Avocados filled with Shrimp

This is a quick and simple recipe and it tastes great. It's easy to make the filling and bring it with the avocados to a party where the avocados can be cut and filled in no time. 

The recipe is based on this one, which uses crab meat instead of shrimps.

Ingredients:
Avocados
Cooked mini shrimp, chopped
Celery
1/2 - 1 Shallots

Mayonnaise
Cream cheese

Lemon or lime juice
Salt

Pepper

Chop celery and shallot very finely in a food processor. Mix with shrimp, mayonnaise, cream cheese, lemon juice, salt, pepper and sea food spice if desired.

Cut avocados in half and take out a little bit of the flesh to be mixed in the filling. Salt the avocado halves. Fill with shrimp filling. Add pepper or parsley to garnish.

Enjoy!

Vegetabel stock from scraps

I stumbled upon this brilliant idea a couple of weeks ago. It is quite simple:
1. Collect your veggie scraps in a container in the freezer.
2. Cook the veggie scraps with herbs in water for about an hour.
3. Drain. Use the stock.

This site has a useful picture to show which vegetables make good stock and what should be avoided.

Whenever the containers containing veggie scraps begin to take up too much space in my freezer I make a pot of stock (or rather I assume this is what I will continue doing, thus far it has only happened once) and make a soup with the stock.

So easy!

Chicken Stew with Vegetables and Grains

This is a recipe I wanted to try out after making a similar ready-made mix. I changed it up a little bit, adding vegetables and changing the cooking process. I imagine, it is also possible to make a vegetarian version of this stew.

2 cups mix of beans, rice and lentils
salt
garlic
rosemary *other spices
1 big onion, chopped
4 carrots, chopped
1 celery, chopped
1 - 2 pound chicken breast
10 cups vegetable or chicken stock

Wash the grains, set aside.
Heat up oil and add onions in a big pot. When onions are cooked add spices and chicken and cook for about 5 minutes. Add vegetables and cook for another 5 minutes. Add stock and grains and cook until grains are done.

Vegetable Soup with Chicken

I wanted to make a mushroom soup with the leftover turkey stock that was sitting in my freezer since Thanksgiving. But I couldn't get any dried mushrooms and didn't want to use only fresh ones (how are dried mushrooms a seasonal thing when you can get fresh ones all year round?).
So I improvised and came up with the following recipe.

1 onion
olive oil
chicken breast
chives, cut into small rings
salt, pepper, cumin, parsley
3 potatoes
1 cup frozen peas
1 cup chickpeas
4 cups broccoli
several stalks celery
white wine
cream
4 cups broth
8 oz of sliced white mushrooms
Cut the onion into small pieces and fry it in some olive oil in a big pot. Rub chicken breast with salt, pepper and spices and fry with the onions until done. Remove the chicken. When the chicken has cooled down a little but, cut it into small pieces. Add chives.
Cut the potatoes into small cubes and add them to the onion. Fry for a couple of minutes while stirring so that the onions don't burn. Add peas, broccoli and celery. Fry for another 5 minutes. Add some white wine and cream and the 4 cups of broth. Cook until the vegetables are done, add spices to taste. Then blend with an immersion blender.
In a frying pan fry the sliced mushrooms for a couple of minutes from both sides. Add to the chicken.
Serve the creamy soup with some of the chicken-mushroom mix and sour cream.

The result was quite tasty, but it made me realize that I need to stock up on my herbs. I only had parsley and basil and would have liked to add tarragon or rosemary.

Christmas Beans Salad

After we bought a bunch of dried Christmas beans (of the family of Lima Beans) for their fun name I started researching how to cook beens and found this wonderful article which consoled me with the idea of continuing to buy dried beans in the future: No need to soak them! Isn't that great?! No need to plan ahead what shall be cooked tomorrow and no need to postpone bean dishes because there isn't enough time for soaking!

Happy about this unexpected good news I fried up some garlic, onions, carrots and celery (later realizing that I didn't need to chop them up into such tiny pieces) and added the mix to a pot of well washed Christmas beans, filled it with water so that the beans were covered by what I judged to be one inch and then cooked them for about an hour or an hour and a half until they had the right consistency.


Then I chopped up some more onion, carrots and celery to make this bean salad.

For the vinaigrette I used:
lemon juice of half a lemon (I didn't have vinegar)
olive oil
a couple of tbsp of the water from beans
chives
dried basil
dried parsley
salt, pepper

The beans taste wonderfully nutty and satisfying. The fresh carrots and celery as well as the lemon juice in the vinaigrette are a fresh complement. Nom nom nom!

Vegetable Stew (with beef)

For this stew I have combined ideas that I found online with what I had in the fridge. This recipe can easily be done without the beef and as a vegan/vegetarian version.

Vegetable Stew

beef for stews (optional)
oil mustard and dressing
4-5 cups of broth
1/2 can of tomato paste
spices: bay leaves, oregano or basil, pepper, salt
3 carrots, sliced
3 big potatoes, diced
5 celery stems, diced
1 onion, chopped
1 leek, sliced
1 apple, diced
3 tomatoes, diced
1 cup mushrooms, sliced
3 tablespoons of flour
3 table spoons of water
In a large pot, fry the beef in oil, mustard and dressing until done on the outside.
Add broth, tomato paste and spices, bring to a boil and then simmer for 30-60 minutes (I used this time to cut the vegetables). Add carrots, potatoes, celery, onion and leek. Cook until potatoes are soft. Add apple, tomatoes and mushrooms and cook for another 10-15 minutes.
Whisk together flour and water and add to the stew, cook for another 3 minutes until the stew thickens.

Outcome:
- I couldn't taste the mustard and dressing at all and I wonder if they are necessary (I think I would have liked a little mustard taste, so I will try to add more mustard next time).
- The stew had a very strong tomato taste which I wasn't expecting since I only used half a can. I want to try to leave that out next time.
- Another thing I wasn't expecting was that I couldn't taste the celery much. I don't like raw celery and for that reason haven't used it in cooking either. Maybe it was masked by the tomato taste, but in the future I will not avoid it anymore.
- I added the apple because some sites say that it goes well will celery or celery root, but I don't think that one apple made much difference. Maybe it was also masked by the tomato taste.
- What I really liked was how the stew thickened slightly with the flour and water mixture that is added in the end.