Salmon-broccoli crumble, or how I broke my food processor (but it was worth it)

Well, it it not entirely broken. I can still make it work using a long stick and some fiddling around its insides. Which is good, given it gave up the soul when I had just started cooking today's lunch. I had broccoli int he fridge, and smoked salmon, in quantities that fit a lunch for one adult, two kids and some leftovers (always, always make leftovers, that's my motto) I looked around a bit. I didn't want to make a simple broccoli purée (the kids had pumpkin soup the day before, they need to use their teeth now and then), quiche sounded boring. I had Grana Padano in the fridge, too (like parmesan, but cheaper and good enough for cooking with it). And this is what I came up with.

Salmon & Broccoli crumble

3 broccoli heads

1 cup oat cream

2 large smoked salmon slices

1/2 cup breadcrumbs
1/2 cup hazelnuts (or just a little more)
10,5 oz Grana Padano/parmesan

2tbsp butter (or substitute of choice)

ground black pepper

Rinse the broccoli ; cut off the hard part of the stem, separate the heads into small chunks. Cook in the pressure cooker for 15 minutes. Drain the broccoli and place it in a greased gratin dish. Pour the oat cream over it and roughly squash the broccoli with a fork. Place the smoked salmon over the mix so that it covers the broccoli.

Preheat your oven at 380°F.

If your food processor is sturdier than mine, use it to ground your cheese. When in doubt, resort to a manual cheese grater, you'll avoid plastic bits flying across the kitchen and the fiddling-with-a-long-stick to make the food processor work again. Do use the food processor to roughly ground the hazelnuts. Add the breadcrumbs, cheese and butter. Process briefly until all ingredients are mixed. Spread the crumbly mixture over the salmon.

Bake for 10 to 15 minutes, until the crust becomes golden.

This was, however, a bummer with kids. The big one decided he did not like salmon this way, which is still a mystery to me as he adores salmon every other possible way.

History junkie - Poisson en croûte

The biggest part of my time is not spent in front of the stove, but in my almost-a-workshop, where I work with ink, paper, fabric and thread - not always together. One of "my" areas is historical costuming, more specifically (yes, I am very specialized... in a number of various domains) the late victorian to early edwardian era, roughly 1870 to 1900. On the other hand, I love books, especially old books. And images, I love images (well, I am a graphic artist after all). Which leads me to my point : I collect bound editions of late nineteenth century fashion magazines.

In case you would be wondering what this has to do with this blog, just open a modern "women's" magazine. browse the pages at the end. I bet you will find a cooking column. And guess what ? It was exactly the same back then.

The recipes are a weird mix to our modern concept of cooking - you will find endeavors most of us find too time-consuming to consider (canning, I'm looking at you), and very basic things. This busy mom is more inclined to try out the latest - as soon as it's not pizza with pasta on it (yes, I found the recipe for this. Carbs on top of carbs topped with carbs. No actual tomatoes included). I am only adventurous to a certain point. This one, I tried out once, and to is now a staple recipe - with a few modern conveniences. It works well with all the fishes I have tried - I would just avoid the small filets like red mullet.

Poisson en croûte - Fish in a crust
2 or 3 large fish filets - you need enough of them to almost fill your gratin dish.
1fennel bulb
1 small onion
1 cup breadcrumbs
parsley

Preheat your oven at 360°F. Grease your gratin dish. Place the fish filets at the bottom of the dish.
Place the fennel, rinsed and roughly diced, the peeled onion cut in four, the breadcrumbs (or stale bread if you don't have breadcrumbs ready) and the parsley in your food processor's bowl and process until no big lumps remain. Spread the mixture over the fish.
Bake until the crust is golden brown.

You can choose your own herbs and veggies mix to add to the crust, of course.
I usually have either stale bread at hand, when it starts to pile up too much and I don't feel like making brad pudding I just process it into crumbs and store them in an airtight container - ready to use, free breadcrumbs, and no waste !

Going nuts - Zucchini and tomatoes tart

This recipe was a casualty of this blog's hibernation, and of just too much happening in the rest of my life. I had it photographed, I wanted to post it, and then... I didn't post it right away. Winter came, and this definitely did not feel like a winter recipe, so I didn't post it either. But I've heard spring is scheduled to start soon (or has been so for a few weeks), and now this seems more season-appropriate.
It was another of those nut experiments I do now and then, when I crave something with fat diary cream and suddenly remember how bad of an idea that would be. The nuts of choice being, this time as often, hazelnuts from our garden (I hear your envy !). We collected them, opened them and roasted them lightly in the fall, and stored them in a metal box.

Zucchini and tomatoes tart
1 pastry dough
2 garlic cloves
1 handful hazelnuts
2 zucchinis
2 tomatoes
thyme, oregano
On the night before, place the hazelnut in a large glass with one or two cups of water.
Prepare the pastry dough, roll it out onto your greased form. Pre-heat the oven at 360°F.
Drain the hazelnuts - but keep about half a cup of the water. add the peeled garlic cloves and mix until you get a thick, not still slightly crumbly paste. Add a little water back if necessary. Spread the paste onto your dough.
Thinly slice the vegetable and place them over the nut paste. Fold the excess dough back over them.
Bake for 40 minutes to one hour (the vegetables tend to stay crispy).

And before I disappear again under a mountain of fabric and ink, here's a link to a fantastic french cooking blog : Goûte,j'ai testé un truc !

Potée - cabbage soup with sausages

I'm cheating - my husband made this one. But since it's not technically one of his devoted areas of competence (like cream puffs, for example), I'm still going to post it on my blog.

