South African Yellow Rice

I’m sorry that the following post will be shorter than normally. I love to share things about food with you, but I just came home from work (it’s 1AM) and I’m exhausted… But since I haven’t updated anything yesterday I felt the need to take a little time to write. Oh, I miss those times already, when I had all the time in the world to do whatever I want!

But now, to food! The first time I am posting here something that I didn’t cook myself. All the credit for this delicious side dish goes to my better half S. He prepared the dish and I only came to the ready table to photograph, and to eat. This South African rice was totally worth a try, something different. Brazilians are huge rice lovers and they eat it a lot, with everything (even with mashed potatoes - carbs on carbs, eh). I’m happy S came up with a rice dish that was also new to him. I love cinnamon and I have used it in cooking when preparing some North African dishes. It worked here as well. 

Unfortunately I cannot refer to the original recipe, as we are not sure where it was found. But with quick googling I could see all the recipes for this dish are quite similar.

South African Yellow Rice

3dl long-grain rice

600ml water

1/2 tablespoon sugar

1 teaspoon turmeric

1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1 tablespoon butter

big handful of seedless raisins

1 small cinnamon stick

2cm piece of lemon peel, yellow part only

Bring water to a boil in a small saucepan. Add in water all ingredients except the rice, raisins and butter. Simmer until sugar is completely dissolved, stirring constantly. 

Melt butter in another, large saucepan. Add rice and cook stirring, until all the grains are shiny and covered in butter. 

Pour the water with spices over the rice, season with salt and pepper and cook rice until tender.

When the rice is cooked, remove from heat and let stand covered for 10 minutes. Remove the lemon peel and cinnamon stick, fluff the rice with a fork.

Add the raisins, mix well, pour into a serving dish and garnish with a beautiful cinnamon stick. Serve hot.

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.

Roasted Carrots and Shallots with Gremolata

Greetings from a train! These Finnish long-distance trains are nowadays so pleasant to travel in, as most of them have a free wi-fi to please internet addicts like myself. The trip between Jyväskylä and Helsinki takes about 3,5 hours, so there has been a lot of time for me to pin stuff on Pinterest, eh. I’m traveling with super heavy luggage, and could not take our camera with me (S will bring it on Friday when he comes to Helsinki), so all I can think of is that I cannot photograph my food during these days! At least I need to try to do that with the things I’m going to prepare for my second birthday party (I think I mentioned that most of my friends live in Helsinki and had not a chance to come to Jyväskylä for the small gathering on my birthday).

While preparing to move, there has also been an ongoing “Operation: empty the fridge”. For some reason we had collected a reserve of potatoes, carrots and onions there, so in the future days I’ll probably post several recipes of those. And here comes the first one, really surprisingly good side dish, probably at its best with chicken or white fish. We had it with salmon and it was okay too. The carrots and shallots here are covered with gremolata, a condiment made of herbs, garlic and lemon zest, which was a new thing for me. I read it is often served with osso bucco, but goes well with other meat too - and carrots! If you also have some extra carrots hanging around in your fridge, give this a try.

The recipe is adapted from Proud Italian Cook.

Roasted Carrots and Shallots with Gremolata

4 carrots, peeled and cut lengthwise into strips 

4 shallot onions, peeled and cut in half

2 tablespoons olive oil

salt & black pepper

a few springs thyme (I only had Italian parsley so I used it)

For gremolata:

3-4 tablespoons good olive oil

1 big clove of garlic, finely chopped

zest of one lemon, extra finely grated

handful of flat-leaf parsley, chopped

Preheat the oven to 220°C. Place the cut carrots and shallots on a baking sheet over parchment paper and drizzle with olive oil, salt, pepper and thyme.

Bake for about 20 minutes or until the carrots are tender but still have some bite to them.

Mix the ingredients of gremolata together. 

When the carrots and shallots are roasted, move to a serving plate and while still warm, toss in the gremolata.

Serve warm.

French Potato Salad

Potato salad is a dish that for me strongly associates to summer. It brings to my mind the sunny BBQ days and picnics in parks. It’s simple to prepare, it’s easy to take with you, it’s flavorous, filling and thus makes a perfect side dish. Potato salad seems to be also quite European thing. Here in Finland you can find commercially produced mayo based potato salad in every grocery store. I try to avoid all convenience food in my diet as far as possible, so I rather prepare my own. When I was living in Berlin I noticed that the Germans are crazy about potato salad and in the markets you could find a wide range of different sorts of potato salads, with veggies, with meats etc.

On the other hand, for my Brazilian boyfriend the typical potato salad was not typical at all. He was wondering how eagerly the guests attacked the potato salad I had prepared when we celebrated the beginning of spring. And indeed, when we were living in Brazil and holding a big party with lots of food I had prepared, the potato salad remained untouched for a lot of time, until all the other food had ended. And even then, the locals very shyly tasted it. 

Anyway, this is a recipe I prepared for this year’s May Day celebration. It’s a very simple, basic salad which you can modify according to your taste by adding herbs, spinach, olives, cheese, dried tomatoes, sky’s the limit.

Simple French Potato Salad

1,5kg firm potatoes (new potatoes work best)

1 big red onion

2 spring onions, finely chopped + more to garnish

small bunch parsley, finely chopped

100ml good olive oil

3 tablespoons white balsamic vinegar

3 tablespoons honey dijon mustard (if you use basic dijon, add also 1 tablespoon light brown sugar)

salt & freshly ground black pepper

Bring water to a boil in a big pot or a steamer pot. I prefer using a steamer pot when cooking vegetables, as I live in an illusion that it would better reserve the flavors, colors and vitamins in them. Carefully wash the potatoes and cook them for 20-30 minutes, depending on the size until cooked but not overcooked. Test with a fork after 20 minutes. Once the potatoes are ready, take off the heat and let cool.

While the potatoes cook, cut the vegetables and prepare the dressing. Finley chop the spring onions and parsley. Cut red onion in thin rings.

Whisk together all the remaining ingredients (olive oil, balsamic vinegar, honey dijon mustard, salt and pepper).

When the potatoes have cooled down, peel them if they have a thick skin. If you use new potatoes, don’t peel. Cut the potatoes into bite-size chunks. 

In a large bowl, mix all the ingredients well together so that all the potatoes cover with the dressing. Let the salad rest in a fridge for one to two hours, so that all the flavors absorb in the potatoes.

Garnish with spring onions and/or herbs.