Rice and Banana Pancakes

In less than two months I will be going to Indonesia for four weeks. As I have started to look for the travelling information, like train timetables and interesting things to see, I have also searched for websites about Indonesian food. I found some prtty good websites like Tasty Indonesian Food that provides the readers with a great variety of recipes and other food-related infromation. I hope to cook some vegetarian main dishes before I leave :)

Today I tried for the first time the famous banana pancakes. I don't know if these are THE Famous Banana Pancakes that the Southern Asian travellers eat for breakfast on Banana Pancake Trail (!) since I have never traveled there, but at least they were my first attempt! I found the recipe here.


Rice and Banana Pancakes

Ingredients

3 Medium Ripe Bananas
2 Tablespoons Sugar
1/4 Teaspoon Salt
1 Teaspoon Active Dry Yeast
1 Cup Warm Water
1 Cup Rice Flour
Corn Oil -- for brushing skillet

Directions

In shallow dish, mash bananas to a smooth consistency. In a bowl, dissolve sugar, salt and yeast in the water. In another bowl, combine banana, flour and yeast mixture. Stir the mixture until it has the consistency of pancake batter. Let stand 30 minutes. Brush skillet with oil. Heat until hot. Pour in 1/3 cup of batter. Cook pancake on both sides over moderate low heat until golden and risen. Continue with remaining batter. Serve warm with syrup.

Hmm, to be honest, there were some slight difficulties in preparing these banana pancakes! The dough was very coarse compared to the usual pancake dough, so I was afraid of them being too thick and uncooked inside. On the other hand, as we discovered after a few attempts, you can move the dough on the pan with a spoon and make it thinner so that it fries faster. We also needed a bit more oil than just "for brushing skillet". However, patiently you can manage to make pretty pancakes which have a slight taste of banana, and which indeed are delicious with honey, syrup or jam!

Cookie debts

New year, new ideas! I'm eventually recovering from the terrible flu I had during the Christmas holidays and now cooking feels like something nice and tempring again. Of course I had prepared something vegetarian, seitan roll for the Christmas table, but I didn't eat even half of it, so the leftovers are still in the freezer :)
I think it is better to make many small promises for the new year so that at least some of them will be realised! One of the promises was to return this lovely Lebkuchen box to the owner, who gave it to me over a year ago, full with some lovely homemade cookies. I had promised to return it full as well, so I baked some of my favourite cookies this weekend. This superrecipe is from a Swedish friend Torun, who gave it to me many years ago, and I have done my fair share to spread around the chocochip evagelion! Here is the original recipe, as written in the tiny piece of paper I have got:

COOOOKIES
* cream 250 g butter
* add and beat in 2,5 dl white sugar and 2,5 dl brown sugar
* beat in 2 eggs and 1,5 tsp vanilla sugar
* sift (it's not 100% necessary, but the cookies DO get better) mix & stir in 6 dl flour, 1,5 tsp salt and 2 tsp baking soda
* stir in 300g chopped dark chocolate and 200 g chopped nuts (if you like)
* make small balls, bake at 150-170 for bit more than 10 minutes
* hide the cookies well

Well, I bake them every time a bit differently. This time I only used brown (Mascobado) sugar so the cookies became browner than usually. I also noticed that there was less chocolate in the cupboard as I had thought (!) so I added 100g of dark chocolate and 200g of walnuts and hazelnuts, finely chopped. Cookies are very tasty even if you add less than 300g chocolate, which is quite a lot! next time I think I'll add a tablespoon or two of cold strong coffee which might give a nice kick to them as well.

And yes, after all also the nutty version was so tasty that I had to hide the cookies :) I'm happy that I can eventually pay back my cookie debts!

Finndian fast food

Weeks are flying by..I have noticed that on some very busy weeks I cook only once and eat that same soup for many days, which is not very inspiring!

I have spotted some good recipes on Vihreä Lanka, the weekly newspaper of the Green Party of Finland. I wanted to try the pea sundal because I had never tried making sundal, even if many other Indian recipes are familiar to me. This recipe you could call "student food", because it basically doesn't cost much - a 500g bag of Finnish organic peas cost 0,88€ in the supermarket.

