In da Kuchl/in the kitchen

Mir war nach Reindling, traditionell gemacht in einem 2L Reindl von Riess.

Das schneckenförmige Einrollen üben wir noch.

 

Fertig gebacken fast doppelt so hoch.

 

Alles was nicht im Magen verstaut wurde.

 

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Traditional soul food: Reindling.

I got a pretty saucepan of suitable size for this treat from Riess.

The recipe says to roll the filled dough in a spiral, I’ll practice that some more. But it turned out fine after 50min of gentle baking, and we plan to finish eating the remains soon.

 

 

The mantis garden W2014

Gestehen wir uns ein: dieser Sommer ist Geschichte. Daher habe ich mich schlau gemacht, ob und wie man diverse Gemüschen überwintern kann.

Zucchini
Zucchini sind einjährig, daher gibt es nicht zu überwintern.

Tomaten
BlackAngels Tomatenspende ist riesengroß geworden und hat verhältnismäßig wenig getragen, daher überlege ich mir noch, ob ich es kommendes Jahr noch einmal versuchen werde -j etzt wo ich weiß, was Ausgeizen ist, könnte ich die Staude ja besser kontrollieren :)
Die nondeskripte “Naschtomate” hat sich trotz Blattlausbefall und auch sonst sehr lausigem August so bemüht, daß ich die gewonnenen Samen aufbewahren, und auch ev. gleich ein oder zwei davon einsetzen werde, um zu sehen, wie das im Winter funktioniert. An und für sich sind Tomaten ja mehrjährig, sie vertragen nur keinen Frost.

Paprika
Hatte ich heuer im Sommer keine, aber es spricht nichts dagegen, ein paar Samen auszusäen und zu schauen was passiert. Aus einer gekauften Biopaprika (Gelber Stierhorn) habe ich etliche Samen gewonnen. Ich werde kommendes Jahr im Herbst welche säen, weil man Paprika angeblich überwintern kann.

Kräuter
Basilikum und Koriander wurden einfach ins Warme gestellt und beerntet.
Minze, Petersilie und Schnittlauch wurden mal versuchsweise im Freien überwintert, aber irgendwann sind sie dann doch vertrocknet.

Eat like a pirate day

September 19, time for a hearty stew:

Fry up 100g of smoked tofu and 1 small onion, add 3 cloves garlic, and add half a bottle of dark beer. Simmer for about 20 minutes after adding 200g of mushrooms, 1 stick celery,, 1-2 carrots and one large potato, and some thyme and rosemary.

Eat, drink lots of beer and sing pirate songs. ARRRRRRRR!

Vampire food

I am getting prepared for winter soul food; one of my favourites is borscht. The vibrant red colour of the beets would make every vampire proud – and when I hold a peeled human heart beet in my hand I totally feel like a vampire straight out of True Blood ;)
I found this nice recipe and my RPG guests have to eat it at least once per winter. This season I plan to stay in character and make a suitable cake afterwards.

 

Sometimes when making borscht a single beet can be squirreled away and used for pink pasta. The recipe describes a salad, but I am sure it will also taste very nice when eaten warm.

Holiday bento

Since I have some days off, I tried some new recipes that fit into bento boxes. The Japanese omelette was very yummy, but we didn’t get to eat it cold because the thing miraculously vanished immediately.

For today’s workshops I made something light:  simple zucchini-ricotta wraps to celebrate my zucchini harvest.

And tonight’s dinner: to use my oven efficiently, I put in two things together: a tiny olive-cheese cake (savoury, not sweet) and a nice big piece of quiche lorraine (minus the egg, and with smoked tofu instead of ham, and I used a square dish instead of a round, because I am a Яebel!). The cake is to be eaten with some salad, and the quiche is frozen in small portions for busy times when there’s no time for cooking. Both pieces rapidly diminished just now *ahem*

 

The mantis garden S2014

Nachdem ich nun einen Balkon habe, gibt es natürlich seit heuer auch Gartenbestrebungen. Weil ich faul bin und gerne gut esse, gibt es hauptsächlich Gemüse: Zucchini, Tomaten und anderes pflegeleichtes Zeug, sowie natürlich Kräuter.
Angeblich versorgt eine einzige Zucchinipflanze zwei Leute einen Sommer lang mit Gemüse, und ich war schon sehr gespannt, ob das wirklich so gut funktioniert.

