Blinis

Some weeks ago on Sunday I didn't have bread for lunch and it was too late to sit down and bake one. Hence, I decided to make something different that could substitute the bread and I tried a recipe that I found in a magazine: blinis. The name reminded me of the blinis that an Israeli Jewish friend of mine used to make for us in Norway, but the recipe he used was totally different. He used to make thin pancakes, smeared them with mashed potatoes or spinach, rolled them into tubes, placed on an oven tray, sprinkled with freshly grated cheese and baked until the cheese melted. They were very delicious. While surfing the net now, I found out that the recipe I tried is most like the traditional Russian version. You can find many different recipes on the net for blinis. The one I will share with you right now is a fast, and yet, delicious one that saves your day.
The ingredients for about 26 coaster-sized blinis are: 4 eggs, 160 grams of flour (I used wheat flour, however any type of flour should be fine), fresh yeast (I used a package of active dry yeast and it worked fine), 12 tablespoons of milk, some butter and salt. Sprinkle the yeast in warm milk and let it dissolve. Add the egg yolks, salt and the flour. Mix well and let it swell for about 20 minutes. In the mean time whisk the egg whites. When the batter has expanded add the egg whites carefully to the batter. It should be a very light fluffy batter. Heat a large frying pan and when it is very warm melt a piece of butter in it. Drop small spoons of batter in the pan to make small pancakes. Fry the cakes a couple of minutes, turn the other side and fry one more minute.

Blinis thus prepared can be served in different ways. You can smear them with sour cream, top with smoked salmon slices and dill. Or you can smear them again with sour cream and some jam. We ate our blinis opening them in two, filling with cheese and ham.

Vacation in France, part 1

On 31st of July we left Florence at 15.00 and went directly to San Remo, a small town by the sea (famous for the national music festival that takes place every year in March if I am not mistaken) near the French border. Since we arrived at 20.00 after two episodes of Sander vomiting in the car (only a few hundreds of meters away from our friends' house) we couldn't see the town center but watched the beautiful sea from the terrace of the house instead. The house was quite strange, built on a hill right by the sea, with many levels and stairs everywhere inside and outside. The rooms were maybe biggish but fitted on a strange plan, the workmanship not good, kitchen too little for the size of the house etc. Anyway, the view of the terrace was beautiful, and we were there only for the night, with no intention of buying the house ;-)

Before I tell about our next day I should mention one of the dishes that was served by our friends that night: raw tuna fish. I was skeptical at first but then I thought about sushi and said 'why not'. It was delicious and very easy to prepare (I prepared it for the first time two days ago).


Raw tuna fish
Cut the fish in (roughly) 3 mm thick squares of 3 cm long edges. Then place the fish pieces in very salty water, salty like the sea-water, for about 15-20 minutes. Afterwards take the pieces out of the water and let all the water run out. Season with extra virgin olive oil only (no lemon juice!). The fish prepared this way is to be served with freshly diced tomatoes and basil. Absolutely finger-licking delicious :-)

☀☀☀

OK, going back to our trip. On the morning of 1st of August we woke up, got ready, had a cup of coffee and some cookies, thanked for the hospitality of our friends and set out for France. We tried to choose the less curvy roads on the navigator so that the little one didn't vomit and the mother (that would be me) didn't get all dizzy and sick in the stomach, but my husband also bought some anti-seasickness chewing gum and syrup 'just in case' (which proved to be very helpful all through the vacation, in fact).

Our first stop was Monte Carlo. If you are traveling to France from Italy following the sea you cannot (and should not) avoid a stop in Monte Carlo. When you enter the city you begin breathing in 'money'. The luxury cars, the buildings, casino signs here and there... You also get the feeling that the space is scarce seeing all the tall buildings glued to each other, parking places all underground, streets quite narrow.. Then you slowly swirl down the hill following the Formula 1 tracks. I felt like I was in the Monte Carlo car race simulator when I recognized most of the streets, the buildings, the tunnels.. While I was turning my head continuously to the right and left trying not to miss anything I noticed that I had lost the chance of taking the picture of the famous casino building :-( But then we were already in the harbor area and we decided to park the car so that we could take a walk and get a bite; it was already noon and we had two hungry monsters in the back.



