Salmon terrine with anchovies butter

We have funny friends, did you know that? Friends who come up with these crazy ideas…. And it seems that our new kitchen is sort of bringing it out in all of them. It could have something to do with the fact that everyone all of a sudden wants us to cook dinner, and hey, it’s even more fun if there is a challenge attached to it. So P. and M., friends we have known for a little over 20 years had decided that Tom and I should do a pressure test.

Checking the recipe again!

If you’ve watched masterchef Australia (2nd season) this recipe might be familiair to you. it’s the salmon terrine that was used in one of the pressure tests. For those not in the know, a pressure test, is where the cooks that were the least successful in that round need to recreate an existing dish within a certain timeframe. usually the dishes are not simple, but require some sort of skill one way or the other. Obviously, we are no masterchef’s, so we bend the rules a little bit to suit our needs. The rule was that the recipes as well as the ingredients would be given to us by friday. So we had the saturday to get extra stuff if needed. I had to work on saturday, so the cooking was on sunday.

Turning the terrine out; le moment supreme

We had three recipes to make; one the salmon terrine with hazelnut salad, two; the drunken chicken recipe from Alvin, three; the roasted pear cake from Neil Perry. The terrine was really not difficult to be honest, it just requires a certain amount of time to cool and set. But once that is done, it is really very straightforward. We were disappointed in the drunken chicken recipe as that was just not to our taste. The dessert however was totally delicious so two out of tree ain’t bad!

Plating up

In the recipe I list the avocado mousse which you do not see on the plate. I did make it, but then I forgot to plate it up… Duh.. The terrine was a big success. Lovely taste of the anchovies butter combined with the salmon. As you can see by looking at the photos I forgot to make the butter layers really thin in the beginning so those are a bit too thick. Paired with some crusty bread this is a real winner and one that will go on our list of party recipes!

I don’t have a good photo of the roasted pear cake but I will def be making that one again so that will come up later!

Smoked salmon terrine

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Prep time	1 hour, 20 minutes
Meal type	Appetizer
Misc	Pre-preparable, Serve Cold
Website	Masterchef Australia

Ingredients

• 700g sliced (smoked salmon)
• 400g unsalted butter (at roomtemperature)
• 1 lemon (rind finely grated)
• 200g white anchovies (drained and pat dried with paper towel)
• 2 slices (pane di casa bread)

Hazelnut salad

• 60 ml olive oil
• 1/4 cup hazelnuts
• 30ml hazelnut oil
• 1 teaspoon chestnut honey
• 1/2 teaspoon Dijon mustard
• 15ml sherry vinegar
• 1/4 cup baby endive hearts (We used little gem)
• 2 tablespoons chervil leaves (picked)
• 2 tablespoons baby basil (snipped)
• 2 tablespoons baby parsley (snipped)
• 1 tablespoon red kale (snipped)

Avocado cream

• 1 avocado
• 15ml lemon juice
• 2 tablespoons olive oil

Directions

. Preheat oven to 180˚C. Trim brown fat from each slice of smoked salmon. Square off long edge of each piece. 2. Process butter in food processor until pale and thick, add rind, anchovies, season to taste and process to combine. 3. Grease the inside of a 1 litre capacity terrine mould with oil, line with plastic wrap, with at least 6cm overhang on all sides. Cut a piece of foam to fit inside the terrine mould. Cover it with aluminum foil and set aside. 4. Cover the base of the terrine with one layer of smoked salmon. Using a crank spatula and a straight edged wooden spoon spread a thin even layer of butter. Continue the layers, alternating salmon and butter mixture until you have reached just over half way of the mould. Cover the terrine with plastic wrap and gently press down, place the foil-covered foam into the terrine and weight down with a few food cans. Freeze for 30 minutes, transfer to the fridge for a further 30 minutes. 5. To make the avocado cream, blend together avocado, lemon juice and oil using a stick blender, until smooth. 6. To make the hazelnut salad, Place hazelnuts on an oven tray and roast until browned. Transfer to a clean towel and rub to remove skins. Heat 15ml olive oil in a frying pan over high heat. Add hazelnuts, cook until golden. Place remaining olive oil, hazelnut oil, honey, mustard and vinegar in a bowl, whisk to combine. Add the hazelnuts to the vinaigrette mixture. Toss salad leaves through the dressing to lightly coat. 7. Heat grill pan over high heat, drizzle bread with olive oil and cook on each side until golden. 8. To serve, invert terrine mould onto a chopping board and slice. Serve with a spoon of avocado mousse, hazelnut salad and grilled bread.

