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Baby Shower Candy-Bar GOALS!!!

As you know, on Sunday we had a small baby shower party to celebrate the fact that a little princess is coming our way shortly. We partied (not so hard) with only a few close friends and I have to tell you that we felt amazing. Don’t really know about our guests, but we really enjoyed ourselves… (hope you guys had a lovely time as well!)

That said, I really wanted to talk a bit about the amazing candy-bar we had as, in my opinion that was the main focus of the party – seriously, nobody is really interested on how a steak looks! The candy-bar was fully home-made and decorated by HomeMade Candy Bar. If you need a candy-bar or just sweets anytime, anyplace give them a try as the desserts were perfection and the way it looked was simply stunning. It seriously was way over my expectations (we did have a candy-bar that was twice as expensive at our wedding and it did not look anything like this one). This was a 20 persons candy-bar and it had everything a dessert freak could wish for: cupcakes, gingerbread, cake pops, marsh mellows, macarons etc. Keep in mind that you can customise it any way you like as they are very flexible on that department and that was one of the things that made me choose them. Also, they have loads of decorating pieces that really make the brandy-bar stand out and you can opt for any colour-theme you’d like. Notice that I really did not want to use the classic pink and blue theme and opted instead for a purple and turquoise theme which posed no problems for the talented duo (did I mention this is a family business: mother and daughter?).

Overall, everyone seems really impressed with the candy-bar and so were we therefore I really felt the need to talk a bit about them here. All worth mentioning is the very reasonable price (about 150 E for the entire thing) which is amazing considering the high quality of the sweets and the fact that the location of the event was at home (no extra transport fee!) on the outskirts of Bucharest.

November 30, 2016

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The best dish you’ll have all autumn long!

Yes, I know this is the second recipe in a row, but I just couldn’t let autumn come for good and not share what is in my opinion the best thing you’ll eat all autumn long. Did I just repeat the post title? Well, yes I did and that’s because this recipe is just that good. This has to be my favourite dish for autumn dinners ever! First of all, I have nothing to do with the recipe in itself, as opposed to the other recipes presented here that all have some sort of twist from yours truly that strays away from the original inspiration, this one is presented to you exactly the way my mother taught it to me.

Yes, this is a family recipe. Well, to be honest, I am the second generation in our family that knows it, so I can say that my mother invented it. A bit about mom… She is what I call an ‘intelligent cook’. Why? Because never ever have I seen that women actually follow a recipe or spend more than 2 hours in the kitchen to cook an entire dinner. She just adapts and uses whatever tricks she can to come up with the best easy recipes ever, that can make you think that she spent an entire day in the kitchen. True, she has been known from time to time to screw things up, but she always jumps right back at it and perfects the recipe so that it is easy and very tasty.

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Today’s recipe is one of those easy, hearty and amazing recipes. First of all, this stew is usually made with meat and using the traditional ways, it can take up to half a day to make. My mom intelligently removed the meat (which is great for me) and used some newly acquired tricks to have this done in less that 1 hour – it took us more because we has to take photos of every step. If you are a meat lover you can always add whatever type of meat you like next to it, but I cooked this one yesterday without it. First of all, there’s nothing that says autumn better than mushrooms in white sauce so this is best for those chilly autumn evenings, especially, as you’ll find out at the end, this is not really a heavy meal but it is quit filling.

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What you’ll need:

800 gr of white large mushrooms (you can easily go for 1 kg and not mess things up – like I said, mum is not really one for measuring the ingredients)
3 large white onions
300 gr of full fat sour cream (if you use a lighter version you’ll need a bit more flour)
2 tablespoons of white flour
1 cup of fresh parsley leaves
2 teaspoons of salt
1 teaspoon of ground pepper
1 teaspoon of vegetable base
1 teaspoon of hot chilly powder
2 tablespoons of pomace olive oil

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What you need to do (keep in mind that although there are quite a lot of steps to follow, the stew is really easy to make and basically foul-proof):

