Cashew Cheese with Garlic and Herbs

This post is dedicated to a dear friend of mine, who happens to dislike cheese beyond measure!

She had dinner at my place last Sunday and looked at me incredulously when I offered her a slice of sourdough with garlic-herb “cheese”. Of course, I would never serve her real cheese – just this mock  cheese made with cashew nuts.

But the texture and taste of this nut cheese are very close to those of the real stuff – it takes a true cheese hater to tell the difference ;)

For a perfect result, soak the cashews overnight, make the “cheese” mixture in the morning, and serve your cheese in the evening. It can be served immediately as well, but the flavours and the texture are optimal if you can wait a couple of hours.

This is what you need:

• 200g cashews, soaked overnight


• 70ml water


• 1 tsp salt


• pepper to taste


• 1 small garlic clove


• a generous handful of 4 herbs of your liking (parsley, basil, chives, thyme, arugula…)

Drain the cashews and place them with the cold water, salt, pepper, and garlic clove in a bowl. Pulse with a hand mixer (or in your food processor) until creamy. Add some more water if needed. The mixture should be firm enough so that you can easily form it into small balls with your hands. If the mixture is too liquid, don’t worry: when you wait a couple of hours, it will be firmer; and if not, you can add some almond meal.

Place the cheese-to-be in the fridge for a couple of hours. Just before serving, roll the mixture into small balls (about 1 heaped teaspoon per ball), which you coat generously with chopped herbs. Serve with good bread or crackers!

P.S. Inspiration for this recipe came from Nicola Graimes’ awesome vegetarian cookbook, “The New Vegetarian Kitchen”. A must-have in every self-respecting kitchen!

Day Two: Borsch Soup

Today was the second day of my No-Cost Food Challenge and I realized I’m going to have to buy onions tomorrow. I’ve got only two left, and I don’t see any sense in trying to cook without onions. So I thought of an additional rule: in order to save another ingredient from ending up in the garbage, I'm allowed to buy just a bit of something. But today, I still managed with no grocery shopping at all.

For lunch I had some rests from yesterday - falafel, hummus, and a bit of rice. For dinner I decided to cook borsch soup, one of my all-time favourite dishes. I had an opened can of sour cream that had to be used, and the beetroots that had been lying in my fridge for three weeks were not getting any fresher either.

I used to cook borsch with my parents’ old recipe, but now I needed to change two things. First of all, I wanted it all-vegetarian. Second, I wanted it a bit more filling, so I added potatoes; in my parents’ recipe there was just cabbage, carrot, beetroot, and onion - no potatoes. And especially no canned beetroots nor sausages - the barbaric habit of some people to add any of those two ingredients was our conversation topic number one at many an occasion :)

For 2-3 portions you need:

• 1 medium-sized onion


• 2 carrots


• 2 beetroots


• about 300g cabbage


• 2 potatoes


• 1-2 garlic cloves


• vegetable broth


• 3 Tbsp tomato paste


• 3 Tbsp olive oil


• salt and black pepper to taste


• sour cream to serve

Chop the onion and crush the garlic. Heat the oil in a large pan and sauté the onions and garlic. Then add carrots, potatoes, and beetroot, cut in thin sticks, and chopped cabbage. (I used Savoy cabbage, and it worked just fine, although the colour didn’t turn out perfect.) Add broth to cover the vegetables, then add tomato paste, salt, and pepper. Let simmer over a low heat until all vegetables are tender, or about 30 minutes.

Serve as a starter or a light main dish with a generous dollop of sour cream and a slice of rye bread. Borsch tastes even better the next day - too bad we ate our way through all of it in one go!

Pelmeni Filled with Potatoes and Porcini Mushrooms

Poor old Silvio. First he insults the Finnish food, then some Finns, as a revenge, go and win the America’s Plate Pizza Contest in 2008 with their Pizza Berlusconi (read the whole story here). And as if that wasn’t enough, it turns out that tortellini, yet another Italian national pride, were not invented by Italians, but somewhere far, far away in Russia by the Komi people - whose cuisine most likely wouldn’t please the delicate taste buds of dear old uncle Silvio either. It’s the finno-ugric Komi language that gave the name for these small dumplings - they call them pel’nyan, or "ear bread/dough".

Pelmeni are are traditionally filled with meat, but I’d say these veggie pelmeni would beat any meat version. They are filled with potatoes and porcini mushrooms - but a very low-budget amount. Only 15g are needed :)

Normally I have no idea how long exactly it takes to cook a specific dish. With pelmeni I do. To make this portion of about 60 pelmeni, it takes exactly one Total Balalaika Show. If you’re able to resist a primitive urge to grab the nearest vodka bottle and to start dancing hopak instead of making pelmeni, that is.

