Spanish Tortilla with Aioli

Happy mid-summer everyone! I don’t know how many of you celebrate mid-summer, but here in the North, I guess at least in Sweden alongside of Finland, it’s a big fest. It’s three days of relaxing, fleeing from cities and spending time at the summer cottage, enjoying the nightless night when the sun doesn’t go down at all, drinking beer and grilling sausages.

I just read from the newspaper that Finnish people, we’re about 5 million all together, eat 4,4 million packets of sausages and drink 11 million liters of beer during the mid-summer. Imagine that! 11 million liters of beer is more in three days than what Saudi-Arabians have consumed in centuries. No wonder alcoholism is the public health problem in Finland.

I spent my mid-summer with S at a friend’s parents place, comfortably near the nature and the city. My friends are food enthusiasts, so for me there was not much to do. Me and S just got to enjoy the incredible summer food and mood. It was a good break from work stress, with good people and we both really enjoyed the weekend!

As I haven’t been cooking anything lately, and I didn’t cook anything basically during the mid-summer either, I am posting you something I did a while ago already. I had a lot of potatoes to use, and I had been yearning for a Spanish omelette for a lot of time. I don’t remember which dish I made, but afterwards had many boiled potatoes as left-overs. So I finally got the omelette done!

Spanish tortilla is basically an omelette with potatoes. It’s super simple to do, just takes a while to prepare it. In Spain they eat it a lot in tapa style, as small snacks with other types of tapas. We had this for brunch. It’s best served with aioli, a strong garlic mayo.

Here I used boiled potatoes, but I know some prefer to use raw ones. If you use raw potatoes, need to cook them in the skillet in generous amount of olive oil before adding the eggs. Using boiled ones is also a bit healthier, if you’re after that!

Spanish Potato Omelette aka Tortilla

4 medium firm potatoes, boiled, peeled and completely cooled

1 large onion

6-7 large eggs

3 tablespoons good olive oil

salt and black pepper to taste

Cut the onions in half and slice thinly. Slice the potatoes.

Heat up the oil in a medium skillet over medium heat.

Beat the eggs with salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste. Gently mix the sliced onions and potatoes with the eggs.

Pour the egg-potato mixture into the skillet. Cook until the edges start getting firm, and reduce the heat to medium-low.

Cover with a lid and cook more 5-8 minutes until the top starts to get firm too. While the omelette is cooking, check that it’s not stuck in your skillet by sticking a spatula under it or shaking the skillet gently.

Flip the omelette by sliding it on a plate, topping the plate with your skillet and flipping the whole thing over. Now the bottom of the omelette should be nice and golden.

Cook for 5 minutes more until the other side gets a golden color too.

Slide on a serving plate and serve warm or room temperature with aioli.

Basic Aioli

2 cloves garlic

2 egg yolks

250ml olive oil

1 teaspoon Dijon mustard

1 teaspoon lemon juice

pinch of salt

All your ingredients should be in room temperature before starting.

Peel and carefully ground the garlic in a mortar. It’s important that there are no garlic chunks, would be a nice surprise!

Transfer the mashed garlic into a medium bowl. Using a wire whisk, whisk in first the mustard and then egg yolks.

Very slowly, start adding the oil. It’s very important to add it slooooowly, as it will emulsify and your aioli will become thick. Add the oil first in drops, and then in a slow, fine stream while constantly whisking with a wire whisk.

When your aioli has reached the desired thickness (it should be thicker than a normal mayonnaise), add the lemon juice and a pinch or salt. Whisk until smooth.

If you wish, you can also spice the aioli with chili or lime juice. Be creative!

Swiss Potato aka Rösti

Hi all! Sorry I’ve been absent from blogging lately. It’s been so busy there hasn’t been time for me to concentrate on writing in a while. We moved to Helsinki with S, had to arrange our things after moving in, I started a new job, had a big party for my 30th birthday (was a couple of weeks ago already, but as most of my friends live in Helsinki I only got to celebrate it now)… So many things have been going on and taking my time. Fortunately it’s weekend and a chance to rest a little bit from all the hustle.

My party last night went great, and I baked things there too: wonderful, sticky and sweet Snickers brownies and a creamy apple cheesecake with oatmeal crisps on top. The thing is, that S only arrived to our new place yesterday, and brought the camera with him, so I didn’t have time to photograph the stuff before rushing to the party place. But I made the brownies with my favorite brownie recipe, doubling the amount of the ingredients. They became just perfectly thick in a rectangular brownie pan. The apple cheesecake recipe I made up by accident, as I was supposed to bake something totally different, which completely failed, and I had to come up with something to save the thing. The result was luckily good.

