Walnut bread in casserole

We've been on holiday for a few days and were,among other things, on a cooking class at our kitchen gods, Hugh Fernley Whittingstall, farm, River Cottage. It was amazing and we covered so many things in cooking, from baking beetroot brownies to joint a guinea fowl. Before we left, I made this bread, and if I may say so myself, this is the most beautiful bread I've ever made! Yes bread can be beautiful, if I had been a bread I had been attracted to this bread. So here is a photo-bomb of the bread.

Walnut bread in casserole

3-4 peas of yeast

350 g cold water

1 ½ tsp salt

60 g of walnut kernels

300 g strong bread flour

100 g rye flour

Crumble the yeast into a bowl and dissolve it in water. Stir in salt and walnuts, then stir in the flour so that it just mixes with the rest of the ingredients. Wrap the bowl with plastic and let the dough rise overnight at room temperature.

Place the cast iron pan in a cold oven and heat to 275 degrees C. Use a spatula to loosen the dough from the bowl and gently turn out the dough on a floured surface. Fold the dough a few times over itself using a spatula. Then scrape down the dough into the hot cast iron pot and put the lid on. Bake for 5 minutes, then lower the heat to 225 degrees C. Bake the bread another 30 minutes. Remove the lid and bake for 20 more minutes. Remove the bread and let it cool on a rack.

Chaurice style sausage

More sausage. This month I had help from my friends Anders and Hasse who contributed more with moral support than hands on support.

Chaurice is a creole / cajun sausage that is eaten as is and used in jambalayas and gumbos.

Chaurice sausage.

Ingredients in the original recipe:

• 1.8 kg pork butt
• 0.45 kg pork fat
• 2 tbsp of salt
• 2 tbsp of thyme
• 4 cloves of garlic
• 1 tbsp of cayenne pepper
• 1 tbsp of paprika
• 1.2 dl finely chopped onion
• 5 tbsp of parsley
• 1 bay leaf

Our ingredients:

• 2.2 kg pork collar
• 0.2 kg pork fat
• 2 tbsp of salt
• 2 tbsp of thyme
• 4 cloves of garlic
• 1 tbsp of cayenne pepper
• 1 tbsp of paprika
• 1.2 dl finely chopped onion
• 5 tbsp of parsley
• 1 bay leaf
• 4 dl bread crumbs
• 4 dl water

There were a lot of onions and I was a little hesitant when we mixed it with the minced meat but it was not noticeable in the cooked sausage.

Seasoning. 

I used the same kind of meat as I used for the andouille sausage, pork collar. At the moment it has been the cheapest  cut. I should find a recipe for beef sausage for the November sausage, forcing my self to use a new cut.

Meat, pig's collar.

We chopped the meat into dices and minced it together with some pork fat.
With some imagination it is visible in the picture that the grinder is placed a bit lower than the one used last time. This is another electrical grinder, which I liked better because it was lower.

Minced meat and some pork fat.

Add the spices, onion, parsley, bread crumbs, water and mix it all together.

Minced meat and seasoning.

After mixing it thoroughly it is time to taste.
Hasse's children got something else for lunch.

Two to the chefs and something else for Hasse's children

With the taste approved it is time to stuff the hog casings and now there is an action shot.

Finally, a picture of the stuffing process.

 After a lot of cranking, some swearing, and a lot of pushing sausage meat there is one long sausage.

A long sausage.

Now the only thing left is to tie the sausage.

Tied sausages.

As the keen-sighted can see in the last picture. One of the sausages burst when I tied it. When it happens just keep your cool and continue to tie the rest of the sausages, and eat it before someone else sees it.

Notes

The boneless collar may be sufficiently fat as it is. Now I have tried twice using a little extra fat and I do not think it made ​​any difference.

Furthermore, it is perhaps useful to make two or three different sausages on about five kilos of meat, total, to utilize the hog casing better.

Tarator de jez

As I mentioned earlier, I am very fond of Lebanese food and this is the second course I cooked last time we ate Lebanese at home. Tarator the jez is a chicken farrago that is something out of the ordinary and I would have been able to eat the entire dish myself, but I was kind to Johan and let him taste a little also.

On a different matter, my parents came to visit us this weekend (I did not offer this then) and since it soon is my birthday, they brought some gifts. I must say that these gifts will be difficult for them to beat in the future. My mother had woven a patchwork quilt to me and I also got an old wafer iron that belonged to my grandmother. 