The boats, well yachts (or 'floating villas' might be the right description of what we saw), in the harbor were amazing.. We even witnessed some rich guy being delivered his new yacht. Not that we want a floating skyscraper, but an 11ft sailboat wouldn't be bad to own one day ;-) Anyway, dreams aside, Monte Carlo is a beautiful rich city, a vision to the eyes, a nightmare for your pocket.. We sat at a cafe in the harbor area, ordered a toast, a crepe and a hot-dog (see the size of that hot-dog in the photo below!) and some things to drink, ending up paying as if we had eaten at a restaurant in Italy. The parking bill was of the same caliber as well. So, we ran out of Monte Carlo before finishing all our money in the first 48 hours of our vacation and got back to France.



Our target for the day was Grasse. We decided not to take the highway so that we can see around, hence we took the road that runs parallel to the sea line. The next city on our route was Nice. When we entered the city from the suburbs I was shocked, to tell the truth. It was far from my imaginations... no different than the suburbs of any other big city, lots of road work here and there, a lot of foreigners, quite ordinary architecture... We rushed through Nice without getting out of the car, but of course we went all the way to the esplanade, driving slowly, watched the beautiful buildings, the beaches, the prestigious hotels, people walking lazily under the sun.



The thing that I began noticing everywhere we went in France was the flowers on and off the streets. There were flowers hanging down light poles, there were flowers in the middle of the large avenues, there were flowers at the intersections.. everywhere... really beautiful.



After Nice we continued on the seaside road and decided to stop at Antibes. It was nothing special. We just went for a walk in the town and by the sea for an hour or so and had to go back to the car and go directly to Grasse since it was already afternoon and we had no place to stay for the night. We drove inland this time and arrived at Grasse, but continued driving in order to find a hotel. After a few inquiries at the hotels we found on the road we chose to stay in St. Vallier, at a little hotel. Our room was on the top floor, with two French beds (my God, how little those beds are). We had to sleep each with one kid that night.

Our day ended at a restaurant, well a small dining place which I wouldn't know how to call, in the village. We took a table outside, under a huge tree and did eat quite well but we were dying of laughter when we were first given the menu. Why? Because there were 'lawyers with shrimp sauce cocktail' and 'ice children' :-) These were the exact words written in the English language menu, believe me! I tried to take the photo of the menu but partly because it was covered with a plastic layer and partly because the waiter took it away from me fast when she noticed what I was doing, that it didn't come out very well. Look below :-)


It turns out that both 'lawyer' and 'avocado' are 'avocat' in French, and whoever had translated the French menu into English must have just gotten the French-English dictionary, looked for 'avocat' and wrote the first word that appeared next to it: lawyer. 'Ice children' was the English for 'ice cream for children' by the way :-)

More about France soon...

Chocolate+Basil=Delicious!

I just have to give you this recipe of a delicious double chocolate cake that I learned and tried out on Sunday. Sunday, around lunch time, I was watching the news on an Italian TV channel and during the news there was a cook that gave the recipe of a cake that was to be cooked in microwave oven. It sounded very interesting because the cooking time was only 8 minutes. I didn't write down the recipe, nor did the cook give a real recipe with measurements of the ingredients. I only watched what he did. When I learned that my in-laws would pay a visit to us later that day, and that it was our wedding anniversary I decided to bake this cake so that we could celebrate our 7 years of marriage with our visitors in the afternoon. I need to warn you: if you are not used to improvising and/or measuring the ingredients 'with your eyes' rather then liters/cups and stuff, don't read it ;-) Oh, one more thing: your microwave oven should have the crisp function. Here it goes:

