Fruity animals

To continue with the fruit-meat combinations, here another one I made quite a while ago:
Pork-apple stew
This is based on onions seared to being soft & golden, and pork pieces fried to have some color; at that point I added pieces of good textured apples, fried them a little bit as well, spiced it all up with a dash of cayenne pepper, and lastly took the heat off with cider vinegar, adding more fruity acid and giving it the final kick.
Simmering that cider vinegar away to have everything blend together gives you the chance to adjust how sour it tastes - some of it will cook off, but don't forget that the Cayenne pepper gains in power as you cook this longer...

A good idea is also to move this a little more in the indian corner, by starting to fry onions with cumin, turmeric and coriander seeds, and maybe some fenugrek, which adds a almost meaty flavor to the whole concept. Less acid in that case is key, but more cayenne might be good.

Any other interesting meat & fruit ideas? Let me know!

Cordon vert

My last night's dinner reminded me on another variation on the theme of fruit, pork & cheese.. Cordon vert.
No worries, you have not forgotten anything essential, I made that one up. Still good.

A dish very typical for rural area german restaurants is "Cordon bleu" (blue ribbon, supposedly not named after the culinary school, but after the blue ribbon of excellence), also common in Austria, I assume. It is veal cut open and filled with cheese and ham, battered and fried, similar to a "Wiener Schnitzel", just stuffed, as can be seen on the right.


My "cordon vert" (green ribbon), first of all, is with pork, i.e. makes the ham obsolete, is not battered, has a different cheese (correct, my alltime favorite gruyere), and is green, because it contains fruit/veggie matter. The upscale healthy choice, sort of.

This is before frying it:Pork cutlet or pork chop without bones, filled with apple slices and gruyere, fried with black pepper, parsley and spring onions.
This is it when it's done, ready for the happy eater:
Enjoy :)

Himmel und... heaven too

Do you know "Himmel & Erde"? It is a traditional german dish with potatoes and apples. Enough said, happiness included.
There is something else going in that direction, combining potatoes & pears - no discussion there either. Yum. (Does anyone know that dish under some name? Am I making that up? No matter, tastes great..)
One step further: add gruyere to the above. Okay? Easy, that is basically nothing else but a traditional Raclette (with gruyere instead of raclette cheese, admittedly): hot potatoes, good cheese molten on top, pear in some form (admittedly, not in Eau de vie form, but that is a very good candidate for accompanying or following this dish).

Yes?
Oh, yes...
Here is today's heavenly dinner:
starting with olive oil, one layer of sliced potatoe, chopped onion, garlic, nutmeg, salt, & black pepper.
Next layer: fried pork chop cubes.
next: pear, in this case fresh from my friends garden, i.e. locally & organically grown, and so tasty on their own..
Then: sliced/cubed gruyere (Kaltbach, i.e. aged in a cave, that is the reserve of gruyere... imagine that!)
Bake it for 25 minutes at 400-420 deg F (or til it smells amazing & the potatos are soft).
This is how it looks then:Himmel, heaven, and then some..
bon appetit :)

From goat cheese cheesecake to salty plums

It's been a while.. business kept me busy, and led me to a trip to Washington D.C., which resulted in me eating my way through the various amazing places there are in that city..

First, DC is a great place for seafood, especially compared to Nashville.. (go figure)I encountered a seafood place that is seriously worth mentioning - very pricy, but a real experience:
DC Coast, with a menu ranging from 'caramelized porcini gnocchi' to 'crab boudin', all very eclectic and creative, but in a very good way. I decided on a tuna dinner, starting with a Tuna tartare, à la ceviche, with lime, cilantro, red onion, and coconut milk, and lightly spicy, an extremely delicious combination that was served in half a coconut on ice. My entrée was 'seared yellowfin tuna', with strips of apple, and a sauce made from foie gras, and one from sweet onions. I'm not sure I tasted foie gras in there, and it therefore had a pretentious touch to it, but the sauces were very tasty and both supported and contrasted the tuna taste really well, very enjoyable dish. As a dessert I chose the 'Chevre cheese cake', made from goat cheese from a local farm, on a pecan cookie crust and sprinkled with caramelized pineapple and kiwi pieces... outstanding.. :)

