Vinegar Cucumbers

Yesterday I mentioned that we had Vinegar cucumbers with carrot crepes. Many people use pickling cucumbers to make them, but I’ve learnt to use greenhouse cucumber, because that’s what my mum used.

Vinegar Cucumbers

½ greenhouse cucumber
2 dl water
pinch of sugar, salt and pepper
distilled vinegar to taste
dill (optional)

Slice the cucumber. Pour the water into a bowl and add salt, sugar and pepper (and dill). Add 1-2 tbsp vinegar, dip a cucumber slice in it and taste if it’s vinegary enough for you. Add more vinegar until it’s good. I usually don’t measure, but I like about 4-5 tbsp. Add the cucumbers to the bowl and refrigerate until your dinner is ready, or at least 10 minutes.

Yugoslavian Movie Night

We watch quite a lot of movies. Especially non-Hollywood and non-English movies. Pretentious art-hipsterism or not, it’s a wonderful excuse for combining food culture and media culture.

Our movie of choice this time was Srđan Dragojević’s excellent and controversial “Lepa sela lepo gore” (“Pretty village, pretty flame”) which was accompanied by some Yugoslavian (Slovenian) delicacies. Hold your horses! We’re very aware the movie is essentially Serbian and the food cultures do vary in the melting-pot of former Yugoslavia, but we found Slovenian vegetarian recipes and decided that it’s close enough.

We had two kinds of salads, mini quiches, beer and Blair’s habanero chips.

Slovenian Cucumber Salad

5 medium/large potatoes + water for boiling
1 kg cucumbers (3 long)
3,5 dl soy yogurt
3-4 big garlic cloves
salt
pepper

Peel the potatoes, cut them half and slice. Boil them, drain and allow to cool. Coarsely grate the cucumbers, mix with salt and drain in a colander for a while. Mince the garlic and mix everything in a bowl. Let sit in the fridge for couple of hours before serving.

The original recipe didn’t say how much garlic would be good. I used 2 big cloves, but I think the salad could have been more garlicy, so I wrote 3-4 cloves.

Lentil Salad

1,5 dl green lentils + water for boiling
1 small red bell pepper
1 shallot
3 tbsp red vine vinegar
3 tbsp oil
salt
pepper

Boil the lentils about 30 minutes or until soft but not mushy. Chop the shallot and dice the bell pepper. Mix together and season with vinegar, oil, salt and pepper. Let sit in the fridge couple of hours before serving.

Nutty Salad

This salad is an easy side dish. Best in the summer when the cucumbers are at their best. I can’t remember how I invented this, but I’m sure it had something to do with the huge amounts of cucumbers we got from our garden. The recipe makes rather small batch (enough for 2 or maybe 3), so multiple it if needed.

Cucumber and Peanut Salad

1 dl peanuts or salted peanuts
5 dl cucumber cubes
1 thinly sliced small onion (optional)
2 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp lemon juice
1 tsp dried mint
pinch of salt and pepper

If you use raw peanuts, start with toasting them. Heat a frying pan and toast the peanuts in it, stirring often, until they have brown spots in them. Let cool. You can peel the peanuts by rubbing them between your hands, but you can use them with the peels too. Partially crush the peanuts in a big mortar or in a plastic bag with a rolling pin. Put cucumber, onion and peanuts in a bowl. Mix oil, lemon juice, mint, salt and pepper together and combine with cucumber mixture. Salad is better if you let it sit about half an hour before serving.

Harvesting And Pickling

Yesterday I posted some photos from our garden. Here’s something that has grown there: a big zucchini, a small yellow summer squash, kohlrabi and snow peas. Kohlrabis are still a bit small, but we took them to make more room for others to grow. Some zucchini, kohlrabis and handful of snow peas were stir fried with some cauliflower, carrots, onions and beans.

We also found a lot of cucumbers. Since we were away for a week, some of them had grown too big.  Here they are on our kitchen table, sorted by variety and size. I don’t know English names for the cucumbers, but in front is Favör II WW, left pile is the good cucumbers and right taste-before-using. Behind them is Reinin Rypäle, sorted by size the same way. In the back are the oversized ones that can’t be eaten.

I used one inedible cucumber to make serving bowl for cucumber relish. Some of the good cucumbers were eaten fresh in salads, but most of them were pickled.

The recipe makes one 5l bucket of sliced pickles. I often slice my cucumbers before pickling, because then you can fit more of them in one jar. If you prefer pickling whole cucumbers, poke some holes on them first to make sure the liquid goes inside the cucumbers too and they won’t become soft and icky. You may also need to make more liquid, because there will be more empty space in your jar.

Pickled Cucumbers

cucumbers (4,5l when sliced)
10 thin horseradish slices
big bunch of dill (few long stalks with the flowers)
6 garlic cloves or some chili slices (optional)
black currant or oak leaves, if available

2 l water
4 dl sugar
6 dl distilled vinegar
2 tblsp salt
1 tbsp mustard seeds
1 tbsp black pepper corns

Before slicing the cucumbers, soak them in cold water at least half an hour, few hours is good. Brush them to remove the little spikes. Slice.

