Tag Archives: recipe diagram

Wild Cherry Pie

7 Comments

There is an old railroad path where the tracks have been gone for many years. Nasty weeds such as stinging nettles are about to take over as almost no one walks there anymore. Along the path a little further on grows some black cherry trees.  The cherries are tiny, sweet with a slight almond taste. They are absolutely fantastic and something I long for every summer.  Its a great treat (despite the burning weeds) to eat directly or to freeze for pies and hot sauces in the Autumn. As they are just too good to be left on the tree for the birds to eat, I will continue coming back each year.

Wild Cherry Pie
serves 4

almond dough
300 ml (1 ¼ cup) milled almonds
100 g (3 ½ ounces) butter
5 tablespoons sucanat

about 750 ml pitted black wild cherries (or similar)

With your hands mix together butter, milled almonds and sugar. Work the dough together. As this is not a crumble, the dough should feel a little sticky. Let it rest in the fridge for about an hour. Grease a 9 ½ inch pie form and arrange the cherries in the form. Flatten some of the dough out in your hand and place over the cherries. The crust should be about 1/4” thick. Repeat until all the cherries are covered. Bake the pie in the oven at 200°C (400F) until the crust has started to get color, about 15 minutes. The crust should be a little crisp and still buttery. Serve warm with some whipped cream.

This recipe was first published at Honest Cooking, 1 September 2011.

 

 

Hirkum Pirkum

2 Comments

At the end of June or the beginning of July is when St John’s wort starts to bloom. In Sweden, the plant is both common as a perennial in gardens and wild in the woods. I find them every year next to my house on the edge of our gravel road. I pick the flower or rather the buds to soak in vodka. In Sweden we call the spirit Hirkum Pirkum which comes from the Latin name of the plant, Hypericum perforatum.

As I’ve said before, St John’s wort is supposed to heal angst and depression. In the old days it was used to drive spirits away. You just needed to hang some twigs of the herb over an image of the ghost or even the devil and that specific spirit would leave you alone.

For the snaps essence: Pick about two tablespoons of St John’s wort buds (skip the flowers that are in full bloom). Rinse and clean them if neccessary. Put the flowers in a jar or a bottle. Cover with 200 ml vodka and soak for about 8 hours. Strain and add some more vodka if you like (I added about 200 ml). The result is a pink and pretty delicious snaps! (You can soak it longer if you want a sharper taste).

This recipe was first published in Honest Cooking, 4 July 2011.

White Asparagus (collaboration)

9 Comments

The other day I made some illustrations for Steen Hanssen‘s article about White Asparagus, or Spargel as you call it in Germany. Steen is a food writer living in Berlin and a weekly contributor for Serious Eats. Like me, he also writes for Honest Cooking, where the current article was published.

Did you know that White Asparagus is dead when the cherries are red or that your pee smells funny after eating them? I always learn something new from Steen’s food stories and best of all they makes me hungry. Steen recommends to eat the asparagus with some cured Schinken, fresh new potatoes and Hollandaise sauce or just plain, simple and buttery!

Read the whole story about Germans culinary spring delicatess here and get hungry like me!

Akvavit

11 Comments

In the old days they used to add different kinds of herbs to vodka. Back then it was often for healing purposes but also as a way, I think, to take out some of the sharp taste in pure spirits. Wormwood was used to cure loss of appetite, both Caraway seeds and Fennel was used to treat digestive problems and St John’s wort was supposed to heal angst and depression.

Whether these cures are true or not my husband and I enjoy flavoring pure vodka with different kinds of herbs and plants. Some of the herbs we find during the summer in the woods (St John’s wort and Bog Myrtle) or in our own garden (black currant, wormwood and coriander). My husband has even engaged one of our friends, who has a backyard garden in Brooklyn, to grow wormwood (for Swedish Bäsk) and sweetgrass (to make Polish Zubrówka).

To make aquavit you don’t really have to go to the woods, you just need three simple spices that you may already have in your pantry: (one table spoon) coriander seeds, (one table spoon) fennel seeds and (one and half tablespoon) whole caraway seeds. Crush them roughly with a mortar and pestle and soak them in 200 ml pure vodka for a day or so. Let it soak longer for a stronger essence or less if you want a lighter taste. Strain and dilute with more vodka to the taste that you like. I recommend using the lightest pure vodka that you can find. For example, outside of Sweden I suggest Swedka or triple-distilled Smirnoff and in Sweden I recommend Renat.

Enjoy Snaps with different kinds of cured herrings, crayfish (Swedish style), caviar and oysters.

