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

new favourite bread recipe

Every week I bake bread, at least. It's ridiculously easy and really quick if you look at the preparation time. It's only the rising that takes a bit longer. If you've never done it before it's really worth giving it a try.

Last week I tried something new and it's my favourite recipe till now...And I've baked a lot of different types of bread. I tried French baguette and ficelle (smaller thin baguette) and Pain de Campagne from the amazing Larousse bread book. I made brioche and even did an attempt to make fresh croissants (which failed as I wasn't patient enough with the last rise).

I mixed all sorts of flours in different quantities like wholewheat, rye, buckwheat, corn and plain white flour. All great breads I must say but adding this secret ingredient just made it that much better.

Oatmeal, the stuff we use to make our everyday breakfast porridge. In the morning we cook it with water and Jamie Olivers Granola Dust, from his new book Everyday Superfoods. We sweeten it with honey or maple syrup and fresh banana. Yum, and so healthy!

I had no idea it would work so well in bread. 

Making this bread recipe will take you two and a half hours (2,5) all in all, so including weighing, kneading, rising and baking. The actual work takes about 10 minutes (if using a Kitchen Aid) to 30 minutes (if kneading by hand).

Ingredients:

350 grams of wholewheat flour

150 grams of cut oatmeal (you can use whole rolled oats if you like)

10 grams of salt

25 grams of fresh yeast or 7 grams of dried yeast.

350 ml lukewarm water

3 tablespoons of olive oil (optional)

Mix your flour, oatmeal and salt in the machine or in a bowl by hand. Mix the water and yeast till dissolved. Add the water and yeast and olive oil to the flour mixture and start kneading, keep kneading for about 10 minuted until you have a soft elastic dough that is not too compact and dry but also does not stick too much to your hands.

Make into ball and cover the bowl with a damp cloth. Leave for an hour in a warm place.

After an hour, when the dough has risen to double its size, beat the air out of the dough and re-knead for a minute. Shape into a ball or put into a bread tin. Cover with the cloth and leave to rise for another 15 minutes in a warm place while you preheat the oven to 200 degrees Celsius.

Bake the bread for 50 minutes until cooked through and golden brown.

Eat immediately with cheese and hot soup! "To die for, how will I ever buy bread again." I quote my friend.

Oatmeal bread

French baguette

Swedish Kanelsnurre, cinnamon rolls pre-baking

Grissini

Buckwheat bread

Easter Bunnies

Dutch filled spice biscuit

A few life changing events have pulled me away from blogging over the last year and a half....
We got married and had our beautiful son!
Both fairly time consuming, life changing, wonderful, big things that, in combination with a fulltime job, left me with no time to blog. I am trying to pick up my creative activities, combining it with being a mom...a challenge I can tell you, but the most wonderful one I can imagine.

This is the second time I've made this biscuit, and it's again a big success. A very traditional recipe we make (or buy) around Sinterklaas, the Dutch version of Thanksgiving basically.
On the 5th of December Santaclaus: Sinterklaas, together with his helpers, comes to bring us presents and candy and we all drink hot chocolate and eat erwtensoup.

See Wikipedia for a better explenation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinterklaas

It's a spicy, cinnamon, full-christmas-flavoured biscuit filled with rich almond goodness.

makes 30 pcs

Ingredients:

for the dough:

200gr flower (any type you like)

100 gr sugar

2 tablespoons of mixed christmas spice (speculaaskruiden) *

a pinch of salt

150 gr cold butter in cubes

2 tablespoons of milk

for the filling:

150 gr of peeled almonds

150 gr cane sugar

zest of 1 lemon

1 egg

for the finishing:

1 egg

30 peeled almonds

* To mix your own Speculaaskruiden mix:

4 tsp Cinnamon

2 tsp ground cardemom

2 tsp ground coriander ( ketoembar)

2 tsp ground ginger

1 tsp nutmeg

1/2 tsp ground clove

To convert grams into other units: http://www.gourmetsleuth.com/conversions/grams/grams-to-cups-conversions

Start making the filling two days in advance (preferably). grind the almonds with the sugar and the lemon zest till it sticks together and is a fairly fine structure, you can add a bit of water to make it more sticky. Make into a ball and put in the fridge for at least one hour.

Preheat the oven to 175 degrees Celsius.

Then for the dough you mix all dry ingredients, the add the butter and mix till it resembles breadcrumbs. Add the milk and quickly combine to create a smooth ball of dough. Leave in the fridge for half an hour.

Take you filling and let it get to room temperature. Mix in the egg until smooth.

Roll out half the dough to a rectangle of about 20 by 25 cm and place on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper. Put the filling on top in the centre so it doesn't leak to the edges.

Roll out the other half of the dough to the same size and carefully place on top.

Now press down the edges and seal with a fork.

finish with one layer of egg wash, then the almonds in straight lines and another layer of egg wash.

Bake the biscuit for 40 minutes until lovely dark golden brown with cracks.

Let it cool slightly and cut into squares with one almond in the middle.

Best with a hot chocolate in the month of December...

just out of the oven

cut into squares

I love cooking when it rains!

The rainy season is here and what I love to do most in the weekend in cook.
I love spending cold Sunday mornings reading new recipes, browsing for 'how to make macarons' on the internet and trying out new things in my kitchen.

Lately we have been changing our diet a little bit, we are eating more healthy grains and vegetables and less white pasta and rice.
I have been making bread with spelt and raisins or with rolled oats and sunflower seeds.
We eat quinoa with courgette, black cabbage, nuts and dried apricots or wholewheat couscous with caramelized unions and grilled pumpkin. All very tasty I must say and it makes you feel really good about what you eat.
Our bodies seem to like it as well as it gives it lot's of slow energy to keep going for longer.

