A week in the metropol

No cooking this week, as I'm off to London for various meetings and conferences today. However, I will share with you couple of pictures of some simple meals I've had lately.

Fish at its simplest
(Purustatud ürdikartulid)



I had bought some nice trout fillets from Edinburgh's Farmers' Market. Usually I would simply season the fish with salt, pepper, dill and lemon juice before grilling it, and serve with boiled new potatoes. Here's a slightly different take on it: pan-fried trout fillets (seasoned with salt, pepper and lemon juice), served with crushed potatoes with dill, garlic and melted butter. Crushed potatoes in its various forms seem to appear in every single cookery magazine and programme these days and it was indeed quite a nice way of serving spuds.

A quick tomato soup
(Lihtne tomatisupp)



This is simply passata diluted with Marigold vegetable stock, reduced a little, enriched with cream, and seasoned with salt, black pepper and some basil. Served with a dollop of cottage cheese.
I quite like the picture, even if it is slightly out of focus..

Drunken potatoes
(Veini-kartulivorm)



A recipe from Jill Dupleix via Valentina over at Trembom in English for another great way to serve potatoes. Sliced potatoes, seasoned with salt, pepper and thyme, drowned in dry white wine and baked in the oven until soft and crisp at the same time.
Valentina's blog is definitely worth a visit, so if you haven't been there yet, please check it out.

Banana creme bruleé



And finally - here's a picture of a banana bruleé I had at Maison Bleue in the company of a very charming Scottish politician a fortnight ago. Lovely place, and the bruleé was absolutely delicious, with a delicate yet crisp bruleé topping, a very subtle hint of banana and a cute cape gooseberry decoration.
I'm looking forward to trying to recreate this pudding, so if anyone out there has a good recipe for a banana bruleé, please let me know.

Stuff the onion: baked red onions with feta cheese & wild mushrooms

Encouraged by my delicious upside down red onion pie, seriously inspired by Nicky&Oliver's delectable braised red baby onions, loosely based on Paul Gayler's recipe for Greek stuffed onions in a feta cheese custard - here is a dish I came up with earlier this week, and will surely keep making in the future.

Paul Gayler is a chef known for his inspiring vegetarian dishes over at the Lanesborough Hotel in London. He has just published his third book on vegetarian food, Pure Vegetarian and some sample recipes were reprinted in Scotsman on Sunday in early March. I simplified the recipe considerably, skipping the feta cheese custard, using tomato puré instead of sunblush tomatoes, replacing dried porcini with some leftover black trumpet chantarelles and omitting the egg and cinnamon from the filling. Gayler introduces his recipe as 'a type of modern-day vegetarian moussaka', but due to the lack of custard my baked onions wouldn't fit this description. However, the result was delicious, savoury and strong-flavoured - lovely on its own with a slice of crusty bread. I can also imagine serving this as part of a buffet or as a side dish to some grilled or braised meat.

Baked red onions stuffed with feta cheese & wild mushrooms
(Fetajuustu ja metsaseentega täidetud punased sibulad)
Serves 4



500 grams red onions (about 9-10)
1-2 Tbsp olive oil
2-3 Tbsp water

Stuffing:
1-2 Tbsp olive oil
onion cuttings
1 fat garlic clove
150 grams wild mushrooms, chopped
2 Tbsp concentrated tomato puré
100 grams feta cheese
2 Tbsp pine nuts
1 Tbsp fresh parsley, chopped
salt
freshly ground black pepper

Remove the stringy outer layers of the onions, then cut off a very thin slice from the root end - just enough to enable onions to 'stand' upright. Cut a generous slice off the top of each onion, then place them in a baking tin. Drizzle with some water and olive oil, cover with foil and bake in a preheated 200˚C oven for about an hour, until onions are tender.

For the stuffing, heat the oil, add the chopped onion tops and fry for 5 minutes.
Add the garlic and fry gently for another 5 minutes.
Add the chopped wild mushrooms, fry for a couple of minutes.
Add the tomato puré, stir to combine.
Add the crumbled feta cheese and pinenuts, stir until combined, then season with parsley, salt and pepper.

