Experimental Cooking by Rozmin

BROWNIES

2010-03-18T00:37:00.002+01:00

I have to make these. Just. Go. Look. At. Them.

Now, if only I was fond enough of my co-workers to bring them Kahlua infused brownies. Then I would have someone to share with, and could justify making them.

Well, maybe if I clear some room in the freezer...

Hmm....

Yes, I will eat the last of the frozen veggies necessary to sustain us through winter. Then there will be room for brownies. :-)

Binnur's Turkish Cookbook

2010-03-15T11:49:00.002+01:00

Hi all, I found this blog I really enjoy: Binnur's Turkish Cookbook

So far I have made 4 recipes from this site: Potato soup, Rustic Red Lentil soup, Pilaf with Eggplant, and Asparagus and Mushrooms in Olive Oil.

I liked them all, but I have to say my favorite was the pilaf. Definitely check that one out! I will be making it again for sure, so you can expect a pic in the future, although Binnur has one on her site. I also was a big fan of the potato soup, I found it very subtle but delicious. My BF didn't like it at all, saying it didn't taste like anything! I guess his palate has gotten a little used to my heavy hand with spices.

Green Salad

2010-03-03T00:28:00.004+01:00

Maybe it's because I'm sick of "winter" foods, but recently, what you see here has made up 50-100% of our dinners for the past two weeks. Those winter dishes--often meaty, always filling and warm--are comforting and welcome at the first hint of cold air. However, when spring rolls around I start dreaming of crisp veggies, a bountiful variety of produce, grilled food, and yogurt and fresh cheeses like feta and mozzarella.

The particular green salad shown here consists of a bed of mixed greens and arugula, topped with sliced red onion, julienned carrot, tomatoes, cucumber slices, avocado chunks and of course, salt and fresh-ground pepper. I use a simple balsamic vinaigrette, just balsamic vinegar whisked with a little bit of olive oil.

I love that such salads are fast, flavorful and healthy--you easily get 2-3 vegetable servings at one sitting!

Kotletiy (Picture)

2010-02-27T21:30:00.004+01:00

Tonight's dinner: Kotleti.

You can see from the oil-soaked paper towel they are a bit of an indulgence. We don't have them all that often, but I like it when we do. With these we just had some chopped cucumber and tomato. We used a little spicy mustard with them as well.

You can find the recipe here.

Greek-Style Lemony Chicken and Potatoes

2010-02-21T19:08:00.006+01:00

Tonight's dinner: tender chicken leg quarters marinated in a Greek-inspired mix of yogurt, lemon juice, garlic and herbs. This was roasted on top of potatoes and onions drizzled in olive oil. As you can see from the photo, it's way too much food for just the two of us, but I made enough for leftovers. I'm planning on topping a green salad with some of this roasted chicken for a nice lunch tomorrow; that is, unless my boyfriend beats me to it and eats it for breakfast!

We just got back from 2 weeks in the States, and I feel so heavy. We ate so much greasy food, especially during the last half of the trip, when we were at a conference. Being at my parent's home (the first week) we could eat reasonably, but during that conference it was difficult. So basically we consumed a large number of french fries and heavy sandwiches.

After that, we've both been craving lighter and more wholesome food. I've been eating almost nothing but green salad for the past few days, just because it's so good after all that grease! But today it was time for something substantial again, yet still nutritious and not too heavy. We had just bought some chicken leg quarters yesterday, so I decided to make this. Greek or Greek-inspired dishes are always so tasty, in my opinion!

Ingredients:
3 chicken leg quarters (or more if you like)
1 T olive oil

Marinade:
1 big clove of garlic for each quarter + 1 extra
1/4 c yogurt (plain)
Juice of 1/2 a lemon
About 1-2 T dried oregano (to taste, can use fresh of course)
1 sprig mint, chopped
Generous sprinkling coarsely ground black pepper
Salt
1 t olive oil

4 medium potatoes
1 large white onion
1 T olive oil
Salt

Method:
Can be done ahead of time: Crush and chop the garlic, and mix all ingredients for marinade in a shallow bowl. Make sure the chicken is clean and dry; salt it a bit. Place the chicken in the dish, coating well with marinade. Separate the skin from the meat to spoon some marinade inside each piece. Let the chicken sit in the remaining marinade, turning occasionally. I marinated for an hour, but you could even do it overnight. Just make sure you refrigerate the chicken.

Chicken in marinade; potatoes and onions in the pan, ready to cook.

When you're ready to cook: Wash (peel if desired) and cube the potatoes. Cut the onion into sort of thick chips or semi-rings. Place potatoes and onions in a roasting pan. Mix well with some salt and 1 Tbsp of olive oil. Remove the chicken from the marinade, laying the pieces on top of the potatoes, skin side down. You can spoon any remaining marinade over the chicken. Place in a 190 degree C (375 degree F) oven for about 30 minutes. After about 30 minutes, take the pan out of the oven and turn the chicken pieces over. The skin side should be facing up now. Drizzle the remaining 1 Tbsp olive oil over the skin of the chicken. Bake for about 40 minutes more, or until chicken is done and skin is crisp and golden brown.

Notes and Serving Suggestion: It was a really nice, mild tasting meal. Filling but not greasy, the sort of thing you feel good after eating. I really like lemon flavor on the potatoes, so next time I may squeeze a little extra lemon juice over them. We ate this with a simple Greek salad. The sauce from the chicken was very tasty soaked up with bread.

Prunes Topped with Cream

2010-01-27T00:02:00.003+01:00

I'm a bad, bad blogger. I have so many cool things to post about, but I don't ever seem to have enough time. But tonight I made this easy dessert that was so fast, I figured that writing a blog post about it would be fast, too. So basically, there was no excuse not to!

This is a Russian dessert that I first had at one of the several New Year's parties I attended in Ukraine. However, I find it remarkable that this could just as easily be French, as it features two French favorites: prunes and crème fraîche. That's basically like sour cream, but a little bit more mild.

I think this dessert is also fairly healthy, but beware that I find it really hard to stop at just one piece!

Ingredients:
12 prunes
12 walnut halves
~1/4 c crème fraîche (substitute full-fat sour cream)
1 T of sugar (can add more or less to taste)

Method:
Mix the cream with the sugar really well. If it's too sour, add a little more sugar. It shouldn't be super sweet though, it's going to balance the sweetness of the prunes. If your prunes are already pitted (stoned? Sounds weird.) then you're more than halfway finished. If they're not, take the stones out. Make a slice down the prune and just wiggle it out until it gives up. Tuck a walnut half inside each prune, and arrange them on a plate. Top them evenly with the cream and sugar mixture. Done!

