Saturday: Wildschwein, Escarole

It's getting to be Fall... and that means game season. woo hoo!
The original plan was to do an escarole torta from Hazan, but then I remembered the time of year. When we walked by the butcher and saw wildschwein entrecote, it was clear what the centerpiece of the meal was going to be.

I kept things relatively simple and cooked the well-seasoned piece of meat in a skillet with clarified butter. I served it with sour cherries and some shallot compote (shallots slowly cooked in butter with salt and a bit of sugar added. I added a Tbs or so of red wine at the end to give things a bit more color).

The escarole still needed to be eaten, so I followed a recipe from BittmanWorld and stewed it with olive oil, anchovies, garlic, and capers (an addition from the Hazan recipe). This is also quite a nice dish. I can easily imagine it as a topping for a torta.

We also had some spaetzle (store-bought, I wasn't that ambitious this evening) and a big green salad.

What a meal!

Wine: Château de Mercuès 2001. This Cahors (mostly malbec) was a nice pairing.

Friday Night Improvisation

One day soon I'll start pulling interesting recipes out of the cookbooks again instead of just winging it. Last night I didn't start. :-)

The two components of dinner were steamed vegetables dressed with a pesto and "Hackfleisch mit Birnen".

The vegetables were quite simple: I cut a couple zucchini, a couple carrots, and a good sized leek (all biokiste vegetables) into matchsticks and them steamed them in the bamboo steamer. I dressed the finished vegetables with a pesto made from walnuts, walnut oil, basil, a bit of garlic, and ground pepper.

For the meat dish I started by gently cooking a minced onion in olive oil. To this I added 300g of mixed ground meat (pork and beef) and a good pinch of salt. I cooked this for a while until the meat started to brown then added a minced garlic clove, some tomato paste, ketchup, cayenne, a dash of sherry vinegar, black pepper, and some diced (1cm) pears (Butterbirnen). I let this cook until the pears started to soften then served it.

I oversteamed the vegetables a bit, but everything was still quite good.

There was also a green salad.

Biokiste 20

mmm, sq

Wednesday: Mexican inspired

ah ha! Cooking again!

Tonight I did something Mexican inspired to celebrate Andrea getting back and because I craved it.

I started by making a slaw from the last of the biokiste wirsing, some lime, salt, cider vinegar, peanut oil, ground coriander, and hot sauce. This I let steep while I made the rest of dinner.

The main course was smoked pork shoulder, kidney beans, and sweet corn in a chipotle sauce. I started by softening some garlic and onion in peanut oil. Then I added a couple chopped chipotles along with some adobo, large-diced (3cm) pork, a chicken boullion cube and some water. After that had cooked for a while I added canned kidney beans and a can of corn and then cooked until it was all hot.

We ate this with sour cream and topped it with rice.

nice food!

leftovers, leftovers, leftovers

Andrea is out of town and it's taking me forever to work my way through the leftovers. So not much interesting to say about cooking.

Nanoreview: Oliv (Basel)

It's a bit expensive, but two smiley faces anyway.

• Food: Very good. Creative, good ingredients, well prepared.
  
• Service: Very good.
  
• Atmosphere: Quite nice.
  

Random note: We liked that the restaurant itself was non-smoking, but the divider between the "lounge", where smoking is allowed, and the dining room needs to be a bit more substantial. We were sitting near the lounge and ended up getting a bit too much smoke.

Friday: Smothered vegetables

This week's biokiste had a bunch of winter-vegetable type stuff in it, and Coop has smoked pork products on sale. Last night's dinner was a complete no brainer.