Tarator de jez

4 servings

3 chicken fillets

salt

2 bay leaves

3 small sliced ​​pickles

1 tbsp chopped parsley

4 pressed garlic cloves

1/3 cup tahini, sesame paste

1/3 cup water

1/3 cup lemon juice

½ tbsp salt

1 teaspoon cumin (optional, I have it in almost everything)

Bring water in a saucepan to a boil and salt it lightly. Add the bay leaves and chicken and cook the chicken until it is cooked. I usually cut the fillets into smaller pieces so it will cook faster, I have no exact time but about 10-15 minutes will do.

Mix together the ingredients for the farrago and taste. When the chicken is cooked and has cooled, tear it into small pieces and stir into the farrago. Done!

Cookie dough truffels

I bought a new baking book a few weeks ago and now I have finally taken the time to bake something out of it. Cookie dough is something, which I think we can agree on, is absolutely wonderful, and should be included in everything, and that is what this book is about, cookie dough galore. The book is called, appropriately enough, "the cookie dough lover's cookbook" and is written by Lindsay Landis.

Cookie dough truffles

½ cup butter, room temperature

1/4 cup granulated sugar

½ cup light brown sugar, packed

2 tbsp milk or cream

½ tsp vanilla extract

1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour

½ tsp salt

½ cup min semisweet chocolate chips

200 g chocolate for the coating

Beat butter and sugar in a bowl until it is fluffy. Mix in the milk / cream and vanilla extract. Stir in flour and salt and mix until all the ingredients form a smooth dough. Stir in chocolate chips. Let the dough rest in the fridge for half an hour until it is firm enough to handle.

When the dough has rested, divide the dough into small pieces and roll them into balls about 3 cm in diameter. Then set them in the freezer for 15 minutes. While the cookie dough cools, melt the chocolate and set up a plate covered with parchment paper. I used a mix of light and dark baking chocolate which I melted in a water bath. Remove the cookie dough from the freezer and dip them in the chocolate with the help of a fork.

Blueberry Liqueur Part 2

Two months have passed since i put my blueberry liqueur in a glass jar. The time has come to place it in bottles.

2 bottles of blueberry liqueur.

I took a photo of the jar after only a week. A lot of the sugar had already dissolved and there was already some color.

After about a week.

After two months the color is much darker.

After 2 months on the windowsill.

Open the jar and separate the liquid from the berries.

Only blueberries left in the jar.

The berries where harder than I expected, but they did not taste that much. Neither good nor bad.

Strain the berries.

Sanitize bottles before the blueberry liqueur is poured in to them. As the picture below shows the bottles holds about 2 dl each. After the small tasting, the bottles will be stored for another 2 months. They will be ready to use by Christmas.

The result and a wee dram.

Notes

Compared to the original recipe I only used sugar which I believe to have been good. Even though it still smelled a bit of vodka it only tasted blueberries with a warm feeling in my chest when I tasted it.

Plum galette

It did not only become jam out of the plums we got from Johan's cousin. I managed steal some of him to make an plum galette. Imagine if you had a year with its own plum tree ... So far, however, I can manage well with our apartment with a gooseberry tree on the balcony.

Plum galette

Pastry

150 g cold butter

1 3/5 cups flour

2 tablespoons granulated sugar

2 tablespoons cold water

Mix together all the ingredients in a bowl with your hands, or use a food processor. Mix only as long as the dough just comes together. The dough is then allowed to cool for about 1 hour.

Filling

10 plums

250g raspberries

1/4 cup granulated sugar

1/4 cup light muscovado sugar

1 tbsp vanilla sugar

Preheat the oven to 175 degrees C. Flour the work surface lightly and roll out the dough. Place the dough on a baking sheet with parchment paper. Divide, core and make cloves out of the plums. Place them and the raspberries in the middle of the rolled out dough. Sprinkle granulated sugar, muscovado sugar and vanilla sugar over the fruit. Fold in the edges a bit sloppy, smooth and try to make it as tight as possible. Set the pie in middle of the oven and bake it for 40 minutes. Let cool before serving

Hummus with skillet bread

On one of our first dates John took me to a Lebanese restaurant and it was love at the first sight, with the food of course and perhaps with Johan. Where I grew up, in northern Sweden, it's beautiful and so forth, but you can't really get any culinary variety, at least not in the town I lived in.

I have several friends who have made hummus often, but since I've been a bit picky, especially with dips and sauces, I have not dared try. I've missed out on so much! Hummus was one of the first things I tried to do myself after having tasted it at that Lebanese restaurant, and it's so good! Nowadays I do hummus at least every other week.

