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My Recipe for Kesäkurpitsapaistos

While I was be­gin­ning to starve tonight, I no­ticed I had no idea what I’d cook. I was get­ting a bit fed up of noo­dles, and didn’t eat veg­eta­bles for a while. I can al­ready hear you say­ing (ac­tu­ally, I can’t, un­less I’m hooked to your mi­cro, but that’s very un­likely, isn’t it?) “Hey wait, veg­eta­bles are dull”… No, they’re not! Not when you cook them prop­erly, and it kind of ac­ci­den­tally hap­pened to me just about an hour and a half ago.

You may also be won­der­ing what the hell a kesäkurpit­sapais­tos can be. Well, it’s the Finnish name of gratin de cour­gettes. My Finnish friend Pasi took some time to find out what a cour­gette is, and he blamed me for not telling him in Finnish (well, now at least I know a word of that weird won­der­ful lan­guage).

I quite didn’t re­spect the orig­i­nal recipe I found, for lack of an egg (has any­one ever seen a gratin in­clud­ing eggs, any­way?). Here are the in­gre­di­ents you’ll need, in or­der to feed two per­sons:

  • A cour­gette (not a too lit­tle one, un­less you’re both anorexic)
  • Cubes of ham (I used smoked ones, about 100g)
  • Some rice (yes, for real! 50g should be enough)
  • A bit of creme fraiche (I used slightly thick one, it’s likely to be bet­ter if it’s more liq­uid - 10cl)
  • Tomato purée (about 70g - this is what I re­placed the egg with)
  • A shal­lot
  • Sea­son­ing (op­tional): gar­lic, Cayenne pep­per

In a ze­roth time (re­mem­ber, in C, we be­gin count­ing with 0), slice the cour­gette. This will save you some time for later and help you find the good tim­ing.

The first step is to slice the shal­lot into tiny bits, and to put it to brown with the ham cubes in a fry­ing pan. That’s where I de­cided to sprin­kle the pan’s con­tent with Cayenne pep­per, just for the per­fume it has.

As soon as you’ve put these in­gre­di­ents in the pan, you can put the rice to cook (im­por­tant note: i used rice that takes twenty min­utes to cook - ob­vi­ously you won’t have the same tim­ing as me if yours cooks faster).

Af­ter three min­utes of let­ting the shal­lot and ham brown, you can add the slices of cour­gettes to the pan. Make sure to make it cook over low heat, for a good 15 min­utes, and to stir the in­gre­di­ents in your pan reg­u­larly.

At this step of the recipe, I was out of ideas for the sauce, and won­dered if it was pos­si­ble to make a sauce of out tomato purée and creme fraiche… And the an­swer is, yes, it is! Google found me a few links about sauces based on such in­gre­di­ents, which re­as­sured me that it would be likely to be ed­i­ble. So, I mixed my purée and creme into a glass, and added a pinch of ground gar­lic to it.

Then, I waited for the cour­gettes and the rice to be ready (and, as I’m lucky, the rice had just fin­ished drain­ing all the wa­ter in the saucepan where I put it to cook), and put both of them in a dish (a dish for gratins :D). I then added the sauce and made sure that every­thing was well mixed.

The next step is to add grated Em­men­tal all over the dish. Well, this even­tu­ally hap­pens in every recipe of gratin, any­way. Then, all you need do is put your dish in the over, at ap­prox­i­mately 150°C, for twenty-five to thirty min­utes. And of course the fi­nal step of this rather long but dead sim­ple recipe: have a nice meal!

By the way, on a com­pletely un­re­lated note, I pushed the Al­ba­tross theme to our Mer­cu­r­ial repos­i­tory to­day, and be­gan work­ing on an xscreen­saver theme for it (and begged Pasi for a cool logo for the theme, too). As soon as these steps will be done, you can ex­pect a first, long time due, re­lease. Keep in touch!

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