Notes and Serving Suggestions: This recipe is so fast, especially if your prunes are ready. It is easily expanded as well, for a party or something. If you do this for a party, maybe poke a toothpick in them. They're really great with tea! I think of this as a dessert, but I think it would also be a cool hors d'oeuvre or tapas style food item.

Vinagret

2010-01-16T16:18:00.000+01:00

The main part of today's lunch is pictured here: pelmeni (Siberian meat dumplings) and vinagret. Vinagret and olivier are what I think of as the "Big Two" of Russian salads. Both are extremely classic, everyone knows them, and you probably won't go to a Russian party or holiday celebration where they aren't present.

Even though everyone knows them, of course everyone has their own way of preparation. And of course, everyone is surprised to find out when someone else makes one of these salads differently, as they are "classics" for which the preparation is set in stone. ;-)

Here is how I've made it, which I believe is a pretty standard preparation. At least, my boyfriend proclaimed that it was "a real one."

Ingredients:
1 medium to large beet
1 large potato, boiled and peeled
1 large dill pickle (like this), or 2-3 smaller sized (baby dills)
1/2 a medium apple
1.5 c kvashennaya kapusta (or substitute drained sauerkraut)
1.5 c canned or jarred peas (you could use cooked frozen ones, but for some reason I've always liked the taste of canned peas)
A couple of tablespoons of oil (we use a mix of sunflower and olive, and it's tasty)

Method:
Boil the potato and the beet. Peel them. I usually boil first and then peel. It's easy, and the vegetables retain more nutrients and taste. (Experimentally verified!) It's best to do this in advance, if they are cooled off they are easier to chop into nice little cubes.

Everything except the cabbage and peas will be chopped into smallish cubes (in the neighborhood of .25"x.25" to .5"x.5"). Start with the beet and potato. Add them to a salad bowl. Salt just a little bit. You'll be adding other salty things (pickle, cabbage) so don't add too much, but the beet and potato should get a little salt of their own. Chop the apple and pickle(s) into small cubes. Drain the peas. Add these things to the salad. Now add the cabbage (or sauerkraut). Drizzle the salad with the vegetable oil, and stir well.

Notes and Serving Suggestions: This is probably my favorite Russian salad. I love all the ingredients separately and together they're awesome. Plus, there's no meat or mayonnaise! (Well, some people add herring. And some people use mayonnaise. See the intro to this post.)

This is great as an appetizer or part of an appetizer course, or, as we had today, as sort of a side dish.

Weekend Cooking Projects

2010-01-16T04:21:00.002+01:00

It's the weekend again ... unfortunately, I think we'll be doing a lot more cleaning than cooking this time. The place has gotten to be a real mess! (We're both very busy with work.)

Plans:

Salad "Vinagret." One of the few Russian vegetarian salads out there (with the exception of any "fasting day" versions of other salads.

We want to try and hunt down some more winter cabbage. So far we've only found it in the farmer's market in the nearby French village. It's a bit more expensive than the regular one, but man, do I love that cabbage! The kvashennaya kapusta we made last weekend is almost gone, so it's time for round two (and maybe we'll make more this time).

I might make some piroshki. Last time I made them I was lazy and used store-bought pizza dough. When fried, this worked beautifully. When baked, the piroshki were bland. It's been a while since I made these from scratch. I may not do it because...

I think this is the weekend I'm going to try to make borodinskiy bread. I bought ingredients last weekend.

I'm going to make a big jar of ryazhenka! (I love the stuff). It's baked and slightly fermented milk. I know, it sounds disgusting. It's really good.

Maybe some soup? Probably should take advantage of the fact that it's still cold outside.

That's probably it. Like I said, a lot of cleaning to do, and maybe some work.

Kvashennaya Kapusta

2010-01-14T20:39:00.004+01:00

This is the fermented cabbage we made this weekend. It's kind of like magic. The first day you don't want to eat it, but of course you try a little bit out of curiosity, and it is insanely salty. I kept asking my BF, "Are you sure we didn't add too much salt? Are you sure?" And he'd just respond, "Don't worry, you can't spoil this with too much salt!" I had my doubts. But then the fermentation actually happened, and it turned into the sour cabbage that I remembered eating in Ukraine.

Ingredients:
2 medium/large heads of white winter cabbage*
2-3 medium carrots
about 5 pieces dried horseradish**
A LOT of salt

*Using the winter kind, which is white and sort of flatter, is important because the leaves are firmer. I think it may still be tasty with regular cabbage, but the texture is better with the winter one.
**This is optional but I strongly recommend it! Each of the dried horseradish pieces I have is about .25"x.25". I'm sure you can substitute fresh, but it's probably stronger, so use less in that case.

Method:
Wash the cabbage, wash and peel the carrots. Grate the carrots on your grater's rough setting. Shred the cabbage (like for coleslaw or other salad). In a large vessel (I use a wide, deep bowl, like this but about 2-3x as deep), put a few handfuls of cabbage and carrots, then add a lot of salt. Sprinkle liberally all over the cabbage. Now, scrunch the cabbage and carrots with your hands, really work the salt in there. Toss in a piece of the horseradish. Add the next layer, a few more handfuls of the cabbage and carrots, and repeat. When you have exhausted all your vegetables, they're all in the bowl and thoroughly scrunched with salt, put a weight of some kind on the cabbage. We put a salad plate on top of the cabbage, and then a large pickle jar filled with water on top of the plate. Let it sit at room temperature for 2-3 days.

Ours took about 2.5 days before it wasn't salty anymore, but nice and sour. The cabbage should still have crunch, but it's softer. There will be a lot of liquid in the bowl, too. Keep it, it's tasty. And while the cabbage is sitting at room temperature, you don't have to worry about stirring or anything. If the liquid rises above the veggies that's fine.

Once the cabbage has fermented, keep it in a cool place, like the refrigerator, or outside (like we do) if it's cold enough.

Notes and Serving Suggestions: I really love this stuff. We made that huge bowl of it this weekend, and it's over half way finished! To serve it, put some cabbage in a serving bowl. Drizzle with a couple of tablespoons of vegetable oil, sprinkle with a teaspoon or two of sugar (to taste), and mix well. Let sit for a few minutes then serve. You can also add herbs, such as dill, and sometimes people add chopped apples. Served as a salad, or as a side dish.

