The Belvedere vodka bottle is so pretty. It’s a great Polish vodka, distilled 4 times.

Risotto al Taleggio. In the background you can see Anne’s twisted baguettes.

This weekend I tried to figure out what to do with the piece of Taleggio cheese that I bought spontaneous a time ago. I finally decided for a risotto, even though I was really frightened as it was my first time making a risotto. But I must say that it’s not hard at all! Just stir, stir and stir :-) This risotto has a lot of taste, due to the creamy cheese. It’s a very stinky cheese but really delicious, especially in this risotto. To the risotto we had Anne’s twisted baguettes which were very easy to make and tasted great! Bake them, you won’t be dissapointed!

Risotto al Taleggio
(recipe translated from Zeta)

2 shallots, finely chopped
100 ml + 2 tbsp Olive oil Extra Vergine
300 ml Arborio rice
200 ml white dry wine
1 litre warm chicken broth
200 gr Taleggio cheese, cut in cubes
Maldon sea salt
pepper

Bring broth to simmer in large saucepan over medium heat.

In another pan heat olive oil, add shallots and sauté until tender and colourless. Add rice and stir for a minute or two. Add wine and stir until evaporated. Add 400 ml of hot broth; simmer until absorbed, stirring frequently. Add remaining broth 100 ml at a time, allowing broth to be absorbed before adding more and stirring frequently until rice is creamy and tender, about 25 minutes. When done the rice corns should be creamy with an al dente kernel. Stir in the taleggio cheese and two tablespoons of olive oil. Season the risotto with salt and pepper. Transfer to bowl and serve, preferably with Anne’s twisted baguettes.

Rhubarb and pineapple are two of my favourite fruits. When we went for groceries a couple of days ago I almost started to scream when I saw that they had rhubarb. It was expensive but sometimes you just need rhubarb desperately! I thought a long time what I should do with my precious rhubarb and I finally decided to make a variant of a recipe on rhubarb and pineapple pie from RecipeZaar. The pie is a bit tart, which I love, and it goes perfectly with vanilla ice cream. I’ve changed all amounts and use my own recipe for pie crust.

Rhubarb and pineapple pie

dough:
5.5 dl flour
205 gr butter
4 tbsp cold water
6 tsp icing sugar

filling:
500 gr rhubarb (rinsed)
350 gr pineapple rings (one can)
50 gr flour
200 gr icing sugar

to serve:
ice cream
icing sugar

Combine the flour, sugar and butter to a grainy mixture. Add the water and combine to a soft dough. Put aside 1/5 of the dough (put it in the fridge) and press the rest over the bottom and sides of a spring form. Place the spring form in the fridge for 30 minutes. Heat the oven to 200 °C and then bake for 10 minutes.

Slice the rhubarb into 0.5 cm wide pieces, cut the pineapple rings into similar sized pieces. Put the fruit in a bowl, add flour and sugar. Stir. Pour everything into the pie shell.

Roll the remaining dough until thin. Cut into strips and place them over the filling in a nice pattern.

Bake the pie in 175° C on bottom rack for 50 minutes until browned and the rhubarb is cooked (the pineapple will remain rather firm). Sprinkle icing sugar and serve with ice cream.

Sorry for the really bad photo which I took it with my cell phone.

You can find them at almost every office in Sweden, the small 2 cl tetra packs with milk. When at work, I always take one to my coffee . Today I got really suprised when I was getting my coffee and found a cardamom flavoured variant of the milk. It smells nice and the idea is good, but my cup of coffee from the hopeless coffee machine was too crappy to improve in any way. I’m sure that it taste much better with better coffee.

I ran out of ideas the other day and lucklily I found a recipe for this warm autumnal bulgur salad in Elle mat och vin. It really easy to make and I loved it, the combination of pomegranate seeds with chèvre and chanterelles was lovely. It’s perfect as starter, but you can also serve it plain as a main dish or as a side dish to meat or salmon. As always I adjusted the recipe a bit; I substituted the golden chanterelles with trumpet ones instead and adjusted the amounts.

