Beetroot Curry

Has Browners gone completely insane? Beetroot curry sounds repulsive. He must have gone native. What’s next, pickled herring soufflé? A dill and walnut chocolate cake? Lingonberry scrambled eggs? But fear not. Beetroot curry is actually rather good. And fabulous to look at.

As you may have noticed, I’ve become rather attached to beetroot since moving to Sweden. It’s all part of my effort to eat more vegetables, to cut down on expensive meat and to become a bit healthier. And it turns out that beetroot are a blessing. They’re tasty, healthy, filling and hold their own against robust flavours. But would beetroot be able to cope with curry?

When Cowie and I were in India this time two years ago, we had a couple of cooking lessons from some of our hosts. I’ll never forget this chap at the Villa Rivercat in Goa patiently whipping up an incredible chicken curry with spices that were so expressive they were like Eddie Murphy after a dose of amphetamines. We both came back from India feeling incredibly healthy having eaten mainly vegetables and fish throughout our trip.

Inspired by thoughts of India I hatched a plan to create the reddest curry every seen and set off in search of spices. The Curry House, in the quaint district of Haga, has every spice known to mankind. And then some. They even sell bizarre things like black feathers, rhubarb root and lots of exotic medicines. It’s a bit like the market in Munnar, but less crazy.

Armed with fennel seeds, cumin, star anise, cardamom, dried red chillies, mustard seeds, turmeric and a massive bag of orange lentils I aromatically waddled back to my flat to do battle with the beetroot.

Ingredients:

10 beetroot
10 small potatoes
1 bag of fresh spinach (or can be frozen)
1 can of coconut milk
6 tomatoes
2 onions
2 cloves of garlic
Chicken/vegetable stock
2 thumbs of ginger
1 dessert spoon of cumin seeds
1 desert spoon of fennel seeds
1 dessert spoon of mustard seeds
1 desert spoon of coriander seeds
10 cardamom pods
5 star anise
2 desert spoons of garam masala
6 dried chillies
Vegetable oil
Coriander leaves
Salt

Method:

Roast all the spices (apart from the garam masala and cardamom) until they are aromatic but not burnt. Then pound to a dust in a pestle and mortar.

Sauté the onion until soft then add the chopped garlic and cook for a few minutes. Then add the grated ginger and breath deeply. A few minutes later throw in all the spices including the garam masala. Allow to mingle and cook for whilst you heat your stock up.

Pour in the hot stock and then add the chopped and peeled beetroot along with the dried chillies and cardamom. You want the liquid to be covering the beetroot.

Allow this to bubble away for about an hour with the lid on – until the beetroot begin to become tender. Then add the halved potatoes and take the lid off so that the liquid reduces. Once the potatoes are becoming tender add the can of coconut milk and 6 finely chopped tomatoes.

Taste for spice levels and seasoning and adjust accordingly with some chopped fresh chillies. At the last minute, stir through some spinach. Sprinkle with chopped coriander and serve.

I had it straight up with no rice, lentils or bread. But I think it would be best served with a chapatti or steaming hot naan. Whilst it might be an assault on the eyeballs it’s a delight to eat.

I made a large vat of it and lived off it for most of the week. You can add some pork or chicken when you are craving a bit of meat.

Further reading:

Beetroot curry recipe from One Bite at a Time
Beetroot curry recipe from Coffee Muffins

Three Ways with Beetroot Gnocchi

In it’s own right, most pasta couldn’t be more bland. Beige and almost flavourless it is like a silent servant being ordered around by the other ingredients. It’s one of the reasons I’ve been neglecting pasta. So in my quest to eat less refined carbohydrates and following the success of my experiments of using root vegetables as pasta substitutes I decided to have some colourful fun creating beetroot gnocchi.

In my head it seemed a fairly simple task. Substitute the potato for beetroot, mix in some flour, add an egg, season, knead, prove, roll into a sausage, chop into nuggets, boil and serve. But I hadn’t accounted for the fact that my kitchen would transform into a blood bath, or that my hands would be caked in lurid red Playdough rendering me incapable of doing anything. But it was well worth all the scrubbing and hard work.

I made enough dough for several meals so played around with various beetroot friendly flavour combinations. Of all the combinations I tried, a simple pairing with a lip pursing goat’s cheese worked well as did a creamy chanterelle sauce and a bowl of super charged aniseed soup with beetroot gnocchi dumplings.

