Cherry gazpacho - a perfect summer treat! (vegetarian, gluten-free, kosher)

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Cherries bring an unexpected twist to tapas classic gazpacho. Cherry gazpacho is a quick, easy and refreshing treat - perfect for lazy summer days!

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Cherries have arrived at the shops and I. Can't. Get. Enough. Of.  Them. 

Another thing I can't help is my thoughts drifting back to last summer and to the day, when I'd just schlepped back home. Armed with the first cherries of the summer I started to put together a photo which quickly became one of my all time favourites. 

And boy, am I glad it did, as that very photo turned out to be the first photo of first my book (yes, still only available in Finnish...) 

Full of excitement (and nerves) I sat down and tapped away a blog post in which I shared my big news with you all. 

Luckily there was more excitement than there were nerves as in case I had at this point had any idea just how much work would lie ahead, I would have probably paralyzed on the floor, stuffing my panic-stricken face with every single one of those cherries. 

Good job I didn't, as that day resulted in two cherry recipes for the book: this cherry gazpacho and a cherry and red wine compote I served with my no-churn, no-fuss cream cheese ice cream.

It was no mean feat for the test audience either. Their ungrateful job was to decide, which of my gazpachos would end up in the book: watermelon gazpacho or this cherry gazpacho.

In the end Cat Blogger's vote turned out to be the winning one.

"Cherry gazpacho - without a doubt. They're both delish, but this is just the right amount of... well, weird!"

My cherry gazpacho is inspired by the tapas bar streets of Malaga, where Dani Garcia's, one of the region's most renowed chefs' version has garnered a veritable cult following. 

So, in case you find yourself lost and hungry in Malaga, make sure to head over to his restaurant KGB!

As a tapas this serves 4, as a shot up to 12

Gazpacho de cerezas – cherry gazpacho:

500 g pitted cherries (appr. 700 g unpitted ones)

1 tomato

½ red bell pepper

½ red onion

½ jalapeño

1 dl olive oil

1 tbsp red wine vinegar (or sherry vinegar)

1 tsp salt

To serve: crispy, roasted Serrano ham crisps and/or crumbled Feta cheese

Halve the tomato and remove the hard core.Do the same with the pepper. 

Measure the ingredients into a blender/ food processor and whizz until smooth. For the silkiest, smoothest finish, run the gazpacho through a sieve.

Chill for at least a couple of hours before serving (as this will also let the flavours develop).

Check the taste, add more salt and/ or vinegar if needed and serve. Ahhhhh.

And now over to you! What are your favourite gazpachos? 

The traditional take? Ajo Blanco; the white gazpacho? Cooling cucumber version? My fruity watermelon variety? 

Or hey - would you like to share your own recipe (please do!)

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Churros con chocolate - fool-proof churros with chocolate and orange sauce (vegan, kosher)

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Sunday is no fun day without churros. With my fool-proof recipe you, too, will turn your kitchen into a churreria in less than half an hour!

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Sunday in Andalusia is not Sunday without freshly fried churros, dipped in thick and oh, so divinely rich chocolate. 

That seems to be the case in our household, too - these days people keep flocking over for weekend sleepovers just to gather around the steaming pile of churros which magically appears on the kitchen table every Sunday. 

Ok, magic might have less to do it that yours truly, but with this fool-proof recipe of mine you don't even need magic. In less than half an hour you, too, can turn your kitchen into a churreria!

While the process is easier than you would ever believe, you do need one of those professional, lined piping bags.

Usually churrerias only sell churros  in the morning and again in the afternoon, but luckily at home you can go crazy over them any time of the day. 

So, go on - spoil someone you love already this weekend!

For more flavour you can also add 1/2 tsp of cardamom, 1 tsp of finely grated lemon (or orange) zest or 1/4 tsp of cinnamon into the churro dough. 

In case you like your chocolate with an extra dose of pasión, you can infuse the milk with a half a red chilli instead of orange.  

¡ Aye caramba!

Depending on the size the recipe yields 10-14 churros

Churros con chocolate:

3,5 dl water

3 tbsp vegetable oil

250 g all purpose flour

1 tsp bicarb

1 tsp baking powder

2 tbsp sugar

½ tsp salt

For frying: ½ l neutral vegetable oil

For serving (optional): cinnamon sugar (0.75 dl sugar combined with 1 tbsp cinnamon)

Orange and chocolate sauce:

2 dl full-fat milk (or vegan substitute)

the peel of an orange, preferably in one strip

200 g chocolate (around 43% cocoa is good), vegan substitute if needed

Measure oil and water into a pot and bring to boil. Combine dry ingredients. 