Weekend Cooking Summary (Late)

2010-01-14T17:04:00.003+01:00

This past weekend we cooked:

-Shuba
-Golubtsy
-Pelmeni
-Kvashennaya Kapusta (salted fermented cabbage)
-Russian blini raised with yeast

Plus my BF and I accidentally made tvorog (farmer's cheese). We were trying to make ryazhenka.

I'll post more about the cabbage, blini, tvorog and ryazhenka later. In the mean time here's a pretty picture of golubtsy:

Ok, so the pictures not so good, but I assure you the cabbage rolls were!

Shuba (Herring in a Fur Coat)

2010-01-13T16:41:00.004+01:00

The finished salad with a portion removed

There are many versions of how to layer this salad, but this is the one my BF's mom uses. The salad is shaped into a dome or elongated dome on the plate. But if I ever get around to having a dinner party, I want to make mine look like a fish. These ingredients will make a small salad that fits on a dinner plate. That means 4 big servings or 8 small ones. (A small serving would be enough if you had other salads/appetizers, but a big one is good if this is the only salad.)

Ingredients:
135 g salted herring fillets (I used ones with 4% salt) (bones removed)
1/2 a large beet
1 medium sized potato
1 small onion
2 hard boiled eggs
1/4 c mayonnaise

Method:
Boil the beet and potato until they are soft. You can peel first and then boil, but I like to boil and then peel (I've heard it makes the vegetables tastier and more nutritious). Boil the eggs. Keeping everything separate: Grate the potato on the fine grater setting and the beet on the course one. Chop the onion extremely fine. Chop the herring into pretty fine pieces, too. When the eggs are done, peel and chop them (yes, you guessed it, into pretty fine pieces).

Now the layering. Spread a very thin layer of mayo on the plate, where you will make the salad. Cover that layer with all the herring. Cover the herring with all the onion. Next comes the potato, then the egg. Now, you should have sort of a dome made from these layers. Cover the whole dome with the rest of the mayo, and then put the beet all over the mayonnaise.

Me with the finished product:

Notes and Serving Suggestions: This salad seems to be an obligatory part of the new year's table. It often shows up
on festive occasions in general. Served usually as an appetizer or part of a large salad/appetizers course, but I find it filling enough to be the main part of a light dinner. Also, all that mayo isn't so bad distributed throughout the whole thing. :-)

I'm Tired!

2010-01-09T00:31:00.005+01:00

I cooked more today than I probably have in the past month! Today I made golubtsy (cabbage rolls stuffed with meat and rice), kvashennaya kapusta (salted cabbage, alluded to in the New Year post), and shuba herring and beet salad, also alluded to in the New Year post).

I had also intended to make a bunch of pelmeni today and freeze them, but it looks like that will have to wait for tomorrow. Tomorrow I'm also going to make a bunch of meat broth, and maybe I'll try my hand at bread (but probably I'll leave that for next weekend). But so far I feel pretty good with 7 cabbage rolls (big ones!) in the fridge, 7 in the freezer, and one in my stomach. :-)

Pictures and recipe for shuba tomorrow, and the same for kapusta shortly afterward.

Weekend Cooking Projects

2010-01-09T00:31:00.002+01:00

This weekend (tomorrow) I'm going to try and make the delicious kvashennaya kapusta (salted cabbage) that I ate ate my BF's parent's house. I know it involves horseradish, carrot and cabbage, but I'm not sure about the rassol (brine). We're going to call tomorrow and ask. :-)

My hopefully soon-to-be-in-laws have a huge stand alone freezer that is stocked with produce from their piece of land (dacha) and tons of pelmeni. They also have lots of cool stuff in jars: preserved tomatoes, aforementioned cabbage, homemade prunes, plumes in sour-sweet syrup, tomato juice, apricot jam, pickled cucumbers, pickled garlic, cherry jam, jars of kompot (kind of like juice), and honey.

The upshot of this is that half of a meal in the winter consists of simply opening a jar or the freezer. I think that is brilliant, and I want to create the same thing over here. You see, we work, a freaking lot. As some of you may have noticed, the big collider (scariest machine ever, I believe it was called) where we're working is going to be turned back on pretty darned soon. We have to prepare for that, so that we can graduate and continue to be gainfully employed. As such, BF and I are both VERY busy, and we have been living on mostly noodles and fried eggs.

That was fine before, but after a week of being fed the goodies I've described earlier in this post and in the last one, it doesn't sit very well with me. Not only because it's not as tasty, but also because it's kind of demoralizing. It makes me feel not like a grown-up to be eating noodles with fried eggs every night, until we run out of eggs, like we did tonight.

Yeah. So, tomorrow we're gonna be busy. I've decided to make 1) salted cabbage to put in a bunch of jars, 2) pelmeni (meat dumplings) and 3) golubtsy (cabbage rolls) to put in the freezer. Sunday I may make vareniki (cheese filled dumplings) and a bunch of meat broth to also freeze.

New Year

2010-01-06T19:20:00.003+01:00

I just got back from Ukraine. It was so fun, and my first time celebrating New Year Russian style. New Year is the main holiday in Russia and in many former soviet countries, including Ukraine.

One of the most important aspects (the aspect?) of celebrating is the novagodniy stol (New Year's Table). This is the dinner table, laid out with tons of different zakuski (appetizers), salat (salads) etc, etc. Sometimes all food for the meal is laid out at once on the table, other times the starters are on the table, and then hot food comes out of the kitchen, and then more hot food, and then of course, tea and dessert!

We saw 4 different New Year's tables on this visit. I don't know if I can even remember everything that I ate, but here's my best attempt at a list. Recipes for some of these to come. I've given some links to my favorite Russian cooking website. It's in Russian but there are pictures, too.

