Sprouts

My latest obsession - sprouts. I've grown sprouts before, but this new procedure that I follow, is so easy and failure-proof, that I believe everybody should try it.

I'm not going to preach about sprouts, the information about their richness in vitamins, especially C, B6 and Folate, fibers and micro-elements is widely available and well-known. And unlike other otherwise healthy ingredients, sprouts are actually very delicious, adding crunch and freshness to any salad or meal.

My first experiments were with lentils and I'm sprouting presently mung beans as well. Here are the steps I follow:

1. Place 2 tablespoons of seeds in a jar, preferably bio-seeds, they shouldn't be treated with chemical and should be intact, not crushed or shelled. Fill the jar with fresh water, cover it with a cotton mesh and leave between 8-12 hours to awaken the seeds. Dependent on the plant, you might need to keep the seeds in a dark place, like for mung beans, or on a kitchen shelf for lentils, where they would get some light, but not direct sunlight.

2. After the initial 8-12 hours period, drain the water, add fresh water and drain it again. Tilt the jar at a 45° angle, so that any excess water can be drained and the seeds can get sufficient airflow, in order to prevent mold or bacteria growth.

3. Repeat this procedure twice or three time a day (mung beans are hardier and thirstier). You'll see the first small white roots poking from the seeds on the second day.

I took these pictures near the window, because of the better lighting and to show off my gorgeous orchid :), but I usually keep the jar on a kitchen shelf away from the window.

4. The growth process is very rapid, lentils are super easy to grow and my sprouting success rate was nearly 100%. On the third day you'll notice the small green stems of the plant, growing from the opposite side of the seed. 

5. The sprouts are ready to eat on the 5th day, but you can leave them a little longer, probably a week, if you want them bigger. Once they have grown big enough, you can store them in a glass container in the fridge for up to 5-6 days.

The initial impetus for my decision to grow sprouts was the uniquely delicious Korean meal I tried in Vienna - Dak Bibimbap. I used my first harvest of sprouts to make a Bulgarian version of the meal with the products I had at hand - boneless chicken thighs, rice, green peas and lentil sprouts and everybody at home polished off their earthenware bowls - it was heavenly delicious. My next experiment will be a sort of Dak Bibimbap with chicken. rice, carrots, sauteed mangold, cucumber and mung bean sprouts. Can't wait for the tiny seeds to grow :) 

Cake with Jam and Custard

I LOVE my morning coffee. It's a ritual, it's a religion, it's a sacred rite and communion.

And I love coming up with ideas for the small sweets I eat with my coffee, while doing my Duolingo exercises and reading my German book, all part of my morning routine.

Our dessert with the morning coffee today was a spongy cake with jam filling and custard coating - a perfect combination of textures and sweetness. The 40 g of sugar in the batter makes it very lightly sweet, almost neutral, the jam filling gives a sudden spike of sugary strawberry taste on some bites and the creamy custard with grated bitter chocolate on top smooths the texture and enhances the moisture of the bite.

Ingredients for the cake base:

• 1 egg
• 30 g sugar + 10 g vanilla sugar + a pinch of salt
• 100 g yogurt 
• 35 g sunflower oil
• 100 g flour 
• 5 g baking powder

Mix the batter, pour in a baking form and bake for 25 min in a preheated oven at 200C. Use an apple corer to form holes in the baked cake. Put the extracted cores of cake aside to be turned into crumbles later. Fill the holes with jam.

Ingredients for the custard:

• 1 egg
• 40 g sugar
• 30 g flour
• 300 g milk 

Cook the custard on the stove and pour it on the jam filled cake. Cover with the cake crumbs. Grate a piece of dark chocolate on top. Serve with hot coffee and enjoy!

Easy Homemade Refrigerator Pickled Vegetables

Ever since we tried the recipe for these mixed pickled vegetables, we've been making them in factory amounts. They’ve become a winter staple on our table—a perfect, crunchy replacement for fresh salad. Packed with vitamins and fiber, they are incredibly easy to make and keep well in the fridge, or on the balcony, if your fridge is full and the winter is as chilly as it’s been lately in Sofia!

For our latest batch of mixed pickles we chose red cabbage, however we usually use white cabbage and you can use either, according to your preferences.

The veggies here are about 5 kg:

• 2 kg red cabbage
• 1.6 kg cauliflower
• 0.6 kg carrots
• 0.5 kg celery stalks
• 0.3 kg red peppers 

Wash and cut all the vegetables into small pieces. The finer you slice the cabbage, the more delicate the texture, though it’s certainly not an exact science! Our secret tip: We like to microwave the carrots and cauliflower for a few minutes first. We’ve found we prefer them slightly softer rather than raw. Since we make this at least twice a month, we've refined it to our liking. It might take you a few experiments, until you find your own "perfect" crunch.

