My best burgers so far…

I love making burgers with millet. I used to make these burgers with millet as the main ingredient, but nowadays, I also put other ingredients to vary the flavour. The latest one was quorn mince. Here is the recipe:

(makes about 50 burgers)

1 packet millet (you can get it at most health food stores or Waitrose)
1 packet veggie mince
3 large shallots or onion, finely chopped
About 12-13 eggs
about 10 slices of (dry) bread, I used about 4 slices of rye bread and 6 slices of seeded bread
Vegetable stock to cook the millet (about 2 1/2 times the volume of the millet)
1 whole garlic, peeled and crushed

Generous doses of:
Caraway
Mustard Powder
Paprika
Nutmeg

Salt
Optional: flour for dusting

Soak the bread in water, stock or spiced water. When the bread is soaked well, drain the liquid and squeeze the water out of the bread.

If you like, briefly roast the millet, before adding the vegetable stock. Otherwise just add the stock and boil until the millet is soft-ish and the liquid has been soaked up/evaporated.

Mix all remaining ingredients in a bowl plus the bread and the cooled-down millet.

Heat oil in a pan. Make patties, dust them with flour if you like and fry them until they are firm on the inside and crisp on the outside. Eat immediately.

You can also keep the burgers in the fridge or freezer and reheat them under a grill or in the oven.

The burgers can be eaten in buns with sauces, by themselves or as part of a ‘normal’ dinner with e.g. tomato sauce and vegetables.

Brown Stuff

This is German-style rice pudding with cinnamon. In the picture, it looks a pretty gross, but it is actually very nice! We used to eat it as a main meal. Saturday was our sweet main course day for some reason where we ate apple & semolina souffle, potato fritters with bramley sauce, pancakes or chocolate and almond pudding. Of course, we had an ‘alibi salad’ for afters
This rice pudding you make in the pot by heating milk and pudding rice together (with a bit of salt) in a pan. You have to frequently stir it until the rice is soft. Sometimes, you have to add extra milk near the end. It is usually eaten with cinnamon and sugar or hot cherries!

This is a caraway cake. Yes, caraway. I had to try it! It is very tasty.

The recipe goes as follows:

225 g butter
175 g brown sugar
3 eggs
350 plain flour (I think I added a bit of spelt flour, just because it was there…)
4 tsp baking powder
1 tsp ground caraway seeds (you can use more if you like and you can use whole seeds!)
grated lemon rind
juice of 1/2 lemon
milk

citron peel, candied lemon/lime, jam or marmelade (I used homemade spiced kiwi butter)

cocoa powder
chocolate sprinkles
more milk

Bake at medium heat for about an hour, depending on the temperament of your oven…

You basically make it like a marble cake. But I also added a layer of kiwi butter and some chocolate sprinkles just out of curiosity. I am quite pleased with the result! Unfortunately, I burnt the cake a bit, so the whole thing has a bit of a crispy crust, and I had to cut some of the top of, which is why the chocolate layer is a bit flat… argh!

Here are the intermediate stages….
1) Non-chocolate dough with jam layer
2) Chocolate dough spooned over the jam layer

While tidying up, I also came across a recipe for a pineapple and banana cake with mango filling. Looked amazing. I’m just waiting for a special occasion to arrive to make it… Otherwise it would be a little over indulgent to have it all by myself!

Potatoes, lots of them

Last weekend, I went to the 24hrs really late and found lots of bargains: a sack of potatoes for 22p, organic cucumbers for 22p each and some whole fat live yoghurt. The first thing I made was cucumber salad and chips. Here is a picture of the chips, made in a normal non-stick pot filled less than an inch with sunflower oil:

… if you can see them under all this ketchup… I sometimes make my chips without taking the peel off the potatoes. The important thing is to make the oil very hot before you put the potatoes in. This way, the outside of the potatoes will close and won’t allow so much fat to pass into the inside.
I forgot to take a picture of the cucumber salad. It had a dill-yoghurt sauce which contained yoghurt, thinly sliced cucumbers, lemon, pepper, sugar, chives & dill (dried), salt, olive oil.

The next day I was even lazier and combined potatoes, cucumbers and yoghurt into one dish: baked potatoes with not-quite-tzatziki. For the latter, I quartered the cucumber length-wise, sliced the quarters thinly, chopped a shallot, squeezed some garlic and added salt and pepper. When the potatoes were ready, I chopped them up to allow them to cool more quickly (I was very hungry!).

I will probably make another soup with the rest of the potatoes…

Poach Pod Experiment

The other day, I discovered a new kitchen tool: poach pods! I’m normally not a fan of silicone kitchen stuff – or anything that feels kind of plasticy – but these intrigued me because they make it really easy for you to poach eggs or make flans or anything else that uses the ‘water bath’ method and is likely to stick to your non-bendy vessel. What you see in this picture is me poaching what is bascially scrambled egg with too much nutmeg. The pods just float on the boiling water – you can even close the lid!

I like this type of egg chopped up into small cubes and dumped into a bowl of vegetable broth, possibly alongside some vegetables and maybe even fake meat balls or dumplings. A very German thing, and usually a pain in the ass to make (my grandma made it in a buttered mug). But now, thanks to my two new companions, I can eat this soupy goodness more often!

