Preparations has started
This is a nice little dish, perfect for serving among other small dishes on a buffé or as a side dish to grilled meat.
It does take its time to get prepared, but it would be worth it, and it is low maintenance, all you need to do is keep an eye on it occasionally to check if so there’s still liquid in the saucepan.
I don’t really have a recipe, so this will just be a rough idea for the how to. Read the rest of this entry »
This is how it looked at the time of serving.
As promised, though a day late, here comes the recipe.
Or well, not really a recipe with accurate measurements, it is more like a rough sketch. As I mentioned in the previous post there’s not really any recipes for this type of cake, it is all up to you and how you want it.
The only thing that is common in all recipes is that the fillings need to be creamy, and that it is best served the day after layering it up. To allow the bread to soak up some of the moist from the filling, simply because they taste better then.
Decorations can wait until a few hours before serving.
Smörgåstårta, is kind of special for the Nordic countries, or perhaps even for Sweden only. Although to my surprise my favorite online dictionary actually had a proper translation for it; Sandwich layer cake.
The translation describes it rather well, it is bread layered with fillings, normally 2-3 layers of filling and then decorated, kind of like a normal cake would be, but naturally with a bit different ingredients as decoration.
Common decorations, as well as ingredients in the fillings, are shrimps, egg, caviar, salmon, cheese and ham, but can be varied almost endlessly, the only limitation is your imagination. Of course one should keep to things that go well together.
In my cake there’ll be: A type of liver paté (leverpastej), smoked turkey and smoked ham, plus a few other things that will turn those ingredients into creamy fillings.
I’ll have a recipe and images up for you tomorrow 🙂
Yesterday when I was grocery shopping I came across a new seed, Durra (Sorghum bicolor), which is sold as an alternative to rice.
The particular package I found contained a mix between Durra and red rice. Since I enjoy trying new food ingredients I bought a package to try.
I cooked it according to instructions, which said 25 minutes. I tasted it and it felt like it was still undercooked, so I left it on for a bit longer. To my surprise it didn’t seem to take up any water or get any softer as time passed, so I figured it probably is meant to be a bit harder then rice. The taste was OK, nothing overwhelming though.
On the package it said to be a replacement option to rice, and to some extent I do agree, but I didn’t really find it as good as rice (or bulgur which I often use instead of rice) when served with stew, in this case chicken stew. Durra just seem to dry, and it doesn’t really suck up any of the sauce.
The package also suggested it to be suitable for use in salads. This I can believe, although I have not tried. What I’m thinking here is to add a little into the salad bowl, kind of like you’d add beans or chickpeas. Or instead of rice in a chicken salad. I think it would work in this scenario because you’d probably add less to a salad then you’d put on your plate together with the stew, or other hot dish.
I will give it another go though, but next time I’ll treat it a little more as I would with dried beans or chickpeas, meaning I’ll let them soak in cold water a while before actually cooking them to see if they get any more moist and soft. If I remember to I’ll post about how that goes later on when I’ve tried.
I know I have lacked in posting here, but I’ve sort of been out of inspiration in the kitchen. Feels as I do the same dishes over and over again. Nothing wrong with that, they are well tested and tasteful, just can’t blog about doing what I’ve already done…
Though I wanna share one small tip about making minced meat sauce. I suppose that most of you do as I were taught to do when I started cooking. That is start with browning the minced meat and then creating the sauce with that as base.
Recently I learnt that there’s an option, that works very well, even better in some ways. The result is a fuller body of the sauce, without adding thickeners. Well suited for large quantities as well.
Start with making the sauce, based on tomatoes or whatever you prefer. When that has been boiled together a few minutes, start adding the minced meat little by little. Remember to stir well while the minced meat gets cooked into the sauce.
When all is stirred in, let it cook for a little while and taste, adding more spices if needed.
The huge advantage of this comes forward when you try and make sauce on a couple kilograms of minced meat and does not have a huge frying pan, or doesn’t want to start frying in one pan and then adding it to a big casserole 🙂
I first tried it when I helped my sister cook for her birthday, we made three kinds of pies, one of them a minced meat pie.
