Business trip

I'm going away for some business. Hopefully I get some nice food in Stockholm, there is a slight chance. I'm back Thursday evening. And then I'll have some indian food from our freezer :-)

Jalapeño

Harvest from or oldest jalapeño plant, which has given us lovely fruit since last summer.

Chili

Yesterday we had chili for dinner. This is one of our favourite dishes, and the smell of chili cooking for three hours can be very frustrating! We always do a no bean chili. We have tried different recipes, but we have a favourite, and yesterday that was what we had. And as always it tasted delicious. We eat the chili with tortilla chips, onion mix, swedish sour cream, grated cheese, some tiger sauce and cold Corona beer. Great!

Rhubarb, Cinnamon and Chile Crumble Cake

Today I wanted to bake something spicy, and I wanted to use some of our rhubarb. We have plenty of it and soon the apples will be ready and then we'll probably focus on apples for a while. So the plan was rhubarb, and more like a cake than a pie. Couldn't find any good recipe though, so I started with a recipe for an apple cake, and made some... well, many changes in it. It turned out well, although I could have used more chile powder. The cake is really big... we'll see if we have to invite someone to taste it. We shouldn't eat all of it ourselves :-)



Here comes my recipe:
Rhubarb, Cinnamon and Chile Crumble Cake

Rhubarb layer
3-4 rhubarbs cut into thin slices (about 2-2½ cups)
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp chile powder
1 tbsp sugar

Cake layer
½ tsp ground cinnamon
1 cup (250 g) butter
1 1/4 cups (250g) sugar
4 eggs
4 cups (450 g) flour
2½ tsp baking powder

Crumble layer
3/4 cup (175 g) raw sugar
1 1/4 cup (125 g) flour
1 tsp ground cinnamon
4½ tbsp (65 g) dried coconut
½ cup (115g) butter

Grease a springform. Preheat the oven to 180 C (350 F).

Mix everything for the rhubarb layer in a bowl. Set aside.

Mix everything for the crumble layer except for the butter in another bowl. Then add the butter and make it crumbly using your hands. Set aside.

Cream the butter and sugar for the cake layer. Then add the eggs, one at a time, and beat it well after each addition.

Mix the flour and the baking powder and then sift half of it in, stir, and add the rest of it. Stir until smooth.

Spread half the cake mixture evenly into the form. Then add all the rhubarb. Sprinkle over half the crumble topping. Spread the remaining cake mixture over the topping, and finally put the rest of the topping on top.

Bake for 1 hour and 10 minutes or maybe a little more. Cover the cake with foil if it seems to get too dark.

Serve with whipped cream.

Spices

Today I went to buy some spices at my lunch break. We try to buy our spices in some of the orient stores in town instead of buying the small and expensive glass jars found in our regular supermarkets. There isn't a great variety of spices in Linköping, but at Orientlivs you find the most basic ones, like chile powder, cinnamon and cumin which is exactly what I bought today.


Our plan was to make chili tomorrow night, to bring to a chili chef competition on Saturday in Stockholm, but unfortunately the event was cancelled. It was the five year anniversiry of the swedish chilepepper society, Svenska Chilepepparföreningen, but it seems like there were too few persons that had accepted the invitation so the event will not take place now, but hopefully later on.

Really sad, but maybe we'll make the chili on Saturday instead. Even though there is no competition around, it's always great to have some real hot and spicy chili for dinner! I'm getting hungry just thinking about it, even though we just had dinner (Macaroni & Cheese, which I noticed earlier today that also Anne is a big fan of!).

Self dicipline? Nah!

Didn't find anything else to bake quick and easy, so I cheated. I made the shortbread cookies aven though they hadn't been overnight in my freezer. And it worked just fine! They're yummy!

I made three rolls of the dough, and now I have tried the first one. The other ones get to rest in the freezer a bit longer ;-)

They're not extremly spicy in any way, and I'll probably add more chile next time I'll make them (for sure, there is a next time) but the aftertaste is warm and full and very enjoyable! We ate them still a bit warm, first just the cakes and then with some vanilla ice-cream. Both worked fine. The chocolate taste reminded us a bit of Oreos, but with a bit more spice. Try them! They are easy and taste great! And we ate all of them... as I said, self dicipline isn't really our thing.

"Chocolate chilli shortbread"

Today I was in the mood for some baking, and I wanted to try these cookies from a blog I sometimes read. Chocolate and chile is often a very good match, so I'm very curious about the result. Unfortunately the dough should be in the freezer until tomorrow, so no cookies for us tonight :-(

I hadn't read the recipe so carefully that I had noticed this before I already had decided to try them, so now I'm thinking if there is something else I could make, to get something tasty tonight! But I ran out of eggs and butter. So, what can I do. I have to figure something out. I want cake and I want it now! And I want something spicy! Have to go and check out the kitchen again...

Red Savina of 2004

It's still many weeks to harvest for most of our chile. The rainy and cold July wasn't what we wanted, and many of our plants haven't even started to bloom yet. Others have green chiles, and some of them are fine like that while others tastes better fully red. Some of those late plants are our Habañero Red Savinas, said to be the hottest chile in the world. Yeah, they are pretty hot. But not only that. They also have a very fruity flavour, and all the habañeros are easy to recognize. But here is a picture of what is to come. It's our Red Savina harvest of 2004! Not all of it, but the result of one day's harvest. We still have many chiles in the freezer since last year. Even though harvest was late (lousy summer last year too), we had a good result, especially from the different habañeros.

Vindaloo Masala from Rafi's Spice Box

I rarely cook, I leave that to my fiancé who is a natural talent in the kitchen. That will probably stop me some from publishing recipes here in the blog. Due to copyright issues I can't just copy my favourites from our books or favourite websites, at least not more than occasionally, and I could never write down the stuff than my fiancé just makes up from his head. What I can do is to link to recipes we love and to great stuff to try out if you like hot and spicy food, and today I'll give you a really good piece of advice...

Rafi's Spice Box is a spice shop in York and Suffolk, UK. Never been to Suffolk, but in June we stayed a week in lovely York, and we totally fell in love... with the spice shop! The concept is great. You can not only buy the ordinary products and spices, but you can also buy curry packs ready to cook, just by adding 1 kilogram of ingredients of your choice. We bought four curry packs, Patia Masala, Vindaloo Masala, Phaal Masala and Malay Rendang. The nice young man who put the curry packs together without even looking at a recipe and as we could see from non labeled jars also gave us a sample of the Bombay Potato to take home with us.

We have now made all these curries except from the Phaal Masala (which is said to be the hottest). And they are all totally adorable. Each pack has given us three great dinners, and tonight we'll eat some Vindaloo Masala from the freezer with some fresh coriander on top.

Since we live in Sweden we can't go back to the spice shop, but you can order your curry packs on the Internet, even internationally! So now we are going to place an order soon for more curry packs. Even though it's not so hard to make great indian food from scratch it's nice to have these pre-made curries to cook.

Beautiful Arizona

Chilepepper comes in different shape and color, and so does also its leaves and flowers. Here is a picture of one of our Arizona plants. It has no chilepeppers yet, harvest will be late this lousy Swedish summer, but it has these small beautiful purple flowers, and multicolored leaves in purple and green. Isn't it lovely?

There's a new hot blog in town!

This is my second blog, but my first written in English. My other blog is about daily stuff with a technology theme, but this will be something else. This blog will focus on chilepepper, hot and spicy food and other related things. There will be pictures and reports from our chile plants, there will be recipes and other useful hints when it comes to hot food, and it will probably also give some reviews of different chile flavours or hot products. We'll see what will fit in under the subject of chilepepper and spice.