A simple one after a day of walking in the mountains: I did a chopped salad with spitzkohl, grated carrot, long green pepper, and minced onion dressed with lemogrette (lemon-juice vinaigrette) with ground coriander and garlic paste. For the fish: cut monkfish fillets into medallions, season them with salt, pepper, and piment d'espelette, pan roast the medallions, serve on top of the salad drizzled with bit of the lemogrette.
We enjoyed this with some good bread.
Baked beans and pork inspired by an old Bittman recipe in the NYT.
Aside from dramatically reducing amount of pork (500g instead of 3lbs), I didn't mess around with the recipe too much.
With vegetable soup as a starter and a big green salad, this was a meal. A very good meal. :-)
Another soup idea from Wiener, mixed vegetable soup: celery root, carrot, potato, leek, and onion. Everything diced, sweated for a bit in butter, and then cooked in chicken bouillon for about 20 minutes. At the end I coarsely pureed the soup since we prefer that texture. Finished with salt, and white and black pepper. Nice and heavy on the vegetables.
To fill out the meal we had leftovers of the ham and knödel (freshly made from leftover batter) from Wednesday. And the required green salad.
We got the first sauerkraut of the season in last week's biokiste. Yay sauerkraut!
The prime motivator here was to have rösti. The pork chop was an improv to fit this.
The rösti was the absolutely simple version: grated Agria potatoes (well wrung out, of course) cooked with some salt in clarified butter. Sooooo good.
The chopped salad: combine chopped spitzkohl (no idea what this cabbage variety is called in English) and radicchio with grated carrot and minced onion. Dress with a combination of ketchup, mayo, mustard, rapeseed oil, white balsamico, sugar, salt, and pepper. Let stand 10-15 minutes after dressing it.
The pork chops: season the chops with salt, black pepper, ground cumin, and piment d'esplette. Pan roast them in a cast iron skillet. Serve on top of the chopped salad.
After another week of travel I again wanted simplicity and vegetables, this improv fit the bill.
Peel a butternut squash and cut it into 1-2cm chunks, toss with some salt and olive oil and then bake at 190C until they are lightly caramelized and ready to eat.
Meanwhile cook diced onion, long green pepper, and yellow carrot together with chopped garlic and some piri piri chilis in olive oil until the carrot softens a bit. Add a can of tomatoes, a pinch of saffron and freshly ground fennel seed and allspice, and some black pepper. Simmer until the tomatoes break down and the carrots are softened, then pick out the chilis and coarsely puree with the stick blender.
To serve: Make a pile of brown rice, add a layer of grated alp cheese, add a layer of sauce, top with the squash.
For the soup: combine in the pressure cooker one cup picked-over and rinsed yellow split peas, 5 cups water, 2 chopped carrots (one yellow and one orange), 1 chopped onion, 2 crushed garlic cloves, half a chicken bouillon cube, and a good pinch of herbs de provence. Seal up, and cook for 12 minutes after it starts to hiss. Open the pressure cooker, puree the soup, add some sliced wienerli and another pinch of herbs de provence, and simmer for a few minutes before serving.
The napa and couscous gratin is a recipe from Wiener, and it's a really good one... no big surprise there.
After four days at a course, I was craving vegetables. That's an easy one to satisfy, particularly on Thursdays.
Heat some olive oil in a pan with a couple piri-piri peppers. Add a couple mostly crushed cloves of garlic, diced onion, and diced carrot and cook a couple minutes. Add some chopped cauliflower and salt and cook, stirring very occasionally so that cauliflower takes on some color, until the cauliflower is ready to eat. Stir in some whole wheat penne, adjust seasonings, and serve topped with grated cheese and chopped parsley.
Together with a big green salad, this was just what I was looking for.
When in doubt about what to do with the big head of escarole in the fridge... go for beans and greens.
The soup: pumpkin, carrots, onion, potato, ginger, butter, curry powder.
The veal: brown cubed veal well, set aside; cook minced onion, a couple halved garlic cloves, ginger cut into discs until aromatic; sprinkle over some flour and cook a couple minutes longer; add water and make sure to get the brown bits off the bottom of the pan; add back the veal along with half a vanilla bean and a couple sprigs of thyme; simmer until the veal is tender. Finish the sauce with a bit of tomato paste to add body.
The knödel I made from a recipe in Wiener, but I got the consistency of the dough badly wrong, so they fell apart while cooking. Very sad stuff; I'll have to try again soon.
After the less than 100% successful rösti on Tuesday, I needed to do one correctly. This was my standard potato version: grate the potatoes, wring them out well, cook in peanut oil until nicely crispy, season while cooking. Verrrrry nice.
As a protein course I cooked some nice little lambchops unadorned in the grill pan. We ate them with a vinaigrette made from balsamico, olive oil, rosemary, and garlic.
Of course we had a green salad as well.
For the chicken: rub chicken leg quarters with olive oil, season them well with salt, pepper, raclette spices, and piment d'esplette. Bake at 180C until the chicken is done and the skin is crispy.
The cabbage: Cook some sliced leek in olive oil, add thinly sliced savoy cabbage and salt. Wilt the cabbage for a few minutes, add white wine, caraway, and crushed juniper berries. Braise until the cabbage is tender.
The carrots: cut carrots into chunks, saute in butter until they shrivel a bit and take on some color, add cream and salt. Simmer until the cream is mostly absorbed. Season with white pepper and serve.
The cabbage would have been better with some stock instead of wine; savoy doesn't need the acidity.
First fondue of the year!
We picked the cheese mixture up at the local cheese shop and combined the cheese (330g) with 100ml white wine, one clove of garlic, 1/2Tbs potato starch, nutmeg, and 1 shot kirsch. We ate it with baguette, a green salad, and a pot of peppermint tea.
mmm, good stuff
Last night was simple: I did the first beet rösti of the year along with a small potato rösti (with bacon on the side). Other than learning that there's a not-so-nonstick-spot in the middle of my usual rösti pan, this turned out well.
Another adapted Wiener recipe: Wilt some cleaned and stemmed spinach in the microwave; drain and chop it. Meanwhile saute minced garlic in olive oil until it takes on a bit of color, add equal proportions of cream and milk and bring to a gentle simmer. Add some grated cheese (I used a reasonably sharp raw-milk alp cheese) and stir to integrate it. Add the spinach and heat through. Just before serving stir in chopped basil and parsley, grate in some nutmeg, and adjust salt. Serve over tagliatelle.
The cheese and cream here really bring out the flavor of the spinach and make for a very nice dish.
Two more dishes from Wiener: a salad with beets, apples, and walnuts and celery-root schnitzel with herb-yogurt sauce.
The salad, a version of Autumn in a bowl: steam some small beets, peel them, halve them, cut them into slices. Peel an apple with good acidity, quarter it, core it, cut into slices. Coarsely chop some walnuts. Combine the beets, apple, and walnuts with a dressing made from minced garlic, parsley, sharp mustard, crushed caraway, brown sugar, salt, black pepper, balsamico, lemon juice, and olive oil. Let everything marinate for a while.
The celery root: Make a sauce from yogurt, sour cream, chopped herbs (parsley, thyme, basil), salt, pepper, and lemon juice. Let stand. Peel a celery root and cook in boiling water until about tender. Slice into 1/2cm thick slices. Bread with flour-egg-breadcrumbs, then cook the slices in olive oil. Serve with the yogurt sauce. The trick here is to make sure the celery cooks long enough to get almost creamy.
We also had a big green salad.
