Hot summer and zucchini harvest

Gosh, what a hot summer we had. It's so hot it's hard to keep the spirit up. Yesterday I was home with headache propably caused by the heat, sun and too little to drink. It's very important to drink and to eat something sweet and salty.

The positive thing though is that the veggies that thrive in this heat are giving lots of fruits, like zucchinis. I need to be inventive now. Zucchini can be boring, but the neutral taste gives you a wide range of flavours to combine it with. Today I made a frittata with basil sauce. Here's the recipe. Oh by the way. In this recipe you can gladly use those zucchinis that has grown too big.

Zucchini Frittata with basil sauce

Frittata

2 large zucchinis

1 onion

4 eggs

1 hand full of sundried tomatoes

50 g of feta cheese

seasoning

Put the sundried tomatoes in a glass of water to soak (I took my home made tomatoes and those are hard). Grate the zucchinis and onion and put in a colander. Pour over some salt and toss around. Whisk the eggs in a bowl and season with your favourite spices. Chop the feta cheese and the drained sundried tomatoes in fine bits. Squeeze the juice out of the zucchini mix to get rid of some water and mix everything in the egg bowl. Fry in a pan on low heat with butter or oil, put on a lid for a while to cook the top of the frittata.

Basil sauce

3 dl of sour cream

1 hand full of fresh basil leaves

1 garlic clove

salt and white pepper

Mix all the ingredients in a blender until you get a smooth light green liquid. This sauce works excellent with a salad or with roast beef, if you like. 

A taste of summer

We have reached that time of year when the season is somewhere between winter and spring. That time is very long here in sweden and can go on for abut two months. One day we have heavy snowstorm, another rain but we also have sunny days when the sun is warming our pale faces. 

This time of year cause every one to long for spring and green grass. 

Luckily, I have saved a bit of summer by drying black currant and raspberry leaves for tea. These leaves makes an excellent green tea.

Pour nearly boiling water over a heap of leaves and let them soak for a few minutes. You can easily pick the soaked leaves up with a spoon.

There you have it, a lovely and mild black currant flavoured green tea that fills you with a summer spirit.

Raw Valentine dessert: Mini chocolate and carob tartelettes and Vanilla pudding with cherry topping

It's Valentines day!! Of course we should give our loved ones some care all the year around, but I think it's good to celebrate a day like this by giving some extra love. 
I wanted to make something special, a not too sweet treat with those ingredients that is conected with love; chocolate and cherries.

This little tartelette is so deliscious. I wanted the crust to have a caramel taste by adding dates.

Crust for the tartelette, ingredients:
5 dates
0,5 dl oat
1 dle almond flour
1 tbsp raw coconut oil
0,5 dl sunflower seeds
Mix all ingredients to a sticky paste, make sure that the dates are fully dispersed, I used a mortar to this step. Adjust the thickness of the crust by adding the almond flour to perfect stickyness.

Fill two small mini pie forms and push the dough against the walls. Put the forms in the freezer. If you have leftovers from this step, you can fill dates with the paste or roll balls in carob or cocoa powder.

Caramel and chocolate is a perfect match. If you don't have any cacao butter you can use only coconut oil, but that will give the tartelette a very strong coconut flavour.

Filling:
20 g of Cacao butter
1 tblsp of raw Coconut oil
1 tblsp of Almond milk
0,5 tsp Honey
1,5 tsp Carob
2 tsp Cacao
a pinch of seasalt
The almond milk will make the filling a bit softer. Melt the butter and oil along with milk and honey on low heat. Pull the mixture of the heat and add carob and cacao and stir well. Add the pinch of seasalt. Oddly the seasalt makes the filling sweeter and enhance the chokolate taste.

Fill the crusts with the filling and put them back in the freezer to set. After half an hour put them in the fridge until serving. 

Chia seeds are perfect to get that perfect pudding like thickness of a liquid. It looks weird but the non existing taste of the seeds makes them perfect for adding any flavour  you like.

Vanilla pudding
1 tsp of honey
1,5 dl Almond milk
2 tblsp chia seeds
 a pinch of vanilla powder
Whisk everything together and whisk every 5th minute three to four times. Then pour the blend into your serving cup and store in the fridge until serving

Cherry topping 
2 dl Seedless Cherries (sour)
1 tsp honey
pinch of vanilla powder
Mix all the ingredients to a runny jam and stor in the fridge until serving

When serving the pudding you can choose to pour the cherry jam over the pudding, or in small glasses and serve at the side.

Note that each serve contains only 2,5 dates and 1tsp of honey, that's not much sugar if you compare what an ordinary dessert of this kind would contain. 
Have a lovely Valentines day <3

Vegan dinner: grey pea burgers with roots and avocado mayonaise

I'm so sorry that I dont have a photo of the soo delicious dinner we ate yesterday. It was too dark for taking good photos and I have already digged in on the plate before I realized I had a good recipe to share. Really embarrassing... I will post a photo nex time, because I'm sure I will make this recipe again.

