The stars of the Halloween

Halloween came softly and tasted a bit salty like homemade butter. It was mildly sweet like bitter honey and a smell of a coming Christmas was in the air.
It was a holy eve of Halloween. The lost souls were hiding from the cold weather, but in the kitchen of a warm home one could hear two voices. The clock spin one hour backwards, the night bloomed in many stars. The Universe was in peace.

Recipe for Pumpkin Halloween cookies:
200 g butter
2 dl raw cane sugar
8 dl whole grain flours or whole grain flour mixture
2½ tablespoon baking powder
1 dl coconut flakes
5 tablespoon cinnamon
5 tablespoon cardamom
A hint of salt
About 1 dl oat/rice or soy milk

On top homemade pumpkin jam:

About ¼ kg of pumpkin
2dl of brown sugar
About 2 dl of water
Hint of cinnamon
Half of lemon juice¨


Chop the pumpkins and leave them to boil with the sugar until they are soft. Smash them to make a paste and squeeze the lemon and add cinnamon.

Mix the sugar with soft butter and until the texture is slightly foamy.
Mix all dry ingredients together and add them slowly to the foam.
Last: add some milk until you can easily bake the dough with your hands.
Bake small stars, which are about ½ cm thigh.
Add about a teaspoon of pumpkin jam on top of the stars and decorate them with some coconut flakes.
Preheat the oven to 200C and bake the stars about 7minutes.

Last, add some sweet honey to finish the flavor.

Enjoy with love.

What more could I wish for?

A morning with Jamie Cullum and a little honey on my tea. What more could I wish for?

The sun above the sky and the sound of children, What more could I wish for?

A little love in my heart. A little love that keeps growing every day. I want nothing more but I give my all. What more could I wish for?

It’s a sweet day, a sunny day. Might as well be the only day I’ve got. But I am thankful I got honey on my tea.

Anything more would be a plus on my menu.



The recipe for a cup of morning tea:
2dl of boiling water
One teaspoon of ginger powder or fresh ginger chopped
One teaspoon of turmeric
Little less than a half of squeezed lemon
Full teaspoon of honey

Nuts seed-fruit bars

The best travelers bite I found out so far! And when you make them by yourself you can add whatever you need in your morning mysli to make it a healthy breakfast to enjoy with a refreshing cup of green tea if you find some hot water along the road. The bars are also a great snack on the road to share with the rides you hitch or the friends you meet.
I’ve made many variations so far and every time they found their way into someone’s mouth too fast. Funny thing, but actually my mom was the only one who didn’t like them so far.

My bars:
Six table spoons of liquid honey
Three dl of sesame seeds
Three dl of tried apple crunches, sunflower seeds, raisins, tried cranberry flakes and crunched almonds.

Roast the dry ingredients just so that the seeds are a bit darker.
Boil water and add the honey in a bowl to the hot water so that it gets liquid.
If heated in too hot temperature honey turns toxic so better to dissolve it with low temperature.
Then mix the dry ingredients with honey. Put it inside of a baking paper and mold into a flat square inside of it. Let it cool down until it’s firm enough to be cut into bars.

Hot mint chocolate in the Finnish nature

Some rides on the dark roads in Finland later I ended up in Vaasa visiting the local couchsurfing team who actually happen to be like my family away from family in Finland. I surfed and lived with them back when I lived there.
My unplanned visit reached all the way to Ikaalinen, where our gang went to spend a nice, relaxed cottage weekend with loads of other France exchange students.
Of course a lot of effort where put on planning the food and not so much effort on the sweet, but even more delicious hot chocolate in the white wild wilderness.


A hint of original mint vodka with boiled rice milk, cocoa powder and whole grain sugar makes the best hot chocolate I have ever drank! It’s awesome in the middle of the pure white snow piles in the country side on your skis.

Thus went a great weekend in the best company that followed a great ride back to mom's kitchen.

