This week's biokiste includes a note from the farmers asking our understanding of the smaller quantities of some things (particularly tomatoes) and the amazing dirt level of the lettuce. The floods last week hit them too.
Tuesday night I found a bag of blackeyed peas in the drawer; that provided the main ingredient for Wednesday's meal.
After soaking the beans overnight, I boiled them with onion, garlic, and some bay leaf until they were just about done. In the meantime I browed some diced bacon in a skillet, added chopped onion, garlic, and hornpeperoni and cooked with some additional olive oil until the peppers softened. After adding the cooked beans, some vegetable boullion, black pepper, a pinch of cayenne, and some of the bean cooking liquid, I covered this and let it simmer 10 or so minutes, until the beans were completely cooked. I served the beans topped with chives.
We also had a big green salad.
In marked contrast to the last time I did a similar dish, this time it was pasta with vegetables and not the other way around. :-)
For vegetables I used zucchini and carrots cut into matchsticks as well as finely chopped onion. I sauteed these in olive oil until the vegetables were tender then served them with pesto (basil, pine nuts, garlic, sbrinz, olive oil) over spaghetti.
We also had a leftover cervelas from the weekend and a green salad.
Andrea's parents came through town yesterday, so we did some grilling.
We didn't have anything fancy: Cervelas (er, sorry, "Bebbi Klopfer"), Grillschnecken (a sausage like Nürnberger bratwurst that's rolled into a spiral and fixed with a skewer; this is another sausage from canton Vaud), and pork chops (bone-in, seasoned with plenty of salt and freshly cracked pepper).
I also made a room temp potato salad (slow-cooked potatoes, sherry vinegar, mayo, and chives) and some quick pickles (daikon, cucumber, and celery salted for a bit in the pickle press then rinsed and mixed with cracked coriander and rice vinegar). Of course we had a green salad as well.
Simple food, but good food.
This ice cream place is relatively new and about 10 minutes walk from our flat. Not only is the ice cream is excellent, but they have interesting flavors (ginger-prosecco! chocolate-chili!), and it's made from bio-milk by a small company in Engadin. So not exactly local, but it wins on all the other fronts. :-)
I think we finally found our ice cream source... too bad it's so close.
This is a pretty substantially modified version of a recipe from Bon Appetit. It made more sense to me to integrate the solids into the burger and there was no way in hell I was going to use the quantity of sugar they call for.
For the mayo: Finely mince a couple canned chipotles and add them to 1/4 cup mayo along with a few tsp of the adobo. Add a couple Tbs orange juice and mix well. Taste for heat and orange juice. Note: this would be better if the OJ were reduced first so that you can add more without overly thinning the mayo. That's for next time.
For the burgers:
500g ground beef
salt
1 small red onion, chopped
1 habanero, chopped
1 Tbs fresh thyme leaves
1 Tbs peanut oil
Combine the onion, habanero, thyme, and oil in a minichop and process until minced. Mix gently but thoroughly with the beef and salt (not a full portion, there's soy sauce in the marinade). Form burgers.
For the marinade:
2 Tbs soy sauce
2 Tbs peanut oil
1 Tbs prepared mustard
1 tsp sugar
10 allspice berries, ground
Combine everything and mix well.
Spoon the marinade over the burgers and let them sit for 20-30 minutes at room temperature before grilling.
This was spectacular food.
We've been saying for months now that we ought to get a grill, but somehow it hasn't happened. Friday's Splendid Table "Griller's Chronicle" recipe for Jamaican Jerk Burgers with Orange Chipotle Mayo was the straw that broke the camel's back. Yesterday we determinedly set out and returned with a nice-looking kettle grill (on the tram... what fun). Last night I put the new toy, er, I mean tool, to the test.
I made some pretty substantial modifications to both the recipe and the technique, so I'm going to do a standalone post for the burgers.
In addition to the burgers, I grilled some zucchini planks and a hornpeperoni. We also had a nice green salad.
It's great to have a grill again... it was dumb to wait so long. :-)
I feel a rant coming on about cookbooks and the importance of mise en place for home cooking... we'll see how this develops
This was a straightforward one but oh... so... good.
I started by sauteeing finely chopped onion, minced garlic, diced celery, and diced carrots in some olive oil until everything started to soften. I added green (French) lentils and some vegetable boullion, fresh thyme, bay leaf, and fresh savory and cooked until the lentils were about 3/4 done. Then I added some sliced saucisson Vaudoise and let it simmer until everything was done.
I suspected that the addition of savory was going to lead to something nice and I definitely was not disappointed.
As a side I made sauteed cauliflower. And we had a green salad. All veggies (except garlic) were from the biokiste.
Andrea wasn't home for dinner last night, so I went for something quick that helped use up the last of the veggies from last week: potatoes and salad.
After boiling the peeled potatoes, I served them with a cheese sauce made from Emmenthaler to which I added chopped parsley and chives.
The salads were shredded carrots with blended salsa and diced cucumber with salt and vinegar.
simple and nice.
I'm guessing that the missing tomatoes this week are due to the absurd amounts of rain we've been getting, but that's just a guess. The newcomer this week is celery.
I planned to make this dish with chicken, but veal was on sale so I used veal instead. It has happened before, it will happen again...