Use a plastic bucket with a lid or few big glass jars. Put a thick layer of cucumbers into a bucket/jar and put a layer of leaves (if you have), some horseradish, dill and garlic/chili (if using). Continue making layers until all the cucumbers are used. Put currant leaves and dill on top.

Mix water, sugar, salt, mustard seeds and peppercorns in a pot and boil 5-10 minutes. Add vinegar, bring to boil again and pour on the cucumbers. The liquid should cover all the cucumbers, but if it doesn’t you have to make a little more. Close the lids, let cool and keep in cold place at least three weeks before serving.

Canning Season 2010 Has Started

If you have too many cucumbers, preserve some of them. Or if you find cheap cucumbers, buy some to make relish. Relishes and pickles are easy to make and they taste good during the long winter months when the cucumbers in the shops are expensive and bad quality. I used slicing cucumbers, but I think pickling cucumbers would be just as good too. You can also make zucchini relish with this recipe, just use 1 kg zucchini instead of cucumbers.

Cucumber Relish

1 kg cucumbers
1 bell pepper
2 onions
2 medium hot chili pods, deseeded (or to taste)
4 tbsp chopped dill
2 dl distilled vinegar
2 dl sugar
4 dl water
2 tsp salt
2 tsp green peppercorns

Grate the cucumbers coarsely (or dice small), chop the onions, dice bell pepper and mince chilies. Combine in a bowl with dill. Mix vinegar, sugar, water, salt and peppercorns in a pot. Put on stove, turn the heat on and stir until sugar and salt are dissolved. Bring to boil, lower the heat and slowly boil about 5 minutes. Put the cucumber mixture into clean glass jars and pour the hot liquid on them. Make sure there are some peppercorns in each jar. Close lids, let cool and store in cellar or fridge. Let sit at least few days, preferably couple of weeks, before serving.

Dill Pesto

Dill on our balcony has grown well and I used some to make pesto today. Then I used the pesto as a salad dressing for a pasta salad, because salads are great food for hot days like today. I made my pesto thinner than regular pestos, because I like it that way in salads. Decrease the amount of oil if you want to make it thicker. Crunchy lettuce, like ice berg lettuce, would be best for pasta salads, but I used some softer lettuce that we grow on our balcony.

Dill Pesto

Bunch of dill
2 tbsp pine nuts or sliced/slivered almonds
1 dl oil (preferably olive oil)
salt and pepper

Blend dill, pine nuts and about 0,5 dl oil. Add more oil to get the consistency you want. Season with salt and pepper.

Pasta Salad with Dill Pesto

7-8 dl cooked pasta (whole grain fusilli, for example)
1 batch dill pesto
3 dl corn kernels
1 bell pepper, cubed
about 15 cm piece cucumber, cubed
3 tomatoes, cut in wedges
small bunch of lettuce leaves
1,5 dl sliced onion stalks or 1 small onion

Combine pasta and pesto in a bowl. If your pasta is just cooked and you use frozen corn, add the corn too, because it will make the pasta cool down quicker.  Add the rest of the ingredients, mix and let sit in the fridge at least half an hour before serving.

Kappa Maki And Other Sushi

Today I made my first sushi. I had eaten sushi once in my omnivorous times, and it had fish in it. Miyoko Nishimoto Schinner’s Contemporary and Traditional Japanese Cooking: Simple, Delicious and Vegan had good sushi rice instructions, which I used. The book said it the amount of rice serves 6-12 people, and I thought half of it would be a dinner for two + some leftovers for lunch next day. I was wrong, we had so much sushi that it looked like we were having a Japan themed party. I guess we’re eating sushi the rest of the week.

Making the sushi was easier than I thought and it was fun. I made kappa maki (cucumber maki) and other maki rolls. I don’t know if the other rolls have Japanese names or do they eat that kind of combinations in Japan, but they were good. I served them with wasabi and Kikkoman shoyu.Leftt: avocado and toasted sesame seed maki. Middle: wasabi, toasted sesame seed and bell pepper maki. Right: avocado, cucumber and toasted sesame seed maki.

Left: wasabi, cucumber and bell pepper maki. Right: carrot (cooked with little bit of water, soy sauce and mirin) and toasted sesame seed maki.

Left: avocado, cucumber and bell pepper maki. Right: kappa maki.

Sushi Rice

1l rice
1l water
1 dl sugar
2 dl sushi vinegar
1 tbsp mirin
1,5 tbsp sea salt

10 nori sheets

Put the rice to a large pot. Fill the pot with cold water, stir with your hands and pour off the water. Repeat until the water is fairly clear. Pour 1l water to the pot and soak the rice at least 30 minutes. Put the lid on (don’t remove it while cooking) and turn the heat to high. When water starts to boil, turn the heat to medium and cook 5 minutes. Turn the heat low and cook 5-10 minutes. Turn the heat off and let the rice sit 5-10 minutes.

Combine sugar, vinegar, mirin and salt in a pot, bring to boil and let cool. Stir the rice with a big spoon or spatula and add some vinegar at the same time. If the rice stops absorbing the liquid, don’t add more. Choose the fillings you want to use and prepare them: cut all the vegetables to thin sticks, deseed the cucumber, toast the sesame seeds etc.

Finally, make the maki rolls. I followed Isa and Terry’s instructions.