I am a Finnish girl living in Portugal writing about my adventures in the World of Food. I have dedicated my blog to gluten- and sugar-free recipes. Many of my recipes are also dairy-free, lactose-free, egg-free, grain-free, vegan and/or vegetarian. I use organic or locally sourced seasonal ingredients whenever possible.
All my recipes are tagged with the appropriate -free labels (e.g. dairy-free), so that you can quickly and easily find the recipes that suit your individual needs.
Catalogna (‘Catalonia’; the type of chicory in the picture on the left, the English name of which I haven’t found anywhere yet) is one of the leaf vegetables I’ve got acquainted with here in Turin. What I usually do is that I steam it and then just eat it as a side dish with salt, pepper, olive oil, and maybe a bit of lemon. However, this time I decided to try something different with some leftover catalogna (already steamed but without any condiments) I had in my fridge. I actually liked the new side dish much more than the old one.
If you’ve never had catalogna before, you should probably be warned that it has rather a bitter taste and might, therefore, not please everyone’s taste buds.
-1. Wash the catalogna leaves and cut them in 2-cm-long pieces.
0. Steam the catalogna until ready (but with a bite).
1. Peel and chop as much garlic as socially acceptable.
2. Heat a teflon pan (without oil), then heat the steamed catalogna, the garlic and a handful of sunflower seeds in it for a few minutes, continuously stirring the ingredients.
3. Turn off the heat, add a bit of tamari sauce and sesame seed oil, mix the ingredients well and serve.
When I lived in Holland and was still blissfully unaware of my gluten problem, I sometimes used to get some lovely couscous salad from a Turkish corner shop down the road. This quinoa salad is inspired by that couscous salad.
GREEN QUISQUIS SALAD (Pronounced 'Green Kiss Kiss Salad')
3 espresso cups of white quinoa
6 espresso cups of water
2 Italian-style small cucumbers or 1 large cucumber
1 green pepper
2 medium-sized red onions
2 cloves of garlic
bunch of fresh coriander
bunch of fresh parsley (about twice as much as coriander)
gluten-free bouillon powder
lemon
olive oil
freshly ground pepper
sea salt
1. Wash the quinoa well. Add bouillon powder and sea salt to the water, and boil the quinoa in it until ready.
2. Wash the cucumber, the pepper, the coriander and the parsley and chop them finely.
3. Chop the onions and the garlic finely.
4. When the quinoa has cooled down a bit, mix it with all the chopped vegetables and herbs.
5. Add pepper, salt, olive oil and lemon juice, and serve either chilled or when the quinoa is still a bit warm. You can serve this salad either as a main course or a side dish.
I rarely go to regular supermarkets anymore but I'm so glad I walked into a nearby Carrefour today. To my surprise, I found chocolate with a 100% cocoa content (a minimum of 99.75%, to be exact). At Carrefour! And it only cost me 2.35 euro for 100 grams! It must be my lucky day.
Anyway, the chocolate is produced by an Italian company called Sugar Company (how ironic), and the good stuff is called Cuorenero Classic Blend 100% Cocoa:
My dear coauthor Michael gave me a bag of organic cacao beans when I visited him in Marseille a couple of weeks ago. I've got into the habit of eating around 6 cacao beans every day now but, unless I can find that stuff (which obviously is the purest of the purest) here in Italy, I will definitely become a regular Sugar Company customer.
Cabbage makes for a great, healthy base for many dishes. It keeps much better than most other vegetables, so it's a good idea to always keep a cabbage in the fridge. Here is my latest cabbage dish. It was quick and easy to make and turned out so well that I'll definitely be making it again.
Medimix
1/2 medium-sized Savoy cabbage
1 yellow pepper
1 very large tomato (or 2 smaller tomatoes)
1 courgette
1 leek
6-8 large leaves of fresh basil
fresh dill
fresh ginger
3-4 cloves of garlic
sea salt
pepper
gluten-free tamari sauce
1. Cut the cabbage in half. Remove the exterior leaves of the half that you intend to use, and cut it in narrow strips.
2. Wash and cut the tomato, the pepper, the courgette and the leek.
3. Peel the ginger and the garlic, and cut them in small pieces.
4. Wash and cut the basil and the dill in small pieces.
5. Sautee the ginger and the garlic in sunflower oil in a large, deep frying pan or a large pot.
6. Add the vegetables, the herbs, the salt and the pepper. Mix well while keeping the temperature high. Then let the mix simmer until the cabbage is soft and until all the tastes have had enough time to blend with each other. As with any cabbage dishes, they only get better as the cooking times get longer (I think).
