Monat: Oktober 2006

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Dinner is Ready With Recipe

Pflaumencremesuppe mit Barbarie-Ente – Plum Cream Soup with Roasted Barbarie Duck

There’s this show here in Germany called „Das perfekte Dinner“ (The Perfect Dinner), which is kind of a mix between a cooking and a reality competition something show. It’s broadcasted daily from Monday to Friday and it works like this:

Every week a group of five people from the same town (or at least region) get together for five attempts at the perfect dinner. Every day someone else prepares and serves a three course dinner for the rest of the group. The dinner then gets „graded“ by the servees and the one contestant who served the best dinner wins. It’s that easy and a lot of fun, because you get all the kitchen drama, a sneak peek into other people’s lifes and the one or other culinary hint all at the same time.

This week one of the contestants started his dinner with a strange plum cream soup, which according to him he once ate in a Berlin restaurant and managed to get the recipe. It was served with roasted duck and the idea of a plum soup alone sounded so weird that I had to try this out. The recipes get published on the TV station’s website, so I had no problems getting it.

Since the recipe I had was intended for five people I roughly halved the measurements thinking I’d get about as much to feed two and still have some left. But apparently we eat too little (which for the life of me I cannot believe), because what I got felt like it could easily serve five or six. So, for a lovely dinner for two I’d recommend roughly halving the recipe again, although you might want to concentrate on the plums and liquids, and leave everything else as it is.

Vegetarians just leave out the bacon and duck and you’ll have nothing to fear. As for regular meat eaters, the duck is not exactly mandatory, but it adds some luxury – and of course a lot of additional flavor – to the dish.

Weiterlesen „Pflaumencremesuppe mit Barbarie-Ente – Plum Cream Soup with Roasted Barbarie Duck“
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My Sweet Tooth

Chocolate Wonderland

Chocolat bagPerhaps you’ll be shocked to learn that I’m not a chocoholic. I’ve always been more for savory food than sweets, but every now and then (and lately more often than not) do I get a strange and sudden yearning for some chocolate. My favorite chocolate right now is the Marabou chocolate and I always grab at least two of those long sticks when we’re at IKEA. They’re sold in regular supermarkets as well, but somehow we got this IKEA routine down and it involves stuffing ourselves with Köttbullar and buying Marabou chocolate.

You also might be aware that I’m not a big fan of all things bitter. I don’t drink regular coffee or eat brussels sprouts and you might catch me eating the endive leaves in a salad first thing, just to get rid of them. So chocolate for me usually means really sweet milk chocolate. I love nougat, and not the white chewy kind (known here as „Turkish honey“), but the sweet chocolatey kind.

But lately my husband and I have gotten a bit adventurous when it comes to the chocolate department. We chased for quite some time after the Lindt 99% chocolate, a very dark chocolate that contains 99% cocoa and is a bit like eating chocolate dust really and only to be enjoyed in really tiny bits. Only a few weeks ago we stumbled upon a special chocolate sale thing at a local department store and each chose a chocolate bar we’d like to try out.

So, naturally when I heard that there was an all chocolate shop in Cologne I went to check it out last week. It’s called „chocolat“ and apparently it’s a small chain with six shops in Germany at the moment. Two of them are in Cologne and one is in Düsseldorf, so we’re covered. I went to the one situated in the DuMont Carré, which is a small shopping mall on Breite Strasse.

At first I was overwhelmed. So much chocolate, so many different brands and flavors, one stranger than the other, although of course you can always get your basic dark or milk chocolate here. They even had traditional Cologne beer bottles made of chocolate, which I believe would be a perfect gift for someone who adores Cologne and chocolate. I wandered around aimlessly, considering all my choices and then went for the Dolfin Carré 24 Épices, which appealed to me because of the somewhat strange use of spices and chocolate (Earl Grey flavored chocolate, anyone?).

I also chose little chocolatey balls intended for making hot chocolate, picking the bourbon vanilla flavor, which turned out to be white chocolate balls. You just drop three to six in a glass or cup and then fill it with hot milk and stir. If you are my husband you might ask your wife (aka me) to add a bit of rum. Both my non-alcoholic and his were really tasty and exactly what you might need on a dark cold winter night.

There were so many other flavors and brands that appealed to me, so I’ll definitely be back. This also reminds me that I have never been to the chocolate museum here in Cologne, which – especially considering my food obsession – seems pretty inexcusable. I know.

chocolat
DuMont-Carré, Shop 14
Breite Straße 80-90
50667 Köln
Phone / Fax: 0221 / 250 88 15
mail@chocolatshop.de

For the addresses of the other shops, please check out their website.

