May returns...

So there we are again, after the season of long weekends and and family visits we are back. Summer has finally entered into our lives and there is no way to avoid thinking about a sunny places where you can enjoy culinary delights. Places like Spain... again. Hehe, well, we like to go back there with our senses at every opportunity. The idea of the day has started with the fact that I visited the charity shop and on the shelf I noticed two wine glasses that I just knew that were going to be great on our dining table. Two high, made of slightly thick greenish glass which beautifully fits the vision of summer, sun and house wine. So without hesitation I bought them (for the entire £2.5) and happily started to going back home. Along the way I thought about what to cook for a dinner...
I have had the glases so perhaps I should have the wine too. Red one will be great I thought, in contrast with the color of the glass. It would look nice if table will be set with different sort of food. At this point, I was on the verge of thinking... Tapas! Well, just an idea for a meal. Along the way home I visited the store and yet bought a cured ham and 300 grams of lean beef. An vision of the dinner appeared in my head. Just few more things, the Greek style yogurt, cucumber, mint - all have probably guessed, it will be also Tzatziki sauce this evening :) - and I've already got everything that we missed in the refrigerator.

As a result, on the table were:

Grilled Beef with feta cheese
Pork loin wrapped in ham and also grilled,
Baked potatoes in olive oil with chilli
Olives
Dried tomatoes
and
Salad with iceberg lettuce and tomatoes

If it comes to the pork I thought that the meat well-seasoned and baked by Daria's mom will fit perfectly into our culinary journey. So the Polish pork has become a part of the idea of ​​tapas.

How? Here is a recipe for ham and pork in a long time maturing ham:

Chopped pork into three 1 cm thick slices. Then cut each slice in half, put half of the red grape on each of them as well as a small sprig of thyme and then wrapped in a slice of ham. After drizled it with olive oil grill for about 15 minutes.

Ingredients:
3 slices of homemade roast pork loin
3 large red grapes
6 slices of cured ham
6 small sprigs of thyme
2 tablespoons of olive oil

Beef with a Greek touch
Diced beef marinated with pressed garlic, balsamic red vinegar, a pinch of pepper, dried smoked paprika, a pinch of chilli flakes, basil, oregano and a pinch of salt. I put it all into the tarracota cassuelas tossed with olive oil and leave for half an hour then I put it in the oven set on a grill option. Mixing from time to time to make beef crispy each side after about an hour I added finely diced feta cheese and added to my beef for a further 15 minutes.

Ingredients:
300 grams of lean beef steak cut into cubes about 2cm
100 grams feta cheese cut into cubes
4 cloves garlic, pressed
1 tablespoon dried smoked red peppers
1 / 2 teaspoon oregano
1 / 2 teaspoon basil
1 / 2 cup olive oil
80 ml ​​balsamic red vinegar
pinch of salt, pepper and chilli peppers

Glasses worked perfectly and became probably our favorite wine glasses. Rays of the evening sun entered through the window and warmed up a room with reddish colour and again we felt like in Spain on the road to Santiago....

Enjoy!

Birthday Dilemmas

What to bake for a birthday of your beloved one when his not a fan of sweet pastries and cakes, and at the sight of thick, luscious creams... just want to say ‘oh no thank you very much’.... Well, and how to please the palate of your beloved one... I can’t say which birthdays is that as I get myself into serious trouble here :) but I assume that he is still young – at least he says so :) I must admit that the plan is partly selfish because I am not a fan of sweets too and my refusing reaction to a chocolate or biscuits offer always causes people to look at me like I was from another planet :) heheh Well! I'm not from another planet but I can easily swap sweets for a delicious sandwich with fresh bread, with an excess of lettuce and some good cheese....

But coming back to the subject, I got another problem with this birthday business – lack of time.... I wish the day was longer – maybe 48 hours long day would be perfect?!

So after returning home I began hurriedly flip through magazines and cookbooks in search of something that would even resemble the appearance of a birthday treat. Well, I found these mini tarts that can be made in just an express pace and contain everything that I could find at the moment in our fridge - brilliant! I thought – I don’t need to go shopping (uffff great relief), I do not have to spend half a day in the kitchen, and I can already imagine the smile on his face.... Mine too :)

So let’s start:

Mini Onion Tarts with Anchovies

First, shortcrust pastry - the easiest recipe that I got once from a friend and is great in about every recipe for tarts - sweet, spicy, the quick ones and the most demanding. And I have to admit that there is no way to not get it right and a number of components is a super minimal:

125g plain flour

75g butter; chilled and diced

1 egg

Knead all the ingredients together into a thick, smooth dough. Then form a ball, wrap in foil and put it into the freezer for about 10-15 minutes.

