Roasted Red Peppers Cream Soup

Sadly, it is that time of the year... we start to think about comfort food, warming stews, creamy soups and slow roasting. Me, personally, I will cling on to summer as much as I can, I'm just not a winter girl.

This recipe is perfect for every season, it is creamy and warming served hot in the colder days, but also quite light and silky served at room temperature in the summer.

You only need a few ingredients, you can go all vegetarian if you want, or you can add some cream  for more consistency.
5-6 roasted red peppers
2 small onions
2 bay leaves
3 springs of thyme
2 tbs olive oil
1 l vegetable or chicken stock
5 garlic cloves
salt and pepper
optional- cream for garnishing
optional- hot sauce or chilli flakes

Start by roasting the peppers. if you choose to roast them in the oven, also add the unpeeled garlic cloves in the tray. 15 minutes should be enough for the peppers and the garlic to be roasted. You can also roast the peppers on a grill or on a special oven top tray.

After roasting, peel the peppers and cut each one in half, removing the stem and the seeds. Also, squeeze the garlic out of the cloves and place it separately.

Heat up the oil in a large sauce pan and add the onion, the bay leaves and the thyme leaves from 2 springs. Cook this for 5-10 minutes, until the onion softens, add the stock, about 1/2 tsp of salt and 1/2 pepper, the garlic and the peppers. Cover, reduce heat and let it simmer for another 20 minutes.

Check for salt, turn off the heat, remove the bay leaves and with a hand blender or a food proccesor blend until smooth and creamy.

Serve in bowls and garnish with some cream (optional) and the remaining thyme spring. It is a wonderful dish and the smell of roasted peppers is irresistable to me, so it gets extra points for that. :) It is also so simple to make, you barely need any cooking skills and it is healthy. You can serve it with croutons, or if you want to fancy it up and impress someone you can also put together some parmesan crostini or garlic bread for added flavor.

Enjoy,

Chicken with Porcini Mushroom

For me, when someone says porcini, I get a tingling in my fingers. These are, in my humble opinion, the best mushrooms you can get or forage (let’s leave the wonderful truffles out of this, shall we? They might be mushrooms as a species, but you can’t make a stew out of them). And, for me, porcini have a different background, as they were introduced to me by the one of the most incredible people in the world, meaning my grandmother. She used to pick them herself in the forest or buy them from other foragers and I loved every tiny bit of that mushroom, any way she would cook it for me: in a stew, with different meats, grilled, boiled, didn’t matter. She was also very picky with her mushrooms: she only used young, fresh porcini, that had no sign of disease or bruising and she didn’t hesitate to throw any mushroom that wasn’t up to some very high standard. Oh, and another thing, she only eats 2 kind of mushrooms: porcini and honey fungus. Anything else, she threw away…  Honestly, nothing else. Bit weird, but she still is amazing and a great inspiration for me. 

So, when I went to visit her a couple of weeks ago, she gave me half a kilo of porcini that she pre-boiled and froze for me. What can I say, I AM her favorite grandson. So, with the mushrooms and my grandmother in mind, I decided to make a dish using the beautiful porcini. Now, chicken wasn’t a choice because I just love it, this recipe works great with some game poultry, quail or pheasant, but chicken breast is plain enough to absorb any spices you throw at it and it doesn’t outshine the porcini, so it’s a viable solution for this dish.

So, 500 grams of boiled porcini means that you can use about 300 grams of fresh ones or about 75-100 grams of dried mushrooms. When using the pre-boiled ones the advantage is that you don’t  have to cook it very long, but with the fresh ones, you get a bit more flavor. 

The meat: 1 free-range (special thanks have to go to my mother for this one) chicken breast, deboned. 

Also: 

2 tbs. of chopped fresh sage, 

a red onion, diced, 

3-4 crushed garlic cloves, 

a spicy chili, 

ground fennel seeds and cloves, 

2 bay leaves, 

Greek yoghurt, 

olive oil, 

salt and pepper, 

some rose wine (go Provence here, the Bordeaux style ones can prove to be a bit too strong for this kind of meat. If using game poultry, replace with red) 

(optional) some turmeric. 

Start of by heating up 3 tbs of olive oil in a heavy base pan, add the sage and cook it for 30 seconds, enough to create a nice and crispy outcome. Add in the chicken, cut however you want, and cook it for 5 minutes, coating it constantly with the sage. Next add the onion, garlic and chili and cook for another 3-4 minutes, after which add the boiled mushrooms, also diced. Add in the spices. Mix everything together and cook for 2 minutes, the add about 1 glass of wine. Bring to a boil on high heat, then reduce to a medium low and let it simmer until the liquid is reduce to half. In the end, add a couple of tbs. of Greek yoghurt and, optional, you can chop some parsley on the dish. Plate it, pour yourself some more of the wine and raise the glass for grandmothers everywhere, be they picky about their mushrooms or not.