Warm bulgur with trumpet chanterelles and pomegranate

3 dl bulgur
600 ml water
1 vegetable stock cube (I actually used fond instead)
1 pomegranate
1 litre of fresh Trumpet chanterelles
3 shallots (chopped)
200 gr chèvre
2 dl fresh plain leaved parsley (chopped)
0.5 dl fresh thyme
1 dl pistachios (coursly chopped)
Maldon sea salt
pepper

Boil the bulgur in the water and stock until done, this should take about 10 minutes. Set aside, put on a lid and keep warm. Rinse the pomegranate. Rinse the trumpet chanterelles, cut the biggest ones into halves. Fry the chanterelles with the chopped onions in butter until all the liquid from the chanterelles has dissapeared and they are done. Add salt and pepper.
Combine bulgur, chanterelles, parsley, thyme and pistachios. Crumble half of the chèvre over the bulgur salad and mix everything. Garnish the bulgur salad with the rest of the chèvre and the pomegranate seeds.

Many countries have their own versions of potato based dumplings; kroppkakor in Sweden, Klöße in Germany, Knödeln in Austria and so on. In Poland there are many dumpling variants made of boiled potatoes. We have the ones with savoury filling “Pyzy“, the sweet ones “knedle” and “kopytka” which are not filled with anything at all. Some people would probably want to add “pierogi” to the above dumpling list, but their dough normally doesn’t contain any boiled potatoes (apart from the filling) so they don’t really belong here.

Knedle ze śliwkami is typical Polish sweet dish, often eaten as a sweet dinner. The Polish kitchen isn’t always healthy… :-) Normally the dumpling dough is made of boiled potatoes, but I found a variant made out of quark (my middlename should be quark…) on the Polish food forum which I read. The result was excellent, and even Fredrik really liked these dumplings.

Knedle ze śliwkami
(makes 12, serves 4)

Dough:
250 gr quark (don’t use Kesella as it’s too runny; I made my own quark)
1 egg
120-130 gr flour
2 tablespoons of melted butter

Filling:
12 small sweet plums
12 tsp caster sugar

For serving:
melted butter
caster sugar
cinnamon

Wash the plums, pat dry and stone by cutting a gash. Stuff each plum with one teaspoon of sugar.

Boil water in a large pot.

Prepare dough in a bowl by mixing all ingredients. Work dough until firm, if the dough is too sticky add some flour. Divide the dough into 12 pieces, then flatten each piece with your hands and wrap it around each plum.

Quark is a kind of soft cream cheese often used in Polish recipes and you’vre probably noticed that I use it a lot, especially in cheesecakes as I’m used to eastern european cheesecakes with quark instead of cream cheese. The problem is that in Sweden we only have Kesella. Kesella works rather well in some recipes but for most dishes it’s just too watery and runny. Some dishes calls for compact quark, and that you solve by making it yourself. This is just the base recipe, when you’re done you can use this homemade quark in cheesecakes (maybe a Tiramisù cheesecake or raspberry cheesecake brownies, pierogi (a sort of Polish tortellini), pancakes (either Polish ones or pancakes that melt in your mouth) or other dishes. Or you can just add some of your favourite spices and put it on a piece of bread together with some tomato slices and you have yourself a delicious sandwich. In day or two I will post another great dish which calls for this homemade quark.

Quark-curd
(makes about 400 gr)

2 litres of filmjölk 3% (I don’t think that it works with the American equivalent buttermilk, but I’m not sure)

Pour the filmjölk into an ovenproof container.

Heat the oven to 100 degrees C. Put the container into the oven for about 1 hour.

It’s done when the quark-curd has thickened slightly and begun to separate from the whey. Be aware that you need to carefully stir with a spoon to see if the whey has separated or not.

Cover a large sieve with a clean kitchen towel (sterilized with boiling water!) and pour everything in the container onto the towel. Let drain for at least 1 hour, preferably longer.