Beetroot Gnocchi

Ingredients

6 large beetroots
2 large potatoes
1/6th weight of beetroot and potato of plain flour
1 egg

Method

Boil the potato until tender, drain, allow to cool for a bit and then mash. Do not under any circumstances whiz in a food processor as it will become gluey and the texture of the gnocchi will be damaged.

Roast the beetroot on a bed of rock salt for 40 minutes. Others suggest boiling or steaming them, but having tried different methods, the salt roasting technique is best. The beetroot keeps its colour better and the flavour is enhanced. Remove the beetroot from the oven and allow to cool. Remove the skin and blend in a liquidiser.
Combine the beetroot puree with the potato and marvel at the bright red mixture.

Season with salt and pepper. Next beat in the flour and the egg. Keep adding flour until the mixture turns from unmanageable red gunge to a well behaved dough. It took far more flour than I had expected to achieve this, so be patient.

Once it is becoming dough like transfer the mixture to a well floured work surface and knead like you’ve never kneaded before. Make sure your hands are well floured and you are wearing a T shirt you don’t care about much.

Tear off a piece of dough for your serving and roll into a thin sausage shape. Roll in flour and cut into little nuggets.

Boil in well salted water until the first red blob floats to the surface and then drain immediately. Serve with any of the flavour combinations below.

Beetroot Gnocchi with Goats Cheese, Toasted Walnuts and Chives

Once cooked, simply place the gnocchi in a bowl, top with goats cheese and toasted walnuts and place under the grill for a few moments to melt the cheese. Then sprinkle with finely snipped chives and season maniacally with salt and pepper. It’s a delicious autumnal lunch time dish that, once you have made the dough, is unbelievably simple to make. The subtly earthy flavour of the beetroot was a super match for the sharp cheese and the soft texture was enhanced by the crunchy walnuts.

Beetroot Gnocchi with a Chanterelle and Goat’s Cheese Sauce

The woody, earthy tones in mushrooms and beetroot are made for each other. Coupled with a splodge of crème fraiche and a knob of goat’s cheese it made for a more indulgent main dish than the previous version.

Sauté two large handfuls of chanterelles in butter and olive oil over a high heat. Sprinkle with salt and continue cooking until they have leached their water out and taken on some colour. Lower the heat. Then add a finely minced clove of garlic and cook for a few minutes to take the raw edge away. Then add several spoonfuls of crème fraiche and bubble away until it has become saucy. Toss in the goat’s cheese and then slather over your just boiled beetroot gnocchi.

Garnish with chives and sprinkle with smoked salt and season with black pepper. Just writing this makes me want to eat it all over again, but this time either with a glass of white wine like a Grüner Veltliner or something more woody like a Chassagne-Montrachet.

Fennel Soup with Beetroot Gnocchi Floaters

Being very partial to the taste of anise I decided to buy up my local store’s stock of fennel bulbs and make a fennel soup supercharged with star anise and tarragon.

I simply roasted 4 chopped fennel bulbs until golden with a couple of shallots and 5 star anise and then added them to a pan of simmering water with a glug of chicken stock. I removed the star anise and then blitzed in a food processor before seasoning and topping with beetroot gnocchi and a sprinkling of goats cheese and walnuts.

The photo doesn’t really do it justice. So you’ll have to take my word for it that it’s a cracking combination and is something I am going to make time and time again. I’ll just have to work on the presentation!

If you’ve been inspired to make some beetroot gnocchi by this post, I encourage you to make a large amount and store the remaining dough in the freezer. After the fun of making beetroot gnocchi, my next task is to do something similar with all the glut of pumpkins that November is promising.

If you’ve got any further ideas about what to do with beetroot or pumpkin gnocchi please let me know.

Spaghetti alla Bottarga

Sardinia’s opal tinted waters that lap against the island’s crinkly coast are awash with bronzed Italian bodies and most excitingly, are wriggling with grey mullet. The history of Sardinia, the Mediterranean and these wriggling mullet is so intertwined that you could write a compelling anthropological thesis about their relationship that would reveal the island’s true character.

