Baked crusty salmon with fresh dill sauce

I like salmon. At least I'm beggining to like it. I'm not big on fish. But anything that has a crispy crust, without a smelly interior, plus a great tasting sauce like a fresh dill sauce makes my day. Or evening. I prepared this with nice looking rice with peas and cumin seeds, but finally it would work better with plain rice, as the cumin is very fragrant and dominated the salmon. ( what?!)
When you buy ready fillet salmon, try to get the wider fillets. The smaller ones, which are more traingular in shape, are from the tail section of the fish, and have tougher meat. The wider, middle section is much more tender.

The salad is a nice addition to the salmon, and it very easy to make, just slice diagonally the cucumber with the skin on, add some fresh chopped dill and a bit of red bell pepper for color, and season with S&P plus some lemon juice with olive oil. Et voila!
PS. if you make this for a romantic dinner, skip the garlic.

Now get the salmon and sauce crackin'

Type of dish: main

Cost: medium

Difficulty: easy

Time: 40-50 min

Serves: 2

Preparation time: 15min

Baking Time: 20-30 min

Oven temp: 190C

You'll need:

a blender, paper towels, tablespoon, cutting board, sharp knife,baking dish for the salmon, tin foil,  gravy boat, small laddle, plates to serve

Ingredients: 

For the sauce:

• fresh dill
• 1 cup natural sugar free yoghurt
• 1 tbsp mayonaise
• 2 tbsp sour cream
• 1 tsp garlic powder
• 1 pinch salt
• 1 squeeze lemon juice
• 1 tbsp pepper 
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 1 tbsp dried or fresh parsley
• 1 tbsp dried oregano

For the salmon:

• 1 salmon fillet
• S&P
• Olive oil
• Lemon slices

Extremely hard to make. 

Preheat your oven. Pour olive oil in the baking dish and spread it around. Wash your fillet in cold water, and pat dry with paper towels and put in the baking tray skin side down. Rub a bit of oil on top of the fish and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Lay enough lemon slices on top to fairly cover it up. Cover with tin foil and pop in the oven for 20 min with the foil on, then take off the foil and remove the lemons and bake for 5 min more. Turn on the broiler for the last 5 minutes for a nice crispy crust.

Fish is done. You can cut it in half and serve. If the skin sticks to the baking dish, don't worry, you weren't going to eat it anyway.

Sauce: 

Put all the ingredients in the blender and pulse until you have a nice green sauce with specs of dill. Pour in a gravy boat and keep in fridge until fish is ready.

How to serve:

If serving fish with rice, place fillet gently over bed of rice or next to it, and pour some dill sauce over it.

Addtional info:

The sauce is great as a dip sauce for croutons or pita.

Amazing Tomato Sauce

You will be grateful for this recipe, because it will change your life, perspective, future choices and so on. Look into the sauce...

It's blatantly easy, so if you're planning, let's say, a pizza, this is a great sauce for the pizza base and as and additional sauce substitution for ketchup. Yes, ketchup. I think you might even make more of this sauce just to smear it anywhere- sandwiches, pasta, meat, the sort.

Trust me, everybody will like you even more once you know this recipe:)

Let's get it on... oh sugar... Let's get it on...Damn you Marvin Gaye.

Type of dish: sauce, dip
Cost: cheap
Difficulty: easy
Serves: 4-6
Time: 35 min
Preparation time: 2 min
Cooking time: 30 min

You'll need:
A low, shallow but deep (?) Saucepan of the frying pan kind. , cutting board, sharp knife, spatula, medium bowl, teaspoon

Ingredients:

• 2 cans of chopped tomatoes. ( or 1kg of fresh tomatoes, skinless)
•  2-3 garlic cloves, minced 
• 1 pinch of coarse sea salt ( buy 1kg and it will serve you for a lifetime, and your friends too)
• 2 tsp red pepper flakes
• grated rind from 1 lemon
• 1 pinch sugar
• 3tbsp olive oil

