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 my foodie friends! Here I am again with another Korean comforting soup. Who doesn’t like a good chicken noodle soup during the cold months? Ideal both for lunch and supper, and of course, it makes a great left over if you want to cook some extra to take to work or freeze.
Dak means chicken and kalguksu stands for knife-cut noodles. Making Dak-kalguksu from scratch is quite time-consuming and being this a simplified version I used bought fresh noodles. As part of this simpler approach, I also choose to incorporate the seasoning, which is usually served separately, to the stock directly. However, I did make the stock, but for an even easier version you could use bought or pre-prepared chicken stock and chicken roast left overs. Generally the vegetables used to cook the stock are discarded afterwards, but I like to cut them and include them in the soup.
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 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!
A new curry recipe! Today I’m sharing a Chinese/Malaysian fusion chicken curry from Nyonya cuisine. Doing my research for the recipe; I became really intrigued by Nyonya cultural background and found some wonderful reading about it that I would like to briefly share with you in order to fully understand and appreciate this curry we are making today (*).
I’ve always thought that a country’s cuisine is a very holistic approach to discover its history, culture and idiosyncrasies; cooking something exotic (to us) is such a wonderful way of travelling without leaving your home, analogous to reading one of those great books that transport you to a different place. I can get so inspired by world’s cuisines that I get to experience a little obsession with the subject, searching, reading and going into expeditions to find ingredients and cook!
(*)The Peranakan or the Baba Nyonya community (also known as the Straits Chinese), evolved in the fifteenth century when the Chinese arrived in Malacca and intermarriage with local women took place. The Peranakan culture is a unique blend of two cultures – Malay and Chinese – intermixed into a fascinating synthesis with elements of Javanese, Batak, Thai and British cultures. Today, they are found throughout Malaysia and Singapore with strongholds in Malacca, Singapore and Penang.
The word Peranakan is derived from the Malay word ‘anak’ which means ‘child’. The term refers to the local-born as well as the offspring of foreigner-native union. Baba is the term for the male and Nyonya for the female.
Peranakan food is a wonderful combination of Malay and Chinese cuisine with influences from Indonesia, Thailand, India, Holland, Portugal and England. Nyonya food is clearly unique and Malaysian/Singaporean in identity. Using ingredients such as galangal, serai, chillies, tumeric, ginger, tau cheow, tamarind, lime juice, belachan, buah keras, gula Melaka; spices such as star anise, cinnamon, cardamom, cloves, nutmeg and leaves such as daun kesum, daun kaduk, daun cekok, daun limau perut and pandan.
I hope that after knowing a little more about this wonderful culture you feel like tasting it with the following unique curry recipe. Trust me, the flavour will surprise you, is neither Indian nor Thai, is just Nyonya, and it’s delicious!
Tagine is a clay cooking pot with a conical lid typical from Morocco that also give its name to the stew that is prepared on it.
I have wanted a tagine as long as I can remember. However, when I finally visited Morocco I was living sort of a nomad life and it wasn’t too practical to accumulate house-ware and furnitures, so I didn’t buy it although I had to restrain myself not to came back with carpets, lamps and kitchen-ware to furnish a full house.
But fate is capricious (a saying in Spanish) and last weekend when walking around a home store, I saw one and decided to buy it this time! I’m not sure were I’m going to put it in my already full kitchen cabinets, but after trying the meal I prepared on it I can assure you is totally worth it! The outcome is absolutely different of the one you would get cooking the same recipe in a regular cooking pot (I know because I’ve tried it before).
I started by a vegetable tagine, but I will for sure explore many other options with my new star utensil! Just writing it is making me crave for another one… Let’s go to the recipe now:
This is a simple but delicious recipe for one of those evenings where you don’t know what to cook and you don’t have much time to do it either but you don’t want to sacrifice taste or quality. It makes a great weeknight option; besides, you can easily switch courgettes (zucchini) by aubergines, carrots or pumpkin depending on what you have at hand or feel like.
And trust me, if you use any of the above vegetables there’s no need to add cream or potatoes to make this soup creamy, you’ll be surprised by its texture! The trick is to use a lot of the solid ingredient and just enough stock to cover it on the pot.
I started to make this kind of creams mainly to rescue the occasional overstock of fresh veggies (I absolutely refuse to throw food away!) that once in a while happens in my fridge and they rapidly became a favourite in our table.
This is a short post for it is a quick recipe! Would you like to try it?
Around the Bowl 
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