Yumi Yumi

It's been a while since I took part at the Waiter there is something in my ... blog event, organised by Andrew , Johanna and Jeanne . This month's event is hosted by Jeanne, who has chosen the Cucurbitacae family as a theme, or if you want a more poetic title, For the Love of Gourd . I've been featuring quite a few pumpkin recipes recently on my blog - pumpkin and flowering quince jam , pumpkin and ginger jam , pumpkin and nutmeg soup , to name just the last three. But I wanted something more mainstream this time, so I baked a pumpkin and ginger loaf, or a teabread. This pumpkin loaf is somewhat different, as it uses grated raw pumpkin instead of cooked pumpkin purée. It's a slightly modifying recipe from BBC Good Food (November 2002). When I baked it few weeks ago, I had run out of those delicious Buderim ginger nibbles that you can buy at Lakeland stores in the UK. If I had had them at the time, I would have certainly thrown in a generous handful of them, for sure....

My loyal readers may remember that photo collage of flowering quinces from last summer, when I made flowering quince extract and flowering-quince and apple jam . Well, I made several other jams using flowering quinces from my mum's backyard this autumn. One of our favourite ones was this pumpkin jam (yep, just as nice as this ginger and pumpkin jam ) . It's a lovely thick jam - flowering quinces are very high in pectin, with a beautiful yellow colour (well, it's mostly pumpkin after all), with a nice acidity lended by the flowering quinces. Another excellent jam to be spread on your breakfast or afternoon toast or English muffin. NB! Note that flowering quince ( Chaenomeles Lindl ) and quince ( Cydonia oblonga ) are related, but NOT the same fruit (quite confusingly, all quinces flower, but that's another topic altogether). Cleaning flowering-quinces for jam-making can be quite a pain. The fruit are hard and small. The best result is to find a comfortable place t...

Stuffed peppers are a handy supper dish, but many of the 'traditional' versions (i.e. filled with minced meat and rice) are too heavy for me. Recently I've tried couple of lighter versions, and this one was well received at a recent dinner with friends. The recipe is adapted from an old issue of British Tesco Recipe Magazine (March 2003, I believe). The dish contains very few ingredients, but had surprisingly plenty of flavour, so I'll definitely try this again. PS Sorry for the small hiatus - I was participating at a workshop in Finland, spending most of the last week in Tampere and Helsinki. It wasn't all work, however, as my dear K. joined me for the weekend of special shopping and delicious eating in Helsinki. Mozzarella-stuffed Peppers ( Mozzarellaga täidetud paprikad ) Serves 3 as a main course or 6 as a starter 3 bell peppers (a red, yellow and orange one, perhaps?) 1 Tbsp olive oil 150 g fresh mozzarella cheese, cubed 8-12 cherry tomatoes, halved or quartere...

I love caraway seeds, that's not a secret. There have been roasted beets with caraway seeds , shaken cucumber salad with caraway seeds , creamy beetroot soup with horseradish and caraway seeds , caraway-infused sauerkraut braised in beer , easy cheese crisps with caraway seeds - to name just a few. And one of my old favourites that has recently enjoyed a comeback, is a 'recipe' for oven-baked chips with caraway seeds. So here's what you need to do. Take your favourite roasting potato (I use a variety, Laura , which has a thin pink skin and dark yellow flesh - Estonians like their potatoes to be yellow, not white inside), scrub very clean and cut lengthwise into wedges (four is plenty). Place into an oven tray, preferably large enough to snugly fit the potatoes in one layer. Drizzle generously with oil (and give them a good stir, so they'd be covered with oil), season with sea salt and caraway seeds. Bake for 35-45 minutes (the timing really depends on the size and ...

Have you had pumpkin jam before? You should, believe me. When I had a huge pumpkin to dissect and prepare few weeks ago, then pumpkin jam was one of the items on my to-try-list. And as we've already eaten most of the jam I made, I'm going to make some more tomorrow. The jam has a beautiful bright yellow colour, and lovely ginger kick. We love it. We had this on pancakes this morning, but it's also great spread of a slice of toast, or served as a condiment with some grilled meat (especially if you go heavy-handed with ginger). Ginger and Pumpkin Jam ( Ingveri-kõrvitsamarmelaad ) 1 kg chopped up pumpkin flesh 50 to 70 g peeled and grated fresh ginger 1 lemon 200 ml (a scant cup) of water 500 g jam sugar (with added pectin) Wash the lemon, pat dry and grate the zest. Remove the white pith and discard. Cut the lemon flesh into smaller pieces. Place pumpkin, water, lemon flesh and grated ginger into a heavy-bottomed saucepan and cook on a low heat, covered, until the pumpkin fle...