Happy Halloween!

Improvised Winter Dessert

I has to use up a few things in the kitchen today and made this improvised dessert from

Yoghurt (Full-fat)
Cranberry sauce
Crumbled spiced (gingery) cookies

Tasty!

Windows7 theme party cake

A tekkie friend of mine had an ironic Windows7 theme party for his birthday. He is a big fan of Battenberg cakes (also called ‘window cakes’), and so the natural choice was to make a ‘Windows cake’! Thinking back, I really should have added some ‘bugs’ to it in the form of those chocolate beetles that are sold for Halloween at the moment! Talking of bugs, my cake had one, too: I got the order of blue and yellow wrong while sticking the cake together and the angle of the window!

Anyway… I still had some food colouring in the house, although the red was almost empty – and ‘natural’ colouring (whatever that may mean), so the red came out a bit weaker. This is the cake before it went in… looks rather a lot like wallpaint!

This is the cake just after it came out of the oven. I had to stick it together somehow. The cake was orange rather than vanilla flavoured, and the only jam I had in the house was home-made kiwi & black pepper ‘butter’ (I think it also had some cayenne in it). The combination worked very well, although the jam was not very sticky. This normally does not matter so much, because the cake is subsequently wrapped with marzipan. But I did not want to wrap it with marzipan. I considered roll-out or paste-on icing for a moment, but then thought the cake would taste much nicer coated with more jam and chocolate sprinkle! And I think I was right!

Another friend then tried to draw on a Windows task bar and folders on the plate with icing, but underestimated the challenge a little…

If you need to recreate it for some reason, here is the recipe for a small-ish cake (I resisted using my big roasting tin for a super-size version…):

150g butter
150g sugar
3 eggs
orange flavouring (and maybe a little vanilla, if you’ve got any)
150g self-raising flour or plain flour with a little baking powder
red, yellow and blue food-colouring (green you get by mixing blue and yellow, of course)

tinfoil (for making the ‘grooves’)
a square or rectangular cake tin

Something from almost nothing

The most challenging ‘ready steady cook’ situation I probably faced today when I tried to improvise food for someone from:

rice
salted peanuts
soy sauce
flour
milk
butter
various spices
ketchup

There was absolutely nothing else at the place. Ended up making flavoured rice (I put a bit too much cayenne pepper in) and peanut sauce. I hope the poor hungry person wasn’t too grossed out!

Autumn Lasagna (Butternut Sqash & Spinach)

I made the lasagna for about 20 people at work today, so you will have to pare the quantities down. Dish is quite work-intensive and money-intensive, but I people have asked me for the recipe – so here it is & as usual open to modification!

1 packet of green, 1 packet of white lasagna sheets
cheddar, grated

2 butternut squashes
chopped walnuts

2 tubs of ricotta
4 bags of spinach

For the tomato sauce:
onions
garlic
about half a celery, chopped
about 4 carrots, chopped
850g can of tomato puree (double concentrate)
fresh basil (or dried herbs)
olive oil
(you can also add courgettes to the mix)

For the bechamel sauce:
2 pints of milk
big scoop of butter
flour
blue cheese
nutmeg, pepper, salt

First of all, cut each squash in half, take out the seeds (keep them). Bake the halves (fleshy side down) on a baking tray until soft. You can paste the insides with (olive) oil before baking if you like. On a separate tray, toast the cleaned seeds with a bit of salt (and oil if you like).

Tomato Sauce: Sautee chopped onions and crushed or chopped garlic. Add chopped carrots and celery. After about 10 mins add about 2 pints of water (add more if necessary). Simmer until vegetable are soft. Add tomato puree and basil and blend the whole thing with a hand-blender. Season to taste.

Put a bit of tomato sauce into one tray. Empty a bag of spinach on top of it, put it into the oven until the spinach is soft and beginning to flatten down. Take the tray out and add some ricotta, nutmeg, pepper and salt. Close this layer with green lasagna sheets.

Scoop the flesh out of the squashes. Put it into the next layer along with a bit of tomato sauce and a handful of chopped walnuts. Close the layer with green lasagna sheets.

Put some tomato sauce on top of the lasagna sheets again and add another bag of spinach. ‘Flatten’ it again by placing it into the oven for a bit and repeat same steps as with previous spinach layer. Close with white lasagna sheets.

Heat butter in a pot. Stir in some flour. Brown it a bit and slowly start adding milk, stirring vigorously with a whisk. When you have a thick sauce, add bits of blue cheese (it will melt into the sauce). Season to taste.

Pour the blue cheese sauce on top of the layer of white lasagna sheets. Top the whole thing with grated cheese, chopped walnuts and some toasted pumpkin seeds. Put tray in the oven for about an hour. Repeat with second tray.

Hearty Tomato & Celery Salad

Have forgotten to take a photo again. Will do next time I do it!

Here is the recipe:

Small, ripe tomatoes or cocktail tomatoes, quartered
Celery sticks, sliced extremely thinly
Spring onions, sliced thinly

Dressing:
Crushed garlic
Dried (or fresh) chives
Oil
Lemon juice
Salt, Pepper

It was so tasty, I ate three bowls in a row!