Sardinia’s location makes the island a sponge for outside influences. Over the centuries Sardinia has been invaded by the Vandals, the Byzantines, the Ostrogoths and the maritime republics of Genoa and Pisa as well as being inundated by Arab raids. It’s this influx of external influences that makes Sardinia’s food culture so interesting. A quick look at the culinary palimpsest shows what a strong influence Arab culture has had on Sardinia with the legacy of fregola and most interestingly, bottarga.

Bottarga (AKA Sardinian Caviar) is the preserved roe sac from grey mullet and tastes deeply savoury, super salty and very grown up. Just imagine a firmer, nuttier version of an anchovy. It is made by salting a mullet roe sac and then pressing it between two pieces of wood and air-drying it. When cured it is then covered in a layer of beeswax and sold for an extortionate price in flash delis all over the world. It gets its name from the Arabic batarekh and is found in various guises across the Middle East.

Like all seafood and Italian food it is at its best at its most simple. Just grate it onto a bowl of pasta that’s been doused in garlic infused-olive-oil and lemon zest and shower it in parsley and you will be eating the very essence of Sardinia.

We had a go at cooking an improvised version of spaghetti alla bottarga in our outdoor kitchen at Casa Teulada whilst we were in Sardinia and loved it so much that I made it my mission to recreate it properly back in my kitchen in Sweden. With a recipe from Mario Batali as a guide I put my waxy block of fishy gold to good use.

Ingredients:

Top quality spaghetti
Bottarga
Italian parsley
Olive oil
2 cloves of garlic
1 lemon
Chilli flakes
Salt and pepper

Method:

Boil the pasta in salted water.

Meanwhile gently heat an indecent glug of olive oil in a cast iron pan and add the thinly sliced garlic and chilli flakes. You just want the garlic to warm through and lose its raw edge which will take no more than a few minutes. If you’ve got some bottarga powder as well as the roe, sprinkle some into the oil for a deeper flavour.

Then when the pasta is cooked use a claw and add the pasta to the garlicky oil. Flick in some of the magical pasta water and toss. Then serve in a bowl and sprinkle with finely chopped parsley, lemon zest and then triumphantly grate over a generous amount of bottarga. Make haste and serve pronto.

Washed down with an icy bottle of Vermentino, each forkful transports you back to the warm, breezy shores of Sardinia.

This post has been entered into the Grantourismo HomeAway Holiday-Rentals travel blogging competition which you can read about here and on www.homeaway.co.uk

For more information about bottarga and Sardinia have a look at these sites:

Gastroanthropology on bottarga
Granturismo themselves on the delicacies of Sardinia and even more bizarrely their account of staying in our apartment!
Practically Edible on Bottarga
One Bite on Bottarga

Turkey Meatballs with Mushroom Sauce

A trip to the supermarket isn’t complete without remortgaging your house. Whereas in the UK, the fierce competition between the supermarkets means you get inundated with special offers, 3 for 2s, bogofs and reap the rewards from loyalty schemes, Sweden just plucks a price for each item out of thin air and then doubles it. And then adds a tonne of tax. For the first month or so I was overwhelmed by the language barrier and a bit naïve about the exchange rate with the result that each bag of food seemed to cost around 30 pounds. Since then, I’ve been far more careful and have cut out expensive items such as meat from my shopping list and instead filled my basket with vegetables and keep things interesting by regularly visiting the fish monger. As a result my bags are now weighing in at 20 pounds and I am feeling a lot healthier to boot.

Whilst exploring the exotic frozen meet section in my local supermarket, amongst the crocodile meat, marrow bones and deer blood, I came across a rather boring, but cheap, giant frozen turkey breast and started thinking of ways to pep up this dull lump of protein.

The first night I lobbed off a couple of chunks and poached them in a stock laced with cardamom, cinnamon and coriander and ladled over a reduced sauce that was supposed to be savoury but turned into butterscotch. Whilst it filled a hole for dinner and lunch the next day, let’s just say it barely deserved the 63 words I’ve just given it.

The worst thing about the meat was the texture. With so little fat it was dry and very tasteless. So the only solution was to mince it and turn this mound of inert poultry into super tasty meatballs. This is an adaptation of a great recipe from Anne’s Food which uses either pork or beef. But I’ve used turkey instead.

