Potato Leek soup with smoked salmon

Today, finally the promised soup recipe!

Leek and Potato soup with smoked salmon and a hint of orange

4 servings

Ingredients:

1 onion finely sliced

750 grams of creamy potato, cut into chunks

2 small leeks, courtly cut

1 cube of chicken stock

1 bayleaf

water

100 ml cream

75 gr of smoked salmon, cut into strips

the juice of 1 orange

Sweat the onion till soft in a large pan for soup. Add the leeks and potato and cook on a low heat for 5 minutes, stirring regularly.

Add the cube of stock and enough cold water to cover the vegetables well. add the bayleaf to add flavour to the soup. Cook on a low heat for 15 minutes, or until all vegetables are soft. Add the cream, take out the bayleaf and blend with a stick blender till smooth, leaving a bit of texture. Stir in the salmon and the orange juice and season with salt and pepper.

Serve with fresh bread, home made is always best of course :))

Buckwheat-Amaretti-Cake

Today, a shorter post as I am currently baking my behind off in the kitchen trying to make a shortlist of 'favourite bakes'.

Soon I will start my own cake catering business. I am brainstorming, creating, drawing and baking a lot to see what will work best. Luckily I am surrounded by talented people who support me in this goal and give me lots of help, challenges and new bright ideas! Thank you!!

One of my recent experiments:

Buckwheat-Amaretti-Cake

ingredients:

100 grams butter

100 grams sugar

3 eggs, separated

100 grams buckwheat flour

100 grams rye flour

7 grams baking powder

pinch of salt

2 apples in large cubes

10 amaretti morbidi (soft amaretti/bitterkoekjes) crumbled up

50 grams almond slices

50 grams of icing sugar

Preheat the oven on 175 degrees celsius.

Beat the butter with the sugar till fluffy. Add the eggs yolks one at a time till the mix is pale and airy.

Add the flours, salt and baking powder. Mix until smooth. Whip the egg whites til firm and fold in with the cake mix with a spatula 1/3 at at time, until just blended. Add the amaretti and apples and mix with a spatula. 

Prepare your baking form with batter and flour. Fill it with the cake mix. Mix the almond slices with the icing sugar and divide over the cake mix.

Make the cake for 45 minutes till golden brown and cooked. You can check this by inserting a knife in the centre, it should come out clean.

Best eaten warm with a scoop of vanilla ice-cream and within two days.

Basics

What seems so basic to some is like magic to others. Speaking to friends the other day the subject turned to food, as it inevitably does most times. And pancakes became a discussion point.

From when I was little I remember how to make pancakes, we used to do it all together for fun, and they are most kids favourite meal. We'd get a big bowl and the whisk out, some milk, flour and eggs and get going! It was a mess, but so much fun!
My friends, on the contrary, had no clue of what a pancake was made of, they always buy pre-mixed dry ingredients (E 2,05 per kilo) and add their own milk and eggs.
For Dutch pancakes all you need is milk, eggs and flour (E 0,98 per kilo)...a pinch of salt maybe.
So, it's the flour that is the secret ingredient?

I have made many different types of pancakes, that last ones were made of chickpeas and tofu, a bit of milk and an egg...not the best combination, but I had to cook lunch quickly and it was a healthy option.
Normally I try out different types of flour or combinations every time, like with bread.
Wholewheat flour, buckwheat flour, cornflour, oatmeal, etc. Sometimes with baking powder, sometimes not. Dutch pancakes traditionally have no baking powder in them, they are flat, like the country itself. Actually there is a saying in Dutch "As flat as a pancake!".
I prefer knowing what goes in my pancake and being able to have some fun and variety every time.

So my basic recipe for pancakes (Dutch ones that is):

For about 6 pancakes:
2 large eggs
150 grams of flour (whichever you feel like)
250 ml milk
a pinch of salt
butter or oil for baking

Just mix everything until smooth and bake in a large hot frying pan in a bit of butter or oil until the batter sets, flip (this is the fun part!) and bake till cooked through and golden brown.
Enjoy with powder sugar, jam, syrup, cheese, bacon....anything really.

