Thursday, October 8, 2015

White fish in foil

I had lots of vegetable still from my shopping trip to the farmer's market. Sometimes there is so much good stuff, I buy a little too much. Solution: chop up part of it and freeze for the next minestrone or vegetable curry. The other part came in my fish dish in the evening:
Yellow and green zucchini, cherry tomatoes, carrots, spring onions and chilis.
whatever is to your liking, just pay attention to cut them according to their cooking time. You don't want part of the vegetables to be overcooked and the others to be still raw.

I put them in the oven with about 180 Centigrade for half an hour, adding just salt and dash of white wine, the vegetable kept the beautiful colors. For an extra taste, I then put them in a pan for about 10 minutes in order the finish the dish.



Sunday, October 4, 2015

Chinese cabbage salad

You know Chinese cabbage? Maybe you agree with me that it can be one of the most boring vegetables. I have seen it many times on the salad buffet, mostly as staff food in large hotels. When it is cut and remains outside for some time, it gets even more boring because it gets dry, not even the greatest salad dressing (and believe me, they don't put that out for staff either) can help it. Most of the time I avoid to buy it, also because you have a really large chunk of vegetable to work.
The trick is to let the dressing get inside the china cabbage and let it rest for at least 20 minutes, the leaves take up the dressing beautifully then. I decided to make a fancy dressing with different flavors: sweet, spicy and hot:


Many recipes with China cabbage are with fruit because this combines quite well.
My ingredients for the dressing:
2 shallots
1 pear
2-3 table spoons of orange mustard
(if you don't have them use normal mustard and orange peel)
a dash of white wine
a dash of water
sea salt
different oils - this time I used grape seed oil and sunflower oil.
Would be perfect with a walnut or peanut oil, too.

Fry the shallots until they have that glassy look, then put them on the salad with a little bit of the frying oil.
Mix up the other ingredients and blend them.
In the end I added roasted cashews.


And remember, it is worth a try and a great salad to bring to a barbecue, goes fine with meat, too.

Thursday, October 1, 2015

Chili con carne - texan style (mostly)

I am listening to a nice audio book called "Texas Cooking" right now that gave me the idea to try a Texan recipe. First thing which comes to mind: Chili con carne, of course. I found a really nice recipe on another blog and was amazed how many types of chili there are. Of course I couldn't find the chipotle in one of our stores, so I had to cheat a bit. The chipotle would be a smoked jalapeno which gives this special flavor to the dish. I didn't want to buy any of those bottles in the supermarket, nor liquid smoke, so I used smoked bacon instead. 
Here are the ingredients I used:
1 diced onion
Beef, cut in small pieces - about 1 pound
Minced beef - about 1 pound
Smoked bacon - about 1cup
All different kinds of chilies, I only had the two types you see below
half a glass of beer
1 can of diced tomatoes
Spices:
My special homemade spicer in the glass made of garlic, almonds, white wine, bread crumbs, olive oil and sea salt
coriander
clove (just 1!)
cumin
1 tablespoon of cocoa

I took the original Texan recipe as an inspiration, so don't tell it to any Texans, as I understood, they usually don't put beans in it (which I didn't) and neither tomatoes (which I did).
Next time I would put more spices and add diffent kinds of chili, hopefully also the chipotle.
By the way, sorry for the pictures, they really are not much, hopefully I will make better ones!