Ingredients:

Meatballs:

1 whole turkey breast weighing around a kilo
1 finely sliced onion
1 clove of garlic
White pepper
Salt
Handful of cardamom pods
Sprinkling of cinnamon powder
Sprinkling of all spice
Some oats/breadcrumbs to balance the moisture – use your judgement
1 egg

Sauce:

A dozen sliced button mushrooms
1 shallot
1 clove of garlic
2 tablespoons of crème fraiche
Thyme
Tarragon
Butter
Olive Oil
Salt and pepper

Whole wheat

Method:

Mince your turkey and add everything in the meatballs ingredients list. Hold back a bit on the spices and make a test meatball which you should fry in a bit of oil. It should cook in about 5-8 minutes. Let it cool and test for seasoning and spicing. Adjust as necessary remembering that you can always add more, but it’s harder to take away!

Form into balls about the size of a golf ball and fry in batches to brown. Transfer to a roasting pan cook in a medium-low oven whilst you plough on with the other aspects.

Boil the wheat and drain, but reserve the starchy water. Keep the wheat warm.

Sautee the mushrooms in butter and oil and season with salt which will draw the moisture out. They should start to turn brown. Then add the onions and garlic and cook until soft but not brown. Then pour in about 300ml of the starchy wheat water and it should cause quite a commotion in the pan. Add a dash of liquid chicken stock and reduce. Add some crème fraiche, tarragon, thyme and seasoning to the sauce which should become quite stroganoffy.

Serve the meatballs on a bed of wheat and topped with the mushroom sauce. What is lacks in colour it makes up for in rich, autumnal flavours.

This recipe made around 20 meatballs which was enough for 5 meals. Which made it incredibly good value. The warming spicing completely transformed the bland turkey and leant itself to being paired with quinoa, cous cous or fregula and plenty of hot sauce.

After dipping my toe into the controversial world of Swedish meatballs, I’m looking forward to giving the proper versions a go next. If you’ve got a great recipe for Swedish meatballs that you can share with me I’d love to give it a go.

Planked Salmon with Fennel Two Ways and Burnt Aubergine Puree

Cowie has a long and distinguished history of buying me awesome cooking gifts, not to mention having built Cassius as well. So when she gave me a collection of cedar planks for Christmas I got giddily excited.

Planking is an old fashioned culinary technique where you cook your meat or fish on a dampened plank of wood, such as cedar, over hot coals. The wet wood emits puffs of steam and smoke that gently encourage the flesh above to yield whilst providing a smoky backdrop. (For more in depth information about planking have a look at this site or buy this book.)

The easiest, and possibly best, thing to cook on a plank is a fillet of salmon. You land up with an indecently moist piece of warm smoky fish that will make you wonder why you’ve been eating boring old poached or grilled salmon for all those years.

We cooked this with a fennel salad which we cevichified from Mark Hix’s book and some burnt aubergine puree that we bastardised from Ottolonghi. And all in a Cornish field with a small BBQ.

Ingredients:

1 cedar plank
1 salmon fillet big enough for two with the skin on
Salt
Pepper
Lemon zest
2 aubergines
2 cloves of garlic
2 tablespoons of yoghurt
Olive oil
1 fennel bulb
Mint
Juice of 2 lemons

Method:

Soak your cedar plank in water for anywhere between 2 and 12 hours. This will stop it burning.

Slice the fennel as thinly as possible. We didn’t have a mandolin on the camp site, surprisingly, so just make sure you’ve got a very sharp knife and haven’t drunk your own body weight in gin and tonic by this stage. Season with salt and pepper and then douse in the juice of 2 lemons.

Light your BBQ. When the coals have stopped flaming throw on two aubgerines and pierce with your knife. Let them burn, Ottolenghi-style, for 20 minutes or until steam is spurting out of the aubergines and the flesh is soft. Remove and leave to cool. Then scoop out the flesh, mash, and mix in the yoghurt, more salt and pepper and a squeeze of lemon. You’ll be adding some smoked garlic later…

Descale the salmon and remove any pin bones. Then rinse in cold water. Pat dry. And then season like there’s no tomorrow. Add a few curls of lemon zest.

Place the plank on the coals and when it starts to smoke lay the salmon skin side up on the wood along with 2 cloves of garlic. Add the fennel to the grill and close the lid. Inspect after 10 minutes and turn the fennel. Judge the doneness of the salmon and continue cooking for as long as you like.