Honey gone nuts with the salad

A good company, hitching and a warm kitchen makes the ideas fly in the mind of a hungry traveler.
While thumbing a ride between Oulu and Denmark I decided to rest a day couchsurfing in my old couchurfers friend kitchen in Stockholm. A day turned into four relaxing days and among other cookings a composed salad was created and eaten with pleasure while making jokes about my almost obsessive use of nuts and honey.
Still, I thought the salad was missing apples; only cinnamon was something I didn’t think of using amongst other spices.

This is what I used:
Half of head lettuce
Half of cucumber
Two garlic cloves
One onion
Two carrots
Sesame and sunflower seeds
Almond
Salt, pepper and lemon pepper
Thyme, fennel seeds and oregano
Lemon juice
sesame oil
Honey
Vinegar

Chop carrots, onions and garlic and cook them in a pan until carrots are a bit soft. Then add almonds and seeds and roast a bit. Let them cool.
Wash and chop salad and cucumber and mix them together.
Make the sauce for them mixing sesame oil, just a hint of vinegar, all spices and some honey.
Mix with the salad and enjoy with every bite. But don’t go nuts, honey ;)

The perfect composed soup ever!

And the name is not a joke! It got right on top of my favorite cookings even if I yet don’t know how much of everything I’ve put, but I had to post it since I already ate three plates just because it was delicious! Maybe I should start to make terrible food to just eat what I have to, to keep my engine running so I can dance dance dance!

Well, I’ve grown to watch my granny cook and I composed something similar to what she did couple weeks ago, but little hint of me in the soup. It's a bit sweet soup also because of the raisins I used, but I loved the variation! Plus it was composed out from what I found in my mom’s kitchen. And I dare say it’s better than my granny’s cookings, and that’s a lot to say!

So, here’s the ingredients I used, but not the exact amounts:

2 carrots
Half of zucchini
2 onions
2 garlic cloves
Half of paprika
About 10 cherry tomatoes
Some rice and red lenses or quinoa
Raisins
Spices:
Salt and pepper
Ginger
Curry
Nutmeg
Oregano
Thyme

And of course water
I also added some honey and some (coconut) cream to the other portion and I’d say the cream version was just perfect! It gave a smooth, rich flavor to the little bit sweet soup. Of course cream makes everything good =D

So here’s what we did with my mom:

Boil rice and lenses. Cut all the veggies, smash the tomatoes a bit and throw the carrots and zucchini in boiling water that we had about 1 liter. Then I added all the spices and let them boil some minutes. After I added all the other cut veggies and couple minutes later the raisins and the tomatoes. I let them boil all together until the carrots were soft enough and then I added the boiled rice and lenses. Of course you can boil the lenses and rice together with the carrots, but we had cooked them before.
Then add honey or cream and vola, it’s done! Bon appétit!

Quinoa and pumpkin seeds

GINOAAAAA!!!

Half of quinoa
Half water
Small spoon of butter
Salt and pepper
Lemon
Herbs

I guess you already know what you have to do. Boil quinoa for about 15min. Add butter, salt, pepper and lemon. Decorate with herbs as well.

For roasting pumpkin seeds (basically the same as roasting sunflower seeds):

Some seeds
Olive oil
Salt

Roast seeds about 10min in olive oil. Add salt and sprinkle some on top.

And enjoy every bite!

Quinoa with coconut

Wonder what is quinoa? It’s a gluten free grain with very high on protein. Check out more: http://www.quinoa.net/

Quinoa recipe for two:
4dl of water
2dl of quinoa
Half of organic vegetable broth cube
Some squeezed lemon
Raisins
Herbs

Boiling quinoa is almost as easy as making couscous. Though, it’s healthier, but not as tasty.
For 2 dl of quinoa you need 4 dl of water. Boil the water with the broth cube, add quinoa and raisins and boil for about 15min until water has absorbed and quinoa is soft.
Add some lemon.
After boiling you can also fry quinoa in a pan with some coconut to make it a bit crispy.
Delicious!

Leftover veggiemix a’la mom’s lentil soup

You might guess from the name that I took what I found from the fridge the other day to show my mom that we still have a lot, and there’s no need to rush to the shop at the rush hour.
So I came up with this thing that was way better than both of us expected.

