The Munchies Blog

One of my flatmates bought a big bag of courgettes (called zucchini in other parts of the world) the other day. I remembered that we’d once made really nice stuffed courgettes but I couldn’t find the recipe anywhere. It think the recipe below is close enough though.

This recipe takes a bit of time to prepare, but I think it’s well worth the effort. The amounts given were enough for 3 people for 1.5 meals.

Mince and Feta Stuffed Courgettes

• 8-9 smallish courgettes
• ca 300g beef mince
• 1 big onion
• 2-3 cloves garlic
• ca 3 handful rice (we used red rice, but brown or even plain long-grain rice should be fine)
• 200g feta
• 3 eggs
• ca 100-150ml milk
• ca 200g cheese (e.g. gouda or mild cheddar)

Boil the rice.

Pre-heat the oven to 180° C. Wash the courgettes, cut off the ends and cut in half lengthwise. Scoop out most of the flesh, leaving a boat-shaped shell. Keep the flesh.

Chop the onion and garlic. Fry the onion, meat and garlic in a little bit of olive oil.

Cut the courgette flesh into small pieces and add to the meat. Fry for a few more minutes.

Cut the feta into very small pieces (or crumble with a fork). Grate the other cheese.

In a bowl, mix the meat mixture, drained rice, feta, an egg and some spices — we used salt, white pepper, smoked paprika and some rosemary. In a small bowl, whisk together the other two eggs, the milk and some more spices — in our case I think it was salt, white pepper, paprika and oregano.

Put the courgette halves into a shallow ovenproof dish, “open” side facing upwards. Spoon the meat/rice/feta-mixture into the courgette halves. Pour over the egg/milk-mixture so that some of it ends up in the dish itself and sprinkle the cheese over everything.

Bake in the middle of the oven for about 20-30 minutes. The temperature and times are for a conventional oven, you will have to adjust them for convection ovens. It’s done when the courgettes are soft enough to eat and the cheese has browned nicely.

I think next time we might use more rice and maybe also slightly more mince.

For those days when the local veggie coop box brought you yet another cauliflower, or when you’re recovering from having a wisdom tooth pulled out…

I think the basics for this recipe are out of Cuisine (the NZ version), but it’s heavily modified.

Cauliflower Soup

• 1 big onion
• 50g butter
• 1 cauliflower
• ca 6 medium-sized potatoes
• vegetable stock powder
• salt, white pepper, smoked paprika

Cut the onion into small pieces. Cut off the cauliflower florets and wash them. Wash and (optionally) peel the potatoes and cut them into quarters or so.

Put the butter into a big pot and melt in medium heat. Fry the onion until soft. Stir in some smoked paprika powder. Add cauliflower and potatoes, stir for a minute or so. Add water so that it just doesn’t cover the contents of the pot. Add vegetable stock powder. Bring to a boil and let simmer until the potatoes are soft.

Remove from heat and puree with a stick blender. Add salt, pepper and more smoked paprika to taste. I noticed that it takes quite a lot of salt to make it taste nice.

Add more water, milk or cream to get the consistency you want. I like this soup very thick, almost like a puree.

Serve with nice bread, something like ciabatta should work fine.

You can use parsnips instead of cauliflower, the taste is almost the same.

This is what I made for dinner tonight (I’m sorry there’s no picture; my flatmates came home just when dinner was done and we immediately started eating).

Red Rice and Tuna Baskets

• 3 sheets flaky pastry, frozen (they’re about 30×30cm here)
• 3 handful red thai rice (normal rice probably works just as well)
• 1 can tuna in spring water (185g)
• 1 onion
• 1 handful chives, cut into small pieces with a pair of scissors
• 2 handful grated cheese (I used colby, but cheddar or gouda would work as well)
• 2 large eggs

Take the pastry sheets out of the freezer and spread out on the kitchen bench to defrost. Cover with clean tea towels if you have a non-trustworthy cat. Pre-heat the oven to 200 C.

Grease a standard muffin tray with some butter.

Boil the rice in salted water until soft.

Chop the onion into small pieces and fry in a little bit of olive oil together with the tuna until the onions are soft.

Cut the pastry sheets into quarters and put each piece into one hole in the muffin tray so that it lines the walls. Some parts of the pastry, especially the corners, will stick out.
When the rice is done, drain it well and put it into a medium-sized bowl. Add the onion and tuna, the chives, the grated cheese and the eggs. Season with salt, black and white pepper and smoked paprika (I used La Chinata spicy).