I started by rendering/slowly browning some lardons (smoked bacon) in a bit of olive oil. As the bacon was rendering I added quartered garlic cloves and shallots cut into chunks. After the bacon was browned enough I added a sliced leek, coarsely diced carrot, chunks of potato, chunks of kohlrabi, and a good pinch of salt, and mixed well. Then came a couple bay leaves, a couple sprigs of thyme, a good grind of black pepper, half a vegetable boullion cube and a little bit (1/2 a cup or so) of water. I topped the pan with some coarsely shredded wirsing (savoy cabbage) and some coarsely diced (2cm) smoked pork shoulder. I covered this and let it simmer, stirring every so often, until everything was cooked through. It's great food.

We also had the green beans and "grain risotto" leftover from Thursday.

Oh, and a green salad.

Thursday Lamb

When shopping yesterday, I found a package of lamb chops for half price. There was no way I as going to pass that opportunity up.

I marinated the chops in olive oil, garlic, crumbled bay leaf, fresh rosemary, preserved lemon, cayenne, and white pepper. Then I broiled them and served with a bit of the marinade spooned over. Very simple and very good.

We also had green beans [biokiste] with butter and some mixed grains (oats, barley, brown rice, lentils, buckwheat, wheat, rye, and wild rice) that Coop sells as "grain risotto". Doesn't have much to do with risotto, but it's a nice side dish.

We also had a nice green salad.

Wine: Linchpin Shiraz; this was a complete no brainer

Biokiste 19

Now with even more lettuce! :-)

Tuesday Night: Spaghetti and pork chops

After the trip Andrea wanted pasta, so last night we had spaghetti. I made a batch of Hazan's tomato sauce with onion and butter to top the spaghetti and some pork chops as a protein.

The chops were super simple: I seasoned them, then pan fried them in olive oil until both sides were nicely browned and the meat was basically done. I deglazed the pan with some red wine, let that mostly reduce, then added some reduced balsamico and black pepper. Once this was saucy I put the pork back in to reheat and get covered in sauce. At the last minute I added some finely chopped fresh basil to brighten things up.

Very good food.

We also had a big green salad, something which was very sorely missed on our hiking trip.

Back home

Got back in town yesterday. I will be doing a few "backpacking cooking" posts and a couple restaurant microreviews as I have time. In the meanwhile, I'll try and get back in the cycle of posting our cooking.

Vacation

We're leaving tonight and will be returning second week of Sept. There won't be any posts between now and then.

A couple of small things

The past two nights I haven't been doing much in the way of cooking since we've just been trying to clear out the fridge before vacation. The couple of things I've made are:

We had some "winter squash" in the biokiste. I peeled and seeded that, cut it into 1cm dice, then cooked it with water, butter, curry powder, and salt. For the first 10 min I left the pan covered, then I opened it to let the water evaporate. This was a nice, quick prep of winter squash.

The last of the vegetables from last week went last night in the form of some stewed chard and a pseudo-succotash (sweet corn, green pepper, hornpeperoni, onion, garlic, piri piri).

Backpacking prep chaos

More backpacking prep: Polenta

In order to make quick polenta interesting, I mixed some dried mushrooms (20g each herbstrumpetten and porcini) that I chopped up with 35g "dried soup vegetables" (leek, carrot, peppers, parsnips, etc.). I added a few Tbs of this mixture along with a chicken boullion cube and a bit of bacon to the 600ml of water for the polenta and brought it to boil. After letting this sit covered for 5 minutes, I brought it back to a boil and added 125g fine polenta. I stirred this over the heat for a minute then covered it and let it stand for 5 minutes before serving.

The result, aside from the sub-optimal texture, is actually quite good. I'm going to double the vegetable proportion, but this dried mushrooms + vegetables mixture is going to be quite useful when we're underway.

Along with the polenta we had leftover grilled chicken with basil and garlic and a big green salad.

Sunday Pseudoleftovers

I guess these weren't really leftovers since it was stuff that I planned to make on Saturday but didn't because we already had enough food.

I started by grilling a few chicken breasts. I didn't do anything to the chicken other than salt and oil it. Aside: it's amazing how nice a simple grilled chicken breast is when the chicken actually tastes like something. I cut the just-cooked chicken into pieces and then mixed it with the garlic, olive oil, black papper, and basil that was planned as the original coating for grilling. This went in the fridge to marinade for a few hours until it was dinner time.

