Spaghetti with heirloom tomatoes and homemade cheesy garlic bread

How is your Sunday going? I hope you’ve all had a relaxing weekend. I will be going for a walk later, do some grocery shopping for next week and cook a Sunday dinner, no other plans for today. It’s a bit cloudy today, but that’s fine for a walk, at least it’s not too hot.

Here is a dish of spaghetti with fried heirloom tomatoes and mozzarella and homemade Cheddar and garlic breads. I got the fresh pasta from a local restaurant, Il Mattarello, in the covered market. They make excellent organic fresh pasta and you can even buy it to go!

As the pasta was such a quality product, I kept the rest of the dish simple. I got some really nice heirloom tomatoes from the market too, and just fried them in olive oil with some garlic, salt and pepper and added mozzarella on top. On the side I served garlic bread made from homemade rolls with some added Cheddar. This was a really nice and pleasing combination, really a favourite dish of mine.

Have a nice Sunday everyone!

Your VegHog

Tomatillo Pineapple

My holiday went past quickly and I’ve already been back to work for a couple of weeks. We had very nice time visiting the countryside and small towns around Copenhagen. The landscapes were so lovely and the holiday was very relaxing. We also visited a bunch of galleries and museums, as there is a government scheme in place that the tickets are half price to all cultural places during the school summer holidays. We saw loads of great art and today we will visit another gallery.

I recently made this salad. It was a creative combination of Tomatillo Pineapple, blueberries, lambs lettuce, basil flowers and feta. It was actually very nice with an olive oil and balsamic vinegar dressing, great summer food!

I’m also growing a huge Ananaskirsebær, Tomatillo Pineapple, plant in my kitchen. It has already given a couple of fruits, but they were more green and not ripe and orange yet, but there are many lanterns ready to be harvested. I’ve kept the plant indoors, because it’s quite windy on the balcony and it has such long thin branches. Also I’m afraid that the lanterns would blow away. It has been an extremely windy July. The plant seems to be happy by the window too.

Have a great weekend everyone!

Your VegHog

Decorated focaccia

I’ve had a lovely week travelling in Denmark visiting many beautiful places on the shore and several museums. But above all, I’ve been taking it easy trying not to think about work, and it has been great. The government has a summer scheme and one part of that is that museum tickets are half price. I will go to one more museum today, as it’s the perfect timing for it now. The weather hasn’t been the greatest, a bit cloudy all the time, but that’s actually a good walking weather. Today seems to be a bit sunnier.

I’ve been admiring this trend of beautiful decorated focaccia breads for a while now and now I got experimenting myself. My bread is of course not nearly as beautiful as some of the creations I’ve seen online, but it turned alright. Such a bread would be really nice to offer to some guests. I will be practising more to make better ones. The bread dough was alright, I just made my basic pizza dough with a little addition of sugar and made it a bit softer. It was rising well and made a fluffy focaccia. The toppings were heirloom tomatoes, basil, fresh onion stalks, shallots and green olives with addition of sea salt and olive oil.

Have a wonderful weekend!

Your VegHog

In My Kitchen in July

It’s July and I just started my summer holiday, yay! I will only have one week’s summer holiday this year and I will be staying in Denmark. Nevertheless I expect it to be quite relaxing. The weather isn’t fully playing along, as it’s very windy and rain showers keep coming, but that won’t get my spirits down, we will just adjust our plans accordingly. Now I want to show you some things from my kitchen, I can’t believe that another month has passed again.

The highlight in my kitchen was probably the Rotten Fruit Box that I got from my brother’s family. It’s a huge box with several bags of different freeze-dried fruit and berries that are a great addition to breakfast bowls and baking, just to name a few uses. The idea behind this is to reduce food waste and to collect the fruit that has dropped to the ground, would be discarded and eventually it would start to rot. It’s a neat idea and the products are of a really good quality.

