Tummyrumble

Kimchi and lamb sausage soup

Kimchee and lamb sausage soup
Originally uploaded by Manne.

Spent the past weekend in Sweden visiting friends and family after the latest Livebookings Academy which was in Gothenburg. This time the venue was Avalon Hotel, which also houses a restaurant with the same name.

After the presentation we stayed on for dinner and treated ourselves to their set 3-course menu with matching wine package. Delicious! Particularly brilliant was the dessert, a perfectly cooked chocolate fondant with lemongrass ice cream and a milk chocolate creme served with an Amarone wine.

As I was going through some of the weekend posts from my favourite food blogs I found a delicious looking idea: leek, lamb sausage and kimchee stew! Thinking about dinner (always...), I decided to try it on tonight.

Since there was no recipe I had to improvise. It came out beautifully and took less than 30 minutes to make. Goes straight into the "quick and simple favourites" section in my recipe book.

Ingredients (serves 4, with bread)

5 lamb sausages
2 medium sized leeks, sliced
2 romano peppers, sliced
300 grams of kimchi
500 ml vegetable stock
1/2 lemon, juice

Lamb sausages I got from Greensmiths on Lower Marsh, where Ginger Pig runs the butcher's counter.

Helped by my trusted Twitter fellow foodies I was told to go to Centre Point Building near Tottenham Court Road for kimchi, to the aptly named "Centre Point Food Store" where you can find all kinds of Korean delights. Thanks @catty, @supercharz, @sulineats, @unwholey, @sugarbardiva and @BillGlover for great suggestions on places selling kimchi in London!

Pickled cabbage is a great treat in my opinion, and kimchi is right up there at the pinnacle of pickled cabbage design.

Method

I started with pan frying the sausages as I intended to cut them in slices which is much easier when the meat has cooked a bit.

Once nicely browned all over (no need to cook them all through as they will stew nicely in the soup) I transferred them to a cutting board and sliced them up at a severe angle (hey, I am using a technical term I learned at Ashburton Cookery School, yay!).

Then I melted some butter in a large pot and added the leek (which I also sliced at a severe angle, just so I could write it again). Once they started to go soft and slightly translucent I added the pepper (severely angled).

Gave it two or three minutes while stirring, then added the sausage and the vegetable stock. If you find the 500 ml doesn't really cover it all, add some more water.

Brought it all to a boil, let simmer for ten minutes.

To finish it up, added in the kimchi and the juice of half a lemon, let simmer for another few minutes until kimchi heated through. 

Serve in bowls. Make sure you have a nice bread to scoop up the juices!

Easing back on LCHF

Last week I decided that I will ease back on the low carbing and start eating less strictly according to LCHF. I guess that makes me more of a GI advocate than anything else.

I still firmly believe that cutting out sugars, especially the refined kind and fructose, while increasing the fat content of your food is a good thing. Since I am not aiming for weight loss though, nor have any other health problems (except my old friend IBS which is basically gone after 8 months of trying to stick to LCHF), the practicalities of every day eating made me decide to start mixing some more carb back in my food.

Besides, it is tasty.

That said, I will stay away from wheat, white flour, refined sugar and white rice (except when I eat sushi...). My page about LCHF has been duly updated to explain my choice.

Update: Kostdoktorn (Swedish), one of the Swedish doctors who advocate LCHF, recently pointed out how much more like LCHF the GI method seems to become (Swedish)... In a newly published cookery book about GI he counted the recipes that might as well have been published under the heading "LCHF" and found 50 of them.

My top five porky dishes

Since Pork Off 2010 was officially announced, with me being the first (possibly only...) contestant submitting a dish, the traffic to my site has significantly increased. The two days after publishing my bacon lattice pork bomb sausages traffic actually doubled. Amazing what a silly post and some people re-tweeting on Twitter can do.

Worshipping the pig!
Originally uploaded by jACK TWO, made available through Creative Commons, thanks!