Salati (Salads):
-Shuba (Herring in a Fur Coat, ours had the beets on top)
-Kapusta (Preserved Cabbage with Horseradish)
-Mimosa (Fish and Egg)
-Olivier (very classic one, mostly potatoes)
-Vinagret (very classic, it has beets)
-Grated carrots with garlic
-"Korean" spicy carrots (posted about these before)
-"Happy New Year" salad
-Green salad topped with radish and red caviar
-Crab and corn salad

Zakuski (Appetizers):
-Kalbasa (Salami)
-Eggplant caviar
-Buterbrot C Ikroi (Buttered bread with red caviar)
-Olives
-Fried pieces of white fish
-Fried pieces of veal
-Stuffed goose's neck
-Holodyets (meat in gelatin)
-Pechenochniy Tort (non-sweet cake made from liver)
-Fried chicken cutlets
-Salted fish (trout, some tasty white one I don't know, salmon)
-Homemade prunes (delicious)
-Homemade conserved tomatoes
-Marinated mushrooms
-Salmon and cheese rolls
-Stuffed mushrooms
-Quince fried with sugar
-Preserved apples

Hot dishes or Main dishes:
-Boiled and salted goose (this is a Tatar dish and DELICIOUS)
-Belyash
-Pelmeni served with Georgian plum sauce
-Braised meat with quince and potatoes
-Cooked duck with apples
-Broth (from goose)
-Plov (with chicken)
-Indian spicy potatoes (I made these)
-A baked chicken stuffed with bread stuffing, American style (but with Russian flavors...dill, parsley, celery root, carrots, parsley root, tarragon, onion and garlic). Everyone was amazed by the idea of stuffing a chicken with bread!

Desserts:
-Thick blini (made with yeast)
-Kievskiy Tort
-Bannaniy Tort
-Tiramisu (not like it's Italian namesake, but good)
-Some tasty jam cookies
-Lots of honey straight from the dacha
-Pineapple
-Homemade jams (cherry, raspberry)

Drinks:
-Balsam from Bashkortostan
-Balsam from Tatarstan
-French white wine and Champagne (our gift)
-White wine from Crimea (BAD)
-Red wine from Crimea (not half bad)
-"Champagne" from Odessa (pretty good)
-Vodka
-Samagon (homemade alcohol) from honey
-Kompot

You know what, I'm sure I've forgotten something! But that's a lot, isn't it? I hope I can manage to find the recipes for more of those things, because they were all really tasty.

Also, this new year I managed to make my first good toast in Russian. I had tried twice before, but this time, I finally managed a really good one.

There will be posts...

2009-12-25T19:04:00.002+01:00

But probably in 2010.

We're going to Ukraine soon and and I'm so excited! This is because in Ukraine, New Year is a major holiday. It is like Christmas is in America. Except that it's sorta like Christmas+Halloween+Thanksgiving+New Year. Yeah. And my BF's mom is a really good cook, so I'm sure I'm going to get to learn lots of cool Russian, Tatar and Ukrainian recipes. Which I will then blog about!

I've been looking through my collection of "draft" posts, and there are a lot of recipes that I want to try. I just feel so much more motivated to cook when the really nice spring and summer produce starts to arrive. (And when I'm not sick, and when my apartment isn't messy...for some reason it's always messier in the winter?)

The most exciting food news lately was that we continued our fledgling tradition of going to a certain restaurant on Christmas Eve for meat fondue. Lots of meat, with 7 different sauces to dip it in, fresh tasty fries, bread and--of course--good red wine. I'm really glad we thought to start that one!

Geneva Restaurant Review: Palais du Saigon (Ferney)

2009-12-07T22:17:00.002+01:00

This has very quickly become a favorite. An office mate introduced me and the BF to this place, oh, two weeks ago? Since we've been there twice for dinner and once for lunch.

The biggest reason why? It's cheap (for here). And still quite tasty.

First Impression: Nice looking, if quite typical, Vietnamese/Chinese restaurant. Not very big, but big enough. From the outside it's quite easy to miss. We drove by it several times before being introduced to it by someone else! They are always busy, which is a sign of it's popularity. Nice: they have their own parking lot, you don't have to look for a spot on the street. The only downside is that from where we live you have to take the car, not the bus.

Food: More than reasonably tasty. I think we've tried almost every single soup, and I like them all. They have pho, but it's not as good as in the states. Certainly hits the spot when you have a craving, though. Beef, chicken, scallops, pork and tofu dishes have all been delicious. I really loved the scallops. Portions on the main dishes are big enough to share with one other person if you get a side of rice/noodles and each get an appetizer/soup first.

Drink: Haven't tried the wine list. I always stick with H2O when it comes to Asian food. BF has had beer, Tsing Tao. He liked it.

Price: For this area, it is very, very reasonable. We're talking 20 euros a person for dinner, 10 euros a person with the lunch special! (I know my fellow Americans are probably fainting at that "cheap" dinner price, but here it is, especially for what you get.)

Interesting: They also seem to do a bustling to-go business. Will have to try that out!

Consensus: Love it! I really do like to go every week. We get to eat out without feeling guilty for blowing a ton of money.

Kotletiy

2009-12-06T00:02:00.002+01:00

These are Russian hamburger patties/meatballs. They are simple, fast and extremely delicious, especially with mashed potatoes.

Ingredients:
1 small onion
50 g bread, stale is ok
Milk enough to soak the bread (~1/3 c)
About 400 g ground beef
Salt and pepper to taste
Oil for frying onions (just a little) and patties (a lot, enough for shallow frying)
Flour for dredging

Method:
Let the bread soak up all the milk. It should be soft enough to just be mush, like oatmeal consistency. While it's soaking, fry the onion, diced. I let the onion get a little brown. Mix the bread, onion and beef very well. You should be able to form balls, but they will be a little sticky. Dredge the balls in flour, shaking off excess. Fry in the oil a few minutes each side, till just almost cooked all the way through. Let them drain on a paper towel on a plate, they will finish cooking with carry-over heat.

Notes: I love these! The salting is tricky, I'd rather undersalt than oversalt. We've had a batch both ways, and well, you can always add, but you can't take away.

Seriving Suggestion: The best with mashed potatoes, also good with bread. They are tasty cold but I prefer them warm and juicy. I even chopped up leftovers and put it on top of a plain frozen pizza; that was delicious.

Too-Many-Vegetables Soup

2009-11-22T21:08:00.004+01:00

Yesterday I realized that we had way too many vegetables around that were going to start being too old any day. So I decided to make a big pot of veggie soup using whatever we had around.

