Chimichurri is a classic, cold, sauce served with meat. There are many recipes around, and here is the one I made the other day:
Cut a large handful of parsley and place in a mortar. Add three or four cloves of garlic and a pinch of salt. Work the pestle and mortar until you have a smooth paste. Add olive oil and lime or lemon juice to taste.
The other day, I was at a friend’s place, the plan for the evening being to have steaks. However, we wanted to make the steaks a little more exciting. What I did, was whip up a quick rub for the steaks, which I then reproduced to have a little sort of sauce for them once they were done.
I roughly chopped the chili peppers, and ran a couple of cloves of garlic through a garlic press. I then added rosemary, basil, salt and pepper, and put it all in a mortar, going to work on it with the pestle. Once done, I used a zester to get some of the zest off the lime before squeezing it into the mortar, adding olive oil.
For the rub, I left it slightly dry, and for the sauce, I added far more liquid, making it resemble a chimichurry.
Ceviche is a traditional peruvian dish, where you take raw fish, cut it into pieces, and marinate it in an acidic liquid, usually lemon or lime juice. I prefer serving it as a starter, rather than using it as a main dish. It is a fresh and tangy dish, which I have always found people enjoy.
Here is my take on it, based on the one Jamie Oliver made in “Jamie’s American Road Trip”.
Start by dicing the fish in rougly centimeter-sized squares. Put it in a bowl, pour over the lime juice, and add a pinch of salt. While it marinates, chop the parsley, then slice the spring onions. Mix the spring onions in with the fish. Divide it up among the plates, and drizzle a little good olive oil over it (I use one infused with basil), before sprinkling a little parsley over it.
The dish is ready to serve as soon as five minutes after you started marinating it, and I would serve it no more than forty minutes later.
In the fall, you get fresh mushrooms growing in the forest. One of my favorites is chanterelle. A little work goes in to making this, but it is oh so worth the effort.
You’ll need:
You’ll want to start by rinsing off the mushrooms, and cutting a little onion which you’ll want to heat in olive oil with a little salt until they are soft. Put the chanterelle in the pan, and keep on a medium high heat.
While the mushroom are heating, finely chop the parsley, and simply wait until the water that will leak from the mushroom has been boiled away. Add a few handfuls of parsley into it and a knob of butter.
When the butter has melted, put the mushroom in a bowl, and serve with toast, salt and butter.
When I was a kid, my mother used to make a chicken dinner dish involving a barbecued chicken and a third of a liter of cream. This is not it. It is, however, inspired by it. It is simple enough to make, and doesn’t take a lot of time either.
You’ll need:
Start by dividing up the chicken, if it’s not already divided up. Slice the garlic finely, then grate the ginger. Heat a tablespoon of olive oil in a casserole, and add the garlic and ginger to it. Once the garlic is soft, add the pieces of chicken to the pot. After a little while on the heat, add the coconut milk and lime juice.
Allow the chicken and sauce to simmer for about five minutes, then add soy sauce to taste. If you want more moisture, add some beer to the mix as well. Leave the sauce to simmer for about twenty minutes, and serve with rice and salad.
I’d been wanting to make a rich, creamy mushroom sauce from scratch for some time, and I finally got down to doing so. I’m sure you’ll find similar recipes a lot of places; this one came from ideas I had in my head, as well as a couple of pieces of inspiration that came to me while I was making it. I made it with fairly coarse bits of mushroom (I used large champignons, but I think chanterelles, shiitake and other mushrooms should be nice as well), as I like sauces like this rustic.
You’ll need:
Cut the onion in slices and put in a casserole with some olive oil, butter and salt. Let the onions sweat until they’re soft and shiny. Meanwhile, slice the mushrooms roughly and add them to the casserole along with a healthy knob of butter. Stir it all around a bit, the put the lid on the casserole and let the mushrooms sweat out all their lovely juices. Ideally speaking, you’ll want the mushroom pieces two thirds to a half of the size they were going in. It all depends on how patient you are prepared to be.
Once the mushrooms have released their juice, add a glass or so of white wine, and increase the heat. Once the sauce stops smelling alcohol, add the milk, the cream and some pepper, then let it come to the boil. As soon as that happens, lower the heat, and let it simmer for a while. I let it simmer for about half an hour, and about ten minutes before it was ready, I added a few splashes of soy sauce. Five minutes later I added a table spoon of flour, bringing the sauce back up to the boil for a little while.
This sauce works beautifully for pastas and pizza, and I’m sure it’d god nicely with a steak as well. I served it with tricolori pasta screws, a salad and a nice Argentinian Malbec called Terrazas de los Andes Reserva Malbec 2007.
The other night we had fish and chips for dinner. To go with them, we had butter peas. It was all very nice, and while the fish and chips were prefab-things we stuck in the oven for a while, I made the butter peas. Here’s what you’ll need:
Melt generous amounts of butter in a casserole, and add the red onion, thinly sliced. When the onion is soft, add the peas and season with salt and pepper. While heating the peas, mash some of them. Serve with fish, chips and all the usual trimmings.
Pitza, also known as pita-pizza, are a great way to make cheese sandwiches. Instead of using regular bread, you use pita bread, and simply add whatever you want to them. Here’s one version I made for Trampe not long ago. You’ll need:
Cut the pitas in two, leaving one half to place on top of the pitzas. Rinse the spinach, then place it in a hot pan to wilt. Spread the tomato sauce on the pitas, then add the wilted spinach and the cheese.
Put them in a cold oven, setting it to 150 degrees centigrade for about ten minutes.
If, for some reason, you keep some Tajin Clásico, sprinkle a little on the pitzas when you’ve baked them for a yummy twist.
Remember when you were a kid, and you mom served you spinach with something? Remember how it was gooey and didn’t look inviting at all? Yeah, me too. I thought that was the only way to serve spinach. I have since learned better. I picked the original recipe up from Jamie Oliver I think, and here’s how I do it. You’ll need:
Rinse the spinach, and melt the butter in a pan. Put the spinach in the pan, and let it wilt for a little while, moving it around all the time, so that everything gets a little butter on it. Take the pan off the heat, and add salt, pepper and lemon juice. Serve with eggs and toast.
Mix the dry stuff while heating the water to roughly 40º C (or 37ºC if you use fresh yeast). Add the water to the dry goods a little at a time, working it in as you go. (If you use fresh yeast, mix it into the water before adding the water to the dry goods.) If you want to, you could toast the seeds in a dry pan before adding it to the rest.
Leave the worked dough to rise for roughly 45 minutes, or until doubled in size. When the dough has risen, work it for a while, before dividing it into three equally large parts. Shape these into rounds and place on grease-proof paper.
Leave the loaves to rise for 45 minutes, while heating the oven to 200ºC. Make a few cuts in the pieces and/or sprinkle a little flour before you put the baking tray into the bottom of the oven for 30-40 minutes.
