Chestnut and shallot tarte tatin

Here comes a dish that can be a serious contender to a nut roast when celebrating a vegetarian Christmas or any other winter fest. There are small shallots and chestnuts balsamic glazed on a tarte tatin accompanied by some dried cranberries, which make such a wonderful seasonal dish together.

I found the recipe in this article: Our 10 best roast dinner centrepiece recipes and it's The not nut roast: Chestnut and shallot tarte tatin by Rosie Reynolds. Once I made the tarte tatin, I absolutely loved it!

The only devious task in this recipe is prepping 500 g of small shallots, which can take a while. Otherwise this is quite an easy recipe for a tarte tatin, as long as the turning over bit goes well.

I'm not going to repeat the recipe here, as the perfect instructions are already in that Guardian article. I would really warmly recommend you to try this dish, it's something different for a change. What do you think of this recipe?

Your VegHog

Gingerbread cookies

Of course also this year I had to make a small batch of gingerbread cookies. Once again I used the ready made dough from Ikea, which is very nice and makes things easy. I used my new hedgehog cutter for the most of them and fully kept to the hedgehog theme this time. I decorated them with a mix of icing sugar, cocoa powder and lemon juice. They filled the flat with a lovely flavour.

Christmas market

Yesterday I spent the day in London's Southbank at the Winter Festival and food market. It was as delightful as ever enjoying some veggie food and mulled cider. Here are some photos that I took there.

We also got to witness a curious happening, about 200 cycling Santas rode past us on their decorated bikes. There were also some elves, Santa's wives and a Christmas tree. It was quite an impressive and funny view. However they were a bit too fast moving for my camera, I hope you get the idea from these photos.

In the Southbank Centre we saw the “Lights Are Shining” exhibition, which is displaying lovely lanterns made by school children.

Harlequin squash twirls

I wanted to make a squash dish that could potentially be served at Christmas. I planned this recipe in my head and even made some notes on my way home from work on the train. I could definitely see these squash twirls on the Christmas table and would gladly eat them. I got inspiration for this dish from several twirl recipes I guess, but I still don't think that I have seen anything exactly like this. I was first planning a squash Wellington, but these seemed like more fun. The Wellingtons can always come next year.

In these twirls I really loved the sage and cumin flavours coming through with the sweetness of the squash. Other squash types can also be used for this recipe, I just wanted to use my harlequin now. So here's the recipe.

Ingredients

1 harlequin squash

2 tsp vegetable oil

Salt to taste

Ground black pepper to taste

1 tsp cumin seeds

80 g spinach

3 garlic cloves

Handful of fresh sage leaves

25 g butter

100 g grated Cheddar

Handful of toasted pine nuts

320 g puff pastry

1 egg

Method

Cut the squash into cubes and remove the seeds. Brush the cubes with vegetable oil and roast in the oven until done. Mash the cubes, season with salt and pepper and let cool.

Chop the garlic finely and cook in oil until done. Add the spinach to the pan and wilt. Remove any excess liquid and let cool.

Prepare the brown sage butter by cooking the sage leaves in butter until they are crispy. Simmer them only at low/medium heat so that the butter doesn't burn. The butter should turn brown by the end of this. Mix the sage butter into the squash mash.

Roll out the puff pastry into a rectangle shape, or be lazy like I am and buy it readily rolled out in that shape.

Spread the squash mash onto the puff pastry, followed by the spinach, cheese and pine nuts. Roll it up into a roulade and cut slices from it. You can decide the thickness yourself.

Place the slices cut side down on a baking tray, beat the egg and brush the twirls with it. Bake them at 200C for about 25-30 minutes.

You can enjoy these twirls either cold or warm. Actually they might have been even a little bit better cold.

Have a good weekend!

Your VegHog

Halloumi and red pepper sandwiches

Here is only a quick post to say that I'm still here, even though mainly quiet. I'm only keeping quite busy, so unfortunately don't have too much time for posting. I really hope that I can catch up a bit more over the weekend, even though I do have many plans for then, *sigh...