Spoon the filling into the pastry baskets and bake for about 20 minutes or until the pastry starts to get brown and the filling looks set. Leave to cool for a few minutes before eating.

I’m quite happy with this food and I’m pretty sure this is what I’ll bring to the next potluck dinner.

It’s still blueberry season here in New Zealand — but you have to be a bit careful, some varieties are not really nice.

The other day, I made blueberry clafoutis, a recipe I’d wanted to try out for ages.

I didn’t change much from the original, but here is a translation.

Blueberry Clafoutis

• 500g blueberries
• 3 eggs
• 50g icing sugar
• 4 tablespoons standard flour
• 100ml milk
• 100ml cream — or just double the amount of milk
• pinch of salt
• butter for greasing the baking dish
• icing sugar for dusting

Pre-heat oven to 220°C.

Grease an ovenproof dish and put the berries in.

Beat the eggs together with the icing sugar until frothy, then add flour, milk, cream and the pinch of salt.

Pour mixture over berries and bake about 35 minutes. Let cool down slightly and dust with icing sugar.

I was a bit confused when I got the ingredients out of the pantry, so I overlooked the icing sugar. I used caster sugar instead, which seems to work just as well. I used 200ml of milk as the cream… well, let’s not talk about this.

Altogether, I liked the clafoutis. But I think I prefer more substantial cakes.

For those of you who do not speak Swedish, that would be “My Grandmothers Rhubarb Pie” (barbarians ,) ). It is not a pie in the traditional sense with a bottom, but it does have a nice crust. When I made it the rhubarb turned out to have a very nice texture, and a taste which was slightly sour, but not very. Perfect, in my humble opinion ;)

So, let’s get to the good stuff…

Take about 500 gr. of rhubarb,
1 dl sugar,
2 tsp potato flour.
Put the oven to 225 degrees C.

Peel and slice the rhubarb, mix with the sugar and the potato flour and put in the oven for 10-15 minutes.

While the rhubarb are in the oven to pre-cook, it’s time to prepare the crust.

Take 100g butter,
1 dl rolled oats,
0.5 dl sugar,
1.5 dl flour,
0.5 - 1 tsp cardamom (depending on how much you like it).

Mix it all together. When you think the rhubarb are done, crumble the mixture on top of the rhubarbs (using spoons didn’t work for me) and make sure to have an even layer.
Put it all into the oven again until the crust has a nice golden colour. It should take about 10-15 minutes.

Serve with custard or ice cream.

You can of course use different fruit or berries, but you might not have to pre-cook them in that case, and you might have to use a different amount of sugar. I will try it out with raspberries and blueberries soon.

I think it was in one of my baking books that I first read about the concept of a pound cake: Use the weight of the eggs to measure out equal amounts of butter, sugar and flour. Back in the old days, when people had proper kitchen scales and so on, the eggs were simply used instead of the usual metal weights. In German, this batter is sometimes also called “Eischwerteig” — with “Ei” meaning egg, “schwer” heavy and “Teig” batter or dough.

The cookbook said that nowadays, use of rising agents like baking powder allowed for “better” proportions of ingredients, or something. I was still fairly curious, and seeing a recipe on Fool for Food (in German) convinced me to give it a try. Claudia (and I) used some amaretto for flavoring the cake. Well, I really like it (very moist and much nicer than my usual “I feel like baking” cakes), but I guess one shouldn’t be scared of greasy food…

Almond Pound Cake

• some eggs — 4 seems to be usual; I used 3, at room temperature
• butter, at room temperature
• sugar
• flour
• about 40ml of amaretto (could be more, I think)
• pinch of salt (which I forgot)

Weigh the eggs (still in their shells), measure out the same amount of butter, sugar and flour. Apparently it’s really important that all ingredients have the same temperature.

And now everything depends on the order the ingredients are added — and it’s very important to beat them properly.
Beat butter and sugar with a balloon whisk for 3-4 minutes. Yes, this is hard work in the beginning.

Beat in one egg at a time, always stir until it’s completely mixed in.

Add the amaretto and stir it in completely.

Fold in the flour. No more stirring afterwards.

Pour in greased(!) cake tin and let rest for 45 minutes. Bake in pre-heated oven at about 150°C/300°F for about 45 minutes (Claudia’s recipe says 180°C, but our convection oven seems to need lower temperatures).

In case you haven’t greased the cake tin: get someone to use brute force to get the cake out of the tin… (Not fun, this part.)