Nachdem ich die heurige Saison erst im Juli, also sehr spät anfangen konnte, habe ich es mir leicht gemacht und zwei fertige “Naschtomaten”-Pflanzen gekauft, dazu hat BlackAngel mich mit einer Zucchini und einer mysteriösen Jungtomate versorgt. Hat auch alles funktioniert, und irgendwann hat die Geheimtomate ihre Früchte gezeigt – sie sind am Ende gelb, und haben teilweise die kuriosesten Formen.

schelm
Abbildung 1: 1 Tomate (wirklich)

Auch bei den Kräutern habe ich etwas nachgeholfen und Topfpflanzen gekauft: Nanaminze und Basilikum, weil ich die am häufigsten verwende. Das Basilikum stand im Supermarkt und sah schon sehr trauig aus, aber nach dem Umtopfen gab es hier sehr viel Caprese und andere Leckereien. Für Schnittlauch und Petersilie habe ich Samen gekauft, die Petersilie ist auch wirklich nach langer Zeit gewachsen.

Leider hat der kalte Sommer die Ernte recht überschaubar ausfallen lassen: 2 Zucchini und etliche Cocktailtomaten, die Kräuterernte war aber ausreichend.

Und jede Menge Mehltau (?) gab es gratis dazu…

 

Dazugelernt habe ich auch einiges. Man muß nicht immer Samen kaufen

  • Tomatensamen kann man direkt nach dem Verzehr der Tomate einpflanzen, bei mir haben diese sehr rasch gekeimt. Man muß dabei offenbar nur aufpassen, keine Samen von Kreuzungen zu nehmen (F1), weil das Resultat dieser Pflanzen mendelt, also sehr unterschiedlich ausfallen kann.
  • gekaufte Koriandersamen, die zum Kochen gedacht sind, treiben auch oft aus; ich hatte zwei Sorten im Test, und eine davon hat auch wild gekeimt.

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Aand all of a sudden, autumn.

August is barely over, yet we have 15° Celsius and persistent rain. So I got confused and made some autumnal food, pumpkin soup: 1 Hokkaido, 1/2 onion and 2 garlic cloves in huge cubes, roasted in a pot and then cooked for an hour, smushed to creamy soup and seasoned with salt and pepper. Served with pumpkin seed oil and some dried pumpkin seads – so easy and yet so tasty.

Skin food

Reducing carbohydrates might improve one’s skin, so I tried some low-carb recipes.

First, some alternatives for bread: walnut bread where flour is replaced with wheat bran and linseed, and linseed-almond bread. Both recipes include curd, and the resulting bakery is rather juicy. It has to be noted that the linseed-almond dough is rather runny, so I used muffin moulds to make conveniently portioned pieces. A third of the recipe’s amount is enough for 6 muffin moulds.

bakey

And Kupferfeuer pointed me to the curious case of the spaghetti squash. I have a 1kg specimen on my table and prepared it like the Italians do with pasta – cook it, noodle up the fruit and serve it with tomato sauce. Just enough for two hungry people, nom!

More summer food

We love falafel, and I found a recipe which doesn’t drown them in hot oil.

I used 200g chickpeas, which is about 3/4 of the original recipe, with the original amount of spices (except the garlic, less is better) and got 10 falafel. Really really good falafel.

I’ll use cooked chickpeas next time to see if the dish is more digestible then.

Summer salad

Preparing yummy meals for work is complicated when temperatures rise, so I looked into reproducing a yummy vegan salad, called Moroccan salad, we often buy at a local bakery.

Their website says it consists of

  • vegetables stewed in a tajine
  •  tabouleh (couscous and lentils with parsley)
  • hummus

 

I don’t have a tajine, but I simply put some oil, one tablespoon smushed onions, one eggplant, one courgette and some red peppers (equal amounts in any case) into my big wok, seasoned it with Ras el hanout and chili and simmered it until disintegration was imminent (about an hour).