Potée basically means "that you put in a pot". You take vegetables and meat, and cook them together in water, et voilà ! The basics for this one are cabbage, and sausages. All kinds of sausages, we like to mix different ones, smoked and not smoked, and a few bacon strips. Now I know I said I'm not a big fan of cabbage - and here I am typing two cabbage recipes in a row - the good part about theses two recipes is : they don't taste too cabbage-y for me. The dear home geek achieved this by balancing the cabbage with other vegetables. It was perfect. We don’t usually put potato in our potée, and from now on I think we will. He used potatoes that we normally keep for fries and sauté-ing, of the firmer kind, and it was a good choice as they kept some of their shape even after cooking.

Potée

1/2 white cabbage

8 carrots

5 potatoes

8 sausages (or more)

Dijon mustard

Preheat a large steel pot and cook the sausages until golden.

Peel and chop your vegetables - like, really thinly. Add them to the pot and generously cover with water. Let the potée simmer for at least an hour.

Serve hot, adding just a little touch of mustard to the plate.

Now, to make this post funnier, I thought we would reheat leftovers, cook some more sausages, just add a little more water and small soup noodles. Except our soup noodles had been invaded by some unwanted guests and got thrown out right after I added the new sausages and the water. I tried to add rice, but realized, again, after adding it, there was not enough for all of us. So I added rice and green peas. It took ages to cook instead of the quick reheating I had originally envisioned but it was delicious. I think I need to experiment with rice and soups some more. But that requires buying a new bag of rice, right ?

Knob celery and Chinese cabbage soup

Winter is for soups. It's cheap, it's easy to make, it reheats well and it works fabulously with most winter vegetables. And the kids love it. Yes, they even loved this one, although getting them to eat cabbage or knob celery in another preparation can be... tricky.

As I previously mentioned, I tend to add some potatoes to any soup, just for the texture, and a little stock (beef or chicken) instead of salt. I don't make my stock from scratch, I'm mostly using stock powder, about 1 tablespoon at a time.

And yes, this is one of my pressure cooker recipes. Because pressure cookers make everything sooo much quicker. Prep time was 15 minutes, with 20 minutes cooking after that.

Knob celery and Chinese cabbage soup

1 medium knob celery

1 Chinese cabbage
2 onions

6 medium sized potatoes

chicken or beek stock powder

In your pressure cooker, preheat one small splash of your oil of choice. Peel and thinly slice the onions and sauté them with the oil. Rinse and chop the cabbage, leaving out the hard core, and add it into the cooker. Peel and dice the celery and the potatoes and add them too. Almost cover with water, add the stock powder. Cook for (about) 20 minutes. Blend into a creamy mixture with your immersion blender.

You will get a fairly thick soup, just add water (or milk, see below) to make it more liquid... and cool it down some.

Now "someone" (looks at her parents) has taught my kids that all soups need an addition of milk and cheese to be edible. Milk is a big no-no for me, so we used oat milk instead as usual. As for the cheese... sometimes, I do eat a little bit of it. This was Maasdam, and it was delicious with the soup.

Lastly, I just discovered this food blog, and oooh ! yummy ! I'm not at all into paleo eating, or losing weight, but the recipes look really, really yummy. I need to try the cacao and roasted hazelnut butter...

More pumpkin !

Yup, more pumpkin. There aren't that many veggies that I really like in winter. To be honest, I only enjoy endive in small quantities, and I'm not entirely a fan of cabbage either. The kids think more or less the same so...
I had some pumpkin left over from my last soup batch (because I had bought a LOT of pumpkin, and my pressure cooker is big but not THAT big), so I made some gnocchi for a change.

Pumkin gnocchi
1 slice pumkin
5 large potatoes
1 tsp ground cumin
4 eggs
3-4 cups flour
chicken or beef stock

Peel and dice the pumpkin and potatoes and cook them until tender in your pressure cooker. Once cooked, drain all water out and squash the potatoes and pumpkin together. Add the eggs and cumin,  and enough flour to get a dough that holds its shape (if you stick a teaspoon into it, it should stay vertical - I know, highly scientific method).
Take a large pot and bring your stock to boil in it. Using two teaspoons, drop little bits of dough into the boiling stock. When the gnocchi come up again and start floating on the surface, wait for about 40 seconds before taking them out. Repeat until all dough has been cooked into gnocchi. You can either serve them just as they're done or put them in a large, oven proof dish to reheat them, adding ground cheese, tomato sauce, etc... if you feel so inclined.

It does take a little time to make all the gnocchi - to give you an idea I started at 6PM and was done by 6:40. As it was a relaxed evening at home I was able to just serve the kids and make them eat between two rounds of gnocchi. And we have enough leftovers for tonight.

Not dead YET !

I know, I know, it's been stupidly long since I last updated. I don't even have a valid excuse for letting you all miss on the Christmas baking. Seriously, I'm that bad a blogger, sometimes.

To amend myself, I'm going to go with really simple today. No fancy Valentine thingie, just a simple soup that works wonders for the kids each and every time. Plus, it's in season.

Basic pumpkin soup

1 pumkin slice

3-4 large potatoes, the kind that don't hold well when cooked

chicken or beef stock

1 pinch ground cumin

Peel and dice the pumpkin and potatoes. Put them in your pressure cooker with just enough water to not quite cover the vegetables. Cook for about 20 minutes, until the veggies are soft and squish-able.

Add the cumin and stock. With an immersion blender, mix everything until you have a smooth texture.

This usually gives you a rather hearty soup, I like to add a little bit of oat milk to make it more liquid - and to cool it down, too. My kids love a little bit of ground cheese with theirs. And then they lick their plates clean.

You don't need to be very precise with your proportions for this to work. The pumpkin is here for taste and color, and you need to add a little bit of potato to get a really smooth texture, that's all. I sometimes add some carrots as well.