Experiencing Cooking Class and Discovering Tagine

I discovered that one of my work associates in the UK is a passionate cook and visited a cookery class during one of his holidays. I was very curious, since I have been playing with the idea of doing it myself. I thought his week in the class passed with lots of laughter and lots of great cooking and was surprised to hear that the action in the kitchen was done in a very pleasant atmosphere and since people took the cooking very seriously it was almost reverential. Wow!
Read David's story...

Experiencing Cooking Class and Discovering Tagine
by David Skinner

Based on my attendance at two cookery schools* in England – one in the south and one in the north – I would really recommend the experience. 

Whether you want to learn new kitchen skills, try out new recipe ideas – or even just take a mental break from work the format of the one day courses offered seemed very well designed.  I was really surprised by how much the Chef instructors can teach you in a day – but it is quite tiring and I noticed that some people who were on a week’s course started to want a break by the time Thursday evening came.

Although it might seem obvious to more experienced cooks, in terms of general technique the big aha for me was the need to protect flavour – even when cooking dinner party style menus.  Some of the key practical insights about this were:

-        use of very good quality sea salts added to the main ingredient of a dish right at the start

-       an ‘only chop once’ approach to preparing soft green herbs which are then added to the dish just at the last minute before serving

-       blanching of vegetables in boiling water for one minute only before cooling them in ice water and then re-heating them in a few drops of water with added rapeseed oil just before serving

-       using rapeseed oil rather than olive oil whenever a recipe calls for heating the oil (olive oil takes on a less pleasant taste when heated over 70C) 

With regard to recipes the biggest discovery for me was the delight of tagines and in fact many of the flavours and textures of Moroccan cuisine in general.

The conical shape of the tagine lid is designed to act as a condenser for the steam generated by the cooking.  This means you can slowly casserole meat, poultry or fish with vegetables, spices and sumptuous fruits like figs, dates, lemons and apricots using very little added water.  The result is a flavoursome and spicy - but not too ‘chilli hot’ - fruity dish with a pleasantly dry texture.

I tried out a chicken tagine based menu that I learned on a group of friends and they reacted really positively (they took second helpings  which is always good feedback I think!)

A very important Moroccan flavour component is the Chermoula paste used as a marinade before cooking the chicken in the tagine.

Chermoula paste is made from the following ingredients using an electric blender:

2          Spanish onions

5          (yes, five!) cloves of garlic

1          lemon, juiced

1          bunch of flat-leaved parsley

1          bunch fresh coriander

Sea-salt to season

Cumin powder, coriander powder, chilli powder and turmeric powder – all added to taste

Half a cup of rapeseed oil

Chicken pieces should be marinaded in this paste for at least one hour (in the fridge)

When ready, sauté the chicken pieces to colour in a large frying pan, allowing space between piece so each has chance to brown rather than steam.

Place the chicken pieces in a tagine and then add the following ingredients:

A dash of rapeseed oil

Another Spanish onion roughly chopped in six pieces

2          carrots, roughly chopped

1          small sweet potato, roughly chopped

1          tablespoon honey

handful of (pitted) black olives

half lemon, finely chopped

handful of dates, stones removed

Add a little chicken stock, but not enough to bubble over during the cooking.  Remember that the tagine is designed to condense the steam from the cooking liquid and so it should not boil dry.  Keep a watch on it just in case though, especially if you leave it cooking for a long time. 

Cooking time is a minimum of one hour, but the tagine could be left on a low heat after that so there is no rush if you are serving it at a dinner party.

The menu I learned recommended serving well-flavoured cous cous with the tagine – and there are many recipes available for this to suit a wide variety of tastes.

The internet has many tagine recipes and indeed Moroccan starters and accompanying dishes.  They all seem quite straightforward, but, it takes a little experimentation with the many spices involved to get the flavour you want - so the key seems to be to add a little of each at a time.

Overall, I feel that my first experiences at cookery school were very pleasant as a holiday which I would thoroughly recommend to anyone interested in cookery – and – I have learned a lot that I can continue to use in cooking for family and friends.

*The two schools were:  Ashburton in the Dartmoor National Park in the south of England and LucyCooks in Staveley which is in the English Lake District.  Both schools are in beautiful parts of England and so would form a convenient part of a touring holiday.

The tagine recipe described above was from LucyCooks.

