. If the English use other fruit than strawberries, so can we.

 

Ingredients per person:
a handful of berries
1 medium meringue (half a palm size)
100ml fresh cream (35% fat)
1 tsp sugar

Break the meringue into smaller pieces with a fork.
Beat the cream with sugar.

Arrange berries, meringue and cream in layers in each serving bowl or mix everything together in a bigger bowl and serve portions from there.

Enjoy with friends!

 

Wild Blueberry Soup with Fluffy Semolina Dessert

Estonian wild blueberries - in season in July

"Go to the forest!" or "Mine metsa!" is one of the expressions in Estonian language that is used to show annoyanceˇwith someone or to say "what nonsense!" or "stop bothering me!", an easier version of "go to hell". A colleague from Turkey recently reminded me of that. An Estonian friend had taught her that, among some other things that I will not repeat here. I am yet to find another nation who has a similar saying.

There is lots of forest in Estonia and a lot of people actually do go to the forest for more practical reasons to forage for wild berries and mushrooms or go for a run or a round of nordic walking on a foot friendly soft forest path.
There are sea/ocean people or mountain people or forest people - a main force of nature that draws certain people to itself . I belong to the latter. Every year during holidays I go and walk around the familiar forests and if the year is good, I might be picking wild blueberries, lingonberries or mushrooms.

Wild blueberries and chanterelles from the forest

Now is wild blueberry time and as I was reaching out for more I remembered two recipes from the past that I am sharing here today.
Wild blueberry soup has been around in the Estonian kitchens for centuries. It is popular and also served at Tartu ski marathon as a source of energy to those on the way to finish the 63 kilometer track. The first recipe of the fluffy semolina dessert that I have seen was published in 1965 in a recipe book that could be found in most Estonian homes. I don´t know where the name comes from, but my guess is that it has some links to German or Russian.

Wild blueberry soup with fluffy semolina pudding

Wild blueberry soup

Ingredients for 6
3.5-4 liters of water
ca. 1 liter of wild blueberries, slightly crushed
3 tbsp starch and 3-4 tbsp cold water
100g  sugar or to taste
Bring the water to boil. Crush the blueberries with a wooden spoon a bit and add the berries to the hot water. Cook for 15 minutes till all the berries break and let out the juice. Add sugar to your taste and mix. The blueberries are much sweeter than many other berries and therefore can be cooked with rather little sugar.
Mix the starch with cold water until smooth. When the berry juice seems ready add the starch slowly and stir until the "soup" thickens. If you like a thicker consistency, mix some more starch with water and add. Bring to boil and quickly take off the heat.
Set aside to cool.

Bubert, fluffy semolina dessert

(Serves 6)

1.5l milk
7-8 tbsp fine wheat semolina
5-6 eggs, whites and yolks separated
7-8 tbsp sugar
Vanilla (optional)
Bring the milk to boil and slowly add the semolina. Stir and cook until the semolina has softened and the milk thickened.
Combine the egg yolks with sugar and beat with a handmixer till foamy.  Take some milk-semolina mixture and stir into the egg-sugar mixture, then pour everything back to the pot. Stir till well combined and thickened. 
Beat the egg whites till stiff and slowly fold in the egg whites. Keep the pudding on the heat for one or two more minutes and then let cool.
Serve the blueberry soup with Bubert on a tender summer night in the garden. No words needed. The birds and grasshoppers and the dessert will tell the story.

A summer dessert from Estonia

For more Food from the forest see also:
Wild mushrooms
Wild Blueberry Ricotta Cake

Food wasting: Shocking Statistics. Left-over breakfast recipe: Pumpkin pancakes

Jams in my fridge and honey

I was going through my thoughts and notes on what to blog about this time when the alarm bells hit my ears on the evening news program: the European Commission has recently published statistics that 89 million tons of usable food is annually wasted  across EU27. That food is wasted by households (42%), by production and processing (39%), by catering establishments (14%) and by retail (5%). If we continue this way there will be 126 million tons of food wasted per year by 2020. Outrageous statistics and bad behaviour!

