Spinach hedgehogs and hoglets

 

I think that November has progressed far enough to publish the first possible Christmas recipe! I got the idea for these puff pastry and spinach canapés in a recipe by Valio, but I added my own hog twist to it, and also changed the filling recipe slightly. These small snacks are a lovely item for example for your autumn and Christmas celebrations. Here is my version of the easy recipe. 

Ingredients

150 g spinach

2 garlic cloves

1 tbsp garlic infused olive oil

Ground nutmeg

Ground black pepper

Sea salt

50 g emmental

40 g pine nuts

2 eggs

500 g puff pastry

Method

Chop the garlic finely and cook it soft in the olive oil. Add the spinach to the pan and wilt them.

Season the mix with nutmeg, black pepper and salt to taste.

Purée the spinach with the grated cheese and toasted pine nuts. Add one egg to the mix.

Cut hedgehog shapes from puff pastry with a cookie cutter. Obviously any other shapes can also be made.

Brush them with beaten egg and place some of the spinach mix on the top.

Bake at 200C for about 15 minutes.

Done!

With this post I will also take part for the first time in Shaheen's Eat Your Greens Challenge from the A2K - A seasonal veg table blog - very exciting! I'm so happy that she pointed out that possibility to me.

Your VegHog

German street food and drink

If I once more may return to my holiday experiences in Germany, I would like to write about the German street food and drink culture. Obviously in Bremen there was loads street food in the offer as the big fair took place. I have already written here about Ischa Freimaak! In this post I'm also referring to my old recipes, as it seems that I have already posted several recipes for these German “street classics”. What I am noticing, is that German street food has still remained quite traditional, not much has changed since my days. There are fried mushrooms with garlic sauce, fried cauliflower, pizza, crêpes, brezel, poffertjes, donuts etc. I think in large cities a different kind of street food movement is already noticeable, for example in Hamburg's Markthalle in the Speicherstadt. It's a covered food market with amazing international food, and many vegetarian alternatives as well.

I enjoyed some local vegetarian delicacies like Reibekuchen, potato fritters with apple sauce, of which I have also published a recipe here. Then I tasted a novelty potato dish, potato spiral in beer batter. These were both very tasty dishes, yet quite rich on deep-fry fat. A little bit of beer was needed to wash them down. 

Vegetarian Flammkuchen I love, and it's more and more often available as a quick snack to go. I sometimes make my own veggie Flammkuchen, and you can find my flame cake recipe here. 

There are more than enough exquisite sweet alternatives to eat, and the Lebkuchen hearts are of course one of the classics. Unfortunately this time I wasn't so much in the mood for sweet dishes.

During the holiday I also started the Glühwein season by drinking the first mulled wine of the autumn outdoors. Drinking mulled wine outdoors is one of my favourite pastimes for this season and I'm so thrilled about the fact that Christmas markets will open soon! It was also possible to drink beer and wine at street stands (of course in Germany!), and actually the weather was really nice for that on couple of days.

I would like to hear about your experiences of German street food culture. Do I have any German readers who have more idea of the current trends?

Yellow pea soup

Pea soup is an age old warming recipe and a Finnish and Scandinavian favourite too. Today I made the pea soup slightly differently by using yellow split peas instead of green ones. (Here I have published my basic pea soup recipe.) This one was also a very tasty variation and it's vegan as are most of my soups. I don't feel that a cream addition is needed as you can get vegan vegetable soups creamy anyway. Also if you want to save some money, this is a good cheap eat full of protein.

Ingredients

500 g dried yellow split peas

2 large onions

1 tbsp vegetable stock powder

2 tsp salt

1 tsp white pepper

2 tsp ground mustard seeds

Method

Soak the dried peas overnight.

On the next day fill a large saucepan with the peas and water and boil them first 15 minutes heavily and then moderately for several hours, at least about four hours. In the beginning of the boiling, remove the foam from the top. By the end of the cooking the peas really need to get very soft, almost melting into the water.

Chop the onions and add them to the soup after the heavy boiling phase. By the end of this all the onions will almost have disappeared, but they give the soup a nice flavour. Also add some vegetable stock powder to the saucepan.

You can let the soup boil under the lid for most of the time, and just stir occasionally once you have found the right temperature. You also might need to add more water later.