This lovely soup should be tried by anyone who says that they hate beetroots. I used to hate beetroots, too, until I actually started using fresh beetroots in my cooking. Give beetroots another chance!
Ruby Soup
4 beetroots
2 carrots
2 small red onions
3-4 smallish cloves of garlic
fresh ginger
fresh coriander
fresh parsley
gluten-free bouillon powder
sea salt
1. Peel the beetroots, the carrots, the onions, the garlic and the ginger, and chop them coarsely.
2. Wash the coriander and the parsley. I used a generous amount of coriander!
3. Put all the ingredients – including the bouillon powder and the salt – in a large pot, and add enough water to cover all the ingredients.
4. Cook until the beetroots and the carrots are ready.
Excuse the name of the crisps but there is a story behind it. After yet another late night at the lab during my MSc course in Edinburgh, I was craving crisps – badly. On the way back home, I walked into one of the night shops on Clerk Street and, unimpressed by the look of the Scottish brands they had on offer, was trying to think of the name of the crisps I used to have in England so that I could ask the shop assistant if they really didn’t have them. I was thinking and thinking but the name just wouldn’t come to me... until, finally, I remembered it: Wankers! As I was about to ask the shop assistant for Wankers crisps, I suddenly realised that something about the name wasn’t quite right. In fact, something about the name was horribly wrong; the crisps couldn’t possibly be called Wankers crisps! And so what would have been one of my worst English language blunders to date was narrowly avoided.
On another note, I find my mistake quite interesting as it suggests that I retrieve English words from my memory using their orthography rather than their pronunciation (the real name of the brand is Walkers, and the words “Wankers” and “Walkers” are much more similar to each other orthographically than phonetically). This is sort of supported by the fact that, to be able to memorise and/or reproduce a new foreign word, I usually need to see it written down.
Wankers Crisps
4 medium-sized red potatoes
sunflower oil
sea salt
freshly ground pepper
1. Wash the potatoes (you don’t necessarily have to peel them) and slice them as thinly as you can.
2. Wash the potato slices in cold water and dry them by placing them one by one on one half of a kitchen towel. Fold the other half of the kitchen towel on top and pat the potato slices dry.
3. Place the potato slices in a baking tray covered with baking paper, and sprinkle oil, salt and pepper on top of them. Toss them around using a spatula to make sure that there is oil and spices everywhere.
4. Cook the potato slices in a preheated 250° oven, tossing them around every 5 minutes. I think the total cooking time in my case was about 25 min. However, because of differences in size/thickness, some crisps were ready before others. Anyway, you have to keep an eye on them as you don’t want to burn them!
5. When crisp enough, let your crisps cool down a bit (not in the baking tray, though, as they might get soft from the remaining oil on the baking paper), then enjoy them as long as they last – which, unfortunately, isn’t very long at all!
Instead of always buying processed soya products, I've decided to start experimenting with soya beans in my dishes. This was my first experiment, and I was quite happy with the result. I'm sure the result will be just as good with any other mix of veggies.
Soyotto
risotto rice
black soya beans
green soya beans
6 courgettes
fennel
1-2 stalks of celery
2 carrots
pea pods
1 onion
4-5 cloves of garlic
fresh ginger
gluten-free bouillon powder
sea salt
freshly ground black pepper
tamari sauce
0. Soak the soya beans overnight.
1. Peel the onion, the garlic and the ginger, and chop them finely.
2. Cook the risotto rice and the soya beans together with the onion, the garlic and the ginger (please check the cooking times of the rice and the soya beans as they might differ from each other). Even though it's a "soyotto", there should be (a lot) more veggies than rice and soya beans in the final dish!
3. Peel and wash the carrots, wash the rest of the vegetables and cut them all in smallish pieces.
4. 10-15 minutes before the end of the cooking time of the rice and the soya beans, add the vegetables, the bouillon powder, the salt and the black pepper. Let the soyotto cook until the vegetables are ready.
Catalogna (‘Catalonia’; the type of chicory in the picture on the left, the English name of which I haven’t found anywhere yet) is one of the leaf vegetables I’ve got acquainted with here in Turin. What I usually do is that I steam it and then just eat it as a side dish with salt, pepper, olive oil, and maybe a bit of lemon. However, this time I decided to try something different with some leftover catalogna (already steamed but without any condiments) I had in my fridge. I actually liked the new side dish much more than the old one. 