Cool as a cucumber in 30C degrees in shade: Cucumber soup and salads

It´s been a hot weekend here with the thermometer showing 30+ degrees or more Celsius. Too hot to even eat. Drink, drink, drink, but eventually the stomach is asking for more. Cucumber with its 90% water content is a great source of hydration for a thirsty body. Often eaten cold the cucumber is the main ingredient for refreshing salads and cold soups.

In Estonia typical hot summer food is boiled early potatoes with dill and butter and cucumber salad with dill and sour cream. If this is not enough, some BBQ from a huge choice of ready marinated meat or endless line of sausages on offer is made quickly.

Cucumber salad 1:

Cucumbers cut into thin slices, add salt, chopped dill and some sour cream. Mix and taste.

Cucumber salad 2 (my own favourite):

Cut one long salad cucumber into thin slices,

add 1-2 tablespoon of salad vinegar,

some salt to taste,

0.5 teaspoon of sugar,

1 -2 tablespoons olive or rapeseed oil,

some black pepper and thinly chopped dill.

Mix well and leave to marinate for min 30 minutes or overnight.

My alternative to gazpacho is 

Cucumber soup (2-3 portions):

3 long salad cucumbers, cold from the fridge

1 tablespoon salad vinegar

1 teaspoon salt

150ml unflavoured yoghurt

3 big leaves of peppermint, thinly chopped

or for a more northern taste instead of peppermint leaves add

a tablespoon of chopped fresh dill

Peel the cucumbers, cut out the seeds, cut into slices. Add the vinegar, salt, peppermint, yoghurt and purée with a mixer or blender. Taste for salt. Season more if necessary. Leave in the fridge to ensure the soup is refreshingly cold before serving.

Cool Cucumber Soup with Mint

A delicious cucumber soup was served at Neumarkt restaurant in Zurich, my current top favourite restaurant in the old town, with a great summer garden, very fast and professional service and most importantly very good local seasonal food.

Chicken and dumpling soup: Estonian “kana-klimbisupp”

Every now and then my friends in Estonia say they want some soup. The craving for some good healthy broth is strong, especially in colder days. On the other hand there are people who always prefer solid food to liquid. This one is a favourite of many Estonians. I like soups that have pieces of the ingredients in them. Puréed cream soups are great as well but every now and then I want to be able eat rather than just swallow my soup.

The dumpling soup is quite thick and serves as a full meal, especially at home with more than one helping. When I was growing up we never had to eat up what someone else put on your plate if we did not want to. Everyone took as much as they wanted and if on occasion what you had put on your plate was too much there was no obligation to eat up. Even if it meant that one mouthful was too many. I have always followed this principle. One’s stomach will tell when it is full, also a child’s. I guess for an adult the problem is not to want too much and recognise the moment of fullness. Soup is healthy, therefore two helpings are perfectly all right for a full meal. 

Chicken soup is well known for the healing properties against a cold. It certainly has helped me through some colds. Many cuisines make use of dumplings, German for example, being one of the closest influencers of the Estonian. The exact making varies, a mixture from old bread or flour, a combination with potato, gnocchis.

Ingredients for the chicken and dumpling soup:

Chicken Stock:

1 chicken

1 onion

Celery leaves or a good chunk of the root

1 carrot

1 teaspoon of salt

2 bay leaves

5 grains of black pepper

Soup vegetables:

2 bigger carrots

2 medium potatoes

Dumplings:

1 ladle full of stock or milk

1 egg

1.5 cups plain flour

Finely chopped dill or parsley

Put the chicken in one piece into the pot with cold water enough to cover the chicken. Bring to boil and wait till the foam starts to form. Cook for a few minutes and keep removing the foam. It is important to remove the foam to get a clear stock.

Throw away the water after the foam has been removed and start again with filling the pot with enough cold water to cover the chicken. Now add the cleaned onion, in one piece, as well as the carrot, celery leaves or root. Add 1 teaspoon of salt, the pepper and the bay leaves. Bring to boil at high temperature, then turn the heat down and simmer till the meat is totally soft and comes off the bones easily, 45-60 minutes. Turn the chicken once in a while and taste for salt. Some prefer to add the salt at the end, however I like the meat to take up some salt during cooking as later on it is difficult.

As the chicken is cooking prepare the carrots and potatoes. Peel and dice them into 1 cm cubes.

When the chicken is soft take it out on a plate and clean the meat off the bones discarding the skin. Remove the carrot, onion and celery from the stock.Put the shredded meat back into the pot.

