Portugal and baklava

... I know, how do these go together?

Well, it felt almost like spring when I went for a weekend trip to Porto in north Portugal with some awesome people. We were drinking beer at the Atlantic coast at 18°C and sunshine. I want to see more of this beautiful country!

Right now, it's the first time in 2 years that I don't have a trip planned ahead of me, as it's job hunting time. We will see where that leads me.

As a nod to my culinarily less exciting trip to Turkey, I had to try the Baklava recipe from The Urban Vegans' new book. Now you might know that I don't really have a sweet tooth and pretty baked items never look pretty when I make them... and I tried anyway, here's the result:


I know, not pretty, and I felt like I had too few (or too small) filo sheets - do they come in a normed-size package in the US that I don't know of? At least they were delicious :)

Testing!

After all this moving, traveling and being ill, I felt like I needed to get back on the cooking track. I was stuck in such a horrible food rut in the last few weeks!

So I was happy to hear that I can test some recipes for The Urban Vegan's new cookbook. I'm working on the presentation as my new flat has a limited selection of dishes, especially bowls.

I barely ever use plates, as 80% of my everyday cooking is either Asian -hard to rice with chopsticks from a plate, soupy or some sort of pasta with lots of sauce, which is also easier to eat from a very deep plate or bowl. I adore French breakfast 'bols', too! Anyway, I need to invest in some pretty donburi-able and ramen-able bowls. Are you a bowl or a plate person?

The first recipe I tried was Farfalle with Shallots and Chard. Dynise is right when she says shallots are often very under-appreciated. You can get them easily enough in the UK, but if you go into a big supermarket in a French-speaking country, the variety of shallots (and all other allium brothers) will blow you away!
This was a very basic dish but the shallots gave it a wonderfully deep aroma!


Tonight we had 'a lot' of snow in London. That is, about 2 inches, but it sufficed to create an utter chaos. I had the final handover for my old flat today, and it took my 3hrs to get home -normally they journey would take 30minutes- after that because the public transport was totally fucked and there also were powercuts on the tube. It's not much fun sitting in a dark tunnel somewhere below Kings' Cross for an hour with no way out! I hope the situation improves, as I'll have to take the train to work on Monday.

So when I finally got home, I started up this nice Humble and Hearty Vegetable Soup. I just adore chewy barley in soups! I'll try to get some new bowls for the next pictures, and maybe sunlight, too!

Quiche and my very first harvest

I don't know about you, but grew up not liking quiche very much. Quiche was what our French teacher made us cook (yup, we cooked in our French lessons) when we actually couldn't cook or what I was served on family holidays in Belgium. It was always fatty, soggy and generally bleh. The fact that I've always hated everything with an eggy texture didn't help much.

When I worked in Düsseldorf, everybody would bake something for the others for their birthday, and I was in pieces when our 60-something omni accountant made a wonderful vegan quiche only for me. (damn, I must make the butter "chicken" seitan from that post again!)

So last week I was blessed with a giant bag of Swiss chard and we had 2 packages of silken tofu in the pantry for weeks (which my flatmate urgently needs for...something. Men.) and I had time to make pastry from scratch. On top of that, my first batch of baby salad leaves was ready to harvest. They made a whole tiny bowl full of salad, with a tomato thrown in - it's too cold in this country this 'summer'. The recipe I used was the basic quiche recipe from The Urban Vegan cookbook, except I threw in the swiss chard and some sun-dried tomatoes and also sprinkled some Mozarella Scheese on top.

Quiche verdict: I loved it and will be buying a quiche pan to make bigger ones, regularly.

This weeks veggie box brought me fresh mint, so I'm drinking lots of Morrocan-style mint tea :) My garden mint is doing so-so as the slugs love it. I didn't know mint had any natural enemies.
Also in this week's box: green peppers, lettuce, lemons, mushrooms, garlic, aubergines, broccoli, cherry tomatoes and a cucumber.


To be honest, I'm thinking about changing box suppliers or not getting boxes anymore at all. I get my box from Just Organic, based in Stoke Newington, so essentially, it's a local business to me. The guy who own it is a lovely chap in the early/mid-Thirties and he goes out of his way in terms of customer service. He delivers in the evenings and is just wonderful when we have complanints. But to be honest, lately I've had a lot of complaints. I know how to store veggies and I know that organic stuff doesn't last as long as supermarket pesticide-laden veg. But when you get a tomato on Thursday night, it shouldn't be mouldy by Saturday morning. The same happened with this week's aubergines and many many of their lemons :( I've never seen a mouldy lemon before I got their boxes.

Plus, while they don't air-freight, the boxes do not really show the change in seasons and I don't get to know what comes from which country.

If you live around London, have you got any recommendations?