Schlachtplatte

Lunch Deluxe

2012-02-12T01:28:00.000-08:00

I wouldn't be surprised if this blog sufferred from an attention deficit syndrom. Sorry blog...Did I just say sorry to my blog? What does that make me suffer from???

Anyway, let's talk food. Let's talk monday lunch. Lunch on mondays must be sparkeling, shimmering, have the ability to make you smile. After all, monday must be the worst day of the week. Whose fault is it anyway that the weekend is only two days long? I would really really like to start a revolution which would bring us the 6-3-6-3 rythm. That is: 6 days of work, three days off. Am I the only person who would prefer that system? Has anyone before thought of this option?

So monday lunch has to serve the purpose of easing the monday blues. Here is my remedy: luxury lunch in a jar with vanilla salt flavored beans, beetroot, baby spinach and warm smoked salmon!

Bean salad with goodies

3-4 tbsp of white beans
1 small beetroot
a hand full of baby spinach
40 gr of warm smoked salmon
vanilla salt
pepper
olive oil
vinegar
a pinch of sugar

The day before you should place the beans in a bowl with water. The neyt day, cook them without salt in the water. Drain after 30-45 minutes. Spice with vanilla salt and pepper. Cut the beetroot (I always buy the vaccum packed precooked kind) into thin juliennes. Tear the spinach into small pieces, do likewise with the salmon. Layer the ingredients into a glass jar: Start with the beans, then add the beetroot and the spinach. Mix a vinaigrette with the olive oil, the vinegar and a pinch of sugar.
Pour over the layers. Then add the salmon on top. Close the jar with the twist off lid and take it with you to work!

Talk to the hand now, monday blues, cause the face (and the stomach) ain't listening!

NAZUNA

2012-01-22T11:21:00.000-08:00

Ok, I will. I just no longer cannot. I have to write about places in Berlin. Even though there is already a great deal of expertise in the field, such as the foodie in berlin or nimmersatt, two virtual places I always visit when I don't know where to eat out in Berlin. For quite some time I was thinking that there is no need for another person to comment on Berlin's restaurants. Actually, I still think so, but I have to channel my enthusiam for Nasuna somehow. If not, the extasy over the place will make me implode, ok?

I had already walked past the place a couple of times before and the foodie in berlin was so lyrical about it, I just had to go there and check it out.

When I got there at around one on a Saturday, the place was empty which made me so sad. You can see in the store that every little detail is thought through with so much love for the food and the customers. I can get really frustrated if people do not get that and I can even be a cry baby if I see a place where the owners put so much love and hard work into and then it just doesn't pay off because the world is full of idiots who rather eat a doner for 2 euros.

I ordered a bento box at the desk and sat down by the window, leaving a safety zone between myself and the tiger. Which, it turned out, wasn't really necessary, as he was of the friendly plastic kind, barking at some dog in the street.

And, as I sat down, people started streaming in. There were always other customers in the store which made my heart fill with happiness because it means that there are other people who enjoy the place.

I was served a bento box filled with typical dishes for the Japanese New Year such as kuromame (sweet black soybeans) and lotus root which, according to the Japanese lady serving me, allows you to see the future through its holes. I tried and saw my bento box. Yippieayeay, that means lots of great more bento boxes at the place this year!

Every little dish was superb, but the very best was slices of cooked minzed meat, flavored with ginger and crusted with black and white sesame seeds. Unfortunatley, I forgot its name but it was so good that you almost not dare to eat the last bite because then, the pleasure is over.

Next time, I will also try some of the Japanese sweets and cakes which looked like jewellery in the large showcase.

And last but not least, a few words on the design of the place. The store was built into an old German butcher's shop which means that you sit surrounded by 1970s tiles with brown onions on them.

The way they designed the furniture and the desk into this store is in lovely contrast, and at the same time not screaming "design" into your face. It's not meant to be hip, cool, look-at-our-vintage-style-like. It simply is executed to perfection, doesn't make you feel like you, the ordinary customer, is destroying the whole design concept and therefore should leave rather sooner than later. If I will ever open a restaurant, café or store, I can just hope that I will have such a lucky hand when it comes to the interior design.

Oh, and at 7,50 Euros, the bentobox is such a bargain!!

Nazuna

Danziger Str. 65

10435 Berlin

http://nazuna-berlin.com/

And while you are there, will you please check out the house to the right of Nazuna? And tell me how the top floor looks like? And, if you know the person living there, will you let him or her know that I would love to see the apartment from the inside? I mean, it must feel like living inside a ship with all those portholes...

Happy Easter

2012-01-15T11:34:00.000-08:00

It's been a while. Hello back. Happy new year and happy Easter, just in case. But then, I have so many things in the pipeline, I WILL be back before Easter. And I also will post a recipe soon (noticed just the other day that there have been a lot of recipe-free posts lately). I will share the deluxe monday lunch box recipe with you, and also the classic carrot cake with cream cheese frosting cupcake recipe. I will let you know all about my new Japanese Deli sanctuary. I will also share the culinary findings of my pre-christmassy-trip to Copenhagen. But before all that, I will share some Christmas-food pictures with you.

We had so much food it makes me dizzy just thinking about it. I will share two dinners with you here. Honest as I am, I will not claim that I stood in the kitchen. What you will see now is my Mom's oeuvre.

It has become a tradition in our family to have roast venison on the 26th which is my grandmother's birthday and when she was still alive, my Mom always prepared her favorite dish. We kept the tradition alive because it is the perfect dish for christmas: greasy and tasty, a good basis for an afternoon nap on the couch. We usually have it with Semmelknödel, caramelized chestnuts (the best!!!!), lingonberry-jam, pears, and a sauce mounted with crème fraîche. Did I mention that my Mom is the best?

Another very traditional Christmas dinner in our family is Tafelspitz, though none of us comes from Austria. We hadn't had it in the last couple of years so this year, upon my request, we brought it back on the menu! The meat, which is boiled in broth can sometimes be on the dry side, but this year's piece was cooked to perfection! Extremely tender meat with lots of different side dishes, what more can you ask for? I think what makes me love Tafelspitz so much are these side dishes, which are like a bouquet of different flavors: you have cold and fresh cucumber salad, boiled potatoes, spicy and creamy horse radish sauce, cold sweet and sour cucumbers (this time, homemade by my aunt) and again, lingon berry sauce (which I swear we don't eat with every dish, this is just a coincidence)!

I don't know about you, but when I look at the photos, I can't wait for it to be Christmas again!

Merry Christmas!

2011-12-25T03:23:00.000-08:00

Simple. Beautiful. Simply beautiful.
Merry Christmas to everyone!

Dear Santa

2011-12-18T00:49:00.000-08:00

Time is flying and Christmas is just around the corner. Instead of a recipe, I will give you a list of ideas of presents foodies like you and me would really really appreciate to find underneath the Christmas tree.

Back in the summer, my sister went to La Réunion and all I got was this lousy t-shirt. Errr, no. Wrong text. My sister went to La Réunion and brought me the most amazing ground cinnamon ever, the best vanilla sugar in the world, on top of that vanilla salt (great for pumpkin dishes for instance), beans, lentils, poivre rouge, ravinsara leaves and last but so not least: fresh vanilla beans. Dear Santa, can you bring everyone a sister like mine? If that is asking too much, can you at least bring everyone at least one of the mentioned spices and staples?

Or how about a petite boîte de foie gras? At least in my kitchen a present very much so appreciated. Some toasted brioche to go with it, and you have the perfect Sunday breakfast.

And lastly, most women always appreciate flowers, so how about some fleur de sel in a chekered bonne mama glass? And yes, I totally think that you should buy a little mother of pearl spoon at ting, so that you can scoop the salt out of the glass jar... Cuteness overload!

Meals on wheels Part VII - London: Cafés

2011-12-04T02:43:00.000-08:00

Saturday afternoon in Berlin. My cell phone rings. A friend asks me what I am doing. I say: "I'm on vacation in Berlin!". Silence. No, I haven't completely lost it. But even after years in Berlin, I can still feel like a tourist in this town, exploring parts of the city that I hardly ever go to. This time, I went to Charlottenburg which to me seems further away than, say, Gothenburg. Isn't that great that a whole new world to explore is just a 30 minute subway ride away? I didn't have a camera with me and this post should after all be about exploring another place - London - but I just have to share three of my finds with you:

First, the perfumery Harry Lehmann. Their homepage looks as dated as the store which is a perfumery cum florist. It is a one of a kind store. When you enter it, you think: "Man, I am sure this place hasn`t changed since the 1950s" and also "Man, I am sure the people who came here in the 1950s thought 'man this place hasn't changed since the 1920s'". It is very cute and although most of their perfumes are to heavy for my taste, a small bottle of one of their lighter ones followed me home.

Second, I stopped by Wald Königsberger Marzipan. Again, a store that makes you believe that travelling in time IS possible. The prices there are really steep, but their Marzipan is sooo good. And I am a true expert on Marzipan. I am so glad I finally made it to this store, it had been on my places-I-want-to-visit-list for too long.

Third, Café Kredenz. Now, that was the only place I had been to before. It feels like a traditional coffee house and they cut perfectly sized slices which, by Berlin standards might be considered small, but I prefer small, but excently cake over large, but mediocre slices of cake. Their praliné cake is my favorite, but most of them look like I would like them.

But now to that other place I was exploring some time ago: London. In London, the difference between rage and courage sometimes only is a matter of perspective.

Something I really found difficult in London was finding small, quite, authentic cafés where I could rest my weary feet. Here is a few of those which I liked very much.

The first one almost made it into last week's post because it is actually situated within a museum. The Geffrye -Museum of the Home is an excellent museum on the history of living and worth a visit for every foodie as it is interesting to learn about the different settings in which people came together to share a meal during the last two centuries.

The conservatory in the back is where the café is located. A really nice place with a great view over the herb garden on the backside of the museum.

I think most people in the museum thought that I had lost it completely, because I took a million photos of the creative shadows which the sun projected onto the curtains. But didn't it just look beautiful?

The next café is not really quite, but I really enjoyed the hustle and bustle, maybe because a quiet, relaxing walk was waiting for me afterwards. It's the Breakfast club in Islington. English breakfast should once and for all shut down the discussion about the British cuisine. I mean, hellooo, a country in which it is considered totally normal to eat 2 poached eggs, thick slices of ham, biscuits and all that topped with tons of sauce hollandaise cannot be considered a place of bad taste. Sure, I couldn't eat that at 6 o'clock in the morning, but at 10 o'clock? Bring it on, baby! And I am sure the skinny model in the foto shooting taking place outside the café would have also loved to dig into my plate of grease!

After this kind of breakfast, I was definitely ready to walk it off with a stroll along the Islington canal. What a lovely place! The sun was shining, the water at times so still that the surrounding was reflected in the most beautiful way on its surface and the old houseboats moaning and growning.

The last place was right around the corner from where I stayed and it turned out to be the perfect breakast place for me. A lovely cup of tea and a slice of lemon loaf cake - me like. The place is called Yumchaa and I especially liked the design of the place, although I admit that I was somewhat disappointed when I found out that this café, too, is a chain (although just a small one). I prefer cafés where the boss is also the owner is also the person who bakes is also the person choosing which tea to sell. I'd rather have a special place that makes me take the subway to the other side of town than a place opening branches here and there. I don't want everything to be available all the time. I want it to feel special to take the time to go to a certain café or restaurant. But from the mass of cafés that lack authenticity this one definitely stands out, the designers behind it were almost good enough to fool me into believing that the furniture had been carried in by a bunch of students only the other day.

Allrighty, those were my tips from my first visit in London! I can't wait to be back but this time in a rented apartment with kitchen and also during the summer, when I would then buy a huge picnic at borough market and devour everything somewhere in Hyde Park!

Meals on Wheels Part VI: London - markets and museums

2011-11-20T01:13:00.000-08:00

I spent my first vacation this year in London, a city I had never been to before. Did I just see your jaw drop? Everyone I told that this was going to be my first trip to London was completely shocked. They were like: 'But you have already been to the weirdest places on earth. How come you have never been to London before?'. To be honest, I don't really know how that happened. But now, I can officially quit going to the self-help group for people who have never been to London before.

