Super easy zucchini salad

This salad is incredibly easy to make and very tasty!

Ingredients:
zucchini
garlic
olive oil
salt
pepper
roasted almond slices

Use a carrot peeler (or zucchini pasta maker) to cut zucchini into thin slices.
Heat up olive oil, fry the garlic and add zucchini, salt and pepper. Fry while stirring for about 5 minutes, not too long so that the zucchini doesn't loose all of its bite. Serve with roasted almond slices.

Vegetarian Bulgur Burgers

We made flavorful and moist vegetarian/vegan burger at the community kitchen. It is adapted from The Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home cookbook.
These burger patties are faster to prepare than most vegetarian burgers and we ate them with home made preserved carrots (left overs from last months community kitchen preserved in vinegar!) and salad.

3 cups boiling water
2 garlic cloves
1 1/2 cups bulgur
2 tbsp canola oil
1/2 cup chopped scallions
1/2 cup grated carrots
1/2 cup chopped parsley
1/4 cup tahini
2 tbsp tomato paste
2 tbsp soy sauce
1 tsp Dijon mustard
1 cup mashed pinto beans (e.g. from a can)
(optional) 1 egg
salt and pepper
Sauté garlic and bulgur in a pan for about 2 min. Add boiling water and simmer for 15-18 minutes until the bulgur is soft.
Stir in the remaining ingredients.
With wet hands, form 8 burger patties.
Either bake the patties for 20 min at 375F / 190C, or fry them for about 5 minutes from each side.
Serve on a bun with tomatoes, mayonnaise, mustard, cheese, pickled carrots or other additions.

Lentils and Vegetables Indian Style

This recipe was an emergency vegetable saver as I had quite a few squash that were going bad after a weekend away. It was also my first try at makeing an Indian dish.

lentils
onion
garlic
ginger
turmeric
cayenne pepper
chili flakes
salt and pepper
leek
carrots
squash
Cook the lentils in water with a bit of salt.
In a frying pan, heat up oil and fry the onions. After a couple of minutes, add garlic and ginger. Add the spices.
Add leek and carrots. After a couple of minutes, add squash. Add spices if necessary.
When almost done, add the lentils and cook until done.

I liked the flavorful result, but it wasn't as spicy as I had hoped, I might have been too careful with the chili flakes. Next time I want to follow an actual recipe to make an Indian dish :)

Spinach Puffs

I started going to a community kitchen event that happens once a week. It's a great way to learn new recipes, the people are very welcoming and the huge kitchen is great, too!

These spinach puffs might just become my favorite recipe. They are easy to make and although I usually don't like feta cheese too much, it adds a lot to the spinach and puff pastry taste AND I can use my muffin pan for yet another non-muffin recipe!

2/3 cups thawed spinach, well squeezed to get as much water out as possible
1/2 cup feta cheese
1 onion
1 garlic clove
1 tbsp olive oil
1 tsp dill
salt and pepper
2 eggs
frozen puff pastry (4"/10cm squares)
Mix spinach, feta, chopped onion, garlic, olive oil, dill, salt and pepper, and one of the eggs.
Place puff pastry squares into muffin pan molds.
Fill puff pastry with spinach mix.
Fold pastry corners so that they meet in the center.
Beat the second egg and brush the pastry with it.
Bake at 400F/200C for about 25 min until golden.

I could imagine changing the salmon roll recipe to fit into puff pastry cups instead of a roll! Mmmh!

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!

Baked Chicken Drumsticks

This recipe claims to produce the best baked chicken legs. Although I like the name of the blog a lot I have to disagree with this entry. Yes, this recipe is quick and easy. But for my taste the result only gets an OK, these cannot be the best baked chicken legs. I will be on the look out for other recipes. Maybe something with rosemary or other herbs..

Picadillo

This Picadillo recipe is one of my favorite recipes. I learned it from a friend a couple of years ago and have made it a couple of times since then.
It is great in tortillas as suggested in the recipe, but I like the rice version just as much. I served it with home made guacamole, grated cheddar and some salad:

Chicken Cutlets

This is a recipe from my grandmother.

Chicken Cutlets:
1lb chicken fillet
2 eggs
2 heaped tbsp mayonnaise
2 heaped tbsp potato flour
1 onion, finely chopped
2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
salt, pepper, paprika, cumin
Cut the chicken fillet in small pieces (about the size of a fingernail). Mix all the other ingredients together. Add chicken, mix well and let the mixture sit in the fridge for 6-8 hours (I only waited 30 minutes and it still worked well).
In a frying pan, heat some oil and use a tablespoon to drop the mixture onto the pan. Fry for a couple of minutes from both sides until golden.
Keeps well in the fridge for a couple of day and can be frozen.

Beans with Spinach and Cheese

Since the Christmas beans turned out so yummy, I as eager to try more bean recipes. Christmas beans are a variation of the traditional Lima beans. So I got some traditional Lima beans to try out this recipe with beans, spinach and cheese.

I cooked the beans (with pieces of carrots and celery), used frozen spinach which I fried up with onions, garlic and seasoned it with salt and pepper. I put beans and spinach in a baking dish and topped everything with cheddar and mozzarella (since I don't like feta cheese much).

The result was really yummy, especially with the cheese. When heated up the next day in the microwave the cheese melted though and around all the layers. Mmmh, my kind of dish :)