Towards the end, season the soup with salt, white pepper and ground mustard seeds.

Enjoy warm, and this is quite nice with Scandinavian style crisp bread as well.

Your VegHog

Moroccan style stew with onion squash, chickpeas and sugarsnap peas

For a change I wanted to combine a squash with more exotic spices, so I came up with this recipe. I want to keep eating seasonal squashes for a long time still, so new ideas are always welcome. In this recipe I used Moroccan style spicing and combined the squash with chickpeas and sugar snap peas. Would Moroccans even use these vegetables? I'm not quite sure, but I have to say that they work with the spices. On the side of the stew I served couscous with almond flakes and a garlicky yogurt sauce to neutralise the spiciness a bit. I liked this dish very much and I'm sure I'll be making similar ones in the future. I also like making a large batch like this, as this is a good dish to take as packed lunch for the next day, or even eat it two days in a row. Feel free to scale the ingredient amounts down, if you don't want to have spare stew or don't have about four eaters.

Ingredients

Stew

100 g dried chickpeas

1 onion squash

240 g sugar snap peas

4 shallots

3 garlic cloves

1 small red chilli

1 tbsp olive oil

2 tsp paprika

1 tsp ginger powder

1 tsp ground cumin

1 tsp ground coriander

1 tsp turmeric

½ tsp cinnamon

½ tsp ras el hanout

500 ml vegetable stock

1 tbsp honey

Couscous

1 cup couscous

50 g almond flakes

½ tsp salt

Yogurt sauce

150 g natural yogurt

1 garlic clove

1 tsp lemon infused olive oil

Method

Soak the chickpeas overnight and boil them in generous amount of water for about one hour. You can also use canned and cooked chickpeas, in that case this step is unnecessary.

Prepare the yogurt sauce. Chop the garlic finely and cook it for a couple of minutes in the lemon infused olive oil, but don't let it get brown. Let the garlic cool and mix it with the yogurt. Now the yogurt can rest in the fridge until serving. Lemon juice can also be added to it to taste before serving.

Then you can start making the stew. Peel the onion squash and remove the seeds. Cut it into cubes.

Cut the sugar snap peas in half. This is an optional step, you can also leave them whole, if you prefer.

Chop the shallots, garlic and chilli finely and cook them in olive oil until soft. I only use a little bit of chilli, but use more, if you like hot food.

Add the spices (paprika, ginger powder, ground cumin, ground coriander, turmeric, cinnamon and ras el hanout) and the vegetable stock to the pan, and then also the squash and chickpeas.

Let simmer slowly under lid for about one hour until the squash is cooked soft. Taste the stew a few times when you go along so that you can adjust the spices according to your own taste. Only when I started cooking more, I started tasting the food as I went along, and that's really necessary to get the taste right. That's also the reason why I'm not always so keen giving amounts for spices here, because I think everyone wants to make the dish to their own taste anyway.

After the simmering, add the honey and the sugar snap peas to the stew and let it simmer for further five minutes. Veganise this dish by leaving the honey and the yogurt sauce out.

In the meanwhile also prepare the couscous. First boil two cups of water and take the pan off heat. Add the couscous, salt and almond flakes to the pan and leave them under the lid for about ten minutes.

Serve the stew, couscous and yogurt sauce together and enjoy!

Your VegHog

Northern German Brauhaus tour

When in Germany, remember to enjoy the local beer! This was my motto for my holiday in Hamburg and Bremen. I went to several pubs and I preferred the brewery pub types. The service is excellent in these places, it's so refreshing to get service to the table even if you are just drinking and not eating. Unfortunately the food tends to be very traditionally German, meaning that there aren't many vegetarian options.

Here are short introductions to the brewery pubs I visited. Unfortunately I didn't write down any specific tasting notes of the beers, as I just wanted to have a relaxing time. I can assure you that all beers were excellent.

Brauhaus Joh. Albrecht in Hamburg 

We bumped into this place more or less accidentally when looking for nice places to spend the first evening. It turned out to be a great comfortable place to spend a few hours, and the beer was excellent too! I tried both main beer variations: Helles, light beer (referring only to the colour, not the alcohol or calorie content) and Dunkles, dark ale.