Going to London felt like having an affair. It was wild, interesting, so much more exciting than back home - well, this being my first vacation this year, anywhere would have felt exciting, but you get my point. But, after a while, the excitment wears off, and you notice how exhausting an affair can be and also how nice home is because it is calmer, shares your history and you know where all your favorite spots are. So, to be honest with you from the very start: as much as I liked London, I still love Berlin a lot more. Yepp, there, I said it. And you can even quote me on that.

Two words: borough market. I was recommended to go there by a very good friend and she was soo right about the place and myself. It was a perfect start to my six days in London and I could go on and on and on about how wonderful this market is. I had an ostriche-burger which was to die for, and I might have even shed a tear or two for not being able to buy any of the fresh products to prepare a lovely dinner from it. Note to future self: no more hotel rooms, rented apartments instead!

After strolling across the market, I joined the line in front of monmouth. Now, take out your dictionary and look up the word long. You will there find the comparison: long, longer, the line in front of monmouth. But trust me, their coffee is worth every single minute you spent waiting. I usually don't like my coffee too strong (I am a sissy, I admit), but their coffee was wonderfully strong with out being bitter and it felt like cotton candy in your mouth. It's difficult to describe but it's definitely one of the best coffees I have ever had. And that in a country of tea lovers!

On Sunday, I went to Brick Lane in the East End, and, knowing quite a bit about the long and changeful history of the place, I decided to have a bagel at Brick Lane Beigel Bake. Brick lane today is better known as Bangla Town, but once apon a time used to be a mainly Jewish neighborhood so I paid tribute to that part of its history. The bagel was as good as everbody had told me, I had the classic salmon and cream cheese bagel, though their salt beef bagel supposedly is their best. Technically not a market stall, I include the Bagel Bake in this category because I suppose that most people come to visit Brick Lane on Sundays when the Sunday up market is up and going. There is also a lot of food stalls, but to be honest with you, some (or should I say most of them) did not even look half as inviting as those at borough market).

I went to 10 museums in 6 days. I love museums, really. At Tate Modern, I saw the pile of porcelain sun flower seeds by Ai Weiwei, which is all that is left from his presumably fabulous installation in the turbine hall there. I honestly can't believe they are all hand painted, but they definitely looked impressive.

The British Museum had a small, but very well executed exhibition on Hokusai's "The big wave" since the museum had recently acquired one print. Having seen the big Hokusai exhibiton in Berlin last month, it was a nice supplement and having been to a fabulous Japanese cooking class, I just found this cartoon also displayed really funny.

Sorry for the poor quality of the photo. In case it is too blurred and small to read the caption, it says: "It is an old Japanese recipe!"

I'll continue next week with tips on nice (and quiet!) cafés in London, but for now leave you with a few of my London impressions which are not food-related at all, but maybe a feast for the eye.

On why in the end and after all I really like the deutsche bahn and what this has to do with Japanese cuisine

2011-11-06T03:28:00.000-08:00

The deutsche bahn and I, we are certainly no match made in heaven. The trains I am in are always late. Or they don't run at all. Or the heating doesn't work. Last winter was especially bitter. There was a lot of snow, sure, but it's not like it has never snowed before in Germany. So I really don't take 5 inches of snow as an excuse for cancelling our train on the day before Christmas, making us jump another train 2 hours later and which then on the way would almost collapse making us arrive even later.

BUT. Yepp, there is a but: the good thing about this odyssey was the fact that deutsche bahn paid a refund. All in all, me and my sister got back 60 euros. Now, I don't live by a lot of rules, but one of those few I stick to goes like this: If you get money back, money that has actually already been spent and thus does not necessarily have to go into any new calculations then you should - no have to - do something fun with that money instead of spending it on something useful such as paying your electricity bill. That is why we decided to spend that money at Sasaya, probably the best Japanese restaurant in Berlin but also one that is on the pricier side of life.

And therefore, I actually have to thank deutsche bahn for making their trains run late and thus giving me the opportunity to experience (and fall in love with) Japanese cuisine!
Unfortunatley, I don't take the train too often and thus also don't get too much money back which is why I decided that it would be cheaper to learn how to prepare Japanese food!

I enrolled in a one-evening class at Goldhahn & Sampson, with Kaoru Iriyama, a delightful Japanese living in Berlin. She had had the chance to undergo some month of training in the kitchen of Hirohisa Koyama who just so happens to be the master of Japanese cuisine and the ched of the Japanese emperor.

Kaoru both knows everything about the cutting techniques which play a very important role in Japanese cuisine, and she also gave us a brilliant lecture on which products to buy, what days you could buy fresh Tofu in which store in Berlin and which products come wihtout msg.

She explained every dish in detail, showed us how to prepare it and it was a true pleasure watching her because the way she treats the products really showed how much she values them and how much she likes to turn them into a great dish.

Just look at her hands in the pictures and you will notice that she treats every product with utmost care.

These were Kaoru's knives from Japan. She cleans and sharpens them every day in the evening. I really need to buy a decent knife very soon. Christmas present, anyone??

The first dish we made was Dashimaki-Tamago, which translates into rolled omelette which we had with snow-radish. It was a great appetizer and I wonder if I can ever have a boring ordinary European-style Omelette again.

Next we prepared a miso soup from scratch. Here, Kaoru shows us what the alge looks like which we used to make dashi broth.

Next we made Sashimi (salmon, lightly fried scallops and shrimp) with cucumber and avocado dices, wakame, snow-radish and mild rice vinegar jelly which is a specialty of Hirohisa Koyama. It was to-die-for-tasty!

As a main dish, we prepared Onigiri, that is rice flavored with different ingredients and pressed into a triangular shape (ok, I still have to work in the latter part as you can see in the picture). With that, we had chicken marinated in Sesame-Teriyaki-Sauce, yumm!!!

For dessert, we made Kuri-An-Dorazyaki which are honey-pancakes with a filling of Azuki bean paste and chestnuts. We used a really great gadget which Kaoru had just received via mail from Japan to brand our pancakes. It's a miniature bird-shaped branding iron which you hold into the gas flame of the stove and then press into the pancake. This might be another kitchen tool which I just can't live without...

And just when you think the evenning can't get any better, you get a free neck-massage from Kaoru! All in all, a really great cooking class! I learned a lot about which products to buy, and also that I don't have to buy an entire Asia-store to cook Japanese dishes in my tiny kitchen. Kaoru patiently explained ever step so that we wouldn't have any problems preparing the dishes at home.

I am definitely happy that I got the chance to be Kaorus student for an evening! So be prepared for some more Japanese recipes here in the future!

Bite-size nutella brownies

2011-10-23T11:42:00.000-07:00

Today's recipe is perversion brought to a whole new level. It's basically 90 % nutella, 10 % flour, 180 °C and then be happy.

When I was a little girl, breakfast would mean one slice of golden toast (that was the brand name) and nutella on top. But breakfast at 7 in the morning was not my favorite meal of the day and I guess sometimes I just simply refused to eat anything. So in order to not let me go to school hungry, my Dad used a little trick: he would draw images into our nutella-breads with the tip of his knife. I remember that flowers were very popular, as well as hearts, and the combination of my (or my sister's) name with a heart was the most dearly loved scraffito. And it also worked in the sense that we would then eat the master piece.

Today, I no longer eat nutella every morning (maybe because no one would scratch pictures into my toast and my dad lives to far away) but I still find it equally challenging to eat something at 7 in the morning (smoothies are the answer, no chewing needed, just gulping). But whenever I do eat nutella, I either eat it on a bun with a thick layer of butter underneath the nutella (perverted, I know, but try it, sooooo goood!) or on the soft part of a brezel (yummmm).

I always have a jar at home but I need like a year to finish a glas, so I went on the look out for nutella-recipes. This nutella brownie recipe is a true gem: very few ingredients, baked in 10-15 minutes and super delicious.

copyrigth of all photos j.

Bite-size nutella brownies

150 gr of nutella
30 gr of flour
20 gr cocoa powder
1 large egg
1 pinch of salt
some hazelnutes, cut into pieces

Preheat the oven at 180 °C (gas stove 2-3). Mix the nutella with the egg, then add the other ingredients. Use small paper cups and fill these with about a teaspoon of dough each. Sprinkle with the hazelnuts and bake for about 10-15 minutes. You want the inside to still be moist. When they start to crackle on the top, they should be about right.

As seen on this blog.

Italian apple cake

2011-10-16T12:27:00.000-07:00

The best strategy when fighting against an enemy bigger than yourself is either to run away, or to pretend that you can master the situation. Since my current enemy is my gas stove, number one is not really an option. So this Saturday, I decided to pretend that I have always done all my baking in a gas oven, that I could sooo do this. And...it worked! I am positively surprised how well it went. I picked one of my favorite recipes to try to bake with my new oven and I am really glad that it did not let me down.

This Italian apple cake was a discovery my Mom once made and ever since, it became one of those family recipes that is always a good choice. I really don't know what supposedly is Italian about it, and in my case, French would be more precise since I used real Bourbon Vanille from La Réunion. Do I hear you say oooooo and aaaaaaaa and mmmmmhhh? Well, on one of the coming Sundays, I will let you know why I currently have the honor of using such a top-notch product.

Italian apple cake

100 gr of melted butter
1 tbsp of vanilla sugar
200 gr of sugar
a pinch of salt
2 eggs
100 gr of flour
2 tsp of baking powder
100 ml of milk
900 gr of apples

Preheat the oven at 160 ° C, which as I now learned means grade 2 or 3 on a gas stove. Melt the butter and let it cool off again. In the meantime, peel the apples, quarter them and cut them into thin slices. Now, mix the melted butter, the eggs, the sugar, the vanilla sugar and the salt, then, add the milk, the flour and the baking powder. Last but not least, add the apple slices. Pour the mix into a 30 cm diameter pie dish, or use small ones for single servings. Bake for about 40-45 minutes until the dough has caramelized and turned golden brown. The cake is best when enjoyed luke warm.

Oopsy daisy

2011-10-13T11:55:00.000-07:00

She's alive! She's back! Well, sort of.

This is what happened the very first time I was cooking on my new gas stove in my new apartment. Let's put it this way: the smoke detector is working!

copyrigth of all photos j.

The three most important things I have learned so far:

1. When you turn on a gas stove, it is very very hot very very fast.

2. When you turn on a gas stove, it is very very hot very very fast.

3. When you turn on a gas stove, it is very very hot very very fast.

In order to calm you down, I can tell you that I have not lost my cooking mojo and the Zürcher Geschnetzeltes which caused all the trouble tasted delicious. The recipe will follow as soon as I can handle my camera in the heat of the action...

I promise....

2011-09-25T08:06:00.000-07:00

.... I will be back soon! So please put on a happy face...just like this one:

copyrigth of the photo j.

Culinary wisdom

2011-09-18T08:31:00.000-07:00

I hope you will have very little "faim" and a lot of "gourmandise" until I am back!

Don't cry,

2011-09-11T08:08:00.000-07:00

Soon, I will be back! Until then: a photo to make you smile.

Happy Birthday

2011-09-04T01:09:00.000-07:00

Dear best sister in the world,

lucky you who is on paradise island right now. If you were here in Berlin today, this soooo would be your birthday cake! It even comes with a 10 % discount on musical tickets... That's just like eating cauliflower-broccoli-soup, right?

It's oh so quiet...

2011-08-29T12:14:00.000-07:00

...shhhhh! This blog is temporarily hibernating! I will be offline and kitchenless for a couple of weeks, which is why I won't be able to blog during that time. There will be a few timed posts here and there, so don't forget me all together. Real recipe blogging will continue in October!

There will be a new modem! A new kitchen! A gas stove (did you hear the tremble of fear in my voice when I said gas stove??)! A bundle of hand-picked bourbon vanilla personally delivered to my front door!

