Summer lunch

It doesn't have to be complicated.

Why re-invent the wheel

Or rather, when someone else has already written a couple of fantastic recipes, why not just link to them?

My talented friend and the founder of myurbaneden has shared a couple of recipes from her hometown of Marseilles. Tapenade and anchoiade. Make sure you check the ingredients of your olives and you can make it perfectly intolerance friendly.

Find the recipes here

Budgie of the beast

It was our third wedding anniversary yesterday and we wanted a nice dinner. The tolerant one always says as long as I keep feeding him he keeps following me home. And we know I always have to cook from scratch so I guess I'm stuck with him.

[See - that's love for you. That's why I've stayed with her all this time. It's not the cooking, it's more the way she makes out I'm only with her for the food and then tells everyone on the internet. Tolerant]

Roast chicken is one of my favourite meals. It's so simple and you can do lots of stuff from the leftovers. The trick to the perefct cooked chicken is as follows:

Oven heated to 190 degrees.
Cook chicken for 20 minutes per 450 grams, plus 20 minutes
Turn the chicken over twice during the cooking,

So for my 1.666kg chicken I cooked it for 100 minutes, started with breast side up, turned it over after roughly 33 minutes and then again roughly 33 minutres later.

You can season the chicken with pretty much anything, just don't add salt until it's been cooked. Yesterday I mixed olive oil with low-salt stock powder, white pepper, hot paprika powder and chopped sage. I rubbed this all over the chicken, put a few garlic cloves inside and added some water to the bottom of the cooking tray, hence gravy happened automatically.

It was served with sweet potato and carrot mash, and lightly cooked string beans. Perfect for a celebratory dinner. And now I'm going to go and make a stir fry from the leftovers.

Pork in orange and coconut

When I was 19 my mum presented me with a book in which she'd written out lots of lovely recipes for food, some of the accompanied with little anecdotes such as "this is pretty much what I lived on during my first time as an adult" next to the recipe for eggfried spaghetti. But not all of them are as basic as that and in there are gems such as my great grandmothers beef stew, our family's favourite herring pickling recipe and the ultimate sweet and sour sauce.

I was looking through this yesterday wanting inspiration for this week's menu planning and saw a recipe that looked ripe for intolerance adjustment.

So I cooked this.
3 pork sizzling steaks cut into thin strips (these are pretty much pork cutlets with all the fat removed)
1 leek cut into thin slizes
1 green pepper cut into thin slizes
50 ml orange juice
1/2 packet of leftover coconut milk
stock (yeast, soya and sugar f ree)
salt and pepper

In a large pan, fry pork until browned. Pour in a bit of water to deglaze a bit, and add the other ingredients. Leave to boil for five minutes.

Served with quinoa.

 

Should I be surprised that it tastes really good?

Inspiration

I have found and fallen in love with a blog, in Swedish. Witty, well-written and far too accurate an account of everyday life in Sweden. Those readers who read Swedish can find it at http://fredrik.cafe.se. I quote (and translate):

"When I met my wife just over four years ago, and she told me she was lactose intolerant, I genuinly had no idea that it to a large extent was my lactose intake she had an intolerance for."

I wonder if the tolerant one feels a certain familiarity with this?

Work under progress

A big sorry to all the Swedes out there who read this. And a big welcome to my English speaking readers. I have been thinking for a long time that I need to translate my food blog to English, for a variety of reasons. So I will work on translating these pages as well old blog posts. This may very well take some time and I also want to start posting blog entries whilst this is happening.

So patience all you food lovers out there. I have taken the first steps, now I have the rest of the journey ahead of me. (In a minute, need to go and turn a chicken over first...)