Get your guns up- Don't turn anything on yet. This is going to be a gentle, fragrant process. In the saucepan, pour in olive oil, sea salt, garlic and pepper flakes. mix it evenly and turn on your cooker, on medium high. Keep close to the pan now. Stir a bit with your spatula and keep sniffing. The sniffing is key to this recipe. Sniff until you can smell the garlic and pepper beginning to smell somewhat more intense than before. The garlic should still be white during this. Let it heat up more, until you just get that the garlics turning golden and plop in the tomatoes. mash them up with your spatula, mix well so the oil incorporates with the tomatoes. Mix it mix it. Now turn  down the heat a notch or two, best if it's medium, and go away. Come back every 4-5 to 6-8 minutes to stir, because we are reduced the water in the tomatoes. The sauce has to be thicker than tomato juice, but thinner than paste. This takes about 25 mins, and until then your sauce should have the constistency you look for in a pizza sauce. You know, the kind you get when you order pizza? Turn off the heat.
Okay, now add the lemon rind, mix, and taste it. You may need to add the sugar if the sauce is a little bit too acidic/bitter. just a pinch will do.
Taste again and you're ready to go. Eat, I mean.

This recipe makes enough sauce for 3 large pizza's plus for topping them all. If you don't plan on making this for pizza and need more, either use 1 can of tomatoes, or freeze the amount you don't need.
Gotta love freezing:)

Lasagne by Garfield

As a kid I would watch the first cartoons with Garfield, but I don't remember much of them. Then, I found the comic books with strips from various years, translated to polish. That was cool. Then, when we got the iPad, we found an app that has every comic strip from Garfield since the very beginning. Now that's what I'm talking about.

Throughout all those years of drawing a fat mean cat and his owner, one thing was sure: that cat loved food. Let's call him a foodini. So his nightly trips to the fridge to say hi to to food are normal. His stealing Jon's food by switching plates- is classic. And his ability to walk through a fresh lasagne is just marvelous. That way nobody want's to eat the lasagne anymore.
Pure genius. But this means Jon can really cook :)
And so, the lasagne.
The first one I made was disgusting. I tried one spoon and it went in the bin.
Second time I decided to experiment a bit around. The problem with lasagne recipes is, that you don't know which one to follow, because you have/don't have all the ingredients. Most famous lasagne recipes comes from the USA, where they get sweet pork italian sausage, whick I can't find here. And mozzarella which is pre-cut and is square-ish. Which mozzarella ever was made square? Americans, I don't get your logic sometimes.
Then there are varieties in recipes from Italy, USA, UK, Poland: beschamel sauce, slices of mozzarella or shredded mozzarella, cottage cheese, or ricotta cheese, parmesan, or yellow gouda
 ( seriously).
Cook the pasta, don't cook the pasta. Go F*(&)k yourself.
This is all very confusing and it makes me want to stop cooking and scream a lot. I hate those kind of different recipes, that just have one thing in common- you're supposed to love it.

I decided to finally go with the "original" edamer/gouda mix cheese, parmesan and ricotta blend.
Without any sweet italian pork sausage, becuase even my Piccolo Italia didn't have it.
And the chase for ricotta cheese was wonderful. Finally, after running around 3 districts I found 1 container of the cheese. Had to do the job. And it did.
Brace yourselves for the magnificent, not-so-original-but-delicious-and-makeable Lasagne!


Type of dish: main
Cost: medium
Difficulty: easy
Serves: 4
Time: 110 min
Preparation time: 40 min
Baking time: 40 min
Cooling time: 30 min ( or you'll cry of a burnt mouth, trust me)
Oven temp: 180C

You'll need:
a super large frying pan, cutting board, sharp knife, spatula, teaspoon, a medium sized baking dish at least 7 cm high, some aluminium foil, medium sized mixing bowl, glass, egg beater.

