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

Every Nation Enjoys Their Comfort Food: Dutch Mashed Potatoes with Kale (Boerenkool)

This week my work travel took me to Schagen in the Netherlands where I spent a couple of days with seed potato growers from Scotland, England, Poland and Holland as well as my equally international colleagues. We had been visiting potato grading stations and warehouses in the unfriendly weather with a brief glimpse into a windmill that tamed the heavy wind into flour for a local bakery. For the first time I visited a greenhouse where 1.000.000 tulips were being grown at a time. The farmer’s wife was not so keen on the bulbs but rather on tourism and had set up a complementing business branch providing tulip excursions. The excursion started with hot coffee and a selection of fresh cakes from the bakery that was as heart-warming to the freezing group as the first snowdrops in front of my house in the middle of January.

Dutch tulips grown in soil, not in hydroponics (Blackberry photo quality)

As we travelled in the car to the tulip greenhouse we passed a field where unusual green plants were growing. It was curly kale or boerenkool in Dutch or Federkohl in German. This type of cabbage is in season only in winter. My Dutch colleague told me that they eat boerenkool with mashed potatoes and sausage. It sounded as a delicious comfort food cooked and enjoyed by Dutch families. I promised to try it. The cooking instructions were quite general and I deliberately did not search on the web for such recipes. The nature of this true example of the northern potato-cabbage dish sounded simple and I jumped to the experiment after I was lucky to find some kale still on sale at the Saturday farmers´ market.

There was one challenge – the onions! How did Meryl Streep in the role of Julia Child manage to slice the pile of onions almost as high as the Eiffel Tower without destroying her make-up or displaying any signs of tears? My trick of not crying over the onions has been the simple ventilation above the stove. Since it is broken now I was faced with a task and a question how do I do it without ending up in a mess of rabbit eyes and running mascara.

Apparently there is always a reason for things to happen when they happen. This morning I was reading How Not To Cry on Clotilde Dusoulier´s Chocolate & Zucchini e voilà, I found a perfect opportunity to try out some tips. This time I picked the "spoon in the mouth" and was hoping not to cry. Slicing the onion trying to manoeuvre with the knife and balance the spoon in my mouth was a challenge, but I DID NOT CRY!


Shopping list:
1 kg of starchy potatoes (eg Agria)
200 g of kale (Boerenkool/Federkohl)
200 g sausage cut into bite size pieces
0.5 dl or 2 tablespoons fresh cream
1 medium large onion
Rape seed oil
Salt, pepper

Peel and cut the potatoes into bigger pieces, chop the cabbage into smaller pieces.
Pour a little rape seed oil into a cooking pot. Add the potatoes, cabbage and 0.5l water or bouillon. Add some salt or 1 cube of bouillon when using water.

Bring to boil and reduce heat. Simmer for ca 20 minutes until the vegetables are soft. Then mash the potatoes together with kale. I only mashed slightly to keep a bit chunky.
Add the sausage and cream and heat up again.

The last thing left to do is the onion. In a separate pan heat 2-3 tablespoons of rape oil and sauté the sliced onion until golden. Add a pinch of salt to the onion if you prefer.

Serve the creamy mash with the onions.

Estonian Apple Crumble Cake

Apple Crumble Cake

A weekend deserves a sweet treat. Even if the extra kilos that have accumulated around the hip-waist line like a life saving ring since Christmas and New Year’s festivities. A piece of cake fresh from the oven to keep up the good spirit eaten with moderation is allowed.

In Switzerland January is the season for storage apples and pears.

In Estonia it is the season for storage apples. Pears don’t store well in Estonia and one can’t find locally grown pears on the grocery store shelves, at least I think I have never seen any. Even locally grown apples in winter months are something that with the spreading fashion of “Grown and produced in Estonia”- food that is gaining popularity amongst foodies and home cooks are only recently becoming more widely available. The price versus Polish imported apples is often times higher, but the availability is a positive sign and overtime hopefully the price will respond to competition.

Apple Crumble Cake

For the dough:
125g soft butter
100g sugar
1 big egg (63g+)
250g plain wheat flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 pinch of salt
For the filling:
Ca 5 big sweet apples (eg. Golden Delicious), so less added sugar is needed
For the crumble:
75g butter
5-6 tablespoons sugar
150g flour
a pinch of baking powder
0.5 -1 teaspoon cinnamon

Mix well the butter and sugar with a hand mixer, add the egg and mix again. Stir the baking powder and salt into the flour and add to the sweet butter mixture. Mix everything together until the dough has formed. Form it into a ball with your hands and keep refrigerated until you prepare the apples.