If you insist on decorating things: mix some icing sugar with a splash of amaretto. Cover cake with mixture. Sprinkle over some almond slivers.

A while ago, I’d seen a recipe for cannelloni with tomato sauce and spinach (beware, it’s in German) on Chili und Ciabatta. It looked so good that I immediately decided to try it out some day. Well, “some day” turned into today. This dish is very nice, even though it’s maybe a bit too much in the current weather (it’s some 25°C here at the moment). I basically didn’t change anything compared to the original recipe, but I’ll still post a translation.

Cannelloni with Tomato Sauce and Spinach

For the sauce:

• 2 Tbsp olive oil
• 1 large onion (we used three smallish ones), chopped
• 2 cloves of garlic (that’s a guess; Petra doesn’t say how much garlic she used, and we didn’t have any)
• about 1.2 kg canned tomatoes
• 1 tsp dried rosemary (original recipe: 2 fresh rosemary twigs)
• 2 bay leaves
• 2 Tbsp tomato concentrate
• salt and pepper

For the filling:

• 500g frozen spinach leaves
• 150g feta cheese, in small pieces
• 150g ricotta or quark
• about 50g grated Parmesan cheese
• 2 Tbsp fresh mint leaves, chopped (I cheated and used 1 tsp good quality peppermint tea)
• 2 eggs
• 2 Tbsp lightly roasted pine nuts
• salt and pepper

And:

• 16-20 cannellonis (don’t pre-boil them)
• ca 200g Mozzarella cheese (we only had 125g)

Put the spinach somewhere where it won’t take too long to defrost. Roast the pine nuts. Get someone else to grate the Parmesan cheese.

Heat the olive oil in a saucepan. Fry the onion and garlic on medium heat until soft. Stir in tomatoes, herbs and tomato concentrate. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat and let simmer for some 25-30 minutes; the sauce is supposed to thicken (which it didn’t do much in our case — but it was fairly thick to start with). Add salt and pepper to taste. Don’t forget to remove the rosemary (if using fresh twigs) and the bay leaves.

Pre-heat oven to 200°C (that’s 390°F — but for our convection oven, 180°C/355°F was hot enough). Mix hopefully more or less defrosted, roughly chopped spinach with the feta cheese, Parmesan cheese, ricotta, eggs, salt and pepper. Use a tiny teaspoon or a knife to fill the cannellonis with the mixture. Don’t expect your hands to stay clean.

Pour some of the tomato sauce into a shallow baking dish. Spread out the cannelloni (squeezing a bit to make all of them fit doesn’t hurt them either) in the dish. Cover with remaining tomato sauce and the sliced Mozzarella cheese. Maybe sprinkle some grated Parmesan on top.

Bake for about 30-40 minutes. The pasta should be soft enough to be edible, the cheese should be a nice light brown (see the picture). I found that with the oven pre-heated to 200°C and turned down to 180°C when putting the dish into the oven, the cheese was brown after some ten minutes, so I covered the dish with tin foil for the rest of the time.

Supposedly serves four, but in this weather they’d have to be quite hungry, I guess…

When I tried out the recipe for a chocolate and pear cake in Linda Collister’s “Backen mit Schokolade” (the English original is Chocolate Baking) last Christmas, I realised that a good recipe is more than just a recipe for good food. A good recipe is one that you can follow without constantly reading ahead — one that takes the planning/scheduling overhead away from you. Bad recipes tell you to do things in an order that doesn’t make sense. Or they cheat by calling for things like “4 large eggs, separated” — instead of telling you to separate the eggs at a time in the recipe “flow” where it makes sense.

The chocolate and pear cake is really nice, but the recipe… well, isn’t. I haven’t managed to optimise it yet, but I’ll post it here with the modifications I made today.

Recipe: Chocolate and Pear Cake

Base:

• 180 g all-purpose flour
• 110 g cold butter, diced
• 30 g brown sugar
• 1 egg yolk
• 2-4 Tbsp ice water

Sieve flour into a bowl, add the butter. Work with your fingertips (much easier than fighting with the food processor) until crumbs form. Add sugar, egg yolk and water. Now the recipe says to use a knife with a rounded tip to make the mixture into a dough. It also says to start with 1 Tbsp ice water and add a bit more if the dough stays too dry. Well, this kind of dough always stays too dry when I do it. That doesn’t really matter though. Just mix things a bit more and try to get a bit larger crumbs.