Ingredients:
1/2 small red onion
1 large white onion
4 small carrots
2 leeks (bulb and lower leaf portion)
1 medium zucchini
2 big white mushrooms
1 c shredded cabbage
1/4 c parsley, chopped
2 cloves garlic
2 T balsamic vinegar
1.5 T olive oil
Salt to taste
A little soy sauce or fish sauce (about 1 t)
1 bay leaf
Water to fill the pot

Method:
Warm the oil in your soup pot. Slice the onions into half rings, add them to the pot and let them saute. Peel and grate the carrots, cut the leeks into half rings, and add them to the pot as well. Salt the vegetables and let them saute. Now add water to fill the pot almost full, and turn the heat up to bring the soup to a boil. Add chopped zucchini, chopped mushrooms, shredded cabbage and garlic. Put in the seasonings: bay leaf, balsamic vinegar, soy or fish sauce, salt and parsley. Add them to your taste. Let the soup simmer until the cabbage and zucchini are soft enough for you.

Notes: I was surprised how good this was. I mean, I was kind of begrudgingly making it, thinking I was basically cleaning out my fridge, and that it wasn't going to taste that great because there was just water, no meat based broth or long-cooking-full-of-goodness vegetable broth. But it turns out it doesn't take a lot of time for the veggies to flavor the water. It only took about 25 minutes or so total. Of course you can use whatever veggies you have around, but I think that the leeks and mushrooms made this especially tasty.

Serving Suggestion: Good with a piece of bread. My boyfriend put leftover roasted chicken meat in his bowl, and he liked it.

Spicy "Korean" Carrots

2009-11-15T05:38:00.004+01:00

This was an attempt to recreate a dish that is sold in markets across the former Soviet Union. I had it in Ukraine, and got a craving for it in a bad way a few nights ago. But Switzerland is not the FSU, so if you want spicy "Korean" carrots here, you have to make them yourself. That is a problem, because it is a closely guarded secret. It's not an actual Korean dish, but those of Korean descent in the FSU who know how to make it don't tell anyone the recipe. There are, however, a lot of recipes on the internet, and I figured that they were all similar enough that the basic approach must be right.

The carrots in the market are sold in looong strips. I think they use one of these. Since I don't have one of those, I had to settle for attempting to julienne my carrots. Since I'm not a chef, and carrots are hard, I had to settle for thicker carrot sticks.

Spicy "Korean" Carrots

Ingredients:
2 very large carrots, 1 small one
1 small white onion
1 big clove of garlic
1.5 T vegetable oil
1 T powdered coriander
1.5 T chili powder*
2 t sugar
Juice of half a lemon
Salt to taste

*Note: My chili powder is mixed with a few other spices (oregano?!) and is a bit weak. You can adjust this based on your ingredients and your taste.

Method:
Cut the carrots into as close to a julienne as you can, or use a vegetable slicer of some kind. They shouldn't be shredded though. Slice the onion into thin half rings, and chop the garlic. Warm the oil in a large skillet. Add the onion, fry until translucent, soft and fragrant. Push the onions to one side, make sure there's enough oil pooled on the other side so you don't have to add more (we want to keep the fat down to some extent). This may mean tilting the pan slightly to get some on that other side. Once you have some warm oil on the opposite side of the onions, add the spices to it. Make sure that all the chili powder and coriander is immersed in the oil, let it fry for some seconds, it should smell really spicy. Add the garlic to the pan, and mix every thing together. Turn the heat down as low as it goes, add the carrots, the sugar, the lemon and the salt. Toss the carrots really well in the spice mix. Let them cook for a few minutes, you may need to keep tossing them so the spices don't burn and so they cook evenly. They should be still a bit crunchy when you serve them.

Notes: In recipes I've seen online they use vinegar, not lemon. But I had half a lemon, so guess what went in, and guess what tasted good? Also, in the real recipe the carrots aren't cooked. They sit in the marinade for a long time. But I cooked them because I was really hungry and couldn't wait. I think it especially worked out because I had thicker carrots. The flavor was close enough to the real thing to satisfy a craving. I think it would be even closer if I didn't cook the carrots and had really nice and thinly cut ones.

Serving suggestion: This was part of a dinner that included frozen and microwaved spinach souffle and perfectly boiled eggs (thank you, boyfriend!). I think they'd make a really good side dish to poultry or pork. Or even hamburgers, come to think of it.

Geneva Restaurant Review: Auberge de Satigny

2009-11-08T23:31:00.000+01:00

Went here with my advisor and office people a few nights ago.

First Impression: Looks nice. Big dining room, can seat a lot of people. Not so much a "date" place though, come with friends. There were quite a few groups of people here and some kids running around. View of the dining room is a soccer field.

Food: Of course, la chasse is on right now. They had a menu for 43 francs or so; squash soup with foie gras for entrée, roasted wild boar with traditional chasse sides, and some kind of egg custard I believe, for dessert. I decided to take this same soup that was on the menu (12 francs), the medallion of deer with sides (34 francs) and my boyfriend and I split a sundae for dessert (9 francs). My boyfriend got salade melée and the deer, others at the table took a terrine of hare and the deer.

The food was not bad. I really enjoyed my soup, I was told the terrine was wonderful and the salad was nice as well. The deer was disappointing. It was a bit tough and the cut was too thick. It is much nicer at Le Chaumaz, where they grill it in front of you, and then take it to the kitchen and slice it into bite-size pieces before putting it on the plate. Their sauce and sides are also better. Here the sauce was a tasty pepper sauce. There were some cranberries, brussels sprouts, candied chestnuts, red cabbage and spaetzle for sides. Dessert was very good; a bowl of vanilla ice cream with chocolate and caramel sauces, meringues crumbled on top, and whipped cream. Oh, wine was nice too.

Honestly, I think it was a bit pricey, simply because the main part of the meal was not up to standards. If I had only taken the soup and dessert (or the terrine and dessert) I probably would've been extremely satisfied.

Interesting: They had a large selection of strange game: kangaroo, ostrich, springbuck, etc. But what I thought was weird is that most of the meat, including deer and lamb, was from New Zealand. I know we have both of those things in Switzerland! I also think it's strange they have so many kinds of meat, when I can tell from the way mine was done, this is not a meat place.

They also have a pizzeria here, you can get pizza in the restaurant or take it to go. From what I saw in the dining room, the pizza seemed to be a popular choice.

Consensus: I really did enjoy my soup and dessert, but I don't think I'll probably be back. The soup was one of the best I've had in a restaurant, but I've already tried it now, you know? Maybe we'll end up back someday though, because it is very close to CERN.