Preheat the oven to 200C.

Peel the apples, if you prefer, clean the seeds out and cut the apples into smaller cubes.

Fit the 26cm diameter baking ring form with baking paper and spread the dough evenly on the bottom. Precook the bottom for 15 minutes.

In the meanwhile, for the crumble melt the butter. Mix the flour with sugar, baking powder and cinnamon and pour the melted butter on the flour mix. Form crumbles with a knife or your hands quickly.

Spread the apples and then the crumble on the cake and bake in the middle of the oven for 35-45 minutes until the crumble starts to brown slightly on top.

Apple Crumble Cake (Estonian: Õuna-purukook, German: Apfel-Streuselkuchen)

A number of crumble recipes call for cold butter for the crumble but whenever I use cold butter the butter in my crumble just melts and the result is not very attractive or crispy. Therefore I use melted butter. If anyone has tips of how the crumble recipe with cold butter stays crumbly and bakes into a crispy topping, please share.

Juicy Roast Ribs

BBQ ribs in summer? Yes! From the oven in winter? Bring them on!

The ribs in Swiss shops seem to be from greedy butchers. The bones bear little meat on them. One could think the poor animals have been kept on a strict diet or the butcher is trying to get away with as little as possible for the lower price. Take a few more grams off and the next alternatives would be to sell the bare bones as dog food or as stock material at best.

In Switzerland one can find very lean meat, a lot of filet  in most shops on one end and lard on the other in specialty butcher shops. You won’t find pork with rind anywhere, the cut of meat that in many countries (eg. Estonia, Australia, Germany) is served as a popular Christmas or special festive meal, pork roast with crispy crackling …

Smoke Roasted Rib Cut of Pork

Some less expensive variety meats and inner organs have found the way onto the shelves more and more in the past few years helping to live the motto of "If you already make the kill, eat everything". There is a variety of livers, kidneys and tongue to choose from as well as recently spotted fresh chicken hearts for the lovers of the Brazilian rodizio. I am still on the look for lamb tongue that I see many food bloggers blog about and would love to try.

Chicken hearts

Where I live the choice of ribs on sale is down to one: pork short ribs. So the choice is between to buy or not to buy. I buy, occasionally, despite the secretly luring subtle taste of disillusionment after the dinner. The relative equation between the bones and the meat is drawing the scale of the bones to the ground and the meat to the sky. And yes, the meat is heavenly.

Oven Roast Ribs

Ingredients:

1-2 raw 5-rib pieces per person

Salt

Black pepper

Oil

Honey

Ca. 1 table spoon of fresh lime juice per 5-rib piece

Roast ribs from the oven

Pre-heat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius (350-360 Fahrenheit).

Rinse the ribs in cold water and pat dry. Season with salt and pepper on both sides. Take a piece of aluminium foil big enough to wrap the ribs in and drop some oil on the inside. Place the ribs on the foil, spread some honey and drizzle some lime juice on the ribs. Wrap the foil together. Place the packages into a cooking tray and cook the ribs until the meat is falling off the bones. Check after 45 minutes that the ribs don’t burn on the bottom. The cooking time will vary depending on the thickness of the ribs and meat.

For the last 15 minutes open the foil and leave the ribs to build more browning on the top.

Serve hot.

Ceviche variation - Estonian marinated oily fish (Est. marineeritud räim)

A lot of people in the world like ceviche, a marinated fish or seafood dish known from Central and South America. Yumm! Humm! ...they say, munching on fish or prawn that has been soaking in lemon or lime juice spiced with locally popular chilli and cilantro. Very nice!
People on the northern side of the globe invented the same cooking technique with their locally popular spices. A special Estonian delicacy is marinated little oily fish. Since limes or lemons don't grow locally vinegar is used instead.

Marinate the small oily fish overnight

Ingredients
500g cleaned raw small oily fish ( raw anchovy, sprat, small sardine)
0.5 - 0.75 teaspoon salt
a 3 finger pinch sugar
1 dl apple or white wine vinegar
1dl  water
black pepper, crushed
allspice, crushed
1 small onion, sliced in rings

2 tablespoons rape seed oil

Layer the fish tightly side by side in a bowl or a small plastic container. Sprinkle with pepper and allspice in between the layers and add a few slices of onion. Repeat layering.
Mix the vinegar, water, salt and sugar and spread on the fish. Press the fish down a little and cover with a lid or plastic foil and leave overnight in the fridge.
On the next day, drain the fish from the vinegar marinade. Drizzle oil on top of the fish.

