Halloumi skewers, before grilling them.

Anne kindly invited us to her Midsummer party this year. We had a wonderful day and the food was really delicious, even if it was far from traditional Midsummer’s food which I’m rather bored of. Anne prepared most of the food and all others brought different things as well. Fredrik and I brought lime marinated halloumi skewers and a chocolate truffle cake with walnut crust and a raspberry sauce. Thanks again for inviting us, Anne!

I love Halloumi, I just can’t get enough of that squeky delicious cheese, it’s so easy to use and so easy to eat :-) For the party I prepared skewers with marinated Halloumi, pepper and red onion. I burnt them on the barbeque while the guys were drinking beer and watching, but I did get some help in the end though :-) The skewers were great but next time I’ll marinate them a little longer than just 1 hour.

Lime Marinated Halloumi Skewers

(makes far too many. I don’t remember the exact quantities, but you get the point)

Skewers:
3 parcels of Halloumi (a total of about 450 g)
1 red pepper
1 yellow pepper
1 green pepper
2 red onions

Marinade:
The juice from 2 limes
The juice from 0.5 lemon
freshly grounded pepper
Olive oil
fresh herbs (I used a herb which I don’t recall, but it tasted and smelled like pineapple!)

Prepare the marinade in a bowl. Cut the Halloumi in cubes and put it in the marinade. Put the bowl in the fridge for a couple of hours. Cut the vegetables and then put everything on skewers (if wodden, put them in water for 10 minutes so they don’t start to burn on the barbecue).
Grill the skewers on a barbecue until they get enough colour.

Yummy! Read more about the different dishes on Anne’s blog.

The last two Sundays we’ve been enjoying these lovely pancakes. They are truly delicious with a scent of lemon (or orange, I’ve done both variants) and they melt in your mouth. The original recipe calls for Ricotta, but I used the Swedish quark “Kesella 10%” and the second time I used the Polish quark “Serek Smietankowy Delfiko”. Both turned out really nice. The pancakes are rather fragile so be careful when you fry them. Serve the pancakes with maple syrup or your favourite jam, myself I prefer them with a Polish Raspberry Syrup.

Lemon and Ricotta pancakes
(adapted from “Frukost och Brunch” by Jonas Borssén)

175 ml quark or Ricotta
50 g melted butter
3 large eggs, separated into whites and yolks
1 tsp vanilla scented sugar
50 ml plain flour
2 tbsp caster sugar
1 tbsp lemon or orange zest

Combine the quark, melted butter, egg yolks and vanilla sugar and put aside. Combine flour, caster sugar and zest in a separate bowl. Combine the two previous mixtures. Whip the egg whites until they become stiff. Carefully combine one third of the egg whites with the pancake batter and blend carefully without loosing the volume from the egg whites. Then add the rest of the egg whites. The batter should be homogeneous and airy.
Fry small pancakes (about 8-12 ones) in butter.

Trumpet Chanterelles

Fried creamy Trumpet Chanterelles
serves 1

200 gr fresh Trumpet Chanterelles
butter
1 small onion, chopped
200 ml cream
salt
pepper
Clean the Chanterelles by brushing them, don’t wash them. Divide the Trumpet Chanterelles by tearing them apart by hand. Fry them in an empty frying pan, without any butter. Let them fry/cook until all their moisture has evaporated. Now add some butter and some chopped yellow onion. Add 100 ml cream, let the Chanterelles absorb the cream and then add another 100 ml of cream, let absorb again. Add salt and pepper. Serve with cooked potatoes and crisp bread.

Langos with sour cream, chopped red onion and grated Västerbotten cheese.

Langos is a kind of bread, or actually deep-fried bread puffs. They are originally from Hungary and they are always for sale at festivals and events in Sweden. They are very popular and people stand in long queues to buy one instead of a boring hot dog or hamburger. You can choose between various toppings and I always choose sour cream, grated cheese and chopped red onion. They are really delicious. When I was a kid my mother used to deep-fry dough, long before we knew about Langos. Yesterday I was very hungry and didn’t know what to eat for dinner when I realized that I had yeast and sour cream in the fridge. So I dediced to do Langos. Real Langos contains cooked potato, but my Mother always used normal bread dough and so did I.

Quick and easy Langos

25 gr fresh yeast
250 ml lukewarm water
~500 ml flour
salt

Dissolve the yeast in the water. Add flour and salt, combine to a flexible dough. Add more flour if needed. Let the dough rise for 10-15 minutes.

Take a piece of dough and roll it out to a rather thin oval. Repeat with the rest of the dough. Heat oil in a pan and fry each Langos separately until both sides turn golden brown. Serve the Langos with sour cream, grated cheese and chopped onion.

Frying small pancakes on the kitchen table

Swedish plättar are basically pancakes, but small ones. We use a special pancake pan, called plättlagg. It looks just like the picture to the left (taken from Scandinavian South as I don’t have any of my own). But what I do have is an electric one, to be placed on the kitchen table so everyone can help out and have a fun time while frying plättar. I really dislike frying pancakes or plättar all by myself at the stove. With my “electric frying machine” (I have to admit that I don’t now what it’s called) it’s much more fun and the pancake frying becomes a social event.

Plättar (for 2 persons)

2 eggs
200 ml flour
400 ml milk
a pinch of salt
a pinch of sugar

Beat the eggs and add the flour and milk gradually along with the sugar and salt. Fill each indentation on the plättlagg or the electric one with batter. Cook until golden brown. Eat, fry, talk and be social if using the electric frying machine, otherwise stand alone at the stove and feel like a pancake slave… :-) Serve the plättar with jam.