Ingredients:

• 1kg ground beef. Use the store bought or go to a butcher and ask him to grind some nice beef for you)
• additional: 1 small carrot
• additional: 1 small celery stick
• 6 garlic cloves, minced
• 1 large onion, finely diced
• 1 can of tomato puree
• 2 cans chopped tomatoes
• 12-16 lasange noodles ( precooked or cook them al dente)
• 100gr gouda/edamer, yellow cheese, without holes
• 1 cup grated parmesan cheese
• 1 container/200gr ricotta cheese
• 1 bunch of fresh parsley, finely chopped
• 1 egg
• S&P
• dried herbs: basil, thyme, oregano ( 1 tbsp of each), sugar, lemon juice
•  olive oil

 Begin:
Chop up all you have to chop, heat the frying pan, fry the beef until it's brown. Yeah, brown. Add the garlic, onion,and if you decided to use the carrot and celery, you should have added it before the meat turned brown. Like, just after it started to dry up and turn greyish in colour.
Fry that up, add the tomatoes, puree and half of your chopped parsley to the pan, and turn the heat to medium. Let it thicken up. This is what you would also call a basic bolognese sauce. Great for freezing.
In the meantime, crack the egg, ricotta, parsley, a pinch of S&P to the bowl and mix it well with the beater to get a smooth texture. You can lick your fingers, this stuff is good!
Check on your tomato sauce, it should have reduced a bit, mix it every once in a while, this needs to get thick, but not paste thick. When the consistency is thinner than paste, try a bit, add some additional herbs, a lemon shot, sugar pinch and S&P. Taste it. You can add some cayenne pepper if you want to. I certainly did, because food without a hot spicy kick is simply not food to me.
Prep your baking dish. Did you cook your uncooked noodles? If not, you're a bad person and you'll have to wait longer for your yummy dish. Know what you're missing out on. Preheat your oven.
Okay, let's layer:
1 cup of the tomato sauce on the bottom of the dish. Done.
Put on 3-4 lasagne noodles to cover it up, with no spots peeking.
Now, a layer of the ricotta mixture,
yellow cheese layer,
parmesan layer,
tomato layer,
pasta layer,
ricotta layer,
yellow cheese,
parmesan
and
BAM!
you're out of noodles or ricotta. Hah.

Put aluminium foil on top of the baking dish, just so the foil doesn't touch the lasagne.And foil- shiny side down. We want the lasagne to bake faster.
Get a ziploc bag for the leftover sauce. I'll tell you what to do with it later.
Pop it in the oven, bake for 25-30 min with the foil on, after that time, take the foil off for the next 10-15 min. Lets get the top bubbly and sexy and looking handsome. Or beautiful. You'll still eat it, belive me. Okay, you're done baking after 40 minutes after you put the lasagne in, now turn off the oven, leave to oven closed and think about who you should invite to dinner, or what should you paint next- the ceiling or the walls, and what colour.
Do this kind of thinking for 25 min, paint your nails instead, and start setting the table. Don't call out anyone yet for dinner- do this last minute. Because when you say LASAGNE, everybody's there in 3 seconds flat.
Why, I don't know. I think it's because everybody has a little Garfield in them:)
Enjoy!

PS. Oh, and if you have more time on your hands, this is great for pre freezing. Make the lasagne, just don't put it in the oven, but wait till it's cold and pop it in the freezer. Defrost it the night before in the fridge and bake as usual.

Pepper Mayonaise

There was a promotion once in KFC, where they served instead of a regular longer, it was called a pepper longer. I don't care much for KFC or any other fast food chain store, what I was addicted to was the pepper mayonaise. I could eat it by the gallon. Weird addiction, I know, but I sometimes act like a pregnant person while I'm not  (pregnant,that is). Stupid me, I didn't bother to make my own pepper mayo, and it's soooo easy! Seriously, even Listonic won't put the ingredients needed. Because all you need is your regular favorite mayonaise of choice and fresh ground black or colored pepper. Just mix the two together and you'll be forever bonded. Yummm... Sorry if I'm lame, I just love food.

Pasta with pesto

My sister loves pesto. She buys pesto. For me, the stuff shops sell is disgusting. So I made pesto. It's quite easy. I didn't find any pine nuts in the store, so I bought sunflower seeds that work just as well, but you need to roast the seeds before adding them to the blender.  Same thing if you find pine nuts. Great thing about this homemade pesto is that you can freeze it (but if you plan on freezing, don't add parmesan cheese. It doesn't freeze well). But if you plan on making a whole lot of pesto, add the cheese. No preservatives, no junk. Just pure, fresh goodness.

