Potatoes and asparagus cream

This is definitely not a seasonal recipe. The fact is that when I tried it and thought it was good to post it on the blog it was actually spring. Pity though that between lazyness and lack of time and energy, I ended up only now to focus on writing this post.
It will surely become handy for next spring!

Ingredients:

• 800 gr cleaned asparagus
• 200 ml of white wine
• 250 ml of cream
• a bit of chives
• 1l of vegetable broth
• 30 gr of butter
• salt
• 1 shallot
• 300 gr of potatoes
• 2 spoons of olive oil
• black pepper
• some slices of sandwhich bread

First peel and wash the potatoes, then dice them in small cubes.

Diced potatoes

After washing and clean the asparagus, cut the tops away and lightly boil them (for one minute) in a little amount of salted water. When they are ready, let them cool off
Slice the stems in small pieces and the shallot as well.

Sliced asparagus stems

Lightly fry the shallot with the olive oil and the butter.

Golden shallot

Then add both the potatoes and the asparagus and cook it so for about 7-8 minutes, at medium heat, mixing around there and then with a wooden spoon, in order to avoid that everything will get stuck to the bottom of the casserole.

Frying vegetables

Add the white wine, and once it has evaporated, add all the broth. Cook everything for about 20 minutes.

At this point add the cream and cook it for 10 minutes more.

It starts to look like a cream!

Add the black pepper and, if needed, some salt.

With a stick blender, mix everything around to target the right consistency removing the casserole from the stove.

Blending

In the meanwhile, prepare also the croutons.

Dice the sandwhich bread and let them roast on a non-stick frying pan, until golden.

Put back the casserole on the stove and heat it up again. Add the chopped chives. Finally, add also the asparagus tops and serve it with the croutons!

Fruits Basket, by Natsuki Takaya

Fruits Basket Ultimate Edition Volume 12 by Natsuki Takaya
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Despite some imperfections, Fruits Basket deserves to be considered (by me) a masterpiece.
What could appear to be a trivial romantic scholastic comedy, turned out to be a very deep story, that touches many interesting levels. Or at least, I have interpreted the different themes in a specific way: the constant sensation of being imperfect and never appreciated by the parents, the fear of being alone and not being accepted and the courage required to connect with other people and on the other hand, also positive subjects as friendship, forgiveness, acceptance and growing up.
Possibly, the way I am describing doesn't make justice of the whole story as such, but all the characters are very interesting and unique and it is incredibly easy to think that it'd be great to find a "Toru" in your life.
The story mixes a lot of drammatic moments, with some that are incredibly hilarious to instead others that are just carrying the story on.
The tempo is always quite high and, despite the 12 volumes of this edition, it doesn't get neither boring nor repetitive.
There are though few confusing things: a little bit too many characters which sometimes are drawn very similarly to each other - hence it becomes quite hard to recognize one or the other; the insertion of the school commitee element, which is very confusing at the beginning and gets away quite a lot from the main plot: this introduces a bit too many elements that are possibly not fully related and makes things a bit too complicated (although it is clear that the whole part is used as an excuse to introduce a couple of characters), and definitely the finale, where something about Toru's mother's death is revealed, but it is nothing that I was considering worthy to write, at that point.
Finally, I think it is very nice to notice how beautiful the drawings in the final chapters are, a real evolution from the beginning, although some strips are a bit confusing in the whole story and they need to be read with extra attention.
In general, this is a manga that just needs to be read (indipendently from your gender) and that transmits a lot of feelings and emotions. It is very nice to see that also today it is possible to find great stories like this one.

View all my reviews

Pepper with Capers

Needing a reasonably simple sidedish? This is a very good choice if you have to do other things at the same time!
Ingredients:

• 6 bell peppers
• 2 spoons of capers
• Bread crumbs
• Olive oil
• Salt
• 1 chopped garlic chove
• 2 spoons of chopped parsley

Slice the peppers and clean them from seeds and not edible parts. Wash them and put them in a pan with some water and the garlic.

First steps: put the peppers and the garlic in a pan

Warm up the pan at a not too high temperature and mix around the ingredients. 

When the water has dried out, add olive oil and put a lid over the pan.

It will now take some time before the peppers are cooked: just stir every now and then to avoid that they get burnt and to check if they are cooked.

Once they are ready (it will take probably at least 30 minutes), add the capers (if you are used the ones preserved in salt, carefully rinse them before using them), the parsley and the bread crumbs and turn off the heat.

It's ready!

Buon appetito!

Let's open the doors to the Autumn

Or better, let's update our door decoration (dörrkrans) to an autumn version (höstkrans), with pumpkins, red berries and pine cones.

Our new door wreath

Torup Skogens Dag 2013 (The day of the woods of Torup)

This year September has been a very mild month, full of sunny and warm days. We decided to take advantage of this beautiful weather and do some outdoor activities, among which "participate" in Skogens Dag in Torup with some friends. Not that it was that warm when we went there... it even started to rain!
If our kids would have been a bit older, this would have been even better than we experienced!