Take a ladleful of broth into a bowl and let it cool a bit. Add half the flour into the lukewarm broth. Mix thoroughly. Beat an egg and add to the mixture. Add more flour till the dough is quite thick (feels heavy and drops from a spoon slowly). No need to add salt if your broth had enough already. If you make the dumpling dough with milk instead of the broth, add some salt to the dough.

Add the carrot and potato cubes into the stock and cook for 5-7 minutes.

Take two teaspoons and start dropping the dumplings into the soup by wetting the spoons in the broth, taking a small quantity of dough onto one spoon and turning it around on the other to push down into the boiling soup. When the dumplings have come up to the surface the soup is ready.

Garnish with chopped dill and/or parsley.

Serve with dark rye bread, white bread or without any bread.

Chicken -Dumpling Soup / Kana-klimbisupp

Food from the forest – 1: Wild blueberry-ricotta cake and blueberry-banana smoothie

50% of Estonia is covered by forest. For many Estonians going to the forest is as natural part of their life as surfing would be for people living close to the ocean like my Brazilian friends or skiing and mountain biking for the Swiss. A walk in the snowy forest on a sunny day is a bright relaxation, but a walk in summer or in autumn will fill your stomach in addition to having a good walk and an abundant breath of totally fresh air.



July-August is the time for blueberries (Ger.: Heidelbeeren, Est.: mustikad), August-September for lingonberries (Ger.: Preiselbeeren, Est.: pohlad), and September for wild mushrooms. The only thing to do before disappearing to fill your basket is to establish where is the exit. The position of the sun in relation to the point of entry (=exit or the place where the car is) is my best orienteering aid. Going with my Mom, the exit rules need to be established early on before reaching the forest as she has a habit to delve among the trees the moment the car stops and her foot touches the moss. It’s sweet but caution is better. Every year there is news about people getting lost in the forest. In my many years of being friends with the forest I have just about panicked once and thought I was lost for 10 minutes on a cloudy day as I could not detect the position of the Sun.



Wild blueberries in the forest







During my holidays in July I went to pick blueberries 5 times and got my oxygen dosis. I would add that the trip to the forest in our case is driven by the excitement and undertaken with a lot of enthusiasm, more so than the material benefit that may come with it. My Dad has so to say prohibited my Mom to make any more jam as there is enough already. In some years the crop is poor, but as long as you can eat some then and there the trip has paid off. That´s as fresh and natural a mouthful as it can get.In the past the berries were made into jams or other preserves. Blueberry jam is a must in the home medicine store – helps with any kind of indigestion, besides being just delicious. Nowadays there is an inversely proportional change from preserves to freezing the berries in the freezer. The shelves in the cellar become emptier while the freezers get bigger. I have friends who have found a new fashionable hobby in making all sorts of fruit and berry smoothies, cocktails and iced juices.Yummie! Well, three freezers of my close families were filled with the season’s blueberries from these trips to the forest. Ready for the winter.



Wild blueberries / mustikad

The forest blueberries make your tongue blue, the industrial blueberries don’t. In my town in Switzerland it is difficult to find forest blueberries in the supermarket frozen food department.  I was recently in Munich and saw the wild blueberries, lingonberries and the chanterelles mushrooms on the market – it felt so much like home, only at  about twice the price.



Blueberry-Ricotta Cake



Blueberry-ricotta cake recipe

24-26cm diameter cake form fitted with baking paper

120g butter

100g sugar

1 egg

250g wheat flour or a little more if sticky (for a healthier option use 50% whole grain wheat flour and 50% plain white wheat flour)

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 pinch of salt

400g of ricotta
4 tablespoons sour cream (20% fat)

3-4 tablespoons of sugar

2 eggs

0.4l or 4 big one-palm fulls of (wild) blueberries (If you use frozen ones - totally fine too - mix the berries with 1 tablespoon of potato or corn starch to keep them separate)

50-100g of almond flakes

Pre-heat the oven to 200 degrees C.

Mix the butter with sugar using a mixer, add the egg and mix again. Add the flour and before mixing with the butter-egg slightly mix the dry flour with salt and baking powder. Mix all into a dough. Form it into a ball with your hands. If the dough is too sticky pat some flour on the dough. Cover the dough with the plastic foil and leave to settle in the fridge for ca 30 min.