This is what I used:
About 2 dl of left over lentil soup (which was basically lentils boiled in water… Pore mom. Don’t worry; we can all add the spices we like now!)
Some 2 carrots
1 Zucchini
1 and a half onion
4 garlic cloves
Some cabbage
A bit of celery
Spices:
Salt and pepper
Garlic powder (I put a lot in my side of the veggies, like always. Mom was left without)
A bit of curry and paprika
Sesame and sunflower seeds on top

Peal carrot, zucchini, onion and garlic and chop them with the rest of the veggies. Put into a casserole with the rest of the lentil soup, add spices and mix. Add the seeds and bake in 200 degrees about 20min or until the vegetables are soft enough.
Bon appétit!

Pie with two different veggie fillings

I organized a dinner for my closest friends in Barcelona and wanted to make something new, and hopefully good as well.
I took the carrot bread recipe, doubled the amount and added some veggies and tofu on top of it to bake it I the oven.
Well, it got eaten by four fellows in less than an hour so I guess we all enjoyed it! A bit too much maybe since the recipe is for about six people.

Here’s the dough recipe:

2 dl of flours (You can use and mix any flours, but I prefer quinoa, almond and spelt)
1 teaspoon of sea salt
4 tbsp of olive oil
1 carrot (original version this was an egg)
Less than 1 dl of water

First peal, cut and boil carrots soft. Then smash them. You can also use leftover carrot from a juice you made or any other vegetable that’s soft and good to be smashed. Also grated cheese can be used instead.
Then mix them and olive oil to flours and salt and mix well. Add just a little bit of water if needed.
Spread the dough into a mold.

A fresh vegetable filling:

About 100g of soft tofu
Olive oil
About 15 cherry tomatoes
About 3 dl of fresh chopped spinach
About 1dl of green olives
Half of squeezed lemon
Pepper and salt

Smash tofu, add some olive oil if the texture is not paste enough and add a hint of salt.
Chop tomatoes and spinach and fry them in a pan in low heat with salt, pepper. Then add some lemon.
Mixed them with tofu and pour on top of the dough. Add the seedless olives on top and bake it in 200degrees about 15-20min.



Here’s another spicy veggie filling:

About 100g of soft tofu
Olive oil
One small carrot
Half of zucchini
One onion
2 garlic cloves
Some cabbage
Spices like:
Salt and pepper
Tandori masala
Garlic powder
Curry
Sesame or sunflower seeds on top

Once again, smash the tofu and add some oil and salt.
Peel and chop the veggies and squeeze the garlic if you find a garlic press. I haven’t found one ever since…well ever since I bought one for my host’s apartment. Maybe I should start to carry it in my pocket and also use it as weapon while hitch-hiking if the ride is starting to look dangerous. They’d probably believe it’s meant to squeeze the nuts. Ouch, a painful destiny to be my ride if you misbehave… Where were we? Oh, yeah, food! Njami!
So, then, fry the carrot a few minutes in middle heat, add zucchini with salt and pepper and fry a few minutes before adding the rest of the veggies with spices. Spice as much as you wish, but remember that tandori masala is strong.
Once cooked, mix the veggies with tofu and pour on top of the pie. Decorate with sesame or sunflower seeds and, again, bake in 200degrees about 15-20min.

Enjoy with your buddies!

Couscous with spices and sunflower seeds

Couscous is so easy and simple to make! And with some spices you can vary the taste! Just like rice, but a lot faster and simpler to make!
Did I mention it’s so easy to make?

No, really, it is!

Basic ingredients are
Couscous
Water
Olive oil or butter
Salt and spices or herbs and lemon

To any amount of hot water you add the same amount of couscous (usually 1dl is enough for two).
Just boil water, add the couscous and oil or butter.
Wait about 3 minutes and add salt, herbs and lemon or spices like curry, paprika, chili, and garlic or tandori masala. You can also make a sweet version for a dessert!

I love couscous with roasted sunflower seeds!

