Bacon and mushroom Pasta

Bacon and mushroom Pasta

There is an unlimited amount of combinations you can have with pasta. It's an easy meal and can be amazingly tasty if you are willing to mix. Today I made bacon and mushroom pasta. It takes about 10 minutes to make and is absolutely delicious. 

Ingredients

• 100 grams lean bacon per person

• 100 grams fresh sliced mushrooms per person

• 5 balls of Tagliatelle per person

• a large spoon sour cream 34% 

• fresh grated Parmesan 

Boil water and start bacon frying.

Put your pasta in the water and cook 30 seconds less than the recommended time. Tagliatelle is usually 5 minutes.

You want the bacon to be fried, but NOT crispy.

 

Remove the bacon to your cutting board and put the mushroom slices into the bacon frying pan with the grease. Cut the bacon into bite size pieces and put it back in the frying pan. Spice your mushroom and bacon mix with some salt pepper and garlic as they fry.

 

Use your spaghetti ladle  to lift the pasta from the pot to the frying pan and add a couple spoons of the water too the bacon and mushrooms. Add a large spoon of sour cream and mix everything and let it simmer for 2 minutes.

 

Pour your dinner into a pasta bowl and top with fresh grated Parmesan Cheese.

Potato wedges

For most of us we have realized that we really shouldn't eat deep fried food, but for me potato wedges of fries was something I'd really miss. Luckily it's easy enough to do really good potato wedges in the oven. This isn't as much a recipe as it is tips for getting really delicious wedges.

Start by washing your potatoes thoroughly. Then cut your potato into wedges. Try to get them as even in size as you can so that they cook at the same pace. Once you have cut the potatoes you will need to rinse them again to remove the starch. After rinsing put them on a tea towel to dry. You can use paper towels but cloth is better for the pocket book and the environment.

Once you've got them dry, put them in a bowl and pour a little amount of vegetable oil or olive oil and mix well so that they are completely covered with a thin layer of oil. Take a baking pan and cover it with tinfoil. You want to use tinfoil to help them get crispy. Then place them on the foil and sprinkle with a chili based BBQ spice.

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Preheat the oven to 200C and when it's warm put the pan in the lower third of the oven for 20 minutes. Take the pan out and turn all of them over and then put them back in for another 20 minutes. I like to do some carrots and onion together with the wedges since they take about the same amount of time. The wedges should be fluffy inside and very tasty. Pick and choose what you want to serve them with.

 

 

Today I decided to have my wedges with a homemade burger. One of my favorites. 

Sunset today. Absolutely amazing.

Tonight there was a blue moon. simply stunning. 

Best Chocolate Brownies

 Best Bistro Style Chocolate Brownies

This is an amazingly easy recipe for Brownies. Great if you are simply feeling a little peckish or if you have someone drop in and you want something delicious to serve with a cup of hot tea.

Ingredients:

1/2 cup melted butter
2/3 cup pure cocoa
1 cup sugar
2 whole eggs
1/2 cuo of all purpose flower
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/4 tsp salt
optional: you can add some chopped walnuts into the batter.

Preheat over to 175 C.

Mix all ingredients in a bowl until everything is combined. prepare an oiled baking form and spread the batter evenly. Put the form in the oven and bake for 25- 30 minuted. check with tooth picks after the 25 minutes.

 

 

after testing I needed another 5 minutes to get it done.

Chicken and Bean Burritos

For those who know me they will tell you that I love my Texmex. Today I made Chicken and refried bean burritos.

Chopped chicken Fillet
texmex spice
Refried beans recipe
Salsa
sour cream
burrito wraps
grated cheddar cheese

Put some texmex spice on your chicken and fry using a little olive oil. When the chicken is almost done you can warm your beans in the frying pan or warm them in the microwave. Heat your wraps to make them more flexible. lay some chicken and beans in the middle of the wrap in a straight line. Add some grated cheddar, sour cream and salsa. I like some hot sauce as well. Fold up the bottom of the wrap and than roll it together. Dinner is done.

 

Bacon and Jalapeno wrapped chicken

This is a very simple meal to make.

ingredients

1 chicken fillet per person
1 Jalapeno per chicken fillet
sliced bacon
your favorite BBQ seasoning.