Once the water boils, remove it from the heat and stir in the dry ingredients until you're left with a smooth dough. Leave to cool, covered for half an hour. In the meanwhile prepare the chocolate sauce. 

Pour milk into a small pot with the orange peel. Bring to boil and remove from the stove. Cover and leave to infuse for about w5 minutes. Then remove the orange peel and bring milk to boil. Add roughly chopped chocolate, stir until smooth and leave to cool. 

Spoon the churro dough into a sturdy piping bag equipped with 12-mm closed star piping tip. Pipe the dough into churros of desired length onto a lightly oiled parchment (this makes them easier to dip into the hot oil and also enables you to fold them into any shapes you want such as hearts or letters prior to frying).

The ideal thickness is about that of a finger as anything thicker than that tends to easily remain raw in the middle. 

Heat the oil in a heavy-bottomed pot (180°) and fry the churros in batches until golden and crunchy. Drain quickly on kitchen towels and, if desired, toss in a cimmanon sugar.

Serve with chocolate sauce and enjoy.

¡ Buenas dias mundo!

Have you ever made churros yourselves? What are your weekend breakfast treats?

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Hasselback potatos - one of the best things you can make out of potatos (vegan. gluten-free, kosher)

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Hasselback potatos is a Swedish classic and one of the best side dishes in the world! 

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Many interns probably don't have terribly great experiences of internships. Sure, being forced to tolerate humiliation and getting treated like a second class monkey is awfully efficient method of character building, but at least in my experience rarely leads to actual employment. And why would it - who'd want to actually pay you for something they can always get someone to do it for free by labeling it as "world experience"?

My experiences range from weird to good. I've been answering phones and making coffee (just guess if university degree was actually required for even those jobs?) but then I've also managed to amass experiences such as Finnish Embassy in Tunisia. 

I was fortunate/ unfortunate (much like beauty, this one's in the eye of the beholder) to move into the country mere days after their revolution, which went on to ignite the Arab Spring the aftermatch of which still conties today; six years on. The unique timing mean I really got my hands dirty, for reporting back to Ministry of Foreign Affairs from the refugee camps on Libyan border to photographing demonstrators being shot to death at my door step.

Ah. Interns, those unsung heros. It's not often they get to leave their mark in history, but sometimes it does happen. Such was the case of Hotel Hasselbacken's restaurant and Leif Elisson, a cook student from Värmland working there in 1953.

Leif got an idea to elevate the humble potato to a whole new level. The result was instant classic (named after the hotel of course and not him...) : Hasselback's potato. Just imagine if they'd had Instagram back then - that Eureka moment would have totally gone viral and within the next 48 hours we'd have all been emptying the potato sehelves in supermarkets across the world!

60 years on Hasselbacken's hotel and restaurant still stand next to Djurgården; still serving this dish on their menu. Go, Leif!

As a side dish for 4-6 people

Hasselback potatos:

6 largeish baking potatos

6 tbsp butter( margarine/ oil

4 cloves garlic, peeled and bruised with the back of the knife
3 sprigs rosemary

salt, white pepper

2 tbsp bread crumbs (gluten-free if needed)

Measure butter, garlic and rosemary into a small pot. Melt over high heat until the butter stops foaming. Remove from heat and let the flavours infuse the butter while you prepare the potatos. Pre-heat oven to 225°c (in a convection oven 200° should do). 

Peel the potatos and pat dry (if you're using thin-skinned potatos, you can also use them as they are).

Using a sharp knife, cut incisions into the potatos a couple of mm apart form each other, being careful not to slice the potatos all the way to the bottom. The easiest way to do this is to cut the potato while resting it on a wooden spoon as this will prevent the knife from accidentally cutting all the way through.

Place the potatos into a buttered/ greased oven proof dish. Brush them generously with half of the butter and season (equaly generously) with salt and pepper. Bake at 225 for 25 minutes. 

After 25 minutes brush the potatos with the remaining butter (and the butter on the bottom of the dish) and scatter bread crumbs on top of the potatos. If you want, you could also insert rosemary leaves into the incisions, which will have started to open up by now. Continue cooking for another 25-35 minutes (depending on the size) until potatos are cooked and soft all the way through.