Just add some sunflower seeds in a hot pan with olive oil, fry a bit in a low heat, but don’t let them burn and eat with couscous… Or separately as a snack! You can also add salt or curry and paprika to the seeds… Yammy!!

Wonder what is couscous? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Couscous

Vegetables with drunken fish

Had a nice dinner party with my salsa teacher back in Spain. This time we discovered the fun of flaming fish with beer. The vegetables were great and the fish tasted even more delicious drunk!

This time you’re not to blame me from the fish dish we greated, but my salsa teacher ;)
The dish is for 2 to 3 people.

Fist the veggies:

Olive oil
1 zucchini
1 onion
Some cabbage
2 garlic cloves
Some salt, pepper and herbs

Wash and shop the veggies. First add olive oil and zucchini to a hot pan but low heat and add salt and pepper. After couple minutes add rest of the veggies. Fry until they are cooked, but not smashed. Add herbs (for example oregano, thymine and basil) and a hint more salt and pepper if needed.

The drunken fish:

Olive oil
2 gutted pikes (or whatever fish your salsa teacher brings you)
Salt and pepper
Half a can of beer (the local the better)
1 lemon

Put the fish into a hot pan with some olive oil and fry couple minutes. Spice with salt and pepper. Add beer slowly and try to make it a flame a bit just for the fun of it. Don’t burn down the whole house! Leave it in low heat, squish some lemon juice and add lemon slices and wait till the fish is cooked.

Serve together with spiced couscous if you like and enjoy the dinner talks!

Hummmmus for my mummy

Wanted to bake some more bread with fibrex fibers with my mom, who is a bit of a bread freak.
Did also some garlicy hummus on top of it…
Well, the bread needs some tuning, but the hummus was great! Even for my mom who doesn’t eat garlic.

Here it goes:

About 4 dl of chickpeas
4 tbsp of olive oil
3 garlic cloves
About ½ dl of water
Juice from half a lemon
½ teaspoons of salt and pepper
Some herbs to decorate

Soak the chickpeas and leave them in water for 8hours or overnight. Boil at least an hour.
Peal the garlic cloves, add them and olive oil with the peas and smash them together until it’s a nice paste. Add water and lemon and stir. Finally, spice with salt and pepper. Decorate with some herbs.
Tasty! Hmmm!!!

Apple-cinnamon and blueberry bread

This is just a sweet version from the carrot bread. But it’s a nice variation for the breakfast table!
(I modified a recipe from http://karppaus.info/resepti/resepti.php?id=659)

For one breakfast bread you need

About 1/2 dl of flours (You can use and mix any flours, but I prefer rice, quinoa, almond flours for a sweet bread)
Just a hint of salt and maybe 2 drops of liquid stevia sweetener (Still wondering what's that? Check out: http://www.cookingwithstevia.com/stevia_faq.html)
2 tbsp of butter or mild olive oil
For apple bread about 2 tbsp of cinnamon apple jam (http://foodpartycorner.blogspot.com/2009/12/x-mas-cookies.html) or for blueberry bread about 2 tbsp of fresh smashed blueberries
A hint of water at the end
On top few almonds and once baked some honey

Mix oil or melted butter and blueberries or apple cinnamon jam with flours and salt. Add just a little bit of water with stevia drops.
Roll a bun, add almonds if you which on top and put them in 200 degree oven for about 5min.
In the original recipe microwave oven is used for 1 minute, but I’m avoiding it as much as I can! Wonder why?
Because they have CANCER-CAUSING EFFECTS, DECREASE IN FOOD VALUE and have BIOLOGICAL EFFECTS OF EXPOSURE.
Check out for more: http://www.mercola.com/article/microwave/hazards.htm

Add some honey on top and eat with a cup of tea!