We ate the cold marinated chicken with spaghetti topped with pesto and some green beans [biokiste] that I parboiled and then sauteed with thinly sliced shallots.

The plate didn't have much in the way of color contrast (green! green! green!), but it was a very nice meal anyway.

For dessert we had grilled pears. We had some very ripe small pears that needed to be eaten so, before I cooked the chicken in the afternoon, I cut them in half, seeded them, and then grilled them.

Backpacking dumplings

Thursday we leave for a 2+ week hiking trip in the Pyrenees. We're going to be doing a some camping as well as staying in huts, so I wanted to expand my repertoire of backpacking food a bit.

Adding dumplings to packaged soup was a suggestion I read a while ago; unfortunately I forgot to note down the recipe for the dumplings. The internet provided a series of recipes based on Bisquick and several derivatives of a recipe from Lydia Itoi. The Bisquick recipes are useless to me, but the other one sounded like a good starting point. I made some adjustments to make the dumplings denser both physically (less baking powder) and nutritionally (powdered whole eggs instead of egg whites, powdered milk).

Dumpling mix
75 g flour
22 g powdered egg (whole egg)
16 g powdered milk
1 tsp baking powder
a couple good pinches of salt

To make the dumplings: add enough water to make a thick batter. Drop in teaspoon sized quantities into boiling soup. Cook for 3-5 minutes.

During today's test I added a couple pinches of herbs de provence to the batter.

This is a good starting point. It's easy to imagine adding pieces of bacon or dehydrated vegetables to the mix and/or aggressively seasoning them.

Saturday at the Grill

Last night we had friends over and did some grilling.

Our contributions were grill bread (recipe from Let the Flames Begin), grilled plums with spicy hoisin sauce (License to Grill), and grilled peaches with a balsamico and black pepper glaze (License to Grill). I had chicken breasts ready to go on with a olive oil/garlic/basil sauce (intended to go with the peaches), but our friends brought loads of meat so that wasn't required.

The grill bread was good but suffered from a lack of salt (cook error); salting it while eating was effective, but not the same. The grilled fruit was excellent.

Wines:

1. Gerard Bertrand 2006 L'Hospi Viognier, we had this with the rabbit on Thursday and it was ok; last night Andrea didn't much care for it.
2. Dourthe No. 1 2006 White Bordeaux, this is a quite nice and grapefruity wine. It worked with the food.
   

Nanoreview: Cantina Don Camillo (Basel)

This Basel Geht Aus recommendation is on top of the old Warteck brewery in Kleinbasel.

One and a half smiley faces.

• Food: Good! Pretty creative and carefully done.
  
• Service: Our waitress was friendly, but scattered and forgetful.
  
• Atmosphere: It's a great place to sit outside on a nice summer evening. I'm not sure how pleasant the inside would be.
  

Thursday: Rabbit

I've had "do a rabbit recipe from FSToS" in my head for a while now; last night I finally got around to it.

I made the basic stewed rabbit (rabbit chausseur) recipe, and I stuck to it pretty closely. My only deviation was to used halved shallots instead of pearl onions (no pearl onions to be found). The resulting dish was good, but not fantastic. The serving pieces of rabbit were a bit small and fidgety to eat, as well as being a bit dry. The flavor was good, and the sauce was quite nice so there is potential here.

The real highlight last night was the roasted potatoes. For those I diced (1cm dice) some festkochende (waxy) potatoes, mixed them with a bit of butter, some olive oil, coarsely chopped rosemary (not too much!), a couple crumbled bay leaves, salt, and black pepper and then roasted them, stirring occasionally, at 200C until nicely crispy and lightly browned. The flavor combination of the butter, the bay, and the rosemary was very very nice.

We also had sauteed zucchini and a green salad.