Type of dish: main

Cost: medium

Difficulty: easy

Time:  20 min

Serves: 6-8

Preparation time: 15 min

What you need to make this dish:

Blender, spoon, sharp knife, medium saucepan, small frying pan, collander, plates to serve,

Ingredients:

• 20 gr parmesan cheese
• 2 fresh basil plants (or basil bunches, whatever you get)
• pasta
• 1/2 packet sunflower seeds
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp pepper
• 30 ml olive oil (plain kind, nothing fancy)
• 1 small garlic clove peeled (additional)

How to prepare:

Heat water in the saucepan, when boiling, put in the pasta to cook (according to the time on the package). Heat frying pan, and when hot, add the sunflower seeds roast them a little. Toss them around for a few minutes, and when done, put in blender. Also put in the garlic clove, olive oil, salt and pepper. Now, cut down the basil leaves, (JUST LEAVES!) and throw them in the blender too. Cut up the parmesan in small pieces and toss that in the blender. Put the top on the blender and blend for 5 minutes, stopping to swish things around, so everything is well cut. Additionally, if it seems to you that it's not oily enough, add more olive oil. When the pasta is cooked, drain it, clean the saucepan and put back in the pasta, add a healthy dollop of the pesto, mix around do the pasta is nicely coated with the pesto and serve on plates, adding a basil leaf on top and a few shavings of parmesan cheese. Yum! Dig in!

Additional info: 

if you have ziplock baggies, the size of a childs hand, freeze in them each a large spooon of pesto. If you have small plastic containers (I have some from IKEA), put in the pesto, and for freezing, pour some olive oil on the top, then freeze. If you have more ice cube trays then normal people have, freeze in the tray, also adding a layer of olive oil at the top. When you need it, just take it out one day ahead and pop in the fridge. It'll defrost nicely. When I don't have time for long defrosting, I just fill up a bowl with lukewarm water, pop the frozen stuff in and just replace the water with fresh lukewarm, until the product has defrosted completly. Bah, that easy. Just don't use a microwave for this, as it usually cooks the stuff before you want it cooked. Sorry to pop your dreams. I really am sorry. 

Serve with:

pasta of the long kind, like tagliatelle, spaghetti, and so on. Also, some pesto with a caprese salad is nice too, but add first more olive oil, as it serves like a drippy sauce. You may also add some pesto to garlic bread,or to your usual tomato sauce (because it's basil).

Guacamole

So you like avocado? Us too. There's a few ways of serving it, and it usualy involves 1 avocado half per person. Sometimes the avocado we find in stores are unripe, hard and basicly useless for the next few days until we set them ripen in the kitchen, hopefully in a warm place. Guacamole is used as a sauce, or more popular, as a dip for crisps, but it's great as an addition for salads or nachos. Or tortillas, for that matter.
The home made version is a million times better than the junk sold in jars which has absolutly no resemblance to actual guacamole. I hereby bann store bought guacamole! Apage!
Here's how to make the real goody stuff:

Type of dish: sauce, dip, side

Cost: medium

Difficulty:  easy

Time:  15 min

Serves: 3-6

Preparation time: 15 minutes

What you need to make this dish:

sharp knife, cutting board, medium bowl, spoon, fork

Ingredients:

• 1-2 ripe avocados
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• juice of 1 lime
• 1/2 small tomato
• 1/2 small chili pepper
• 1/2 small red onion, chopped up finely
• 1/2 small garlic clove, peeled and smashed
• salt
• pepper
• fresh cilantro

How to prepare:
Your newly acquired chopping and cutting skills are fabulous here. Cut the avocados in half, around the seed. Open up and whack you knife straight into the seed, then firmly holding the avocado half, turn the knife. The seed should stay on the knife. Now get rid of the seed, we won't need it. Use the spoon to remove the avocado from the skin, put in bowl. Dice the tomato and pop that in the bowl too. Now slice the chili pepper into small pieces and throw that in the bowl. Same goes with the onion and garlic. All in the bowl. Now, using a fork, smash the avocado, so most of it is a pulpy mash, and mix well. Pour in the olive oil and lime juice. Try a bit. Make a face- you probably need more lime juice or salt. Or pepper for that matter. So season, mix again and add a little bit of chopped cilantro. Cool down in the fridge until you're ready to serve.

Additional information:
We know some people who don't like it spicy, so if you're one of them, leave out the chili and garlic (shame on you!).