(Est. Marineeritud räim)

Serve with dark rye bread for the authentic northern taste.
In summer serve with new potatoes with butter and chopped fresh dill.

Rösti - Swiss Potato Paradise Dish

I had a bit of time to look around the Zurich airport recently. They are still going through some major renovation, but some areas have been finished. A refreshing change to nondescript fast food places is a new eatery that flirts with healthy - local- fresh theme. The green insignia of the Marche´corner invites with fresh breads, a salad bar, fresh juices, a grill station, pizza, fresh rösti as well as a pastry selection and a bar area.
Since I had time until my flight was boarding I wanted to try something out. At 5 pm the bread counter looked a bit deserted with little choice left, but the bread that was available didn´t look bad. Plain or with nuts or olives, bread rolls, sweet muffins? I chose a loaf with olives as a little bring along present for my host.

Fresh olive bread

Storm Joachim was taking its share outside and many flights were cancelled. I remembered my travel motto: "Eat and sleep whenever you can, since you never know when is the next time".
I can never say no to a good potato dish. Rösti is a Swiss specialty. It is great just plain. More sofisticated versions with special cheeses from the Alps or Gorgonzola or with sausage or with vegetables or bacon or mushroom or egg can be found in restaurants offering Swiss specialties. The next 20 minutes passed tasting a gold brown thick rösti. The potatoes and the level of frying was good, the potatoes stuck together. I had to season with salt as none had been used in the cooking process. Another traveller was desperately looking for some salt too at another table - he had some grilled vegetables. It could be the health aspect, however unseasoned food hardly satisfies a belly.

Rösti and blackberry-orange juice

Ingredients (for 2):
500g cooked potatoes
1 tablespoon oil
10 g butter
Salt
1 small onion (optional)
a couple of slices of bacon (optional)
1 tablespoon milk

Grate the potatoes on the wide cut, thicker pieces give a stonger bite. A 24 cm diameter pan is easier in the cooking process than a very big pan. Heat the oil and butter on the pan. If you are using onion and bacon cook the chopped onion and the bacon strips in the oil until the onion is slightly glassy. Add the grated potatoes and mix with the onion and bacon. Season with salt, use less if you are cooking with bacon. Cook further and stir every now and then. Press the potatoes together to make a firm "cake" and place a plate on the potatoes. Cook on low heat for 15 minutes until a crust has formed and potatoes have browned. Turn once. Sprinkle the milk on the potatoes and cook another 10 minutes until the bottom turns golden brown.

Serve as a standalone dish or as a side dish to a meat sauce. A popular Zürich specialty is rösti with a creamy veal and champignon sauce.

Persimmon kaki-apple & ricotta dessert - Swiss winter 2011

It is December and Christmas is all around. No sight of snow, temperatures above zero Celsius, constantly. Two weeks ago the Bern Christmas Market emerged overnight after the yearly Onion Market Day. The rare smell of the spruce catches my nose every time I pass and gives me the shivers. (That´s home.) Glühwein or mulled wine stands are full of people. The cafés in the streets are also brewing the season´s top drink, the spicy aroma following me in the archways. I like that most of the Glühwein is sold in recyclable porcelain cups.

Glühwein - red or white, Punsch...

The stands at the farmers´market have made space for Christmas decorations.

Christmas tree in Bern on Parliament Square

Farmers´market in December

Christmas on the market

The Christmas Market is full of stuff offered for presents. My favourite stand is one that sells all sorts of musical instruments, pipes, flutes, didgeridoos, castagnettes, drums and a whole lot more, the names of which I don’t even know but all make very good sounds. You can feel it, you can feel the rhythm…

Didgeridoo plus the classes to learn to play it

Want to make some music, pick an instrument

Fantastic rhythm instruments

The second favourite is a games stand with board games, some of which I used to play and still do whenever the occasion presents itself. 

"Mensch ärgere Dich nicht" board game, very competitive

More intellectual games

And a very interesting display with voodoo dolls. What fantastic artistic little creatures.

