Broccoli Muffins

Son sick, husband traveling and no interesting cooking during all week. Making up something for dinner to end the weekend sounded like a good plan!

I´ve made broccoli muffins, which turned out pretty well considering I didn´t have a recipe... I didn´t even looked for one, I just wanted to try something new, and fast, with the ingredients available in the fridge.

Only ten minutes of preparation, 30 minutes in the oven and ta-da...

You have to admit they look pretty gorgeous and I promise they tasted just as good!

If you´re keen on giving a try to this muffins, here´s the recipe (I made a very small portion):

- 1 cup of flour
- half of cooked broccoli (mine was small)
- 1/3 cheese (whatever cheese you prefer, but choose wisely! I used a goat cheese, Portuguese, which added an amazing flavor)
- 1/4 olive oil
- 1 egg
- Coriander
- salt and pepper
- 1 tea spoon of baking powder - however I don´t think it worked :/

Mix everything very well and cook it for 30 minutes at 180º.

Heavy dinners are really not my thing and these muffins seem a perfect option, to go along with a soup or a salad.

Give it a try!

Stews cheer any rainy day

Stews are the kind of food I grew up with and a simple beef stew with spaghetti was always there throughout my childhood and teenage years. There´s nothing elegant, complicated or much to be said about this dish - it´s just simple comfort food, so easy to cook and easy to like!

See?

My son also loves this stew, it´s one of his favorite dishes. I can swear he doesn´t take the eyes of prize until he´s finished... which takes about 5 minutes! This is how fast he can eat...

And aren´t stews  just the perfect food for a rainy day? This last weekend was so depressing, it rained almost non-stop from Friday to Sunday and I felt like preparing something more homy but easy to warm up the spirit - rainy days give me very uncomfortable headaches!

Like I said, there isn´t much to be said about this stew. To prepare it, you just need to brown 1 onion in olive oil, add tomato paste (approx. 2 table spoons), cubes of beef, salt, pepper and coriander or parsley, whatever you prefer - I always prefer coriander over parsley. You also need to add water, just enough to cover the meat, not drown it , otherwise it´s harder to get the tick and flavorful sauce in the end.

However, you have to make sure that the water doesn´t boil away, since the meat needs at least about 1 hour to cook. You might need to keep adding a little bit of water every 15 minutes or so and once the meat is tender it´s time to add around 2 cups of water again, followed by the spaghetti. Ten more minutes and it´s ready to eat!

Portuguese egg tart - my old own version

The egg tart is probably the signature piece of the Portuguese people. Even on this side of the world, it´s very popular, although considerably different from the tarts we have in Portugal. At least the egg tarts I´ve tried here in Singapore are more quiche-like to me, but I´ve heard that the ones in Macau are very similar to the Portuguese tarts, which I believe to be true since Macau was a Portuguese colony for over 400 years, until 1999. Macau is definitely in my traveling list!

I have a recipe that I learned when I was 15 and I´ve kept it with me for all these years. I knew it would come in handy to surprise my non-Portuguese friends some day :) The basic different between my egg tart and the real one is that I don´t use puff pastry. I  would either have to made it myself - which is quite challenging - or buy it, so a prefer to make the pastry that came with the recipe. I also use a larger mold instead of several smaller ones. 

Needless to say that I have already made this recipe a few times and yesterday was one of the occasions, as I was having a couple friend of ours over for an afternoon snack.

Trust me, this recipe is very easy to make and puts a smile on any face! So please take note:

For the pastry you need:
- 150 grams of flour
- 60 grams of sugar
- 75 grams of melted butter
- 1 egg

Mix all the ingredients and line the mold with it, letting it cool down in the fridge for about 15 minutes. In the meantime, prepare the filling.

And for that you need:

- 1/2 L of milk
- 7 table spoons of sugar
- 2 peels of lemon (makes all the difference to use the peels!)
- 4 egg yalks
- 2 table spoons of corn flour (Maizena flour)

In a pan, mix the milk, the sugar, the eggs and the lemon, put on the stove and let it heat up.
Then dissolve the corn flour in a little bit of cold milk and add it to the mix in the pan. Keep stirring until the filling becomes creamy and ticker.