Serve. For instance with steak or fish.  

You can also let your imagination run wild with these babies (Iäm sure Leif would approve).

You could subsitute some or all of the bread crumbs with Parmesan. Or you could add crunchy bacon bits into it (can I get an Amen?). When serving these with fish, you could combine bread crubs with chilli flakes and/ or finely grated lemon zest. 

Familiar with Hasselback's potatos yet? How would you pimp yours?

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Creamy and dreamy soup with caramelized onions and chestnut spread (kosher, vegan, gluten-free)

Creamy soup with caramelized onions and chestnut spread only requires a few ingredients but the result is so dreamy!

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Aftter feasting on Sweden it was time for home-coming and bitter return to the reality where I'm expected to cook my own food. Motivation was close to zero, but so (after all the culinary conquests) so was the balance of my bank account. 

The situation wasn't made any better by the fact that by the time my broken heart finally allowed me to keep any food down, I had happily outsourced the catering and kept wolting what ever I needed to stay alive, directly to my bed.

The darker side of life as a food blogger, vol. 143

When I finally managed to convince myself to at least try and pick myself up, it felt as if I'd never even held a ladle  - let alone a camera. Oh, how quickly the mighty fall indeed.

Luckily sometimes cheap and easy mean delicious, too, as this creamy soup with caramelized onion and chestnut spread prove. 3 ingredients I found in the fridge and... well, that's it, really. 

What really made it sing, though, was a tube of crème de marrons (chestnut spread) that I brough back from my trip. It lends the soup gentle sweetness and richness, but in case you don't have one on hand, no problem. In that case I'd probably add a bit of brown sugar (a spoonful of unsweetened peanut butter might do the trick, too!)

It's impossible to find an ingredient as cheap as onion - a kilo will set you back less than €1. But toss it into a pot to caramelize for an hour and whoah - you've got yourself such fantastic, sweet and savoury depth of flavours you couldn't ask for more. 

While cheap and cheerful, there is certain je ne sais quo in this  - you could easily serve it as a starter at a little finer function, too. 

Serves 3-4

Creamy soup with caramelized onions and chestnut spread:

roughly 1,1 kg onion (after peeling and trimming you're left with 1 kg)

2 tbsp butter (or oil) 

1/2 tbsp balsamic vinegar

3 tbsp finely chopped fresh thyme (or 1,5 tbsp dried)

7,5 dl vegetable stock

1 tube (78 g) chestnut spread (crème de marrons)

3/4 tsp salt

3/4 tsp black pepper

2 dl couble cream, loosely whipped (or a vegan substitute such as soy cream)

to serve:

roasted onion flakes, thyme (or for a gluten-free alternative: roasted, gently salted seeds)

Peel the onions, trim off the stems and slice finely.

Heat butter (or oil)in a large pot or pan and add the onions. Leave to caramelize over medium heat for about an hour, stirring every 10 minutes or so and checking, whether there's still enough liquid (and that the heat's not too high).

If it starts to seem like they're about to burn, lower the heat and/or add a small splash of stock.

One they're soft and caramelized to beautiful mahogany colour, add thyme and balsamico and stir, scraping off all the bits in the bottomof the pan, too. 

Blizz the onions together with vegetable stock and (if using) the chestnut spread. Check the taste and season as needed. 

Fold in the cream, sprinkle the crunchy onion flakes on top and serve.

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Sourmilk bundt cake with dried fruit - a Christmas classic for a reason (vegan, kosher)

This moist sourmilk cake with dried fruit is a Christmas classic for a reason!

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This year, too, the Cat Blogger's Christmas table will feature some unlikely traditions (tzatsiki, Nigerian stew and one Hanukkah menora-wielding food blogger for whom 2 kilos of shrimps has already been stashed away in the freezer!) along with some more classic treats. 

One of them is this moist sourmilk bundt cake, the family heirloom recipe of which has now been trusted with me, too.

The recipe is so old it actually gives the measurements in coffee cups and the final product is baked over camp fire wearing a loin cloth. 

Ok, I might have added that last bit for dramatic effect, but you get the idea. It's old. But, as the oldies often come, they're classics for a reason. 