Make a ball out of the dough (well, if you can get the crumbs to stick together, that is), wrap in foil and refrigerate for some 20 minutes.

Get rid of all the stuff hiding out in the oven. Put a baking tray on the oven floor. The oven needs to be preheated to 200°C — do it now or, if you want to save energy, wait a bit with that. Find a springform, about 23 cm in diameter.

Filling:

• 125 g bittersweet chocolate, broken into pieces
• 125 g butter
• 90 g brown sugar
• 4 large eggs
• 125 g ground almonds
• 2-3 drops almond essence (I guess a little splash of Amaretto would work just as well)
• pinch of salt
• 2 ripe, medium-sized pears (preferably Williams Christ)

Put an ovenproof bowl in a saucepan with water. Put chocolate into bowl. Heat (not boil) the water so that the chocolate melts.

Meanwhile, separate the eggs. Beat the egg whites together with the salt (hint from one of my aunts: much easier if you also add a Tbsp cold water) until soft peaks form. Set aside. (My reason for doing that now is that I only have one bowl that I can use together with the food processor. After setting aside the egg white stuff, I can clean and reuse that bowl.)

Check that nothing bad is happening with the chocolate. And if you haven’t started to preheat the oven yet, better do it now. Take the dough out of the fridge and put it into the springform. Flatten it out and stretch it a bit so that it covers the bottom and goes up at the sides, about 2-3 cm high. Now it’s probably time to take the chocolate off the stove.

Whisk the butter (which should be fairly soft — either put it in the microwave for a very (!) short time, or reuse the chocolate saucepan), add the sugar. The recipe says that this should become thick and creamy. Well, doesn’t happen when I do it. Just ignore the recipe and gradually whisk in the egg yolks. Stir in the chocolate, then add the almonds and the almond essence or amaretto. Fold in the beaten egg whites.

Pour the filling onto the base and make the surface look pretty.

Peel the pears, cut them in half and get rid of all the stuff you wouldn’t want to eat (if the pears are ripe enough, a teaspoon can be very helpful for this task). Slice thinly, but don’t cut all the way through — the slices should stay connected at the top (look at the picture, that makes things much clearer). Spread out onto the filling in a decorative way.

Set the springform onto the hot baking tray and bake for 15 minutes (still at 200°C). After that time, turn down the heat to 180°C and bake for some 10 more minutes — until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.

Carefully get rid of the side part of the springform. Serve the cake warm or cold. The recipe suggests to serve it with crème fraîche or vanilla ice cream. Whipped cream also works well (and I’m a bit sceptical about the crème fraîche).

According to the recipe, the cake tastes even better the next day (even though it won’t look as pretty).

Note: It’s important to use ripe pears. Or to equip people with knives.

This is my mum’s meatball recipe.

400g of minced meat (I only use beef).
0.75 dl rolled oats.
1-2 tablespoons potato flour.
1.5 dl water (I tend to use 50/50 milk and cream instead :) ).
1 egg.
1 teaspoon salt.
1 small onion.
Black pepper, all spice and a bit of stock powder.

Chop the onion into small pieces and fry them slightly while allowing the liquid and the rolled oats to stand in a bowl.
Mix it all together until it’s a good mixture, and fairly sticky. It’s important to make sure that there’s no lumps of rolled oats, but it tends to get bad if you overwork the mixture as well.
Once the mixture is finished, put cold water on a cutting board and roll small balls. The water keeps the mixture from sticking to the cutting board (and your hands).
Once you think you’ve got enough meatballs, start frying the first pan on medium heat while rolling more balls.

I’d seen a biscotti recipe on Cooking for Engineers a while ago, but I didn’t feel like trying it out. One problem is that it’s difficult to get hold of untreated oranges here, and in addition to that I’m not too fond of aniseed. When I stumbled over a recipe for Chocolate Biscotti a few days ago, I decided to give it a try. “Everything’s good if it’s made of chocolate”, after all ;)

I followed the recipe, with one exception: I didn’t have much time when I made them, so I baked the slices standing upright, thus saving the “flip slices over and bake for another 20 minutes” step. The biscotti were fairly nice, but I think I made the slices too thick (about 1.5 cm, should be 1 cm). As I used the food processor to mix the dough, I might have overmixed it a bit (I hadn’t seen the warning about that on Cooking for Engineers until it was too late). I’m definitely going to make them again, but then I’ll add almonds or walnuts to the dough. Chocolate is nice, but the biscotti would be even better with a bit of texture variation, I think.