Cut the chicken fillet into two even slices. Lightly spice. Cut Jalapeno in half and remove the seeds. Place half of a Jalapeno on each slice and then wrap with bacon. I usually use 2 slices of bacon for each piece. Use tooth picks to hold the bacon, jalapeno and chicken together. Place on hot grill and grill about 3 minutes on each side (all 4) Bacon should be starting to get crispy when they and that's when you know the chicken is done. Makes sure to get the bacon on all sides grilled. The tooth pics will help with standing the pieces on their sides.

Today I made oven baked potato wedges, roast onion and roast carrot to go with the meal.

Oven baked potato wedges recipe

 

Banana Bread Recipe

Banana Bread Recipe 

 

 

I'm a little fussy when it comes to bananas. I think they taste best when they are yellow but before the skin starts getting spots. I really don't like them once they get soft. So banana bread is a great solution. This is an easy recipe from my favorite cook book.

Ingredients

• ½ cup of butter
• 1 cup sugar
• 2 medium eggs
• 3 medium sized over ripe bananas mashed
• 2 cups all purpose flour
• 1 tsp baking soda
• ¼ tsp salt
• 1 cup sour milk*

Cream the butter and sugar together thoroughly. Beat the eggs well. Add eggs to mix and beat well. Sift the flour, baking soda and salt into the batter and mix. Add banana and sour milk to the batter and beat thoroughly. Grease a bread pan and pour mix in evenly. Bake in  oven preheated to 175°C for 60 minutes or until bread tests done.(use toothpick test)

*to make sour milk add ¼ teaspon lemon juice to milk and let stand for 20 minutes.

 

 

I've been BBQing all week. So what if it's raining every day.

grilled salmon

grilled strip loin

Homemade burgers

There are a few things that are important to insure that you get good burgers, the quality of ground beef should be the highest on your priority list. Get very lean beef that is freshly ground. Another big contributor is to make sure you don't over mix your burgers before pressing them. If you mix them too much you will end up with tough burgers. Another big thing for me is that you should NOT use bread crumbs.  Use freshly ground Parmesan instead.

recipe

• 4 pounds lean ground beef
• 3/4 cup grated Parmesan
• 1 onion grated into juice
• 1 tsp black pepper
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 pinch oregano
• 4 tbs tomato paste
• 4 tbs Heinz ketchup
• 5 egg yolks

Put all the ingredients into a mixing bowl and  mix until ingredients are mixed together. You can use a kitchen assistant or a hand held mixer with the dough hooks. Weigh your burgers and press them. I like to weigh mine in small freezer bags so they can be pressed in the bags and then frozen. This prevents the burgers sticking in the press and they will if you put them straight into the press.

If you don't have a a burger press you can cut the top ring off a plastic container and use the bottom to press the burgers in the ring. for every day burgers 100grams is a good size to aim for. I like to do some super burgers that can be used with or without bread at 225 grams. But burger size is a personal preference things. Test and see what you like.

Amazing full moon this week

Blueberry Pancakes

This original recipe comes out of an old cook book that a friend of mine once found at a garage sale. It has a lot of great recipes and I use it quite often. It's hard to find newer cook books that dont include mixes that I can't get here in Sweden. This is old school and everything is from scratch.

Recipe

ingredients:

1.5 cups of flour
1 tbs sugar
1.5 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
2 egg yolks, beaten
1.5 cups milk
2 tbs melted butter(not margarine)
2 egg whites
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/5 cup blueberries

1. Combine Flour, sugar, baking powder and salt in a bowl. Add the vanilla and mixture of beaten egg yolks and milk: beat until well done.
2. Beat the egg whites until stiff, not dry, lay over the batter, then add the blue berries. Fold the mix together
3. Heat your frying pan until quite hot, add a little butter and pour your batter into pancakes. Turn the pancakes when they fluff up and get lots of bubbles. Turn only once.
4. Serve the pancakes immediately on a plate and top with a little butter and real maple syrup. They can try to say the fake stuff tastes as good, but that just aint so. 

Nice sunset this evening

Bacon Pasta

Pasta rules!!

There is an unlimited amount of combinations you can have with pasta. It's an easy meal and can be amazingly tasty if you are willing to mix. Today I made bacon and mushroom pasta. It takes about 10 minutes to make and is absolutely delicious. 