If those aren't things to look forward to, my dear reader, then I don't know what....

Until then: Go have Ice Cream! Preferably at Hokey Pokey, Stargader Str. 73, Berlin, Germany. I can't say much about their 15 flavors, because so far, I have only eaten the grapefruit sorbet. All the 25 times I went there that is. Call me boring, if you wish, but whatever you do, eat ice cream there!

copyrigth of the photo j.

Redcurrant strudel

2011-08-14T01:50:00.000-07:00

I still had some redcurrants left from when I made these tasty red currant muffins. I never get why they don't sell them in smaller quantities. I always put what's left into the freezer where they keep nice for a very long time. Since this weekend was another one of those rainy grey summer weekends (whatever happened to the Berlin summer??), I decided to use them in what for me actually is a winter dish: strudel. Strudel in my brain is linked to skiing which is linked to winter, duh.

But it also works quite well to get you through a grey and rainy august-day. Now, some people are really ambitious and make their own strudel-dough (which, apparently should be so thin that you could read a newspaper through one the sheets). I on the other hand am one lazy ass, and instead go to a local turkish supermarket to buy filo or yufka dough.

Topfen-Strudel with redcurrants

60 gr of sugar
1 sachet of vanilla sugar
250 gr of curd cheese
2 eggs
1 tbs of rum or kirsch
melted butter
redcurrant
filo or yufka dough

Preheat the oven at 220 °C. Separate the eggs and beat the egg whites. In a seond bowl, mix the egg yokes, the curd cheese, the sugar, the vanilla sugar and the rum or kirsch.

Now, take a filo or yufka sheet, place it on a baking pan and smear it with melted butter, add another sheet, smear that one with butter, etc. until you have about 5-8 layers, depending on how much dough you want. Now, mix the egg whites with the curd-mix, so that you get a really fluffy curd filling. It will be somewhat runny, but not too much. Place the mix in the middle of the dough sheets and sprinkle the redcurrants on top. Now, fold up the sides of the dough and close all the cornes. Smear the whole package with butter. If the strudel opens at some parts, it doesn't really matter. You can make several in a pan as in the picture above or just bake one single strudel on a larger baking sheet. Bake for about 35-40 minutes, until the dough is golden brown. Sprinkle it with confectioner's sugar right before serving!

freckled-fruit-confiture

2011-08-07T06:05:00.000-07:00

Most of the fruit of this week's recipe comes straight out ouf paradise. Which in my case translates into my parent's lush garden. It's wild and savage and not neatly trimmed and the artificially created pond by now looks like it has been there for more than a century. There is lots of trees, and the plum trees are turned into the best plum cake by my mother. The mirabelle tree sits right next to the pond, so sometimes, the ripe fruit take a plunge.

My Dad shook the tree and me and my Mom picked up the ripe fruit. Back in Berlin, I decided to turn the mirabelles into jam. Since I had some very ripe apricots left, I decided that this would become a freckled-fruit-confiture: don't you just love the red freckles that the sun paints onto mirabelles and apricots alike?

And just in case you were wondering: No, I don't bake my own croissants. I am lazy, plus the bakery right down the street sells fantastic ones.

freckled-fruit-confiture

400 gr of mirabelles

2 ripe apricots

250 gr of preserving sugar

5 tsp of amaretto

juice of one lime

juice of one lemon

Remove the cores of the mirabelles. No fun work, I know, but worth the result. Remove the core of the apricots and cut them into small pieces. Add the sugar, the juice and the amaretto. Bring to a boil. Boil for about 3-5 minutes while constantly stirring. Fill the hot jam into thoroughly cleansed glass jars, and close them immediatley. Makes three small glasses.

By the way: I wanted to add amaretto, but wasn't sure how much is appropriate so I checked other recipes online. Some suggested 2 tsp for 1 kg of fruit. I added a lot more and you still can't taste any (which is fine, because I actually just wanted to use it as a flavor potentiator).

Currently on the menu: Redcurrant

2011-07-31T02:30:00.000-07:00

There are three kinds of fruit: fruit that looks lovely and tastes lovely (e.g. strawberries). Fruit that looks ugly but tastes great (e.g. kiwi). And fruit which looks great but tastes horrible, such as carambola. Redcurrant definitely goes into the latter category as well. There is only one way to make their taste live up to their looks: sugar. I would never eat redcurrant raw, but a redcurrant meringue pie is something really nice. This time, I added some extra sweetness by adding marzipan cubes to my redcurrant muffins and that made redcurrant jump right into the frist fruit category!

copyrigth of all photos j.

Redcurrant marzipan muffins

75 gr of butter
175 gr of redcurrant
125 gr of flour
30 gr of oat flakes
1 tsp of baking powder
1/2 tsp of natron
1 egg
a pinch of salt
50 gr os sugar
1 package of vanilla sugar
100 gr of unsweetened yoghurt
50 gr of marzipan cut into small cubes

Melt the butter and let it cool off again. Preheat the oven at 180 °C. In bowl number one, mix the oat flakes, the flour, the baking powder, the natron and the salt. In a second bowl, mix the eggs with the sugar, the vanilla sugar, then add the butter and the yoghurt. Pour the mixture from bowl two into bowl number one and mix only for a short time. Add the redcurrant and the marzipan cubes and fill the dough into muffin molds. Bake for about 25 minutes until the muffins are golden brown. Let the muffins rest in the molds for another 5 minutes, then let them cool off on a rack.

The muffins taste refeshing because of the mixture of sweet marzipan and sour redcurrant. Yields about 9 muffins.

Two things you can do with potatoes

2011-07-24T03:23:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, I went to the open house weekend at the Weißensee Kunsthochschule. The place was buzzing with creativity and all the students got to present the fruits of their labor. The artworks were by far better than what the boring currently on display "based in Berlin"-show has to offer. I particularly liked one piece of art, made with potatoes: a student had carved little figurines from potatoes and allowed them to turn moldy and fall into decay. Quite amazingly, as they shrank and turned darker, they imitated the human aging-process. If anyone knows the artist, let me know so I can credit him or her!

Now, on a more life-embrassing side, you can of course also use potatoes to cook. Which, I admit, I hardly ever do. I have always been a pasta-person and when I was little, dramas took place during dinner when my parents had decided to serve potatoes. Well, the older I get, the more potatoes sneak into my menu, that is, maybe 10 times a year, compared to 0 times a year.

The best potatoes you can get are the small ones at the beginning of the season. I like to use them for potatoe-salads. This time, I opted for a creamy version. It goes very well with grilled meat and fools you into believing it's summer, although it is raining 24/7.

copyrigth of all photos j.

Creamy potatoe salad

Two big handful of small (almond) potatoes
1/2 a cucumber
60 gr of crème fraîche
capers
salt
pepper

Boil the potatoes with their skin in salted water. Sratch the juicy parts out of the cucumber and cut the firm parts into pieces. Cut the potatoes into slices. Mix the crème fraîche with a pinch of salt, a pinch of pepper, capers (I use a lot) and some of the fluid the capers come in. Now, add the potatoes and the cucumber. Put the salad into the fridge for an hour or two and then serve it in a nice, summery bowl. Serves 2 people.

Rock 'n' Roll

2011-07-17T01:15:00.000-07:00

See the flowers in the photos? They are my new second-favorite flowers. My favorite flowers are hollyhocks. They are pretty and wild, especially when all different kinds of colors are grouped together. I also love their English name, because for me, hollyhocks are always connected with vacationing, so hollydays and hollyhocks go well together even lexically. My second-favorite flower (future yet-to-be-met husband, I hope you are busy takings notes right now) used to be dahlias, but they had to make way for my new second-favorite flowers which are called drum sticks! Rock 'n' roll, baby! I love how simple, minimalistic and chic they are!

Ok, so how do I now build a bridge from talking about flowers to talking about this amazing, quick and dirty raspberry smulpaj? Let's just pretend this is a very artsy fartsy art house movie in which sharp cuts are loved and appreciated and even honored by critics.

When it comes to fresh berries, I am more into strawberries than into raspberries, which, comparing their prices, is a good thing for my wallet. But raspberries are my favorite fruit to go into a typical Swedish smulpaj. Since this post is already full of trivia, I can easily squeeze in the useseless information that I prefer the Italian word for raspberries: lamponi. Smulpajs (are you all still with me?) are crumble pies which are very typical for Sweden. You will find them at every café. They are very quickly put together and most of the ingredients should already be in your kitchen cabinets. Served with vanilla custard or vanilla ice cream, they also make a great dessert.

Lamponi smulpaj

For one small pie dish you need:

raspberries (sorry, didn't count them)
2 tbs of brown sugar
2 tbs of flour
1 large tbs of ground almonds
1 drop of bitter almond oil
1 tbs of butter

If you make more than one small pie dish (which should serve one person), just adjust the measurements. Preheat the oven at 170 °C. Put the rasperries into the pie dish, you don't have to line them up as pedantically as I did in the pictures. In a small bowl, mix all the other ingredients into small crumbles. Place the crumbles on top of the raspberries and put the pie dish into the oven. Side note: If you spill a little bit of the bitter almond oil on your fingers, don't lick it off, even if its smells seductively good. It is called bitter for a reason, you know (cause I didn't know). Put the pie in the oven for about 20 minutes, bake it another 3 minutes with the grill option on to make the crumbles really golden brown. Serve luke warm.

This recipe also works with any other kind of fruit: nectarines, apricots, apples, you name them!

Green asparagus quiche

2011-07-10T03:42:00.000-07:00

I love white asparagus. I love it enough to eat it every second day during asparagus season. This year however, I didn't really seem to crave it at all. I maybe had asparagus only every second Sunday this year. Weird. But I did try something new: green asparagus. Well, I know, green asparagus is not really new, not even to me, but I usually stick to the queen of asparagus, that is the white kind, mabye with purple tips. So what did I prepare with the green asparagus? I made quiche for a picknick in the park. Quite a good choice I'd say, though, all in all, I will stick to white asparagus in the future...never change a winning asparagus so to speak!
And before I forget, here is a piece of trivia, from the queen of trivia (aka my sister): Back in the days (those days when rubber boots were still made from wood), people did not use knives to eat asparagus. They took them up with their fingers and sucked each piece of asparagus in, which must have benn quite a show. Now, why in the world did they not just use a knife and cut off bite-size pieces? Because upon contact with the sulfuric asparagus, the silver cuttlery would tarnish!

Green asparagus quiche

the bottom

200 gr of flour
125 gr of butter
1 egg, some cold water if needed
1 pinch of salt

Cut the butter into small pieces into a bowl with the flour. Add the egg and the salt. Now mix everything, adding a little water so that everything combines. Don't mix for too long. It doesn't matter if you still can see chunks of butter in the dough-ball. As a a matter of fact, the quiche will in the end be better if you do. Now wrap the dough ball in plastic wrap and leave it in the fridge for a couple of hours. I usually prepare the dough in the morning and then bake the quiche in the evening.

In the evening, preheat the oven at 160 ° C. Take out the doughball, and roll out the dough using a rolling pin. You need a little flour on the surface so that the dough won't stick to the pin. Place the dough in a quiche baking dish and put it in the oven for about 20 minutes.

the filling

3 eggs

200 gr of sour cream (or cream)

15 pieces of green asparagus

125 gr or grated parmesan cheese

salt, pepper

While the quiche is prebaking, cut off the end of each asparagus and blanch the asparagus in boiling water with a little but of salt for about 7 minutes. In the meantime, mix the eggs, the sour cream, the parmesan, the salt and the pepper. Pour the mix into the pre-baked quiche crust. Now, take the asapargus pieces and place them on the quiche crust. I alternated, since they are a little bent. So: one asparagus facing up with its head, one facing down, one facing up, well you get the idea by lookign at the pictures. Put the quiche back into the oven and bake for another 25-30 minutes or until the egg-cream mix is no longer runny. Sprinkle with freshly ground pepper shortly before you serve it.