Cut the onion as finely as you can, but do not stress over that, slice the mushrooms in big chunky pieces if you want to feel their texture and chop the parsley.
In a bowl mix the salt and the pepper and in another one mix the vegetable base with the chilly powder.
After taking lots of pics of your ingredients (for some reason I find it extremely satisfying to take photos and edit food pics), put the oil in a saucepan and let it heat up before adding the onion.
After about 5 minutes add a teaspoon of the chilly mix and half of the parsley and stir well for another 5 minutes.
Add half of the mushrooms to the mix, a teaspoon of the salt and pepper mix and stir well.
After abut 5 minutes add the remaining mushrooms and another teaspoon of salt and pepper mix, give it a good stir and put a lid on.
When the mushrooms have left a considerable amount of water, pour the remaining chilly mix, give it a good stir and place the lid back on. Keep in mind that the entire recipe will need a moderate-low stove flame.
Now for the tricky part… take the flour bowl and carefully incorporate water while stirring continuously until it reaches the consistency of sour milk (not too watery).
Pour a glass of cold water to stop the boiling in the saucepan and carefully add the flour mix while stirring continuously. The cold water you just added will keep granulations at bay.
Leave the stew to boil for a few minutes and then add the sour cream, the remaining parsley and what is left of the salt and pepper mix and stir well.
Bring it to boil for another couple of minutes and that’s it!

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Keep in mind that, if you do not like your food too spicy, you should cut in half the quantity of both the pepper and the chilly powder – my entire family enjoys spicy food, hence the spiciness of this one. I really hope you’ll love this recipe as much as I love it. As you can see from the nutritional info, this stew doesn’t go overboard on any unhealthy stuff and, as usual, the info is for the entire quantity. If you followed the recipe to a letter, you’ll end up with about 5-6 servings, depending on how hungry you are, and after dividing the numbers I’d actually say that this can be considered a light (about 170 kcal), warm dinner. If you like it, than pass it on to your friends and family!

October 1, 2016October 1, 2016

evenlymatched1 Comment

Craving potatoes…Again…

We haven’t posted a recipe in a while now… Not necessarily because we have lacked in the cooking department – in fact we kinda did, with all the construction works going on – most of our cooking has been about D cooking wonderful breakfast recipes as surprises for me during weekends, therefore, no photos were taken to document that. Since some (all) of his dishes turned out AMAZING we will re-do them and post them here. Today is all about yesterday’s dinner and me craving potatoes again.

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This is a very easy to make dish, basically you can add anything in it, but I have to warn you, it needs 1.5 hours to be ready from the point when you only have the ingredients until you can actually enjoy it, so start before you are hungry. The ingredients are basics and to be honest, we had most of them in our house. This is yet again a no-meat dish because I still seem to have an adversity towards meat these days.

What you will need for about 30 potato patties:

1kg of white potatoes (but you can use whichever type you like)
2 eggs (we use free-range eggs that my mother brings me from the countryside every week)
1 garlic head (not too big as you still want to feel all the other ingredients and potatoes tend to absorb the garlic flavour better than anything else)
about 8 young green onions
300 gr of cheddar (we used both white and red cheddar – about 150 gr each)
50 gr of butter (use full fat butter as it is better)
15 gr of fresh oregano (you can use whatever fresh greens you like)
salt
pepper

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What you need to do:

Preheat the oven at 200 degrees Celsius.
Grate the potatoes and put them in freezing water as you do not want them to turn brown. I was lucky enough to have D help me with this step as he knows how important my manicure is to me and I always seem to grate my fingers whenever I attempt to grate anything.
Cut the onions, mince the garlic and the oregano and grate the cheese.
Whisk the eggs and melt the butter (we used the microwave for the butter for about 30″)
Get a big bowl as you are going to mix all the ingredients together. It doesn’t really matter what order you put them in, but it is really important to mix them really well.
Start making patties from the mixture and arrange them on a tray (use some baking paper otherwise they will stick to the tray and that is very messy).
Put them in the oven for about 40 minutes after which time you should add some cheddar on top of them and leave them in the oven for another 5 minutes.
That’s it! Enjoy!

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Processed with Snapseed.

This is not the healthiest meal out there, but it is an ok one according to my UP app. Yes it is packed with saturated fat, but it is also almost equally packed with unsaturated fats and fibres. Now all the data you see here is for the entire quantity – that is about 30 patties – yes, we used two trays to bake the entire composition, but you can use half of the ingredients. That means that one patty provide about 70 kcal which, in the grand scheme of things, is not that much. Naturally, nobody can only eat one, so I’d say that one serving consists of three-four patties, so it is rather ok for dinner.

September 29, 2016

evenlymatched2 Comments

Inspiration Board…

Just to give you a quick Sunday update on what is going on in our house… I have put together an inspiration board to help you get a quick sneak peak on the end result. We decided to go with a mix of grey and yellow just to spice thing up a bit design wise… Most of the stuff we bought is from Mobexpert, Vivre, Fleximo and Ikea. Hope we will finish soon and share with you our newly decorated home (or at least pieces of it).