As I am curious to see what the more authentic recipes included, I did some research and instead of just adding curry powder, as the first recipe suggested, I went for this one at SpicyTasty:

Green Peas Sundal

Ingredients:

* Dry Green Peas : 1 cup
* Onion : 3tbsp (finely chopped)
* Green chili : 3 to 4
* Garlic :1
* Ginger : 1/4″
* Cumin seeds : 1/4tsp
* Coconut : 2 tbsp (optional)
* Salt : required to taste

For Seasoning:

* Oil : 1tbsp
* Mustard Seeds : 1 tsp
* Urad dal : 1tsp
* Whole red chili : 2
* Curry leaves : 6 to 8

Method of Preparation:

1. Soak the dry green peas overnight in a warm water.
2. And pressure cook the soaked green peas with water and little salt for 2 whistle in medium flame.
3. After that strain the water and keep the coked peas aside.
4. Now grind the chopped onion, cumin seeds, ginger, garlic and green chilies in to a thick paste.
5. Heat oil in a pan add mustard seeds, urad dal after it sputter add the whole red chili and ground masala fry them till the raw smell goes off from the masala or fry them for like 4 to 5 minutes.
6. Now add the curry leaves mix it all together and add the drained & cooked green peas.
7. Stir well and let it stand in the heat for upto 4 minutes in low flame.
8. Remove from heat and sprinkle with some coconut (shredded) if you want.


I followed the recipe otherwise, except I used just a normal kettle for boiling the peas (took like 30 minutes) and I didn't have urad dal, so I left it out. I also reduced the chili - I put just one red chili from my mum's garden, as they were quite hot, but I added some chili powder in the end as it wasn't spicy enough to my taste..so if you like it hot, use many chilis! Since my mixer is not working so well for small quantities, I could get as fine results as in the original recipe.

However, this was a very easy and tasty recipe, I think I'll do it again! It works as snack or a side dish, or as a main dish, as I prepared it together with boiled barley. So this is quite a satisfying mix between the Finnish ingredients and Indian spices and Indian way of preparing the dish. I hope to stroll one day on the long beaches in Chennai where they sell sundal as a snack :)

PS. If you have some good recipes for Indian vegetarian dishes or good blogs/websites with Indian recipes, please send me the links to the comment box! :)

Today's mood

Today's mood is as grey as the weather and requires pancake therapy! Nothing makes the day sweeter & brighter than a pile of pancakes: first I make some with cheese and tomato filling, then add a little bit of sugar in the dough and prepare some sweet ones :) Mmmmh!

It's also very inspiring how many different recipes there are..in almost every country I have ever been to, there's some pancake speciality!

Spicy rice noodle soup

A windy rainy day, a perfect soup day! I thought of cooking oriental noodle soup, because I bought a pack of Thai rice noodles two days ago. Since eating alone is rather boring, I invited my flatmate to join for a spicy oriental soup :) I was actually thinking about doing a Japanese style recipe from Joanna Farrow's 30-Minutes Vegetarian, but didn't have black bean sauce and didn't feel like looking for it..this is an easy recipe, contains whatever you can find in your fridge :)

I followed the instructions of a noodle soup on the website of International Vegetarian Union. Besides recipes they have a lot of information about vegetarianism - good to learn something new, e.g. how to say in Bahasa Indonesian that I don't eat meat, chicken nor seafood (Saya tidak makan daging, ayam atau makanan laut).

When trying to pronounce that, I take a second plate of the spicy soup!

For 2-3

1 onion
2 garlic cloves
(a bit of ginger)
1 tbsp chili paste or fresh chili
1 tsp sesam oil mixed with a drop of ordinary cooking oil

carrots chopped to small toothpick sized pieces
cabbage cut into small stripes (easy to do with a cheese slicer)
tofu (I used approximately 150g of cold-smoked tofu)
vegetable stock powder (preferably without natriumglutamat)
1 tsp brown sugar
rice noodles
water



Chop onions and garlic. Chop also other vegetables and tofu before starting to cook so that you don't burn anything (happens sometimes in hurry!). Fry onion and garlic for a moment, add tofu. After tofu has got some colour, add the vegetables and chili paste and fry for few minutes more. Add water, vegetable stock powder and sugar, let simmer for some time. Add noodles and boil on a low heat until ready and spice with salt, pepper and whatever you like. Garnish with roasted peanuts or cashews, or with few coriander leaves.

I used Thai rice noodles, that need 10 minutes of cooking, but I guess other noodles would do the trick as well. You can also add e.g. bell pepper or zucchini in the soup if you have them at hands. Next time I'll add less chili paste (not everyone is as addicted as I am!) and maybe a drop of soy sauce. And one day I'll also master delicacies like Thai Tofu & Noodle Soup :)

Lasagna with soy and zucchini

I cooked this lasagna quite while ago, but now eventually I'll update it here :) It's very simple and quick to make, and you can prepare it even if you have only one kettle - well, you need two kettles and a bit more time & effort for making the tomato sauce and bechamel sauce for the more traditional Italian lasagna :) This isn't traditional, maybe not even so Italian, but still worth trying!

