Red Curry Quorn

I rarely, rarely, rarely cook with meat substitutes. I really don't like most of them. Quorn is made from mushroom protein and.. well, it's not meat, that's for sure. Some swear it tastes just like beef, or chicken, or well, some kind of meat, but for me..? Well, no. The texture *is* different. And the flavor isn't much at all, which is why it needs lots of seasoning. Anyway, I did cook this curry using quorn "mince", so I thought I'd share it with you. Maybe some of you have a bag of quorn in your freezer, like I did...

Red Curry Quorn
(printable recipe)
Serves 4

500 g quorn mince
cooking oil
1 yellow onion, finely chopped
1-2 tbsp red curry paste
a thumb-sized piece of ginger, finely grated
2 garlic cloves, grated or minced
1 red pepper, finely chopped
400 ml coconut milk
water
pinch of sugar
salt
chili powder
garam masala
1-200 ml single cream
2-3 tbsp japanese soy sauce

Fry the quorn and the onion with red curry paste in some cooking oil. Add ginger, garlic and red pepper, and fry for a few more minutes. Add coconut milk, and season with a pinch of sugar, salt, chili and garam masala. You might want to add some water to make it saucier. Cook for ten minutes or so. Towards the end, season with more spices and soy sauce, and stir in some single cream to make the flavors a bit more round and smooth.

Recipe in Swedish:
Quorngryta med röd curry

Chicken Salad for dinner

Apparently, I blog so much about "desperate dinners" that I was approached by a company whose idea is to provide groceries for one week of dinners. Well, I still enjoy choosing what I eat, and eating well - I just don't have time for elaborate recipes, or blogging about them, at the moment. But hopefully I can still provide some inspiration! Tonight's dinner was really good. We bought half a rotisserie chicken, shredded it and tossed it with baby spinach, a red pepper, an avocado, and a mustard balsamic vinaigrette. What made it special was homemade sourdough croutons - I'll tell you about the sourdough bread as soon as I can, because it's really good. Croutons are super easy - just cut up some bread, toss with olive oil and salt and toast in the oven at 200°C for about ten minutes.

BBA: Multigrain Bread Extraordinaire

aka: Little piece of heaven!

Once again we're baking out of order in order to keep up with our daily lunch needs. I must say however that this bread is my favorite sandwich bread so far.
What a beautiful loaf of bread! I did however make a couple adjustments to the recipe as follows:

-I substituted a 7 grain cereal for the cornmeal and wheat bran because that was what I had at home.
-I also substituted white rice for the brown rice, once again because that was what I had in the fridge already.
-I found that I needed to add a lot of extra flour I could be because of my soaker. I didn't measure the water I just filled till it covered the grains as it states in the recipe.

I doubled the recipe and it made 2 large loaves over 2 1/2 pounds each.
My lunch! I am officially committed to never buying store bread again. One bite and I was with my family eating a $7 sandwich at the Atlanta Bread Company. This loaf could easily sell for $5-10. Let's just say 5 stars! This bread is pretty well perfect.

BBA: Brioche

Let them eat Brioche!

According to Peter's book, the history of brioche "includes allusions to Queen Marie Antoinette, whose last words are reputed to be properly translated as 'Let them eat brioche,' and not 'Let them eat cake.'"
There are three different types of brioche in the book, rich, middle-class, and poor man's. I decided to make the middle-class so that I could get a good idea of what brioche is (I've never had it before) but not needing to work-out non stop.


Here's my pretty bread! I was surprised at how quickly this loaf baked. The times in the book are a little vague depending on what shape you made the dough. I figured the loaf would be on the max side of things. It cooked a lot faster than I thought, so it turned out slightly over done.

The Crumb! Looks almost like pound cake, but it's a lot lighter think cream puff.

French Toast

(We almost had breakfast for dinner I was so excited about this!)






Ingredients

* 2/3 cup milk
* 2 large eggs
* 1 1/3 tablespoons honey, warmed in microwave for 20 seconds
* 1/8 teaspoon salt
* 5 (1/2-inch) slices day-old brioche
* 2 tablespoons butter

Directions

In medium size mixing bowl, whisk together the milk, eggs, honey, and salt. Pour the mixture into a deep plate or pie pan

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Dip bread into mixture, allow to soak for 30 seconds on each side, and then remove to a cooling rack that is sitting in a sheet pan, and allow to sit for 1 to 2 minutes.