Apart from Hamburg there are Brauhaus Joh. Albrechts in Bielefeld, Düsseldorf, Soltau and Konstanz too.

Gröninger Privatbrauerei Hamburg 

I think Gröninger was my favourite among all the brewery pubs I visited this time. The atmosphere was wonderful and the historic cellar was a really beautiful and cosy place. I really liked the service, which was very friendly everywhere we visited, but especially here. We tried Gröninger Pilsener and Weizen. I'm not a big fan of wheat beer, but I was educated by my better half that that was a particularly good Weizen.

We also got a local liqueur recommended by the waitress and of course tried it. It was Hamburg's very own Helbing Kümmelschnaps, a caraway seasoned liqueur, spicy yet surprisingly mild at 35 %. Even I can drink that without twitching my face! 

Hofbräu München in Hamburg 

Hofbräu Brauhaus brings a little bit Munich to Hamburg. This is a huge pub with Bavarian flair, it's full of long tables and the beer is served in huge tankards. I wanted to include this Brauhaus to this post although it represents southern German beer culture. All German beer sorts are very qualitative and brewed according to the German purity law Reinheitsgebot, which means that any German beer can only include three ingredients: water, malt and hops. Thinking of that, the variety in tastes is amazing.

Gasthausbrauerei Schüttinger Bremen 

Schüttinger is the only pub in Bremen that I visited this time. I only had an afternoon beer break in this place, but it would have been good to stay longer and to see what goes on in the evening. Around lunchtime the place was fairly empty, only some tourists were drinking there, which made it a nice and tranquil dark cellar, a place to relax and get away from the busy shopping streets.

What are your experiences from the German Brauhaus type of pubs? Have you been, or would you like to go? What do you think about German beers in general?

Garlic soup

Now the evenings are getting chillier and vegetarian soups are back on the menu with vengeance. To me this garlic soup represents autumn comfort food par excellence. Only a couple of days after seeing the recipe, I cooked it. The original can be found here in the recipe collection of Valio, but it's in Finnish only. However, I followed it fairly closely and gave all the ingredients and instructions here in English.

This soup is just beautiful, but I wouldn't recommend eating it before important occasions or for example job interviews, as it is pretty garlicky! I have never chopped two whole bulbs of garlic into a dish, but this ended up being quite gentle after all that simmering.

If you started feeling like having a garlic soup topped with hot bread and cheese, this recipe is quite a good one, and it's easy as well!

Ingredients

2 garlic bulbs

2 leeks

50 g butter

2 tbsp wheat flour

1,5 l vegetable stock

2 dl dry white wine

Ground black pepper to taste

2 tl marjoram

1 baguette

150 g grated emmental

Method

Chop the garlic finely and chop the leeks into thin rings.

Heat butter in a pot and cook the garlic and leeks gently until they are soft. They must not get brown during this process.

Add the wheat flour and vegetable stock to the pot.

Then let the soup simmer for about one hour.

Season it with the white wine, black pepper and marjoram.

Toast the baguette slices with cheese in the oven and place them on the soup.

Enjoy the soup and let it warm you!

Your VegHog

Ischa Freimaak!

My holiday is now over and I will be writing a few Germany related posts in the coming week or so. I hope you'll like them!

I visited the 979^th Freimarkt in Bremen, which is one of the oldest Volksfest in Germany. It is a fun fair that has been held yearly since 1035, with the exception of the wartime, and it lasts a couple of weeks around late October. This was my second visit to the fair, and this year we even got a good weather for some outdoor fun.

The fair is huge and it's mainly situated on the Bürgerweide just next to the main railway station, but there are also plenty of street food stalls and medieval style stalls in the city centre of Bremen. There is pretty much something for everyone, young and old: rides, sweets, food stalls, drink tents, games, toys etc. I'm not really a type for roller coasters and such, but I still enjoyed the visit just looking around. I was also happy to see a lot of German vegetarian food in the offering.

I wanted to share some of my photos with you to show the good Stimmung on the fair ground. I had so much fun going there with my brother and his family, who live in Bremen, but had especially hilarious time laughing about the tiniest things with my small nephew.

If you now got excited to visit the fair, unfortunately you'll have to wait until next year, as today is the last day of the 2014 fair.