Caramel Oatmeal Muffins

We had our first regular weekly early morning meeting today, and I tried to add some cheer by bringing in some muffins. These muffins are really tasty - the delicious topping with crunchy caramelly oatmeal is irresistible! They hold up well in the freezer too - I admit that I made these a few weeks ago, and just gave them a quick spin in the microwave this morning.

I use Swedish filmjolk which is a kind of soured milk. You can use buttermilk, and I think regular yogurt would work nicely too.

Caramel Oatmeal Muffins
Makes 12 regular-sized muffins

2 eggs
200 ml (0.8 cups) sugar
50 g melted butter
300 ml (1.2 cups) flour
1,5 tsp baking powder
125 ml buttermilk or Swedish filmjolk

Topping:
90 g melted butter
50 ml (0.2 cups) homemade vanilla sugar (or regular sugar + 2 tsp commercial vanilla sugar)
200 ml (0.8 cups) rolled oats
1 tsp cardamom
1 tsp cinnamon

Beat eggs and sugar until fluffy. Stir in melted butter, buttermilk or filmjolk, flour and baking powder. Divide among muffin cups.

Mix all the ingredients for the topping, and add a good dollop to each muffin.

Bake at 200°C for 10-12 minutes. Watch them closely so the topping doesn't burn!

Recipe in Swedish:
Muffins med krispig havretopping

Slow Cooked Beef Tenderloin - Tjälknöl

Today is a very special day - we're having a guest blogger! Welcome, Danne! (He's married to one of my dearest friends, Tesse. I wrote about their wedding, here.)
That's all from me - over to Danne. //Anne

When Anne asked me so politely if I wanted to guest blog, I just couldn’t say no. So here is my contribution: Slow Cooked Beef Tenderloin.

The Swedish name is “tjälknöl”, which roughly translated would be frost-bump.

The reason for that name is that you start the cooking with frozen meat. I use beef tenderloin even if it’s more often used on elk steaks, roast beef and such "bigger" pieces of meat.

You place the frozen piece of meat on the bars in the oven (75-90°C). (You might want to put something under the meat cause there will be some dripping.)

Let the meat stay in the oven until it reach the right temperature. For beef tenderloin that is 58-62°C. (If you use other meat, you have to check what the appropriate temperature for it is.)

Before the meat is ready in the oven, I prepare the marinade. How much you need depends on the size of bowl you will use later on, so for a large bowl, you need to double (or even triple) the basic marinade recipe.

The marinade is made of 1 litre of water, 100 ml of salt, some ground pepper and 2-3 bay leaves.

Mix some of the water and all of the salt in a pan and bring to a boil. (The only reason for this is to make the salt dissolve into the water more easily.) Then you add the rest of the water and spices. (You have to let the marinade cool off before you use it.)

Place the cooked meat in enough marinade to have it covered and place it in the fridge. I keep the tender sirloin there for about 6 hours. If you use a shorter time the meat will not take enough flavour. On the other hand, if you let it stay too long, it will make the meat a bit too salty. If you should use the recipe on larger pieces of meat, more time will be needed. Over night could be necessary.

When the meat has been in the marinade you wrap it in aluminium foil and keep it in the fridge until its time to eat it.

The result is meat that is extremely tender. It just melts in the mouth and has a touch of flavour from bay leaf. (Should you use another kind of meat, like elk, you can replace bay leaf with for example juniper berries.)

This way of preparing the meat is very easy. Even if the time it needs to be in the oven and in the fridge is long, the actual time used for doing something with the food is very short. When I was preparing the food for our wedding, my wife and I had time go and get some coffee with Anne and Per, while the meat was in the oven.

You can serve the meat with whatever you like, weather that is potato salad or potato gratin. It fits perfectly with almost anything!

Enjoy!

Blogging By Mail - goodies from Brazil!

I got my Blogging By Mail package last night! Ooh, very exciting this one - I could see from the box that my package came all the way from Brazil! It was sent by Patricia of Technicolor Kitchen, and as the theme was "my favorites", she sent me several of her favorite candy.

MY favorite of those was definitely the peanut brittle - pé-de-moleque - that you see in the middle of the photo in the large, round box. Yum! I graciously donated some of them to Tesse who happened to be over for the taste-testing - Tesse is an avid golfer, and these are perfect to stick in your bag for a quick mid-course pick-me-up.

There's also Dulce de Leche sticks - very sweet!, a sort of banana candy that's really interesting and intensely banana, and Brazil's answer to M&M:s, Confeti!

I love getting to try goodies like these, from the other side of the world. I love how diverse this planet is, and how we can all learn from one another. Blogging By Mail may seem like a small thing, but really, I think it's important to share your culture, and this is a good way to do it. So, a big thanks to Patricia for my lovely package, and to Stephanie for hosting this round.

And - head over to Katie at Other People's Food - she's the one I sent a package to, and she has a really nice blog!