September 25, 2016

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Easy like Sunday morning…

D’s version of events:

I woke up on Sunday morning with the urge to try some extreme activities and because L was still sleeping I decided to cook her breakfast. To be completely honest, I was thinking about doing this ever since I found a nice pic on the internet with a forest fruit omelette a few days back. So I got out of bed, brushed my teeth, drank my usual 500 ml of room temperature still water, put on some Sunday morning clothes (aka some sweatpants and a t-shirt) and went to our local store to buy some ingredients. Usually, because we want to avoid buying unnecessary stuff we always prepare a grocery list, however this time I didn’t, so when I got to the register I realised I bought ingredients for lunch and dinner for a couple of days plus a very nice bottle of wine which we will review later on our blog. After I payed for everything I went home, put on my CHEF attitude and started cooking. Of course, right when I was pouring milk over the mixed eggs, L walked into the kitchen only to find that I was not photographing the exact thing I was doing (‘What if we manage to cook something blog worthy?’ she said with an accusatory tone), and right she was because we ended up with quite an interesting breakfast. So I got busted trying to surprise her with breakfast but she was definitely surprised when she saw what I was doing and of course when she saw what I had planned for lunch, which will be covered on the blog in the days to come.

My version (the true version) of events:

I woke un Sunday morning to all sorts of suspicious sounds coming from the kitchen. Half asleep I made my way towards the source of my awakening and found D cooking and (as I later found out) taking pictures of mostly everything he did, because he knows that we need photos as proof just in case whatever comes out of our kitchen is blog-worthy good.

I love Sundays, because when we’re at home, there’s nothing more comforting than spending the day together and doing all sorts of plain activities like cooking or going out to have lunch, that just recharges us for the week to come. This time, after he teased me all week long with food pics (I’m on a healthy strict diet during the week), he decided to cook me something that would surprise me. At first I thought that he only used whatever ingredients we already had in the house but later I found out that a) he walked the dog and b) went to the supermarket and bought stuff to feed 10 people for a whole week. I guess that’s what happens when you go shopping for food on an empty stomach and without a very clear grocery list. Let’s get back to the plate of deliciousness…

What you’ll need in order to make two servings of this heaven-tasting pancake/omelette:

3 eggs
250 ml of whole milk (whole milk makes the eggs creamier)
125 gr fresh raspberries
125 gr fresh blueberries (we try and steer clear of refrigerated fruits)
1 tsp of ground cinnamon (D knows that I would put cinnamon in everything, sometimes I even put it in my coffee)
10 gr of butter (divide it into half as you’ll need that for each pancake/omelette -panlette, let’s call it- for frying)

All those ingredients we normally have in our fridge, hence the confusion thinking that this was yet again a leftover breakfast. Honestly though, I think that you can use any type of fruit in the panlette, I’m even thinking of trying a combo with dark chocolate and bananas. Yes, this recipe contains absolutely no sugar nor flour and if you want to actually make it healthier you should use only the egg whites and toss the yolks aside.

The road from ingredients to a beautiful plate of panlette:

After you wash and arrange all the ingredients for that winner photo, you batter the eggs as good as you can until they become almost creamy.
Pour all the milk and batter some more.
Walk into the kitchen and startle the cook (D in thins case).
Add all the cinnamon to the mixture and when you realise that it doesn’t incorporate well, use the hand-blender to force all the cinnamon into the mix.
From this point on, you have to do everything you’d normally do for a pancake.
Put half of the butter into the pan, and then, using a ladle pour half of the composition, just like you would with any pancake mixture.
This is where it gets tricky (or at least for unexperienced cooks like us), you have to turn the thing over on the other side. D was a genius in this department as he used the cover of the pan, turned it over and the skilfully slid the panlette back into the pan.
You add half of the blueberries and half of the raspberries and keep the other half for the second panlette.
Basically that’s about it. You’ll also need to make a strawberry sauce but that’s easy, you just use the hand blender to turn them into a smoothie, but keep two strawberries to decorate the plate.

There you have it, a satisfying (very!) breakfast, that will keep you full until lunch. All the nutritional information is from my amazing UP app and it’s for two servings (you’ll have to divide it by two to find out the info for one serving).

In my opinion, this was the perfect Sunday breakfast and to be honest the best tasting ever, but I’m biased cos I love the cook. D, on the other hand, being the perfectionist that he can sometimes be, thinks that the panlette could use some improvement, but trust me, try it out like this at first!