Another great present that I got was actually my company’s summer present (yes they do give us Christmas and summer presents, mostly kitchen gear): a cold brew coffee maker. I was sceptical at first, if I would ever use such a gadget, but then we tried a batch and the coffee was excellent. We’ve been cold brewing ever since. Now especially in the summer ice coffee is so refreshing. I walk to the station in the mornings and have my coffee cup with ice coffee with me. It’s so refreshing to drink the coffee on the train straight after the walk. It takes a long time to brew though, 12-24 hours, so it’s not that handy for a spontaneous coffee, if you’ve just ran out.

Then I’ve of course been cooking a lot and here are a few dishes. When I saw these cheese steaks in the shop, I had to buy them. They are just the perfect summer addition to vegetable dishes. I made a pita with hummus and a veggie burger with them and more dishes will be coming.

Here’s another veggie burger with “dirty” mac’n’cheese with roasted red pepper on the side.

Risotto is another great dish to cook in the summer. Now I have plenty of arborio rice, as I bought this large pack from an Italian store. This risotto is a mushroom and asparagus one.

I’m sharing this post again with Sherry from Sherry’s Pickings blog, who is hosting the In My Kitchen event.

Have a nice weekend everyone!

Your VegHog

Summer brunch

It is so nice to have some outdoor meals in this glorious weather. It is quite hot here, but in the shade with a little breeze from the harbour you can just about survive. This morning I prepared a little spread on our balcony table with iced cold-brew oat latte, watermelon slices, nectarines, red currants, yogurt with granola and dried berries and freshly baked cheese-sausage-horns with vegan chorizo. It was such a nice relaxing moment with no rush to go anywhere or to do anything.

Now we will go to a street food market to have further treats outdoors. I’m curious about vegetarian zucchini fritter gyros from a Greek stall. I think I’ll have to try that today, unless I'm still too full from this brunch. Let's see, anyway it will be a very relaxing day today.

Have you been enjoying some al fresco dining this summer?

Enjoy your weekend!

Your VegHog

Spicy sausage stew with mini polenta bites

It’s another cloudy day, but it’s still very warm. We will buy some garden/balcony supplies today and just potter around. I hope I don’t see any tempting new plants at the garden center, but I’m sure there will be some that I want to take home with me. Perhaps we would need a few decorative summer flowers, as most of our plants are grown for food.

Here is today’s plantbased recipe. I made this spicy sausage stew with vegan chorizo, roasted sweet potato, bell pepper and tomatoes and served it with fried mini polenta bites. The whole meal was vegan and a very pleasing combination. It was a nice summer dish, I would say. Here’s how I made it.

Sausage stew

1 sweet potato

1 bell pepper

10 cherry tomatoes

1 onion

2 garlic cloves

Salt to taste

Ground black pepper to taste

Smoked paprika to taste

4 vegan chorizo sausages

Vegetable oil for roasting

Cut the vegetables in cubes and roast them in the oven until done. Season with salt, pepper and smoked paprika.

Also slice the sausages and add them to the roasting tin. Roast for a while so that the flavours blend nicely.

Polenta bites

125 g polenta

650 ml vegetable stock

Fresh basil

Fresh thyme

1 tsp salt

½ tsp ground black pepper

1 tsp garlic powder

Vegetable oil for frying

Heat the vegetable stock with the seasoning and cook the polenta in it.

Once cooked, spread it on a baking paper and let cool in the fridge for about 30 minutes.

Cut small shapes off the polenta with a cookie cutter and fry them in oil.

I served the stew and polenta with a green salad on the side, consisting of rocket, fresh peas and spring onion. I also added a tomato dipping sauce on the plate.

Have a nice Sunday!

Your VegHog

Mushroom and pea risotto

It has been very warm over here this week, but today started a bit rainy. I’m still optimistic that it will be a beautiful day. We will soon wonder to town to see what’s happening today. We might go back to our old hoods in Østerbro to see if anything has changed in a couple of months. Otherwise I don’t have many weekend plans once again.

I think risottos are good summer food, so I made a mushroom and pea risotto. I used nice and firm brown closed cup mushrooms, fresh Danish peas and new season onions with their lovely green stalks. It was a lovely combination and just perfect midweek meal.

What is your favourite risotto?

Your VegHog