My recipe's been converted into a bit more precise measurements (how oh, very 21st century!) seeing how I don't even drink coffee, let alone own a collection of coffee cups. As for the dried fruit, you can use just raisins, or add some dates and/or figs in the mix, too. I use them all as... well, it's Christmas.

While not normally a massive fan of bundt cakes (they tend to be served by dry old ladies and the cakes seem to be every bit as dry and old) I do love this one. Last Christmas I had two six slices (somehow trying to make sense of the fact that not celebrating Christmas in my case seems to mean celebrating at least two of them each year). 

The batter comes together in the time it takes to pre-heat the oven and I've just been revealed that the version I so happily wolfed down last year was actually vegan. 

So, here you go - both versions of the cake! 

Buttermilk bundt cake with dried fruit:

4,5 dl all purpose flour

1,5 dl sugar

1,5 tsp cinnamon

1 tsp baking soda

3 dl raisins (and/or dates and/ or figs (I use 1 dl of each)

1,5 dl syrup

2,25 dl buttermilk (or same amount of soy milk mixed with 1 tbsp of vinegar)

1 egg (or 2 tbsp of chia seeds mixed with 4 tbsp of water)

150 g butter (or margarin), melted

Also:

butter (or margarin) and bread crumbs for preparing the tin

Pre-heat the oven to 175°c  (in convection oven 150° should do). Grease and dust the tin. 

In case using dates and/ or figs, cut them into smaller pieces. 

Combine dry ingredients and fold in the dried fruit.

Beat syrup with buttermilk and egg. Add into the dry ingredients. Finally whisk in melted and slightly cooled butter.

Pour the batter into the prepared tin. Bake at the lower part of the oven for 40-50 minutes (depending on the oven) until a skewer inserted into the cake comes out clean. 

Let cool in the tin and then turn it out onto a serving platter. Serve and be merry!

And along with this recipe the blog is going to bugger off for a short holiday. May you all have a wonderful Christmas/ Hanukkah/ Kwanzaa!

Meet you back here on December 27th, ok?  That's when I'll be presenting you last of the Bulgarian souvenirs!

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Sweet rice pudding arancini (gluten-free)

These sweet rice pudding arancini recycle any leftover rice pudding into such a dreamily light treat that you should be in the kitchen making rice pudding as we speak!

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While not much of a connoisseur of the psyche of any member of the porridge family, I dare to say rice pudding is something there's never any left over, right? Perhaps it's the fact it takes quite a bit longer than, say, oatmeal? Or the creamily rich, comforting texture that just makes people reach for seconds? 

Next time you're making it, go on, double the amount straight away as following day you'll have everything it takes to make these dreamy sweet rice pudding arancini which take the rice pudding to a whole new level.

For a sweeter take on the traditional rice pudding use my recipe for Spanish arroz con leche. Another option is to add sugar (or another preferred sweetener), vanilla and finely grated lemon zest into the leftover pudding. Orange zest and/or cardamom would work a treat, too. Next time I might go even further and hide a white chocolate ganache heart into these babies...!

For  a dairy-free treat, cook the pudding using coconut milk. For a gluten-free diet substitute all purpose flour with coconut flour and breadcrumbs with gluten-free ones. Make sure to use fridge-cold rice pudding - for this purpose you want the pudding to be the stiffer kind. You can prepare these in advance, just make sure to store the breaded arancini in the fridge until ready to fry.

Oh, and another way to make the most of leftover rice pudding? This Aland pancake!

Makes 12

Sweet rice pudding arancini:

appr. 3 dl cold rice pudding

2 dl all purpose flour

2 eggs, whisked

2 dl bread crumbs

For frying: oil

To serve: cinnamon sugar

Using a tablespoon, scoop out little nuggets of rice pudding and roll into balls. Place on a sheet and transfer to fridge to wait while you prep the breading stage.

Measure flour into one bowl, whisk the eggs in another and pour the bread crumbs in a third one. 

Roll the arancini in the flour, then in the eggs and then in the bread crumbs. Make sure to be thorough with each phase, as properly sealing the surface with the coating prevents the filling from leaking out. 

Heat oil in a heavy bottomed pot (180°c). Fry the arancini in batches until golden brown. Using a slotted spoon, lifte out of the oil, drain on kitchen towels and (should you want to), toss in a mixture of cinamon and sugar.

Serve. Enjoy. And reach for seconds...!

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SHARING IS CARING!