Put butter and bitter chocolate pieces in a bowl that can go in the microwave and melt at 160 watts for 2 minutes. I didn't have bitter chocolate at home, so I skipped that ingredient. If they do not melt thoroughly in 2 minutes, leave them a bit longer at the same power. In a big bowl whisk (don't use a hand blender) 4 eggs and sugar for about 1 minute. I added about one and a half 'small water glass' of sugar, though I usually use not that much sugar in my cakes I added that extra half a glass since I didn't have the chocolate which would have contributed to the sugar content of the cake. Add in a pinch of salt, baking powder, dark cacao powder, a little bit of all purpose flour and mix well. I used one small water glass of flour. Mix in some milk. I didn't measure my milk, just poured in from the bottle as much as I thought was necessary. Finally add the melted butter and chocolate in the batter. The result will be not thick and not excessively liquid. One important last-minute ingredient: fresh basil leaves. Wash some fresh basil leaves and add the shredded basil into the batter. Grease the crisp tray of your microwave oven and cover it with flour as well. Pour in the batter and bake using the crisp function for 8 minutes. Your cake is ready in circa 15 minutes, preparation time included. You can serve it with whipped cream, or vanilla ice cream, garnished with fresh basil leaves. I am planning to bake it again using bitter chocolate with chilly, mmmmm...

Buon appetito!

Food that smells of summer: 2 vegetable dishes

Last week I had quite some tomatoes, squash, eggplants and peppers in my refrigerator that needed to be consumed before they got bad. They were left over from the weekend before. We were expecting three more friends to join us for Sunday-lunch, but unfortunately they couldn't come because of sicknesses.

Since I hate the idea of throwing away food, especially raw materials, I turned to my little collection of cooking books (no, not Internet, I am quite traditional when it comes to searching for recipes/vocabulary/information; I first check my books/encyclopedias/dictionaries, only when I am not satisfied with what I found I consult the Internet) and found two very fitting recipes that smell of summer. These following recipes saved me from the trouble of thinking what to cook for two consecutive dinners.

The first one is a French dish, three vegetable tian. You need onions, garlic cloves, squash, eggplants, tomatoes and mozzarella cheese as the main ingredients. Peel and slice the onions into rings. Peel and crush the garlic cloves. Cook the onion and garlic in olive oil until the onions turn transparent. Wash the eggplants and squash, and slice them in ca. 4 mm thick slices. I cut the eggplants in their length and the squash in their width. Brush an oven tray with olive oil and place the eggplant and squash slices over, season with salt and bake in a preheated oven at 180 degrees C for about 8 minutes. I used my microwave oven instead, placing the slices on the crisp-function tray. After pouring some olive oil over them I cooked the vegetable slices using the crisp function for 9 minutes, by which time they were partially cooked. Wash the tomatoes and cut them in slices discarding the hard stem. Slice the mozzarella cheese into the same number of slices as you have of tomato. Take an oven dish (an oval/round one would be perfect) and spread the softened onion in a layer on the bottom (without greasing the dish before) followed by a layer of overlapping, partially cooked eggplant slices. Cover with a layer of overlapping and alternating cheese and tomato slices. Season with salt and pepper and sprinkle with chopped herbs (parsley, basil and oregano - optional). Top with a final, fairly loose layer of squash slices and lightly season again with salt and pepper. Cook in a preheated oven at 180 degrees C for 25 minutes. Remove the tian from the oven, drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with freshly grated Parmesan cheese and breadcrumbs. Return the tian to the oven and cook for a further 20-30 minutes. You can serve it with nothing but crispy white bread.

The second dish is Italian, peperonata. I had eaten it a few times at my in-laws' house, but never prepared myself. Main ingredients are red and green peppers, tomatoes, onions, garlic and balsamic vinegar. I had one each of red, green and yellow peppers, so I used them all. Cut the peppers into quarters, deseed them and remove the fibres. Then cut them into big rectangular (2 cm x 3 cm ca.) pieces. Roughly dice the flesh of the fresh tomatoes. I used canned tomatoes since I had finished the fresh ones the day before while cooking the tian. Peel and finely slice the onions and garlic. Heat some olive oil in a pan and sweat the onions until they turn transparent. Add the peppers and garlic and sweat for 5 minutes. Stir in the tomatoes and pour in about 4 tablespoons of balsamic vinegar. I mixed 2 tbs of balsamic vinegar with 1 tbs of red wine vinegar. Season with salt, pepper (and a pinch of cayenne pepper if you wish) and sprinkle a pinch of sugar. I used about 2 teaspoons of sugar since I cannot tolerate the strong taste of vinegar. Simmer the peperonata, covered, for 30-40 minutes until the peppers are soft but still retain their shape. Sprinkle with fresh thyme leaves before serving. Peperonata can be served as a side dish to any kind of fish, meat or poultry, or you can serve it cold as a starter, which is the way I prefer serving it.

