The best soup in the world

Well, hello there. It's been a while since I posted something. 

Frankly I have been busy neglecting my health by working and studying. 

But now spring has arrived and I have more time and energy to put on deliscious and healthy food.

First harvest in the garden comes from weed, the nettles. Use gloves and a scissor to pick them, you surely know why. Nettles makes a perfect tasty and healthy soup, filled with vitamins and minerals.

Nettle soup

Pick 3 L lightly packed nettles. Wash them in the sink with lots of water.

Boil a large pan with water and boil the nettles a few minutes.

Drain off the water, but save it to water the plants (great fertilizer)

Chop the nettles finely in a blender

Take the large pan and melt a large piece of butter (or coconut oil)

Whisk down 3 tablespoons of flour in the melted butter

Add 2-3 liters of boiling water while stirring

Add vegetable broth (3 chunks or 1 dl liquid)

Add the nettles and boil for 5 minutes

Give the soup some spices, pepper and chili

Eventually add salt.

Serve with egg halves

Vegetable salt

Hello there!

I miss a real herb garden. It's not that there's lack of space, the case is that I don't have the time to finish the building of it, a stone wall that will preserve the heat from the sun for the herbs to thrive. 

In the garden I had before this one, I had a bed for my herbs and made a very tasty herb salt every year.

This blog gave me the idea of making a salt of vegetable. It's in swedish, sadly for you foreign readers, but she has many great ideas about growing and cooking vegetables.

Anyhow, here's my version of veggie salt

1 onion

a couple of kale leaves

a bunch of tips from the sugar snaps

a grab of nasturtium leaves

A big bunch of basil leaves (the only herb)

two chilis (not the hot ones)

and a grab of maché lettuce

see photo below.

Mix all the ingredients above in a blender and pour 200 ml salt while still blending. The salt will absorb the juices and preserve the tastes of the greens.

Dry the salt in the owen with the door slightly open, the temperature should not be higher than 50 degrees Celsius. Store in nice glass jars.

This salt goes to everything and add a lovely taste to any dish. 

Hot and sweet tomato marmalade

It looks like two cans of sunshine and it's not far from the truth. This marmalade is easy peasy to make and you only need three ingredients to make it.

First of all, you need tomatoes. This tomato is a Russian outdoor bush tomato. It is easy to grow in buckets and it gives you plenty of golden mild tasting tomatoes.

Then you need a chili fruit. Just one. This chili is not very hot so I used a large one. If you use a hot chili, use only half of the fruit. The red one at the bottom was picked for this marmalade to give it some red decorative dots.

Recipe

1 kg peeled yellow tomatoes cut to pieces

1kg sugar with pectine (marmalade and jam sugar)

1 chili fruit finely choped

Add everything in a saucepan and boil on medium heat until the tomatoes "falls apart". Remove carefully any foam and pour in clean cans. 

I'm so happy for this years growing season. All my vegetables has been growing very successful this summer. Usually at least one wont thrive. The warm weather with watering everyday did the trick. Here's my bed with kidneybeans ready to be picked, enclosed by nasturtiums.

My sugar snaps has grown all the way up in the apple tree. It's over 2m height and still gives me crispy, sweet and stringless snaps. This is the best sort ever it is called English saber (but translated)

 This is how I treat my vegetable beds when the crops are harvested. I turn the tops and soil with a fork and mix it with grass clip.

 Do you grow your own veggies? 

Taking care of the harvest

It has been a great summer for my lemontree this year. I planted it in a huge pot and it growed wildly. I haven't seen any budding lemons though even if we got lots of flowers. Maybe it put all energy to grow branches and leaves. 

Anyway the branches became to long so I cut a few off and put them in pots to see if there will be any new lemontrees. Wouldn't those become a great christmas gift or birthday present?

 The leaves in front of the pots will be stored in the freezer. Yes these will be excellent for adding a hint of lime in a stew. You know you can buy those dried lime leafs in asian food stores? These are the same but when you put them fresh in the freezer you save all the essential oils for the stew. I get some clever ideas sometimes ;-)

Another clever idea when you get too many zucchinis. Chop them up and put them in the freezer. I chop them in slices and cubes. The slices are a great topping on a home made pizza.

I don't buy much canned or frozen vegetables during the winter season when I grow and store the excess my own.

Tea blend

Maybe a bit late for posting this. But if your garden is fresh still there is time to pick leaves for a tea blend.

Last years blend were only made of black currant leaves and raspberry leaves but this year I added rose leaves both flower and bush and flowers from red clover.

The leaves are poured over a oven tray with a parchment paper on. Let the leaves dry in room temperature on an airy space. Store the leaves in a tin can (not airtight). This will be my brew in the darkest months of winter when I need a sip of summer memories.

C-vitamin rich black currant juice

Another fluid post. As I don't get many berries this recipe is excellent for bringing out the best and most of  the small amount. 

