Hi everyone and welcome to the last entry of this year!

As per tradition, I’m sending out the invitations to our annual tulpa Xmas dinner which we’re holding in Castle Odylfius dining room.

And of course, here’s the menu which I know a lot of you have been waiting for a well:

Zoodles

This year’s newcomers to the menu is the zoodles, which taught me about brining vegetables in order make them crispier by forcing out the water with salt. What you do is that you cut your zucchini into about spaghetti sized strips and then, if you’re following the classic recipe for zoodles, you rub salt all over them and let them sit in a sieve over a bowl so that all the water is forced out. After about 30 minutes you should have some strips which are ultra crunchy. I found that the same works more or less with salted water (and it works with other veggies like potatoes and kale too!)

Then you simply rinse off all the salt when you’re done and fry them up with some oil and herbs for a bit and then it’s serving time. Easy as that!

Pasta Lumps

They’re super easy to make, all you need is fine sifted pizza flour, then you add whatever spices you want to be in your gigantic pasta balls, (I’d recommend salt, MSG, black and white pepper, oregano, thyme and basil)

Add about the same amount of vegetable oil that you’d add to a typical bread recipe, because apart from the yeast and sugar, it’s precisely the same thing going on here. Mix it until you have something coarse looking and then add water until you can form a smooth dough. Knead it for about five to ten minutes, the less you knead it, the fluffier and fuzzier your balls will be, the longer you go, the more harder they get.

Then when you have a dough to your liking, it’s time for the hardest choice: How big do you want them? I’ve found that cooking time increases with size of course, but if you make them too small (marble size and below) they can boil into pasta mud instead. I tend to aim a bit less bigger than a golf ball.

After you’ve made all your balls, get a big pot filled with water and add whatever broth you want. I tend to go with anything meat related as that pairs well with the liquid smoke that you should also add to the broth. Once it’s started boiling, turn it down so that it’s got a medium heat to it, you want a boil that’s a bit more than a simmer, but less than full on tilt. Then you just add the balls into the water and stir them every 10-15 minutes or so. Be sure to scrape the bottom of your pot to avoid pasta debris sticking to the bottom (or you’ll be scraping those out later while cursing yourself for not doing it before). I also like adding some more vegetable oil to the water, I don’t know if that does anything for flavor, but I like to imagine it does.

Let the whole thing boil for about an hour and a half, you’ll know that the balls are done when they feel solid all the way through. Then you take them off and let them rest for about 10-15, this will let them solidify even more. Then you can serve them with whatever you want on the side. My guilty pleasure is to eat them with just a gravy on the side like heathen 😀

Oven Baked Salmon

This is the most stupidly simple recipe for salmon I’ve ever found. You’ll need a few thick salmon filets which you put into a bowl, then slice up as much onion, garlic and shallots as you want in thin bits and put them into the same bowl. Then add your seasoning (I like to keep it simple with black pepper and salt and dill) and pour liquid cooking butter or margarine to it and mix it all together until everything is evenly coated with your spices. Then you just lump all of that into an oven tray, cover it with aluminum foil and let it sit in the oven on 180c or 356f for about 25 to 30 minutes. Remember, always make sure your salmon is cooked through according to your local guidelines. So my times are approximate for the kind of salmon I use.

While that’s going, time to start the basmati rice. General rule of thumb: one part rice to two parts of water.

If you wanna be fancy, add some fish stock to the water and white pepper, it’ll harmonize well with the fish later! For sauces, you can use anything really that goes with fish, hell, you can even make things simple by just adding some créme fraiche and call it a day!

I highly recommend having some kind of vegetables, my faves are either green aspargus or edamame beans.

Chicken Paprikash

I’m not going to reinvent the wheel, my recipe is just a modification of something Max Miller did on his show Tasting History. All I did was add lots of garlic and more cream.

And that’s it for this year’s newcomers, I hope you all enjoyed reading about them. We’re sure going to love stuffing ourselves with it for the next couple of weeks!

We wish you all a stress-free and calm set of holidays and that next year will be better than this one.

As always, your scribe

Wondrous Fairy