Difficulty 2/5
To tell you the truth, the only reason why I mark this as a 2/5 difficulty is because of the poached egg, that can be tricky at first. Other than that, it’s super easy and an ideal recipe for you to experiment on and vary as many things as you like, so you use whatever you have in the fridge. The veggies go into the oven with olive oil that we first infuse with rosemary, saffron and garlic, then it’s just a matter of cooking them in the oven. Just buy a pretty smoked salmon and practice that poached egg so you can use it for many other things. And if you’re too scared of poaching the egg, you can cook a hard-boiled egg or have it cooked midway. Finally, I’m going to teach you how to toast quinoa! What? Toast quinoa? Yes! It’s AMAZING and once you have it you’ll add it to everything: salads, yogurts, fruits, etc. Also, if you’re like me, you’ll loooove that triangles tea towel in the picture, so I’ll leave the link from where I bought it: Colas Home. This girl is super talented and has lots of other home accessories and they’re all pretty.
Portions: 3
Ingredients:
– 1 fennel bulb
– 9 baby carrots with stems
– 2 leeks
– salt and pepper to taste
– 500ml olive oil
– 1 sprig rosemary
– Pinch saffron
– 1 garlic clove
– 30g quinoa + 60ml water
– 3 eggs + vinegar (150ml per liter of water)
– balsamic vinegar and slices of lemon to garnish
Procedure:
1. Quino! Cook it in double the amount of water to quinoa in minimum temperature with a lid on until it’s completely dry. If you’re not an expert on cooking quinoa, I advise you to always have some white quinoa in the mix because you can see that as it cooks, a white dot in the center becomes smaller and smaller until it disappears. Just like in pasta. At this point you can eat it as if it were rice, or mix it into a salad, etc.
2. Spread it on a baking tray and this goes into the oven at 180C. Toss it around every 5min to ensure it doesn’t stick nor burn until it’s nicely golden.
3. The egg! We can do this 🙂 Bring the water and vinegar to a boil. Open an egg inside a small ramekin or container; do not open it directly into the water because 1) the egg could be spoiled and you would have to discard the water and 2) because when you open it, the egg drops in a long form, and that’s the result you’ll get if you do it this way. Not pretty. With the ramekin we ensure that it drops in one go.
4. Once the water is boiling rapidly, decrease the temperature to medium-low so that only a few bubbles are visible. Make a swirl using a large spoon in the water and pop the egg (in one go) in the center of it. Retrieve it after 2-3min. You can touch it and you should feel that the egg white is already set but it has a wobbly center (that yummy yolk!). Then you just need to cut off that tail that forms which is completely normal.
5. The oil. Put the olive oil in a pot with the rosemary, saffron and the garlic clove (crushed) on minimum heat. When it starts to boil, turn off the heat and let it cool down.
6. Wash throughly all your veggies. The carrots we cut in half lengthwise. Don’t they look pretty?
7. We remove the stalks form the fennel and cut in half lengthwise. Here we cut off a bit of the base, making sure that we’re not disconnecting any of the leaves. If you haven’t tried fennel yet, I recommend it completely. It has a lovely aniseed aroma.
8. We remove the top green part (we only used the white section) and then cut it in half lengthwise. Here we remove the base, again making sure we’re not removing any leaves in doing so. Then cut again so we end up with lengthwise quarters.
9. Put the leeks in a separate baking tray or somehow guarantee that you can put them in later since they need less time. Put salt and pepper on all veggies and then sprinkle the oil on them using a spoon. Don’t sprinkle the garlic or rosemary, but the saffron pistils are fine. The carrots and fennel need 30min, at 15min take them to flip them and at that point, the leek goes in as it only needs 15min.
10. I cut my smoked salmon into strips and folded them for presentation. I also sprinkled some balsamic vinegar on top and served it with lemon quarters, which give a nice touch to the dish.
This recipe is truly delicious and you can really adapt the techniques you learn here to any vegetable you have at home: brocoli, turnip, zucchini, aubergine, corn, etc! You can also use the egg technique for a breakfast, or the crunchy quinoa for anything you like 🙂 I hope you liked it!