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Shaved fennel salad

Even though the weather is certainly not salad-weather at the moment, I figured that maybe, if I eat enough salads, the sun will magically appear? Will that work you think? Sort of reversed psychology for the weather.. As I am typing this it is actually pouring down with rain again so sofar it hasn’t helped, but I can always try, right? As I know is the case with a lot of people that do not live in Weimar (where the sun apparently always shines..:)

I’ve also noticed that – while I am certainly not a vegetarian – I actually do eat a lot of vegetarian dishes. Most of the time that is when Tom is not home and it’s just Gizmo and me in the house. I love to eat salads (Tom doesn’t) and I love to eat cheese (Tom hates cheese) and I like vegetarian dishes (Tom wants meat) so those moments are ideal to try out new salads.

This particular salad comes from the book Super Natural Every Day from Heidi Swanson of 101Cookbooks. The book is gorgeous and filled with great vegetarian recipes. My friend Hermin was coming over for dinner and as always she was on another diet. I always ask her what the diet of the day is when she is visiting. Just so I know what to cook! This time it was a no-carb diet so fairly simple to cook. I prepared my favorite salmon burger and thought this salad would make a great addition to that as it included fennel and dill which I think work great with salmon anyway.

The biggest hurdle is to shave the vegetables thin enough. I don’t have a mandolin, as that would work perfect I think, so I used a potato peeler instead, which is a little trickier on the fennel but worked great on the courgette. I also added a little honey as suggested by Heidi as my lemons were pretty tart.

Paired with the salmon this was a great meal!

Shaved fennel salad

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Serves	4-6
Prep time	30 minutes
Cook time	5 minutes
Total time	35 minutes
Meal type	Salad
Misc	Serve Cold
From book	Super Natural Every Day

Ingredients

• 1 medium courgette (sliced into paperthin coins)
• 2 small fennel bulbs (trimmed and shaved paper thin)
• 15g dill (fresh and chopped)
• 80ml lemon juice (freshly squeezed)
• 80ml extra virgin olive oil
• fine sea salt
• 4 or 5 handfuls rocket
• honey (if needed)
• 60g pinenuts (toasted)
• 60g feta cheese (crumbled)

Directions

Combine the courgette, fennel and dill in a bowl and toss with the lemon juice, olive oil and 1/4 tsp salt. Se aside and allow to marinate for at least 20 minutes or up to an hour. When you are ready to serve the salad, put the rocket in a large salad bowl. Scoop all of the zucchini and fennel onto the rocket, and pour most of the lemon juice dressing on top of that. Toss gently but thoroughly. taste and adjust with more of the dressing, olive oil, lemon juice or salt, if needed. If your lemons are particularly tart you may need to counter that by adding a little honey into the salad at this point. Serve topped with the pinenuts and feta cheese.

Super Natural Every Day: Well-loved Recipes from My Natural Foods Kitchen
is published by Hardie Grant Books.

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It’s chaos everywhere; one person is running around with smoked eel trying to remove all the bones, the other is rummaging through the racks beneath the kitchen counter searching for an empty pot, someone else is peering over my shoulder to see if I maybe have the gelatin powder, while on the other side of the kitchen a few folks are stirring and chopping. (not necessarily in that order)

It’s really not that easy cooking with a large group of people. Did you know that? You would think that maybe all those hands would make the job lighter, but I’ve found sofar that it actually makes the job at hand harder. Trying to concentrate over measurements is virtually impossible if chaos is all around you.