After the veggies are sliced and mixed, we cook the brine. For this 5 kg mixture of veggies we put:

•  2 tablespoons salt
• 2 tablespoons sugar
• 250 g apple cider vinegar (one cup)
• 150 g sunflower oil (2/3 cup)
• a few grains of black pepper and allspice

We bring the brine to boil, pour the hot brine over the veggies and mix thoroughly. Let the mixture sit at room temperature for a couple of hours to begin curing; then, move it to the cold to slow down the fermentation.

We use a food-grade plastic container for the initial mixing, but we prefer transferring the pickles to glass jars for long-term storage. While they are ready to eat in just a few hours, the texture softens and the flavor only gets better with time. These should keep for months in the fridge—though in our house, a 5 kg batch barely lasts two weeks. Apparently, 5 kg of veggies isn't that much for a family of adults :)

Persimmon Cake

I had two medium size persimmons in the fridge that were getting over-ripe, so I decided to make them into a cake. This summer we went full throttle into the cream cake territory and I made almost two dozen cream cakes with berries we picked on our hikes, or bought at the market.

The recipe I chose is more a sort of an algorithm I follow for cream cakes, covered with cake glaze. The cake is made of three layers - a hard layer, which might be made of biscuits and butter or baked cake, a cream layer, often custard, cheese cream, sour cream or a combination thereof and a fruit layer, made of berries or slices of fruit, covered with cake glaze.

Ingredients: 

Biscuit layer:

• 200 g cracker biscuits
• 100 g melted butter 

Cream layer:

• 50 g powdered sugar
• 200 g sour cream
• 1 blended persimmon 

Fruit layer:

• 1 thinly sliced persimmon
• 1 pack red tortenguss 
• 30 g sugar
• 220 g water 

Preparation:

The cake involves no baking, and almost no cooking but for the cake glaze. In order to prepare the biscuit layer, first grind the biscuits. I used the remaining content of a pack of wholegrain crackers and brought the quantity up to 200 g with some of my home-baked lemon biscuits. Then mix the biscuits with the soft butter, spread the buttery crumbs on the bottom of a cake dish and press. Leave in the fridge for at least half an hour to cool and harden a little.

Meanwhile blend one persimmon, add the fruit to 200 g of thick 20% sour cream and fold in 50 g of powdered sugar. Spread the creamy layer over the biscuit layer.

Finally cut the second persimmon into thin slices and arrange them on top. Even better if you have more than one, then you could tile the slices on top of the cream. Cook the tortenguss (cake glaze) according to instructions and spread the hot glaze over the fruit slices. 

Place in the fridge and leave overnight. Serve with coffee and enjoy!

Jam-Filled Muffins

The parking lot for the hiking trail in the village of Sirishtnik is a small square at the end of the village, near some abandoned houses. The people and the houses are now gone, but the fruit trees are still giving fruit and mid-November there were some scattered quinces on the grass under the quince tree at the end of the parking lot. Last year, when we hiked there more or less at the same time of year, we gathered a handful of fruits and made quince jam, which came out very aromatic and delicious.

This year the quince harvest was even bigger and we made almost a dozen and a half jars of jam, which should last us years :) Here is the method and recipe we applied this time:

The total amount of quinces we gathered was 3.5 kg. We washed them and put them in hot water to boil until soft, so that they would be easier to cut and clean. Then we took them out of the water (which we preserved), let them cool and cleaned them. After all cores were removed, the harvest yielded about 2.5 kg quince meat. To that we added about 1 l of the water, in which the fruit was cooked and blended them with a hand blender. Then we added 1.8 kg sugar to the mash and let it stay in a cool place for a couple of hours.

Once the sugar had completely melted and soaked in the quince mash, we added the juice of half a lime and brought the jam to cook at medium heat for an hour. once the jam was cooked, we poured the hot jam into the clean jars and turned them upside down to cool, no boiling of the jars is required.

I used the jam to make a batch of jam-filled muffins. This is probably my fifth batch of muffins with jam core lately. I've been experimenting with the batter and the filling method and though I wouldn't claim that I've nailed it, I am pretty happy with my latest results:

Ingredients for the muffins:

• 2 eggs
• 80 g sugar
• 200 g yogurt 
• 70 g sunflower oil
• 200 g flour 
• 5 g baking powder + a pinch of baking soda
• 5 g spices (cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves) + a pinch of salt 

Preparation:

Beat the eggs with the sugar, add the oil and yogurt and mix. Stir in the flour, mixed with the baking powder and the spices. Distribute the batter in 12 muffin forms. Place a teaspoon of jam in the center of each muffin form, stirring it lightly to push the jam inside the batter. Bake in a preheated oven at 200C for 25 min, until a toothpick test confirms readiness.

