Herby citrus salmon

The good point of living in Finland is that it it always easy and pretty cheap to get your hands on salmon. It is one of the cheapest and most abundant fish here, not to mention how delicious it is. We have it quite often as a midweek dinner, simply baked with pesto and served with a seasonal salad.  Nowadays, one can buy here pestos of a really good quality, and it is extremely fast to prepare salmon this way. As much as both of us love red pesto, Mr. No Onion Please complains that the green basil pesto has too strong herby taste for him. Therefore, I tried to create a kind of herby paste that wouldn’t have such a strong taste, but would compliment salmon nicely. I decided to incorporate some citrus flavour as well. The outcome was pretty good and both of us liked it.  The salmon was served on a salad bed made of wild rucola, goat cheese and cherry tomatoes confit.

Ingredients

500g salmon filet

3 toast breads (skin cut off)

zest from 1 lemon

juice from half a lemon

half a glass of basil leaves

half a glass of thyme leaves

2-3 tbsp of olive oil

salt

1. Wash the salmon filet and put it into greased ovenproof dish.

2. Put the bread, lemon zest and juice, basil and thyme into a bowl and blend it well to a paste

3. Add olive oil and salt to your liking. My paste was pretty thick, I wanted it to create a nice layer of  it on the salmon. If you wish you may add a bit more of olive oil to make it more pesto like. Spread the paste on top of the filet.

4. Bake in 200C for 25 min of until ready. I put the aluminium foil after 15 min of baking to avoid browning of the paste.

Summer liver salad

Just a quick note to let you know that I’m back from my holidays I had lot’s of fun sightseeing, hiking in the mountains and visiting my family, a real pity it’s already over. But there is a good news too: just 6 weeks till the second part of my holidays Life is good (particularly in the summer ). Now I have to look through hundreds of pics I made, get back to working mode and make one million of other things. Huh, it’s so easy to get used to lazynes, but somehow getting adjusted to regular working mode is a total nightmare. Anyway, I have to try to organise my life again and I leave you with this delicious recipe that I have found on Tatter’s blog. Enjoy!

INGREDIENTS:

3 tbsp oil
handfull of croutons
3 handfulls of watercress
2 handfulls of salad mix
500g poultry livers, cut into pieces (I used a piece of veal liver)
12 pancetta slices, finely cut
125ml Marsala or sherry
1 tbsp french mustard
1 tbsp of torned sage leaves (or as in my case a whole bunch )
salt and black pepper

olive oil  mixed with herbs such as:
dried garlic, basil, pinch of chilli

1. Heat a pan, add the oil. Fry pancetta till nicely brown and crunchy. Set aside.

2. Add liver pieces to the pan. Fry for several minutes. Set aside. Add sherry to the pan and heat for 1-2 min to reduce the liquid in half. Add mustard, sage, salt and pepper. Add liver pieces again. Mix them well to coat in the liquid and put the pan off the heat.

3.  Arrange salads and watercress on the plates. Put the liver pieces on top and sprinkle with pancetta.

4. Drizzle a bit of oil with herbal mix onto croutons and scatter them on the plate. Season with rest of sherry sauce and olive oil mixture.

Refreshing summer salad

Hello everybody! No no, I haven’t abandoned my blog, neither have I been too lazy to write It just so happens that I was  in Washington DC for several days and had absolutely no time to post anything. But I’m back now together with some cool cooking books and magazines as well as aebleskiver pan (I dreamed about having this one for years!). Oh yes, and quite some pictures too To get back into the blogging routine, let me start with something extremely simple we had just before departing. This lovely summer salad is extremely fast to make and really refreshing on a hot summer day. As usual with salads I’m unable to give you any certain amounts, but I hope you’ll try it anyway and enjoy it as much as I did! To keep it really fresh I didn’t use any dressing but a tiny bit of oil would be fine.

INGREDIENTS:

watercress

feta cheese, cut in small cubes

watermelon, cut in cubes

peas, fresh or frozen (boiled and cooled down)

mint leaves (quite many)

How to slow roast lamb plus a quick Mediterranean leftover salad

I’ve just noticed that till now I’ve blogged either about sweets or about Asian inspired dishes. I admit, we love to use lots of spices as well as have combined sweet, sour and salty flavors together, just as it is done in that part of the world, but it doesn’t mean that we’re eating only like that So here, finally, is something more European. A slow roasted lamb and still a second recipe for Mediterranean salad with the roast leftovers.

We don’t eat lamb that often. Or actually by that I mean we don’t eat it at all. Usually, I order it when we go to a restaurant, but Mr No Onion Please firmly states that he dislikes this meat, cause it is bitter (has anyone ever heard that lamb has some bitter aftertaste?). I understand if he said “stinky”, cause I guess that’s the most often heard complaint, but BITTER? Well anyway, once I got the permission to finally buy some lamb I decided to slow roast it, as I hoped that it will mellow the whatever taste there is that makes Mr No Onion Please shudder. In his book “Jamie’s Kitchen”, Jamie Oliver describes how it should be done. I’ve just added some lemon to flavour it nicely and otherwise followed exactly his recipe.

Ingredients:

2kg lamb meat for roast (leg or shoulder)

olive oil

salt & pepper

bunch of rosemary

bulb of garlic unpeeled, broken into cloves

lemon cut in wedges

1. Preheat your oven to the highest grade possible. Score the skin (beware not to disturb the meat), splash with olive oil and rub it with lots of salt and pepper.

2. Press the garlic cloves with knife so that they crush a bit. Place the meat on the roasting tray together with rosemary, garlic and lemon (place those around and on top of the meat).

3. Tightly cover the tray with tinfoil and place it in the oven. Immediately turn the oven down to 170C and cook for 4h.

Yup, simple as that, no fuss at all and of course slow roasting rewards you with delicious meat that melts in your mouth. And yeah, according to Mr No Onion Please there’s no bitterness anymore (if there ever was any ). Now, when you roast 2kg piece of meat, obviously there will be quite some leftovers. But that’s not a problem really cause I have here for you a truly refreshing salad recipe.

I must say, I’m really bad when it comes to salad recipes, as I basically just throw things together and I simply can’t give you any proper measures on how much of what you need. But hey, I bet most of you do it same way, so just toss the things together as you usually do and you’ll get a great Mediterranean flavours inspired lamb salad.

Ingredients

green stuff (oh how lovely descriptive is that ) – I used watercress since it’s in season

cucumber – sliced, then cut into sticks

2 red bell peppers, cut in half, deseeded, brushed with oil and baked till soft, skin removed, torned to smaller pieces

feta cheese, cubed

sun dried tomatoes, finely chopped

big bunch of mint, shredded

pieces of roast lamb

olive oil + a pinch of sweet paprika