Easy cooking

When it comes to cooking I`m lazy. I love to read recepies or watch cooking shows where many ingredients are involved but I`m too lazy to use more than a few things in my food. I would like to be one of those that find pleasure in cooking for hours with a lot of different ingredients but that will never happen. Often I think “today will be the day I make that time consuming dish I`ve been wanting to make” but instead I cook pasta with sausage or something.

20161217_150421Today I made what we call “makaronipudding”, pasta pudding. It might not sound tasty but it is. There are many ways to make this pudding but this is how I do it.

Ingredients:

Macaronis

6 eggs

5 dl milk

Bacon (I used about 250 g)

Oven 200 C

Cook pasta for four persons. Put it in an oven tin.

The amounts for the eggs and milk are not what you have to use, it`s what I think suits this dish. Anyway, whisk the eggs and milk together and add salt and pepper.

Fry the bacon.

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Add the bacon to the pasta. I use a lot of butter in the pan and I put that on the pasta as well it gives the dish a nice flavour.

20161217_152157Pour the egg mixture over the pasta. For more flavour, add some cheese on top.

Bake in the oven for 20-30 minutes in the middle of the oven.

Serve with lingonberry jam.

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Delicious!

Dinner idea

I love pancakes. I love to eat them with different kinds of jam and sometimes I even add some whipped cream with the jam. The only thing I don’t like too much is to make them. It’s easy but it takes time. You have to be by the stove the whole time to either flip the pancakes or put new batter in the pan.

That’s why I like the ovenbaked pancake! It “cooks itself” and it tastes like…….a pancake. I make my oven pancake with bacon because that makes the dish delicious.

For the pancake today I started with the bacon. I fried it in a pan until it was cooked through. -Don’t put uncooked bacon directly in the pancake batter! That just gives you soft bacon pieces that are rather bland in flavour.  I then mixed 4 eggs with flour and milk. I can’t give you any measurements (other than the eggs) because I didn’t use a recepy but the texture should be like a thicker white sauce.

I added the fried bacon to the batter and put the whole thing in an oven tin. I baked the pancake at 200 C for 30 minutes in the middle of the oven.

Serve with lingonberry jam.

Saffron buns

In Sweden saffron buns are one thing we eat around christmas. Especially on december 13 when we celebrate St Lucia. Saffron buns are just that, saffron flavoured (wheat) buns. I don’t like saffron in food but these buns are delicious.

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Ingredients:

50 g yeast

200 g butter

5 dl milk

1 g saffron (I mix it with a little bit of whiskey, that brings out the taste more)

2 dl sugar

0,5 teaspoon salt

1 egg

17 dl wheat flour

Oven: 250 C

Put the yeast in a big bowl. Melt the butter and add the milk to it. Heat the mixture to 37 C.

Add the butter to the bowl and stir until the yeast has desolved (I don’t know if that’s the right word).

Add the other ingredients and work the dough for a while. Leave it to rest under a kitchen towel for 40 minutes.

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Take the dough out of the bowl and work it with a little bit of flour.

Divide the dough into 40 pieces. The shape of these buns are normally like the letter s but I couldn’t get them that way. I just made bun shapes instead.

Leave the buns to rest for 20-40 minutes.

Brush them with beaten eggs and place raisins on top.

Bake for 5 – 10 minutes in the middle of the oven.

 

 

 

 

 

Dogcipan

In Sweden marcipan is a popular christmas candy. I made a not so good attempt at making marcipan dogs today.

I thought I did well until it was time for the chocolate. I wanted to give the dogs some personality and the chocolate would do that. I would “paint” eyes and fur on them. Haha, it ended up looking like chocolate had exploaded on the poor dogs.

The dogs were fine here.

Poor dogs.

Vegetarian Bolognese

I think it’s easy to be a vegetarian these days. Or at least easier than it was a couple of years ago. I have been a vegetarian from time to time and I remember how it was long ago. There were only a few products out there and they were often disgusting. I remember a bolognese sauce you could buy that made me feel sick because it tasted bad. Restaurants didn’t have much to choose from and what they did have was some watery tomato sauce or something like that. I’m not a vegetarian today but I like to have some meatless days. I feel that I can’t eat too much meat and with all vegetarian options out there it’s easy to make a tasty green meal.