Spanikopita

2009-11-07T14:29:00.005+01:00

This is one of my favorites, but I've never made it till now (it's currently in the oven). It's Greek spinach and feta pie.

Ingredients:
1 package of phyllo dough
1 small onion
1/4 c parsley (fresh)
1/2 c dill (fresh)
.25 kg of fresh spinach
100 g feta cheese
2 small eggs
Salt to taste
Copious amounts of olive oil

Method:
For the filling: boil the spinach, drain, squeeze and chop. Mix in a bowl with: the parsley, dill and onion (all chopped), feta cheese (crumbled), salt, and eggs (beaten).

Pie: My packet was divided into two equal sections separated by paper (one section for the top, one for the bottom). I think there were about 5 sheets in each layer. Grease a pan (I used a cookie sheet with some depth) with olive oil, and put down a layer of dough. Brush that layer with olive oil. Continue until you've done 5-6 layers. Now spread the filling over the dough. Continue the same dough laying procedure (5-6 sheets interspaced with olive oil). Bake at 180 C (350 F) till golden brown on top.

Notes: It certainly was easy to make, the hardest part being handling the dough (not that hard). However, I think I did something wrong. I don't know what. The pie was quite tasty, but did not look quite right. All the top layers were very separated. I know with phyllo they're supposed to be kind of separated, but we're talking completely. I think there are a few things I will do differently next time:

1) Let the pie sit a while before baking, so that the top layers have a chance to come together more ... maybe pat the thing down a little, too.
2) Much, much more spinach filling (it is only a thin layer, I would like it to be a thick one). This was limited today by what I had around.
3) I will take a tip from Baklava recipes I've read and cut into individual pieces before baking
4) Probably bake at a slightly lower temperature next time.

But it was good taste-wise. Even the flaking off phyllo is tasty; it got all goldeny and crunchy, it's like really thin crackers.

It occurred to me that the phyllo sheets are practically perfect for samosas. They're just like what my grandmother used to use.

Red Cabbage Sauté

2009-11-06T23:31:00.003+01:00

In case you couldn't tell from last post, kasha + fried eggs + veggie saute = fast, tasty and nutritious dinner. Reasonably cheap, too.

Ingredients:
200 g red cabbage sauerkraut
2 t oil (any kind)
1 small onion
1 small apple
Salt to taste
A splash of apple cider vinegar if you want extra tart flavor

Method:
Warm the oil in a pan. Peel the onion and slice into demi-rings. Saute them until golden with hints of brown caramelization. Turn heat to low, add the apple, cut into matchsticks (peeled if you prefer), the cabbage, salt to taste and the optional vinegar. If your sauerkraut is not very wet, add a tablespoon or two of water to keep things from burning. Saute till apples and cabbage are warm.

Notes: Satisfying and tasty on a fall evening. Also, light and healthy.

Serving Suggestion: We had this with kasha (roasted buckwheat groats) and fried eggs. I think a dollop of sour cream or thick Greek style yogurt would have been good on the cabbage.

Extremely Fast Dinner

2009-11-03T19:53:00.002+01:00

This was made (and I'm sorry to say) eaten in less than 45 minutes. Yeah, I eat too fast.

This fast and yummy dinner consists of kasha with fried eggs and cress saute.

Ingredients:
1 package cress (I think mine was garden cress, 75 g package)
1 small onion
1 T olive oil
1 big clove garlic
1.5 cups kasha, rinsed well
Eggs (however many you want)

Method:
Kasha: rinse well, put in a pot with 1.5 cups of water. Add some salt (as you would for rice), bring to a boil. You should also add some butter, but I don't have any right now, so I added a little bit of olive oil and a gruyere cheese rind for flavor. Allow to boil (not vigorously) till all water is evaporated, then remove from heat, cover and let steam for at least 5 minutes. You can cook it longer for softer kasha, this will need a bit more water.

Saute: Warm oil in a pan. Add chopped onion and saute until golden-brown. Add garlic, saute a couple of minutes. Just before serving, add cress and cook till wilted down.

Eggs: Fry them how you like them. (For me, over medium or sunny side up).

Serving Suggestion: Good eaten kind of all mixed up. Also good with bufala mozzarella cheese on the side.

Vegetable Pancakes

2009-10-29T20:11:00.003+01:00

Just made these, but we'll have dinner later tonight. I ate one though. It was tasty, but for dinner I'm going to serve them with sour cream mixed with garlic and dill (that'll be really good)!

Ingredients:
1 small potato
1 small-medium zucchini
2 medium carrots
1 small onion
1/4 c flat leaf parsley
2 eggs
1/2 c flour
1 tsp baking powder
Salt and lots of ground black pepper to taste
Oil for frying

Method:
Grate all the vegetables except the onion. I only peeled the carrots. The onion slice very thinly, and the parsley chop. Add all to a mixing bowl. Crack in the eggs, well, add the rest of the ingredients (except oil) and mix very well. Warm oil to fry. Place dollops of the vegetable mix in the pan, smush them a little to make them more pancake shaped. I did 3 at a time in my pan. When done on one side (golden brown, a couple of minutes) flip and finish on the other side. Remove from pan and let drain on towels/paper towels.

Notes: I think a good step to do, which I was going to do and forgot, is to salt the vegetables, let them sit a few minutes, and then remove the liquid that comes out of them before you add the eggs and flour etc.

Serving Suggestion: Well, I intend to top them with sour cream or yogurt mixed with chopped dill and minced garlic. I'll probably either have them with leftover schi from yesterday, or some arugula. These could be a light meal or appetizer. Probably good for breakfast too.

Schi

2009-10-28T16:04:00.004+01:00

This is a traditional Russian cabbage and potato soup. It's not the fanciest, there are others that are more interesting. But it's hearty and warm and good anyway! Some versions are made with sauerkraut instead of plain cabbage, adding a sour/tangy taste. That's pretty common in Russian soups, to add pickled vegetables or a little vinegar and sugar for a special flavor. I haven't seen that in schi recipes using regular cabbage, but I add a little pickle brine to mine because I like it.

Ingredients:
4 qts beef stock*
2 large potatoes
1/2 small head of cabbage
1 onion
1 T sunflower oil
2 medium carrots
1 medium tomato
Few T pickle brine
Salt to taste

Stock:
Stock is very easy to make. In a large pot, place meat, an onion (halved), a carrot (halved), a few cloves of garlic (whole), couple of bay leaves, some peppercorns (I use a mix of black and white peppers and allspice). Bring to a boil, let simmer until meat is tender. This will depend on your cut of meat, but generally longer time = more tender meat + tastier stock. I let mine go for about 3 hours usually. Meat with a bone gives better stock.

