Nutty Sbrisolona

Nutty Sbrisolona

It's best described as something in between a cake and a giant cookie.
Italian in origin of course, as everything else that I truly love. Fruity, nutty and crumbly.
Break it apart and have it with coffee. Crumble it up as use as part of a dessert with
whipped cream or ice cream. Or maybe the best way to enjoy it: when still varm,
break off little pieces and sprinkle them with a sweet dessert wine (i.e sauternes) and
devour it (along with a glass of the wine).

Bake in 160 degrees C for 45 minutes,
preferably in a springform. 

2 ½  cups flour (partly wholemeal) 

¾ cup polenta (fine or medium grain)

200 grams butter

100 g (¾ cups) chopped walnuts

100 g (¾ cups) chopped hazelnuts

1 cups caster sugar (white or brown)

2 egg yolks

Grated zest of one lemon

Pinch of bourbon vanilla powder
Blanched whole almonds for decoration (optional) 

Sift polenta and flour into a large mixing bowl, mix them and knead in the butter.
Add sugar, lemon zest, vanilla and chopped nuts, and finally knead in the egg yolks. 

If you want practical portions, that can also be used as cups/base for a dessert later
(save on dishes!), you can press the dough into muffin tins and bake. Then freeze.

Brownies - easy as can be!

Brownies  to die for (kladdkaka på ren svenska)

200 degrees C; around 20-30 min depending on size of tin

2 eggs

1 pinch of salt

1 pinch bourbon vanilla powder

3 dl sugar (brown, white or mix)

4 tbsp cocoa powder

1 ½ dl plain flour (or mixed with whole wheat if you like)

100 g melted butter

Optional: coarsely chopped walnuts or pecan nuts; coarsely chopped dark or white chocolate

Mix it all in large mixing bowl, pour in baking tin of choice and bake until just chewy enough in the

middle. It’s an art and needs practice (or beginner’s luck!).

Cardamon cake with a couple of twists

This is a variation of a traditional Swedish cardamon cake, to which I have added some more flavours, and the option of more nutrition as well. It has a child-friendly texture (=just normal cake texture, and with extra sugar on top!) but provides some tastebud excitement for the more adventurous eaters.

200 g butter (melted)
2 eggs
3 dl sugar
3 dl milk
8 dl flour
2.5 teaspoons baking powder
0.5 teaspoons baking soda (sometimes called bicarbonate of soda)

2 tablespoons grated coconut 

2 teaspoons ground cardamon
1 pinch bourbon vanilla powder
grated zest of one lemon

Melt butter and let cool. Turn oven to 180 degrees C.
Grease a cake tin with butter and 'flour' it with grated coconut.
Whisk eggs and sugar until white and fluffy (high speed) in the main mixing bowl.
Combine all dry ingredients in a separate mixing bowl.
Alternate adding some of the flour mix and some of the milk into the main mixing bowl to keep the batter at a workable texture (medium speed).
Add the butter and mix until just combined (low speed or with spatula by hand).

Lemonzest, vanilla and coconut about to be mixed in with the flour.

Pour batter into baking tin. Before going into the oven, sprinkle with grated coconut and pearl sugar (also called nib sugar or hail sugar).

As for the timing, just test with a tooth-pick or an uncooked spaghetti. Stick it in a few places where the cake is at its thickest. If it comes out dry, the cake is done! Count on somewhere between 35 - 50 minutes depending the shape and size of your tin. (Or make muffins - it's faster!)

Family's favourite fried rice

There is one meal that our whole family really, really likes - mamma's fried rice. That's because it can be varied in such a way that it fits the little picky eaters as well as their slightly adventurous parents. The picture below is a testament to the beauty of this dish: everyone eating calmly, finishing all the food (obviously not all the veggies, but what else is new...). 

The basic recipe is as simple as it is delicious, and I do want to stress that it originates from a Thai cookbook (that I bought in desperation after having spent five weeks while breast-feeding and eating my way through the menu of an excellent tiny restaurant by a remote beach, not knowing how I would survive when leaving the place).