This recipe was first published on Honest Cooking, 28 April 2011.

Semlor for Fat Tuesday (guest post)

23 Comments

My second guest to write here on kokblog is Anna Brones who is a Swede (like me) living in Portland, Oregon. Anna is a writer and co-funder of Under Solen Media (New Media Marketing company). We just met on the Internet and immediately started a conversations around Swedish treats such as knäckebröd, gravlax, and the Swedish Fat Tuesday bun called Semla.

Semlor For Fat Tuesday
by Anna Brones

In my family, as with many, food represents tradition. As a child growing up with a smorgasbord – pun intended – of Swedish foods all year round, I found nothing unusual in our repertoire of dining choices. There should always be hard tack in the pantry, pickled herring and aquavit indicate a good party, and open-faced sandwiches are a perfectly acceptable way to start the day. In Sweden, yes. In the U.S., maybe not.

The same goes for seasonal traditions. I can’t have Christmas without meatballs, and I can’t have a winter without a semla.

A semla, also known as fastlagsbulle or fettisbulle, is a flour bun filled with almond paste and topped with whipped cream and powdered sugar. Historically the decadent pastry was intended for consumption on fettisdagen, Fat Tuesday. But in modern day, the tradition of semlor has gone far beyond just fettisdagen, allowing for Swedish pastry shops and bakeries to fill their windows with the baked good from just after the New Year all the way through Easter. Several months of pastry bliss.

But tucked into the forest of the Pacific Northwest, we were thousands of miles from a Swedish bakery. And yet, I remember that antsy feeling that would come in the late winter months, as my mother would whip out the baking supplies and create masterpieces of almond paste and whipped cream. I would inevitably end up with powdered sugar on my nose.

And thus tradition was born. If Fat Tuesday comes and goes without having eaten one, something is wrong. But with a food savvy mother, my own food traditions come with high expectations.

So in preparation for fettisdagen this year, I figured it best to make some semlor in advance, fine tuning the recipe and ensuring that come Fat Tuesday, I could successfully produce a baked good that would live up to my own standards.

A misread recipe and a bag of whole wheat flour later, I had a batch of cinnamon rolls and a plate full of mini-sized semlor buns on my hands, small enough to be bite size for a five year old. Failure.

“You used whole wheat flour?”

“Well yeah, you know how guilty I feel about buying regular flour,” I responded to my mother on the phone. Along with food tradition, she has also instilled a continued expectation of stocking my apartment full of healthy food. Things made with white flour and sugar are out of the ordinary.

“Did you even buy whipping cream?”

“Umm… no,” I quietly added. What am I going to do with an entire bowl full of whipping cream by myself? I thought.

“Anna, if you’re going to make something decadent, make something decadent. It has to be a real semla!”

And that is where tradition wins. No need to use organic agave instead of sugar, or switch out unbleached white flour or even attempt to make something that doesn’t use butter and eggs, because when it comes to baking and cooking in the name of tradition, you stick with what works, and you get what you expect: a celebratory moment with a cup of coffee and a semla.

semlor
(20 buns)
400F (200°C)

250 ml (one cup) milk
100 g (3 ½ oz) melted butter
25 g fresh yeast (2 teaspoons dry yeast)
¼ teaspoon salt
3 tablespoons sugar
½ teaspoon cardamom
1 egg
850 ml (3 2/3 cups) flour

1 egg, lightly beaten, for glazing

filling
200g (about 1/2 lb) almond paste
insides of the buns + 200 ml (7/8 cup) milk
100 ml (½ cup) whipped cream

Melt butter and add in milk. Heat until lukewarm. Pour over yeast and let sit for 3 minutes. Add rest of ingredients and work the mixture into dough. Leave dough to rise under cloth for 15 minutes.

Knead dough on floured surface. Separate into two sections, then each section into 10 small balls. Place on greased baking pan and let rise for 20 minutes. Glaze each bun with lightly beaten egg. Bake approximately 15 minutes. Cover the buns with a cloth and cool on a wire rack.

To fill
Cut off a circular “lid” off of each bun and set aside. Scoop out inside of bun with a spoon or fork. Mix in a bowl with almond paste and add milk to make a smooth mixture.

Fill buns with mixture and top with whipping cream. Place lid on top of whipping cream and garnish with powdered sugar.

•••

You can follow Anna Brones on twitter, @AnnaBrones

More Swedish baked classics

Kanelbullar – Swedish Cinnamon Bun
Pepparkakor – Ginger Bread Cookies (at EcoSalon)
Lussebullar – Saffron Buns
Mazariner – Guest post by Anna Brones