Buon appetito!

Trip to Todi

Today we went to Todi, a little town in the province of Perugia, in Umbria region. We have these American friends, a recently retired couple, who have rented a three bedroom apartment in the center of Todi for 3 months. They kindly invited us to spend some time together and we couldn't say no.

We were planning to leave the house at 9 o'clock in the morning, but being a typical family with little kids of course we didn't manage getting on the road before 9:40.
There was some traffic but no queues on the highway, so it was fine, except for one idiot! He was driving a black BMW X5 and was trying to pass us from the right hand side, which, of course, is not possible, this is not England! My husband didn't let him pass and the idiot got mad! When it was possible we did change the lane and let him pass to our left, thinking that now he will go ahead on his road to hell leaving us in peace. We were wrong. He didn't pass us, but placed his car next to ours, VERY close to ours, dangerously close, and kept his speed equal to ours, blocking us behind a motorbike for a couple of minutes. This was not enough, he even drove ON to our car, forcing my husband to make a sharp motion towards the right, nearly out of the road! The idiot tried to push us out of the road, can you believe it???? And assuming that he was not blind, since he was given a driver's license, he must have seen the two little kids sitting in the back of our car, yet it meant absolutely nothing to him. After some time we somehow got in the left lane again, one car ahead of him, and when we could we came back to the right lane to continue in our own pace. This idiot came like a lightning out of the blue again and passed us at only millimeters' distance, so close to us and so fast that though our car is a huge SUV it shook with the wind of his BMW. Then he got lost in the distance... Everything lasted about ten minutes, but they were my worst ten minutes on the highways of Italy. I have sworn, and cursed him. I had taken his plate number but it is of no use. This is Italy, you NEVER find any police on the highways when you need them. And the streets and highways are full of idiots like the one we met this morning. I don't understand why they keep wondering about the reason of the huge number of accidents that happen in Italy every year. They should just watch themselves driving! It is obvious. They drive like maniacs.

Anyway... We did arrive at Todi around 11.15. We went to the apartment of our friends for a while. Then we went out to the narrow streets of the tiny town. It is a quite beautiful little medieval town with its stone buildings with thick walls, narrow streets, streets of tens of stairs, streets that suddenly open into a piazza, little and crowded restaurants, cafes on either side of the streets, flowers hanging down from the little balconies that open to the narrow stony streets, huge stone buildings with little shops squeezed one against the other... They took us to a typical restaurant and we ate very well, sipping our red wine from Umbria. I chose some long flat pasta with black truffles as my first dish. It was delicious! My second dish was a plate of entrecote cooked medium-rare and sliced, placed over a bed of fresh spicy rucola, and washed with the sweet-and-sour balsamic vinegar.. absolutely to make you lick your fingers. My favorite was my side-dish though. I ordered some eggplants prepared in a way that I had never tried before. They had sliced the eggplants in half a cm thick disks and then grilled them. Afterwards the eggplants were placed on a little plate. Over them there was some extra virgin olive oil. They were topped with toasted pine nuts and raisins (also the raisins were toasted). And on the very top there was a layer of freshly grated pecorino cheese. I recommend the eggplant lovers to try this recipe, definitely a winner.

Instead of eating some dessert at the same restaurant we preferred to go out and get ice-cream somewhere else. After a short walk and some rest at the apartment of our friends we got on the road home towards 5 pm.

Italy (but especially Tuscany and Umbria) is full of beautiful little towns that make the foreigners (Americans, Germans, and the others) fall in love and come back again and again. I should admit, they are right, it is a beautiful country.

Barbecue season is opened

Finally spring has arrived. Not that we had an extreme winter this year, it was abnormally warm the whole winter. And now it is too warm for April; last Thursday it was 31 degrees C here in Florence!

This weekend seeing the beautiful sun I decided to benefit from it and did 4 machines of laundry, all dried out under the sun in a few hours. I love the smell of laundry dried in fresh air. In the winter I hang them on a rack in the attic or put some small pieces on the radiators (my husband doesn't like it, but it is quite fast to dry socks and stuff), which create a lot of humidity in the house..