Organized chaos

But then again I wouldn’t want to miss it for the world. It’s great fun and yes, we have more failures then I would care to mention here, but we laugh about it, eat it anyway and move on to the next dish. Our group is usually around 14-15 people which is a large enough group. Some have a lot of cooking experience, others have virtually none, but we all help eachother and in the end it is about sharing the experience, having a good laugh and a fun dinner at the end. Our cooking club is now over a year old already and still with the same folks except for one. No one ever really misses a session unless on holiday or away for work, but we’re all pretty faithful. It’s only once every two months to I guess that makes it a little easier to plan into any one diary plus the dates are fixed at the beginning of the year so we know where to keep the diary empty!

Cleaning eel

Last Friday was our first session in a different location. We had some disagreements with the owners of the previous place. Let’s just say that we were forced into doing things we didn’t want to do so that was end of story. Luckily we found a new place immediately as this is the same cooking location were Tom and I have done countless cooking courses over the last couple of years so we know the place. It’s a much older kitchen (and arguably it could be a little cleaner) but it’s a good location with a lot of atmosphere and in the middle of Amsterdam so close to the Albert Cuyp market.

Me having fun!

The menu this week was a smoked eel with fried herbs, shrimps with risotto, watercress coulis and crispy ham, escalope milanese with tomato and courgette and strawberry soup with vanilla icecream and caramel sauce. Not too complicated you would think, right?

Well, the starter went a bit wrong, so we had eel soup instead of the turned little pudding it was supposed to be. Actually that was the only real failure, the rest of the dishes were pretty much ok.

Shrimp risotto

But the highlight of the evening really was the delicious dessert of strawberry soup, homemade vanilla icecream and caramel sauce…. So for that I will share the recipe with you; well for the soup as the recipe for the icecream was changed at some point and I don’t want to give you false information!

Strawberry soup

Strawberry soup

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Serves	10
Dietary	Vegetarian
Meal type	Dessert
Misc	Serve Cold

Ingredients

• 1kg sweet strawberries
• lemon juice
• 1/3 dl water
• sugar (to taste)
• 1 pinch salt

Directions

Puree about 2/3 of the strawberries with a little bit of lemon juice and a pinch of salt. Add some sugar if needed. The rest of the strawberries you can use for decorations. Strain the strawberries through a sieve and put into a deep, cold plate. Garnish with the rest of the strawberries and ad a ball of icecream in the middle.

Note

Well ofcourse this recipe is so simple you can hardly call it a recipe but that doesn't make it any less tasty!

Don't mess with the chef!

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Steamed quinoa

I drive a lot. Part of my job is going from one location to the next either in Europe or in Holland. Well mostly in Holland really, but once or twice every so many years I also have to drive to Germany, France or similar places. I love driving, I’m comfortable on the road and don’t mind having to get in the car. Never had an accident either until yesterday. I was on my way to a client to discuss the photoshoot we’re having end of May. Moodboard, ideas, that would all be discussed this particular morning in Amsterdam. It was raining hard, so not the best conditions to drive in and I had already called them that I would be a little later due to traffic jams.

I was almost there, about 800 meters left to go when I turned right on a busy street. Bicycle path was on my right and I had to cross that to get to the next street. I never saw the motorcycle speeding towards me and before we both new it, he had hit my car, or I had hit him, however you look at it and I saw someone tumbling down the street.

The next things that happened are almost a blur; I parked my car on the side of the road and ran to the man lying on the street. I half expected him to stand up and I would have loved it if he had then started shouting at me but no, he remained lying down softly moaning. Obviously in pain. I tried to say something, then realized I had to call 911 (or 112 in Holland) immediately so ran back to the car, grabbed my phone, went back to the man and started dialing.

By then, two people who had seen it happen, had stopped and that was a good thing as I started to get very shaky and the bystander got my phone from me and explained what had happened to the ambulance people. Thank God, the ambulance and police where there within 5 minutes, sirens blazing.

Both police and ambulance people where extremely nice to me. I guess it was pretty obvious that I was badly shaken, could hardly explain what had happened. They also couldn’t understand a word the poor motorman was saying, as it turns out he wasn’t Dutch and I’m not even sure he spoke English. One of the policeman led me to their car and planted me inside to calm down a bit and obviously to hear from me what had happened.