Over medium-low heat, melt 1 tablespoon of butter in a 10-inch nonstick saute pan. Place 2 slices of bread at a time into the pan and cook until golden brown, approximately 2 to 3 minutes per side. Remove from pan and place on rack in oven for 5 minutes. Repeat with all 8 slices.



Buttermilk Syrup
I was introduced to this at a local restaurant and had to try it at home
3/4 cup granulated sugar
3 Tbsp butter
1/3 cup buttermilk
1 Tbsp corn syrup
1 tsp vanilla
pinch of cinnamon (optional)

Combine sugar, butter, buttermilk and corn syrup in a small saucepan over medium heat. Bring to a low boil, stirring constantly. Reduce heat and simmer for 2 minutes (continue to stir!) until all sugar has dissolved. Remove from heat and stir in vanilla and cinnamon if desired.

Recipe from Dinner's on me
Ta Dah! This was the most amazing french toast I have ever had the pleasure of experiencing! I am planning on freezing and saving the other loaf of brioche for breakfast when my sister comes down next week. (yup Tiff that's you so be excited!)


I wouldn't say it's a healthy breakfast, but what a way to start the day!

Cookbook Watch: lots of news

Ok, so I don't really cook much these days, but I *do* read cookbooks. I have a stack of new books easy to reach when I'm feeding the baby, and it's nice to get some sort of foodie enjoyment, even though it's outside the kitchen. (It's that, and daytime television...) I'm sure I'll be cooking again soon, but for now, this will do nicely. So, expect tons of cookbook reviews coming up. Let's start with a few that are nice, but not exactly for me...

First - a real first, Gordon Ramsay's first book to be published in Swedish. However, they chose "Healthy Appetite" ("Frisk Aptit" in Swedish) for that first, and I'm not super impressed by this. Come to think of it, I'm not a big fan of Gordon's books in general, except for "Fast Food" which I really liked. (And only got from the library - I should buy that one.) However, Gordon has a lot of fans here in Sweden due to the tv shows, and I'm sure many of them will like this book.



Another book which surely will have a lot of you excited is Bobby Flay's latest: "Burgers, Fries & Shakes". I fully expected to love it, but having read through it I realise it's the sort of book I'll never use. It's nicely written, with very thorough information about the food, good recipes, and great photos but... it doesn't make me hungry. Well, except for the shakes. Which I'll never make, since each one seems to have enough calories to last a week. (Slightly exaggerated, but as someone who tries to be fairly moderate, it just won't work.)



I also got a review copy of Trina Hahnemann's "The Scandinavian Cookbook". As always when encountering the term "scandinavian", I'm a bit sceptical. I find that there's a huge difference between Swedish, Danish, Norwegian and Finnish cooking and sure enough, this one is mostly Danish. I don't recognize a lot of the dishes, and I'm definitely not interested in cooking most of it. I suppose it's nice if you're curious about Scandinavian food and don't care all that much about the differences between the countries, but for Swedish food I vastly prefer "Very Swedish".



And for something different - an e-book. It's called Simply Summer and is written by Angela Tunner. The e-book is just $1.99and has some great-sounding recipes as well as pretty photos. However, it *is* an e-book, and I'm not super comfortable reading recipes in that format just yet. One would think so, since I'm so used to blogging, but... not really, no. But if you don't mind the format, it's definitely a very nice book.

And another quick dinner...

And here's another one of those not-super-special-perhaps-but-really-good dinners. We made a vegetable sauce with tomatoes, zucchini, red peppers and onions, and served it with spicy fried chorizo and pasta. Lots of parmesan. Delicious!

No culinary wonder but...

...really tasty. Cooked pasta - undercook it slightly, it will cook more in the oven - tossed with a cheese sauce (which I always buy ready-made), some very quickly blanched broccoli florets, and some crispy bacon and fried onion. Then baked in the oven. Dinner. Done.