Rye rye whisky brownies

Juuri unaged rye whisky is the star of the show in these brownies. It's distilled by Kyrö Distillery Company in my birth place in Isokyrö, Finland. I've written about these guys a few times before and just can't get enough of their products. In the meanwhile their range has grown and I can't keep up tasting everything and introducing it here. Luckily in August I will be going to Finland again and should get a chance to sample a few of their products. The title of the post is a reference to the distillery's products and marketing, as they often use the “rye rye” thing.

For the recipe itself I took guidance from Waitrose's Chocolate and Whisky Brownie Cake, but have posted my own version below. I added some rye flour to the recipe as well to make it double rye with the whisky. I wanted to make sure that I'll get a nice and dense texture for the brownie and thought it's best to take some advice from other recipes. Here's how I made the brownies.

Ingredients

Brownie dough

150 g dark baking chocolate

150 g butter

2 eggs

250 g sugar

50 g rye flour

75 g wheat flour

1 tsp baking powder

Other ingredients

50 ml Juuri unaged rye whisky

300 ml double cream + 1 tbsp sugar + 2 tsp whisky

Handful of fresh raspberries

Vanilla ice-cream

Method

Melt the chocolate and butter in a water bath.

Whisk the eggs with the sugar.

Add the cooled chocolate and butter mix to the eggs and sugar.

Carefully add the flour and baking powder and mix into a dough.

Line a baking tin with baking paper and grease it. I baked mine in a 27 x 17 cm rectangular baking tin.

Bake at 180 C for about 35 minutes. The dough should be a bit soft in the inside, which you can test with a skewer.

Let rest in the tin for 15 minutes after the baking.

Remove from the tin and pour the whisky on the top.

Let rest for at least 10 minutes and then cut into squares.

Serve the brownies with whipped whisky flavoured cream, vanilla ice-cream and fresh raspberries.

Enjoy!

I'm entering the recipe to the We should cocoa challenge. It's hosted this month by Johanna from Green Gourmet Giraffe and co-hosted by Choclette from Tin and Thyme. This month's theme is malt, which got me curious and thinking of some nice combinations. I was certain that the maltiness to my recipe would come from either beer or whisky, but went with whisky in the end. It was nice to be baking for a change.

Have a nice week!

Your VegHog

Thai red lentil soup

I made a warming yet summery light vegan red lentil soup with Thai flavours. The recipe is from Yotam Ottolanghi's vegetarian cookbook Plenty More (p. 100-101) and it has also been published in an older Guardian article The new vegetarian: Thai red lentil soup. In the recipe in the book there's an addition of aromatic homemade chilli oil as finish on the soup, which makes such a warming and nice addition. There are also crunchy sugar snap peas on the top of the soup to add a different texture to it and to make it more interesting. I made my own red curry paste for this soup (similar to this one). 

The soup recipe on the web page is pretty much the same as in the book, so I am not going to repeat it here, but I will write the chilli oil ingredients below, as I think that it can make a wonderful addition to many dishes.

Chilli-infused oil

180 ml sunflower oil

1 shallot

1 garlic clove

1 tsp ginger

½ red chilli

½ star anise

2 tsp curry powder

1 tsp tomato purée

Zest of ½ lemon

Heat the oil in a pan. Add the finely chopped shallot, garlic, ginger, chilli, star anise and curry powder and fry at low heat for five minutes.

Add the tomato purée, the remaining oil and lemon zest. Simmer for 30 minutes. Let cool and strain through a muslin.

As this dish is quite legume-centric I would like to share this recipe with My Legume Love Affair #96 June Edition 2016 hosted by Lisa from Lisa's Kitchen.

Have a good weekend all!

Your VegHog

Mikkeller gin & tonic with strawberries and blood orange

We just had quite heavy thunderstorms here, so I thought it would be nice to think about more sunshiny things. Actually not really, as I really like thunderstorms and this time I even managed to stay semi-dry, so can't complain. Anyway when it was warmer and sunnier a while ago I made these gin & tonic drinks with local fresh strawberries and blood orange that had kept in fine condition in the fridge. Now I've definitely run out of blood oranges. I used Mikkeller gin that is a special thing to have and I buy a bottle maybe couple of times a year. I really like it, it's really brilliant quality with nice artwork. It makes me miss Copenhagen again!

So here's the drink and the ingredients for one glass were about the following:

4 cl Mikkeller gin

200 ml tonic

2 strawberries sliced

½ blood orange sliced

Have further a good week, almost weekend now!

Your VegHog

Sausage rolls

Vegetarian sausage rolls are so nice that I could eat them every day. They are really nice especially for gloomy Mondays. I really can't imagine that anyone would miss any meat when eating these ultra savoury sausage rolls containing pearled spelt and spices. The easy way to the savoury result in this recipe is the concentrated vegetable stock, which I used for the first time. It was really effective, so I will be using it much more in the future. It's very much stronger than my usual dry vegetable stock powder. I also added a few herbs into these sausage rolls along with onion, garlic and carrot.

Ingredients

1 onion

2 garlic cloves

1 carrot

Rapeseed oil

½ cup pearled spelt

1 tsp concentrated vegetable stock

Oak smoked sea salt

Ground black pepper

Bunch of fresh parsley

Marjoram

Sage

320 g puff pastry

1 egg

Black and white sesame seeds

Method

Make the sausage filling by chopping the onion, garlic and carrot finely. Cook them in rapeseed oil until they are soft.