3C Cookies

2011-07-03T08:58:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow is fourth of July! As a citizen of the world, I am patriotic only about planet earth, not about some nation or another as history taught earthlings over and over again that nations rise and fall, so why bother getting too emotionally attached to an area demarcated on a map by victorious warlords? I do however think that days like the fourth of July are a nice opportunity to have a theme party - with the food served coming from a particular country! So tomorrow, we will have homemade hamburgers (errr, ain't that a city in Germany?), French fries (or should we actually wait with those until the quatorze juillet?), ketchup (wait a second, wasn't that supposed to come from China) and chocolate chip cookies (ok, but these MUST be real American)! The three-c-cookies are one my favorite kind, and here's a secret: if you want them to taste just like they do in the US, you have to make your own brown sugar! Sounds scary, can be messy (or a nice peeling for your hands) but is actually done in no time!

3C-Cookies

400 gr of flour
250 gr of sugar
40 gr of sugar beet molasses
one sachet of vanilla sugar
2 eggs
200 gr of soft butter
1 tsp of natron
200 gr of chocolate (I usually take two kind, a bar of milk chocolate, and one darker kind)
1 tsp of salt

Mix the sugar, the vanilla sugar and the molasses, you might dig into the mixture with your hands to really get all the white sugar to turn brown. Nevermind the mess though, it works like a peeling and makes your hands as soft as baby-skin! Add the soft butter, and then the eggs. Now, throw in the flour, the salt, and the natron. Mix well. The dough will be really heavy to beat, it's not a runny kind of dough. Now, cut the chocolate into small dices. Add those to the dough. Now, preheat the oven at 160 °C. Using two spoons, form small ping-pong-sized balls which you place on a baking sheet. Leave enough space between the doughballs, as the dough will spread flat in the oven. Bake the cookies for 15-20 minutes, until they are golden brown. They are at their very best, when they have just come out of the oven and are still warm, and the chocloate still runny! Makes a lot of cookies, like, 50, I guess.

Taboulé

2011-06-26T03:19:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite take-along meals is taboulé. If it wasn't for all the chopping and dicing, it might also be one of my favorite dishes to prepare... Whenever I take the train, have a picknick or want a really, really tasty lunch box, I make taboulé salad. Most people use parsly to prepare it, I however use mint. It makes the salad so much more refreshing. I usually buy one of those thick bundles which you get at your local Turskish corner shop, take one or two stems to brew myself a nice cup of fresh min tea, and use the rest, chopped up, in the salad. Tomato dices and cucumber dices complement the color palette, diced feat cheese turns it into a real meal. Packed in small jam-preserving glasses, the salad is ready to accompany you wherever the day takes you!

copyrigth of all photos j.

Taboulé

120 gr of couscous
10 baby tomatoes
1/2 a cucumber
1 bundle of mint
80 gr of feta cheese
olive oil
bouillon
1/2 lemon
salt and pepper

Prepare the couscous according to what the label says, but add some bouillon to the water. Let the couscous cool off while you dice the cucumber (I leave mine unpeeld but cut away the seeds in the middle), the tomatoes and the feta cheese. Chop up the mint and mix all ingredients in a large bowl. Flavor the couscous with some genrous spoons of olive oil and the juice of half a lemon, add salt and pepper, then mix the couscous with the other ingredients. The salad tastes best if you leave it in the fridge for a couple of hours before you eat it. Makes 2-3 portions.

Meals on wheels Part V : Göteborg

2011-06-19T01:27:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, I was on a three day getaway in Göteborg, Sweden.

I've been there many times before, but never on my own. Three days is not a whole lot, but I managed to squeeze in most of my favorite places to eat or buy food. Now, where would a true foodie go when in Göteborg? Right, to the church of fish, or the fiskekyrkan, as it is called in Swedish. It's Göteborg's main fish market, and since the building resembles a church, it is commonly reffered to as the fish-church. As I had just had breakfast, I skipped the decliciously looking fish and chips and only dreamt about all the great dishes that I could prepare with the top-notch quality fish on display.

Next, I stopped at the saluhallen, the market hall, which sits right downtown. It's airy, packed with people, and a true feast for the eye! There are fruit stalls, vegetable stalls, delicatessen stalls, spice stalls, meat stalls, confieserie, knäckbröd stalls, you name it! It's a great place to buy a pick-nick which you can enjoy in the local park.

On Sunday, I took the boat out to one of the small islands in the archipelago south of Göteborg. It's free if you buy a tram ticket. Isn't that the best thing ever? A town where riding boats is part of public transportation! I love it! Styrsö is my favorite island in the southern archipelago (Marstrand would be my favorite in the Northern archipelago). It's what you'd call a Smultronställe in Swedish. I love that word. Smultronställe literally means a spot where you find small forest strawberries, but it is used commonly to describe a cozy place where you can totally relax. The island is small which means you can stroll around among the beautiful old summer houses, relax on the water edge, take a swim, and visit the cute little café Öbergska: It sits right at the harbour, they offer delicious home made quiches and pies which you can eat it their little garden. Who would say no to a slice of homemade apple cake with vanilla custard in that setting? I also find the prices quite moderate.

Dear future employer, could you please pay me a decent salary, so that I can buy such a humble abode?

Two more places I highly recommed but which did not end up on camera are Brogyllens konditori and Hagabiografen. Brogyllens is the classic old style café which serves lovely patisserie creations. Their prawn sandwich is one of the best and they serve tea in the classic théière Salam by Guy Degrenne - you just got to love a place that does that! Strangely enough, the café closes at 15.00 on Saturdays, so it's best to go there early, when there is still a whole lot variety in the display to choose from. I also think that they have more and also more elaborate dishes on offer during the weekend as compared to weekdays.
Hagabiografen is a totally different place. It's actually an arthouse cinema, but they also have a very cozy and stylish café. Their summer terrace is a great place to sit and watch the crowd which seems to have sprung right out of a lifestyle/fasion/state of the art-blogg. If you want to know what Berliners will wear next year, study the Hagabiografen's crowd. It also totally lacks the elitist attitude that in crowds can bring and is rather relaxed. They mainly serve pasta, soups and sandwiches and their small menu means that they rather focuse on a few dishes and do them well than offer anything and everything. I always have a grilled goat cheese sandwhich which they serve on home made nut bread. Their sallad dressing is also to die for!

Don't try this at home, kids!

2011-06-11T23:39:00.000-07:00

I already blogged about my favorite strawberry dessert last year, but if you were not yet following my blog then, you should definitely follow the link - it is simply the best. Today's recipe comes in second, and is definitely only meant to be enjoyed by grown-ups. It's simple, smooth, elegant, refreshing and tipsy. Once upon a time, it was called strawberries with amaretto-flavored curd cheese. Over the years, it matured into strawberries with curd cheese-flavored amaretto, so -please, kids- don't try this at home!

copyrigth of all photos j.

Strawberries with amaretto curd

500 gr of strawberries
250 gr of curd cheese (quark in German, but if you can't come across any, your best choice is turkish yoghurt)
100 ml of heavy cream
sugar
amaretto

Cut the strawberries into small pieces, mix them with 2 teaspoons of sugar and set them aside. Whip the heavy cream and mix it with the curd cheese. That way, the curd cheese will get fluffier. Now, add as much sugar as you like, i's suggest somewhere between 1-3 tablespoons. Likewise, add amaretto to your liking, I'd recommend between 5-10 tablespoons. Some like it very subtle (my Mom), others (yes, that would be me) like it very, very strong!

Makes 3-4 portions. If kids are present, just set aside some curd cheese and cream mix for them, which you can additionally flavor with sugar and vanilla sugar.

Shaun the brioche

2011-06-05T01:22:00.000-07:00

I feel a little sheepish about my first attempt at making brioche....

So tell me, all you talented brioche-bakers out there, what is the secret? How do you keep the top-ball from sliding to the side?

Are my balls too big or too small? Were they not exactly centered when I placed them on the bottom-ball? Was I supposed to let the balls rise seperately?

In any case, they tasted great, though my favorite yeast dough is still made with heavy cream instead of butter.

copyrigth of all photos j.

Shaun the brioche

180 gr of flour (type 505)

1/2 sachet of dry yeast

1/2 a tsp of baking powder

100 ml of warm milk

50 gr of warm butter

25 gr of sugar

a pinch of salt

1 egg yoke

optional: small chunks of chocolate

The night before: Heat the butter and the milk until they are lukewarm. Mix the flour, the yeast, the sugar, the baking powder and the salt, then add the milk-butter-mix. Mix well until you have a smooth, round dough ball in your bowl. Let rise for about 40 minutes. Knead the dough again, separating it into 5 small balls. Four of those will be your bottoms, if you want, place a chunk of chocloate in them, close them, and place them with the smooth side up into a brioche pan (or muffin pan). Take the fifth ball and separate it into four small balls, which will be your top-balls. Carefully place them on top of the bottom balls and make a wish to the "let-my-top-ball-stay-centered-brioche-fairy". Now, place the pan in the fridge where the brioches will rise over night.

In the morning: Take the brioches out of the fridge. Preheat the oven at 170 °C. Paint the brioches with the egg yoke. Bake them for about 25 minutes, until they are golden brown. The ones with a heart of chocolate taste best fresh out of the oven, when the chocolate is still somewhat runny.

Baaaaaaaaa!

I like it, I like it not, I like it, I like it not....

2011-05-29T00:48:00.000-07:00

K. said "Tastes good to me!"

I said "Uuhhhhh the rhubarb is super sour! Less would be better"

M. said "Nooo! More would be even better!"

Well, I guess it's up to you to bake this cake and see what you think! In any case, we all had a lovely time, somewhere in the countryside around Berlin, sitting, chatting, eating cake and enjoying each others company underneath the old apple trees of a friend's garden!

Marzipan- rhubarb cake

500 gr of rhubarb

125 gr of butter

100 gr of frozen marzipan

115 gr of sugar

1 sachet of vanilla sugar

zests of one organic lemon

3 eggs

200 gr of flour

3 spoons of baking powder

Place the marzipan in the freezer. Take out the eggs and the butter, you want them to have room temperature. Once the butter is soft, grate the frozen marzipan (that's why advice you to put it in the freezer, it grates so much easier that way). Preheat the oven at 160 °C. Cut the rhubarb into 2 cm long sticks, it is not necessary to peel the rhubarb first. Now, add the sugar and the vanilla sugar to the butter-marzipan mix. Then, add one egg after the other. Finally, add the lemon zests, the flour and the baking powder. Smear the dough into a baking pan (26 cm diameter), then stick the rhubarb pieces into the dough, but don't stink them in too deep, because the dough will rise around them. Bake for about 40-45 minutes and decorate with confectioner's sugar!

Squirrel cake

2011-05-22T01:23:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, I tend to be very animalistic. Especially when it comes to stockpiling things. Last summer, I was so sad to see apricot season slowly fade, because, man, were those apricots sweet and juicy! So, what to do about it? A foodie's solution goes like this: you buy an extra kilo and put them in the freezer. My only problem is that I never find the right moment to eat such stockpiled delicacies. Whenever I want to make something with them, I realize that once I use them, they will be gone, so of course, I keep them for an even better occasion...On Saturday, I went to the market, and guess what I saw there: this season's first apricots! Which was when I thought ohmygodohmygod, I still have a kilo of apricots in my freeeeeezer! Like a stupid squirrel, I first postpone the use of my stocks and then I forget about them entirely.

So I went home, made this cake, and felt happy. End of the story.

copyrigth of all photos j.

Squirrel cake

2 sheets of puff pastry
1 egg
150 gr of sour cream, or crème fraiche
1 sachet of vanilla sugar
1 tbs of sugar
3 apricots (frozen or fresh)

Defrost the puff pastry and the apricots. Preheat the oven at 200 ° C. Place the puff pastry in a 20 cm diameter baking pan. In a small bowl, mix the egg, the sour cream, the vanilla sugar and the sugar. Pour the mixture on top of the puff pastry and add the apricots on top. Bake for about 20-30 minutes. Serves 2-3 people. This recipe also works very well with other fruits, apples, pears, cherries, plums, you name them. It is also a quick and dirty solution if you are in desperate need of a cake, since basically, you should find all the ingredients in your kitchen.