So anyway, in this post there's a food theme as well. These halloumi and red pepper sandwiches are just my kind of breakfast or lunch when I want something more substantial. For these I used wonderful olive ficelle as bread, fried halloumi slices golden brown and topped with fresh red pepper slices. I quickly toasted the cut sides of the ficelle on a frying pan and brushed them with a garlic clove. These sandwiches were very good, but try adding some hummus and they would be getting even better!

I promise that I will post something better soon. How is your week going?

Have a nice Friday and weekend!

Your VegHog

Twice-cooked broccoli pasta

Today I wanted to share a perfect weekday recipe with you that I recently found. Even though it's December, some ordinary food is still needed of course. This is a beautiful recipe with broccoli cooked twice, first boiled in water and then pan-fried, until it's creamy and served with pasta. There are added heat of chilli and comforting garlic with the broccoli in the sauce, pretty much a perfect company for it. Broccoli cooked this way goes so well with pasta and this could become one of my favourite ways of cooking it. This dish is very easy to veganise simply by using vegan pasta.

Here is the original recipe from The Guardian article by Rachel Roddy directly from Rome: Broccoli ripassati with olive oil, garlic and chilli. Check out the article, as it contains the perfect description of the dish and some other serving suggestions for it! I followed the original recipe pretty closely, but used 250 g spelt tagliatelle to go with my two heads of broccoli. 

Even though this isn't my own recipe, I really want to enter this post to this month's Eat Your Greens a vegetarian cooking challenge hosted by Shaheen from A2K - A Seasonal Veg Table blog. I think that broccoli is always a nice green vegetable to use and this is quite a cunning way to cook it. What do you think, would even kids be into it in this texture and combination?  

Have a nice week!

Your VegHog

Happy Independence Day Finland!

Today Finland has been an independent country for 98 years (can't wait for the big celebration in two years, maybe I should even go there then!). This year I haven't prepared anything special for the independence day, so instead I decided to share 10 Finnish recipes that I really like and have posted here before. I'm linking back to the original recipes. These are quite typical Finnish dishes, made from simple ingredients, honest and tasty, food of my childhood. It's a mix between sweet and savoury dishes and I hope that you'll enjoy this post.

Sweet things first:

Nutty apple pie – All kinds of fruit and berry tarts and pies are very typical in Finnish baking. This one is a Finnish apple pie recipe, very tasty with some added nuts and almonds. 

 

Chocolate and peppermint balls – Sweet chocolate balls covered with peppermint crush made from Finnish sweets.  

Yule porridge – A traditional Christmas porridge, similar to rice pudding, served on Christmas Eve with cinnamon, sugar and a hidden luck bringing almond. 

Laskiaispullat – These super tasty strawberry and cream buns are traditionally eaten on Shrove Tuesday. 

And then the savouries:

Potato pies – These potato pies are similar to the traditional Karelian pies, but filled with mashed potato instead of salty rice pudding. I absolutely love both savoury pastries and should make them much more often. 

Pea soup – A great soup made from dried peas and cooked slowly for ages to achieve one of the most comforting vegan soups for this season. 

Carrot and spelt rolls – The addition of grated carrots to rolls is a very nice thing and this is just one of the basic recipes for such rolls. 

Mushroom and pearled spelt cabbage roulades – Cabbage roulades can be surprisingly nice, especially filled like these ones with pearled spelt and mushrooms and they aren't even too fiddly to make.  

Vegetarian cheesy oven sausages – This is Finnish 1980-1990s working class grub at its best, veggie sausages filled with cheese and then baked, best served with potato mash (of course this is only the vegetarian version of the original recipe). 

Finnish swede casserole – A traditional Finnish Christmas casserole made from mashed swede. This would be a great addition to any vegetarian Christmas feast. 

 

Your VegHog