The dough is quite soft and lets itself to be spread on the bottom of the form. Pre-cook the dough for 10 minutes until the dough seems cooked and not raw soft sticky any more.

Mix the ricotta with sour cream and sugar. Taste before adding the egg (salmonella risk!) and then mix in the eggs.

Set the oven to 190 degrees C.

Put 2/3 of your blueberries on the pre-cooked dough, then the ricotta mix, more blueberries on the ricotta mix and the almond flakes on the blueberries.

Bake in oven for 35-45 minutes. The almond flakes should take a slight brown colour and check the cake with a match (ricotta should not stick to the match).

Let the cake cool down before serving.

Cool blueberry and banana smoothie, even better with icecream

Blueberry-banana smoothie

In a blender mix per person

a handful of blueberries,

1/2  banana,

some apple juice,

ice cubes into a smoothie.

If you want to give yourself or your friends a special treat add some ice cream as well. (Thanks for treating me=))

Mix well until the ice cubes have been crushed and the drink takes a nice thick consistency.

Vegetable Soup of Love or Hate, the Estonian “piima-aedvilja supp”

There are some foods or ingredients that one can either love, adore even, or hate, such as marmite, liquorice, coriander/cilantro,…, you know the kinds. The end of June, but mostly July is the time when families in Estonia either unite in praise or split at one summer soup. This is the time when the young vegetables strive in their adolescence. The fresh adult vegetables in August or September make a good soup too, but the very best is the “sweet sixteen” in the middle of the northern summer. This July I had the opportunity to once again sing the ode to this very special soup with my family. Fortunately all of us belong to the adorer group. I have friends who hate it. If you belong to the lucky ones with a functional hobby garden and can add the picking of the vegetables yourself to the cooking process, congratulations! In our family this soup is usually cooked in a relatively big pot and all of it gets eaten in one meal by the people around the table. This usually means more than one already generous helping...

Ingredients:

A bunch of young carrots

A bowl of new peas

A good palm full of new potatoes

A medium new cabbage or cauliflower or broccoli

Water to cook the vegetables in

0.5 -1 l of milk

Salt

Chopped dill and/or spring onion

Cut the carrots and potatoes into small bite size cubes and cook in the boiling salted water for 5-10 minutes, add the chopped bite size cabbage, cauliflower or broccoli and peas and cook until everything is soft but still with a bit of bite left. Assess the quantity of the liquid you wish to have in the soup. The final liquid should be roughly half water, half milk. If there is already too much water in the pot, take some out before adding the milk. Bring the soup to boil. Taste for salt. Finally add the chopped dill and/or onion greens. Serve immediately.

Estonian vegetable soup / piima-köögiviljasupp

Travelling Emotional Food

People have always travelled for food. Just think of the Great Famine that happened in Ireland  when the country’s potato crop was destroyed by potato blight disease and many people left to make a new living in America between 1845-52. Nowadays, in the more developed world, people travel for food on purpose for pleasure, to find new experiences, new tastes, learn about foreign cuisines. Many food blogs are created by people travelling and reporting their food adventures, TV programs are produced every year in many languages about food and travel.

My writing today about the emotional food that travels was sparked when I was reflecting about what I have seen my international colleagues and friends living abroad bring back to Switzerland from their trips to their home countries. I can say that over the years of my observations the popular items that people miss and bring from their home country to give them comfort, provide a home feeling in a foreign surrounding are actually quite basic: bread, sweets, beans, tea, cheese, tortillas, rice, more special items include chorizo or blood sausage. The tea in Switzerland is very weak and people who like black tea with milk must bring it from home or find an Asian food shop locally to stock up if they don’t want to drink a vague almost transparent brownish liquid pretending to enjoy a cup of tea. On top of the list of the South American sweets is a local basic like dulce de leche (Spanish). Some exchange students from Uruguay had packed at least 3 or more liters of it for their stay in Estonia. The locally available sweet condensed milk when boiled becomes a similar caramel sort of thing is clearly not the same. My Brasilian colleagues bring doce de leite (Portuguese) from their trips home. Also peanut based sweets from Brasil are very popular items to which I would add my own halvaa from Estonia. 

