What do to with leftover aioli? Make some nice sandwiches and spread them with beautiful yellow aioli, add parma ham, salami and cheddar. Soo tasty.
Yummy sandwiches
Simply bake some homebake ciabattas in the oven, leave to cool, cut in half and spread both halves generously with aioli. Place some parma ham and salami on the bottom half, slice some cheddar and put on top. Eat! Sooo good!
On Saturday I made fish soup for the first time, totally improvised but with my mother’s version in mind (although not knwing the recipe for it). I think I came quite close, and this is exactly how I like my fish soup. Although I should have used better stock! Only had stock cubes at hand and that’s just not good enough. But it was still pretty good, and with the homemade aioli it was even great! 🙂
Fish soup with aioli, 2 portions
For the aioli:
2 eggyolks
2 tsp dijon mustard
a pinch of salt
some white pepper
250 ml coldpressed rapeseed oil
1,5 small cloves of garlic, pressed
For the soup:
3 carrots
1 potato
1 layer of a fennel
150 ml cream
75 ml white wine
500 ml water + stock
1 clove garlic, pressed
1 trout fillet
1 whiting fillet
100 g peeled prawns
some chopped parsley
Start with the aioli: Mix the yolks with the mustard and salt and pepper in a steady bowl. Use an electric whisk to mix the oil, little by little, into the eggs. Using a good rapeseed oil will make the mayonnaise all yellow and pretty, but only give it a slight taste. You can also use a sunflower oil or something similar, but not a strong olive oil, it will give the mayonnaise the wrong flavour. Usually when making mayonnaise you add a little bit of white wine vinagar in the beginning as well, but I happened to all out of vinegar and since I add both the mustard and garlic, it is actually not needed, but when making regular mayo I think a little vinegar would make it even better. Press in the garlic after you have mixed all the oil with the yolks. I thought 1,5 small cloves was absolutely perfect for my taste, but taste your way to your best result. Cover the aioli with clingfilm and put it in the fridge while making the soup.
For the soup, peel the carrots and potatoes and chop them into similar sized pieces, cut one layer of the fennel into matching pieces, put it in a pan and cover with water, throw in some salt and boil until the vegetables are cooked. Then puree them, add cream and wine and water + stock until preferred texture and taste, press in some garlic, season with salt and pepper. Bring to a boil. Then cut the fish into pieces, 1 x 1 inch, place in the soup and cook for a few minutes. Next throw in the prawns so they heat up, lastly sprinkle the parsley on top. Serve immeadiately with a large dollop of aioli in each bowl, some nice crusty bread and a nice chilled wine. Enjoy!
Sometimes I’m in the mood for really greasy food. It usually occurs when I’ve had lots of wine to drink the night before… strange isn’t it?! This happened to me on Friday, all I could think about was comfort food with melted cheese. So instead of getting a way too greasy take away I made my own junk food, and it hit the spot. 🙂
Schnitzel burger with potato wedges, 2 portions
2 pork escalopes
100 ml natural breadcrumbs
2 eggs
2 seeded large burger buns
2 slices plastic cheese
Swedish pickled red pepper
6 large Maris Piper potatoes
olive oil
Cajun spice
Start by cutting the potatoes into wedges. I kept the skin on. Then pour some olive oil onto a roasting dish, place the potatoes in it and pour over a little bit more oil, then season with the Cajun spice and flip them around a bit so that all wedges are coated in oil and seasoning. Place in an 175-200 degree oven (depending on the oven) for about 40 minutes, Check on them a few times and flip them around a bit. When they have been in the oven for 30 minutes or so and have started to soften, it is time to start cooking the meat. Beat the eggs in a bowl and dip the pork in the beaten eggs, then coat it in breadcrumbs. Fry in butter in a frying pan until the meat is cooked through and the outside is crisp. Place a slice of plastic cheese on each schnitzel and let it melt. Toast the burger buns and serve with the pickled sliced peppers (I use a Swedish pepper salad, but you can buy pickled peppers here and just slice them). Some ketchup and mayo is perfect to dip the spicy wedges in. Yum!
These truffles are my absolute favourite! To visit Charbonnel et Walker’s shop on Bond Street is like stepping into chocolate heaven with cute little boxes.
This is a great gift for someone who has everything, or instead of dessert after a rich meal or whenever you need a little pick me up.
135 g £10.75. I have seem them in Heal’s and the occasional Waitrose as well as the Bond Street shop and the website. If you like chocolate you will love these!
I found this elderflower liqueur on Nigella’s website, and it is so fabulous I want to tell everyone I know about it. We have finished off a bottle quite quickly, and everyone we treat to a glass of this is hooked. It is lovely on its own, in a drink, in whipped cream for a dessert, in cakes… In just about anything I think!
Waitrose stock this bottle of deliciousness, and it costs about £15. Please, go and buy it!
I eat this a lot. Maybe too often, but it is so good I just can’t help it… 🙂 Usually I serve it with some other finger foods and some nice bread.
Baked camembert, as a starter for 4 or as a lighter supper served with other bits for 2-3 people
Take a large camembert, preferably one in a wooden box, remove the wrapping and place it into the bottom half of the wooden box. Score the top with a knife, and put in 200C oven for about 20 minutes until the cheese is all runny and yummy. I sometimes put a splash of white wine and some pressed garlic into the grooves but I honestly don’t notice much of a difference with or without it. The most important thing is to choose a good piece of cheese. Serve with some nice fresh bread, maybe salami and gherkins.
