Red curry with tofu, brown mushrooms and runner beans

For this dish I followed a simple recipe found on the red curry paste package . By adding, though,  chopped mint leaves and serving it with coarse bulgur instead of noodles or rice, I managed to transform it into a new dish. It sounds simple but the flavours combined perfectly and gave the dish a divine taste.

Ingredients

2 Tbsp red curry paste
1 can of coconut milk
1 clove of garlic
runner beans
4 brown mushrooms
chopped mint leaves
1/2 cup coarse bulgur

I start with the bulgur, rinsing it with water and then adding it to 600ml boiling water. I will add a vegetable cube and stir it once, cover the pan and let it simmer for around twenty minutes. Meanwhile, I prepare my curry. The recipe sites that we should heat the coconut milk and add the curry and the vegetables. I changed it slightly; mixed two spoons of red curry paste with two full spoons of the cream that concentrates on the top of the can and the garlic chopped to get some extra flavour and then poured in slowly the rest of the coconut milk, the mushrooms and beans. After 15 minutes of simmering my curry is ready. I will mix the curry with the bulgur and add the chopped mint leaves on top.

Tart with salmon, leeks and dill

Trahanas

This week I wasn't feeling well so I was cooking mainly 'sicky food'. Deprived of taste and smell and with no appetite or energy to make my usual experimental dishes, I, instead, went back to my childhood memories and dug up easy to make dishes, such as chicken soup with lemon and egg sauce (kotospupa), dry bread (frigania) and a grain and milk thick soup( trahanas), simple and nutritious recipes but most important, ideal for upset stomachs and feverish colds.

Trahanas is made from a mix of cracked wheat or rye and milk and can be cooked into a soup with water , stock or milk ; could be made into a thick pie or added into other dishes instead of or with rice. There are many different variations of the basic recipe across Greece and its origins go back to ancient Greece.

My grandmother used to make each September the whole year's production, boiling the ground wheat with the sour milk, letting the mixture to cool overnight, and then spreading it in the form of small balls under the sun to dry out on a sheet for a couple of days. She would cook it into a soup with water and throw in an egg when the soup was ready.

My take was to make a chicken soup and add trahanas instead of rice.



Ingredients

150 gr trahanas
1 chicken breast ( better if I had thighs or the whole chicken)
1 carrot
1 celery
1 onion
salt and pepper
feta cheese

The idea is to boil the chicken breast with the vegetables until it's cooked, pass everything through a sieve, keep the vegetables and chicken aside and add trahanas into the water. It will take 12 minutes to be cooked. Meanwhile I melt the vegetables and shred the chicken and add everything to the trahanas soup with some feta cheese to make it more salty. Grind some pepper on top and the soup is ready.

Just to add that in the traditional chicken soup, we boil the chicken with the vegetables and the last ten minutes we add the rice. Meanwhile we whisk together the juice of one lemon with 2 eggs  till we get a smooth mix. Βefore we pour it into the hot soup we mix one cup of the warm soup water into the egg-lemon mix, then whisk to combine.

Stefano's red pepper pesto and chestnut flour cake

The photos don't do it justice, but this shell pasta with red pepper pesto was absolutely delicious. The recipe was simple; all you need is the right ingredients and an italian touch.

Ingredients (for 6 people)

2 Tbsp olive oil
12 red peppers cut into strips
2 Tbsp wine vinegar
3 gloves of garlic
grated parmesan cheese
basil (12 leaves)

1 packet of conchiglie rigate (shell pasta)
grated parmesan cheese



After heating the olive oil in the pan, Stefano added the red pepper slices and cooked them for 10 min or until they became brown. Before removing the pan from the heat, he poured in some wine vinegar to balance the sweetness from the peppers. When the peppers cooled down, he added them to the food processor with the garlic, the parmesan cheese and the basil, making them into a paste. The pasta was cooked according the packet's instructions and was mixed with the pesto before served.

The chestnut flour cake