Ingredients for filling:

2 tbsp Olive Oil

30g Butter

450g Onions, thinly sliced

750g Curd Cheese

115ml Milk

2 large Eggs

1 tsp Cumin Seeds, crushed (optional)

1 pinch Salt

1 pinch Black Pepper, freshly ground

60g Anchovy Fillets, halved lengthways

Roll out the pastry thinly on a lightly floured board, then use a glass with large diameter to cut it and line the muffin tin. Chill for 30 minutes.

Heat the oil and butter in a pan, and add the onions. Cover and cook over a gentle heat, stirring occasionally, for 20 minutes, or until the onions are soft but not browned. Uncover and cook for a further 4–5 minutes, or until golden. Set aside to cool.

Preheat the oven to 200°C (400°F/Gas 6). Line the pastry case with greaseproof paper and baking beans, and bake blind for 15 minutes. Remove the beans and paper, and bake for a further 10 minutes.

Reduce the oven to 180°C (350°F/Gas 4). Spoon the onions into the pastry case, spreading them in an even layer. Beat together the curd cheese, milk, eggs, and cumin, if using. Season to taste with salt and pepper, then pour into the flan case. Lay the anchovy fillets in a S letter shape on top, and bake for 25 minutes, or until the pastry is golden and the filling is set. Serve warm.

Enjoy!

Food energy and the easiest soup in the world... :)

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about healthy diet. Especially, since the media promote it widely trying, however not effectively to fight the civilisation’s diseases, such as obesity, diabetes and heart disease. Well, and for this, since we have an excellent access to the products from around the world and the preparation of daily meals has become a rather enjoyable culinary trip. I also like to have a full control of the products we buy every day - meat from a halal butcher, Spanish tomatoes, or maybe fruits from Pakistan... selection is huge! Among the friends, I’ve noticed this trend to buy terribly expensive organic food. But does healthy food must be so expensive, and why something that 10 years ago was so normal and cheap and hosted on the table of every housewife, today is a luxury? Do we, the inhabitants of the western world know really what to eat to feel great and healthy for many years? While ordinary Europeans, suffering from flu seek an advice of another doctor of conventional medicine, on the other side of the globe Chinese, the world's healthiest people eat a delicious warming meal, which also has an antiviral properties... I had a chance to experience the blessings of Chinese medicine myself, when treated a chronic problem which conventional, seemingly well-developed medicine could not treat. And so I came across a book 'Chinese System of Food Cures: Prevention and Remedies Who would have thought that chewing fresh cherries may fight laryngitis... The book presents a fascinating, proven ways to use the healing properties of foods by understanding their flavours, energy, action and movement. It also explains why the food affect people in different ways. The key is 's score', a scale based on the traditional principle of Yin and Yang that applies to food and body types. The book contains a huge number of ideas for selecting and preparing hundreds of vegetables, fruit, meat, grains and legumes in order to alleviate and treat a wide range of health problems such as obesity, smoking, insomnia, asthma, peptic ulcer, diabetes, hypertension, inflammation kidneys, hepatitis, diarrhoea, anaemia, and many others. Who among us would have thought that the food has such a power – well, Chinese have known this for centuries. Energy of foods relates to their capacity to generate sensations - cold or hot - in the human body. So according to this principle - the consumption of products with a warm energy will allow us to experience the sensation of heat in the body and the food with cold energy, feeling cold. In everyday life, everyone knows that eating ice cream makes you feel cold and drinking hot beverages causes a feeling of warmth in the body. In addition to heat and cold energy, food also has a cooling energy, warm and neutral. They do not refer, however, the current state of food. An example is tea, which has a cooling energy, so even if we drink hot tea is as if we drank cold drink, because soon after tea enters the body, the heat will be lost, and it begins to generate cold energy, which makes our body cool. Conversely, intake of red pepper, which has energy generating heat and even if you eat peppers straight from the refrigerator, her seeming cold is lost in the body after ingestion, causing a sensation of warmth. That all knowledge seems to be very enigmatic, however, we use it unwittingly in everyday life, choosing the right foods. For example, on rainy, cold day when completely wet going home, the first thing we can think of is to eat something warming - for example, a bowl of hot soup with roasted vegetables.

It’s very warm here today, the first signs of spring's probably for good hit the island, the sun warms us through the window and in a large pot mung beans is simmering ... According to the rules of yin and yang, it has a cooling energy and thus restores the balance when we are hot or have a fever. Although we do not have a fever and we’re fully enjoying the heat of sunlight today, the simplicity of this soup has confounded us to the extent that we decided to cook it. You cannot miss, of course, all other good properties contained in this little bean, such as proteins, vitamin B6 and C, folic acid and other ....

This soup can be enjoyed either hot or cold, and it is refreshing and healthy!