As a side note, the whole house was left smelling like somebody had made forest fruit jam. I just love that smell so much… It reminds me of the time when I was a little girl and used to spend my summers at the countryside and my grandmother cooked all sorts of fruit-based goodies.

April 11, 2016

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Pasta night!

Last Wednesday we decided to venture into the kitchen yet again, simply put, because we always have fun cooking together (I think it’s fun because we rarely do it and because we are equally ‘talented’ so there’s no competition). I even suspect we always like the end result so much because it’s made by us, so you could say we are biased.

We decided on pasta because it’s the quickest dinner and you can put whatever you want/like in it and they still turn out edible. Yes, we followed absolutely no recipe, as per usual. The quantities used are for ten servings because we needed to feast on pasta the entire week, not because as we have no idea what we are doing in the kitchen hence we bought a ton of stuff…no, that wasn’t the actual problem at all….good thing we have pots large enough for these kinds of errors!

What we used:

250 gr of basil tagliatelle (amazingly good taste)
250 gr of wholewheat tagliatelle (we needed to lie to ourselves that we were eating healthy)
15 gr fresh basil (I could put basil into anything I cook)
200 gr red onion (2 medium onions but it sounds more scientific in grams)
3 jalapeño peppers (we like everything hot)
1 garlic clove
30 gr chives (as with basil, I could use chives for everything)
50 gr grated parmesan (because…pasta!)
200 gr red cheddar (because we just came from the UK and we missed the taste of cheddar)
100 gr sliced Kalamata olives
800 gr Jamie Oliver‘s tomato&garlic pasta sauce (tried it for the first time and it was good)
1 tsp Jamie Oliver‘s green pesto (had it already from our last adventure in the kitchen)
500 gr brown mushrooms (because according to D, they are better-I couldn’t feel any difference, but they do look better in the pics)
250 gr diced bacon (yeah, we messed the ‘healthy’ part with this one)
1 Tbsp Olive oil (see this post to know which type we like best)

How things went in our kitchen:

D chopped all the ingredients, took photographs (hence the much nicer photos than my last food post), and I came in for the easy part. In my defence, I did have a lot of work to do that day.

How you get from ingredients to food:

Heat the olive oil in a pot. If you’re cooking for 10, like we did, make sure you have a large pot as a lot of ingredients will have to fit into it.
Fry the chopped onions until it turns golden (that’s about 5 minutes stirring continuously)
Throw in the sliced garlic and fry for another 2 minutes.
Put the chopped chives, basil and jalapeño pepper over the onion-garlic combo and fry for another 2 minutes.
It’s time to turn this half healthy mix into something totally unhealthy by adding the bacon and letting it fry for about 4-5 minutes.
Put the pasta into a pot with water, a tsp of olive oil and salt (keeps the pasta from becoming sticky) and bring to boil.
Back to the other pot (you need to be a decent multitasker for pasta), add half of the sliced olives and then slowly add the mushrooms (if the ‘stew’ becomes too moist, just drain off some of the water).
Time to add the rest of the olives (ignore the other pot as the pasta is not boiled by this step)
Add half of the sauce (1 jar) and bring to boil stirring constantly for about 1 minute (check the other pot to see if the pasta decided to be ready-pasta, tagliatelle especially are very tricky to get to the right consistency)
Back to the sauce pot, mix a teaspoon of pesto and 3/4 of the grated parmesan (the rest of the parmesan will be used for decorating the plate for photos). Let everything boil for 1 minute.
Add the other jar of sauce, 10 gr of the chopped basil and 20 gr of chives (the rest is for decorating), stir well and let it boil for 1 min (noticed how we went from fry to boil? That happened because of the mushrooms that tend to leave a lot of water).
Put 2/3 of the cheddar over the whole mixture, stir well until integrated and take the pot off the cooker. At this point, the sauce is technically ready, all you have to do is pour it over the pasta.
Make sure, that while you’re holding a knife, you check with the other person (D in my case) that they have everything written down and nice photos of every step-it is very important to check all that holding an impressive knife!

That’s it! Now it’s time to decorate a plate for Instagram/blog pics and eat.

Keep in mind that the nutritional information shown here is for 10 servings, therefore, one serving will provide you around 450 kcal. This is not the healthiest of foods, but it is quite filling and satisfying taste-wise.

As a side note, we have cooked pasta before , also for 10 (because we never seem to learn how much stuff to buy) but it has never ever take us 4 hours from the point we started chopping until the moment we started eating. It took us that long because apparently taking pics and notes of everything takes a lot of time, but by the time we got to the eating part it was socially accepted to drink wine so we are not complaining.