In Sweden we like to eat plockmat, lots of different little bits for dinner with some nice bread with it. After our big lunch out on Sunday we couldn’t really think much about food that afternoon, we were too full, so I improvised a plock plate even though the fridge was quite empty. This is the result:
Plock plate, 3 portions
1 packet Swedish smoked sausages (or Frankfurters)
12 crustades (you find them at Waitrose and they are actually imported from Sweden)
Swedish cream cheese with girolles (or use brie)
Strawberries
Small gherkins or cornichons
Fru the sausages in some butter and cut them into pieces. Put a bit of cheese into each crustade, pu them into a 200C oven for about 5 minutes until the cheese has melted and the crustades are a bit browner (but not too brown). If you used brie, put a small dollop of jam (apricot, gooseberry, pear, fig…) into the crustades when they come out of the oven. Put everything on a plate together with the strawberries and gherkins. Serve with bread and balsamico glaze (for the sausages). We also had a baked camembert, which will get its own post.
I love to eat tapas-style food, without it having to be Spanish food at all. Sharing plates of food with friends makes me happy!
This is a recipe I found in a Swedish cookbook by Monika Ahlberg. It is dead simple but very tasty. As Malin said: “It tastes very advanced.”
Parma parcels with sundried tomatoes with fresh figs and crema di balsamico
1 packet parma ham
100-150 g cream cheese
5-8 sundried (or even better: sunblush) tomatoes in oil
a few fresh figs
balsamic glaze (crema di balsamico)
Chop the tomatoes roughly and mix with the cheese. Place a dollop of the cheese on every parma slice and fold into small parcels. Place these randomly on a plate. Cut the figs into wedges and place on the same plate. Drizzle balsamic glaze over the plate, serve with bread.
In the original recipe Monika place black olives on the plate as well. I do that sometimes, or it works just as well with pimiento olives, or like here, completely without.
Monday mornings are not my favourite, and I always struggle to change from weekend mode to work week mode. That is probably the reason why I forgot the cable for my camera this morning and can’t upload any photos.
Instead I will tell you about that lovely place Trinity I keep mentioning. Malin came to visit us for the weekend and since I have mentioned this amazing restaurant to her a few times she was very keen to go. So yesterday we treated ourselves to their Sunday lunch. 3 courses for £25!
It is great that it takes me 10 minutes to walk there, but I would happily trek across London to enjoy their food!
It took as a while to decide on what to eat because the menu was so good. Especially the dessert section looked better than ever before. We started off by choosing different starters. Malin went for the Welsh rarebit with a nice strong mustard and pickled onions. It was nicely presented on a wooden board. Christopher chose the starter most men in the restaurant seem to choose: a charcuterie platter with duck hearts, foie gras mousse, rabbit terrine, bacon and homemade pickled. Served on a lovely board of black stone and with some toasted sourdough bread. I chose deep-fried sand eels with deviled aioli. It was also served on a piece of stone, but mina had a lighter colour. The aioli was served in a nice ceramic pot and they had sprinkled some crackling on top for crunch. Absolutely divine. I could have eaten that aioli as it was, spoon by spoon, but I managed to resist…
For mains Malin and I went for tagliatelle with girolles, peas and parmesan and it was divine. The spaghetti was soft and nearly melted in your mouth, the buttered girolles were lovely together with the parmesan and the light sauce it was served with. Christopher had the traditional roast beef with Yorkshire pudding, roasted potatoes, horseradish and gravy. The meat looked perfectly cooked and Christopher said it was even better than last time he had it.
We were all really full after the maincourses, but still in the mood for dessert. Malin and I both chose the duck egg crème brulee served in a low ramekin with a round sheet of caramelized sugar balancing on top of it instead of caramelizing the actual crème, very clever. It looked amazing and the crème was velvety smooth with lots of black vanilla spots. The caramelized sugar looked very nice and tasted good too, but there was a bit too much of it for my liking, it got a bit too sweet. Chris chose a Wigmore cheesecake, and since Wigmore is one of my favourite cheeses I had to try it. It was lovely, tasted quite strong from the cheese but was very smooth. It was served with a poire granité that didn’t taste very much but other than that we were all extremely happy with the meal in full.
Malin was kind enough to buy us the cookbook How to eat in, and we had a flick through it yesterday and are very excited to recreate some of the things we have eaten at Trinity. The recipe of their bread, which I forgot to mention, is in it. It looks quite difficult, but the bread is so good it will be worth it. It is always served warm from the oven and is nice and crisp on the outside and soft in the middle. We always have two rolls each even if we shouldn’t… Just can’t help it! 🙂
This lovely food market is a place I can never get enough of! There are always new things to discover as the seasons change, and yet I haven’t tried all the different lunch options they have, and some I might want to try again. 🙂
When it was Christopher’s birthday last year and he had to work all day, I took my shopping bag and bought all the groceries for his birthday dinner here. Oh, how I wish I could afford to do most my food shopping at Borough Market. That day I came home with girolles, pheasants, scallops, jerusalem artichokes and lots of other vegetables.
And here I can find lots of things I am used to finding in the supermarket in Sweden, girolles (love girolles!) and salsify for example.
My tip is to get here early on a Saturday before the crowds hit around 11am, do all your shopping in your own pace and then when the hunger kicks in, choose one of all the delicious dishes available, take it with you and sit down outside the Southwark Cathedral next door to the market. That’s a Saturday morning well spent!
Scandelights