Breakfast bread with carrot

Some fibers to start of the day! And the recipe is easy and fast, so you can do it even with one eye open.
I modified a recipe from http://karppaus.info/resepti/resepti.php?id=659

Two breakfast breads with carrot

1 dl of flours (You can use and mix any flours, but I prefer quinoa, almond and spelt)
1 teaspoon of sea salt
4 tbsp of olive oil
1 carrot (original version this was an egg)
A hint of water at the end
On top some sesame seeds

First peal, cut and boil carrots soft. Then smash them. You can also use leftover carrot from a juice you made or any other vegetable that’s soft and good to be smashed. Also grated cheese can be used instead.
Then mix them and olive oil to flours and salt and mix well. Add just a little bit of water if needed.
Roll two buns, add some sesame seeds on top and put them in 200 degree oven for about 5min.
In the original recipe microwave oven is used for 1 minute, but I’m avoiding it as much as I can! Wonder why?
Because they have CANCER-CAUSING EFFECTS, DECREASE IN FOOD VALUE and have BIOLOGICAL EFFECTS OF EXPOSURE.
Check out for more: http://www.mercola.com/article/microwave/hazards.htm

The texture of the bread is not so solid, but once it’s cooled a bit, you can cut it and eat it with lettuce, and cucumber or just with a cup of hot tea or self made juice!
And of course if you want to enjoy the healthy breakfast with your friends, just make more dough!

Fresh!!! Apple-carrrrrrot juice

We found a juice maker from my mom’s kitchen and decided to make some fresh juice… Well, lot of effort and little juice, but all worth it!

For 4 dl of juice you’ll need
4 organic apples and
8 organic carrots
(Optional rice-, coconut- or oat milk)

Peel and chop the apples and carrots, put them to the juice maker and pour for two glasses. You can also add some milk to make the juice smoother. Enjoy!

Valentines Day with American Pie

This little apple monster wanted traditional American apple pie and found a good recipe to develop into a lower low carp version.
And since it happened to be a Valentines Day I added some love and happy thoughts in it… Yak, sounds something that a beauty queen would say with a Pepsodent smile.
But I did find a heart shaped casserole to fit the pie.
The portion is for about 8 peeps and here it goes.

Filling:
1 kg semi-acid apples
1 dl of raisins
2 tbsp of liquid stevia sweetener (Still wondering what's that? Check out: http://www.cookingwithstevia.com/stevia_faq.html)
2 tbsp of cinnamon
1 tbsp of nutmeg
a pinch of sea salt (Sea salt vs table salt: http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/sea-salt/AN01142)
2 tbsp of quinoa flours or buckwheat flours
2 tbsp of olive oil (mild) (Why oils, not butter? Read more about baking with olive oil, start from the bottom of the page: http://recipes.howstuffworks.com/how-olive-oil-works4.htm
About other oils as well: http://missvickie.com/howto/spices/oilguide.html#Which%20Oil%20is%20the%20Most%20Healthy)

First, make the filling. Peel the apples and remove core. Cut the apples into small, about 1cm cubes and mix the stevia and oil.
Mix cinnamon, nutmeg, salt and flour. Sprinkle the mixture evenly among the apple cubes.

Dough:
4 1/2 dl of quinoa flours or buckwheat flours
a pinch of sea salt
1 tbsp of liquid stevia sweetener
150 g of soft butter or olive oil (mild)
1 1/3 dl of cold water

Make the dough. Measure the dry ingredients in a bowl and mix it with the butter or the oil.
Add cold water and stir quickly into a dough. Wrap it into cellophane and put it into the fridge for half an hour to make it firm.

Then, divide the dough into two parts. Roll the first part in flours, put it between two baking papers and roll about 2mm thick, so that it covers the casserole (diameter 23-24 cm) and edges as well. Use the paper to pass the dough to the casserole.
Spread the apple filling to rise to the middle and even it with a spoon.
Roll the other part of the dough to cover the apples. Lubricate the edges with water and close them by pinching.
You can lubricate the cover with a little bit of egg and spread some crushed almonds on top. Make some steam holes with a fork.
Put the pie in the oven for 200 degrees for underlying the 15 minutes. Lower the heat to 175 degrees and cook about 40 minutes.
You may also want to decorate it with sprinkling some cinnamon on top like I did for my ugly first timer.
Let it cool and enjoy with tea and friends!
Happy Valentines!