Remove the pastry from the fridge and pour the filling in. Let it cook in the oven for about 40 minutes at 180º, until the filling gets some dark/burned spots. As you can see in my photo, I didn´t get that result, with my new oven I never do actually... I have tried all the programs possible but for some weird reason I never get the finishing I would like to have. Anyways, for your reference, look at the image on the top part of the blog.

The egg tart is delicious, creamy, very light and always a hit! How can you not love it?

Happy Monday everyone!

 

I´m going home!

Just booked the ticket to go to Portugal in March... I feel like jumping up and down! I miss my family and friends so much and the country itself that I can´t put in words what it means. Knowing myself as I do, I´m pretty sure I´ll be counting the days until the D Day comes!

And knowing my family as I also do, it´s 100% certain that they will prepare infinite feasts for us... please do! If there´s something one needs to know about a Portuguese family is that everything is about food. It´s about having cheese and chouriço with bread still warm, big lunches on weekends, big enough to make the food last until Tuesday, it´s about going out on purpose for an expresso and egg tart, drinking too much and laughing too loud... 

Going back to relive all this gives me the great opportunity to showcase here the true Portuguese cuisine and look at it as I´ve never looked before.

Really looking forward to it!

The 3 Kings Day and the King´s Cake

January 6th is the last day of Christmas season on the Christian calendars. Known as the 3 Kings Day, in the Portuguese culture this is still a festive day - not as much as it used to be in the old days -  when people undo the Christmas threes, sing carols (so called Janeiras) and have the King´s cake (bolo-rei).

The 3 Kings Day refers to the "Magi of Bethlehem", Caspar, Melchior and Balthasar. According to the Bible, these three kings saw a bright star on the night Christ was born, following it to Bethlehem, where they found the Christchild and presented it with gold, frankincense and myrrh.

The King´s cake resembles a king´s crown. It´s a round cake with a hole in the middle, a very golden color and lots of candied fruits on top.

In reality, this cake is also present on Christmas Eve, but since there are so many other desserts and sweets to eat on that day, the poor cake ends up being a bit neglected. That´s what I see every year - a beautiful cake decorating the table... But not today! The King´s Cake can be bought in every pastry (no one makes it) and found at every Portuguese home. In some regions of Portugal, I would say more in the countryside, the carols tradition is still alive wherein a group of people go from house to house to sing the Carols (as Janeiras), getting in return a slice of the King´s cake and a glass of Porto wine.

For those who, like me, are not particularly fond of the candied fruits, there´s another version of this cake - the Queen´s cake! Like the King´s cake, this one is also made with lots of dried fruits, such as raisins, walnuts or  hazelnuts, just doesn´t include the candied fruits.

I´ll try to find today a Queen´s cake recipe to make it. If I can´t, at least the tradition is already documented here!

Is Tempura Japanese or Portuguese?

If your response was "Japanese", guess again...

Against common sense, Tempura is actually a frying technique first introduced to Japan by the Portuguese back in the 16th century. I learned this just recently with a cooking TV show and went online to find a little bit more about it...

Tempura is more precisely a technique of dipping fish and vegetables into a batter and frying them and comes from the Latin word tempora, "times" in English, which refers to Ember Days, meaning the holy days when Catholics avoid meat and instead eat fish or vegetables. There´s another theory for the word Tempura, although not as strong, that says that it derives from the Portuguese word tempero, which in English means seasoning.

As far as the technique is concerned, there´s also the possibility that the Portuguese picked it up from  Goa, once a Portuguese colony in India, as it seems to be a variation of a dish called "Pakora".

I was surprised to learned all this simply because nowadays the Portuguese don´t use a batter as light as the one used to prepare the Tempura. Only one dish (according to my research) resembles Tempura and it´s called "garden fishes" (peixinhos da horta in Portuguese). It´s a side dish made with green beans which I haven´t had in years, so if I hadn´t read about it I wouldn´t have been able to make the association by myself...

It looks like this.

I love Japanese food, being tempura one of my favorite dishes. When I was pregnant with my son and forbidden of eating sushi, Tempura was what I used to have instead. Good memories!