Remove from the heat and mash the smoky garlic into the aubergine. Dress the fennel ceviche with some olive oil, shredded mint leaves and check the seasoning. If you’ve got the inclination, remove the salmon skin and place on the grill to crisp up.

Serve the salmon from the plank with the two types of fennel and a saucy smacker of smokey aubergine puree.

The salmon was softer than an Andrex puppy’s downy ear and subtly smoked. Whilst the fennel was sharp and crunchy on the one hand and charred and sweet on the other.

After a scorching debut I think that planking may well be my new favourite cooking technique. We’ll have to push the boat out next time with some more adventurous recipes…

Further reading:

Epicurious on maple planked salmon
Accidental hedonist on Copper River planked salmon
Man Meat Fire
Cedar Grilling Company – they know a thing or two about planking
Cedar plank recipes from Tasty Timbers
Buy planks in the UK here
How to cut your own cedar grilling planks

Arctic Char with Roasted Fennel and Grated Tricolour Carrots

When Cowie was last over in Sweden we had a cracking dinner at a small restaurant and bar called Stearin, in Gothenburg’s trendy Linne district. My beef was delicious, but it was Cowie’s fillet of crispy skinned and soft fleshed röding that really caught our attention. We couldn’t work out what the mystery fish was. We left the restaurant convinced we had eaten trout but then found out via the magic of the interweb that röding is actually arctic char.

So when I saw a fillet of röding in the Feskekôrka I snapped it up and made it my mission to recreate the dish. I decided to make good use of an abundance of mulitcoloured carrots which seemed to be behaving like a chameleon as they changed colour to match the pink and purple speckled fish skin. And a stray fennel bulb seemed like a good idea too. As did an orange and a lemon.

Ingredients:

Fillet of Arctic Char
Half a fennel bulb
3 grated carrots
1 orange
1 lemon
1 tablespoon of honey
2 teaspoons of Dijon mustard
Some chopped parsley
Glug of olive oil
Half a red chilli
Salt and pepper

Method:

Roast the fennel in a hot oven with a wedge or two of orange for 30 minutes, or until soft and slightly coloured.

Grate your carrots. I used my MagiMix which took a mere 4 seconds and made me feel like a WI superhero! Dress the carrots with a mixture of olive oil, honey, lemon juice, Dijon mustard, orange zest and finely sliced red chilli. As well as some salt and pepper.

Season the fish and sear skin side down until the skin is crisp. Then turn over and barely cook. You want the fish to be mooing.

Arrange the plate with the fennel as the foundation and balance the fish on top with the carrots looking like an upturned birds nest on the edge of the plate.

It’s a delicious, light summer dish that would work just as well with salmon or trout. The carrots, with their citrus, honey and chilli notes and the sweet, aromatic fennel more than played their part too.

Further reading:

More information about Arctic Char on Chow
Swedish recipe for röding and an interesting Scandinavian food blog

Seared Salmon with Cauliflower Puree and Redcurrant Sauce

I came home from the market with a bag full of treats and a brain that was racing with ideas about what to do with all my lovingly purchased ingredients. Bargainous oxtail and short ribs went straight into the freezer taking with them a meaty portion of my “what to cook” conundrum. I stood looking at my haul playing a mental game of word association, but with food. Then, with a shard of crimson inspiration, things clicked into place.

Super fresh redcurrants glowed like rubies, begging to be matched with a fillet of salmon that was so fresh I imagine there’s a fish swimming around with an oblong hole in its side. And with an absence of potatoes, a cauliflower raised a hand and volunteered to fill in. Seared salmon with cauliflower mash and redcurrant sauce may sound like something Alan Partridge may pitch as the name of his new TV show, but I can assure you it is delicious.

Ingredients to serve one (sob sob):

1 salmon fillet with the skin very much still on
Handful of redcurrants
5 cardamom pods
1 onion
2 cloves of garlic
Half a head of cauliflower
250ml of milk
2 table spoons of crème fraiche
1 tablespoon of grated horseradish
1 tablespoon of honey
Salt and pepper

Method:

Start by making your cauliflower mash. Saute the onion and garlic gently until soft. Don’t let them colour. Cut the cauliflower into small pieces and simmer in the milk. Be careful not to burn the milk. When soft blitz in a blender and then add the crème fraiche. The consistency should be smooth and soft. Season with alacrity and add the grated horseradish if you fancy a bit of warmth.