Smoothie- the red one

2011-05-15T01:44:00.000-07:00

Since I started this blog with a smoothie recipe a little more than a year ago, I might as well begin my second year of food blogging with another smoothie recipe. For me, there are three smoothie seasons througout the year. There is summer with nectarine smoothies. Then, there is winter with pear smoothies, and then there is the season where I am sick and tired of pear smoothies but nectarine season has not yet begun. That's when I have frozen raspberry smoothies!

copyrigth of all photos j.

Frozen raspberrie smoothie

3 tbs of frozen raspberries
1 banana
200 ml of orange juice
4 tbs of yoghurt

Put all the ingredients into a blender, blend for 30 seconds. Pour into a glass and enjoy this ice cold breakfast treat!

One year

2011-05-08T00:08:00.000-07:00

One year of food blogging. One year of great recipes, photo sessions and bulks of cookies that had to be devoured. Here is an assortment of my favorite photos from my first year of food blogging. Click on each picture to get to the recipe. Which one is your favorite photo/recipe?

Weird things my sister does

2011-05-01T02:16:00.000-07:00

1. My dishes when she is in Berlin. I have breakfast, leave the apartment, she comes over to my place during the day, does all the dishes, and leaves again. Like an elf that goes unseen.

2. Comparing songs. No matter which song, she will know another one which has the same bridge, sounds exactly like, or reminds her very strongly of song X.

3. Travel everywhere by train. No, really. Everywhere. Even if it means a 41 hour train ride.Only very laid-back people do that.

I feel guilty for fact number one. I mean, what a luxury. So, to make up for it, I made her a snack for her last train ride. That 41 hour long one. It was only possible because she had to change trains in Berlin, and so we met up at the station and I handed her some Schinkenhörnchen, which a couple of hours later, she gladly bit into while the Eastern European Steppe was slowly passing by outside the train window. Schinkenhörnchen are croissants filled with swiss cheese and ham and are one of the most traditional German picknick and travel snacks. They taste great during train rides, but also on a picknick blanket at your local park!

Schinkenhörnchen

4 sheets of frozen puff pastry sheets
4 slices of ham, cut into small pieces
swiss cheese
1 egg yoke
3 spoons of milk

Defrost the puff pastry. Preheat the oven at 180°C. Place equal amounts of ham and swiss cheese on each puff pastry sheet. Close them and make sure that the edges are thoroughly closed. I sometimes use a fork to tightly squeeze the two parts together. Mix the egg yoke and the milk and dab each puff pastry pocket with the egg-n-milk mix. Put the 4 Schinkenhörnchen on a baking sheet and put them in the oven for about 20 minutes. 4 Schinkenhörnchen will make a great dinner for two, or a wonderful snack for one person during a 20 hour train ride!

Plaited yeast bun(ny)

2011-04-24T01:57:00.000-07:00

"This is worse than Christmas Eve!" I said to my sister yesterday (via Skype, this is the 21st century after all...). It's the first year I am making a traditional German Easter bun, and, since I like yeast buns best when they are fresh, I wanted to prepare everything Saturday evening, and then bake the bun Sunday morning! So, when the dough had risen, the strings had been plaited, and the bun was placed in the fridge to slowly rise some more over night, I was full of aniticipation and excitment! Like a child on christmas morning, tipteoing to the christmas tree, I opened the fridge this morning, and there it was, the bun had beautifully risen. In the oven, for 35 minutes, in the photo studio for 5, on the plate, and in the belly in no time!

copyrigth of all photos j.

Small plaited yeast bun(ny)

125 ml of heavy cream
250gr of flour (505 type)
1 tsp of dry yeast
40 gr of sugar
zests of an organic lemon
pinch of salt
1 egg
1 egg white
some milk mixed with an egg yoke
raisins if you like

Warm up the heavy cream in a casserole. In the meantime, mix the flour, the sugar, the yeast, the zests, the egg and the egg white, then add the heavy cream (and the raisins if you like). Mix thoroughly for about 5 minutes. Then set the dough aside and let it rise in a warm spot. After about an hour, take the dough, divide it into three pieces and form long strings with each part. Now braid the three strings, place the bun on a baking sheet, cover it which a bowl and leave it in the fridge over night. In the morning, mix the milk with the egg yoke and spread the mixture over the bun. Bake it in the oven for about 30-35 minutes. Enjoy with butter, fleure de sel, and jam (Thanks a million, Kat, for sparing your last glas for me, just because you know how much I liked your jam!)

Citrus fruit 'Grütze' with amaretto curd

2011-04-17T09:06:00.000-07:00

My Mom is a great chef, and she makes really lovely desserts, such as tiramisu (which, when I was kid, was decorated with a panda-bear cocoa-coating, as panda bears were my favorite animal. Did I just hear someone say spoilt brat?). Yet, for certain sweets in this family, my Dad is responsible. Such as Christmas candy. Or amaretto desserts. As a matter of fact, my Dad is the king of amaretto desserts. The other day, I found the recipe for amaretto-almond cream which we used to have with strawberries. Since it is not yet strawberry-season, the amaretto-almond cream production is on hold. His most famous amaretto dessert recipe however features citrus fruits. It's my favorite winter-time dessert (I have already shared my favorite summer-time dessert on the blog, can you guess which one it is?). Cold, tart pieces of orange and grapefruit, orange juice jelly and curd with amaretto to top it all off! The combo might sound weird, but try it, I am sure you will be surprised!

copyrigth of all photos j.

Citrus fruit 'Grütze' with amaretto curd

1 orange
1 grapefruit
3 sheets of white gelatine (or agaragar if you are a vegetarian)
250 ml of orange juice (freshly squeezed or any good quality kind from your local supermarket)
100 gr of curd (Quark in German, if you can't find curd, your next best choice is greek yoghurt)
50 ml of cream
2 tbsp of sugar
2-10 tbsp of amaretto

Fillet the orange and the grapefruit. This can be tricky, if you have never done it before. Remember: Practice makes perfect. Which, by the way, is also a good excuse to have this dessert very often. I used to eat a grapefruit every morning, before I switched to smoothies, so I can probably fillet one while sleeping. Here are my main tricks:

1. Use a very very sharp knife.

2. Start with the grapefruit. It is much easier to fillet a grapefruit than to fillet an orange.

3. Be generous. Cut off all the white even if that means you will also cut off more of the fruit than you are happy with.

4. Watch this tutorial on youtube (and simultaneously find out what father christmas is doing in the summer time...): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQAoe1z9iSI&NR=1

Now, bring the orange juice and 2 table spoons of sugar to a boil. In the meantime, place the sheets of gelatine in cold water. Once the juice has boiled, let it cool off a little and add the softened gelatine sheets (not the water in which you soaked them!). Let it cool off until the mix is at room temperature. Place the grapefruit and orange segments in a bowl (or in portion-sized glasses) and pour the juice-gelatine mix on top. Voilà, the 'Grütze' is done. Put it in the fridge and leave it there for a couple of hours until it has congealed.

Before serving, whip the cream and mix the whipped cream and the curd. Add some sugar according to your liking. Now, add the amaretto to the curd-n-cream-mix. The recipe calls for two spoons, my Dad always took six, and I prefer, say ten. Try several times during the process and you will see if you want more or less. Now, take the 'Grütze' out of the fridge, place a generous dollop of amaretto-curd on top of every portion, and then indulge your desire!

fishquiche

2011-04-10T00:43:00.000-07:00

Do you see the adorable fish-container in the photos? It used to stand in front of the window of an antiques store around the corner. I used to walk past it for, like, a year, always stopping and admiring it. I loved the freckles on the fish, I loved the simple shape, I just really liked stopping by there every now and then. Then, one weekend, shortly before Christmas, it was all of a sudden gone! I was so sad, thinking, someone else with less deciding-anxiety and a larger wallet than me had bought it on the spot. So for the first time, I actually walked into the store, instead of just looking into it from the outside. I frantically asked the shop owner about the whereabouts of the fish container. She calmly announced that all that had happened was that she had changed the shop window decorations as Christmas was approaching. I guess everyone in the store could hear my sigh of relief. I understood this as a sign and finally decided to buy it. I guess it is one of the most expensive useless items I have ever bought, but I am so happy I did! Every time I pass it on my way in and out of the kitchen, I smile when I see it! And today, we are baking fish quiche!

copyrigth of all photos j.

Quiche-the bottom

200 gr of flour
125 gr of butter
1 egg, some cold water if needed
1 pinch of salt

the topping

2 carrots
1 leak
2 salmon filets
3-4 eggs
250 gr cream

Cut the vegetables into small pieces and sauté it in a pan. Cut the salmon into small pieces, no need to sauté it. Mix the eggs with the cream, add some salt and pepper. Once the quiche was in the oven for about 20 minutes, take it out and evenly spread the vegetables and the salmon on the crust. Pour over the egg-cream-mix. Put the quiche back into the oven for about 40-60 minutes or until the egg-cream-mix has set.

The quiche tastes great staight out of the oven, but also the next day as a cold snack. I like to accompany it with a nice bowl of salad.

Three things I would take along to a deserted island

2011-04-03T02:09:00.000-07:00

Wohooo, I made it! I overcame my urge to procrastinate! J. versus procrastination 1:0!!!! This week, we are making granola. Breakfast casserole is for weekend breakfast. Granola is for everyday breakfast. Making granola is totally easy-peasy and it seems to be incredibly popular among food-bloggers lately. Check out la tartine gourmand's version, the chocolaty delicious days granola or Helena Ljunggren's chokladmüsli (love her blog, check it out even if you don't speak Swedish!) I read many different granola-recipes last week, and finally decided to go with the foodie in Berlin's version only to then add some pecans, leave out some seeds, some yoga, change a little bit of this and a little bit of that, so I guess this granola is nothing like the foodie in Berlin's granola but I am pretty sure hers and mine are both delicious!

I like my granola best in a large bowl, with slices of banana and the granola island in the middle topped off with three raspberries!

copyrigth of all photos j.

Granola

300 gr of rolled oats
100 gr of pecans, cut into small pieces
100 gr of slivered almonds
100 gr of raisins
65 ml of oil
100 ml of honey
30 gr or brown sugar
1 package of vanilla sugar
65 ml of water
a pinch of salt

In a pan, mix the oil, the honey, the brown sugar, the vanilla sugar and the water and bring to a boil while stirring constantly. Be as careful as a scout in the woods! We are making syrup here. Syrup is incredibly hot and will leave ugly burn-marks on your hands if not handled with care. It also tends to boil over if you divert your attention to something else. In a large bowl, mix the oats, the pecans and the almonds, then pour the syrup into the bowl. Make sure all the dry ingredients are covered with syrup. Spread the mix on two baking sheets. Bake in the oven at 180 °C for 15 minutes, watch so that the granola does not burn. Reduce the temperature to 150 °C and bake for another 45-60 minutes or until the granola is golden brown. Open the oven every now and then and stirr the granola. Let the granola cool off and dry out completely on the baking sheets for another 2-3 hours. Keeps nice and fresh in a metal box for, I guess, 3 weeks.

Best weekday-breakfast ever and a GREAT midnight snack!

Self-punishment

2011-03-27T13:55:00.000-07:00

I will not procrastinate writing blog entries in the future.
I will not procrastinate writing blog entries in the future.
I will not procrastinate writing blog entries in the future.
I will not procrastinate writing blog entries in the future.
I will not procrastinate writing blog entries in the future.
I will not procrastinate writing blog entries in the future.
I will not procrastinate writing blog entries in the future.
I will not procrastinate writing blog entries in the future.
I will not procrastinate writing blog entries in the future.
I will not procrastinate writing blog entries in the future.

That said, let's see how I will be doing next Sunday...
Bets will be accepted in the commentaries.

Happy birthday, D. and thanks for your breakfast-casserole recipe!