Another group of products are spices and sauces. Chiles and spicy sauces from Mexico, my elementary item of a certain type of Mayonnaise that always has space in my suitcase, occasionally Estonian mustard, sometimes flavour mixes that one used to like at home. A certain Chinese spice mix that a friend could not find in Switzerland, he had to bring from the UK. I also bring jams made out of Estonian berries, I have even brought green onions as I can’t find such ones here. Plus Estonian bread, either my Mom’s or my sister’s self-made bread or something new from the huge choice of breads from the country’s many bread makers.

Of course there is plenty of bread, sweets, or other food for that matter, here in Switzerland. It is just that special connection one has built with some foods and ingredients since childhood or simply grown to like them so much that the more or less similar substitute products in the foreign country fill the stomach but are incapable of satisfying the real craving. That little piece of dark brown rye bread with some butter and at best times with the Tallinna kilu (sort of spicy anchovies filet, but not quite) creates an emotional connection and a feeling of happiness thousands of kilometres away even if for just 10 minutes.

Now, it may seem that there is more import than export. Not true.

I can say that there is equally heavy traffic of food going out of Switzerland. Every time I go to Estonia I get a shopping list of things to buy and pack. Again the foods are not always specialty foods, rather simple basics like a certain cream cheese, a red pesto, tortellini, Allgäuer cheese. Since I have been making the Brasilian pão de queijo in my household and introduced my family in Estonia to it, the sour manioc flour travels with me. Not available to buy locally.

There is another type of food traffic developing slowly as the world globalizes and global sourcing through friends or international colleagues becomes possible. For example, I have a great supply of goiabada, the guava marmalade from Brasil. I have already got to know some different types of it. Or Arbuequina olive oil from my colleagues in Spain. The recent additions are a tamarind sauce and red chiles from Mexico and romesco sauce from Cataluña. Even if I don’t travel to these countries, I can still get to know them through food.

I must confess that I have travelled just for food. I once took a holiday and travelled back to Luxemburg mostly just because to visit a rather small casual restaurant that had basically only king prawns cooked in oven with lots of garlic on the menu. The guests were happily breathing in an intoxicatingly strong garlic air and all tables were eating prawns and more prawns and more garlic. Unfortunately I know where the restaurant is (I hope it is still there), but I don’t remember the name. I guess I have to go back and look what it is called...

Here is a recipe of a substitute dish for the Estonian räim, a small fish that is bigger than anchovies, but smaller than sardine or perhaps the size of the small sardine. I can buy Italian sardines here and occasionally make the very traditional “Estonian” fried small fish.

Fried and marinated sardines as a substitute to Estonian räim

Remove the bones from the fish. Put some salt and black pepper on the filets, turn the fish in flour, then in the egg mixture. Fry in a pan with some oil for a few minutes. The fish is great just fried, so I eat if warm. Another way is to marinate the fried filets in a mixture of sliced onion, vinegar, sugar, salt, some tomato sauce or ketchup and a little water and eat the next day.

Carrot Pie with Chunky Parmesan

It is weekend and more time again for kitchen experiments. I feel I need something without meat or even fish. The whole week I have wanted something in the lines of a cake, a pie or something else baked but have resisted the temptation. A veggi pie today perhaps? So I hit the market.

It is June and the counters at the Farmers Market have made space for piles of orange fresh new carrots. These thin sweet roots are “knackig” (Ger.), crisp and juicy and best enjoyed raw. Somehow I suspect that the bigger thicker carrots further away that are not sold in a bunch and don’t have the green leaves but are equally bright orange, hard and clean of soil are from the last harvest. I am really embarrassed that I am doubting this…I should know this. My logic of the agricultural calendar says they must be from last year’s harvest but as a consumer it can be confusing as they look the same all year round. Old or new crop today is carrot time.

I’ve grown up with carrots. Carrots grow in the northern latitudes and are a common vegetable, besides potatoes of course, in Estonia. My Mom used to make carrot pies and my aunt, who had a real stove with an oven that was heated by wood, used to make small carrot pies that were juicy soft and looked like small shiny golden brown pouches. We call them pies, picture them as empanadas filled with carrot and egg and sometimes some bacon.

I buy my carrots, Italian flat parsley – onions I have at home – for the pie and some strawberries for dessert. I see some big free range eggs and get half a dozen. Somehow I’ve always thought that the eggs at the market are more expensive, but no. So I’m thinking that from now on, I will take my egg business to the market.