Ingredients for the basic fried rice for 3-5 people; quantities approximate: 
4 cups (ca 1 litre) cooked rice (so less if un-cooked!)
4 chicken filets cut into small, longish strips
2 - 3 eggs
1 teaspoon of sugar
3-4 tablespoons of soy sauce
2-3 tablespoons of ketchup
vegetable oil (I use olive oil because that's what I always have in hand, but clearly a soy, canola or other neutral vegetable oil would be more authentic)

Shallots, spring onion and lime

Garnishes
The core garnishes are lime wedges, chili-infused fish sauce, fresh coriander and shallots.
Other vegetables that go well with this dish are cucumber, iceberg lettuce, spring onion, and green beans. (My addition of asparagus is not authentically Thai, but really tasty.)


How to do it
Prepare in advance: 

• Infuse fish sauce with chili, fresh or dried. I always keep a jar of this in the fridge, it lasts for months. 
• Marinate the chicken pieces in half of the soy sauce for a couple of hours before cooking. 
• Boil the rice, possibly even a day or two in advance or use leftover rice, as it becomes less of a sticky mess than using freshly cooked, warm rice.

Chili-infused fish sauce, with a touch of lemongrass. More for the looks than the taste, as it gets pretty hectic tastewise among the fermented fish and chili flavours....

Frying it up:
Pour some oil into the wok (or large, deep frying pan), crack and whisk the eggs together in a separate bowl and pour them into the oil, stir until scrambled. Remove from wok. Fry the chicken bits. When they are cooked through, add the rest of the soy sauce, the sugar and ketchup. Stir through, then add all the rice, start mixing it all together, and add the fried eggs at the end. Serve with a selection of garnishes and you are done!

I love these really small and skinny Asian asparagus; they are the size of the ones you would normally buy canned in Europe. 

Favourite shopping

One of the perks of living in Asia is the shopping. And I don't mean the clothes - I mean the kitchen accessories. I am an avid lover of all thing stainless and melamine, and anything you can put stuff in, or put in stuff. Or just use for baking and cooking.

On my casual stroll home form the pool this morning - yes, I am a part-time house-wife in her early forties with a duty to keep fit, especially considering the hours spent in the kitchen - I saw in the corner of my eye a shop I had never seen before. Outside were piles of buckets, bathroom carpets, brooms, towels and lots of different large tupperware. The latter is always a good sign. I went in, and paradise unfolded. It had it all - both the do-it-yourself stuff that is needed around the house like rope, tape, hammers, lightbulbs, paint and other more hardcore paraphernalia. But it also had my favourite metal and plastic, to fill my all too small kitchen cupboards and eventually moving boxes, but I did not care, as the kitchen devil had me.

Two cake tins, of two different sizes of course, are always useful. Then there were the melamine spoons; I know some people fear using melamine in the kitchen after the food security scare in China a few years ago, but it's not like I am going to grind it into powder and put it in the kids' milk. So that was a must have, especially since the old IKEA plastic spoons have more or less disintegrated after a decade of use. The potato press is new, but according to all the cooking experts I watch of Youtube nowadays it's a must. I used to like lumpy mashed potato, but clearly I was wrong. May also come in handy to mash healthy, secret ingredients to put in the kids' food. (More on that later if I get any good ideas.) The best thing of all are the baking trays - I had to buy two of them. In my mindbogglingly small oven, one has to maximise the size and number of one's baking trays, and these bad boys did the trick!

Thoughts on baking and my daily bread

Being a baker's daughter from Sweden, where most people still do quite a lot of cooking and baking "from scratch" I am always surprised at people's ignorance when it come to baking. (Incidentally, there is no word for 'from scratch' in Swedish, that's the way it is assumed to be done.) Once when serving a bread-loaf filled with olives and feta cheese, someone asked how I got the stuff so seamlessly into the middle of the bread. And after having talked at length about my newest sourdough bread (yes, I know...) my colleague asked whether I used self-raising flour for that. And last but not least, the deprived take-out dinner child's surprised look when she saw me make pizza made me want to cry. She did know that she can make her own pizza!

Real mozzarella and parmesan cheese - from Italy and not the Australian varieties widely available here i Singapore. The latter tend to have an aftertaste of milk powder, which I find difficult accept. And homemade tomatosauce, the only one with my picky kids' stamp of approval; only a little onions and garlic, boiled for at least half an hour with canned tomatoes and then mixed until completely smooth.