2011-03-20T02:07:00.000-07:00

Last weekend's wedding was really sweet! We had such a great time in Austria, surrounded by family members who are as crazy about good food as I am. And the food. We ate all day long. I am not kidding. All. Day. Long. The feast took place at a family-owned traditional Austrian restaurant, and the veal they served came from their own farm where the animals are fed with alpine hay. Can you say tender???

And the partying continues! Next week, we will celebrate my former host mom's birthday, hooooraaaay! Unfortunatley, I can't jump the next plane to the US, but I will be thinking about her all day long! To do her honor, this week's recipe is a dish I learned from her. She does the best spinach-cheese balls in the world and makes absolutely great mango salsa to go with fish, but her breakfast casserole blew my mind. So simple, so smart, so convenient, so tasty! I love it, because you prepare it the night before, just add the cheese in the morning and throw it into the oven the next morning. Great for people who are grumpy in the morning and don't want to fiddle with preparing breakfast and superb if you want to have friends over for brunch!

Breakfast casserole

1 egg per person

50 gr of ham per person

30 ml of milk or cream per person

one slice of toast per person or old bread

swiss cheese

salt

pepper

In the evening, cut the bread and the ham into dices. Mix the milk (or cream) with the egg and season with salt and pepper. Spread the bread into a casserole and pour the egg-milk-mix on top. Put the casserole into the fridge and let the bread soak over night. The next morning, preheat the oven to 180 °C. Take the casserole out of the fridge and sprinkle with swiss cheese. Let the casserole bake in the oven for about 20 minutes, until the egg has set. Hearty, tasty, simply great!

Something borrowed, something blue...

2011-03-13T14:21:00.000-07:00

Heute bleibt die Küche kalt, wir gehn' in den Wienerwald! Well, almost. I will be gone for a lovely family wedding in Austria where there willl be plenty of delicious food. Sorry for making you jealous. In the meantime, to keep you all happy, I borrowed a lovely picture my Dad sent me last week - he passed by a snow-covered picnic table, thought of me and my blog and set the table ready for a nice picnic! The snow looks sort of blue, so phew, we just saved that marriage from bad luck!

copyrigth of the photo J.'s Dad

Come back next week for a recipe, hopefully one to your liking!

A vegan cake??

2011-03-06T01:13:00.000-08:00

I don't want to sound arrogant, but rumor has it, I was born with a brain. A pretty useful one. Sometimes, I have my moments though, when the pendulum of smartness swings back into the very dark and far away corner of my brain. That's exactly what happened when I made this cake. I had found the recipe already some time ago, and last weekend felt absolutely the right time to finally bake it. So, already on Friday, I was thinking to myself 'I can't believe I am baking a vegan cake! Me, the lover of a decent medium-rare filet! Me, the person who loves food so much she would never have her diet restricted to only some foods!'. Yep, that's what it sounds like when I talk to myself in my brain.

Anyway, I had the plan, I made a shopping list, and I went shopping at the market. I asked for butter, I asked for chocolate and I asked for eggs.

That was Friday. Saturday, I got up and was thinking 'So this is the day I am baking a vegan cake?? Wild! Crazy!'. I got up, took the butter out of the fridge, took the eggs out of the fridge so that they would be at room-temperture. No suspicion on my side yet. Honestly, it took me until the cracking of the eggs that I realized that I was not baking a vegan cake, but a gluten free cake! Dark and far away side of my brain that is...definitely.

Luckily, I am a person who enjoys a good laugh so I actually like the pendulum to swing into that dark corner every now and then - I am always one laugh richer afterwards!

The cake itself is a true revelation, so moist and perfect, I will never make chocolate cake with flour again. In fact, I think this cake is the best thing you can do with a bag of finely ground almonds.

copyrigth of all photos j.

The so-not-vegan-but-gluten-free chocolate cake

200 g butter
200 g dark or semidark chocolate

200 g ground almonds

4 eggs

1 bag of vanilla sugar
200 g sugar
3 teaspoons baking powder

a pinch of salt

Preheat the oven to 180 °C. In a bain-marie, melt the butter with the chocolate until well combined. Roast the ground almonds in a pan. That might take a while, but once they are a little brown, pay close attention, because they easily get burned as well. Beat the eggs, the sugar, the vanilla sugar and the pinch of salt, then carefully add the almond-flour and the baking powder. Pour into a 26 cm spring pan and bake for about 35-40 minutes, or until a knife stuck into the cake comes out clean. It's an easy-peasy cake, I promise!

Now set the table with some flowers, cause they make you happy, cut off a big slice, sprinkle with some confectioner's sugar and digg into the cake!

I found the recipe 'in the rockies'!

Culinary-Hide-and-Seek: Metti una sera a cena supper club Berlin

2011-02-27T00:33:00.000-08:00

This post is about my third supper club experience. I am so sold on the concept. Every single evening was unique, interesting, tasty, funky and different. This time it was Metti una sera a cena, a supper club in Berlin by an Italian couple who frequently travel between Venetia and Berlin. Metti una sera a cena translates into 'let's get together and have dinner' and I think it is the best way to describe the concept of supper clubs: sure, it is about the food - if you were not interested in food, you would've not come in the first place - but it is also about meeting new people and having a great time with a group of people you might have never met otherwise. It is sort of like a lucky bag, as you never know what to expect, and, like the lovely host said, it is sort of like facebook in real life!

There were 8 guests which is a perfect size as you all get to share one table and get the opportunity to talk to each and everyone, and mind you, there is always so much to talk about over a dinner. There were people from the US, from Switzerland, from Great Britain and from Berlin, and English was the language of the evening. There was expertise in lots of interesting fields, a lot of humor and just a general love to talk about food. Restaurant tips were swapped ('I am pretty sure it's called Bora') and lifetime-dreams (the farm!!!) shared. And last but not least, I learned what it is like to have dinner with Stephen Hawking. All in all, a great bunch of people!

But this is a food blog right? So what about the courses served then? Well, I am kind of running out of supperlatives, it feels like I already used them all during my last posts on supper clubs. It really amazes me what two laymen working in a tiny kitchen can achieve! The quality of my photos however also amaze me, but in a negative way. Sorry about that, for whatever reason, I am not satisfied with the pictures I took and they really don't do the lovely arranged dishes justice.

The dinner started with an Aperol which, just like the wine, I had to skip that evening (Note to future-me: make sure to be able to drink alcohol next time you go to Metti una sera a cena!!!).

The appetizer was a stockfish cream on croutons. The croutons were perfectly crisp, and the stockfish cream fluffy and balanced in flavor. The drizzles of olive oil were impecable, after all the chefs are Italian.

The first course was a Leek and Saffron Risotto with Gorgonzola Cheese. I make risotto quite often myself, as I like its texture a lot, but boy do I have to sharpen my risotto skills! This must have been softest and smoothest and silkiest risotto I ever had, as a matter of fact, I think this was my favorite dish that evening. The hosts really put a lot of effort into choosing their products, so the gorgonzola was actually bought in Italy and brought to Berlin by the chefs. I wish I could make monthly trips to Italy just for grocery shopping...

Schie con Polenta was the second course, a dish which gave away the home region of the hosts, as it is a dish typical for Venetia. The briny shrimp were laced with garlic and accompanied the creamy polenta nicely.

As an intermezzo, we were in for a treat of parmesan ice cream. Here is another great thing about supper clubs which my sister who was with me pointed out: Supper clubs give you the opportunity to eat and enjoy dishes which you might have not necessarily ordered from a restaurant menu. Raise your hand if you would have ordered parmesan ice cream! See? You get the point. A wild estimate of 70 % of the guests probably wouldn't have gone for the parmesan ice cream were they to choose an ice cream at a restaurant, but all of us were positively surprised by the ice cream at the supper club. Ice cream with unusual flavors vs. guests: 1:0!

The dessert was Sicilian cannoli filled with mascarpone cream with sprinkles of orange zests and lavender blossoms accompanied by a fruit tartare, made of amongst other fruit Kiwi which, again, were imported straight from Italy!

Grappa (again, I missed out this time) and coffee was served to round of the dinner, and finally, the hosts were also able to get out of the kitchen and share a drink with their guests.

In case you hadn't already guessed by the lovely arranged food, the hosts are both artists, and the dinner takes place in their living room cum studio cum gallery which makes a lovely and inspiring setting for a dinner. Cooking, after all, should also be considered an art!

Thanks to the hosts for a unique and tasy evening, and thanks to the other guests for contributing to making this dinner a night to remember!

Hello Goodbye

2011-02-20T01:49:00.000-08:00

The last two weeks were busy, really busy. If the last two weeks were a piece of knitwear they would be a 2 meter long, 2 meter wide square knitted with size 1 needles... On the positive side, I got to meet my friend M's little daughter L. who is the cutest baby born in 2011 (J. being the cutest one born in 2010). Her eyebrowes are as soft as milkfoam and her little ears make me think of swedish cinnamon rolls. So, in order to celebrate this "hello", I made some cherry oat muffins which I gladly shared with M.! But there was also a sad goodbye, yet a temporary one: one of my best friends moved to Australia! Australia, that is that far away place on the other side of the globe, the place my Dad tried to dig a tunnel to when he was a kid. I think about 1 meter along the way, he gave up, but that is still further than never having tried at all!

So Australia it had to be, and though she will be deeply missed here, I sooo grant her the nice weather, the beach, the barbies and the G'days! Her favorite cake being lemon cake, I decided to give the soaked lemon pound cake a try to take along to her potlach farewell party. People seemed to like it, as there was hardly any left by the end of the evening, but then, people might have just been really hungry. Yet, it also bore my examination, and so I was lucky to have made an extra couple of muffins patiently waiting to be photographed the day after the party!

So, in honor of the last two weeks filled with 'hellos' and 'goodbyes', here is the recipe of hello-goodbye soaked lemon muffins! And just for the record (pun not intended), I am a huge beatles fan.

copyrigth of all photos j.

Hello-goodbye soaked lemon muffins (also works for pound cakes (does this recipe name ever end?))

250 gr of butter
200 gr of sugar
5 eggs
250 gr of flour
4 organic lemons
2 tbs of baking powder
80 gr of confectioner's sugar

Take the butter and the eggs out of the fridge about 1-2 hours before you start baking, so that they are at room temperature. Preheat the oven at 170 °C when you start with the cake. Grate the four organic lemons to get a fair amount of zests. Mix the butter until it is very fluffy and creamy, then add the sugar and the eggs one by one. Add the zests and the flour mixed with the baking powder. Put the dough into a loaf pan lined with baking parchment or fill it into small muffin pans. Bake the pound cake for about 50 to 60 minutes, the muffins are done a lot faster, say between 20 and 30 minutes. Make the test of doneness by sticking a knife into the cake: if it comes out clear, the cake is baked all the way through. In the meantime, take the four lemons and squeeze them until you have 100 ml of juice. Bring the juice and 80 gr of confectioner's sugar to a boil and let it cool off again.
Once the cake/the muffins is /are out of the oven and still really really hot, immediately start to soak the cake with the cold syrup. It might look like way too much syrup, but just keep on pouring! Wait until the cake has cooled off, then take it out of the pan. Cut it into slices and enjoy!

I really liked the tartness of the cake, which you can easily adjust by using more or less confectioner's sugar in the syrup. If 250 gr of butter is not enough for you, you can top of the cake slices or the muffins with a generous dollop of sweetened crème fraiche (crème fraiche mixed with (vanilla) sugar). Some people smoke, some people drink a lot, I prefer slowly killing myself with fat.