Voodoo dolls, great faces

Christmas Market

A sweet treat today: Persimmon kaki and apple dessert

Ingredients:

1 persimmon kaki, cut into cubes

2-3 apples, peeled, hearts out and chopped

250g ricotta cheese

250g curd (Magerquark)

10 tablespoons sugar

Juice of one lime, the green one

1 tablespoon gelatine “powder”

0.75 dl milk

Put the apple and persimmon pieces into a pot together with the lime juice and bring to boil. Add half of the sugar. If you have sour apples you may need more sugar. Add sugar to your taste. Cook until the fruit is soft, about 10-15 minutes.

In a bowl mix the ricotta and the curd and add the remaining sugar, again add more to your taste if needed. Purée the soft fruits with a mixer and let cool.

Mix the gelatine with the milk and let it soak for 15 min. Then heat and melt the gelatine by putting the bowl into a pan with some hot water. No need to boil the water in the pan, heating it just enough to melt the gelatine is fine.

Persimmon kaki - apple & ricotta dessert

Mix the melted gelatine milk with the ricotta.

Fill serving bowls or glasses with the ricotta first and then add the fruit purée on top. Leave in the fridge for a few hours or overnight.

TIP: you can also use the special sugar for making jams, the fruit purée would harden a bit more.

Plastic Around Carrots: Are You Buying Carrots or Plastic?

 

Carrots are wonderful vegetables. I use a lot of carrots in soups or as vegetable side dishes. Since I don’t have a garden I get my carrots from the farmers or supermarket. I like to select carrots and buy the ones I like. Depending on the dish I may choose narrower or thicker ones. The narrower I find sweeter and crunchier for eating raw, the thicker ones are easier to grate or more convenient to chop for soups or good in stews.

Daucas Carota (Lat), Carrots (Eng), Möhre, Karotte (Ger), Rüebli (Swiss Ger), Porgand (Est)

In the supermarket the only option is to use the plastic bag offered. In order to reduce the amount of bags and consequently the costly garbage at home I use one bag for all the vegetables and fruits I buy instead of a separate bag for each. And I often reuse the bag at home for something else.

So yesterday in a supermarket I chose my carrots and wondered around the vegetable section for a while. I found there were 4 different possibilities to buy fresh carrots.

1. Select your own and weigh them yourself. Price per kg 1.60.
2. 1 kg packaged in a plastic bag. Price per kg 1.60.
3. A value line 2.5 kg packaged in a plastic bag. Price per kg 0.84.
4. 4 carrots packed on a plastic tray wrapped in plastic. Price per kg 1.90.

Carrots in the value pack on the left, packed in double plastic on the right

Voilà! Number 4 was not explicitly marked as a bio-organic product that would perhaps justify a higher price. Apparently there is demand for carrots packed on a plastic tray and people are willing to pay more for it. In fact, I would just be paying more, once for the tray and second time for creating more garbage. Every bag of garbage you generate costs in Switzerland.Personally, I find no use for that tray at home to give it “a second life” in some other use to justify its existence even if the price was the same as for the loose carrots. 

I use one bag for all the veg and fruit I buy and reuse the bag

Yes, I have considered the point of hygiene as well before writing this, but did not find a convincing point. I see people eating fruit and vegetable bought in supermarket without washing them first. So they are not really bothered about this at all. When I buy the carrots selecting them from a crate myself, yes, someone else may have touched them, but I will wash and typically peel the carrots at home, so no issue there.

Please help reduce meaningless plastic!

Bruschettas with goat cheese, persimmon kaki and pears

 

As a child we often made bread with cheese in the oven. This was called “ahju juustusai” or oven cheese bread. The cheese melted and the bread turned crispy. Discovering the Italian food later in my life it turned out that they like to crisp their bread with some olive oil in the oven as well and call it bruschetta. I am sure that in other countries there is something similar: slices of bread with a topping cooked in the oven.

Having just some bread that may be even a few days old, some garlic and olive oil or a piece of cheese you have the ingredients for a crunchy savoury snack.

Judging by the local supermarket choice it looks like November is the season for persimmon kaki. The orange fruit is called “hurmaa” in Estonian. As this fruit does not grow in Estonia or in Switzerland I do wonder in my brain cells that focus on etymology why the Swiss have borrowed the name persimmon kaki and the Estonians hurmaa? Must be related to the country of origin where this fruit first came from, I guess.

Cut bread into slices

Drizzle some olive oil onto them

Cut 5mm thick slices of persimmon kaki and place them on bread

Cut slices of hard goat cheese and place on top of the fruit

Or grate the hard goat cheese and place on top of the fruit

Preheat the oven to 190-200C. Cook for 10-15 minutes until the cheese melts, becomes slightly brown and the bread becomes crispy.

