Ecological meat

Yesterday I got about 1 kg of sheep minced meat, grown pure ecological from my friends Espen and Live. They have a little farm in the woods of Hurum here in Norway. The animals are outside, enjoying the nature. No overgrown animals, living in small cages here. The animals are grown with love, with old knowledge of animal hold and are slaughtered quick without stress. The love to their animals is tasted in the fantastic meat, browning beautifully in the butter, losing no water and tasting wonderfull. By eating this meat, I am aware of how wrong industrial meat production is. If you, dear readers have the possibility, try ecological meat and taste the difference...
Have a nice evening for those in Europe, a nice day in the US and sweet dreams in Asia and for the Aussie people :)

Jelrik

Strudel with bacon and leek

Now that autumn is on its way, we can enjoy the warmth of the kitchen oven in the house by making food in it. One of my old favorites is this strudel with leek and bacon. My mother used to make this dish when I was a small child. Maybe I changed some of the ingredients but the taste is quite known from my child years.

For two strudel I use 2 packets of butter pastry (frozen). You can make this yourself but that takes a LOT of time.

I use one big leek, about 400 g bacon, 1 cream (double or light)(3dl), a cleave of garlic, grated cheese (200-300 g), some pepper and salt and egg yolk.

Warm the oven to 200 C (392F)

Cut the leek in small circles, bake the bacon in a big casserole.

Add the leek, the pressed garlic and the cream. Season with salt and pepper. Add the cheese and let it cool down a bit.

Roll out the pastry in a big rectangle. Spread the fill over the half of the rectangle. Cut in the other half with a knife. Cover the fill with the empty half of the pastry. Press the sides and brush with egg yolk.

Bake in the oven for about 20-25 min or until golden.

You can serve the dish with a salad.

Jelrik

French macrons

A rainfull Norwegian day need some romance and colors on the table to bring spring feeling back. What about some beautiful French Macrons.

Make a liquid dough of 240g of flour sugar, 140g grounded almonds, 3 stiff beaten egg whites and color as wished (depends on fill)
Make small rounds on a macron mate or greased paper, bake in oven in 140 C (284 F) for about 10-12 min. be careful to not burn them or crack the top. You can avoid that by putting a plate beneath the macrons in the oven. Let them cool down and fill with whatever you like. On my picture the fill is white chocolate butter frosting with pink color. Have a nice day!

Jelrik

Sunday's dinner

Well a quick follow up post : dinner ready on plate with cucumber salad, mashed peas, watercress mayonaise, pink russian egg, seatrout and pommes amandine. Delicious

Pink russian eggs with watercress

Today we're going to eat a seatrout. Yesterday I made some hermetic beetroots from the fresh beetroots in the garden. So I had quite a lot of pink boiling water. Then I thought of my good friend and kitchen inspirator Johannica and had some boiled eggs overnight in the pink water. I made homemade mayonaise, blended the yolks with mayonaise, small cuttet watercress from the garden (the plant is so big this time of the year), some hungarian red peppers and chili.
A nice little sidedish for the fish :-)
Have a nice sunday!! Jelrik

Warm squashsalad with lemon, feta and fresh mint

This is a really good summer-ish little side dish salad.

Take for 4 pers 2 squash, juice of half a lemon, a rectangle of feta cheese and a handfull of fresh mint leaves.

Cut the squash in small cubes and cook for 2-3 min in boiling water with salt. Let it draim for water. Make a vinaigrette of salt, olive oil and lemonjuice, salt and pepper. Cut the feta in cubes and the mint in small pieces. Still warm, mix all together and here you are. Easy and delicious

Sheep cupcakes

Today, my kitchen was invaded by cupcake sheeps. They hade quite a party there and there are coming more and more of them this way :-)

Start baking an ordinary vanilla cupcake. While cooling the cupcakes down, you make black marsipan and make some small heads out of a little ball. I bought the sugar eyes in a kitchen store (Rafens for the Norwegians). Make also some legs.

Make so a white chocolate frosting and cover the cupcakes with frosting. I used a french tip.

Put together head, legs and cover the frosting with small marshmallows.

And here you are: A new sheep is born

Jelrik

Confirmation cupcakes

The daughter of my colleague had her confirmation last week Saturday and he asked me to make cupcakes for the guests in some lilac colors to go along with the table decorations.