It is difficult to write the exact recipe for this soup, since the amount of ingredients depends on individual taste. For two hungry people like us, we used these amounts of ingredients:

2, 5 cup fresh mung beans (soaked for two hours in advance)

3 tablespoons sugar

5 cups water

Place the mung beans and water in a pot. Bring to a boil and simmer for about 1 hour. Add sugar to taste.

And that's all - is it not the easiest and healthiest soup of the world?

Enjoy!

Oriental chicken soup

Today, it will be a bit oriental... We definitely craved for "Chinese food" as well as something light. We prepared a Japanese-inspired soup embellished with some typical ingredients for Chinese cooking. Unusually for the Slavic kitchen, chicken breast looked incredibly aesthetically pleasing, while still tasted like grilled meat, not cooked. But let's start from the beginning.

We had a huge pot of polish style chicken broth in the fridge, you know, one of those very traditional with lots of vegetables and chicken pieces, fat one... :) In fact, Chinese or Japanese "chicken soup" is a little different. But still. So to get a more oriental version of the broth for the soup we boiled chicken soup with garlic, few spring onions and a small amount of mild red chili peppers and ginger. After about 40 minutes we got rid of all ingredients just leaving the watery part of the broth, we added some pak choi leaves and spring onion cut into about inch pieces. Boiled for 10 minutes and there it is, soup is ready.

Ingredients for the broth "oriental"

1 liter of pure broth

2 green onions

6-8 cloves garlic

1 small red chili pepper - mild

1 cm ginger root

1 / 2 pak choi

When I made a transcontinental conversion of the broth, my chicken breasts drew a flavor from the marinade in a fridge.

After about two hours the lovely flavoured fillets landed on a grill until deliciously browned on both sides.

Marinade:

4 tablespoons water

4 tablespoons light soy sauce

2 tablespoons Mirin

4 cloves crushed garlic squeezed throughly

2 cm fresh ginger root well pressed

pinch of brown sugar

1 teaspoon lemon juice

Now when all the flavours made us hungry already we need to prepare noodles. Well, we used just a traditional Japanese noodles, bought in our local oriental shop. We cooked them for few minutes and strained in a colander. Then put them on a side of the bowl. Grilled and wonderfully aromatic, crispy chicken breasts chopped into slices, so to be able to eat them with chop sticks and put them on the pile of noodles in a bowl. Vegetables with chicken soup landed on the other side of the plate. Then pour chicken broth into a bowl. Gently so as not to destroy the delicate composition of this beautiful looking soup;) at the end it is just to decorate the dish and fill the gaps in flavour. On top we just arranged thinly chopped pieces of ginger, spring onion, red pepper strips and garlic.

Decoration:

Pickled ginger

Chopped green onions

Chopped red chili peppers - the focus at the discretion of

Garlic, sliced ​​into strips

Enjoy your soup!!!! 

Relaxing moments and sundried tomatoes and olive loaf

Oh Dear.... What happened to me last week? That was a really strange week - weird though... Is that Saturday or Sunday today? For some reason (Only God knows what) I've lost a plot...

Last week, everything turned upside down - sleepy days, then the sleepless nights, the weather didn't want cooperate with us at all... one day the sun was shining so we took all the gear out to welcome the balcony season, the next day we put the winter coat on again... arghhh...

... I've missed a three yoga classes - VERY BAD OF ME!!!! :(

...We didn't even cook anything particular, just a super extra quick dishes... most probably we were eating them in an extra rapid pace... I don't remember what we've been feeding our bodies with last week... :(

Ok, I remember something - I remember the exam I had last week - Oh God, I was afraid of it like a hell... however, when I left the class all my emotions and stress have gone forever. VERY WELL!!! :)

Oh, I must not forget to mention all the beautiful words and response we received from friends and strangers on the appeal for help to Jarek's sister...for which we are very grateful... THANK YOU!!!

The week ended with a visit of a good friend of mine who I haven't seen for a long long time...We sat for a whole night, chatting, gossiping, watching films... All these seasoned with some great food (finaly) and with bottle of our favourite Pinot Grigio...

... And now relax... flannel pyjama, woollen slippers, favourite fluffy blanket, huge cup of lemon tea, our comfortable sofa and the strong wind outside the window... Oh..and let it blow...

...and sundried tomatoes and olive loaf with fresh rosemary and mozzarella cheese...

Recipe tracked down a few weeks ago on this blog, and then forgotten, and found again by an accident at the BBC Good Food, slightly modified by us, which was associated with the current contents of our fridge... as we do not waste any food at home. It is so great recipe that can be easily modified according to your taste! We took an advise of Polka who left the loaf in the oven until completely cool to not fall down .... and our didn't fall down!!