A short history of food-related matters: the Frankfurt Kitchen

2011-02-13T01:54:00.000-08:00

I love going to museums. Good thing I live in Berlin where there are plenty to choose from. A museum which somehow managed to escape my attention is the "Museum der Dinge" - that is "the Museum of Things". What "things"? you might ask - paintings, sculptures, cars? None of the above and yet a little of everything. The Museum of things is a museum of 20th century product culture. It comprises the archive of the Deutscher Werkbund, an association of designers, architects and artists established in 1907. It was meant to function as an institution bringing together designers and manufactures of every-day products. It also tried to educate people on things both functional and in style. For this purpose, they selected examples of the prodcut in question, put them in so called Werkbund-boxes (see first pircture below) which teachers could borrow in order to discuss the products' use and style in class. I am somewhat sceptical about being able to teach 'good style' which I think should remain the individual's choice. Heck, if I look through photos of myself during the last 15 years, there certainly were a fair amount of style-desasters, but looking back, I think I needed those in order to find my style.

And yet, the Werkbund had an excellent eye for great design, awarding the best cutlery, tea pots, bowls etc. every year. If you come from a family of collectors, you will immeadiately feel at home at the museum with its maze-like aisles full of china, cutlery, glasses, etc. Especially if you grew up in Germany, you will also recognize many of the every-day prodcuts on display from the last 100 years.

The most interesting "thing" in the museum however, especially if you are a foodie, is the "Frankfurter Küche"- the Frankfurt kitchen: Designed in 1926 by Austrian designer/architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky (what a cool name by the way), it used to be the state of the art kitchen in the 1920s. Kitchens which used to be the center of every house and apartment were now being outsourced to a special room, where only the cooking and preparing was done. The kitchen turned into a functional room and was no longer condsidered to be a living room, where families spent most of their time and also took their meals.

The Frankfurt kitchen was both plain in design (you will be very much reminded of the famous Bauhaus school when you walk through the museum) and ultimately functional: tests had been made to see which working stations should be placed where. According to the movements the good German housewife made and the ways she went from the sink to the living room, back into the kitchen, to the sink again, then to the dust bin, to the stove, to the sink and back to the dustbin, the kitchen was designed in order to faciliate the work as much as possible.

The kitchen had standardized measurements and modules and was built into about 10 000 apartments and houses in Frankfurt.Up until today, its influences can be seen in German kitchen design.

copyrigth of all photos j.

Now there is only one thing left to say: Go visit the Museum of things! I deeply recommend taking a guided tour, as you easily get overwhelmed by the thousand and thousand things on display!

Werkbundarchiv – Museum der Dinge
Oranienstraße 25
D-10999 Berlin

www.museumderdinge.de

Cheese crackers

2011-02-06T01:14:00.000-08:00

Although I live in Germany, I don't really like sausages. Kind of makes sense that I don't like Schlachtplatte which always comes with sausages. But even cold cuts on sandwiches are not my cup of tea. I am more of a cheese person. Goat cheese, Manchego, Gruyère, Cheddar - I like them all. And cookies, I looove cookies, I am sure you already took notice of that. So, why not combine the two? Salty cheese cookies, or, to be precise, crackers is what I made last week. Sooo yummy! Cracker really is the right word because they make fabulous crackling noices when you chew them and at the same time, they somehow melt in your mouth - a funky texture combo!

copyrigth of all photos j.

Cheese crackers

150 gr of flour
150 gr of grated cheese (Swiss, Gruyère, Cheddar or any hard cheese of your preference)
150 gr of butter
1 egg yoke
sesame seeds or any other kind of seeds

In a bowl, mix the flour with the grated cheese. Add the butter, cut into small pieces. Add the eggyoke and mix everything thoroughly. Cover the dough with clingfilm and put it in the fridge for about 30-60 minutes.

Now, roll out the dough on a floured surface and cut out cookies using cookie cutters such as round shapes, hearts, fish, etc. Preheat the oven at 200 °C. Repeat until no dough is left and place the cut out cookies on a backing sheet. Sprinkle the cookies with sesame seeds, sunflower seeds or the seeds of your liking. Bake the cookies for about 15-20 minutes, until they have a nice, golden color.

The cookies are a great snack, go very well with an aperitif, or are perfect for a picnic in the park!

I was soo sure that I had a heart-shaped cookie cutter, but once again, my memory proved unreliable. I still hope that this recipe is accepted as a valentine's recipe in the valentine's blog event hosted by Alice, as I am sure lovebirds would like to feed each other these crackers!

Pretty please with sugar on top?

2011-01-30T02:04:00.000-08:00

Dear sister,

if I promise to make another batch of these cookies next week, will you promise to clean the bain marie for me? Pretty please with sugar on top?

Imagine brownies. Imagine bite-size brownies. Imagine bite-size brownies that stay crispy on the outside and fluffy on the inside and nice for, say, 10 days in a tin box. You may say, I'm a dreamer, but clearly, I am not the only one, because Miss Martha-I-know-what-a-prison-looks-like-from-the-inside-cause-I-am-greedy-Stewart clearly also dreamt about such chocolate cookies and had her crew develop the recipe for crackled chocolate cookies. I found them first through Bakerella's blog and I must say that her's look prettier because they crackled nicer. But it's all about inner values anyway, right? I like them, my friends like them, my sister likes them, so what about you?

Crackled chocolate cookies (with sugar on top!)

100 gr of melted dark chocolate
80 gr of flour
30 gr of dutch cocoa powder
1 tsp. of baking powder
pinch of salt
60 gr of butter at room temperature
130 gr of brown sugar
1 large egg at room temperature
1 package of vanilla sugar
40 ml of milk
confectioner's sugar

Melt the chocolate in a bain marie and let it cool off a little again. Beat the butter, the vanilla sugar and the brown sugar with a mixer until fluffy. Add the egg, the melted chocolate, then the flour, the salt, the cocoa powder and the baking powder, lastly the milk. Wrap the dough in plastic and put it into the freezer for about an hour.

Preheat the oven at 180°C when you take the dough out of the freezer. Cut the dough into small squares (2X2cm). Put some confectioner's sugar into a soup plate. With your hands, role each square into small balls which you then roll around in the confectioner's sugar until they are compeletly covered. Place the balls on a baking sheet, leaving some space between them. Bake for about 12-15 minutes.

The cookies taste great with this banana milk, so make sure you have some over-due bananas at home.

I found this recipe via Bakerella over on Martha's page, and converted the measurements from cups to gramms, slightly adapting the recipe. I must say that I found the original rather carelessly written. First thing on the directions is to preheat the oven. Then, you are supposed to leave the batter in the fridge for 2 hours. Okay, folks, who seriously would leave the oven on for 2 hours while the batter is cooling off in the fridge?? Even my so-not-state-of-the-art-oven heats up in, say, 10 minutes! So Martha, the recipe rocks, the directions don't!

If life gives you leopard-skinned bananas...

2011-01-23T00:49:00.000-08:00

I like simple things. Plain white sheets for example. They make you feel like you are waking up in a fancy-schmanzy hotel bed although it actually is Monday morning, minus 10 degrees outside, and you already pushed the snooze-button twice.

Or drawings. The most simple form of art, yet so elaborate, as they capture an idea instantly before it is then tuned up into a painting, which more often than not is far less interesting than the first simple sketches.

Or banana milk. So simple. Banana, milk, straw, ready, set, go.

It sometimes happens that I find leopard-skinned bananas in my kitchen. As I like my bananas best when they are still almost green (except for those you get in the tropics, but that's a whole different story), leopard-skinned bananas could be somewhat of a bummer. But hey, it's fashion week in Berlin and I hear leopard-print is up and coming, so banana milk actually passes as an it-girls accessoire, I guess.

So, if life gives you leopard-skinned bananas, make banana milk!

copyrigth of all photos j.

Banana milk

1 brownish-yellowish leopard-skinned banana

1 glas of milk

In a blender, thoroughly purée the banana, then add the milk and whisk until the mix is all bubbly and velvet-like. I usually don't add any sugar as the banana is sweet enough. Pour into a glass. Invite your five best friends, get two straws each, and see if you can all suckle the glass empty within one second!

Banana milk always is a winner, it makes you feel better instantly and it also tastes great with chocolate cookies! I know I am weird, but try this: take a spoon and stir the banana milk with it. The numbed sound that the spoon hitting the glas makes is one of my favorite sounds in the world. Makes me feel all warm and cozy. I warned you, I am weird.

You can't deny you are a foodblogger...

2011-01-15T20:57:00.000-08:00

... if you type in "googlehupf" instead of "gugelhupf" when searching for a recipe for German Bundt Cake online! Where is this going to end my dear readers?

But lo and behold, we are not baking Bundt cake, or gugelhupf today. I promised last week that there was a savory recipe coming up, and here it is. Yes, reliability is my middle name (though my third name is procrastination, but you don't need to tell everyone about it, deal?).
Today's recipe is inspired by puff pastry tartelettes which a friend of mine recently prepared for me and a bunch of friends. She had mixed hazlenuts with cream cheese and used that as the pastries' filling. In my version, I added apple slices, as I like the combination of cheese and fruit. So here we go, finally a sugar-free recipe again!

copyrigth of all photos j.

Savory hazelnut pastries with applefans and a nice bowl of greens

4 puff pastry squares

1 apple

1 lime

4 tbsp of ground hazelnuts

50 gr of cream cheese, if you like you can use goat cream cheese

salt

pepper

1 egg yoke

a small handfull of lamb's lettuce per person

olive oil

lime juice

sugar

salt

pepper

Defrost the puff pastry. Preheat the oven at 200 °C. In a dry pan, slightly roast the ground hazelnuts. Mix them with the cream cheese, some salt and pepper. Cut the apple into squares, and cut those squares long ways into thin slices, but make sure that you don't cut all the way through. That way, you can spread the slices apart a little, and they will unfold sort of like a fan. Cut the lime in half and sprinkle the apples with lime juice so that they won't turn brown. Once the puff pastry has thawed, spread an equal amount of the cream cheese nut mixture on all four squares, leaving an edge, then place an applefan on top. Now take the egg yoke and brush it along the edge of each square. Put the pastry into the oven for about 15 minutes or until it has risen and turned golden brown. Rise and shine so to speak!

In the meantime, thoroughly clean the lamb's lettuce and prepare the vinaigrette, which in this case, does not really deserve that name because I substituted the vinegar with lime juice. I took 2 spoons of olive oil and one spoon of lime juice, some sugar, salt end pepper, quick and easy and also a good way to use up the lime.

Makes 2 servings and also tastes great the next day at work!

Say NO to New Year's resolutions!

2011-01-09T02:52:00.000-08:00

Phew, the last few posts all featured sweets! It's best to wave goodbye your new year's resolutions now or you might as well stop reading here. I promise to bring on a hearty recipe soon, honestly, but in the meantime, we are baking a chocolate pound cake! I found this chocolate cake over on smitten kitchen already some time ago, and since it seemed full of dense, dark chocolate rather than full of sugar, I absolutely had to try it. One of the best things about this cake is that you only need one bowl - a very essential criteria if you don't have a dishwasher and hate doing the dishes as much as I do. I liked the cake a lot, since its description was true: you get a very chocolaty but not overtly sweet cake. However, I thought it was laking something. Some cream, or maybe something fruity? I scanned my fridge and laid eyes on a jar of super tasty sour-peach-jam which I had gotten from a friend. She's a pharmacist and knows how to add an extra little pulverized vitamin C to her jams, a trick which I will have to apply as well when jam-making-season is in full swing again!

And, wow, what an explosion of flavors - chocolate with tard jam, gotta love it! Now that the jar is empty, I won't be baking this cake again until my friend will make some more jam next summer!

copyrigth of all photos j.

Chocolate pound cake

125 gr of butter at room temperature
225 gr of brown sugar
100 gr of white sugar
1 pakage of vanilla sugar
1 large egg at room temperature

240 ml of buttermilk
190 gr of flour
75 gr of unsweetened cocoa powder
1/4 tsp of natron
1/2 tsp of baking powder
a pinch of salt

Preheat the oven at 180 °C. Line a pound cake pan with baking parchment or grease the pan thoroughly. In a large bowl, whisk the butter, then add the brown, white and vanilla sugar. Add the egg and mix well. Add the buttermilk. At this point, things might start to look a little lumpy, but don't worry, it'll work out in the end! Now, add all the other dry ingredients and mix only until they are fully absorbed by the moist ingredients. Pour the dough into the baking pan and bake for 60 to 70 minutes or until a wooden stick that you poke into the cake comes out clean (= the cake is baked all the way through). While the cake is in the oven, you can go and have fun watching ickle and Lardee bake a cake. Let cool off in the pan for 10 minutes, then take the cake out of the pan.

