The beginning of November calls for cold nights which start the movie season and movie season means popcorn season. In our city of Ljubljana it’s also the start of the 26th film festival Liffe and for the tiresome preparation of the list of films, we prepared popcorn with a different twist. We admit that we were a bit skeptical when we undertook this recipe which we found on our favourite What’s cooking good looking blog. But the idea of a salty-sweet popcorn seasoned with rosemary intrigued us to the point that we decided to give it a go. We weren’t sure that the recipe would be worth publishing on our blog but it wowed us. We were stuffing ourselves with popcorn even more than we usually do at the movies.

Roast 1/3 cup (80 ml) of popcorn in a big covered dish, on a tablespoon of olive oil. The popcorn is ready when it pops every 2-3 seconds. Place it in a big bowl. Now roast a cup of almonds and a cup of pumpkin seeds for a couple of minutes. Roast them until you can smell the pleasant aroma, then add and mix with popcorn. Now melt 140 g of quality dark chocolate above a water bath and pour it over the nutty popcorn. Mix well and place the content on a baking dish which you have encased with baking paper. Put the dish some place cold until the chocolate hardens.

While the chocolate is cooling, you have time to prepare the rosemary salt. Mash 1/2 teaspoon of sea salt with a twig of rosemary in a mortar. Now chop the twig in small pieces and mix well with salt. Before serving season the popcorn with this salty-rosemary mix.

Keep the popcorn in an air-tight container so it remains crispy. Let the moviember begin!

This is a recipe for those sweet late Saturday mornings, a breakfast for cuddling. It will suit you best after a long Friday night, especially if it’s made by someone else than you. :) Ever since we tried it’s been on our favourites’ list. To prepare it you’ll need a bit more time than preparing cereals with yoghurt but they’re still quite fast to make. You can prepare four dishes with two eggs in each dish to feed four people from the listed ingredients.

Heat the oven to 200 degrees Celsius.

Mustard bread

Mix a tablespoon of mustard with seeds (or replace with a mustard you have in the fridge) with a tablespoon of Dijon mustard, a tablespoon of extra virgin olive oil and 1/4 teaspoon of salt. Add about two to three handfuls of bread which you have cut to cubes. Distribute them on the baking dish for about 10 - 12 minutes until they become crunchy.

Creamy greenery

Heat water over medium temperature in a large dish and bring to boil. Add a big bag of spinach (or other greenery such as chard or kale or a mix) and boil it for 2 - 3 minutes. Remove the spinach from water. You will need about 400 ml of boiled vegetables. Now heat up a pan to a medium temperature and quickly roast some chopped shallots. Add the spinach, a tablespoon of Dijon mustard, 100 ml of heavy cream and season with salt and pepper. Cook for about three minutes.

Eggs in the dish

Distribute the creamy spinach into four dishes greased with butter and place them on a baking dish. Place the dishes in the oven for 8 minutes. In the meanwhile grate a handful of Gruyère cheese (or parmesan). After 8 minutes of baking, carefully break two eggs over each dish (8 eggs altogether), season with salt, pepper and a tablespoon of Gruyère cheese. Bake for 6 minutes, just enough to cook the whites and leave the yolks runny. Allow the dishes to cool down a bit for a minute, then decorate with thyme and parsley.

Serve the breakfast on our rectangle board. Eggs on one side, bread on the other and coffee as an absolute morning must-have in the middle.

Original recipe is available here.

We’ve started the soup season! This time we cooked it from roasted carrots to improve our vision. Because the vegetable is baked in the oven prior to cooking, it tastes even yummier and sweeter. You can feed four very hungry people from this recipe. The original recipe was published by the inspiring chef Donna Hay.

Heat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius. Clean and roughly chop 1 kg of carrots and 340 g of onions. Place everything on a baking dish and drizzle it with two tablespoons of olive oil and spice it with a teaspoon of ground cumin. Season with salt and pepper, then stir. Bake for about half an hour or until the carrots become soft.

During the time of baking prepare the herbal dumplings. Mix 150 g of flour with a teaspoon of baking powder, two tablespoons of chopped parsley, 2 tablespoons of chopped chives, salt and pepper. Add 60 ml of milk and 60 ml of cream to the dry ingredients. Knead and make balls from the dough.

Place the roasted vegetables to a saucepan with 1,5 l of vegetable stock and blend it with a rod mixer. Add 250 ml of pouring cream and heat it over medium heat and bring to boil. Add the dumplings and cook for about 6 to 8 minutes.

Bon apetit!

Today we are sharing a great trick for making chocolate bars. They’ve impressed all our tasters and they only takes a few minutes to prepare.

Melt 150 g of fine dark chocolate and 100 g of white chocolate above a water bath in two separate small dishes. Add two table spoons of peanut butter to the white chocolate. When both white and dark chocolate are completely smooth, remove them from their heat sources and in the meanwhile place baking paper over a bigger chopping board or a cool marble board. Pour slightly chilled but still liquid chocolates on to the baking paper, alternating white and dark chocolate, to get a chessboard pattern. When you run out of chocolate use a stick, a toothpick or something similar - we used our fork from the set of utensils - and make some freehand moves. This is how you create the marble effect. Sprinkle the chocolate with cut pistachios and/or dried cranberries. Until the chocolate hardens you can store it in the refrigerator and then brake it into smaller pieces. Before serving make sure it’s preheated to room temperature because this way it’s much more delicious.

We served our chocolate bars on the round chopping board. They can also be a great gift - just wrap them up in pretty paper and put a bow around it!

This time we baked simple cookies for our dogs. During baking we put some peanut butter on their noses to make the waiting a bit easier. We cut one hokkaido pumpkin in half, removed its seeds and baked it in the oven. When done, chisel its content with a spoon. To make the cookies you will need to make pumpkin puree from about a half of the pumpkin (you can use the rest to make a spicy thai soup).

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius and encase a baking dish with baking paper. Mix 160 ml (2/3 cup) of pumpkin puree with 60 ml (1/4 cup) of peanut butter and two eggs. After a couple of minutes of mixing, gradually add about 400 g (3 cups) of spelled wholemeal flour. When the mixture gets dense, knead it with your hands, adding flour until it’s no longer sticky and you get a nice unite sphere. Roll out the dough to about 4 mm thickness (ours was thinner and then the cookies were more like crackers) and cut it with cookie cutters. Place the cookies on the baking dish and bake until they turn gold for about 20 minutes (depending on their thickness).

The cookies were generally made for an always hungry beagle and a bit less hungry whippet, but we ended up eating half of them. Oops.

The original recipe can be found here.