100 ml olive oil, plus extra few drops for greasing

200g plain flour

2 large sprigs of fresh rosemary

3 large eggs, lightly beaten

100ml soy milk (Original recipe contained cow's milk)

a handful of black olives, pitted, plus extra small handful of green olives (optional)

100g sundried tomatoes in olive oil, roughly chopped and drained of oil

120g mozzarella cheese (or other favorite cheese)

pinch of salt

1/2 teaspoon white pepper

Preheat oven to 190stC. Grease the loaf tin with oil and sprinkle it with bread crumbs or coarsely ground cornmeal.

Drain off the tomatoes and olives on paper towels and cut it carelessly. Grate the cheese. In a bowl, mix the flour and baking powder. Add the remaining spices and herbs (at your option, preferably fresh).

In a separate bowl, whisk the eggs with olive oil and milk. Then mix together the dry and wet ingredients and mix gently with a wooden spoon. Add the cheese, tomatoes and olives, leaving a little of each to decorate at the end. Pour the mixture into the tin and decorate with remaining tomatoes, olives and cheese. Bake for 30 - 40 minutes until the cake feels firm to the touch and is golden and crusty on top. And now you can serve it on its own or with a sprinkle of olive oil.

Enjoy and have a nice, relaxing weekend!!

THE POINT IS THAT TO LIVE!!!

Dear All! Please help!! 

Today we’re asking you for help for 28 years old Danusia, one of our family member, Jarek's sister.

Danusia carries the spark of new life that will join our family soon in April. Sadly, she suffers from very rare brain tumor, called chordoma. This slow-growing but highly malignant parasite leaves no illusions - it also fights. It is located in the most inaccessible corners of her brain preventing complete surgical removal and the use of standard chemotherapy and radiotherapy. After diagnosing cancer, in 2007, Danusia underwent tumor surgery when it was still in relatively small sizes allowing the treatment in Poland. However, the tumour did not give up and came back, this time much larger, as demonstrated in MRI scan in July 2010. Before the MRI results, she learned that she is pregnant. Since then, she has been fighting not only for herself but also her son. 

Due to the complex nature of the tumour, its location around the ocular structures in the brain, and above all its size, the only possible treatment is available only outside the country. In December 2010, Danusia was qualified for a proton radiotherapy (proton beam) in Paris, in the Centre of Proton Therapy at the Institute of Marie Curie. But before that occurs, she needs to undergo a very complex operation to remove that part of the tumour, which cannot be removed even by the French protons, and which could lead to loss of eyesight. While the operation in Poland will be free of financial cost, the Parisian part of the treatment must be dearly paid. The cost of this treatment is 42 982 EUR. In some cases, the Polish National Health Service funds the treatment that is not available in Poland but can be done elsewhere. But the final decision in the case of the Danusia has not yet been made. Unfortunately, the treatment in Paris, is associated with a three-months stay at our own expense because there is no need of hospital stay during proton therapy. This will be a very difficult period in which Danusia will need her son as much as he will need her, and it is therefore necessary to create the right conditions for both of them. Of course, the treatment does not end at the stage proton therapy in Paris, but it will be a great first step, followed by long-term rehabilitation binding with serious costs. 

We are fortunate that the obstacle in the treatment of Danusia is not a medicine, but serious costs which in this case are much more than we can provide. However, we are full of faith and confidence that with the help and involvement of sensitive people she will manage to achieve the goal and she will gain her health back and will see how her son grows up. 

We try to spread our appeal to all for even the smallest help in raising money for treatment and rehabilitation of Jarek's sister. We strongly believe that she will beat the cancer, and with your help it will be possible and easier to achieve. 

Danusia is registered with cancer foundation called Fundacja Rak'n'Roll in Poland. There’s been pretty loud about this foundation in recent times in Poland since the founder, also cancer patient, supports pregnant women with cancer, and whose common serious struggle with the disease in this exceptional period for a woman have remained unnoticed. 

How you can help:

Donations can be sent to Fundacja Rak'n'Roll - cancer foundation – With a note ‘Dla Danusi’.

If you send a donation from Poland, then use the account number of the foundation: Multibank 73 1140 2017 0000 4502 1050 9042.

If you send a donation from abroad, use the bank account number : MultiBank: PL73 1140 2017 0000 4502 1050 9042.

Swift code: BREXPLPWMUL 

We will be grateful for any help. Daria & Jarek

Weekend Bakery #107. Invitation.

Hurrray... So this week we have the great pleasure to run the Weekend Bakery. We would like to invite you to bake with us this weekend. In our house, among the various bakery goods - these easy and the more complex ones, so-far the triumphant are the loaves we called medically :) 'emergency bread'. And that's because they can be prepared quickly, contain a small amount of ingredients and taste insanely delicious even with just a butter... They are a great idea for those lazy days when you do not want to go for a shopping or simply when your guests are on their way and there is not even a slice of bread in your cabinet :)

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