My daily bread

My best friend when making bread is the sponge (raskdeg på svenska!) - it's a mix of flour, water, salt and yeast that is made in the evening, to bake with the next day (or any 8-12 hour period that suits your schedule). My dad always made a sponge, but he never left it overnight.  As for the quantities, I use around 700 ml of water for a teaspoon of dry yeast, a couple of teaspoons of salt and then enough flour to make it into a loose dough. I usually use normal white wheat flour to get the yeast and gluten into action (as described above), which is the whole point of the sponge. Mix it for a while to make sure the gluten wakes up and starts forming threads. Then leave it over night.

If you want to add some healthy ingredients in the dough, it's best to it from the beginning. So before adding anything else to the water, I mix oats, oat bran, wheat germ, ground flax and other ingredients that like to soak a little into the water, and leave for 15-30 mins. Then I add the flour, yeast and salt and mix to a gooey consistency, and wait until morning. (Some would advice leaving out the salt in the sponge, but I find that it makes little difference to the proofing process and I don't run the risk of forgetting to add the salt the next day, which used to happen about every other time or so...).
In the morning, this is what you get; a visibly bubbly dough ready to feed with more flour and knead until manageable:

Sponge in the morning, after proofing in room temperature over night. 

Into the sponge, I usually white and whole grain flour of some sort, and add some soy-, blackbean-, buckwheat- and quinoa flour for added nutrition and variation. But not enough for the kids to notice. Then let it rise a few more times, about an hour or two each time, knead in a machine before the first proofing period (if you have one), then on the workbench. Add more flour to make it workable, but you may keep the dough fairly loose if you can manage it. You will see it growing and becoming really alive as you go through this process. Before the final proofing period, sift a generous amount of flour and/or oats/oat bran/polenta on a tea towel, place this in a basket or large bowl. Shape the dough into some sort of round shape and place it on the towel in the bowl. (Later you can experiment with other shapes, but this is the easiest, especially if you have a loose dough.) Turn the oven on 240 degrees and put a tray in to heat it up.

When the big bun looks fully grown in the bowl - after maybe an hour - take the oven tray out, gently place your big dough bun on it, floury side down on the tray, and place in the oven. Leave at 240 degrees until the bread has gotten crusty and brown, then lower to 200 degrees. It should take an hour until it is ready. Take it out and let it cool on a rack. The looser you keep the dough, the crustier and chewier the bread will be. This is the result:

My daily bread. 

My kids love it, also toasted when it's a couple of days old. It's easy once you get the hang of it. Especially if you live in countries with not much bread tradition, it is such an asset to be able to make your own bread. Here in Asia, bread tends to be the American toast variety, and often filled with a lot of additives to keep it fresh forever. I love most Asian food, but when it comes to bread, I gotta make my own!

Burmese food - a beautiful mix of all things Asian

Traditional Burmese fermented tea-leaf salad. Apart from the actual tea-leaves, it was really good.

Burma (Myanmar) is one of the poorest countries in Asia, it is on the verge of possibly overthrowing decades of military rule, and their are still ethnic and religious violence in the northern provinces. Nevertheless, in addition to its stunning beaches and friendly people, the food holds promise an amazing future as a tourism destination. 

Burmese food is an amazing mix of the regional cuisines - Chinese, Thai and Indian - with additional influences from the rest of South East Asia. This is what we saw (and partially ate) the week before Christmas 2013: 

Bye, bye birdies - see you in a wok full of oil!

Vietnamese 'raw' spring rolls.

Squid salad, Thai style.

Fried pancake batter of some sort.

Fish and chicken in a street stall.

Add caption

Fried sweet dough with sesame seeds; in Chinatown.

Tiny mandarins.

Spring rolls and fritters are always popular street food all over SE Asia.

Hot pot - another Chinese influence. I have had it in Guizhou; in Switzerland we called it fondue Chinoise.

Palm sugar.

Rice with beans (left); also served for breakfast in our guesthouse.

Whole durian fruit.

Durian opened - and smelly.

Dried seafood.

Fried bugs of some sort; the kids guessed cockroaches, but I think not.

Green papaya, sold by the slice.

Samosas.

Rice, rice, and rice, and also some rice at the back.

Breakfast from the steamer.