I guess it was a pretty straight forward accident; obviously my fault but definitely not on purpose. I had to have my alcohol levels checked (also obviously zero) and they wrote down all my details and I could move on. The motorman had been taken away in the meantime.

And then you have to get back in your car and drive away. My car – btw – had hardly a scratch. A little dent in the front bumper and a scratch along the front of the bumper but that was it. In a way it’s probably good to have to drive straight away after something like that. I had called Tom to tell him what happened but it would have been silly to let him come and pick me up. After all, I had to get back in the saddle, so to speak.

And then comes the waiting. Waiting to hear if the man you hit is gonna be ok. I had nothing to go on; no name only his license plate from his motorbike. The police had promised to call me in the afternoon but didn’t, so I started calling them myself this morning and they did call me back fairly quickly to tell me that the man had been released from the hospital and was gonna be ok eventually. Wearing a brace around his back for possibly a few months as he bruised something there but it could have been worse!

For someone who has never even hit a pole or whatever, this was an experience I hope not to repeat. And with that said, I will be leaving you with something a lot sweeter then the story I just shared; a delicious quinoa dessert. The quinoa is slowly steamed with lime and coconut and is then eaten lukewarm with rhubarb and raspberries.. Mmmm, what’s not to love?

Quinoa with coconut, lime and rhubarb

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Serves	2-3
Prep time	10 minutes
Cook time	45 minutes
Total time	55 minutes
Meal type	Breakfast, Dessert
From magazine	http://www.deliciousmagazine.nl

Ingredients

• 100g quinoa
• 150ml coconut milk
• 1/2 lime (juice and zest)
• 1 tablespoon honey
• 100g raspberries
• 100g rhubarb puree (or you can add more to taste)
• 12 pieces coconut with peel on
• mint (for decoration)

Directions

Get a shallow wide bowl that fit into your steamer and add the quinoa, coconut milk and 50 ml of warm water, the lime juice and zest and a pinch of salt. Place the bowl in your steamer and steam the quinoa for about 30-40 minutes. Stir once or twice during steaming and check if the quinoa is done to your liking at the end. Be careful as the steam is very hot.

Take 2-3 glasses or bowls and put some raspberries at the bottom, stir the honey through the cooked quinoa and divide over your glasses. Add the rhubarb on top and garnish with the coconut and mint.

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Breakfast

Remember I told you I had another funny story with Paris as, well let’s say as part of the story? Well here is comes, the story of a love gone sour… (nothing serious here, it’s a typical case of how a lot of holiday loves end I guess)

The love story starts in England, in a tiny tiny town called South Nutfield where I worked as a volunteer for a foundation that organizes holidays for disabled people (previously called Winged fellowship). I signed up on a spur of the moment thing, as my sister did it a year before me and loved it.

It was a very international mix of people, although the fact that I’m the only Dutch causes some issues in the first few days as it turned out that my school English was in no way sufficient. I didn’t understand ANY of the accents spoken, with the English ones being the worst. I forgot where they all came from but they sure had some heavy accents. That is not what you learn in school, so they might as well have spoken Russian as far as I was concerned. Within a few days I sort of got the hang of it and all that English started to make sense again.

My patient was a lovely lady who suffered from multiple sclerosis and while we had a pretty full day as volunteers I did still manage to fall in love with one of the French guys who also volunteered. He was blond, sexy and very sweet and we had a great time at the mansion, trying to sneak away to steal a kiss here and there. Privacy was hard to find though in a house filled to the rim with people, so before I knew it, we had agreed to meet in Paris where he studied. We said our goodbyes after a fun two weeks and I was already excited and looking forward to meet Y. again in Paris!

Ah Paris, that glorious, glorious city of romance! How could my visit not be romantic? The bus ride was long to Paris and I was tired when I arrived but excited too. I wasn’t too alarmed when Y. was not at the bus station when I arrived. The bus was delayed for several hours so he probably went home. I called him to say I was there and he sounded…well, not like the guy I used to know I guess, but I was still not alarmed.