Grey peas is a very old crop that the vikings grew as one of the daily grocery staples. It is filled with proteins and minerals. The pea is smaller than the usual pea and is patterned like a birds egg, very beautiful.

Grey pea burgers
 serve 4
3,5 dl grey peas or green lentils.
0,5 dl small dried tomatoes, soaked in warm water
fresh basil leaves ca 7
1 garlic clove
1 small onion
1,5 tsp vegetal buillon powder
1,5 b- yeast powder
salt and pepper

Baked vegetables
Swedes, parsnip, potatoes, carrots in the amount for 4
0,5 dl small dried tomatoes

Avocado mayonaise
2 ripe avocados
0,5 dl rapeseed oil
stenches of tabasco choose your own amount
1 pressed lime
salt and pepper

Soak the peas (or lentils) in plenty of water over the night. Boil the peas on low heat for 15 minutes.
Peel the roots and chop in big chunks and bake them in the owen for 40 minutes in 200 degr C, with some ground pepper and rapeseed oil. Peel and chop the garlic and onion finely fry in a pan with a little oil on low heat. Strain the boiled peas pour in the mixer with the other ingredients and mix.
Heat a frying pan with vegetable oil (rapeseed oil). Spoon up some pea mix and roll burgers and fry. Fry the burgers in quite a high temperature for a minute per side. If you fry too long the burger will be soft and falls very easily apart. Set the burgers aside on a serving plate and keep them warm.

Throw in the soaked dried tomatoes in the owen on top of the roots the remaining 6 minutes.

I didn't rinse the mixer from rests of pea mix, because I thought it just added some extra filling and spared me some time. Mix all the engredients for the mayonaise except the oil. Pour slowly the oil during mixing in the blender.

Hopefully the roots are baked and ready to be served with the burgers and the mayo.
The burgers and the mayo can also be served like a hamburger between breads with some fresh salad. Hm, thats what I'll do next time and post a photo of it.
I hope you'll try this recipe. My fellow who can be a bit picky with vegetables and loves meat, he loved this dish (the best dinner I have eaten for ages, he said).

I use cold pressed rapeseed oil because of it's perfect balance of fatty acids and it adds a mild nutty taste to the dishes.

Below is a photo of the flower of grey peas. It has a lovely two toned purple that changes colour after one day.

Vegan and gluten free cookies

This is a nice treat made of almond pulp and yellow pea flour. 

350 ml almond pulp

150 ml pea flour

1 tsp baking powder

mix these ingredients toghether in a bowl

carefully melt

100 gr coconut oil

add a large tbsp of honey to the melted coconut oil. And pour the mixture in the bowl and blend thouroughly to a soft dough. Add some chopped dried apricots. 

Take a tbsp of dough and roll balls, put them on parchment paper and press them down. Bake the cookies in a owen preheated to 175 degrees C for 15 minutes. If the cookies feels moist. Lower the temperature and let them dry for another 15-20  minutes.

Breakfast smoothie

This is my breakfast for today. A banana chokolate smoothie.

2 dl homemade youghurt

1tsp cacao powder

3 dried apricots (eco)

1 peeled banana

 Mix everything in the blender and drink. As I didn't put the apricot in water first there were some chunks left after mixing, but that gives just the smoothie another dimension.

The youghurt is homemade from milk with added bacteria from fit line. This batch were made just by taking 50 ml from the first batch added to the next. If you buy youghurt with living bacteria in the store you can do the same with that.

Juicing

We didn't get a single apple last summer, it was so rainy and cold. This summer, on the other hand has been so sunny and warm and my appletrees are almost breaking of the weight of apples. A good thing is that the apples of my 3 trees doen't get ripen at the same time. I have three different sorts and they have different purposes.

I can highly recommend to juice the apples and store it in the freezer to get good summer vitamins during the whole winter.

It is important to rinse the apples first to get rid of bug and eventual dirt. Another note; I pick my apples from the trees, not the ground.

The apples doesn't need peeling, cut them in chunks and remove kernels and the little twig.

When juicing, you get a foam on top and sediment at the bottom of the can. Skim the juice and try to avoid the sediment when pouring up in bottles for the freezer. 

For serving, you can add a third of water. I have to add a little sugar as well to get the children to drink.

My juicing machine looks like this, the brand is OBH Nordica. Waste comes out to the left and the juice in the can to the right. It is a bit limited when using. For example you need to stop adding apples and rinse the clogged strainer/separator every other minute.

If you don't own a juicer or can afford one, at least here in Sweden, there are farms that have juice presses where you can leave your apples to get juice in return for a fair price.
I'ts a huge problem here (well for me) were people don't bother to take care of all the fruit but they buy their juice and jam in the store instead, weird or what?