I was inspired by a few of my favorite new cookbooks:

'Veg' by Hugh Fearlney-Whittingstall

'Ottolenghi' by Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi

I've been a great fan of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall for a few years now. He has a great tv-series called 'River Cottage' and several restaurants and cooking schools throughout England.

I love his real look on food, meat and vegetables and how he tries to help us eat more healthy and understand where food really comes from.

Now, you might fear that I might have given up on my love for baking cakes...on the contrary!

I baked my first 'fancy' cake yesterday. A four-layered Schwartzwalder Kirschtorte by a recipe from Linda Lomelino. I loved the pictures in her book about cakes and therefore bought it.

It is not only a beautiful book but also has a great amount of recipes in it  for stunning birthday/wedding/anniversary cakes.

This was the result after my first attempt:

layers

Macarons attempt

La Bella (but most of all Buona) Sicilia

Finally we managed to go. After years of wanting and months of planning, we went to Sicily!
We landed late in Palermo and were picked up by the bed and breakfast we booked there.
Our first culinary experience of the Island was an Arancina (a deep-fried ball of risotto filled with sticky cheese), it wasn't what we had hoped for, but we were too hungry to even notice the disappointment of our stomachs.
The next day we went out to discover the disordered beauty of Palermo, it's great Opera house and many, many of it's delicious treats. We had lunch at the harbor with Swordfish Caponata and polpette di pesce, followed by Pasta con le sarde e finochietto. Then on our way we tried some mini Canoli, this is the typical sweet of the island. It's a crunchy deep-fried rolled dough filled with ricotta and chocolate. Delicious!
Then in the evening we met up with three Sicilian friends who showed us a traditional Sicilian restaurant in the heart of the city called 'Ferro di Cavallo'. We took a big mix of antipasti; caponata, panelle, prosciutto crudo con ricotta and so on...This was followed by fresh swordfish, filled squid, and more fishy delights. We simply couldn't fit in any dessert otherwise I would obviously have had one.
What a feast it was!

The next day on our way to rent a car, we stopped over for a very much needed cappuccino in a very fancy pasticceria. We discovered these amazing biscuits there called 'I Toto Siciliani' that my Love is now crazy about so I had a go at copying them. They don't taste exactly the same, but they turned out yummy anyway.

We drove towards Trapani, our next stop and had a lunch break in Scopello. A cute tiny village right at the sea. I had an amazing pasta with fresh seafood, the best I've ever had!

We moved on to Trapani where we knew we couldn't leave before having tried the Couscous with fish and so we did in a very charming and elegant restaurant called 'Serisso 47'. The owner made us try several mouthwatering starters followed by the famous, and extremely delicious, Couscous.

The following morning we visited Trapani's harbor and for coffee and more sweets we went to a place called 'Evangelista', this is where we took about half a kilo of almond biscuits as a souvenir (already finished unfortunately...).

We decided to head back to meet our friend in Scopello and finally have our long longed for dive into the blue sea.
That evening I had an (again, I know this is getting boring) amazing pasta with gamberi e pistacchio. I really need to try this at home soon as it was too good to be true.

When we woke up the sun was smiling at us in the blue sky, it was 27 degrees on the 2nd of November.
After a delicious breakfast with homemade crostata we took our little Fiat 500 to the 'Riserva dello Zingaro' A big nature reserve right at the coast. This is where our friend took us to the most beautiful beach I've ever seen. I though I was in the Caribbean or some other tropical place.

Nearly at the end of our trip we found an olive oil factory just outside Scopello. We arrived at peak time as all the local farmers came around to have their freshly picked olives squeezed into delicious olive oil.
We wanted a taste of that and decided to bring home a 3 liter can to dress our salads with or, even better, soak some fresh bread in, Mmm!

I haven't really experienced home sickness to a holiday place before, I always found the though of going back home, sleeping in our own bed comforting. But Sicily has changed that.
I want to go back as soon as I can! Eat the great food, drink the good wine. Soak up the warm sun and bathe in the blue sea. It seems to good to be true!

I've even started a trial and error phase of copying the almond biscuits, the raisin bread and this week I'll start on the challenging Caponata...

Caponata di pesce spada

Harbor of Palermo

Outrageous cakes!

Canoli Siciliani

Flower power Cappuccio

Pasta al mare in Scopello

Le Saline with wild Flamingo's 

Trapani

Trapani

Breakfast view in Scopello

Riserva dello Zingaro beach

Freshly picked olives at the Oleificio

Oleificio Scopello

Back at home with a souvenir

Home made Sicilian sweets

Pane con uvette e semi di finocchio

A fine Fall

Fall is here again, I can't believe how fast seasons change, they're back before you know it!

Weather wise I'm not the biggest fa of fall but when it comes to nature's beauty it's maybe the best out of the four of them. It's in serious competition with spring I'd say.

As I have a new phone that takes great pictures I snap around as much as I can. On a lunch break stroll around the office, or on a rainy day in the weekend, like today, when we went to visit a small village at Lake Como called Torno.

Here I saw the most beautiful leaves and berries that made a stunning still life against a stone, mossy wall. I hope I'm not the only person walking there enjoying this extraordinary beauty, as it makes me feel so happy to be able to be surrounded by all this.

Bright!

Bamboo at work

Hungry snails

Weddingdress inspiration

Fluffy mushroom

Monte Generoso

Happy leaves

I love nature!