Kategorien
Dinner is Ready With Recipe

My Very Special Pasta Salad

Pasta Salad
It occurs to me that I have this thing for dishes that can be prepared in large quantities, so that you can prepare them Friday evening or Saturday morning and then don’t have to think about cooking for the rest of the weekend. The downside here is that you have to like that one dish so much that you don’t mind – in fact, actually enjoy – eating nothing much beside it.

So, if you think about spending and adventurous weekend, doing exciting stuff and maybe eating out or preparing a fabulous dinner, this is not the thing for you. If you want to spend the weekend mostly on the couch, watching DVDs and reading, this might exactly be what you want. And in my opinion there’s nothing wrong with a weekend spent on the couch. In fact, I love those lazy-ass weekends every once in a while. There’s always a tiny little feeling of guilt, a little voice that tells me „You should get out and do something“, but I learned to ignore it.

So there I have two special dishes that I make on these occasions. One is my oh-so-yummy Chili con carne, which I usually serve with some kind of pasta to make it last longer, the other is My Very Special Pasta Salad.

Please be aware that this is in no way healthy food, but to me it is comfort food at its best. I bet it has a lot of calories too, especially since there’s mayonnaise involved, but I’m not a calory-counter. If I like it, I like it and that’s that. So, if you’re looking for a healthy and diet-approved meal, skip it, please. You won’t be happy with what you’ll get. If you’re looking for something to eat while watching your favorite TV shows (which means Gilmore Girls, Veronica Mars and a lot more) on a couch, probably cuddled up under a blanket, then this might be the one.

In my experience it lasts up to three days, if stored properly, but it’s usually best on the second day. So I would prepare it on Friday evening, enjoy your first bites while the pasta is still warm and then spend the next day running from the living room to the kitchen and back to get another serving. At least that’s what I do.

Weiterlesen „My Very Special Pasta Salad“
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Not-the-Kitchen

Currywurst Deluxe

Curry Cologne Logo

The Currywurst is a German original. Presumably invented by a certain Herta Heuwer in Berlin on 4 September 1949 who, out of boredom, started experimenting with the ingredients at her sausage stall, it is now famous on various parts of Germany, mostly Berlin, Hamburg and the Ruhrpott, which is close to where we live, so we get our fair share of Currywurst stalls as well.

Basically it’s a hot grilled pork sausage. The key to what makes a Currywurst a Currywurst instead of an ordinary sausage is the sauce, which is ketchup-based but seasoned with various spices, thus achieving the unique Currywurst flavor. Basically it’s a simple take-away dish, not very healthy – mind you, but seriously: who cares? – and usually served with french fries, but one with a tradition and apparently a legend. There even is a novel called „Die Erfindung der Currywurst“ (The Invention of Curried Sausage) by Uwe Timm, just so you know how important exactly we take our Currywurst. It’s literatureworthy!

However, you usually just get it at take-away stand or small tiny diners, served in a plastic bowl, often drowned in the sauce, which is not necessarily a bad sign, depending on the quality of the sauce. You certainly won’t see it on the menu of a restaurant, because for some reason, it’s just not meant to be served at the table on a real plate with real, rather than plastic, knives and forks.

Or so we thought.

Then some day I stumbled upon a small restaurant called Curry Cologne. At first I thought it could only be an Indian restaurant (curry, you see?), but further investigation showed that this was not the case. Instead we’re talking about a small restaurant serving Currywurst, and Currywurst only, but with some deluxing going on. Naturally, we had to check it out, so this Saturday while on another Cologne shopping spree we decided to go have ourselves a Currywurst deluxe, just as the place promises.

It’s located close to the Ring, near Friesenplatz, so you can easily reach it by foot, especially since we had to change trains there anyway. When we got there it was about 1:30 pm and the place, small as it is, was packed. Once we got seated we ordered the Deal, which is one Currywurst, one order of French fries with a sauce of your choice and one beverage for 6,70 Euro. You can have your sausage normal, spicy or fruity (we ordered spicy) and choose between seven sauces for the fries. I took the peanut-saté, Peter ordered fruity Frites sauce (and there’s also Aioli and French herbs). Both were really good, and I must admit that I liked Peter’s sauce a tiny bit more, so I kept on dipping my fries in his sauce.

Both the sausage and the fries were really good, the fries being of the Belgian kind, which is really large and thick and potatoey and also: really hot when they come to your table. And yes, this was a warning: Don’t be as impatient as I was, a burnt tongue hardly ever is worth it.

You can also order a Krautsalat, which is a bit like the German version of cole slaw, or be decadent and order the Candlelight Deal, which is two sausages and two orders of fries, but with wine or champagne.