Hummus

1 package pre-cooked chickpeas

6 tbsp sour cream

2 tbsp tahini (sesame paste)

1 large clove of garlic

2 tbsp lemon juice

1 tsp cumin

salt to taste

How to:

Blend the chickpeas until you have a fairly smooth mix. Stir in sour cream, tahini and lemon juice. Press the garlic and season with cumin and salt. 

Skillet bread

1 3/4 cup flour

½ tsp salt

2 teaspoons baking powder

50 g butter

3/4 cup water

How to:

Mix the dry ingredients in a bowl. Add the butter and disperse with your hands. Pour in the water and mix it together into a dough. Divide the dough into several pieces and roll out into a thin  bread. Heat a skillet and make sure it is hot, there should not be any fat in the skillet. Bake one bread at a time, about 4 minutes on each side. Adjust the heat gradually.

Perfect bread for dipping in hummus.

Macarons with elderflower ganche

A while ago Ladurée opened in Stockholm, and as the macaron lover I am, I had to try a macaron from them, the macarons have apparently been flown all the way from Switzerland. A friend of mine lives near their store and when I visited her for some weeks ago, I finally got the chance to buy me a few. Macarons are perhaps a little too expensive to buy everyday but Ladurée has an amazingly wide selection with lots of exciting flavors so a few macarons did not hurt my wallet.

But it's much more fun to make them yourself. It takes a little time and can be a bit tricky at times, I tried to color the first batch I made, but when I added the color, the meringue batter became very loose after being very firm and nice, I had probably worked it too much. So I had to make a new batch. When making macarons yourself, the best thing is to figure out which filling you fancy for this particular batch. This time I was tempted to make a ganache and then found a recipe for elderflower ganche. There was still some of my elderflower lemonade left, so it had to be. I must say that it is the best tasting filling I've ever made for macarons!

Macarons with elderflower ganache

Macarons

115 g almond flour

230g icing sugar

144 g of egg white

72g caster sugar

seeds from 1 vanilla pod

½ tsp salt

How to:

Grind the almonds and icing sugar together in a food processor or, if you use almond flour, sift the almond meal and icing sugar in a bowl.
Whisk the egg whites in a large bowl until soft peaks form. Whisk in caster sugar, salt and vanilla seeds so that it becomes a thick and glossy meringue batter.
Fold in the almond mixture (about one-third at a time) into the meringue batter with a spatula. When all the dry ingredients have been mixed in properly, continue to divide and fold the meringue mixture until batter is thick and shiny with a bit chewy texture.
Pour the meringue mixture into a spun or plastic bag fitted with a 1 cm wide tip around the nozzle. Pipe out on parchment paper, or do as I do and invest in a macaron mold made of silicone, it has given me much better results. Tap with your hand over the baking sheet so that any air bubbles in the macarons disappear. Let stand at room temperature for 30 minutes and heat the oven to 150 degrees C.
Bake for 10-15 minutes. Let the macarons cool for about 10 minutes and remove them from the baking paper.

Elderflower ganache

1 cup undiluted elderflower lemonade

1 tsp lemon juice

1/3 cup heavy cream

100 g of white chocolate

How to:

Heat the elderberry lemonade on low heat and let it reduce until there is about half of it left. Add lemon juice and cream and bring to boil. Stir in the white chocolate and let it melt so that the ganache becomes smooth. Pour into a bowl and let cool in the fridge until it set. Pipe or click the ganache on half of macarons and then add each filled with an unfilled.

Elderberry lemonade

The elderberries are finally ripe enough to be picked! Since I used the flowers to make lemonade, I felt it was only right to do some lemonade of the berries too.

My sister has been visiting for the weekend and the elderflower lemonade was, according to her, a big hit. She unfortunately did not get the chance to taste any of the elderberry lemonade since we have given away a big bottle and the lemonade we have left ended up in the freezer. It really must be one of the best gifts you can give away, something you made ​​yourself. I know that at least I appreciate such a gift very much.

Elderberry lemonade

2 l elderberries

about 2 cups water, or to cover the berries

1 teaspoon citric acid

2 cups sugar per liter of juice, drained

How to:

Rinse the berries. Put them in a pot and add water.

Cook for about 10 minutes until the berries are soft and mash them against the edge of the pot.

Strain the juice and let it drain for about 30 minutes, measure it and boil it again. Add sugar and citric acid and boil again. Skim off and put in clean, warm bottles.