In the days following this dinner, I mostly pursued my interest in chinese or generally asian food. Right at the entrance to china town, behind the big gate, is Tony Cheng's restaurant; on the first floor, mongolian cuisine, on the second floor, chinese and: Dim Sum. Living in Nashville, I am deprived of the better chinese food, as you will hear from all chinese living here.. one of the few praised exceptions is Golden Coast (on West End Ave) serving Dim Sum on the weekend - knowing that, I had to try the supposedly even more real deal in DC.
Check out Tony Cheng's Dim Sum menu for yourself - it sounds already really good, and is actually very affordable when you share with someone. My choices were a little limited to the carts that came by in the first 20 minutes of me being there - both me and my colleague really were hungry and could not wait for more offers.. so we had spare ribs in black bean sauce, some noodle dish with shrimp and peas in it, roasted duck, and fried sesame balls; I liked it very much, and every time I am astonished how much asian food I can eat and still not feel as stuffed as I feel with most other food styles.

Another chinese restaurant that was really worth going back to was close to Dupont Circle, City lights of China. The best one can do in my experience, is go to a chinese restaurant with chinese friends and colleagues, and let them order a whole bunch of food. With this approach, we ended up eating steamed bass, cantonese style, with ginger and scallions, steamed spinach, ma po tofu, and fried shrimps in their shells. This was a dinner for four, we only almost finished everything, and walked home very happy in the freezing cold night :)

Last on my asian dinner experiences is a little vietnamese place that might not look like much - but the vietnamese wife of my friend was there once, desperately wanted to go back and she sure was right. The place is Pho An in the White Oak shopping center in Silver Spring, at the end of the red metro line. We had garden rolls (with white rice, shrimp, spring onion, rolled into rice paper) for starters, dipped into a peanut sauce that we made spicy by adding pepper paste. Then we ate a big bowl of 'Pho', a noodle soup, in this case with beef slices, that are still red and cooking when it comes to the table, in a broth that has a very complex flavor, and apparently is based on secret recipes that no restaurant shares with anyone. To add into the soup, there is a big plate full with bean sprouts, limes, cilantro, jalapeno pepper slices, and leafy green vegetables that I did not recognize. Who cares, throw it all in, be happy, such a beautiful rich dish to eat at an icy cold winter night.

What was really interesting to me were the drinks - I tried 'salty plum', which appears to be water with salt and sugar and whole and fuzzy pieces of dried plum. Stir it all up, and it looks very ... strange (as you might be able to see on the right). It tastes very strange as well, slightly sour, a little sweet, for my normal taste way too salty, but somehow it is good and refreshing and I kept thinking about what this taste is about and why I cannot tell whether I really like or dislike it.. odd. But.. good. Somehow. :D

Aside from the asian adventures (I had more than the ones I mentioned here): at the First Cup Cafe, right at the convention center, you can sit down in a big armchair, grab one of the books off the window seals, or look at the photograph exhibition they have hanging up, and enjoy the best Avocado-Eggplant sandwich I have ever eaten or imagined.
I went back there and had it a second time. Amazing. Go get it!

Election Spaetzle

What better than making and eating Spaetzle on this election night, while listening to npr and watching the NYTimes statistics crawl higher and higher on the blue side of the political spectrum.. I'm optimistic, & hungry, and I have leftover from last night that is perfect for this, so - Spaetzle it is.

First, a little background: Spaetzle is a very traditional staple food of southern Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Spaetzle are essentially egg noodles.

The main ingredients are flour, eggs, sometimes a little water, and salt. The major fluidity of the dough comes from the eggs. Consistency and texture of the dough depend on how the Spaetzle will be finally shaped.
There are three ways to get them into the boiling or simmering water:
they can be scraped from a wooden board, that's what I did tonight.resulting in thicker, lengthy, very irregular shaped Spaetzle. This requires a thicker dough as shown in the photo of my tonights dough (that did not include any water) almost like a dumpling dough.
Or they are pressed through a Spaetzlespresse, resulting in longer and thinner Spaetzle that resemble more typical noodles (needing a more liquid dough), or, lastly, they are scraped through a device called Spaetzleshobel (this dough is typically the most liquid of all three), resulting in small Spaetzle-blobs, called "Knoepfle" (little buttons).