Enjoy with your fresh coffee or tea.

Quiche

Quiche is one of the dishes, that I've been obsessed by lately. I used to consider it difficult and time-consuming to make, but I came upon an idea for the crust, that revolutionized my understanding of the dish and quickly turned it into a staple.

I've gathered some pictures from the last two quiches that I baked recently, but the varieties are endless - quiche is more an algorithm, than a recipe.

The main feature of the dish is the crust, which I prepare into the chopper.

Ingredients:

• 90 g wholegrain flour
• 85 g white flour
• 60 g water
• 55 g sunflower or other vegetable oil
• half a teaspoon of salt

Preparation: 

Mix the ingredients in the chopper with short pulses, until a dough is formed. Place the dough in a form and spread it evenly on the bottom, forming a border of 2-2.5 cm on the side. Cover the dough with baking paper and baking weights (I use a bowl of designated beach stones).

Bake in a preheated oven for 20 min at 200C. Take the dish out of the oven, remove the baking paper with the weights and bake the crust further for 5 min.

Meanwhile prepare the filling. For my Quiche Lorraine I cooked a handful of chopped mushrooms, which I spread on the crust.

Then I prepared a mixture of 3 eggs, 140 g milk, 60 g flour and ham, chopped into small pieces, which I poured on the mushrooms. I covered the filling with grated yellow cheese.

I baked the quiche in the oven for about 25 min, until ready.

This dish is equally delicious warm and cold, served with white wine or rose.

The quiche can be also vegetarian, here I made one with two zucchini, lightly cooked with olive oil and chopped dill. Once they were ready, I covered them with a tablespoon of wholegrain flour, to bond the moisture. The filling is made of 3 eggs, lightly beaten, milk, flour and cubes of feta cheese and yellow cheese, spiced with black pepper.

I'm a big fan of the zucchini version, and I've tried the same recipe with broccoli. The brilliant thing about quiche is, that it is an extremely flexible dish, adjustable to the contents of your fridge :)

Banana Muffins

The more one knows about cooking, the more free one feels to experiment and create concoctions in the style of "the contents of my fridge". Thus today I mixed a batch of banana muffins and they turned out so delicious, that I decided to write down the recipe for further reference.

What I had were a  bunch of bananas, that according to husband were not very tasty, some open cup of yogurt and chocolate chips, and of course, flour, eggs, sunflower oil and other household staples.

 Ingredients:

• 1 average banana
• 1 egg
• 60 g sunflower oil
• 50 g sugar + a pinch of salt
• 100 g yogurt
• 200 g flour
• 8 g baking powder
• vanilla extract
• chocolate chips 

 Preparation:

Mash the banana, add the egg, the oil, the yogurt, the sugar and a pinch of salt and mix. Fold in the flour with the baking powder. Add the vanilla extract and stir in the chocolate chips. Distribute the batter into 12 muffin forms and bake in a preheated oven at 190C until golden.

The resulting muffins are very fluffy and the semi-sweetness (only 50 g sugar) allows the taste buds fully to appreciate the distinct banana taste and the bitter-sweet flavour of the chocolate chips, a classic and timeless combination.

Best enjoyed with a cup of freshly brewed hot coffee or tea. 

Cinnamon Biscuits

My new favourite biscuits - I've been making these regularly and the recipe is definitely a keeper. I tried it with melted butter and with a combination of butter and sunflower oil, but surprisingly, these are better with vegetable oil, IMHO.

Ingredients:

• 1 egg
• 60 g oil
• 75 g sugar
• 220 g flour
• 5 g baking powder
• pinch of salt 
• spices

Preparation:

Lightly beat the egg with the sugar, add the oil and the spices. I make my own mix of cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg and aniseed and add about a teaspoon of that, but you can add as much or as little to taste. Mix in the flour with the baking powder and form a pliable, but not sticky dough. Separate the dough into twenty small balls and press each ball between your palms to form a cookie. You can put aside a tablespoon of the sugar and press each cookie into the sugar, to sugarcoat it. You can also improvise some design on top of the cookies, as I did with the help of a fork.

Bake in a warm oven at 180C until the cookies turn lightly brown. Serve cooled with coffee or tee.

I had an idea to use the same dough to make a pie crust, so I made a blackberry custard pie. It was really delicious and the dough is perfect for pie crust, but the cinnamon taste was a bit overwhelming, so probably vanilla or no spices next time.