The Full Bodied Hellbay Forest Onion Soup

Most people eat to live, but some of us, at least some days, live to eat. Today is one of the days. Dinner today is served in two dishes. First comes the Full-bodied hellbay forest onion soup. This is a full dish for two persons. As a starter, you better halve the recipe.

One red onion

One regular onion

Four Shallots

1/2 liter water

1/2 cube bullion

1 laurel leaf

1 ts dried estragon

2 tbls white wine vinegar

1/2 ts black pepper

1/2 tbls maizenna

4 tbls butter

2 slices loaf

1 dl grounded cheese (blend of parmesan and jarlsberg)

Slice onions and fry for a couple of minutes in most of the butter. Add maizenna and dilute with water. Add the rest except loaf, the rest of the butter and cheese. Let simmer for 15 minutes. Fill into two oven proof dishes. Fry the loaf-slice in the butter. Put on top of the soup add cheese and bake 5 to 10 minutes.

Tastes lovely. Bon apetite.

As an improvement, I would use a dry white wine and real meat juice instead of vinegar and bullion.

HellBay Smoked and Peppered Mackerel

For a second dish of today's dinner we made a Mackerel salad. It's really simple in composition, but tastes great after the sweet and heavy taste of onions. Here's what you'll need:

Whole grain pasta (about four handfuls)

1 smoked mackerel with pepper

1/4 yellow pepper

2 tomatoes (try to get some sweet, ripe ones)

1 avocado

1 shallot

pine nuts

3 cloves of garlic

1 lime

really good olive oil

salt

Cook the pasta. Rinse it briefly in cold water and put it in a bowl. Drizzle some good olive oil over it and stir. Remove the skin and bones from the mackerel. I like to remove the dark grey fish fat before tearing it into suitable pieces with my bare hands, but do as you like. Either way, toss it in with pasta.

Cut and slice the vegetables into pieces that suits your palate. I like to "pop" the garlic before making thin slices of it, but either way is fine. Chop, slice or press it, do whatever suits you, but be sure to add enough ;) Roast the pine nuts in a hot and dry pan until they're golden brown. Add everything to the party in the bowl and add the freshly squeezed lime juice and a couple of pinches salt. Taste it while you ad it!

You probably won't be able to eat it all after the onion soup, but don't worry. It's great for breakfast on top of a thick slice of the HellBay Forest Bread.

If you, like me, are one of the few that struggles a bit with smoky foods here is a tip: Serve the salad with sour cream (or preferably Norwegian seterrømme) mixed with a bit of lime juice and salt (taste it while you add it). There you are :)

We enjoyed Bernard Lager (Czech imported) to both dishes - Perfect!

The HellBay Forest Bread

We are both quite into coarse bread. This is a recipe that I have experimented with a bit. It is very simple, perhaps the coarsest bread I've ever made successfully. It must be made in two operations, because it is a sourdough.

First day you simply blend 1 liter of coarse ground whole rye flour...

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