As to the dish: I started by lightly browning 300g of veal geschnetzeltes in olive oil. I set the meat aside and added a finely chopped red onion, a couple minced garlic cloves, and a good sized carrot (diced small) to the pan. After cooking for about 5 minutes, I added a zucchini cut into chunks. This cooked for a minute or so, then I added a small amount of stock (bouillon), the veal, a Tbs of capers, and a Tbs chopped fresh herbs (rosemary, thyme, and lemon thyme). This cooked, covered over low heat, for about 20 minutes, then I added a few Tbs of cream and let it cook, uncovered, another couple minutes. Just before serving I added a pinch of cayenne, a couple grinds of black pepper, and a good quantity (~1/4 cup) chopped parsley and basil.
As a side we had the leftover pseudo-succotash from Monday and some rice/wild rice.
Oh yeah, and a green salad.
Last night I did another cold (room temp, really) tomato soup variation and used the sweet corn from last week's biokiste to make something resembling succotash (without lima beans it can't be real succotash and I haven't found lima beans here).
The tomato soup was simplicity itself: I put the tomatoes through the food mill (medium disc); added some new mexican chili powder, a bit of chipotle powder, salt, and cream; mixed well; and then let sit for a while for the flavors to meld.
For the pseudo-succotash I cooked a chopped red onion, some minced garlic, and a few chopped hornpeperoni (long green peppers) in olive oil with lardons (smoked bacon). When the peppers started to soften and the bacon was cooked, I added the corn kernels, some soissons beans, and a bit of chicken bouillon and then let the whole thing cook gently for another 5-10 minutes, until the corn was cooked.
Both the soup and the succotash were very good.
We also had some bread and a green salad.
Wine: Valley of the Moon 1999 Pinot Blanc. I'd been afraid to open this bottle because I thought there was no way it would have survived 7-8 years. Luckily that was incorrect. It's totally different than when it was young, but it was still quite nice.
I bought too much stuff for our breakfasts this weekend, so last night we had the remaining ham, salami, and fleischkase as abendbrot. We also had the last bit of vegetable tart from Saturday night and a nice green salad.
For this I more or less followed the technique (if not the recipe) for eggplant tart in BittmanWorld. As vegetables I used onion, garlic, zucchini, and two kinds of peppers (red bell and green "hornpeperoni"). I complemented the basil with a bit of fresh thyme and used grated sbrinz as the cheese.
My crust, naturally, ended up being ugly. I'm normally not quite so bad with pie crust, but this was a larger, deeper, pan than our usual tart pan and, and, and. Still, the crust had nice flavor and acceptable texture.
As I said, the result isn't pretty, but it sure was tasty:
There were biokiste potatoes to be used, so this time I didn't do rösti from a bag... I started from scratch. Since things turned out rather well, I'll do some detail.
After peeling and grating the potatoes (I used the standard box grater we brought from the US, but I think a coarser grater would be better here), I wrapped them in a kitchen towel and wrung them out very well to get out as much moisture as possible. I think this really helps to get a crisp result.
I started by cooking some thinly sliced smoked bacon in peanut oil over medium-high heat in a non-stick pan large enough to hold the final rösti. When the bacon was cooked (but not browned), I added the potatoes, a few pinches of salt, mixed everything well, and then pressed down the mass (with the lid from a smaller pot) to form a cake. After cooking for 3-4 minutes, I stirred everything up, seasoned a bit more, and then pressed it down again. After doing this a few times, the potatoes started to look cooked, so I pressed the whole mass down again and let it cook undisturbed for about 10-15 minutes (until the bottom was clearly nicely browned). I then flipped the thing over (using a plate! the sides of my saute pan are too high to actually flip it), added a bit more oil to the pan, and let the other side cook for 10-15 minutes or until it was nicely browned. Just before serving, I cranked the heat up and refreshed the top (first cooked) side so that both sides were nice and crisp.
This was a very successful rösti and is a pretty straightforward (if time consuming) technique.
Last night we had a couple of friends over for dinner. The theme of the evening was "Summer's Bounty" (a.k.a. "use up vegetables!").
Dinner was:
After scooping out the insides of a couple medium sized eggplants, I cooked some finely chopped onions and garlic in olive oil until the onions were translucent. Then I added the (finely chopped) eggplant insides and a good pinch of salt. I cooked this over medium heat for 10-15 minutes, until the eggplant had nicely broken down. In a separate pan I browned some ground pork and beef (with salt, of course), which I then combined with the cooked eggplant mush. After seasoning with allspice, a bit of fennel, some cayenne, and black pepper, I squeezed in some lemon juice and then filled the eggplant halves. These baked at 180C for about 30 minutes, until the eggplants were soft.
As a starch, I made a batch of soupy rice using risotto rice and chicken stock (from the carcass of the roasted chicken). I added a slug of white wine and bit of butter at the end to liven it up.
We also had the last of the gazpacho from Wednesday along with a green salad.
Not just red salad tomatoes this time; there are also a few plum tomatoes, a green tomato, and some nice orange grape tomatoes. And two ears of sweet corn. Sweet corn! Oh, and chard and the other usual suspects.
To go along with the leftover roast chicken, I made a batch of gazpacho from the recipe in La Cocina de Mama. I used the food mill again to start things out, but this time I only pureed/emulsified about 1/3 of the tomato with the onions, garlic, bread, oil, and vinegar. After making the emulsion, I stirred it into the remaining tomato. This produced a nicer texture than the fully pureed variant.
I served the gazpacho topped with chives and freshly toasted almonds that I slivered just before serving.