I made the pie dough with my sister’s recipe:

100g hard butter from the fridge

2.5dl or 250ml flour (white or wholegrain)

Salt (two pinch)

1 egg yolk

1 tablespoon cold water

Chop the cold butter in the flour and salt mix into small pieces. A two pinch salt = a pinch between two fingers. Add the egg yolk and 1tbl spoon water. Mix all into a dough, wrap into the plastic foil and leave in the fridge for 30 minutes.

Carrot pie filling:

500-600g carrots

3 medium-small onions

3-4 tablespoons olive oil

150g parmesan

3 eggs + egg white left-over from the dough

75ml milk

Thyme

Curcuma

Flat parsley, a good handful, chopped

Salt and pepper

Pre-heat the oven to 200 degrees Celcius.

Clean and chop the onion rather finely but the fineness and equal piece size is not important at all. Peel the carrots and grate with the rough side. Very thinly grated carrot will lose the bite.

Heat the oil in a pan and fry the onion slightly. Add the grated carrots to the onion and cook for about 5 minutes till carrots are softer. Add some salt and pepper, chopped thyme, curcuma (about a three pinch) and as last the parsley. Taste for salt as the carrots have a natural sweet taste.

Chop the parmesan into small chunks. In this recipe I replaced the usually grated cheese with chunks of Parmesan to give the filling a crunchier texture.

Mix the eggs, add the milk and some salt.

Roll the dough into a thin layer and fit into a 24-26 cm diameter baking form that is fitted with baking paper to avoid sticking to the bottom and sides.

Layer on the dough half the carrot mix, half the chopped parmesan, then carrots again and on top parmesan chunks. Pour the egg-milk mixture on the carrots.

Cook in the oven for 30 minutes or until the filling is cooked and the cheese on top is turning golden brown.

Mouth-watering Carrot Pie with Parmesan Cheese

Enjoy warm or cold.

I was showing the pie on the Skype and the mouths were salivating on both sides of the camera in Estonia and in Switzerland. :-)

Peppery Strawberries

June is definitely strawberry time in Switzerland as the local strawberries are on the market. In Estonia the best time for local strawberries is July. The best are the ones picked from the garden on the first round of walk around in the morning. How many ripe red ones are there today? Going around and looking for the best of the best and eating straight away.

Strawberries with sugar, with whipped cream, with chocolate, with mint, in fresh desserts, with champagne, in cakes - the classics.

Sometimes unusual combination of ingredients can produce a delightful outcome.

If you are looking for a new taste experience try fresh strawberries with some freshly ground black pepper. A little powder sugar on top if you wish.

Spice your strawberries up with black pepper

….The soothing cool juicy sweet strawberry with a tick of spicy sizzle lingering on the tongue for a moment or two or three….help yourself to another! ;-)

Gravlax with lemon and dill

Dill (Fr. aneth) is a very popular northern herb. In Estonia it is traditionally used with fish, especially oily fish like salmon or trout, crab and almost inseparably with new potatoes. In the more southern countries dill becomes a rarity. In Switzerland one can still find it in the supermarket every day, but in the restaurants it is very rarely used. One of my favourite or perhaps the favourite restaurant in Bern Mille Sens is the only place that has managed to surprise me in the most positive sense with its use of dill.

Back to gravlax.

In this blog you can find some instructions how to make your own gravlax in one big piece - see under "Fish".

I am a great fan of gravlax and generally of raw fish. For more variety I made it in a different way and was very pleased with the result. Instead of curing the fish in one piece I cut the raw fish into slices and then added the marinade. After some curing time the salmon with all its good omega 3 and 6 fatty acids is ready to be served with bread or with boiled new potatoes and some butter. It is an indulgent weekend brunch dish to be enjoyed withour any rush.

It does not take a lot time and is cheaper than buying the cured fish. It is very simple to make and the taste can be varied by adding different ingredients. Next time, why not with either lime, orange, capers, horseradish, onion and/or mustard?

Ingredients:

250g raw salmon

Zest of 0.5 lemon

Juice of 0.5 lemon

0.5 teaspoons sugar

1 teaspoon sea salt flakes

Dill, chopped thinly

Cut the raw salmon into slices as thick as you prefer.

Wash the lemon. Peel off or grate off the yellow skin and chop very thinly.

In a bowl mix the juice of half the lemon, sugar, salt and the chopped or grated lemon zest.

Marinate the salmon with lemon juice

Gravlax - Dill gives the salmon a delicious northen taste

Put one layer of salmon slices into a bigger bowl or plate, sprinkle with some marinade and chopped dill. Repeat in layers until finished. Put the last dill on the top layer. Cover with aluminium foil and leave to marinate for 12 hours.