Method:
Remove the meat from the stock and set aside. Bring the stock up to a boil and add the potatoes (peeled and cut into 1/2" cubes). Chop the cabbage. I like to chop it thickly, instead of shredding it, for this soup. After the potatoes have been in about 15 minutes, add the cabbage. Warm the oil in a saucepan. Cut the onion into half-rings and saute in the oil. After a couple of minutes add the carrot (shredded). When it's all soft, add the chopped tomato. Once the tomato is cooked, remove the saucepan from heat. After the cabbage has been boiling about 30 minutes, add the contents of the saucepan to the soup. Add the brine to the soup and salt to taste. At this point you can also chop the meat and put in the soup, but I prefer to serve the boiled meat separately, on the side. Let flavors combine on a simmer for about 15 minutes. Serve.

Notes: This tastes better the next day, after the flavors have mixed even more. I have no idea why tomatoes are included in a traditionally winter time soup, but they are! I've seen recipes that use chicken and chicken broth, if you prefer. To make this vegetarian, I would just use a nice vegetable broth.

Serving Suggestion: My boyfriend claims that this is one of the few Russian soups that is not usually eaten with sour cream. He qualifies this by saying that "of course" a person CAN add it if they want. Put chopped greens (dill, parsley) on top of the soup just before serving.

Turkish Style Eggplant with Rice-Pasta Pilaf

2009-10-27T13:25:00.003+01:00

Eggplant recipe just sort of made up with what I had around, especially some stuff from the freezer (one chopped eggplant, 2 whole tomatoes). Before we go on a trip, if there's any produce that we didn't finish I just pop it in the freezer. The eggplants I chopped, but tomatoes I freeze whole. When I want to use them, I run a tomato under hot water for a few seconds. The skin is really easy to peel off after doing that. The tomato is still rock-hard, it's really easy to chop up.

The pilaf is my attempt to recreate something I had at a Turkish co-worker's home.

Turkish Style Eggplant with Rice-Pasta Pilaf

Ingredients:
For the eggplant:
1 eggplant
2 tomatoes
1 small onion
4 cloves garlic
1 large or 2-3 small carrots
1 T olive oil
2 T chopped fresh parsley
2 lemon wedges
1/3 c of a tomato sauce (any kind you like)
1/3 c water
2 bay leaves
Salt to taste

For the pilaf:
1 small onion
1 T olive oil
1.5 c raw rice
.5 c small pasta (orzo, vermicilli, stars)
3.5 c water
Salt

Method:
Eggplant: Mine was frozen, so to remove the excess water I just had to thaw in the microwave and drain. If yours is fresh, chop it and put it in a bowl. Salt it a little and let it sit about 10 minutes, the salt will draw the liquid out. Drain. Warm the oil in a pan. Saute one onion, chopped. When soft, add the carrot(s), shredded and the minced garlic. When the carrot is soft, add the remaining ingredients: eggplant, chopped tomatoes, juice from the lemon wedges, tomato sauce, bay leaves, parsley, water, salt to taste. Let it simmer while you prepare the pilaf. You can let it cook just until the eggplant is soft, or keep it simmering as long as you want (may need to replenish liquid in that case).

Pilaf: rinse the rice. In a pot, warm the oil. Saute the chopped onion till soft. Add the rice, and saute it for a few minutes. Don't let it brown, but the grains will become more translucent, and shiny. Add the water, pasta and salt. Cook as normal. I let it boil gently till the water is all gone, then I remove it from the heat and cover it, letting it steam for about 10 minutes. Fluff with a fork before serving.

Notes: My friend made her pilaf with orzo, which was really good. Mine was with vermicelli, which is what I had around. It was fine, but it was kind of like normal rice. Next time I will use orzo. The tomato sauce I used had peppers (not spicy ones) in it. You could use plain, or even just tomato paste. I think a spicy tomato sauce, like arrabiata, would be tasty in it. This meal was fast and easy to prepare.

Serving Suggestion: Very good served with yogurt. You could add the parsley at the end instead, if you want, sprinkling it over the dish just before serving

Geneva Restaurant Review: Kwai Foods

2009-10-26T00:30:00.004+01:00

This is an Asian restaurant near the main train station. I'm not exactly sure which kind of Asian food it specializes in. From the menu I think it's a Thai-Chinese Fusion thing.

Verdict: I may give it one more shot, but in general I'm not inclined to go back. Nothing special, and there are a lot of other places in town.

What was eaten: Tom yom koong (hot and sour thai soup with shrimp), tom kha gai (sweet/sour coconut milk thai soup with chciken), duck in red curry sauce, beef in panang curry.

The tom kha was tasty, the tom yom wasn't as good. A little bit of soy sauce made it better. The beef in the panang was really nice, but the curry itself was absolutely nothing special. I didn't like the duck, as for me duck is only good with a crispy skin. The red curry and panang curry sauce tasted identical. The best part of the meal for me was the lightly pickled cabbage salad that is served with the main dishes.

Price: Just under 50 CHF, not including beverages. About as cheap as you can do it in this town, but I like certain kebab places, like L'Etoile de Beyrouth, better for that price.

The one reason I may go back? The table next to us got a really good looking plate of fried noodles with chicken just as we were leaving. I may have to try that.

If you live in this area, you may be familiar with Mike Wong. This place is a similar quality, and price. If you want to sit and eat, the atmosphere is nicer here, but if you want to go I think Mike's has a larger menu, maybe.

Insane Lemon Saffron Cake

2009-10-26T00:05:00.005+01:00

I found this recipe here, while looking for a recipe for a cake using fromage blanc. (That will come later, I hope.) The horoshaya kukhniya (good cook) site is one of my favorites, and the recipe sounded cool, so I thought I'd give it a try. The site is in Russian.

Oh, and I'm calling it "insane" because 1) the lemon flavor is really strong, 2) it is very sweet. You'll need a cup of tea with this. It's not bad, but for my personal taste it was too sweet. My BF must have liked it though, because he ate a bunch of it. So nice to have someone other than myself to test these things on!

