From the category archives:

Gluten-Free Breakfast

Bone Marrow Recipe

by Emilia on July 30, 2010

Eating head to tail has been something of a revelation to me after I quit being a vegetarian; bones, offal and all things edible in an animal are now something that I frequently eat.

As a child my favourite foods did include reindeer bones, the yellowish greasy marrow was sucked out of them after a long cooking, and a sort of reindeer jerky which was made from the heart of the reindeer, it had been dried outside until it was tough, salty and just very delicious. I couldn’t get enough of these foods, but somehow I still held a deep aversion to things that included liver, heart and parts not so often eaten.

I do realize now that it is a cultural thing; I was happy to eat the dried hearts for example because everyone around me enjoyed them when we visited my mother’s family in Lapland. But at home in the southern parts of Scandinavia everything else than the plain muscle meats were considered something not so tasty and it really rubbed onto me too.

Then came the vegetarian years which played a number on my thinking in many ways, I felt like all foods from animals were not so tasty, something I never wanted to have anything to do with. It was only vegetables, beans and grains for me. As years progressed my aversion towards meat grew stronger and I once thought that I would faint when I saw someone bite into some pink charred liver in a restaurant. It all seems so ridiculous now.

This only tells the tale of how deeply the ideas of suitable foods to eat are embedded into our minds even though reality might differ from what we believe. The culture around us dictates much of what we believe is something safe and good to eat, as a vegetarian I was surrounded by others who also believed that every part of an animal was something not to be eaten. People would call minced meat for example as slaughter waste; the language we used reflected the morality of what we thought was right, it felt like an affirmation.

In many ways offal has had the same fate as meat in general has had with vegetarians; it is not eaten and it is not usually appreciated.

But all of this seems to be changing; even the prices of kidneys, liver and ox tail for example have gone up - at least here. There are more and more restaurants serving bone marrow, heart, sweetbreads etc.

For me starting to eat bone marrow for example has been something of a learning experience, at first I had to close my eyes when eating them even though I enjoyed the taste -who wouldn’t enjoy the incredible richness - the sight of those big cooked bovine bones on my plate was so strange. My first times eating liver were difficult, I smothered them in lingonberries, the taste is like that of a slightly rusty nail, I thought.

Now days there isn’t many foods I enjoy more than lamb kidney, liver and bone marrow. I say it was worth it, adjusting my taste buds to these new things.

For some more reading I would recommend this book, The River Cottage Meat Book and about the health aspects of bone marrow Mark’s Daily Apple

Two Bone Marrow Recipes

Basic Bone Marrow

-Bones

-Salt

Put the bones into a dish of some sort, keep in mind that the fat will start dripping when they cook, so something with higher sides is essential.

Cook the bones for approximately 30 minutes at 400F/200 C, the bones are done when there is no more pink in them.

Scrambled Eggs and Marrow

serves 2

-4 eggs

-the marrow from 4 already cut and cooked bones

-1-2 tbls creme fraiche

- some chopped chives (optional)

Scramble the eggs with the creme fraiche, be thorough so that no clumps remain.

Put your pan on medium heat, add a little bit of olive oil and butter. Pour the eggs in, start by moving a spatula towards the center from all around, just gently move the liquid towards the center until the eggs start to get more firm. This movement will give you a soft scramble, not a tough and rubbery one. When they are almost done add the marrows into them.

Top with chives.

The creme fraiche will give you the best scrambled eggs ever and the marrow adds richness to them.

This can of course be done without the marrow too.

Getting Lost

What better to do on a really hot and humid day, when the temperature rises to over 30 C, than getting lost when hiking in the forest.

This is exactly what we did with my boyfriend. I don’t know how it happened and luckily we were in no real danger since the woods are not all that big at the place where we were, but it was still hard on the feet and the soul also. Imagine walking on endless forest paths when it’s so hot that you can’t even think straight, it will start eating you up after the first couple of hours.

I might be inclined to start taking a map with us from now on.

It wasn’t so bad when thinking of it afterwards, we got to swim in the above forest lake, which was lovely, we found a bunch of wild strawberries, bilberries and lots of raspberries in the forest.

I don’t know what wild strawberries are called in English, but here they are called metsämansikka which translates to forest strawberry. They are extremely sweet and full of flavour, much more sweet than a regular strawberry. One of my favourites when it comes to anything sweet.

The bilberries are all ripe and bursting with flavour. I was very surprised when I ate my first bilberries straight from the forest this year, they are so much sweeter than usual, it must be the hot weather.

