Meatless Monday #3: A meatless day in Glasgow

Last Monday we were still in Glasgow after the wonderful Christening on the day before. Not being home to cook just meant I had a reason to test out some vegetarian alternatives in restaurants.

I started with ordering the vegetarian breakfast at the hotel.

Potato scone, fried mushroom and tomato, baked beans, poached egg and
a vegetarian sausage. 

This was actually so good that I ended up having it every morning. I'm not a huge fan of English bacon and black pudding, so that worked out well. 

We had lunch in a cute, little Italian restaurant nearby our hotel. The restaurant had a wonderful lunch deal where you go a starter and a main course for only £10. 

Crostini with mushrooms and blue cheese. 

I don't know why I have the habit of always ordering meat dishes in restaurants. Most places you get really wonderful vegetarian dishes made with just as much care as any other dish, and just as tasteful. This is a habit I will have to break!

Mushroom and spinach lasagna that tasted much better than it looks. 

The lunch was wonderful and I was really looking forward to see what I would have for dinner. 

Mixed bean & harissa burger with hand-cut chips and tzatziki.
I added some Stilton, mushrooms and onions as toppings. 

The burger was the only slightly disappointing meal that day. The meal overall was very good, but the burger itself was a little dry and bland. I blame this on the chef, not on the concept of a bean & harissa burger, so I will see if I can find a better one somewhere else! 

Meatless Monday #2: Spicy tomato soup

I have a notebook called "A random log of the things we eat"

No system at all in it. But I still like it! 

I like to make a note of it when I make something especially good, I have my staple grocery list in there, and I use it to keep track of what we actually manage to make during an "Eat-What-We-Have-In-Our-Fridge" week. Today's recipe is from this book.

This is how I like tomato soup; spicy and creamy without containing cream. This recipe is my own, which is not something I can say very often.The amount is fitting for 2 people.

I threw in a couple of tomatoes I had. 

Spicy tomato soup à la Marit 
1 big or 2 small onions
10 garlic cloves
2 tbsp olive oil                                          
2 tsp minced chili
2 tsp pesto rosso
4 tbsp ketchup
2 tsp soup bullion
400 g (1 can) crushed tomatoes (or the same amount in fresh tomatoes)
1 dl red wine
2 tbsp balsamico vinegar
water


Keep the dry skin on the garlic cloves, drizzle them with 1 tbsp olive oil and some salt, and bake them in the oven on 200C (ca. 400F) for 20 mins.

Chop the onion in big chunks (and the tomatoes if you use fresh ones). Sauté it in a big pot with 1 tbsp olive oil. When the onion is glaced, add the garlic (without skin), chili, pesto, and ketchup. When this is heated up, add the bullion, the tomatoes (if you use crushed tomatoes), the red wine, and the balsamic vinegar. Let this simmer for around 30 mins. If it gets too thick, add some water.

Some wine for the soup and some wine for the chef. 

Take the soup off the heat and run it smooth in the blender or with a hand mixer. Add as much water as you need to get the thickness you like. Put the soup back on the heat and let it boil for another few minutes.

We really like our soup thick. 

We had our soup with some bread and an egg.

This recipe is based on what I always have in my fridge and will be adopted to whatever I have available. 

What is your favorite soup?

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For other posts in this series, please look here.

Small blue marbles in a pie

Like I foresaw here, I did indeed meet a sweet blueberry pie after my little walk in the forest!

I'm not much of a baker. I like cooking, but baking has never really caught my interest. However, with the perfect amount of blueberries sitting on my kitchen counter, I had no choice but to make a blueberry pie. As we will see  later in this post - blueberry pie can never go wrong, even when the baker isn't really up to the task.

I love the look of blueberries. They shine like small marbles. 

I looked up pie crust recipes. They all contain butter, flour and water and it all has to be ice cold. Ain't nobody go time for that, so I decided on just mixing a cup of flour and 100 g (ca. 4 ounces) butter and threw it in the freezer for half an hour. I don't know what the water is for, but I suspect adding some of it might make the dough easier to work with. It is possible it could have improved the end result.

This is my dough. I think it looks good. 

The blueberry pies I've had before, has usually been just blueberries and a layer of pie crust also on top. For some reason I thought vanilla custard sounded good together with the blueberry pie, so I decided on adding that as a layer in the pie itself. I used this recipe, but decided to use a little over 1 cup of heavy cream and skip the milk since I wanted the custard to be really thick.

The brown sugar actually worked well with the custard. 

I think it was at this point I did my major mistake. I was beforehand a little worried about the amount of liquid in the filling of the pie (hence the skipping of milk in the custard), but this should also have made me realize that pre-baking the crust could be a good idea. Which I of course didn't do.

Dough, vanilla custard and blueberries. The dough should have been pre-baked before this. 

After 50 minutes in the oven, the crust seemed baked and the blueberries were cooked, but I could see through my glass cake pan that the crust at the bottom was not going to be crusty.

It looks like a mess, but at least a hot and delicious one. 

The blueberry pie with the vanilla custard was awesome, but very messy. I'm willing to give it a second try, but the pre-bake the crust before putting the vanilla custard and the blueberries in. An alternative is of course to make the blueberry pie and the vanilla custard separately, but what would the fun be in that?

Have you had any good ideas in the kitchen that in the end didn't turn out that great?