For about 60 pelmeni you need:

For the dough:

• 300g all-purpose flour


• 50g rye flour


• 125ml water


• 4g salt


• 1 egg

For the filling:

• 340g potatoes, peeled and cubed


• 1 medium-sized onion


• 2 Tbsp oil and 20g butter for frying


• 15g porcini mushrooms


• 250ml hot water


• salt and pepper to taste

 

For cooking:

• about 3 liters vegetable broth

To serve:

• smetana/sour cream


• parsley


• grated (parmesan) cheese


• black pepper


• Russian-style pickled cucumbers

First, make the dough. Measure the flour in a baking bowl, add salt, then water and egg. Work the dough until it feels elastic. Add a bit more water if needed. Then cover and let stand in room temperature until your filling is ready.

For the filling: first boil 250ml water. Place dried mushrooms in a small bowl or a cup and pour the hot water on the mushrooms. Let stand 15 minutes or so. Chop the mushrooms with scissors - and keep the water.

In the meantime, chop the onions and garlic. Heat oil and butter in a large pan, sauté the onions for a few minutes, then add potato cubes and continue frying over a low heat. Stir regularly so that the potatoes don’t stick to the pan. After 10 minutes or so, add garlic, mushrooms, mushroom water, salt (I used a heaped 1 tsp fleur de sel), and pepper. Cover and let boil until the water has been absorbed and the potatoes are tender.

Place the filling in a bowl and let cool until you roll and cut the dough.

Now, take half of the dough and roll it out on a floured working surface as thin as you can. I’m still a novice to pelmeni making and mine were not as thin as they should be - but the pelmenis tasted great even so.

Use a glass (mine had a diameter of 7 cm) to cut out circles out of the dough. Repeat until you’ve used all of the dough. Then place about 1 tsp of filling on each circle. Wet the edges and close the circles so that the result looks like half moons. Press the edges well together with your fingers.

Then it’s time to cook your pelmeni. Bring the vegetable broth to the boil and cook about 10 pelmeni at a time in it. They are ready when they come back to the surface - this takes about 2-4 minutes. Remove pelmeni with a skimmer and place on a plate. Repeat until all pelmeni are cooked.

Place the desired amount of pelmeni on each plate - I’d say about four if you serve them as an appetizer, about ten if it’s a main course. Serve with a dollop of smetana and decorate the whole with chopped parsley, black pepper, grated cheese, a pickle wedge or two, and rye bread. And, obviously, with sto gramm vodka to go with!

Hummus, or When the Chickpea Died and Went to Heaven

I had cooked too much chickpeas for my tagine (see my previous post) and was wondering what to do with them when I saw this recipe for hummus, a delicious spread made of cooked chickpeas, tahini paste, lemon juice, garlic, and salt. The recipe comes from my newest cookbook, called Jerusalem and written by Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi. A very recommendable book with interesting stories, great pictures - and foolproof recipes, at least so far!

I wanted to make a smaller portion, so the quantities are not exactly the same in the “Jerusalem” version of the recipe.

You need:

• 300g cooked chickpeas


• 150g tahini paste


• 1 big garlic clove or 2 smaller ones


• 2 Tbsp lemon juice


• salt to taste


• about 50ml water (I used the cooking water from the chickpeas)

Place all ingredients apart from water in a food processor bowl. Pulse until smooth, and then add enough water to form a creamy paste. Place your hummus in a serving bowl and cover. Let stand in room temperature about 30 minutes before serving. If anything is left over, store in the fridge.

I decorated my hummus with black olives, slices of red pepper, lemon, and some parsley, and served it with fresh white bread as a starter. Yum!

P.S. In my opinion, hummus is at its best the day you make it!

Grissini with Rosemary and Olive Oil

Among my favourite Italian bread types are grissini, those long bread sticks that you can nibble on while waiting for the meal to be served. They come in various different flavours, but I prefer the ones with rosemary.

On Wednesday, I tried baking my own grissini for the first time. The taste compensates the somewhat imperfect shape!

I made the dough using sourdough starter instead of commercial yeast and once again, you really don’t taste it. I love to play with the idea that in 1679 when grissini are said to be invented there was no commercial yeast - so the recipe that follows just could be the original one..! Who knows?

For 20 long, thin grissini you need

• 450g flour (I used spelt, type 630 - next time I’ll try with whole-grain)


• 300g water


• 150g sourdough starter, refreshed 3-4 hours before (but doubled in volume - if not, wait until it has)


• 3 Tbsp olive oil


• 2 tsp dried rosemary


• 11g salt


• Plus some more olive oil, salt, and fresh rosemary (optional) for finishing.

In a baking bowl, combine flour and water and let stand for about 30 minutes. Then add all other ingredients and knead 10 minutes or so. Cover the dough with a damp kitchen towel and let ferment 6-8 hours.

On a baking surface, work the dough so that the air bubbles disappear. Divide the dough in 20 parts, and work each part into a long, thin bread. Place on an oven pan (either greased or covered with greaseproof paper) and let ferment about 20-30 minutes. Brush your grissini evenly with olive oil and grind some salt on top. If you want, you can also decorate your grissini with fresh rosemary leaves. Bake in a preheated oven (225C) 10-15 minutes or until golden brown (but be careful, they burn easily!).

Serve as an appetizer with a glass of red wine! If anything is left over, store in a dry and cool place.