Yesterday I also did some gardening, planted some new flowers in pots and put them in my front balcony, planted some herbs and placed them in the rear balcony which my kitchen opens to. I also changed the pots of some flowers and my daughter helped me. She likes playing the gardener with her mother :-)

We opened our barbecue season as well yesterday: a big piece of beef-steak as high as two-fingers, the way traditional bistecca alla fiorentina is supposed to be, cooked rare, delicious Tuscan sausages and the inevitable eggplant prepared as my father-in-law prepares it. We like inviting our friends to barbecue in the summer and we always prepare our special eggplant. Everybody loves it. Now I will give you the recipe of this delicious and easy way of enjoying eggplants.

You need eggplants, better if they are the purple short and fat type, fresh basil or mint leaves, some garlic boats, white wine vinegar, sea-salt and extra virgin olive oil.

Cut the eggplants in their length without pealing off their skin. The slices should not be too thick (they wouldn't be cooked well on the grill), and neither too thin (they would get burnt immediately). The right thickness is about 4-5 mm. Place the slices side by side on a pan, layering them with sea-salt. Leave them aside for some time so that the bitter liquid of the eggplant comes out. Then wash off the salt, squeeze them slightly and dry them completely placing them between two clean kitchen towels and pressing over a little. Next, place the dried slices again in a pan, pouring some extra virgin olive oil on each layer making sure that each slice gets oil on it. While the eggplants are getting barbecued cut the garlic boats in thin slices and put in a deep bowl. Add the basil/mint leaves and the vinegar. The grilled slices of eggplant are put in this vinegar-garlic-basil/mint mixture and mixed a few times before they are eaten so that each slice soaks in some vinegar. Buon appetito! :-)

Don't read this if you are on a diet!

I love experimenting in my kitchen and today I had the perfect occasion. I had chocolate from two Easter-eggs, two bags of cookies that were about to go soft and a whole package of mascarpone cheese whose best before date is tomorrow! I have been surfing the net for a suitable recipe in which I could use all the materials that I wanted to get rid of. Finally I found an all chocolate cheesecake recipe that seemed OK. But of course I had to adapt this recipe to the ingredients that I had at hand. I sat down to work...

One of the bag of cookies was of type quaresimali, with chocolate, in the form of letters of the alphabet, something that you can buy only around the time of carnival here. The second bag contained cookies made of corn flour, quite good to accompany a cup of black tea actually. I placed all these cookies in the blender and after a few turns I had the cookie-flour for the base of my cake. In the mean time I had already melted about 200 grams of butter and left it aside to cool. I mixed the cookie-flour and the melted butter with a tablespoon of dark cacao. After covering the bottom of my springform pan with baking paper I pressed this mixture to cover it evenly and baked the base for 10 minutes in 175 degrees C.

While the base was in the oven I began preparing the fill. In a bowl I mixed 250 grams of mascarpone cheese and a cup of sugar. I added 2 tablespoons of flour to the cheese-sugar mixture instead of only one as written in the original recipe. Then I added 5 eggs one by one, mixing very well after adding each egg. I substituted the sour cream with two tablespoons of full-milk yogurt. Finally I added the melted chocolate and 1 ml of vanilla extract. After tasting the mixture I decided that it was too sweet for my taste (must be the chocolate from the Easter eggs; milk chocolate, nobody likes it in the family, that is why it was left uneaten until today). So I added one full tablespoon of dark cacao. Looking in the box of cacao I noticed that very little was left. I thought 'What the heck..' and added the rest of the cacao as well :-) I poured the mixture over the base and rolled it into the oven at 220 degrees C. After 15 minutes I took the temperature down to 150 degrees and put the timer to 45 minutes. Right now the cake is still cooking. So I cannot tell you yet how this experiment turned out. But I will add a picture here as soon as possible, and tell you what the family members thought about my all chocolate cheesecake.


The all chocolate cake was delicious! We all ate two slices each yesterday. But next time I will try to make it with a different base, maybe a thin layer of pan di spagna with cacao. This one was rather heavy for our taste. We are not used to eating so much butter. (14.04.2007 10:03 AM)