So I made those small sweet ones topped with my favorite white chocolate frosting and decorated them with some golden hearts, sprinkles and lilac marzipan flowers. They symbolize springtime and the white innocence of a young girl

Love, Jelrik

Best bread in the world

I got the recipe for this bread from a friend and she found it on Internet. It's a recipe from the book "Elsker deig" (love dough), written by Marit Røttingsnes Westlie.

It's a moist bread with a fantastic crust and is one of the best breads you can make at home.

It contains just a little yeast and a lot of water. You don't need to knead it, just wait and see. Because we use spelt flour, it needs a lot of water.

I made it in a clay pot (Römertopf) but it's also possible to make it in an oven pan with lock.

Recipe:

600 g wheat flour

250 g spelt flour

7 dl water

4 ts salt

1 ts yeast (dry)

Blend quick together the flour, salt, yeast and add the handwarm (37degr. C) water. Just use a spatula to mix it.

Cover it with plastic or a lock and let it rest in room

temperature for at least 12 hours but best 24 hours 

After 24 hours it looks like this (it bubbles and looks alive):

Now if using a römertopf, soak it in water for 10 minutes, take some oil on the sides so the bread don't stick and put it in the oven. Oven on 240 degrees C. (464 F). In the meanwhile, put a lot of flour on the bench put the dough on it and flip the sides. When the oven is warm, pour the dough in the römertopf.



And there it goes in the oven for 30 minutes, covered with lock. After 30 minutes, remove the lock

Now give it 10 to 15 min extra untill crust is golden:

Now take it out of the form and cool it down on a rist.

Tastes magnificent

Hugs, Jelrik

Fly me to the moon...

This evening, there was a wonderfull moon outside. So why not try making a picture of our best neighbour? I took a normal quite cheap telescope with a 8x objective, took my iPhone and aimed the objective at the little hole in the telescope and here is the result.

The big white crater on top of the image is named Copernicus. It is about 30 km diameter and is surrounded by rays of about 800 km made by the spreading of hot material after the impact. Under Copernicus you can see the craters Reinhold and Lansberg. Just to the right side of Lansberg, Apollo 14 and 12 landed. The big crater at the bottom is tycho, named after the Danish Tycho Brahe. It is a big and prominent crater with good visible sides and a high mountain (an albedo) in the middle.

Nice clear nights are perfect for viewing stars and the moon. So go out and look up :-)

Another image of Copernicus with the rays good visible

Pink strawberry cupcakes

In Norway the last days have been beautifull and quite warm for the time of the year. I got spring vibes and bought some strawberries (from Spain but what can you expect in march). So a little Hello Kitty inspired pink girl-ish strawberry cupcake. My daughter loved it!

Have a nice week further

Jelrik

Pavlova - a heavenly merengue dessert

Today, we celebrated my daughter's 4th birthday and for the occasion, I made this fantastic Pavlova.

Pavlova is a merengue lower layer topped with whipped cream and a thick layer of fresh inviting fruit. The dessert was made for the first time when the Russian dancer Anna Pavlova visited New Zealand in 1926.

The difficulty of a Pavlova is to obtain a crispy outside while inside there is a fluffy marshmallow-ish fill. I got inspired while watching Masterchef Australia and the fabulous Donna Hay speaking with love about Pavlova. So I used her recipe which you can find by clicking here.


The best tips are:
- Be very precise measuring the ingredients
- Make the eggwhites really stif before carefully whisking in the castor sugar.
- Low heat, long baking time
- Let the Pavlova cool totally down in the oven before opening.

It looked like this ready baked:

A crispy side

Top right before serving and serve directly. Otherwise you risk collapse of the meringue and a wet meringue

Good luck with the Pavlova and thanks to Donna Hay for the perfect recipe.

Jelrik

Orchid Inspired Cupcakes

Today we had a family birthday party for my niece, my nephew and my sister in law. I was asked to make cupcakes and I made a lot of those carrot cake cupcakes with the orange roses (like I blogged a few days ago). But those roses were quite difficult to make beautifull on a few of the cupcake forms I had which were like big yellow crowns. Really nice...

The crowns made me think of the top of buddhist temples and chinese building style. One of the most used flowers in Asia is the orchid and there came the idea to make some orchids to cover the cupcakes.

So with white icing, I made a curled flower with some instructions of the book of Manuela Kjeilen (Love, Manuela, which you can order by clicking here!
Afterwards I made with eatable lillac, gold and yellow glitter some details ( i used a brush which is normally ment to be used to apply eyeshadow. It is a soft brush) and sprayed them with a pearl spray.

A little orchid flower for all the mothers on this mother's day :-)

Jelrik