We left the place content and full. It’s a nice place to get a quick bite to eat for lunch or dinner, with a little bit more chic and definitely more charm and cool then lots of other places serving similar food. The food is good and plenty and the location, just off Friesenplatz (and therefore close to the subway) is great. Of course I have to go back there, if only to taste the French herbs sauce, but also because of the special tingly feeling you get when your Currywurst is served on an actual plate. Yay!

Curry Cologne
Antwerpener Straße 5
50672 Köln
(0221) 58 94 556
info@currycologne.de
The menu (in German)

Kategorien
Baking My Sweet Tooth

Little Bees

Marzipan-Bienchen

This evening I made cupcakes for work tomorrow as a thank you for the lovely birthday gift my co-workers gave me. I made Nigella Lawson’s Carrot Cake Cupcakes and her Night and Day Cupcakes, both from „How to be a Domestic Goddess“, which was a birthday gift as well.

I had bought marzipan and yellow food color some days ago, because I wanted to make little marzipan bees for my birthday. That was back when I naively thought I’d have the time to actually bake a cake for my birthday. Since my father is an entomologist it would have been a nice surprise for him, but unfortunately I never got around to making anything remotely cake-like. For his birthday then. It’d be perfect.

Anyway, it seemed like I should use the marzipan anyway, since I was afraid I’d just forget if I didn’t and then I’d feel bad if I’d have to throw it away, so I decided to make marzipan bees to decorate one batch of the cupcakes with. It was easier then I thought but took a lot of time and patience. The result however is one of the cutest things I ever made in the kitchen.

I colored the marzipan yellow and made little oval bee bodies. Then I made the stripes and eyes with melted chocolate. I used a teaspoon to dribble the chocolate from for the stripes, but that didn’t work for the eyes, so I used a skewer instead, which – as it turned out – would have been the better choice for the stripes as well. The wings were little shredded almond pieces. I was a bit afraid of that part, but it turned out that finding good wing-sized almond pieces was actually harder than pushing the almond wings into the little marzipan bodies.

I also dribbled some more chocolate on the frosting, but that was mostly because I had so much left (bee stripes and eyes don’t really need a lot of chocolate) and I hate letting things go to waste and could think of nothing better to do with my little bowl of melted chocolate. Just eat it, you say? Well, maybe you’re right.

Needless to say I am really proud of my little bees. Too bad they’re going to be eaten. And soon.

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Baking Kitchen Rants

Adventures With Yeast

Somehow I refuse to believe that yeast and I are not meant for each other. I always come back and try again. There’s a good relationship in there somewhere, we just haven’t found it yet. At least we respect each other, or at least I respect The Yeast. A lot. I believe yeast is a very powerful and versatile being and that once we get to know each other better we will be able to achieve a lot of culinary goals together.

For now though, there’s a lot of struggle and misunderstandings. Most of the times we make a compromise, like yesterday when I wanted to make bialys which, for those who just like me, have never heard of those things before, are kind of like bagels, only they don’t get boiled first and they don’t have a hole but are rather punched down in the middle, leaving a depression which is then sprinkled with a mixture of finely chopped onions and poppy seeds. They seem to be a pretty New Yorkish thing and since I consider myself pretty up to date with all things edible, I was a bit confused wondering why I had never heard of bialys before.

So, naturally, once I learned that bialys exist, I had to make some myself. It’s a simple yeast dough, which usually means that I spend all evening in the kitchen either tearing my hair out in despair or leaving dough traces all around. I swear there were little bits of yeast dough everywhere. I don’t know how this always happens, it just does, as Peter never tires of pointing out.

In my own defense I would like to add that I only had two recipes and they both were Americans one, meaning that I had to deal with converting all the measurements, which added to the hair-tearing-out part of this specific cooking experience.

On the plus side I’d like to say that the dough rose perfectly. I used a trick I had read somewhere and put it in the oven with the lights on. Apparently that’s a damn good place for yeast dough to rise and practically climb out of its bowl.

The next struggle came when I had to punch in that depression which is practically what makes a bialy a bialy. Yeast dough has its own will when it comes to shapes and stuff, so convincing it to please, PLEASE stay flat in the middle is not as easy as it sounds. Then came the onion mixture, then came the oven. I had the bialys in the oven for about 30 minutes until they were brown and crispy on top and then set them on the counter to cool down. Two were eaten right away and considered tasty, the rest was packed in freezer bags and then put in the freezer.

In the end, I felt like this was one more step towards a wonderful and enriching relationship. We’re not there yet, though. But I’m confident that one day we have learned so much from each other that baking with yeast will just be easy-breezy for me. That day will come. I am sure.