The Spaetzle need to hang out in the simmering/boiling water til they start to rise. At that point they can be lifted out and added to a bowl of already waiting Spaetzle-friends..

Adding a little bit of butter to that bowl helps them not caking together. Also, draining them well after lifting them out of the water makes them more easily separateable.

At this point you can (and I do) dive in and eat the hell out of them.. they are sooooo good. And so easy to do..

The Spaetzle idea came to me last night, actually, but after making the "sauce" I had intended I was too lazy for Spaetzle-making. But, there is plenty leftover, and this is what it is: a little stew from veal, dried porcini, and carrots, with onion, and fresh herbs from my garden (thyme, rosemary, sage, a little lavender), as well as bay leaves and juniper berries to get the whole thing a little bit a hint of game..
This is how it looked last night :-) And this is how it looks with Spaetzle :-D
What a difference.. !
The polls look like Pennsylvania and Ohio go to Obama, which means I'm stuffed & tastewise happy, but also politically quite a bit more relaxed.. optimism paid out, the celebration Spaetzle turned out amazing and so did the context.
Now I need a Schnaps :)

Nectar of the gods

Two nights ago, I had the pleasure to taste mead home-made by a friend's friend, lovely people willing to share a godly drink with me..
Mead, in german called "Met", also known as honeywine, or, in the old germanic and wikings time, as drink or "nectar of the gods". They knew why they called it that..

It contains all the good stuff from honey, lots of vitamins and minerals; warmed it tastes wonderful at cold winter nights, and helps against colds, both warming you up, soothing a sore throat, making you nicely sleepy and providing biochemical support for your immune system to fight off the intruders.

As one of the oldest, or the oldest alcoholic drink known to mankind, it deserves a special hommage: it is known since about 7000 BC from China (!), at least 3500 BC in egypt, and has been brewed by the Germanics in central Europe around 1000 BC, long before the Wikings roamed the region.

One idea how the Germanics came to make mead so early is the following: for long trips by sea, bee pollen were stored on board and eaten by the crew to prevent skorbut. To protect the pollen, they were covered with a layer of honey. If the honey was too young, and thus contained too much water, or if the container was not air-tight such that the pollen could draw water from the outside air, then spontaneous fermentation could occur. The resulting mead was an unexpected surprise for the Germanics, and thus was considered a gift of the gods.Making mead caught on easily with the Wikings, who liked roman wine, but lived in regions too cold to grow grapes.

Wiki tells us this how they might have made it:

“

Take of spring water what quantity you please, and make it more than blood-warm, and dissolve honey in it till 'tis strong enough to bear an egg, the breadth of a shilling; then boil it gently near an hour, taking off the scum as it rises; then put to about nine or ten gallons seven or eight large blades of mace, three nutmegs quartered, twenty cloves, three or four sticks of cinnamon, two or three roots of ginger, and a quarter of an ounce of Jamaica pepper; put these spices into the kettle to the honey and water, a whole lemon, with a sprig of sweet-briar and a sprig of rosemary; tie the briar and rosemary together, and when they have boiled a little while take them out and throw them away; but let your liquor stand on the spice in a clean earthen pot till the next day; then strain it into a vessel that is fit for it; put the spice in a bag, and hang it in the vessel, stop it, and at three months draw it into bottles. Be sure that 'tis fine when 'tis bottled; after 'tis bottled six weeks 'tis fit to drink.[17]

”

In simple words: take lots of honey, add some water, maybe some lemon juice, brewer's yeast and some additional nutrients for the yeast, put all that in a big jar with gas valve so it won't explode, and let it do its thing.

And, maybe a year later or less, fill the golden liquid into bottles and distribute it to friends.
That's where I come in, have a dear friend come over with one of those bottles, and we drink to our health all night. :)