Ice cream

I made ice cream yesterday. No ice cream machine was involved! I love ice cream and I`ve been looking for a machine but I haven`t found anyone I liked. They are either too expensive or too big. I don`t want one that is big enough to fill a room and I don`t want to spend hundreds of dollars on one. The smaller ones don`t make much ice cream and I felt that I had give up the idea of making my own ice cream.

I was happy when I found out that you can make tasty ice cream without the machine! You just need a hand mixer! The amounts in this recepy are what I think makes the best ice cream. And it is delicious! This flavour is chocolate nougat.

Ingredients:

3 dl double cream

3 dl (cold) condensed milk

2 teaspoons vanilla powder (not vanilla sugar)

4 tablespoons cocoa powder

50 g melted nougat

Whisk the cream until it gets stiff. Add the cold condensed milk.

20161218_155922Add the rest of the ingredients.

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Put the mixture in a bowl and (of course) keep it in the freezer.

It tastes like creamy delicious ice cream.

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Bananas

20161217_155030-Honey, I think we have to buy bananas. There`s only nine left.

Haha, that`s what happens when the members of a household buy food without checking what the others already have bought. Nine bananas, they will probably not be eaten. Or I rather know they won`t get eaten.

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.

Pizza

I have tried to make homemade pizza. I have tried to make different pizza’s but they haven’t tasted nice. I don’t like the ones I’ve made and I definately don’t like those you buy frozen. The frozen ones don’t even taste like pizza. They are machine made and they all both taste and look like nothing that you get in a pizza restaurant.

Today we bought pizza and it was great! Like all things I couldn’t eat it all the time but once in a while is fine. I don’t know why pizza’s from restaurants are the best. I don’t think it’s all about the oven they have it must be how the make the pizza. The sauce is the most important part and you can tell if a pizza is made with love or not depending on how the sauce is. I like “Margarita” pizza where the topping basically is sauce and cheese. The sauce has to be good in order for it to be tasty. They could just use tinned tomatoes but that wouldn’t make a good pizza.

I don’t know how pizza is normally served in other countries but in Sweden we always have kind of a coleslaw to go with it. It’s cabbage with oil and vinegar.

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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