After two nights of burritos we still had tortillas left to eat; since yesterday was warm, I rejected the idea of enchiladas (besides, those are much better with corn tortillas). The next thought was to do wraps; that was a good one.
To fill the wraps we had:
I have no idea how long it's been since I did burritos. Yesterday the craving hit and we were able to find some reasonable looking (and not extortionately priced) flour tortillas.
A simple one: I made a tomato sauce by gently cooking some minced garlic in butter until it was golden then adding tomato puree and simmering for 15-20 minutes; I finished with cream and salt. For the pasta, I lightly browned some gnocchi in a pan and then add strips of ham, chopped basil, and chopped chives. Served topped with the sauce, this was quite good.
Start by cutting some new potatoes into chunks and boiling them until almost done. Meanwhile cook some diced bacon, minced garlic, and diced onion in olive oil with a couple piri-piri chilis. When the potatoes are ready, add them to the pan along with some diced long-green pepper and some salt and pepper. Brown the potatoes lightly and serve with a salad.
We had a nice rib steak in the fridge that wanted to be eaten. As usual, I kept it simple: Season the steak with salt and pepper and brown it well on both sides. Toss the pan in a 200C oven for 10-15 minutes until the steak is done. While the steak is resting, deglaze the pan with a splash of red wine and some veal essence. Reduce this substantially, stir in a bit of mustard and serve over the sliced steak.
As vegetable sides we had steamed broccoli (also nice with the sauce) and caramelized fennel. Of course there was a green salad involved too.
Really good food.
We had a piece of Taleggio from the weekend (it didn't really work on sandwiches and wasn't that big of a hit on the cheese plate) that it would have been a shame to toss out. This was an improv to use it up.
Cut some broccoli into florets and steam it until it is crisp-tender. Set aside. Cook some short pasta (whole wheat spirals for us) until just underdone and drain it well. Put back in the pan, add diced Taleggio, some minced garlic, chopped walnuts, chopped basil, and the broccoli. Mix over medium heat until the cheese has all melted; serve topped with grated sbrinz.
The combination of broccoli, walnuts, and Taleggio was quite a good one.
We had a couple of cream puffs (for want of a better word) leftover from Saturday night that were just screaming to be used with the wild strawberries we had gathered during our hike. I didn't do anything fancy: whip some cream with sugar, cut the cream puffs in half, fill one side with berries, top with cream, top with berries, top with the other half, spread berries around.
As an appetizer I did a farinata with onions (cook some thinly sliced onions in the pan until they take on some color, then ladle the batter over them).
We had a couple friends over for snacks yesterday evening. Mostly the food centered around a cheese platter (a bunch of different Swiss cheeses, dried fruit, walnuts, crackers, etc.) but I did do a bit of kitchen work:
A strategy for using up the half baguette we had leftover from Tuesday night (I kept the baguette in a plastic bag with a moist paper towel so that it didn't turn into a rock).
Since it was too hot for real cooking we did a big salad: greens, shredded carrot, cherry tomatoes, lightly steamed cauliflower, gruyere, and some cold cuts (roast pork and ochsenmaul). As dressing I made a basil-chive vinaigrette. This combined with some good bread made for a very nice meal.
An easy meal with Andrea's parents at the end of a longish day: Joe's special, rice with cheese sauce (butter, flour, good chicken stock, bresso, piment d'esplette for those who wanted it), green salad.
Andrea's parents were visiting and the weather was good, so I fired up the grill. Nothing fancy this time: a few varieties of sausage and some speck. As an experiment (remembering the smoked bologna recipe from Thrill of the Grill), I also grilled a piece of fleischkäse: I started it on the cooler part of the grill until both sides had the chance to take a bit of color and it puffed a bit, then moved it to a medium-hot part to finish the coloring before serving. Good stuff.
To go with the grilled things we had bread, potato salad, and a green salad.
An inspiration for preserving some of the fantastic sweet cherries we have:
A simple one to use the peas (snow-pea like) from the biokiste.
Cut some pork tenderloin into 2cm chunks. Season these and then brown them in clarified butter; set aside. Add some good chicken stock to the pan, deglaze, and reduce to a syrup; pour over the pork. Add some butter to the pan and cook some minced garlic and onion for a couple of minutes. Add the peas, salt, and pepper and mix well. Cover and let cook a few minutes, until the peas are almost crisp-tender. Add back the pork and its liquid and cook another minute or so.
This was a very nice combination of flavors.
Of course we also had a big green salad.
An improv selected to use up the broccoli from last week's biokiste.
I was feeling a bit lazy, so we did a big mixed salad instead of real cooking: roasted chicken from the store, soisson beans, steamed beets, steamed fennel, red and yellow bell pepper, and lettuce. As a dressing I did a vinaigrette with dill, olive oil, cider vinegar, garlic, and a bit of melasse for sweetness. We also had a nice loaf of bread on the side.
The protein course was leftover meatloaf. To go with it I did some steamed beets and a whole-wheat pasta with a simple cheese sauce: melt some butter in a pan, add some flour and cook a couple of minutes. Whisk in some rich chicken stock. Stir in minced dried tomato and grated gruyere. After the cheese melts grind in some black pepper and add raclette spices. Taste for seasoning before stirring in the pasta.
Simple and very, very nice.
This one was the result of a nice piece of veal loin that we found half price and the zucchini in this week's biokiste. It somehow seems early for zucchini, but I guess it's not.
Nothing particularly fancy here: ground beef and Kalbsbrät (2:1), minced onion and garlic, finely diced carrot, salt, and pepper. Mixed well, formed into a loaf, topped with a glaze made from tomato paste, ketchup, cayenne, and bourbon. Baked at 175C until the internal temperature was 75C.
To accompany I made oven potatoes (using the fantastic spring potatoes from the biokiste) and a cabbage salad (shredded cabbage tossed with salt and left to sit for an hour or so, then rinsed, squeezed out, and tossed with white wine vinegar and rapeseed oil).
Of course we had a green salad as well.
Very good food.
Satisfying a craving for dumplings...
The filling: ground pork, finely chopped cabbage, minced garlic, minced ginger, soy sauce. We wrapped this in wonton skins to form various different shapes and then cooked the dumplings in a bamboo steamer. We ate them with two dipping sauces: soy sauce, black vinegar, ginger juice; dark soy sauce, mashed garlic, chili oil, xiao xing wine.
The stir fry was chopped broccoli stems cooked with Szechuan chili-bean paste and some hoisin. Served over rice, of course.
The second dipping sauce suffered from the fact that the dark soy we have just isn't that great, but otherwise this was really good food. The dumplings are so easy that we really ought to do them more often.
There was chicken stock in the fridge and I had a craving for something spicy; this is what happened.
Brown some diced pork shoulder in peanut oil with salt. Add chopped garlic and diced onion and carrot. Cook until the carrot starts to soften. Deglaze with red wine and let that reduce most of the way. Add ground cumin, coriander, and both sweet and hot paprika and cook for a couple more minutes. Add chicken stock and a bit of tomato paste and simmer. Ten minutes before serving add some corn and kidney beans. Adjust salt by adding soy sauce.
To go along with the soup I also made a pan of cornbread; it was a very nice pairing.
The usual cuisine de kuhlschrank: a quasi-random menu based on what was in the fridge.
To go with a salad made from the leftover grilled steak and vegetables from Saturday: warm potato salad made from sliced potatoes, bacon, garlic, cider vinegar, rapeseed oil, and plenty of dill.