For the tabouleh, I simmered 150g of red lentils for about 7 minutes (I usually overcook them, so yes: shorter cooking time == less mush). I poured boiling water over 150g bulgur and let it rest for 10 minutes. Mixing lentils and bulgur with lots of parsley and mint leaves finishes this part of the dish.

 

The combination is incredibly tasty :)

Nepalese food of bliss

Eating at a Viennese restaurant called Tibet acquainted me with momo, Nepalese dumplings. The cheese-filled variant is my favourite,  and recently I found the recipe online. Dumplings have the perfect size for lunch boxes, so I’ll report back if cooking momos is successful.

Bavarian weiss vurst

At my previous workplace I had lots of Bavarian colleagues. Once a month, we would gather in the office kitchen to have a big Weißwurst brunch (consisting of lots of veal sausages imported by the colleagues, pretzel rolls and the only permissible mustard: Händlmaier).

Recreating this brunch without meat is difficult, if one is picky concerning the taste of the sausage exclusively. We tested sausages advertised as Weißwurst by Vegourmet, but found them to be not much different from generic vegan sausages you can buy in larger supermarkets.

If one appreciates the combination of vegan sausage, Händlmaier mustard and a bite of pretzel together however, this makes for a nice Sunday brunch. A beer doesn’t hurt.

Stomach fights back

The cafeteria at work does not like vegetarians (or any type of good food, for that matter), so I started doing regular DIY lunches. Of course the puzzle-loving part of my brain instantly fell in love with the Japanese art of bento – but I haven’t looked into traditional bento recipes yet. Instead I made Ento and OriEnto (mock duck, resp. falafel, hummus and vegetables), or packed leftovers and the like.

Before I invested in dedicated dishes (yes, bento boxes have caused many many addicted collectors), I decided to try myself and see if I could persist making lunch for both of us at least three times per week; two weeks passed and  I managed not to lose patience (I do simple dishes; but of course cooking and kitchen cleaning still require time every day). But it really helps if the other person likes the stuff you cook :)

Now I’ve ordered two types of bento dish (modern yet pretty bento-dedicated boxes from the French company Monbento, and ordinary glass storage boxes which can be microwaved) to be used in the future. And I do hope I don’t succumb to foodography and bore you to tears with tons of bento box pictures :)  (but those chances are slim – lucky us).

Bag of Nom (+4 stamina)

As a vegetarian I have a hard time finding edible food in our work cafeteria. So I started bringing my own noms instead.

For the worshippers of ease there are gazillions of tasty soups and stews, for the lovers of cuteness and healthy food there is the Japanese tradition of bento. All of them require similarly dimensioned boxing, so a single carrying device should be sufficient.

I found this very good bento bag tutorial – I will just use less colours for mine:

bento

Curryvurst!

Soma and I always have vegetarian Curryvurst when we are at the WGT in Leipzig. As I did not want to wait a whole year for the experience, I picked up some vegan vurst and combined several sauce recipes until I was satisfied with the result.

I mix and heat:
250ml tomato purée
2 spoons of hot mustard
2 spoons of grated apple

and put in:
salt, pepper
1 dried chili
curry powder
hot paprika powder
Worcester sauce

Sufficient for for about 4 sausages.

Wall of food shame 2013

It is quite educating to have a list of all the food that went bad and has been thrown away. 2013 saw these things gone beyond edibility:

  • 6 apples
  • 1 pear
  • 1/2 bell pepper
  • 150g toast
  • 200g cooked cereal and smoked tofu
  • 200ml joghurt
  • 2 garlic bulbs
  • 4 tomatoes
  • 2 naan breads (before I discovered that I shouldn’t be a wuss; these things are vacuum-packed and last quite a while)
  • 1 citron
  • 1/2 portion curry and rice
  • 1/2 pineapple
  • 100g smoked tofu

 

Most of it went bad during a heat wave (I wanted to eat nothing at all). Fruit on the other hand, if not taken from its packaging immediately after bringing home, tended to get mouldy.

I hope I’m able to reduce this amount of wasted nom next year.