I usually prepare the tomato sauce for vegetarian lasagna with soy or TVP which is very practical to use and adds some more protein to any vegetarian sauce. Also in this recipe I have used dark crushed soy.



For the sauce:

1 onion (or two if you really like onion)
3 garlic cloves
1 tbsp olive oil for frying
2-3 dl soy (or other TVP)
6-7 dl water or vegetable stock (I just added 1 tbsp of organic veg stock powder)
200 g soft/processed cheese (that melts well)
spices as basil, thyme, rosemary, black pepper, salt

zucchini (around half a kilo)
lasagna noodles
parmigiano cheese


Chop the onions and garlic and fry them in olive oil.

Add the soy and some water, let it simmer for some time and add more water if needed, and the spices. If you don't know how long to cook TVP, check on the package.

When the soy is cooked, add the cheese and let it melt into the sauce.

In the meantime chop the zucchini into pieces or slices and lightly oil a lasagna baking dish.

Lay some sauce and pieces of zucchini at the bottom, cover with pasta and repeat until the baking dish is full. Add the rest of the sauce on top of the dish and sprinkle some grated parmigiano on top of it.

Bake in 225 C for 40-50 minutes. Enjoy with some green salad :)

Apple pie has got some new fans!

I made this very same pie again last week for some foreign guests and they seemed to love it as well..this time I put more apples, because I had got a huge bag of them from a friend and I couldn't eat all of them. One of the new fans of this pie said that I will be get to a good marriage, so let's hope that this pie works wonderfully on some innocent, unmarried guy ;)

Irresistable apple pie

I have made this apple pie twice this week and both times it disappeared so fast that I didn't manage to photograph it, sorry! Maybe that tells something about it more than any picture would do? And anyway, it just looks like any other apple pie, but tastes like a piece of heaven!

I promised to translate it so that also my boyfriend, whom I'm trying to encourage to take first steps on the divine path of baking, could make it at home :) So here it comes, freely translated from the original recipe at the Finnish baking website and online shop Ullan Unelma .

Apple pie

200 g butter
1,5 dl sugar
2 eggs
3 dl wheat flour
1 dl grated coconut
1 tsp vanilla sugar
1 tsp baking soda
0,5 tsp cardamom
0,5 dl milk
3-4 apples, depending on their size
cinnamon and sugar

Preheat oven to 200C and lightly grease a pie form with butter or oil.
Beat sugar and butter into a smooth mass. Add eggs one by one, beat well.
Mix flour, coconut, vanilla sugar, baking soda and cardamom and add some, then milk and then the rest of the flour.
Spread the dough on a pie form and add sliced apples on top of it. Sprinkle some cinnamon and sugar on the pie.
Bake in 200C for about 25 minutes and enjoy with vanilla sauce, ice cream or just like that :)

I guess I have to make it again, just to have a picture of it as well. This is a very easy recipe, doesn't take much time but tastes very good! Happy apple season :)

Culinaristic travels of this summer

It's been a looong time since I wrote something in my blog..I feel like I haven't been spending so much time in the kitchen OR at my computer, since we have been on the road quite a lot, visiting three weddings, then moving out. But now I want to update some summer (food) stories here with a "slight" delay - here's first a very subjective repotage from the longer travels of this summer.



What the Finns are most mesmerised about when being abroad? Fruits! Just imagine that the only domestic fruits we can get here are apples, between August and October..it was just a pure delight to spend the first morning (and last as well) in France by picking up cherries and eating them very fresh, under the cherry tree. Also abricots, nectarines, peaches, melons etc. were very tasty and juicy...



Croissants! That's one of the things I miss most from French food culture when being in Finland. They are never quite the same, although we have some cafés and bakeries that try to make up for the loss, for example Labrioche here in Tampere. It's great to begin a new day with a fresh croissant, some honey or marmalade on it and a cup of green tea.



From Paris we traveled to Ghent, a cute Belgian town, which seemed calm and relaxed after a hot, crowded, busy Paris..I couldn't help stopping at every cute shop display to admire all those cute compositions of candy, kitchen ware, household decoration etc.