Classic rhubarb cake with strawberries

Classic rhubarb cake with strawberries (Est. rabarberi-maasikakook)

Whilst the rhubarb is a little earlier in season than the strawberries there are a few weeks when both can be harvested locally and so the classic rhubarb cake has another facette.
The base recipe is the same. Only for the filling add about 200g of strawberries cut into slices or cubes. Keep the cinnamon for more spice if you like it.
As strawberries are sweet less sugar can be mixed with the rhubarb.

Classic Rhubarb - Strawberry cake (Est. Klassikaline rabarberikook maasikatega)
Here the recipe again:

Base dough:

150g butter

100g sugar

1 egg

250g plain wheat flour

A good pinch of salt

0.5 – 0.75 teaspoon baking powder

Filling:

400g Rhubarb cut into pieces

6 table spoons sugar

Cinnamon, 0.5-1 teaspoon
200g strawberries, sliced 

Top layer:

3 large eggs (63g+)

3 full table spoons sugar

3 full table spoons flour, same as above

For the dough: Mix the butter with sugar with a mixer, add the egg and mix again. Add the flour, salt and baking powder and mix the dry ingredients together before mixing with the butter. Form the dough into a ball and leave to settle in the fridge for 20-30 minutes.

Peel and cut the rhubarb into slices.Cut the strawberries into slices.

Heat the oven to 175 degrees C.

Roll the dough more or less into the size of the baking form and place in the form on the baking paper. Form the dough with your hands to fit and cover the bottom. Only cover the bottom, no need to have the dough cover the sides. Bake for 10 minutes until the dough seems cooked from the top and slightly brown from the edges. Pre-baking the bottom is good as the filling and top is heavy and juicy raw and the dough my remain uncooked - not so tasty.

Mix the eggs and sugar in a bowl until the egg forms almost white and very thick foamy mixture – ca 10 minutes. Take a sieve and sieve the flour into the egg-sugar mixture and stiring very carefully mix the flour with the egg.

Mix the rhubarb with sugar and lay the pieces on the pre-cooked dough.

Powder the rhubarb with a very light layer of cinnamon.
Add slices of strawberry on top.

Now add the egg-sugar-flour mix on top and bake for further 30-40 minutes until the top firms and turns light brown. I don´t recommend putting an aluminium foil on the top to avoid too quick browning as the cake raises and may stick to the foil. Instead, if you see the colour change too fast, lower the temperature to 150C.

Let the cake cool down in the warm oven with the door slightly open. Cover with powder sugar to give it a seductive visual effect.

Estonian classic rhubarb-strawberry cake

 

Green Asparagus and mushroom soup

Asparagus tastes good together with potato and goes well with mushroom. Why not have all three together? In a soup. This soup is an "antipode" of two pyramids. I explain.

Ingredients Pyramid:

3 medium large potatoes forms the base of the soup and gives it the thickness. In the middle is generous handful of asparagus (about 200-250g). On the top of the pyramid is 15g of dried porcini (cep) mushrooms (Ger: Steinpilz/ Fr: Bolets/ Est: puravik)

Taste Pyramid:

The most prominent taste comes from the mushrooms (base of the taste pyramid), the middle folds into the taste of asparagus and if you really look (ie. taste) hard you may detect the taste of the potato in a small triangle in the tip of the pyramid.

Makes 3-4 as a starter:

15g dried mushrooms

250ml warm water

3 medium large potatoes

200-250g green asparagus

0.5l water or vegetable stock

1 tablespoon of cream cheese or fresh cream (optional)

Put the mushrooms into warm water for ca 20 min.

Heat the water or stock in a pan. Peel and cut the potatoes into cubes and add to the boiling water. Cook until soft.

Cut the asparagus into pieces. (No need to peel the green asparagus.)

Drain the mushrooms and add the mushroom water into the pan for more taste.

Add the asparagus and mushroom to the soup and cook for 5 minutes or until the asparagus is almost soft.

For visual effects and more bite you may want to take out the “heads” of the asparagus spears now.

Purée the soup with a mixer or blender. Taste for salt and thickness. If the soup is too thick add some more water.

If you want add some cream cheese or fresh cream to the soup.

Add back the asparagus “heads” and serve.

Asparagus - mushroom soup