Hello my foodie friends! Busy times around here, so quick and healthy solutions are required without sacrificing flavour. Also, with the most caloric holiday season of the year around the corner, I like to keep it as light as possible as long as I can, before chocolates, pannetone and other Christmas delights become impossible to resist…
Last evening I prepared this simple and easy cream of courgette soup that I’d like to share, I hope you like it! An easy formula that can be applied with any other vegetable you fancy: aubergine, pumpkin, carrots…
Hello foodies of the world! Sorry for my absence the last few weeks. I’ve been pretty busy with no time for new recipes worth posting. Although I always cook, in busy days I tend to repeat old favourites or cook easy and quick things like omelettes and salads.
The truth is, I’ve never been good at extreme multitasking, I know, is shocking to acknowledge such a thing these days, but I’ve been like this since I can remember and I’ve made my peace with it. But, as I’m also a perfectionist, I rather do one thing at the time and do it right than to do everything just like that. To me, is like my father says: sometimes is not that I don’t have the physical time, is that I have no “mental” time. Of course I keep challenging myself to find the balance, but I won’t fight my nature either.
I’ve thought of this post a while ago and since is less time-consuming than posting a new recipe is a good way for me to show up and say hi! I reckon that after 10 month blogging, it would be a good time to make a top ten of Around the Bowl’s reader’s favourites and give these recipes a second chance to be discovered and hopefully inspire someone new!
The top ten is based on the blog statistics for all ten months and the posts are rated upon visits and sharing figures. I hope you like the recipes if you haven’t tried them before or that they inspire you once again if you did! I’ll be back soon with new soup recipes to share!
I can´t believe that 10 months have gone away since I started this blog! 60 posts later, it’s time to start revisiting some of my favourite recipes, to get creative and add a different twist. Shchi, the classic Russian cabbage soup was one of my first posts and definitely among my favourites! Now that autumn is finally here, some days ago I was really feeling like eating Shchi again, I haven’t cooked it since the first post! But this time, I added some Middle-Eastern style meatballs, and the fusion turned out amazingly well!
I slightly varied the Shchi recipe and the meatballs are of my creation, however you’ll notice a clear Middle-Esatern influence: I prepared them with bulgur, inspired by the traditional Kebbeh, and it just gave them the perfect texture! I think I’ll always use bulgur from now on instead of bread crumbs or flour. A pinch of cinnamon, among other typical spices, is a little secret I’ve been applying to my meatballs since I first saw the delightful movie “A Touch of Spice” (2003), which I highly recommend by the way, every foodie should watch it!
Would you like to try it? It’s a great healthy complete meal to warm up your evenings! and I made Yakisoba with the remaining cabbage, yummy!
Ramen is complex and simple at the same time.
Why complex? Well, If you try to unravel its secrets or to find the definite and true recipe you can go mad on the process; there are as many versions as regions or cooks in Japan and all around the globe! Making the broth from scratch takes a lot of time, ingredients and patience, but that probably might be the key to a good ramen, then it is possible to be as playful as you desire with the toppings and garnishes! By the way, the home-made ramen stock reminds me of the Spanish cocido broth because of its meat cuts and cooking method, it’s interesting to find this connection points between such two different and distant cultures through their cuisine.
And why simple? Because ramen also allows to be simplified and transform into a healthy, delicious and creative dish for the every-day easy to put together meal. I just use a good quality stock and the rest is pure inspiration!
Although I usually choose to go for the extremely simplified version of this soup, I love this guide to Ramen, it provides a lot information classified in a very clarifying way, its like the Ramen encyclopedia!
I absolutely love rice cooked in its many varied forms, paella, sushi, curries, fried rice, you name it. And risotto, of course! It is in fact a staple dish in my usual menu. I love its creaminess and particularly that it is possible to prepare it with virtually anything you have in your fridge and pantry (besides the rice and stock, which I always have in stock and some hard Italian cheeses I always keep in my freezer). It is also an excellent option to entertaining, being quite easy to scale up and prepare larger quantities. There are endless options to adapt it to the seasonal produce availability and to your guests taste: vegetarian, gourmet, etc., you just need to use your imagination and play with ingredients, following the basic preparation that remains basically the same. Besides, who doesn’t love a good risotto?
Today I’m sharing two recipes I cooked at home in two different occasions and that we enjoyed a lot. I thought of presenting them together in the same post to show you what I was talking about above: it’s the same procedure, just changing the variable ingredients. Easy and delicious!