Ingredients

100 grams lean bacon per person

100 grams fresh sliced mushrooms per person

1 small leak chopped

5 balls of Tagliatelle per person

a large spoon sour cream 34% 

fresh grated Parmesan 

Boil water and start bacon frying. You want the bacon to be fried, but NOT crispy. Remove the bacon to your cutting board and put the mushroom slices and leak into the bacon fat and fry it up. Cut the bacon into bite size pieces and put it back in the frying pan. Spice your mushroom and bacon mix with some salt pepper and garlic as they fry.

Put your pasta in the water and cook 30 seconds less than the recommended time. 

Use your spaghetti ladle  to lift the pasta from the pot to the frying pan and add a couple spoons of the water too the bacon and mushrooms. Add a large spoon of sour cream and mix everything and let it simmer for 2 minutes. Pour your dinner into a pasta bowl and top with fresh grated Parmesan Cheese.

 

 

Still waiting for warmer weather to come but at least it was a nice sunset today and that's never a bad thing. 

 

 

Refried beans

Love my Texmex

When I first traveled to LA in 1986 I had no idea what Texmex was and that's a shame. In LA I was introduced to a whole new world of flavors and Fell in love with it. I'm a real fan of hot and spicy so it was love at first taste. There was a great Burrito place that I spent a lot of time at on Sepulveda Boulevard. It was a cheap lunch and a very tasty one. They had a great beef and bean burrito. They also had a nice orange whip drink, but that's a whole different story. 

When I moved to Sweden in 1989 they were just starting to market Texmex, but it was impossible to get good refried beans. They sell a small can of something they call refried beans but there is nothing  in them that you should be putting in your body. It's like buying guacamole dip that contains no avocado, how is that even possible? A couple years ago a decided I needed to figure out how to make my own beans. I watched a couple youtube videos and read some recipes and started the testing process. Now I have a pressure cooker and it's down to a science. You can make them without a pressure cooker, but it takes A LOT LONGER. 

ingredients

800g Pinto beans

1 medium onion

2-3 cloves garlic(chopped)

1 tsp cumin (ground)

4 chicken bullion cubes

1-2 jalapenos (depends on your personal hot scale. I like two)

I use an 800g bag of beans and it makes about 2kgs of refried beans. The import thing is they are incredible easy to reheat after being frozen. I put them in plastic bags and they keep for a couple months in the freezer. 

Always start by hand sorting through your beans to make sure there are no small stones. The plants are kept in soil with a lot of small gravel to make them easy to irrigate and it's not uncommon to find a small stone mixed in with the beans. Nothing you want to be biting into so start with the sort. 

Once sorted put the beans in a bowl and cover with water a couple inches over the beans because they will absorb a lot of water. Let them soak over night with a cover.

Chop a medium size onion and fry it with a little butter. Put the kettle on to cook up water while you are letting the onion get slightly yellow and soft. Chop up 2 or 3 garlic cloves and add them and 4 chicken bullion cubes with a little of the water. Mix until the cubes have melted. Chop up a jalapeno and throw it into the pot. Grind up a teaspoon of cumin and add that. Then strain your beans and put them into your pot. Add enough boiling water to cover your beans plus a couple centimeters extra. Once again the beans will soak up water and you will be able to remove excess water later.

Bring the Beans to a boil on medium high and put the lid on. Once the pressure cooker seal closes, turn the heat down to low and let it cook for an hour. Take the pot off the heat and let it cool down and release the steam on it's own. This will help the beans cook the last little bit without risk of burning them. The beans should be soft and you should be able to mash them with your finger. This is a great time to taste test.

Strain the beans into a bowl saving the liquid. Put the beans back into the pot and mash the beans. The consistency is up to your own personal preference. Use the liquid you save to give the beans moisture. You don't want dry beans and there is so much flavor in the liquid. I like to use the liquid instead of water when cooking up my texmex beef to get full use of the amazing flavors. 

 

Tips

• portion your beans into small plastic bags for freezing
• you can reheat in microwave or in a pot. 
• You may need to add a little water when you reheat
• for a really good bean dip you can just add a little sour cream
• bean burrito is a great thing to serve to your vegetarian friends