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!
The day after we had a crayfish party, we could only think of one thing to eat for dinner: meat, potatoes and preferrably bearnaise sauce. 🙂 And I knew just where to find it, so we went to Natalie på Pers Krog in Malmö. The food they serve there is classic Swedish dishes influenced by the French kitchen. You can either sit outside on the veranda where they have heaters and blankets even though it has both walls and a roof, or you can sit inside and eat fondue. We chose the a’la carte menu and sat on the veranda.
The food is classic, tasty and comforting. Some of the waiters have probably worked there a long time and aren’t too enthusiastic, but the younger staff were really good. The interior of the restaurant would benefit from some restyling, but the old definitely has its charm.
For starters mum and I had Toast Walter, which is similar to Toast Skagen but has some horseradish in it as well. We were given very generous portions and it tasted wonderful. Dad chose spicy prawns cooked in butter, garlic and chilli, served with bread. Christopher went for snails and was very pleased with his choice. For mains mum and dad chose fillet Oscar, which is steak with a lobster tail on top and served with both jus and bearnaise sauce. Christopher chose tournedos Rossini; steak with foie gras and truffels on top, with jus and potato gratin. I chose plankstek; steak served on a plank of wood, with potato mash, bearnaise sauce and baconwrapped green beans. A real classic! We were all very pleased when we left.
For my birthday my mother made this yummy cake! She makes it quite often as it is such a crowd pleaser and you can make it far in advance. I don’t know where the recipe originates from but it is cut out of a magazine a long time ago.
Lemon mousse roll, 12+ portions
For the cake:
4 eggs
200 ml granulated sugar
100 ml potato flour
1 1/4 tsp baking powder
For the mousse:
4 eggs
125 ml granulated sugar
1 1/4 lemons, juice from
3/4 lemon, peel from
8 gelatine sheets
400 ml whipping cream
Whisk egg and sugar together for the cake, when it is white and fluffy, pour in the potato flour and the baking powder mixed together. Line a large baking tray with edges with baking paper. Bake in 250 degrees for about 5 mins (200 degrees might be enough for a fan oven). Turn it onto a baking paper sprinkled with sugar and remove the paper that was in the oven. Leave to cool.
Separate the eggwhites and yolks for the mousse. Whip up the yolks with the sugar until light and fluffy, mix in the lemon juice and peel. Wet the gelatine in water, squeeze to remove excess water and melt it into 50 ml hot water over low heat. Pour it gently into the sugar mixture little by little while whisking. Whip the whites until hard foam and turn it gently into the sugar mixture. Whip the cream until firm and turn it gently into the mixture. Let it set a little. Spread the mousse onto the sponge, let it set a little in the fridge before rolling it up from the shorter side. Wrap in parchment paper and then put it in a large freezing bag and freeze it until you need it. Defrost it slightly before serving it, so that the sponge has defrosted but the mousse is still frozen in the middle. (If deep frozen defrost it for an hour before serving it). Pipe whipped cream on top and place berries on top and around it for decoration. We emptied passion fruits over the cream and had grapes on the side, but it works with any fruit or berries.
Yesterday I wasn’t really prepared to make dinner, as I expected us to go out before going to the Proms. But the koncert didn’t start until late, so I was more in the mood of going home and relax until going there, so I quickly had to come up with something. Defrosting prawns doesn’t take long, and making this pasta dish doesn’t take long either – a perfect weekday dinner.
Pasta with tiger prawns, red pepper pesto and mushrooms, 2 portions
Pasta, I took farfalle
200 g cooked and peeled tiger prawns
1 can sliced button mushrooms
250 ml single cream
3 tbsp red pepper pesto
1 clove garlic, pressed
a splash of chilli sauce
some chilli flakes
stock
Italian herb seasoning
salt
white pepper
Cook the pasta according to the directions on the packet. Fry the mushrooms in some olive oil until they have got some colour. Then lower the heat and pour in the cream, followed by the other ingredients for the sauce, except the prawns. Bring to a boil, have a taste and adjust the flavours according to taste. If the sauce gets too thick, pour in a little milk. When the pasta has a minute or so to cook, pour the prawns into the sauce so they heat up. Drain the pasta and serve the sauce. If you have some fresh parsley at hand (I didn’t), chop it and sprinkle on top of the sauce. Enjoy!
Scandelights