A raspberry-scented candy speciality of Ghent called cuberdons, which weren't unfortunately anymore so liquid inside when I ate them at home as they were fresh. Maybe it was the constant +30 weather that dried them ;)




World famous Belgian chocolate was sold in many shops :) I was caught in pfotographing action in front of this shop by the owner of it and she was very pleased to hear that the display was so cute, just look at those retro packages! If you can't afford buying hand-made chocolate, buy in a supermarket Galler chocolate bars - I tried pistachio and grand marnier, mmmm!



I can't say that I would be a big fan of French fries, but on this travel we ate them quite many times! This picture presents actually FRENCH fries somewhere near the Clignancourt flea markets, but I must admit that I fell for the Belgian ones ;) Their secret is to fry them twice, which makes them very crispy and tasty. We ate the best fries of Ghent in Frituur 't Puntzakje which you can find at Kleine Vismarkt 9.



I can proudly say that I have managed to drink a beer! Completely on my own! I hate beer taste and smell, but as a real culinarist I can't say no to something that is pink and smells of raspberry :)

Playing with agar agar

Wow, it's been busy times and that's why I have been mostly cooking something quick and not even taken any pictures for a while..I have also tried some new things which I want to share with other curious cooks.

My mum had bought agar agar for our first attempts to make vegetarian panna cotta. As I eat dairy products and eggs, it's not too difficult for my family members to cook and bake for me. Gelatine I try to avoid if I just can: I usually check package information carefully and leave cakes and desserts with gelatine for the others. Sometimes I would like to try making a cheese cake, so it's time to try agar agar, gelling agent made from seaweed. In many countries it can be purchased from supermarkeat, but here in Finland it's sold in pharmacies and ecoshops.

In fact I tried agar agar for two dishes: panna cotta and white chocolate & coconut cake. I found several vegetarian panna cotta recipes in fact in various languages, but just checked them out for the approximate amounts of agar agar. I had a one small cup of cooked cream (around 1,5 dl) and I mixed 1 teaspoon of agar agar in it. It was too little and it ended up being like thick cream with some bigger pieces of jelly in it. Not very pretty, but tasty with blueberries ;) I hope to try it soon again.

Because it was mothers' day, me and mum also baked a cake together. My mum has been making some no-bake cakes with jellified coffee or cream filling, and this time we tried one with a white chocolate and coconut combination. I was suprised how well it worked and how pretty the cake looked in the end! The original recipe was taken from the website of a Finnish cooking programme and slightly modified; there would have been a caramel sauce on top of it, but we left it out.

So here's a recipe for it:

Bottom:
150 g cookies (e.g. digestive)
1 dl grated coconut
75 g butter or margarine

To the side decoration of the cake:
a sliced carambola fruit

Filling:
(gelling agent, see later)
3 dl cream
200 g white chocolate
250 g curd
1 dl sugar
2 tsp vanilla sugar
2 tbsp lemon juice

(Caramel sauce:
1 dl sugar
1 dl grated coconut
1 dl cream)

Mix the cookies and coconut in a food processor and pour in melt butter. Press the mixture on the bottom of a springform pan, which is covered with baking paper (just to get it out easier). Place the sliced carambola on the sides of the form.

At this point mum soaked the gelatine, but if you don't want to use it, boil some hot water and mix agar agar with it. Since I mixed the gelling agent with about 2-3 dl of filling, I took 1,5 tbsp agar agar and mixed it with some tablespoonfuls of hot water. It dissolved quickly into a jellified mass, which I left aside to cool a little.

Prepare the filling: melt the white chocolate in the microwave or water bath and let cool a little. Whisk the cream and pour the chocolate into the bowl, beat again. Add curd, sugar and vanilla sugar. Spice with some lemon juice. Then add the agar agar mass, mix very well until the consistency is smooth and pour into the baking form.

Let it cool at least for some hours and then remove carefully from the springform. You can also cook some caramel sauce to decorate it: boil cream and sugar together on a low heat until thick brown sauce and add then the grated coconut. Let cool and spread on the cake.

As you can see, we made one bigger cake (with gelatine) and one smaller one (with agar agar). I took maybe one fourth of all the filling, so my cake was thus very small 2-3 persons' cake :) I also used for the bottom just 3 cookies, some coco flakes and a knob of butter. However, this was a good attempt and I'm positive about trying it again. I have read that it might not work so well with dairy products and end up being gritty and not very prettily jellified, but I liked the consistancy of the cake. However, since I'm just experimenting for the first time with agar agar, all tips and recipes are welcome. Mum said that she'll happily leave gelatine out of all the cakes and desserts, if she's convinced enough about switching to the veggie-friendly version :)