Enjoy,

PS:  if using game poultry, make sure to lightly coat the meat in some flour before cooking it. This will create a nice caramelized exterior, as well help the sauce thicken.

Bourbon Beef Steak with Blistered Broccoli and Napa Cabbage

You know those shirts that say:“I cook with wine, sometimes I put in my food”?. Think of that and replace wine with bourbon for this recipe. You would be surprised how versatile good old Jack can be not only for the meat, but also for the side dish. So let’s start breaking this recipe down.

The meat- grab yourself a nice piece of beef steak. Now, I wanted to mix things for the meat so I did a super easy and delicious trick that can give a real lift to any steak. Cook your meat to your desired result (remember that test to check your meat by comparing to different variations of your clenched fist? Use it!). 

With one minute or so to spare throw in the pan 20 grams of bourbon and flambé the meat. Also, it will impress anyone else in the room making you look like you performed a Holywood-like stunt. What can I say? The ladies enjoy a live flambee…. Back to business, let the meat rest for 3-4 minutes, lightly brush one side with some spicy mustard (try and get the type that has horseradish in it) then grab the meat and put the mustard side in some ground pepper. This will give your meat a strong, pregnant peppery taste and you can always use this trick to cover one or more sides of a steak that didn’t really came out your way.

So where should we use more bourbon you ask? Why, the sauce, of course. 

Grab yourself 75 grams of butter, 

some shimenji mushrooms (or whatever type make you happy on the inside), 

50 grams of whisky, 

50 grams of stock and 

the same amount of cream. 

Start of by melting the butter in the same pan that you cooked the meat in. Add in the mushrooms and cook them for 3 minute on high heat, then pour in the whisky. Take advantage of this occasion to perform some more pyrotechnics, cook for another minute, then reduce the heat and add the stock and cream. In about 3 minutes add the salt and pepper and remove from heat. 

For the side dish, I served the meat with some blistered broccoli and stir fried Napa Cabbage. Regarding the last ingredient, it was a nice surprise for me as its taste proved to work very nice with the meat. Simply cut it any way you want and throw it in a pan with a couple tbs. of olive oil on high heat. Cook for 2 minutes and add just a touch of bourbon to, you guessed it, flambé the cabbage, cook for another 2 minutes. Touch of salt and pepper and you’re done.

The other vegetable didn’t get the bourbon treatment, but I can’t complain: Mrs. G liked it a lot, so much that I can’t cook broccoli in any other way. What can I say? Broccoli can do that to a woman. I found this recipe on Instagram, on the @bonappetitmag account. Cut the veggie into florets making sure you keep a long enough stalk for each floret.

Then cut each one in half so you have a flat surface for each broccoli. Heat up some olive oil on high heat, put the veggie with the flat side down in there and cook until you get a dark brown color. Flip the broccoli and place the pan in the oven for 10 minutes. Plate the broccoli and add a splash of lemon juice, some chili flakes and garlic slices. Absolutely delicious. It’s a wonderful way to give broccoli a nice twist, similar to a Ottolenghi recipe for a broccoli salad that applied similar that technique, but in which you first blanched the veggie before grilling it on a super hot grill.

So, that was our bourbon beef dinner, but feel free to use whisky instead of bourbon. As a suggestion here, go for Islay whisky, some Laphroaig would really hit the spot with its peaty, rich taste.

Enjoy,

Lebanese- Inspired Salad

You’ll love this dish it has intense taste, a good level of sourness and some nice crunch, and it all mixes incredibly with the hummus. If you think about the crunch in the bread and the tangy dressing you can realise that it was inspired but the very famous Levant salad- fattoush.

So, grab yourself a romaine lettuce head coarsely cut, some tomatoes - diced, a skinless cucumber -diced, a couple of radishes – thinly sliced (I didn’t have those to use, but they work great). Mix the veggies together. 

Now for the crunch part: take some pita breads and carefully insert a knife in the middle in order to separate the two sides so you can cut the pita in half (basically, this bread is a like a giant, very thin, empty on the inside doughnut, that you want cut in half in order to obtain 2 slick sheets of bread). Use a brush or your fingers (whichever tastes better J) to very lightly coat the bread with some olive oil, then pop it in the pre-heated oven, high heat, for a minute, or until it reaches a dark brown color, similar to caramelized sugar. Remove the bread from the  oven and cut/brake it in to pieces for the salad. 

For the sour part, I mixed in some olive oil, about 2 tbs, the juice of half a lemon, 1 tbs of honey, a crushed garlic clove, some salt and pepper together (use a mortar and pestle to crush the garlic and mix the sauce in there), the result will be a tangy sauce that will counterbalance perfectly the rich hummus. For the traditional taste of fattoush, replace the lemon, or part of it with pomegranate molasses or juice. A different take would also be to add in even a couple of pomegranate seeds to the salad, that, besides giving great flavor to the sauce, also brings in for you some very nice, vibrant color.

And one last thing, the pita bread chips and some light aioli sauce= match made in heaven. 

Enjoy,