I recommed a fruity jam to go with it, how about bitterorange jam for instance?

This cake was posted on smitten kitchen under the name of Everyday chocolate cake. I converted the measurements from cups to gr.

Salty caramel

2011-01-02T01:22:00.000-08:00

The last year was full of great food experiences! There was a perfectly pink lambroast which we ate for Easter in Göteborg, seated at two packing cases which served as a make-shift table. There was freshly squeezed orange juice in Ojai during our California trip and an heirloom tomato sandwich prepared by my former host mom in the US. There were the dishes that my parents always prepare when I come home. And there were supper club dinners, a both delicious and social experience.

2010 kind of was also the year that I came out: is there a more public way to confess that you are a foodie for life than to start your own foodblog?

Today's recipe is one of my personal food revelations of 2010 - salty caramel! It was the cherry on top of the ice cream of Thyme Supper Club's November dinner and since my sister liked it so much, I made some right before Christmas and gave it away to her for Christmas.

May your 2011 be full of salty caramel!

copyrigth of all photos j.

Salty caramel

200 gr of white granulated sugar

200 gr of heavy cream

50 gr of butter

fleur de sel

In a large pan, blend and melt all the ingredients minus the fleur de sel. It is important to use a pan with a large surface because you want the moisture to evaporate. Bring the mixture to a boil, but be careful, caramel gets incredibly hot! Cook until the caramel has a golden brown color. The caramel is just right, when it has reached the so called firmball stage. I quote Caroline from Thyme Supper Club here: "Cook to the firmball stage. This means having a bowl of cold water standing by. Drop a little caramel into the cold water, fish it out with your fingers and squeeze it. You want it to hold its shape, but to be squashy under pressure, like fudge or chewing gum."

Once the caramel has reached this stage, pour it onto a baking sheet and spread with a spoon or spatula. Dip the spoon into cold water so that the caramel won't stick too much to the spoon, but in any case, this part of the process is sort of messy. Let it cool of a little while, then sprinkle fleur de sel on top and cut the caramel into bite-size squares.

Fill into a nice glass jar and give it to a person you like or eat them all by yourself!

This salty caramel is made after Caroline's recipe which she shared on Thyme Supper Club's site.

And there won't be snow in Africa this Christmas...

2010-12-26T00:45:00.000-08:00

Have you ever heard this line in that stupid christmas song "Do they know it's christmas time at all?"??? Have you ever been to Africa? I have and even before I had been the only thing that came to my mind when I heard this song was 'Well thank God there won't be snow in Africa this Christmas... climate change is already doing enough damage on the continent and snow would really be the last thing people need...'. Anyway, enough of my christmas wisdom! Schlachtplatten wishes you a merry Christmas!

I am sure you are all enjoying your favorite Christmas dinner this weekend so I spare you a recipe and instead show you some christmas impressions! We are having a white, relaxed, food and laughter filled christmas and are enjoying a few days off and you should be doing the same!

We have enough christmas tree ornaments to decorate 20 trees with, but for the last three years, we decided to go with a tree decorated with birds only. Along with that came a Maneki Neko standing underneath the tree trying to catch the birds.... if that ain't a modern interpretation of a nativity scene then I don't know what is...

copyrigth of all photos j.

Scientists have recently solved the problem of getting as many cookies out of a sheet of dough. Read all about it here (in German). Little did they know that our grandmothers had already developped the perfect multi-cookie-cutter! This must be one of my all time favorite kithcen utensiles!

Cherry oat muffins

2010-12-19T01:21:00.000-08:00

Are you already sick an tired of Christmas flavors? Do you wish cinnamon, cardamom, anise and clove would go to hell? Or at least move to the far end of the kitchen cabinets until next October when the supermarkets will start to fill their aisles with Christmas products again? Well, I am almost at this point, and it's not even Christmas yet! For all you out there who are almost at that point today's muffins will be the right thing.They conain a hint of cinnamon which makes them qualify for Christmas-baking, yet they are not too overtly sweet and the oat flakes give them a healthy appearance.

copyrigth of all photos j.

Cherry oat muffins

75 gr of butter
175 gr of morello cherries (drained)
125 gr of flour
30 gr of oat flakes
1/2 tsp of cinnamon
1 tsp of baking powder
1/2 tsp of natron
1 egg
a pinch of salt
50 gr os sugar
1 package of vanilla sugar
100 gr of unsweetened yoghurt

Melt the butter and let it cool off again. Preheat the oven at 180 °C. In bowl number one, mix the oat flakes, the flour, the baking powder, the natron, the salt and the cinnamon. In a second bowl, mix the eggs with the sugar, the vanilla sugar, then add the butter and the yoghurt. Pour the mixture from bowl two into bowl number one and mix only for a short time. Add the drained morello cherries and fill the dough into muffin molds. I used canelé-mold because I thought they looked cute. Bake for about 25 minutes until the muffins are golden brown. Let the muffins rest in the molds for another 5 minutes, then let them cool off on a rack.

The muffins taste great after a long walk through the winterwonderland, I recommend a cup of hot chocolate to go with it.Yields about 6 muffins, or 8 canelé-shaped muffins!

I found this recipe already some time ago on her blog.

Same same but different

2010-12-11T10:15:00.000-08:00

I guess when all you have seen for ten days in a row is snow, it makes sense to post a recipe for white food. Sort of blends in with the onset of winter which we have lately braved here in Berlin. I found this recipe for a blanquette de la mer on her blog already some time ago and it reminded me very much of my childhood: every time we would go to a gault-millau-rated-higher-than-16 restaurant I would order a dish with fish, a creamy sauce based on white wine, and some rice. That was before I was old enough to enjoy a 5 course dinner, of course. I don't recall being a picky eater, but apparently, there was one occation where I insisted on having french fries at a very high-end restaurant in France. According to my liking, the garcon started to call me "the belgian girl". Whether I got the french fries or not, I can't remember, but I am pretty suere that my parents ordered something else for me instead.

The blanquette tasted really nice, hot and steamy as it was. I still think the acidic flavor of the white wine goes excellent with the fish! It was same same but different though, since I made some changes to the original recipe. For instance, I did not use shrimp. I also made some more vanilla carrots to make sure that some little vitamine would find its way into the dish as well.

copyrigth of all photos j.

Blanquette de la mer

400 gr of monkfish

300 gr of salmon

200 ml of vegetable stock

100 ml of dry white wine

1 egg yolke

120 gr of crème fraîche

1 small onion

1 dry bay leaf

salt

pepper

Cut the onion into tiny dices, braise them lightly in a casserole. Cut the fish into dices, say between 1,5 and 2 cm. Add the diced fish into the casserole and braise for a moment, then add the vegetable stock, the bay leaf and the white wine. Let simmer for about 15 minutes. Add salt and pepper according to your taste. Now, mix the crème fraîche with the egg yolk and bind the sauce. Do not bring the sauce to a full boil after you have added the egg, or it will curdle.

This is a quick and easy dinner that leaves enough time to prepare rice and some vegetables on the side!

Makes between 2-3 servings, depending on how hungry you are!

This recipe was insipred by her recipe in German.

Nut triangles

2010-12-05T00:33:00.000-08:00

It's snowing! Like crazy! It's almost christmas! I really love this time of the year! Sitting inside with a hot cup of tea, trying to count the millions of snow flakes that rush past my window, and the christmas candy in the oven is spreading a promising scent...

Nut triangles are a classic German christmas candy, but are also sold and eaten throughout the rest of the year as well. I made some last weekend and brought them along to a nice creative afternoon spent in the outskirts of Berlin in the sewing studio of Kaffiknopf - a very talented friend of mine: check out her homepage if you still need chistmas gifts for children or coffee-cozy lovers or knitting-addicts because she sells all kinds of cute handmade prodcuts she makes in her studio which always seems flooded with light.

In exchange for some nut triangles, she let me use her sewing machine and never tired of my stupid questions on how to continue my little sewing project!

Nut triangles

For the crust:

110 gr of spelt flour
25 gr of sugar
1 tsp. of vanilla sugar
1/2 egg (or one really tiny one)
50 gr of butter

For the topping:

2-4 tbsp of apricot jam or hjortron (cloudberry)

100 gr of butter
115 gr of sugar
1 tbsp. of heavy cream
100 gr of finely ground hazelnuts
50 gr of coarsly ground or chopped hazelnuts

50 gr of dark chocolate

For the crust, cut the cold butter into small cubes, add the flour, the sugar, the vanilla sugar and the egg and mix. Let the dough rest in the fridge for about an hour. Preheat the oven at 180 ° C and spread the dough about 1 cm think into a square baking pan. This was sort of messy with my dough, but the cookies still tasted fine in the end, so don't start to worry, if the dough has a mind of its own. Prebake the dough for about 10 minutes. While the dough is in the oven, prepare the topping. Melt the butter with the sugar and the heavy cream in a casserole, turning it into lightly browned caramel. Add all the nuts. Take the dough out of the oven and spread the apricot or cloudberry jam on the crust. Then, take the nut caramel and spread it out on top of the jam layer evenly. Put the baking pan back into the oven and bake for another 15 minutes until the topping has a nice brown color.

Once out of the oven, let the big square cool off for a while, but not until it has entirely cooled off. To cut the big square into neat small triangles, it is necessary for the topping to still be luke warm. After you have cut the big square into the triangles, let these cool off before you melt the chocolate. Now, dip two corners of the nut triangles in chocolate.

It's time to enjoy the triangles. They are really dense, though, so it is good to know that they keep fresh and tasty in a can for 2-4 weeks!

This recipe was inspired by her recipe for Nussecken in German.

Grapefruit Sorbet

2010-11-28T00:24:00.000-08:00

Business as usual this week, it's Sunday, and a new blog entry is up!

Do you like tart things? I do! My favorite fruit is grapefruit. I eat a grapefruit every morning. EVERY morning. And I do not add any sugar. I like my breakfast to be fruity and tart. It' s a good way to wake up. But I do not only eat grapefruits for breakfast. Actually, my favorite dessert contains grapefruit (recipe comming up sometime in the near future!). And this summer, I came across the best ice cream ever. Of course, it was grapefruit sorbet. After having passed my last university exam, I rewarded myself with a visit to Vanille & Marille, an ice cream parlor I had heard many good things about. And, yes, me too, I fell in love with their products at first taste. I remember that after I had the first spoonfull of grapefruit sorbet, my vocabulary was reduced to yummmmm, yummmmm, yummmm!

Grapefruit sorbet is the most refreshing ice cream and full of vital vitamines (at least I think so). I tried to make my own, and was pretty satisfied with the result, although its texture obviously was not as smooth as Vanille&Marille's sorbet. I did not use an ice cream machine, so if you do, let me know about the result!

Copyrigth of all photos j.

Grapefruit sorbet

4 grapefruits

2 egg whites

some sugar

Squeeze the juice of 4 grapefruits, add some sugar by the teaspoon if you want to and depending on how sweet the juice is. Heat the juice if you added sugar in order for the sugar to melt. Let the juice cool off. Beat the eggwhites and mix with the cool juice. Place the mixture into a flat container which you put into the freezer. Now, go read a book. Once every hour, you should pay your sorbet-to-be a visit. Take a fork and scratch the layer of ice which is slowly building up along the edges. The more often you scratch and mix, the smoother your texture will be, though do not expect your sorbet to be really smooth. You would need an ice cream machine for that.

Even though it is as cold as ice in Berlin these days, I wanted to share this recipe with you now, because I am sure that it will make a nice and light dessert which will be very much appreciated as part of a Christmas menu.

You think ice cream is unhealthy and contains too many calories? Check out brilliant Christoph Niemann's scientific solution (well, almost) to this problem!