Add the redcurrants and cardamom to a pan and just cover with water. Boil until the currants of soft and the liquid is red. Pass through a sieve and return to the pan. Add the honey and reduce until it is syrupy. (If you carry on reducing it and then let it cool it will become jelly).

Then season your salmon and sear skin side down to crisp up the skin. Turn it over and barely cook until it is rare. Spoon the cauliflower puree onto a plate and place the salmon on top. Dress with redcurrant sauce and serve.

I was rather pleased with how it turned out. The earthy flavour of cauliflower was a good foil for the salmon whilst the sweet, sour and aromatic redcurrant sauce added a powerful counterpoint. The blood coloured moat made it look like it had been cooked by Dexter. My favourite part of the dish was the way that everything was so soft except for the lusciously crispy salmon skin which snapped, cracked and crunched in equal measure.

Further reading:

Redcurrant sauce
Cauliflower puree
Dexter

Tricolour Carrot Tagliatelle with Orange Zest, Coriander Seeds and Scallops

This started out as a healthy experiment that worked well in principle but wasn’t quite right taste wise and evolved into a dish I’m really proud of. Inspired by the success of making salsify tagliatelle I thought it would be fun to do something similar with carrots. But whereas the creamy seafood sauce worked wonders with the salsify thanks to the white root vegetable’s oystery taste, my horseradish carbonara was best consigned to the compost bin.

But rather than give up I mulled things over, invested in some multi-coloured carrots and had a look in my Flavour Thesaurus. Prior to peeking inside, I had wondered whether orange and a Middle Eastern spice might work well and was delighted when I stumbled across the fact that Niki Segnit recommends both orange and coriander seeds as two great flavour combinations to throw at carrots. So I thought, what the hell, let’s try both. And then threw some scallops in as well to turn it into a proper meal.

Ingredients:

A bunch of peeled, long, multi-coloured carrots
Coriander seeds
2 oranges
4 scallops
Red chilli
Salt
Pepper

Method:

Using a vegetable peeler, cheese slicer or mandolin, shave your carrots into thin strips. Then cut all these carrot strips into tagliatelle width slithers. You’ll be left with a bowl of raw carrot tagliatelle.

Squeeze the two oranges into a pan and reduce the juice with a tea spoon of honey and some crushed coriander seeds. Add the zest of half an orange and check to see it all taste vibrant. I added a touch of chopped red chilli as well for good measure, but you needn’t if you don’t fancy it.

Then boil the carrots briefly in salted water. And sear your scallops having seasoned them first.

Add the carrots to the sauce and combine. Serve in a bowl. Season. And then add the scallops on top. Then gasp at how beautiful, healthy and delicious this is. It may not be a traditional bowl of pasta. But it’s certainly strikingly different.

If you’ve got any thoughts about flavours and sauces that could accompany carrot tagliatelle please let me know…

Further reading (beware it’s all a bit health foody):

Griddled salmon with carrot spaghetti
Carrot spaghetti with green pesto
Carrot tagliatelle with almond garlic and brocoli

Langoustine Fregola

One of our favourite meals in Sardinia was a bowlful of comforting fregola, strewn with mussels and fire licked vegetables, laced with mullet stock and lifted by a kick of chilli and a blast of lemon zest. It was our take on a Sardinian classic. Just without the pricey clams, saffron or tomatoes! After we’d devoured what was in our tangerine coloured bowls, I couldn’t help myself from scooping out the residual grains of moistened fregola from the discarded mussel shells.

Fresh from having our fregola virginity stripped away from us, my curiosity took over and lead me into the darkened corners of the information super-highway, where people discuss how to hand roll semolina so it turns into perfectly irregular nuggets of pasta-cum-couscous. It seems that fregola is a culinary palimpsest, showing the influence that Arabic culture has imparted on Italy. All of which is fairly ironic considering some of the nationalistic rumblings that occasionally get expelled from the mouths of officious Italian politicians about evil foreign food.

The main differences between the two are that fregola is toasted, giving it a nutty quality and that couscous tends to be much more granular. Meanwhile, to confuse matter, Israeli couscous is normally the size of a small pea and untoasted.