Today, in addition to the “print friendly and pdf button” that you can find at the bottom of each post, I’m “launching” a new improvement: the recipes are in a printable format, that make even easier to save or print them. I hope you like it!
I’ve already introduced my favourite Thai recipe book and today is the turn of my favourite Indian cuisine author. I’m sharing a recipe from “Curry Easy” a fantastic recipe book from Madhur Jaffery. Her approach to Indian cooking is both simple and authentic at the same time. Her recipes turn out so good that we had drastically reduced our visits to Indian restaurants, because we found ourselves saying: what for? let’s cook it at home, that it tastes as good or sometimes even better than the restaurant food!
Living in the coast, in a fisher’s town, the other day an indecent amount of fresh squid came to may hands (it was already clean fortunately). I didn’t know what to do with it! Although there are endless Spanish recipes to cook it, I’m not very experienced in preparing seafood, I find it quite difficult actually, that’s why I usually order it at restaurants instead of cooking it home. But this time I remembered this Indian recipe that I never tried before and decided to face the challenge! I added my touch by including some fresh mushrooms and used stock instead of water for the sauce.
It is really easy and the result is amazing! Squid flavour is very strong, so make sure you like it or replace it by any other seafood or fish of your choice. The good thing is that I got to cook all the squid and this curry makes a great left-over or it can be freeze for future use.
Hello foodies of the world! It’s been busy around here but there’s always time to squeeze a good Thai home-made food in. I often cook wonderful Thai curries with coconut milk, but I wanted to try something different that needed to be very easy and quick to put together as well. That’s why Tom Yum came to my mind, it is an aromatic hot and sour soup made with a lemon grass, kaffir lime leaves, galangal/ginger, lime juice, fish sauce and chilli base. There are different variations depending on the protein component: fish, prawn, mixed seafood, pork or chicken (Gai/Kai); which is the one I’m sharing today.
If you cook Thai regularly, you probably already have all the basic ingredients in your kitchen and just have to add any protein source and vegetables of your choice. You can also turn it into a vegetarian dish by adding tofu and into a vegan one by trading the fish sauce for soy sauce. Tom Yum makes an excellent week day healthy and complete dinner.
At home we are big fans of Japanese culture, including food, of course. A couple of years ago while celebrating a birthday in a Japanese restaurant in our area, we discovered Sukiyaki and immediately knew we were going to try it at home and so we did! Is really very easy to prepare once you got the right ingredients.
Sukiyaki is basically a sauce simmered in a hot-pot at the table centre where all the ingredients (beef, tofu, mushrooms and vegetables) are slowly cooked while eating. Udon are added at the end to soak the rest of the broth.
My approach to it is slightly simplified and I served everything already cooked in a big flat pot at the centre of the table, or sometimes in separates bowls, including the udon. I also add stock to the sauce because we like ours “soupy”
The sauce ingredients are the same you would use in a basic udon soup, check out the recipe Francesca, from SicilySelfies kindly gave me the other day, you’ll find it at the Vietnamese Pho Chay post comments.
Me a little obsessed with Asian food? nah… And yet another Asian dish…I’ve been wanting to cook Pho for a while and today was the day! It was my first time and surprisingly it doesn’t taste like any other Asian soup I’ve cooked before at its flavour it’s quite unique; the spices on the broth really make a difference.
The traditional Pho is made with beef stock and usually contains beef as well, but Chay is the veggie version of this soup, usually with tofu as the protein ingredient. The choice of vegetables was based on what I have at hand this time, but you could use broccoli and bok choy for instance. Would you like to try it? It’s a safe bet!
Back in 2008 I went on holidays by myself and I couldn’t have made a better choice for a solo trip than Dublin; besides being a very pleasant city, people is so friendly that I hardly ever had dinner on my own, I always ended up chatting with someone at the pubs or restaurants. And locals might have had a contagious spirit, because visitors behaved extremely friendly as well.
One of those evenings I was sharing table with a lovely English couple at a very touristy nonetheless excellent Irish food restaurant (sorry, I did not record the name of this one!) when I had my first Leek and Potato Soup. Happiness! It still amazes me how something so simple can taste so good!
And you probably know the rest of the history if you have been reading any of my previous posts; back at home I made my homework and find myself a nice Leek and Potato Soup recipe to reproduce some of the holidays bliss at home. I served this one with sauté champignon mushrooms, traditionally you would serve it with bread and butter. Shall we share it?
Around the Bowl 
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