Torup is a place not too far from Malmö; a beautiful castle, its park, the stables and a beech woods can be found there. I think a lot of people from Malmö take the occasion to visit the woods for a nice walk and for picking up mushroom. There is also a recreational area, with a part devoted to kids.

During this event, one walks around a specific path and have the opportunity to visit different stands. Most of them are informative about activities related to the woods, handled by different organization, and most of them offers also snacks.

The sun is shining through the trees

During the day there are some events that are planned for kids, for example an outdoor theater or some "troubadour" playing his guitar and entertaining everyone. A troll named Smulan could be also seen wandering through the trees...

One of the different stands

One of the stands was from the ornithological group and they were having not only birdhouses, but also...stuffed birds! Not exactly what I was looking for.... :-)

It is tempting with a fire when the day is a bit chilly!

Another stand, which interested Mattias very much, was about mushrooms. You can all imagine how bored I was ;-)
But for us, most of the walk was devoted to find something to eat (surprise, surprise!) and we ended up trying almost all the food from the different stands.

The theater

In one bigger area, few stands were collected and it was possible to grill one own hot dog and bread and we spent definitely a lot of time doing that! Especially the bread (not the one specific for hot dogs, the "bread stick" ) was very interesting.

Grilling hot dog and bread

Taking this walk, although the weather was not perfect (and we didn't have the right clothes for such an activity) was very nice and I hope we will take the occasion to experience Bokskogen and the area around Torup more often, although we have our own little "woods" to take care of...

Gamla Brogatan, Malmö

About one month ago, it was our sixth wedding anniversary. We had big plans for the day but we ended up changing them all, since we were tired and Isabella's rythm, like usual during the weekend, was a bit messed up.
After a lot of replanning, we decided that go and take an ice cream at Dolce Sicilia, stroll a bit around Malmö and a dinner out (which is something so uncommon these days) was good enough.
The problem was searching a new place where to eat and we picked Gamla Brogatan from the list of unexplored places. Also, it was Sunday and where we really wanted to go was closed...
I had been in the restaurant before, other three times, while for Mattias it was a brand new experience. However, the times I have been there the menu was definitely different.

The restaurant is quite cosy and has a very calm and old fashioned atmosphere. One has also to think that we were there when noone else dares to eat dinner ;-)
We got to choose our food form a decently long menu with different choices, mainly meat based (especially for the main dish).
The choice for fish or vegetarian food is a bit restricted, but still existing!

As for appetizer, I choose a soup. I was quite stuffed from the ice cream and didn't feel like stuffing myself even more.
The soup was of leak and potatoes and enriched with 200 kgs of parsley.
If we think of the 70s touch of the parsley, the soup was quite ok, not exactly creamy but more on the "minestrone" style.

The soup

As main dish, I was having a bit hard time finding something that was of my taste. If there was something I liked, there might have been that the side dish was something I would have not approved. So, the choice ended up on being a dish with rabbit, which I thought was quite unconventional in a quite classic Swedish style menu.

The rabbit

Three things didn't convince me of my main dish. Again, a big fist of parsley spread allover the dish (the chef must have had a special feeling for it), the fact that some pieces of meat tasted old and finally, that the dish was a bit too much "autumn-winter" style and I would have not expected it to eat in that format in the end of the summer.

If we think about the service, everything was ok, but I didn't appreciate that we couldn't have a bottle of water on the table. Every time we were thirsty, not having taken anything else to drink, we had to look the waiter with "puppy-eyes", hoping he would noticed us.

The evening was quite ok, but the dinner was not memorable. I think Mattias was luckier in his choice, but mushrooms and sauerkraut were not what I was looking for... :-)

Red plum and blackberry jam

As always in this period, we end up having a lot of fruit thanks to a nice combination: our own production as well as the one of others who decide to dump their harvest on us.
In this specific case, we did collect all the plums of our little tree and since they didn't seem to survive that much we planned to make a jam out of them.
At the same time we got a big box filled with blackberries.

The plums

Ingredients:

• 600 gr of plums
• 400 gr of blackberries
• 1 kg of sugar
• the juice of one lemon

The fruit is boiling

I started by warming up the plums for about 3-4 minutes, keeping them in movement so that they would not get stuck to the pot. When they looked a bit softened, I added the blackberries. I stirred for few minutes and then I added the lemon juice.
I let the mix cook at a quite high temperature for about 5 minutes more and then I blend it.

The blended mix, pity the picture became blurred

Finally, I add the sugar and since I am lazy I use the one specific for making jams, so that I don't have to spend too much time wrestling with it (and Isabella at the same time).
I cooked everything, while stirring, for about 5 minutes, then I put the content in sterilized jars, which I then store in a dark and cool place.

Another blurry picture capturing the jam