Tortellini Salad

It's a really beautiful day today. The sky is blue, the sun is shining, and I'm back at work. And that feels fine! I'm off to the gym in a short while, and I'm looking forward to the week. Not usually this perky - but today really feels like a good day.

I watched the latest episode of Top Chef last night. Frozen pasta meals, like the chefs had to prepare, are usually not very exciting, but they come in handy sometimes. I'm more interested in microwavable food, since that's all I can eat at work, but I might feel inclined to experiment a bit more with the methods for freezing and packing.

But of course, food is always best eaten fresh. And this fresh tortellini salad is wonderful. Perfect summer food, and make sure to try it while you can still get good asparagus.

Tortellini Salad
Serves 2

250 g fresh tortellini with your favorite filling - we bought a mushroom variety
1 handful cherry tomatoes, halved
1/2 small red onion, thinly sliced
100 g smoked ham, sliced into strips
1 bunch (about 250 g) fresh asparagus
1/2 tbsp olive oil
1/2 tbsp white wine vinegar
salt
pepper
parmesan

Trim the asparagus by breaking off the woody part of the stalk. (Just flex it gently - it breaks at the right point as if by magic!) Boil in salted water for 4-5 minutes, then immediately remove to a bowl of icy cold water.

Boil the tortellini - you can use the asparagus cooking water to save wated and energy.

Cut the cooked asparagus into smaller pieces, halve the tomatoes, slice the onion and the ham. Drain the apsta and toss with all the other ingredients. Drizzle with oil and vinegar, and season with salt and pepper.

Top with some shaved parmesan cheese.

Recipe in Swedish:
Tortellinisallad

Homemade Strawberry Cordial

I wish I could give you a recipe, but sorry. I haven't made this myself. Thankfully, my friend Danne has, and I've been lucky enough to taste this wonderful strawberry cordial on several occasions this summer. It's really summer in a bottle, the very essence of warm, sunny days.

Swedish Crisp Bread with Caraway

Ha! One new year's resolution down! (And sigh, four to go!) I finally made crisp bread, Swedish Knäckebröd. Was it hard? No. Was it expensive? Oh no. Was it time consuming? A little. And a little messy, too. But was it worth it? Oh, yes. I actually made two batches while I was at it - I'll post about the second kind in a few days.

This is a pretty basic recipe, and you can use it as a base to play with. Feel free to add other seeds if you prefer! The one piece of equipment that you might not have is a knobbly rolling pin, a kruskavel. It looks like this. Not absolutely necessary to have, but it does help here.

The traditional shape is large rounds with holes in the middle - the holes are actually for storage, because these were traditionally hung on a stick, from the ceiling.

Swedish Crisp Bread with Caraway

25 g fresh yeast
500 ml (2 cups) tepid water
2 tsp salt
600 ml (2,4 cups) coarse rye flour
600 ml (2,4 cups) wheat flour
2 tsp caraway seeds, bashed in a pestle and mortar
2 tsp sesame seeds
2 tsp linseed

Crumble the yeast into a bowl and add some of the water. Stir until the yeast is dissolved, then add the rest of the water, and all other ingredients. Mix by hand or with a machine until the dough starts to form. Add extra flour if it's too sticky. You don't have to knead it much, just enough to get a proper dough that holds together. Remove the dough to a clean bowl, cover and leave to rise for one hour.

Shape the dough into a large, thick rope and divide into 15 pieces. Roll out each piece into rounds, using a lot of flour so it won't stick. Roll it as thinly as you can (the crisper it will be!) and finish by doing a few rolls with a knobbly rolling pin, a "kruskavel". If you don't have one, prick the dough all over with a fork. Use a small glass or a cookie cutter to remove a hole from the middle of the round.


Or use cookie cutters - I couldn't resist making a cat.

Place directly on a baking sheet and bake at 200°C (that's for a convection oven, use 225°C in a regular oven) for 10-12 minuter. You have to turn them after half the time or they will burn.

Recipe in Swedish:
Knäckebröd med kummin

A disappointing dinner

It happens to me, and I'm sure it's happened to you too. Sometimes, the recipe that sounds so good on paper, just doesn't work at all. We recently had such a dinner, where all three new recipes turned out to be.. so-so. Or outright bad. Above, a salad of caramelized pears, walnuts and endives. Sounds good, yeah? Well, it was horrible. The endive was way too bitter (how on earth do you eat this stuff?) and the pears couldn't make up for it. The nuts didn't help. A strong vinaigrette or a smattering of blue cheese might have helped, though, but that wasn't in the recipe.



We served that (thankfully just for the two of us) with grilled lamb. Usually a winner, but this one was rather boring. The marinade sounded good, but it wasn't very exciting at all. And the meat was really tough and stringy - can't fault the recipe there, though.



It was served with a chili-aïoli that also sounded incredibly good, but was just bitter and nasty. Sigh. Huge disappointment, that one! Needless to say, you're not getting the recipes. Be thankful.