Saturday night fish: salmon tartar

I love fish tartar and my favorite is tuna tartar. Differently from Rio, where I normally find fresh tuna, Trondheim doesn't have fresh tuna. Tuna is a high seas kind of fish and not a Norwegian type of fish. Hope this does not sound as complain because it is not. There are lots of different and fantastic fish in Norway, as everybody already knows, and I love them too. I make tartar using the freshest salmon one can get and it is just delicious.

Tartar is a French dish slightly similar to Peruvian ceviche and Syrian-Lebanese raw kibe as these dishes are cooked in lime juice but also bears some similarities with Japanese sashimi, specially if served with a soy based Japanese style sauce.



Tartar is a very simple dish, just like sashimi, ceviche and raw kibe and I made it even simpler as I didn't add egg to the mixture. Not all tartar recipes list an egg, but some of them do. I make tartar with nothing but freshly squeezed lime juice, French spring onions, shallots, salt and pepper. You can serve with a creme fraiche or yogurt based sauce but my obsession with Japanese cuisine stops me from eating tartar the French way since I definitely prefer the Japanese soy based sauce with lime juice, ginger, garlic, sesame seeds and more spring onions.



Salmon tartar

250 grams fresh salmon filet
1 tablespoon chopped spring onion (cut in very small pieces)
1 tablespoon chopped shallot (cut in very small pieces)
1 tablespoon freshly squeezed lime juice
salt and pepper

How:


Cut salmon in small dices;


Chop spring onions and shallot. Mix salmon, onions in a glass bowl. Add lime juice, salt and pepper and toss well.


Let the mixture stand for couple of minutes and divide the fish in small potions and serve with white toast or any kind of bread you like.


If you prefer you can slice some cucumber and roll the spoonfuls of tartar with the cucumber and serve them as a roll in a plate with some sauce.

Japanese style sauce

2 tablespoons freshly squeezed lime juice
4 tablespoons shoyu (Japanese soy sauce)
4 tablespoons nam pla (fish sauce)
1/2 teaspoon grated garlic
1 teaspoon spring onions
1 teaspoon toasted white sesame seed
1 teaspoon grated fresh ginger


Squeeze few tablespoons of juice from some of the best Brazilian limes,


Add some tablespoons of shoyu and nam pla (photo),


Add French spring onions, ginger,


white sesame seeds et voilá


Serve the sauce with the tartar.


If you prefer serve the tartar in cucumber rolls. Just slice the cucumber with a cheese slicer or a mandoline.

My favorite green salad

I am that kind of person who finds pleasure in simple things. I definitely don't go through life after luxury or sophistication, not that I don't enjoy those things after all, because I do. It is just that the beauty of bare feet on the ground or a fruit compote served with a spoonful of soft cheese speaks to my heart. Simple is speaking without saying a word, telling more with less words, subtle, distinctive, natural.

Simple loves of mine: bread and butter with café au lait, rice and beans, guava jam with white cheese, sugarcane juice with lime, açaí with banana, roots samba, zabumba-triângulo-e-sanfona, iced-mate with warm cheese ball in São Paulo, iced-mate with Globo cookies in Rio, pineapple ice cream from the blue troller, freshly cooked corn at Praça 15 docks in Rio, acarajé from street vendors, sweet popcorn, churros del Uruguay and coconut tapioca on Barra da Tijuca beach.

This put I can tell that I just love simple salads my favorite salad being the most simple among the simplest. Spinach and green apples, isn't it simple. All right, actually it has few more things than just spinach and apples. Sometimes I happily add some slices of cucumber. Not today. For now what about adding slice of the best Parmesan cheese money can buy, homemade croutons with loads of garlic and a spoonful of the most tasteful dressing?

And here it is, and I don't much more to be satisfied:


Washed and dried fresh spinach leaves;


A whole green apple to be sliced;


The best Parmesan money can buy;


Homemade croutons with lots of garlic


and a tasteful dressing ...

Dressing for my favorite green salad

3 or 4 anchovy fillets
1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
5 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
2 tablespoons freshly grated Parmesan cheese
1 or 2 garlic gloves
salt and pepper

Smash, process or mix the ingredients until you get a homogeneous mixture. Transfer the mixture to a clean jam jar, seal it and refrigerate. Dress the salad with the mixture before serving. Can be kept refrigerated for a week.