“Best before” or “Consume by” are two different things.
Indeed consuming fresh dairy or meat products with a passed “Consume by” date can cause health problems and I wouldn’t advise anyone to do it, however “Best before” just denotes until when the quality of that product is best and not when it becomes unusable. It is easy to mix up these two, but picturing 3,5 million trailer trucks full of wasted food that is generated in European Union the distinction between the two can make a whole lot of difference. All these trucks standing behind each other are more than enough to make a trip around the Equator. On top of the issue of wasting food that people can eat, how does the environment cope with the mountain of waste?
If foods with a past best before date have been stored in good conditions, the food is likely to be good for some time.
In many countries there are organisations that collect and distribute the food close to “Consume by” and “Best Before” dates to people and organisations in need. In Switzerland a few of my colleagues and I worked with one of such -"Schweizer Tafel"- last year. In my home country there is a similar "Estonian Food Bank".

I hereby reach out to the readers and ask to please support in the ways small or big available to you to help reduce the food waste.

Tips on how to reduce waste and turn leftovers into tasty ingredients:

- Leftovers from the fridge (eg. slightly wilted vegetables) or dry goods cupboard (eg. lentils and beans past “Best before” date) make wonderful soups, stews or pancakes
- Pasta stores long after the best before date
- Dinner leftovers make a good lunch the next day
- It is worth checking the inside of canned foods past “Best before” date before just throwing them away
- Cut the old rye bread –very popular in Estonia – into small cubes, roast in the oven and eat as a healthy snack alternative, but DON´T eat the mouldy old bread.
-Make croutons or bread crumbs from the hardened white bread
-Check the freshness of the eggs by carefully dropping an egg into a glass filled with cold water. If the egg drops to the bottom it is good to eat, if it stays on the top it is not fresh.

Check eggs for freshness: The egg at the bottom is fresh

Pumpkin Pancakes
To use up an egg or two that has been in the fridge for some time and a piece of pumpkin try these pancakes for breakfast with a mug of freshly brewed coffee.

Ingredients

2 eggs
250g pumpkin of any type
120g flour (1 cup)
0.5tl baking soda if you wish to make small thick pancakes
1.5 dl butter milk or fresh milk
a pinch of salt
1 teaspoon sugar
Rape seed oil or sunflower oil for frying

Grated pumpkin adds colour

Mix the eggs, salt and sugar with a fork, add some milk and mix again. Add the flour and baking soda, mix again. Leave a little milk for later or add some water if the dough becomes too thick. As last add the thinly grated pumpkin. Mix everything. Let rest for 10-15 minutes for the flour to expand.
Heat some oil in a shallow frying pan and fry either small pancakes or crepe-type over the pan pancakes.
Serve with honey or jam. There may be some jars of jam open in the fridge that are waiting to be eaten and not eventually thrown away.

Fluffy pumpkin/squash pancackes

Deviled Eggs or Stuffed Eggs (Estonian: Täidetud munad)

 In the last century the nutritional advice that was projected in the media recommended to limit the number of eggs eaten per week to one or two. In more recent reading I see a significant change to even recommending one egg per day. Of course people who have egg allergy know if and what they can eat. Eggs are very old food. As our ancestors were eating eggs, the animals in the wider food chain eat eggs; I would say that the eggs are a proven food regardless of the fashion in the nutrition circles.

Brown eggs seem to be more popular on the market

The real country eggs from the birds that have been eating real grass are the best.

In Estonia the filled boiled eggs have been popular for decades. Nowadays one can buy the ready made ones in the shop; however I prefer to make them myself. These egg halves were always present on party dinner tables. These dinner tables that were full of all sorts of dishes deserve a separate story. Here is a little pre-taste in the form of filled eggs.

Eggs at farmers´market

The simplest recipe of filled eggs:

1 egg per person as minimum.

Boil the eggs (8-10min, the yolk must be hard)

Let them cool in down. If you are in a hurry, put them in the sink with cold water.

De-shell.

Cut the eggs in half either vertically or horizontally.

Take out the yolks into a bowl.

Press the yolks with a fork into a homogenous mash.

Mix the yolks with mayonnaise, ca. 1 teaspoon per each egg.

Mix into a smooth paste. Season with salt if necessary.

Fill the egg whites with the yellow paste.

Garnish with some dill or parsley

Filled eggs with sun dried tomato, mayo and chives

For a more sophisticated version and more variety add one or more of these ingredients:

Mustard

Anchovy paste

Cayenne or chilly pepper

Capers, chopped

Sun dried tomatoes, chopped

Chives

Dill

Fried and cooled bacon bits