He arrived soon enough and we went to his place, or so I thought. I was a little taken aback when I saw the ‘apartment’ we were supposed to stay in that weekend. It was a dark hole of a place, with a bed for 1 person, a dirty tiny kitchen and a not so pleasant smell. Y. explained that this was not his place but the place of a friend that he had ‘borrowed’ for the weekend so we could stay together. Aha… Y. immediately started kissing me, making it pretty clear that he wanted to ‘make love’ with me right there and then. I felt dirty and tired after having been on the road for more then 10 hours so I gently pushed him away, saying I wanted to have a shower first, have a bite to eat and do some fun things maybe before attempting anything psychical in that tiny tiny bed.

He grudgingly agreed; we went to a horrible restaurant where I started to feel this might not be the weekend I had thought it would be. He behaved like a totally different person from the Y. I had met in England, but I was stuck, I knew no one else in Paris and I wasn’t the world traveler I am today (or I like to think I am today) so I had no clue what to do and figured the best thing was to endure it for the weekend. We went to an Ingmar Bergman film I believe it was. A weird film about horrible tests on human’s that ended in a lot of blood and murder. I can’t really remember the name. Y. fell asleep during the movie. (Yes, he really did… and snoring loudly too!) We went home after and had horrible sex. I mean, seriously… French man are perfect lovers?? Well not all of them I can tell you! Lol.

The next couple of days only became bearable because he did have a few nice friends and we hung out with them, but any moment spend alone with Y. was terrible and I’ve never been happier that my stay in Paris ended! It was probably a good thing that I had been to Paris before or I might have forever associated that gorgeous city with that horrible experience. Thinking back on the whole thing; my guess is he actually had a girlfriend at the time, so couldn’t take me to his own place, so he thought to have some cheap sex in his friends flat with that weird Dutch girl. I guess I will never know, but it was a big big disappointment!

Now on to better things in life, I will share this delicious breakfast with you that is made of some of the leftovers from that gorgeous French souffle. I added some matcha into the yogurt and sweetened it with Manuka honey which I got from Julia before. I used the rhubarb-blackberry puree and the crumble I had leftover. It’s the French delight I made for the Monthly Mingle that made me remember this “lovestory”. More to follow there but now over to the recipe!

Matcha yogurt with rhubarb-blackberry puree and hazelnut crumble

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Ingredients

• 1 teaspoon matcha powder
• 250ml yogurt
• 1 tablespoon manuka honey (or regular honey)
• 4 tablespoons rhubarb blackberry puree
• 2 tablespoons hazelnut crumble

rhubarb blackberry puree

• 500g rhubarb (sliced into 2 cm pieces)
• 140g sugar
• lemon zest (of one lemon)
• cornflour
• 150g black berries (I used frozen but you can use fresh too ofcourse)

hazelnut crumble

• 75g flour
• 50g butter
• 50g brown sugar
• pinch salt
• 50g rolled oats
• 50g hazelnuts

Directions

Rhubarb puree

Preheat the oven to 200 C. Put the rhubarb with the 140 gr of sugar in a pan, add a splash of water, cover the pan and let it simmer on low heat for a while. Once the rhubarb is cooked but still has some chunky bits in it, add the blackberries. You can use frozen blackberries if you cannot find fresh. Add a bit of lemon zest in the pan as well. Put some cornflour in a small bowl, add water and whisk until smooth. Add this bit by bit to your fruit mixture until it is thick enough. It should become a thick puree. Leave to boil for another 1,5 minute to cook the cornflour. Then put your fruit puree into another bowl and stir to cool it down for at least five minutes.

hazelnut crumble

Make a crumble by adding the ingredients together in a bowl and mix it with your fingers till it resembles a rough crumble. Put the crumble on a baking tray, spread it out and bake for about 5 minutes until light golden brown.

Add 1 tsp of matcha powder to your yogurt and still well to combine. You can add more or less matcha if you prefer. Sweeten the yogurt a little bit with the manuka honey to your taste. Make layers in the glass with the puree, the yogurt, ending with some hazelnut crumbles on top!

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