Delicinha, viu?

Waiter! There is something in my roasted rib

Norwegians love their pork specially the people of the Trøndelag region, where we live. This region is the traditional pig farming region of Norway. Roasted rib is one of the traditional dishes of Norwegian Christmas but it is also a must on Sundays all year round. When I saw the November theme of the event Waiter! There is Something in My.... I immediately wanted to make my roasted pork ribs with potatoes and shallots for a perfect Norwegian Sunday lunch. I used a small piece of rib since we were only three at home today and I don't like left overs of pork ribs.




Roasted Pork Rib

1 kg of pork rib
8 shallots
5 garlic gloves
8 potatoes
180 ml white wine
120 ml orange juice
sal and pepper
water

Cut the skin of the rib in both directions with deep cuts making small square cuts to open access to the meat. Make a marinate with wine, garlic, shallots, salt and pepper and put the rib in the marinate turning the meat around so the marinate can penetrate the whole piece. Let the rib stay in the marinate covered inside the refrigerator for at least two hours. Heat oven at 200C/350F and transfer the rib to the oven when it is very hot. Let is roast for about half an hour or until the wine and the marinate is almost dried, then add the orange juice on top of the skin and let it roast for another 15 to 20 minutes and add 1/4 cup of water. Keep adding liquids if the pan starts to dry but not more than 1/4 cup at a time. The meat will be ready in one hour or one and a hal hour and it all depends on how done and how roasted you like the skin to be.


While the rib is being roasted you can half cook the potatoes in boiling and add them to the roast and let them finish cooking with the meat, in the meat juices, for at least half an hour before the rib is ready to be served. You can make a graving with the juices on the pan or serve the meat with previously prepared tyttebaer sauce.

Scandinavian late night snack: pickled herring and lumpfish eggs on 'white' blini

Herring is a very popular fish here in Norway. It is an everyday fish which is eaten mostly pickled and served for breakfast. Sweet-sour pickled herring is a breakfast food. However, I must confess, I can't eat herring for breakfast. I can't have fish for breakfast at all. My darling Per used to eat herring and fish for breakfast but have dropped the habit to please and avoid cultural shock with his multicultural family. Our kids don't like to have herring for breakfast either, actually they don't like having herring at all. For me it is cultural, I just can't stand the strong smell of fish being served with yogurt, honey, jams, fruits and cups of coffee and milk.

But there is more to this family than cultural shock. Outside breakfast time I eat a lot of herring and I simply adore pickled herring with lots of onions. Actually I dare say that pickled herring is one of the most delicious fish served in Norway and I regularly serve it at night, as an adult snack. Herring fits perfectly with a diverse selections of white wines and mostly with vodka, preferably Finnish vodka 'Finlandia' or Swedish 'Absolute'.



I made some white blini (with wheat and not buckwheat flour) and served the herring with a sour cream based sauce and a small spoonful of lump fish eggs (Cyclopterus lumpus). Lump fish eggs are very popular in the entire Scandinavia and this one is produced in Sweden. Lump fish is a bottom fish found in the both sides of the North Atlantic and the eggs we ate last night came from the coast of Iceland.



Blini are easy to make, light, delicious and fit with the Norwegian way of eating herring which is on white bread or on the extra thin 'leaf bread'. Norwegians normally eat dark whole grain breads, ultra dark and the darkest breads in the planet but herrings are preferably served on white bread over a line of butter and with a spoonful of sour cream. For this reason I started to serve herring on white blini, made of wheat flour only. To the sour cream I add some garlic, chives, parsley, extra virgen olive oil and salt and pepper to make a sauce and finish with the lump eggs.

This snack is pretty easy to make since I buy the herring ready to be served. Some people here fish their fish and deliver their catch to special places where they can have their trouts, salmons or herrings smoked, salted or pickled. A lot of people do it around here but we are not exactly fishing people in this house. Well, Per would love to spend his days fishing and eating him own catch only but reality bites. The herring we find in the market is very good and pretty fresh. Herring can be found fresh, in mustard sauce, pickled, in tomato sauce, in pepper sauce, in oil, fermented, smoked or salted and dried. Herring make a really delicious late night snack, to eat while watching a movie when it is snowing outside.