Have you heard of dukkah before? I had, but hadn't actually eaten any until this June, when in Bloomington, US, I had a chance to try a lovely pistachio dukkah made by Cindy Bradley , a local food blogger. Basically, it's an Egyptian dry mixture of chopped nuts (mainly hazelnuts), seeds (coriander, cumin, sesame) and possibly some other spices . It's a popular street food, where fresh wheat bread is dipped first into olive oil and then into the dukkah-mixture. But it can also be sprinkled on salads to give some crunch (say, instead of toasted pinenuts). Apparently it can be used for breading fish and meat when cooking. Quite a few bloggers have already featured dukkah on their blogs - Heidi adds black peppercorns for some heat, Jaden adds chilli pepper for an extra kick, Rosa combines almonds and hazelnuts, and my dear friend Ximena cheats a little :) The recipe below is very lightly adapted from the British food magazine Olive (January 2007), and makes a small bowl of...

Some desserts are so simple, that it's hard to call them recipes and it's difficult to decide whether to blog about them or not. But then you did seem to like my oven-baked toffee apples a lot, and that hardly qualifies as a difficult dish. So here's another one for you. The only difficult part can be sourcing the rye bread crumbs - but you can always take couple of slices of stale rye bread (caraway seeds and all), and blitz them into fine crumbs in your food processor. As for lingonberries - I bet cranberries, which are far more easily available, would work just as well. Baked Apples with Rye Bread and Lingonberries ( Õuna-pohlaküpsetis ) Serves 4 For rye bread mixture: 200 ml (a scant cup) of fine and dry rye bread crumbs 50 g butter, melted 4 Tbsp caster sugar For the fruit mixture: 4-5 cooking apples, (peeled and), cored and sliced 200 ml (a scant cup) lingonberries For serving: vanilla custard or ice cream or whipped cream Butter a small oven dish (ca 24x30 cm) Mix t...

Photo by Juta Kübarsepp, for the October issue of Kodu & Aed, 2012 As somebody aptly commented on my Flickr photo page , it's that time of the year :) When heading to the market these days, you'll see piles of beautifully bright orange pumpkins and winter squashes everywhere. I got one from my mum just over a week ago, and we enjoyed a number of different pumpkin dishes during the week. I made a pumpkin and ginger loaf , two types of pumpkin jam (one with ginger , one with flowering-quinces ). And this soup. There are two things with this soup that make it different from other pumpkin soups I've tried so far. Firstly, it's fat-free , making it perfect for those who are preparing for the Christmas or Thanksgiving feasts laying ahead of us (and if you're omit the cream drizzle, it's vegan , too). Secondly, it uses nutmeg as a seasoning - giving the soup a lovely and different twist. Fat-free Pumpkin Soup with Nutmeg ( Kõrvitsasupp muskaadiga ) Serves 4 500 ml...

Few weeks ago a friend of mine from Toronto, Melissa, came to visit me. Melissa and I both did our postgraduate degrees in Edinburgh in year 2000, after which she left first to her native South Africa and then moved to Toronto to do her doctorate. She had promised to visit me on several occasions since she left Scotland, and we even managed to meet up at a conference in London at one point. Now, finally, she - and her beautiful 9-month old daughter Natali - came to Estonia for a brief, 8-day visit. And this gave me an opportunity to try some Jewish recipes I had been wanting to try for a while. You see, Melissa is Jewish, who keeps kosher. And she's vegetarian. In this Land of Pork Chops Served with Cheese Sauce , it was easiest for us to eat at home. And one night, I baked us a batch of Rugelach. Rugelach - when said with a low, husky voice, and repeatedly, sounds sweet and funny (at least little Natali seemed to think so!), like something out a fairy tale, so I was thrilled to b...