Anyway. Since I am a big fan of the pig I figured I should list my favourite five recipes with pork in them. Well, by necessity it of course becomes the top five dishes I have written a post about on my blog. There are other favourites I make often like sticky pork ribs (great for steaming in oven until done, then finishing off on an outdoor barbecue for that great sticky crust), Tuscan fennel rubbed pork belly (amazing), bobotie with pork mince, Swedish browned cabbage with lots of lardons... Excuse me, I am just going to get something to wipe the drool from my keyboard.

When it comes to pork I like mine really fatty. While I used to worry about fatty meat, recent scientific findings have completely convinced me there is no need to cut back on saturated fat. Au contraire.

Among pork lovers there is this mythical cut, bacon like yet not, called lardo that I therefore would love to try. If you happen to know anywhere to get it in London, do please leave a comment!

So without further ado and no particular order, for all you pork lovers attracted here by Pork Off 2010, here are my favourite five blog posts with pork in them.

Creamy pork with garlic mushrooms

This pork chop dish is really simple to cook, yet returns such an amazing result. It also has a really clever method making sure all you need is a plate and a frying pan so for the washing up haters out there this is perfect.

Tomato and carrot soup kissed by the sun

Some day my pretentious title giving will have to come to an end. While this dish may not sound very porky, there is a good chunk of bacon added for protein and flavour.

Puff apple pancake

Another non porky sounding dish, yet without lots of great rashers of bacon it falls flat on its face. I recommend getting some really nice pork from Ginger Pig for this, not just your average Tesco Danepak watery crap.

Baked pork chops with a porcini and creme fraiche topping

Yes, it is a Delia recipe and no, I am not ashamed. While this is a bit more finicky than the pork chop recipe above it is so tasty. Fun to make too, any dish that ends up in a package you have to open up before serving gets bonus points.

Last but not least;

Flesh pancake, the classic Swedish oven baked dish

Yeah I know, the title is a bit lost in translation... I guess "oven made thick pancake" is more mouth watering but I like the zombie connotation of "flesh pancake". When I was a kid in the 80s we were served this a lot in school. 

Sure, school kitchen means canteen grub, but this dish seems to lend itself very well to industrial cooking since I and many others developed a deep love for it. Cheap ingredients, simple to make, really rewarding pay off. Requires lingon berry jam, which you can get at Scandinavian Kitchen at Great Titchfield Street. Go there, try their open sandwiches, or forever be sorry.

Now I am going to go make me a bacon sarnie.

I am in good company

This morning as I checked my blog stats my eyes did a double-take over one of the referrers that started with "http://witch-talk..."

Huh? Of course I had to check that out.

Turns out it is a dead simple web page with some summary information about LCHF, much like my own dedicated page on the Low Carb High Fat subject.

What made me smile though is the company of links with which my own page has been associated: Annika Dahlqvist, well known doctor and proponent for LCHF in Sweden; and Jimmy Moore's Livin La Vida Low Carb!

Wow, I am honoured. ;) Guess it just goes to show that there is a serious lack of authoritative online information about LCHF in English. If I had time to the blogging thing more seriously I would definitely focus my writing on that.

My favourite writers are still Fat Head and Hyperlipid, if you want to follow two funny, very knowledgeable and interesting bloggers writing frequently on the subject of health and fat.

Healthy ersatz crisps - roast kale

Bowl of crispy, salty kale leaves
Originally uploaded by Manne.

Having read about oven roasting kale in a few recipes online we decided to try it out. Being an avid lover of all things kale and cabbage I always get excited when I find a new way of cooking and eating these amazing vegetables.

Recipe is dead simple: 

Heat oven to 200 degrees Celsius. Take a bag of kale, remove the hard stem. Toss the leaves in olive oil and flaky sea salt. Place on a roasting tray in oven, leave for five minutes. Turn the leaves over and roast for another seven to ten minutes, until crispy. Sprinkle with some more salt if you like, serve immediately.

So tasty! What really surprised me was that it feels like eating crisps. Light, slightly bitter, crunchy crisps! Absolutely awesome, this will become a staple snack from here on when the urge to eat potato crisps comes on...