Freshly Made

These last few weeks, I've been busy. With nothing in particular, though, just work and life and stuff... Been thinking a lot about how I really want to live my life - and I'm sorry to realise, that my dream life is pretty far from my actual life. After being stressed out about how on earth to change this, then realising that I just have to take it one step at a time, I feel myself wanting to cook again. It's amazing how one's senses can go on strike sometimes. 

Now, I'm sort of a project-driven person, with a short attention span. I get these ideas, that I go with for a short amount of time and then it sort of slowly becomes less interesting. I would love to be one of those people, who are consistently... well, anything, actually (Of course, I am consistently doing lots of this, like drinking coffee first thing in the morning, but that's just not very exhilarating, is it?).

In this case, cooking wonderful food, taking tantalising, mouth-watering photos, and blogging about it in witty, clever prose, is something I would love to do consistently. It's not gonna happen. Mainly because I'm not a clever, witty, creative kitchen-goddess. An because I get sidetracked. A lot. But now for my newest idea.

Vegan food. For few days now, I've been eating only vegan food, and I have to say that I feel great. It has given me a lot of energy. Now, I have been a pescetarian for a lot of years (been a vegetarian since I was 12 years old, then at some point started eating fish as well again, primarily for nutritional reasons), so the leap to vegan food is not monstrously huge. The only thing I'm worried about missing at some point, is dairy products, mainly because cheese is so deeply ingrained in my consciousness as comfort food. And rich, creamy desserts....

But there you have it. That's what I'm focusing on right now.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I'll go into my kitchen and see if I can make vegan ris á l'amande, which is a traditional christmas dessert here in Denmark, involving lots of milk and whipped cream. More on that later.

I seem to crave soup these days - it must be the shoddy weather and looming winter. There is something comforting about food you don't have to chew... Unfortunately, my boyfriend has a sincere dislike of my vegetable soups - allegedly because I tend to blend them into creamy deliciousness (what he refers to as 'baby-food'). So whenever I find myself making dinner for one, I instantly see it as a chance to fulfill the soup-void inside of me...

This time, my vegetable supplier had left me with a lot of parsnips - a vegetable I'm not all that familiar with.
But this soup turned out nice. Next, time I will definitely add more spices, though.

Indian-inspired parsnip soup:
Vegetable oil
5-6 parsnips, peeled and diced
2 cloves of garlic, pressed
1 onion, diced
2 green chillies, sliced
1 tsp of cumin powder
1 tsp of cardamom powder
1 tsp of turmeric
1 tsp of ginger powder
1 liter of water
salt, pepper, fresh lemon juice

Heat up the oil and let the garlic, onion, chili and spices fry for a few minutes in it. Add the parsnips and water. Let it simmer until the parsnip is tender. Blend it :)
Finally, add salt, pepper and lemon juice to taste.

Serve with a dollop of full fat yoghurt in each bowl and decorate with a little parsley or mint. Afterwards, curl up under your favorite blanket with a good book.
 

When I saw the egg replacement event at egglesscooking.com I knew immediately I wanted to participate! I'm no vegan, but I've always felt sort of weird about eggs - both consistency and origin makes me cringe a bit whenever I use them (and I do use them). I had heard about using flax seed as an egg replacement before, but never tried it. Now it is time, though, to banish them from my muffin baking! Because it works!

I used the recipe here to make the flax seed substitute. Really easy. It had a wonderful sticky, slow-flowing consistency, and an unappealing brown colour.

Next up, I sort of followed the recipe for pumpkin muffins at smittenkitten - except that I used apple sauce instead, omitted the pumpkin-pie spice (and used only cinnamon), replaced the eggs with my flax seed goo and, finally replaced 1/2 a cup of the flour with oat flour.... I did write 'sort of'...

The result was a moist, flavourful batch of muffins. Very delish. This is definitely not my last time baking with flax seed.

Fresh ginger really is one of my favorite flavours. In this case, the combination of ginger and yoghurt added freshness to a dessert, that would otherwise have been quite heavy. I have to say, I loved it.

250 g of fresh pomegranate seeds
50 g of sugar
1/2 a vanilla pod
water
fresh lemon juice from 1/4 lemon

1 tsp freshly grated ginger
120 g of short-grained rice
7 dl full fat milk
50 g of sugar
4-5 dl of yoghurt

Place half the pomegranate seeds in a pot along with a small amount of water (about 1 tbsp), the sugar and the seeds from the vanilla pod. Bring to a boil and let it simmer until the pomegranate seeds are tender. Mash it up a little in order to extract more of the fruit juices. Put it though a sieve to remove the lumps. Add the fresh lemon juice and let it chill.

Put rice, ginger, milk and sugar in a pot and bring to a boil. Let it simmer for about 20 minutes, until the rice is tender and it all has a smooth consistency. Let it chill. Mix in the yoghurt.

Serve with pomegranate sauce on top, as well as fresh pomegranate seeds.

I love taking pictures of food. Over at 1x umrühren bitte, a new montly blog event, food-o-grafie, about food photography is just starting up. I hope I'll get to see a lot of beautiful shots. First round, however, is about the cameras themselves.

My current camera is a Canon EOS 400D, which is also my first digital SLR camera. I didn't buy it specifically for food photography, although it seems this is what it is being used for, most of the time.

As I have no previous experience with SLR cameras, I really have nothing to compare it with. I love it, but it's big and bulky (compared to a compact, at least). I still only have the lens that came with camera (18-55 mm). Guess I should learn to work with that before buying more lenses. Would love a macro lens, though. And a wide angle lens. And a...

For the last few years, my interest in taking photos has grown quite a bit, so in April this year, I decided to finally buy myself some decent equipment. After endless researches on the internet, and asking my camera-savvy sister, it came down to a choice between the Canon and the Nikon D40. My sister had just bought the Nikon. So I bought the Canon (how trivial that my choice should be determined by plain old sibling rivalry).

Since then, I've tried to get a grip on a lot of terms that I was previously blissfully unaware of - such as ISO, aperture, shutter speed and RAW vs. jpg...
I'm still struggling, so I've thought of taking a photo course, just to get the basics right. Until then, I'm just experimenting and taking lots of photos. 95% of them get the delete-treatment. 5% are reasonably okay, but always get a free trip to Photoshop-land before being shown to anyone. But I'm getting better. Here is a close-up of some pomegranate seeds. They look like little rubies.

These little cakes are so easy to make that it can hardly be called a recipe. Vegan and fat free - not sure if they can be called gluten free as well, as I don't know if oat is actually gluten free. I've resarched it a bit and there seems to be some diagreement on that point - can anyone shed some light on that matter?

They sure ain't pretty! But they taste great!

10 fresh, pitted dates
2 bananas
Oatmeal
Maybe some spices if you like - I used cinnamon and cardamom.

Blend the bananas and the dates to a smooth mass - add oatmeal until you have a nice, lumpy consistency and then add some spices. Place small lumps (about the size of a large date) of the dough on a baking sheet and bake for 15-20 minutes at 200 C.

I want to improve my food photography skills, so I've decided to practise on some unsuspecting ingredients...