Goat cheese and persimon kaki & pear bruschettas

Variations:

a) As an alternative to the persimmon kaki you can use pears in the same way.

b) You can also grill the fruit first on the grill pan and add the visual effect of the grill stripes on the fruit slices before adding the cheese on top and cooking the bread in the oven.

Meet Stachys, a forgotten famine vegetable or an expensive gourmet weed with tubers?

 

My recent trip to the farmers´market made me curious about little root type things that reminded me of the Michelin man in the miniature form. Turns out this is stachys affinis, sometimes known as Chinese artichoke or in France crosnes. The roots are actually tubers that can be eaten raw or cooked. On popular request about my visits to the market I decided to experiment.

Stachys affinis, chinese artichoke - eatable tubers

First, I must say, these whitish or ivory colour tubers are not cheap…at least not at my market. Searching on the internet I happened on a site that described stachys as famine food. When all else fails, eat stachys. It almost feels like when things are hopelessly bad, let’s get a bottle of the most expensive champagne and enjoy the moment. What an interesting paradox…perhaps this is the most expensive weed grown under bio-certificate and sold to gourmands for a fortune. For this handful I paid almost 5 francs. The same money can buy me 2.5kg of non-bio potatoes or 1.5kg of bio potatoes. Both are tubers.

5 Francs for this handful of stachys...perhaps because it is Bio

At home I tried them raw. Crisp bite, not chewy, no strong taste of its own, indeed a bit nutty in taste if anything. Not bad, but not too impressive either.

Chinese artichoke or crosnes can be eaten raw

Since the guy at the market explained that besides raw I can cook them with a little olive oil and season with salt and pepper, I followed his advice. They don’t need to be peeled, just washed.

I prepared a salad with Roman lettuce and for the dressing sautéed the stachys tubers in some olive oil, added small bacon strips, salt, pepper and lime juice. Mixed the sauce on the pan and poured on top of the lettuce. Pomegranate to garnish and add colour. Ready.

Sautéed chinese artichoke in a salad

Some recipes advise to pre-boil the stachys before sautéing. Since it can be eaten raw, I figured no boiling required. The cooked stachys maintained its crisp bite although softer than raw. The taste is soft, nutty, allows various flavour combinations in salads, sautéed vegetables or stir-fry dishes. I might experiment just once more as a wok stir-fry...after the next pay-day.

The literature I found mentioned that stachys is easy to grow and yields circa 1 kg per square meter and is good for digestion.

Judge yourself.

Beetroot soup with sauerkraut

I was making some Spanish potato omelettes earlier today. When the tortilla stuck to the pan and the result was not what I wanted I first was surprised with horror. What happened? I have made the Spanish tortillas many times before and was looking forward to another glorious result. I then thought it must be the pan that for some reason has changed its quality. I was disappointed with the whole thing.
Like I hadn´t had enough, soon after I found myself experimenting with pumpkin. Again I had pictured something else and felt more disappointment sneaking upon me. Pumpkin is a tricky vegetable for savoury dishes. I started off with a pumpkin spread for toast for tomorrow´s breakfast, then changed part of the mix and moved on to frying pumpkin-potato cakes on a pan (another, non-sticky one, this time) and eventually will end up with pumpkin soup from the same roasted pumpkin for dinner tomorrow. In summary the Sunday in the kitchen went from high expectations to horror to disappointment to curiosity to annoyment to keeping going... Next time it will be better! Next time it will be beetroot. Beetroot never let´s me down.

Red beetroots growing in my favourite garden - July, roots still small

 
Beetroot Soup with Sauerkraut

1 small onion
1-2 tbl spoons oil
1 big potato
2-3 medium beetroots
1.5 l water
salt or 1 cube of bouillon
black pepper
100-150g Sauerkraut, pre-cooked
sour cream or creme fraiche
onion seed sprouts or chopped parsley


Chop the onion and fry in a little oil in a pot. Cut the potatoes and beetroot into small cubes. The ratio should be 1:2 of potato to beetroot. Add the water to the glassy onions and bring to boil. Cook the potato and beetroot with some salt until soft. Purée the vegetables with the mixer or blender and return to the pot.
If the sauerkraut is too long, cut it into more bite sized length and add to the puréed soup. Bring to boil.
Taste and season with salt and pepper.
Serve hot with sour cream and onion sprouts or parsley.

Beetroot soup with sauerkraut

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