Thursday salad

Inspired by the contents of the box: quarter some new potatoes and steam them until just cooked through. Toss warm with olive oil, mashed garlic, salt, chopped basil, and minced onion. Steam some green beans until crisp-tender, toss into the potatoes. Add toasted and coarsely ground almonds, black pepper, more chopped basil, more olive oil, and a splash of balsamico. Let stand 15 minutes or so, stirring occasionally. Just before serving mix in some grated parmesan. Serve over lettuce with cherry tomatoes on the side, drizzle with olive oil.

Wednesday: stuffed zucchini

Lots of zucchini to use up!

Grind some lamb with onion and garlic. Season well with salt, black pepper, cumin, and piment d'espelette. Cook for a few minutes. Stuff into hollowed out zucchini halves, top with feta cheese and tomato slices. Bake at 175C until the meat is cooked through and the zucchini is soft.

Serve with rice and mint-feta-yogurt sauce.

Tuesday leftovers

To use the leftover chicken from Monday: caramelize some thinly sliced onions and chopped garlic with some olive oil. Stir in the boned and diced chicken and cook gently for a few minutes. Just before serving stir in coarsely chopped mint and some lemon juice.

We ate this with basmati rice, the leftover yogurt sauce, and sliced zucchini cooked with butter.

Monday miscellany

It's cool enough to cook again, so I had to take advantage of it.

The main dish was chicken baked with fennel (from Bittman), which is simple enough: slice some fennel; put it in a baking dish with some olive oil and season; bake at 175C for 10 minutes; add chicken parts and season with salt and pepper; bake another 30 minutes or so, removing the breast pieces when they are done and setting aside; serve with lemon slices.

As a side I did vegetable rösti of a sort: grate some zucchini then salt it and let it drain; mix with minced onion, mashed garlic, lemon zest, grated carrot, lemon zest, chopped basel, and enough flour and breadcrumbs to make you believe it's going to hold together; form small patties and saute in olive oil. We ate these with a sauce I made by blending together feta cheese, mashed garlic, yogurt, and mint.

The zucchini things didn't hold together quite as well as I would have liked, but they (as well as the chicken) tasted great.

Friday: baked ratatouille

The ingredients in this weeks box were perfect for a ratatouille.

Put some olive oil in a baking dish. Layer in thinly sliced zucchini and eggplant, very thinly sliced onion, sliced tomatoes, chopped parsley, thyme, and basil, salt, pepper, and some crushed garlic. Top with bread crumbs mixed with olive oil and bake at 175C until it's ready.

Really nice stuff.

Wednesday's salads

Still too hot to cook!

1. Potato salad: sliced potatoes that I steamed in the morning and then refrigerated all day tossed with mashed garlic, minced onion, parsley, chives, rapeseed oil, white balsamico, mustard (plenty of it), and a bit of vegetable bouillon
2. Smoked pork salad: diced (1cm) smoked pork loin tossed a vinaigrette (lemon, garlic, peanut oil, honey), chives, and piment d'espelette
3. Cold pasta tossed with a pesto rosso (dried tomatoes, basil, pine nuts, garlic, olive oil, parmesan, black pepper)
4. A big green salad

Tuesday: Bread salad

When we got back from the mountains it was hot as hell in the flat, so there was no way I was going to do real cooking. Instead I did a tomato-bread salad (panzanella) with some leftover pagnol, tomatoes from the box, basil from the balcony, olive oil, garlic, onion, balsamico, and a bit of veggie bouillon. After letting this soak for 30 minutes we ate it over lettuce.

Catching up.

I'm hopelessly behind with the blog (again) so here's an attempt to catch up with at least some of the things I've made recently:

1. chicken legs marinated in garlic, lime juice, fish sauce, sriracha, soy, and shallots, then broiled. I served the extra marinade as sauce (after boiling it, of course).
2. A salad made from grated zucchini (salted for 30 minutes), chopped tomatoes, olive oil, white balsamico, and basil
3. wurstsalat (the usual method)
4. Japanese-inspired beef salad: thin steaks seasoned, seared in the grill pan, thinly sliced, and then marinated in soy, mirin, sake, and sesame oil
5. thinly sliced peppers marinated in balsamico and olive oil
6. potato salad (more than once, multiple kinds)
7. salade nicoise
8. Chard cannelloni: chard leaves cooked with olive oil, garlic, and piri-piri chilis, then chopped and mixed with finely diced smoked bacon (from Wallis) and parmesan. We rolled this up in lasagna noodles, topped with a bit more parmesan and ran it under the broiler for a couple minutes before serving drizzled with good olive oil

Another round of energy bars

Made a batch of energy bars for a backpacking trip. I used more or less the same proportions as last time but I did stronger spicing (2tsp ground ginger, more nutmeg, more black pepper) and, due to ingredient availability in the kitchen, I made a couple substitutions:

• 100g dried mango instead of the prunes
• 200g honey instead of 110g honey and 90g zuckerruben sirup

I also left out the butter, but that's because I forgot, not due to any clever plan. ;-)

The results were, once again, really good. This makes a large quantity so we should be set for a few weekends.

Tueday's randomness

A couple of weeks ago I marked a recipe for gooseberry relish that looked like an interesting way to use the gooseberries from our balcony when they got ripe. Last night as the night. Since there weren't a ton of berries (our bush is small) I ended up doing a half recipe, which meant there was insufficient liquid to put the ginger and mustard seeds in a bag; I just dumped them in and then picked out the ginger slices before serving (the mustard seeds blended in well with the seeds from the berries themselves). I also didn't add any additional sugar other than what came in with the elderberry syrup. The resulting preparation maybe could have used brightening up with some lemon juice, but it was still quite good.

We ate the relish over thinly sliced pork steaks that I seasoned with salt and cooked quickly in the grill pan.

As an accompaniment I made a batch of coconut rice (using coconut milk to replace most of the water in a standard short-grain rice recipe). I have no idea where this idea came from, but it worked reasonably well.

Of course we had a big green salad as well.

More salads

I did a couple salads to take for a picnic by the Rhein: wurstsalat and fennel marinated with preserved lemon slices (recipe from Bittman, but I used mustard seeds instead of coriander).