Another basic in our house is tomato sauce, the simplest of all, but the best at the same time.
It's all about the garlic, the quality of your olive oil and the tin of tomatoes you're using.

For 2 servings:
1 big clove of garlic, finely sliced
3 tablespoons of good olive oil
1 tin of 400 grams poppa di pomodoro, best quality you can get. We love Mutti.
salt
pepper
peperoncino to your liking

Heat a saucepan and add the olive oil. Add the garlic and fry till light golden. Add the tomato sauce and stir well. Add a pinch of salt and pepper and peperoncino if you like a bit of a kick. Leave to simmer on a low heat for 15 minutes. You can add strips, tinned tuna, basil. Again all goes with this staple dish.
Just cook up some good pasta and keep a bit of the cooking water. Mix the water (about two tablespoons) with your sauce and stir. Mix in the pasta and serve hot! Nothing beats a good pasta al pomodoro in our house.
I notices I don't even have a picture of it as it's 'just' a basic.

Mutti polpa di pomodoro

Pink garlic

Yeast pancakes with honey

New life as a family / Cinque Terre

I am enjoying motherhood a lot, it's an amazing new feeling, a new kind of love that I have encountered. There is this new little person that totally depends on us, and mostly on me as I breastfeed. We watch him grow and develop so quickly, it's hard to keep up. He seems to have a new skill/sound/look everyday.
Our boy was born five weeks early, so we had some more baby-time with him, which I think was great as babies grow too fast anyway, it would be great if you could stop the time every so often.

Being a mom is also exhausting though, I have to be honest here. The broken nights, less sleep and the fact that you don't do anything else than care for your baby. It's sometimes a miracle if I get to shower before noon. I choose to be home with the baby for a year, not working full time, but picking up freelance work as a designer when the time allows it. This gives me peace, knowing I made that decision and that I have time to be there for our son, see him grow up.

A while ago I had the absolute urge to go somewhere new. To get out and enjoy a long weekend as a new family. Me, my husband and our new baby.
I choose Cinque Terre, because I had never been, It's a three hour drive from Como and it seemed like a place you could visit in a few days.
I picked a bed and breakfast called Villanova in Levanto from the internet and booked two nights. It turned out to be the perfect place for us to stay, close to all five villages but in a quiet area. Beautiful spacious room with a great local produce breakfast and above all, very kind people.

The first evening we visited Monterosso, we had a good fish pasta dish, but not amazing.
A cute town right at the sea. Obviously we were visiting in winter so the hustle and bustle was missing. And unfortunately the best restaurants were closed.

The next day we made the mistake of taking the train to Vernazza, we waited one and a half hours for  a ten minute train ride. I can advise you, check out the train time table and make sure it's up to date...

We arrived when the sun was dipping into the sea, a pretty sight. We sat at the harbour and saw the sky turning red to purple. It was cold as we stopped at a small wine bar for a glass of red wine, Garbin, lovely.

We took the train back and had a fantastic dinner in Levanto at Osteria Tumelin. They do great fish dishes, we tried the risotto ai frutti di mare. Very kind people and good service as well.

On our last day, after the husband investigated the area on his bike, we drove up and down a very adventurous route to Manarola. We took the buggy up some stairs to reach Trattoria Billy, where we ate some amazing black (squid ink) pasta with seafood, looking over the harbour of the tiny, charming, village from the terrace. We took some more steps to reach the most beautiful views of the sea and the sun setting in it.
Very satisfied we left Cinque Terre with a full belly and an empty head.

The Cinque Terre coastline with the railway

Vernazza sunset

Vernazza Harbour

Somewhere over Levanto

Monterosso

Trattoria Billy's tagliolini al nero di seppia