Anyway, last time I blogged I mentioned about the massive amount of potatoes we had stored in our fridge and that had to be used. One totally new thing for me, when I lived in Brazil, was what they called Batata Suíça, a Swiss potato. I know and have eaten rösti, a Swiss potato cake made of grated potato in a frying pan, but its Brazilian cousin was something different. I thought it was divine. Yes it was a similar fried potato cake, but it was always filled with cheese and different kinds of other fillings. Typical examples were for example finely chopped chicken, dried meat (which the Brazilians seem to love…actually they love all meat), fresh rocket, sun-dried tomatoes, shrimps, herbs, even stroganoff…you name it. The only thing that a Batata Suíça always has is requeijão, a creamy cheese that is not cream cheese. Here in Finland we call the similar product melted cheese, which it really resembles. After some googling I found out that an American equivalent could be processed cheese in a liquid form, or some kind of a cheese spread. If you can find these products on your local store, you should give this dish a try. The Brazilians don’t go crazy for this for no reason!

The recipe (in Portuguese) is adapted from a great Brazilian food site Tudo Gostoso (everything delicious).

Swiss Potato in a Brazilian Style

1kg big firm potatoes

salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

200g requeijão/cheese spread/processed cheese (choose the one with most fat)

125g fresh mozzarella cheese, sliced

2 tablespoons butter

Bring water to a boil in a double boiler or regular large saucepan. Wash the potatoes and boil them semi-soft. Test it with a fork, the potatoes need to have some bite in them, otherwise the next step will be very difficult to do. Also, the larger your potatoes, the easier the grating.

Let the potatoes to cool in a room temperature. When cooled, place them in a freezer for about 10 minutes. Take the potatoes out of the freezer, peel and roughly grate them. Season with salt and black pepper.

Melt the butter on a medium size skillet over medium heat. With moist hands, press half of the shredded potato on the bottom of the skillet. Spoon the cheese spread on top, leaving it about 2cm from the edges to prevent it from trickling out. Spread the sliced mozzarella evenly over the melt cheese and top with the rest of the shredded potato. Wet your hands in water if spreading the potatoes is difficult.

Fry the potato cake from both sides until it’s golden brown and crispy on each side. Keep the skillet covered between the flips. The easiest to flip the swiss potato over on a skillet is by using a plate to help.

Let the potato cake to set for 5 minutes before serving.

Parisian Potato Breakfast Omelette

Some months ago I took an objective to try new breakfast dish every weekend, as those days were the only ones we could spend a long time enjoying a breakfast together. I did that actively for some weeks, but then got lazy and the tradition ended before it even really started.

One of my favorite Spanish foods is tortilla española, a potato omelette, that I have some times also had for breakfast (not made by me, though). That is, however, a bit too much work for a morning, with all that peeling and cutting potatoes etc. In the weekends I wish to wake up in a slow pace, enjoying the morning moments with food, coffee and magazines, not spending a lot of time in the kitchen preparing stuff. So one weekend I came up with a solution to my yearn for a Spanish potato omelette: to do it of a ready potato product. Now I know, that it is not the same thing at all. I know those frozen potato products are full of fat and so on, but I will now admit: this was good. We at least were very happy to start a day after this breakfast, so unless you’re totally against using any ready products, try this! If you are, try the Spanish omelette instead :-)

Breakfast Omelette à la Pommes Parisienne

400g pommes parisienne

4 large eggs

1 tablespoon olive oil

1 small onion or half of a big one, thinly sliced

half of a red bell pepper, julienned

handful of mushrooms

1 teaspoon ground cumin

0,5 teaspoon sweet paprika powder

salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

a few spring onions (green parts only), to garnish

Sautée the mushrooms on a dry pan over medium heat until they have lost their excess liquid and gotten some golden color. Keep stirring frequently so that they won’t stick in your pan.

Heat the olive oil in an oven-proof skillet. Add in all the vegetables and Parisian potatoes, and sautée over medium heat until the veggies are tender and the potatoes have gotten color. Season with cumin, sweet paprika, salt and black pepper.

Break the eggs on top of the sautéed vegetables, spice up with a little more salt and pepper and place the whole pan into the oven for 10-15 minutes, or until the eggs are cooked.

Garnish with chopped spring onions and serve on a sunny morning.