Very carefully remove the centres of baked onions (I used the tiniest teaspoon for that). Make sure to keep the onion bases intact, but there is no need to despair if you fail - just use removed onion layers to cover the hole.

(If you wish, you can chop up the removed layers and add to the stuffing. If you manage to remove some nice intact layers, you can use these for stuffing as well. I started with 9 onions, but ended up with 13 stuffed ones:)

Fill onions with the stuffing, put into a baking dish, cover with foil and bake at 200˚C for about 30 minutes, removing the foil for the last 10 minutes or so to brown the onions nicely.

Allow to cool slighly and serve.

UPDATE: T. Carter @ Lifechanges ... Delayed tried this recipe as well.

A magic mushroom quiche

Let me make something clear. I've never smoked a cigarette in my life, nor tried any other substances that might be considered illegal in some countries (moderate consumption of alcohol is luckily legal in my part of the world). So obviously this is not a quiche of magic mushrooms. But last week one of my regular readers emailed me and said that s/he is feeling a bit low and a magic mushroom quiche might cheer him/her up. And a very dear friend of mine, T. refuses to eat mushrooms, unless they are of the abovementioned kind. So I thought that by calling my mushroom quiche a magic one might just cheer A. up and might have tricked T. to eat the quiche had he been around.

And, to be fair, I thought there was something harrypotteresque about those black trumpet chantarelle mushrooms I used anyway. Don't you think so? (Click on the photo to enlarge).

The recipe is loosely based on a mushroom and blue cheese quiche recipe from Valio that I've tried many times successfully. As I had some nice mushrooms* on hand this time, I didn't want to overshadow their earthy-musky flavour, so I omitted the blue cheese. I also incorporated the tarragon (usually in the filling) into the pie crust this time. Just like with pizza doughs, I find that seasoning the pie crust gives a small, but necessary lift to the whole dish.

A magic mushroom quiche
Serves 6-8



Pie crust:
100 grams butter
200 ml plain flour
1 tsp dried tarragon
0.25 tsp salt
2-3 Tbsp cold water

Filling:
200 grams fresh black trumpet chantarelles
1 medium onion (I used a large banana shallot)
2 Tbsp butter
a generous handful of fresh parsley
3 eggs, whisked
150 ml sour cream
salt
crushed black pepper

Mix the butter, tarragon, salt and flour with a knife until you get coarse crumbs, then add the cold water and mix the dough together. Let it cool in a fridge for about 20 minutes, then roll out and line a 22 cm pie dish with the pastry. Prick with a fork, then put into the freezer for 20 minutes (this reduces the need for blind baking, as the pastry will shrink only very little).
Pre-bake at 200°C for 15-20 minutes, until the pastry is light golden brown.

Meanwhile, make the filling. Clean the mushrooms thoroughly (if possible at all, avoid rinsing them and use a damp kitchen roll or brush), chop into smaller pieces.
Mince the onion. Heat the butter in a saucepan, add the onion and fry gently for about 10 minutes, until onion starts to soften.
Add the mushrooms and sauté until some of the liquid evaporates (trumpet chantarelles are very dry anyway, but this may be necessary for button mushrooms).
Cool the mushroom and onion mixture.
Add the eggs, sour cream, finely chopped parsley. Season with salt and pepper.

Pour the filling into the pre-baked pastry crust and bake for another 20-30 minutes, until the filling has set.

Cut into slices and serve with a salad.



* After complaining about the non-availability of wild mushrooms in Edinburgh, I've now discovered a small shop, Clarks Speciality Foods, in Bruntsfield, that sells various wild mushrooms at reasonable price. A new mushroom stock is brought in every Friday - straight from Paris markets apparently - and they try to vary the choice of mushrooms. So far I've bought pied bleu mushrooms and these black trumpet chantarelles. I'll be back for more soon.

Clarks Speciality Foods
202 Bruntsfield Place
Edinburgh EH10 4DF
Telephone: 0131 656 0500