My next post will have to be something with berries.

Popularity: 7% [?]

A Blini Recipe

by Emilia on March 30, 2009

Blinis, or blintz, are made from buckwheat and maybe best described as a Russian sour pancake - if you like sourdough bread you will probably love blinis.

Buckwheat blinis were born in Russia and I do consider them to be the single most delicious culinary gift the land of the Tsars has given; although I must say that in general Russian food is really good, blinis just happen to be extraordinarily tasty. Fermented pickles, fermented butter and fermented milk products like smetana all have a special place in my heart and they came here from Russia; most of the Finnish foods I like are actually Russian.

The process of making blinis starts with mixing some buckwheat flour with yeast and sour cream, the dough is then left to rise for some time either in the fridge for a longer time, or at room temperature for a shorter period of time. I usually leave it in the fridge over night; the sour scent from the dough is heavenly in the morning. After the fermenting some milk is heated and added to the dough with egg yolk, salt and butter, the egg white from the egg is whisked and then it is folded into the dough.

I would describe the scent at this point like the one you get from really strong beer.

The cooking in my house is done on a pancake pan made from cast iron with a lot of butter which needs to be hot enough, otherwise the outside will not be crisp, but it is left to be just too fatty and soggy. Blinis have all kinds of different fillings, but the most common would be some caviar, chopped onions and smetana, or sour cream, I also like to have them with some chopped cooked eggs mixed with butter.

Whatever the filling is, the blinis rarely disappoint.

A Blini Recipe

For some dairy-free blinis you could try using soy yogurt instead of sour cream, some soy milk instead of milk and lard instead of butter, some vegetable oil is fine too. In general I find lard to be better here than butter, but butter is more traditional. Organic lard is hard to get here - I get some pig fat from the organic pig we buy every now and then -so I usually use butter.

These are cooked just the same as regular pancakes, a cast iron pan is better because the heat distribution is different, but any pan would be fine.

Blinis

serves 4 people as a main course and 6 as a starter

Part 1

-400 grams / 14 ounces sour cream

-2,5 dl / 1 cup buckwheat flour

-20 grams / 0.7 ounces fresh yeast

-1 teaspoon sugar

Heat the sour cream until it feels warm when you touch it with your finger, add the sugar and the yeast. Mix them together and then add the flour.

Leave the dough to sit at room temperature for a couple hours, or leave it at room temperature for one hour and then over night in the fridge.

Part 2

-11/2 dl / 3/4 cup full fat milk

-1 tsp salt

-2 tbls melted butter

-one egg yolk

-one egg white

-a lot of butter for cooking

Take the dough out of the fridge, it should look like this.

Heat the milk and add the melted butter and salt to it. Pour it into the dough and mix the egg yolk to the dough too.

Whisk the egg white until white peaks form and then fold it into the dough.

Now the dough will be more liquid and it looks like this.

Heat a pan on medium heat.

It is the right temperature when the butter placed on it turns golden and foamy.

Cook the blinis. You can see that they are done when the bubbles on top turn into holes, then flip them and cook the other side.

Serve them hot with sour cream, or smetana if you can find it, some caviar and chopped onions. Or you could serve them with boiled eggs that have been mashed with a fork and mixed with butter and salt.

This my contribution to Go ahead honey, it’s gluten-free, which is a monthly gluten-free event, hosted this month by Naomi at Straight Into Bed Cakefree and Dried. The theme this month is gluten-free canapees.

Popularity: 44% [?]

Gluten-Free Banana Bread

by Emilia on March 1, 2009

I decided to make some banana bread this morning; it was an ex tempore kind of thing based on the fact that we had three blackened overripe bananas oozing with sweetness and a hint of the rot that will eventually devour them. This happens to almost everyone every once in a while - forgotten bananas that go black - but usually I just make some muffins with almond flour, eggs and bananas, it is simple, easy and fast. This time though I went for banana bread - sometimes you just need a change.

This all went well with my new decision to maybe post recipes without thinking about what kind of shots I want out of them, somehow this blogging has made me go a bit overboard with the planning of shots and a new simpler approach would do me some good. I invent recipes more often than I post them, just because I have become some sort of a perfectionist with the shooting; this should really be more about the food than the so called hunt for the perfect shot. I will still try my best to take the nicest photos possible and there is so much I want to learn about photography, light etc. but I do not want it to act as a hindrance for posting recipes.

These bread shots were taken without planning, in natural daylight and it took me less than five minutes to edit them and shoot them; this all felt very relaxing, no more stress about the two things I love so much - photography and food.