White blini with pickled herring and lump fish eggs

For the white blini:
2 cups wheat flour
1 table spoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
2 eggs room temperature
1 cup lukewarm milk


Sift flour, salt and baking powder and set aside. Beat eggs as to make an omelet. Add beaten eggs to flour mixture and mix until incorporated. Add milk, slowly, mixing well to make a very homogeneous batter. Butter a non adherent frying pan with butter, removing the excess with paper towel and add small spoonfuls of batter. Let it cook until golden one side (around two minutes) and turn around to cooked the other side. The blini will look like a very small butter-less slightly inflated pancake.

Sour cream sauce:
1 cup of sour cream, creme fraiche(crème fraîche) or whole yogurt
1 'boat' of garlic grained
1 table spoon extra virgem olive oil
Salt and pepper
Chives
Parsley

Mix garlic and olive oil to cream and mix well to incorporate and soften the sour cream. Add chives, parsley, salt and pepper and mix again. Serve the blini with a spoonful of sauce, a slice of fish and a small spoonful of lump fish eggs on top.

In the lunchbox: puff pastry fish

This little fishes are an idea of Moira of the blog Tertulia de Sabores here who made them for a 'finger food' event promoted by the blog Mirepoix. If you like my fishes you can vote for Moira here.

I totally fell in love with Moira's idea and knew I had to make it to the kids. Made out of puff pastry molded to look like a fish these little treats can be filled with anything your child enjoy to eat. Moira's fishes had tuna filling while my fishes have ham, cheese and parsley filling. It remains quite impossible to make the kids in this house eat tuna. They can eat the fish made out of puff pastry but not with tuna filling, at least not yet.


(before going into the oven!)


Aren't they beautiful? Well, my fishes can not be compared to those made by Moira, which are much more handsome than my little ones but this is my first time. Next time I will try making them smaller and I won't be so lazy to make nice drawings on the 'skin' of the fish. By the way, I have just baked these fishes and they will be a surprise in the lunch box tomorrow.

Living in Narnia...

The weather around here shows that it is officially winter even if it was suppose to be autumn. During autumn the leaves are supposed to turn yellow and red and fall. But not here, not in Trondheim, not in Norway. Autumn here is something more symbolic, when the days get really, really short and dark and it gets pretty cold, and colder and colder and even colder. The temperatures go below zero and everyday life is a serious issue. We can also count that there will be a lot of snow in autumn, sometimes by the end of October the snow is already here, everywhere in this country except for a thin stripe on the West coast.

This year we were quite lucky and what I call the Narnian life style has caught us a little later since it was not until yesterday that the snow storms began to last the entire day and night. Esthetically the result is amazing, white landscape which turns blue in the pictures, with amazing forms, textures and colors. I can't deny the beauty behind the cold white days. The snow creates a different environment, the colors as I said, but even the sound. The acoustic changes and it feels like one is in a dream. It is pretty weird for me because I am a girl from the tropics and I feel I am inside a fairy tale, living on the pages of an adventure book such as Narnia for example.













I love to experiment with the camera and I have been doing some with speed and flash experiments with an old digital Nikon. It was just for fun but I found that some of the results are pretty amazing.


Inside the wardrobe

While the children love to play outside with the snow and talk about winter all year long I feel happy for them. Although inside I am the most miserable person in the world. While the days are white and cold I stay inside the 'wardrobe' cooking and thinking how much I would love to make time goes faster so I could move our life to the beaches of Narnia 2. That would be fun for me.



Sweet potato bread

Today I baked a delicious sweet potato bread which was so soft and tasty. The recipe of the Sweet Potato Bread is from the blog Magia na Cozinha, and can be found in English here

As I preferred a slightly salty breads I added only one table spoon of sugar instead of the five recommended by the recipe and I also added an extra table spoon of salt to the recipe. The potato is already sweet so the bread didn't get salty keeping the sweetness of the potato very subtle. It tasted perfect for me. Thanks Xará!