Today I made a vegetarian bolognese sauce. I used minced quorn as base. It doesn’t taste much as it is but with spices it’s delicious. I made my sauce with my quorn, tinned tomatoes, onions, milk and cream. I served it with fresh pasta.

Beef idea

I almost never eat a whole piece of beef, I prefer it minced. I think a whole beef almost tastes like blood and that`s why I have to cook it all the way through. In a restaurant I always order my beef well done otherwise I can`t eat it. And I don`t like a big steak because it`s to meaty. What I do like is a minute steak. It`s thin and easy to cook.

Today I made minute steak and potatoes. I fried the steak until it was done and after that I put it in an oven tin. I poured cream as well in the tin in order to get a sauce. On a baking paper I put potatoes, peppers and tomatoes and I cooked the whole thing in the oven. The beef came out soft after having been first fried and then slowly cooked in cream and the sauce that “made itself”was tasty.

Tasty!

Almond candy

I like all sorts of candy. What I don`t like is all the sugar it contains. I sometimes feel sick when I eat too much of it. That`s why I`m excited that I`ve found a recepy for a healthier candy, almond candy. I like almonds but they don`t taste much as they are. This recepy makes them tasty and there`s not much sugar involved.

You don`t have to bake the almonds for a long time in this recepy and that means you don`t remove all the nutrients from the nut. Almonds are healthy and they are filled with protein, vitamin B and E and magnesium. I know it would be better to eat them without a sugar but sugar almonds are better than no almonds.

Ingredients:

1,5 tablespoons golden syrup

1 tablespoon sugar

A pinch of salt

100 gr sweet almonds

Oven 175 C

Mix syrup, sugar and salt in a saucepan on low heat. Don`t let the mixture boil. The heat is only suppose to help in blending the ingredients. Add the almonds and coat them in the melted sugar.

Place the almonds on a baking paper. Make sure they`re not in one big lump. Spread them evenly on the paper. Put the paper on a oven tray.  Bake for 8 minutes in the middle of the oven.

Tasty!

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Bacon

I think that bacon makes food delicious. The salty flavour gives almost all food a richer taste. Pasta goes especially well with bacon. I like vegetarian pasta sauces but bacon sauces I like even more. And to serve a bacon sauce with fresh pasta is my favourite meal. I don`t make my own pasta because I`m too lazy and also because I think the ones you can buy are tasty.

This is an oven cooked pasta dish. Like I said I`m lazy and this is easy to make. I make a sauce with vegetables and bacon. In this sauce there`s peppers, fresh tomatoes, tinned tomatoes, bacon, onions, milk and cream. I fry the fresh vegetables and bacon for a while and then I add the tinned tomatoes, milk and cream. I also add salt and pepper.

I put the fresh pasta in an oven tin and pour the sauce on top of it. I put some cheese on it and cook at 200 C in the middle of the oven until the cheese has melted.

Fish

I should eat fish more often. I don`t know how to make fish tasty and that`s why I seldom cook fish dishes. I think  fish needs a good sauce and there`s the problem. With meat you can just make a sauce out of the meat juices in the pan but with fish you need more. There are many ready made sauces but I often don`t like them. And then there`s the fish itself. I don`t like them all. My least favourite is salmon. Almost everyone likes it but I find the taste over welming. Whatever you do with salmon it just taste salmon.

This fish dish started as a sauce for baked potatoes. We had it with potatoes, butter and salt. Because I`m lazy I thought that baked potatoes required too much of an effort to eat (I said I was lazy). Then I began frying potato pieces to go with the sauce and that`s what I do now. To make it even easier I cook the potatoes in the oven while I make the sauce.

I can`t give you the amounts of the ingredients cause I don`t use a recepy but here`s what I put in the sauce.

Creme fraiche

Tinned tuna in water

Tomato purèe

Red onion in small pieces

Dried dill

Salt and pepper

I mix it all in a bowl and serve with fried potatoes.

Fast food

I write fast food and I mean food that takes little time to make. This was fast food. It`s not the healthiest food but I think you could treat yourself to it from time to time. I like bacon and french fries together and that`s what it is. It`s bacon and french fries along with peppers and tomatoes. I cook it in the oven.

In the oven tin there`s eggs mixed with milk, salt and pepper and I cook it at the bottom of the oven. The french fries are cooked in the middle of the oven.