Add the pearled spelt, concentrated vegetable stock and water to the pan and let simmer until the spelt is cooked.

Season with herbs, salt and pepper and let cool down.

Roll the pastry out and cut two long rectangles from it.

Fill each rectangle with the sausage mix and close the pastry. Cut the pastry into smaller rolls.

Brush the rolls with a beaten egg and sprinkle sesame seeds on the top.

Bake the sausage rolls in the oven for about 15-20 minutes at 200 C.

Enjoy!

Your VegHog

Favourite eateries in my area – The Rockstone / Neighbourhood / Ebb & Flow

I want to introduce to you some of my favourite eateries around my area. I already once revealed to you that I live in Southampton, in southern England, and all of these pubs and restaurants are quite close to my home, which means that I'm a regular visitor. I will continue this series at some point, but here are three places first of all. They aren't vegetarian places, but all are very veggie friendly.

The Rockstone

Few years back I went to The Rockstone pub at least once a week to share a huge portion of vegetarian nachos with char-grilled vegetables with my partner. The so called Tuesday “nacho night” was a must for us in order to have a good week. It was always interesting to see the seasonally changing vegetables on the portion. Once we tried to have a portion each instead of sharing, but failed quite miserable, the portions are just so huge. We also had a running gag back in the day that I could possibly only take a starter and would even then be too full. That rule still applies to this place.

Lately I've been eating there less, but it's always a good place to go, if you want to get full of good veggie food and dine in a relaxed pub atmosphere with frequent live music performances. They mainly make burgers, but are very veggie and vegan friendly. This is the place, where I ate deep-fried smoked cheese for the first time. It was such a wicked starter, but unfortunately not on the menu anymore.

Last time when I went there, I had the Highway to Halloumi salad as a main and rye bread with red lentil hummus as a starter. The halloumi was properly fried and they didn't hold back with the amount of halloumi. The red lentil hummus inspired me to make my own recently. My partner had the Mexican burger, which is very tasty, spicy and huge, served with fries and a side salad.

Neighbourhood

Neighbourhood is quite a new restaurant with beautiful modern interior decoration serving a variety of dishes many of which are vegetarian. This is a great place to have something more unusual for lunch.

I really like their robata grilled aubergine, pepper, portobello mushroom, sweet potato with flatbread and hummus dish, and also the grilled market garden salad, which is depicted here. It contains barbeque marinated sweetcorn, courgette, peppers, fennel, red onion and halloumi cheese with a basil puree. I definitely have to go more often to this place.

Ebb & Flow

Ebb & Flow is a quaint café with mismatched crockery and cute details in the interior design. This is the type of place where I like to have a break on a shopping trip, just to have a coffee or a quick snack.

They serve an all day breakfast with a really good vegetarian fry up with quorn sausages and all the typical fixtures of an English breakfast. They also have a few vegetarian options for sandwiches and flatbreads. Pictured here are a grilled cheese and cherry tomato sandwich and a roasted spring onion and smoked harissa hummus sandwich. I also always take their pineapple juice with the meals.

I've only once eaten here in the evening and then chose the tapas option. They had several different veggie tapas and it was quite a nice meal. I would really like to taste one of their mains one day.

Swiss chard bubble and squeak

When I saw the article Nigel Slater’s spring bubble and squeak on the Guardian I felt sorry for myself not having those ingredients as leftovers in my kitchen, but as Nigel kindly advised, it's such a nice dish that you can even buy the ingredients extra for it. And that's what I did, apart from the swiss chard, of which I had a few leaves left waiting to be cooked. I decided to use chard instead of cabbage and also made a little addition of onion and ends of packets of Cheddar. As herbs I only used parsley, as I had that freshly available, but otherwise I pretty much followed Nigel's recipe. You can find his recipe through the link to the article. These small fried potato cakes tasted just wonderful on a bed of fresh lamb's lettuce.

I'm sharing this recipe with Eat Your Greens, which I am hosting this month. The vegetarian and vegan cooking challenge is co-hosted by Shaheen from A2K - A Seasonal VegTable. You still have plenty of time to participate and share you recipes with green vegetables by midnight 28^th June.

As I used quite cheap ingredients for this dish and also ends of packets and left-over vegetables, I would like to share this recipe with Credit Crunch Munch as well. This months host is Lisa from Lovely Appetite, and the event is co-hosted by Fab Food 4 All and Fuss Free Flavours.

Have a good Sunday!

Your VegHog

In my kitchen in June

Time to show you a couple of my new kitchen items and some other stuff too. I hope you like the products as much as I do.

I celebrated my birthday end of last month with a Dino party, as seen in a previous post. I just loved this dino party set, although it's a shame that the items are disposable. Luckily I still have enough stuff for a couple of more parties.

My partner got me some beautiful little vegetable and wildlife themed brooches and a hedgehog necklace as a present. He had even drawn this lovely card, so cute!

He also got me this marble plate with a little bowl and a wooden coaster. I really love the more natural and less polished dark marble. These will be part of some wonderful food presentations in the future. I can't wait to use them.

It really seems that I have been extra nice this year (does it only count for Christmas or birthdays too?), as he also got me these beautiful ceramic bowls. I loved the mismatch colours, as he knows that food bloggers need many different presentations.

Another newcomer to my kitchen is purple basil that I found in a shop and now want to put it everywhere. I hope you don't get tired easily looking at some purple spots on my food presentations! The basil itself is very fragrant so it's great to use and a nice change from the usual green.

I'm sharing this post with Maureen's In my kitchen for June.

Your VegHog