The fregola we encountered in Sardinia was gnarly and unevenly coloured which gives it a characteristic, hand made charm and could well be the basis for its name. As SFGate says, “The name fregola probably derives from Italian fregare, meaning to rub, an apt description of how moistened semolina is transformed into fregola’s coarse crumbs.”

So back in Sweden I decided to revisit our Sardinian adventures by creating a bowl of langoustine loaded fregola as a sort of Sarda-Scandi fusion.

I blitzed the Fishchurch and left carrying a bagful of langoustines and a hake carcass which I had wangled for free. Brilliantly, the fishmonger had been more careless than frugal so there was still plenty of meat on the bones, especially around the head, so it made for excellent stock.

Ingredients:

1 hake carcass plus accompanying stock vegetables in order to make a litre of fish stock
200 grams of fregola
4 raw langoustines
2 handfuls of spinach
2 cloves of garlic
1 onion – finely chopped
Orange zest
Half a finely chopped red chilli
Olive oil
Salt
Pepper
Chilli sauce

Method:

Boil the fish carcass along with a carrot, a stick of celery and an onion for 30 minutes. Strain the liquid and discard the bone and keep any meat that falls off. Reduce the stock, but don’t go too crazy because it can go gluey.

Meanwhile sauté the onion until softened and add the minced garlic. Then add the fregola and enough stock to cover. Cook until the fregola is soft and season. Grate the zest of an orange into the fregola and stir through half a red chilli. Then add the langoustines and cook them until they change colour followed by the spinach which you just want to wilt and add colour.

Check the seasoning and serve with the claws hanging over the edge of the bowl. I added a splash of chilli sauce at the end just to give it a lift as well, but that’s optional.

It’s very moreish. Luckily I didn’t eat both portions and managed to save some fregola for my next meal, which found its way into a roasted red pepper.

Further reading:

Chocolate and Zucchini recipe for fregola sarda
SFGate on fregola
Fregola with leeks and sausage
Fregola with goats curd, tomatoes and asparagus on Eat Like a Girl
Fregola sarda with vegetables and wild garlic pesto
Artisan pastas
How to make fregola by hand

Potato “risotto” with smoked mackerel and horseradish crème fraiche

Regular readers will know of my fondness for risottos. What’s not to love about a dish that’s more comforting than a hot water bottle? The only downside is that they have a tendency to be somewhat bad for your waistline. In essence they are the equivalent to the first year you spend at university where it is almost impossible not to put on a stone or two of not very solid fat!

Given that I am trying to eat more healthily and cook with a more Scandinavian mindset, risotto hasn’t really had much of a look in. But when I found myself with a bag full of ageing potatoes that needed cooking I felt as if a compromise might be achieved. Marcus Samuelsson soon came to the rescue with his recipe for potato risotto which I took inspiration from and tweaked with the ingredients that lay expectantly in my fridge.

Ingredients:

I bag of potatoes, peeled and finely diced
2 shallots
1 clove of garlic
½ litre of vegetable stock
100 grams of peas
100 grams of spinach
2 mackerel fillets, torn into pieces
3 tablespoons of crème fraiche
Grated horseradish
Olive oil
Salt
Pepper
Dill
Thyme
Tarragon

Method:

Peel your potatoes. Then finely dice them. This is quite laborious, but sadly, essential.

Sautee the shallot and garlic in olive oil then add the potatoes. Stir for a minute or two and then add hot stock and keep stirring. Add the thyme and tarragon. Then add more chicken stock and continue until the potatoes are tender. Be careful not to overcook. For me it took around 15 minutes.

Add the frozen peas and spinach and let them cook through. Then add 2 tablespoons of crème frache and a knob of butter and stir until the risotto is creamy. Don’t be as aggressive as you would be with rice because you don’t want to mash the potatoes.

Add the smoked mackerel and allow to rest so that the fish warms through. Season and serve with a dollop of crème fraiche on top and some grated horseradish and garnish with dill.

It was delicious. And for some reason felt healthier than a normal risotto. The combination of potatoes, dill, horseradish and smoked fish was unmistakably Scandinavian. I loved every single mouthful and went to bed dreaming of eating the leftovers for lunch!