You get a ruby coloured drink when mixing 1:4.

200 black currant leaves

1 L black currant berries

1 organic lemon in slices

600g sugar

2 L

Bring the water to boil with the sugar added. Pour the hot fluid over the rest of the ingredients, cover with a lit and let it stay in a cold place for 3 days. Strain and store in the freezer.

Cooling slushie

I recently posted this refresher on my other blog. For you who don't read it I post it here as well because I can't recommend it enough to you. It is soo soothing at a hot day.
A watermelon slushie. It's so easy and refreshing.

Cut watermelon in cubes, throw in a plastic bag and put it in the freezer. I buy whole melons and freeze the excess. If the cubes are deep frozen, let them soften for about half an hour. Put them in a blender and mix until you get a smooth slushie. If you like add water or soda.

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?

Todays Green smoothie

Todays green smoothie comes entirely from the garden. The apples are ripen and the rest, sallad, kale and sugarsnaps has been harvested for a while.

The ingredients on the tray gives two small bottles of green smoothie

Here's a little snapshot of the next years crop. Broad beans, blue peas, sugar snaps and grey peas. It is very easy to harvest and save peas and beans to sow.

Grow your own "bamboo" sticks

Ok, it's not exactly bamboo sticks. It's rather the function of them I describe. The candy smelling, white blooming bush; schersmin. I have one in my garden and every spring, a few stems are dead (while new ones sprouting). These dead ones are perfekt as growing support, straight, sturdy and long lasting. 

This is how my borlotto lingua beans looks with the stems as support. During the winter they are stored outdoors leaning against a wall and holds the next growingseasons without breaking.

 Picture of the lunch, squash, salad, leaves from celeriak, radish, onion tops and pesto of dill.

Different containers for growing seeds

It's time for growing vegetables. As many vegetables are sensible for the frost nights of the north they need to start the season indoors or in a green house. If you have a large vegetable garden you need lots of pots for the seeds. But with a bit of fantasy these pots can be almost for free. 

With a pot maker you can make pots out of news paper. These are perfect for plants that you don't need new pots along the indoor growing. Here are some pots with sweet corn. The paper pots stands on a plastic tray for minced meat.

A tray for lego bits, actually Legos Christmas calendar with 24 boxes is another clever solution. I grow suedes in this tray . 

All my kaleplants have problems with earth bugs. They are completely invisible so it took time until I realised why all my seedlings died. To protect the kale plants, you need a moist air. Plastic containers for baby tomatoes are perfect little green houses. They will keep the air moist.

This is how it looks under the lid.

To be continued ;)

Blood orange

I highly recommend you to buy fruits and vegetables depending of the season. Right now it's the season for buying the Italian blood oranges. They are sold cheap in nets right now.

These oranges are actually ordinary oranges. What makes them red in the meat and peel is the temperature differences between cold frosty late winter nights and warm days. The red colour is antocyanin an antioxidant  good for your immune system. So beat the winter flu with a glass of fresh pressed blood orange.

Weird looking porridge

Chia seeds looks so weird, they reminds of small insects eggs with a grey brown crackled surface, and they taste nothing.

If we think a little positive about this; the benefit of something that tastes nothing is that you can combine with ingredients that taste lovely as they are.

If you put them in water, the chia seeds swells and form a clear gel around the seeds. That makes them look even spookier. The benefits of this seed is that it contains lots of omega 3 oils and is high in proteins and lots of other nutrients.

To get a tasty porridge I top it (hide the weird seeds) with sliced bananas, coconut flakes and pumkinseeds, yum.

Easy peasy porridge

2 Tbsp of chia seeds

100 ml water

mix it in your porridge bowl and keep it in the fridge over night. In the morning the porridge is ready to eat. Just add a little salt to it if you like and serve with different toppings

Irresistable spread

 Those mornings you feel for something heavier or those times when you need a snack, a seed cracker with almond butter is a tasty choice. When I heard about almond butter I googled lots of recipes and found out how easy it is to make. And as many people are allergic to nuts and peanuts (like one in our family) this is a good replacement for peanutbutter.

Almond butter
Roast the almonds 300ml in a hot frying pan. I think its better to roast them quickly than on low temperature and slow. If you wan't to go completely raw, skip this step.
Pour the almonds in your food processor and start the engine.........
......Use a good portion of patience here........
At first it looks like grated almonds but as you continue the almonds will turn to a more heavy dough. Continue to mix until you get a creamy spread, add a little salt and there you have a spread full of energy.

The allergic son has looked at his bigbrothers nutella spread with envy. With this spread you can make something similar, almost exactly in taste. Add honey, cacao, and vanilla powder. Be careful about the cacao the taste of the spread is already quite strong. If it gets to thick, add some sunflower oil to the spread. 

Both the almond spread and the fake nutella is full of calories so it's not a daily treat ;)