Insane Lemon Cake
Adapted from the "Simple Lemon Cake" at horoshaya kukhniya

Ingredients:
For cake:
3 eggs (the ones I have are small)
1/2 glass of sugar
2/3 glass of flour
1.5 tea spoons baking powder
lemon zest to taste
a generous pinch of saffron

For syrup:
3/4 cup of sugar
juice of 4 lemons
1 t honey

*A note about measurements: in Russian recipes it's quite common to see units of a "glass", a "tea spoon" and a "soup spoon" or "big spoon". The glass corresponds roughly to 1 cup. The tea spoon and soup/big spoon correspond roughly to a standard teaspoon and tablespoon, respectively. Perhaps the Russian spoon measurements are slightly bigger, in my opinion. I'm not sure if it's true, but I think that this comes from a time when there was considerably less variety amongst people's belongings--like silverware and glassware. Under those circumstances, saying "a glass of sugar" works just fine.

Method:
Preheat oven to 180 degrees Celsius (roughly 350 Fahrenheit). In a bowl, beat the eggs with the 1/2 glass (cup) of sugar. When well combined, stir in (carefully) the zest, saffron, flour and baking powder. When everything is incorporated, pour the batter (which will be thick) into a cake pan. It's better to use a deep pan if you have one. When the cake is firm and golden brown on the top, take it out. This will probably be about 40 minutes. Let the cake cool, and meanwhile prepare the syrup. I cheated and stuck my cake in the freezer while I made the syrup, so I didn't have to wait for it to cool very long. For the syrup, combine the lemon juice, sugar and honey. Heat on low until sugar is dissolved and a syrup is formed. This syrup should be poured over the cake. I cut off a bit of the top of the cake (so it was flat) to expose a more porous surface before pouring the syrup on top. This was because I didn't have a deep pan, and if I had done otherwise the syrup would've gone everywhere. Once the syrup has soaked into the cake, serve.

Notes: The original recipe called for tumeric, but I thought that sounded strange, so I added saffron instead. This made it smell great. This cake is really sweet and rich with the syrup. Without it is a bit hard, dry and not very sweet. So, it needs to soak in something, but I think this syrup is too much. What sounds good to me, coming from an Indian background, is some sort of lightly sweetened milk. The original recipe's syrup calls just for lemon and sugar. I added a bit of honey because I thought it was too sour, but then I tasted it and realized that it was already on the verge of too sweet, so to mellow things out I added some water instead of more honey. Adding water is what the original recipe suggests.

Next time I make this I'm going to try to soak it in something else, and maybe leave the lemon flavor out entirely. My idea is to basically make the saffron cake, but add some pistachios. Then, instead of syrup, I will mix some cold milk with Rooh Afza and pour that over the cake instead. Hmm, why didn't I think of that an hour ago?

Serving Suggestion: You must have tea with this. Otherwise it's impossible.

Creamy Mushroom Sauce

2009-10-15T01:52:00.002+02:00

Whipped this up tonight. It was really good, fast and super simple.

Ingredients:
10 small button mushrooms
1 T olive oil
1 T butter
4 cloves garlic
1 small onion
1 T boursin cheese
2 t creme fraiche
2 T chopped fresh parsley

Method:
Melt butter and oil together in a saucepan. Saute chopped onion till soft and slightly golden. Add chopped garlic, saute a minute or so more. Add sliced mushrooms, and saute until soft. Remove from heat. Stir in boursin cheese, creme and parsley until boursin is melted and everything is well mixed. Salt to taste.

Notes: It was really good. My BF liked it too. He ate it on top of noodles. I had it on top of a bed of spinach with a fried egg on top. I think his way sounds tastier, but I'm trying to watch the calories. Can't argue with spinach when it comes to calories.

Serving Suggestion: On top of a bed of spinach (maybe slightly wilted and salted), noodles, rice or (sounds really good) boiled potatoes.

Onion Soup Gratin

2009-10-14T01:40:00.002+02:00

I made this really tasty onion soup recently. It was very delicious! Not as dark brown as the kind I see in restaurants, but very flavorful and slightly sweet. This is the time of year when we can find 5 kg bags of onions for about one euro. So of course I made this soup!

Ingredients:
1 qt beef broth
20 onions
4 T butter
300 mL cider
100 mL white wine
a little dried thyme

Method:
Make a beef broth. I made it in a 5 quart pot. After it's done (or about half an our before it'll be ready), caramelize 20 onions (type doesn't matter) in a soup pot. Go slow, to make sure they don't burn. Deglaze with 1/2 the cider. Keep caramelizing. When liquid evaporates, deglaze again with 1/2 the wine (I used white). Repeat once for each. Add some dried thyme and fill your soup pot with the stock (no meat or bones). I ended up having quite a bit of stock left over for another day. Allow the flavors of the soup to combine for 5-10 minutes on a simmer. Serve.

Notes: This was very time-intensive but so worth it. I don't know how this would taste using a vegetable broth; probably just fine, as most of the flavor is from the onions and the alcohol (and the ton of butter)! It may be a little too sweet though. In the case that you want to use vegetable broth, maybe cut back on the onions by one or two. This becomes much faster if you already have broth ready, but it still isn't exactly fast. The caramelizing and deglazing took about ... 45 minutes maybe? I saved it for a weekend because it was not fast.

Serving Suggestion: To serve, ladle into bowls. Cover bowl with a thin slice of baguette bread (or chunks), and grated Gruyere or Comté cheese. Place under broiler till cheese melts and is golden brown. Alternatively, it is very tasty just ladled into bowls, and eaten with some bread on the side. You could just sprinkle grated cheese on top of the hot soup.

Orecchiette a la Funghi

2009-10-14T01:31:00.003+02:00

Very simple and tasty meal. Again, made at a time we didn't have a lot of different ingredients around. I basically looked in the fridge and used what was there.

Ingredients:

Orecchiette--I had about 6-7 cups cooked
Quite a bit of butter (maybe 2 T?)
1 T olive oil
1 small onion, chopped
3-4 cloves of garlic, diced
Splash of white wine
1 cup frozen mushrooms*
1/4 c shredded Gruyere cheese
Small bunch of fresh basil** chopped

*Ours is a mix of chopped wild mushrooms--of course if you have fresh mushrooms, go for it!
**Actually mine was frozen, as this was again done right after a trip. I always freeze whatever fresh before I go away on a trip.

Method:
Bring a large pot of lightly salted water to a boil. When it comes to a rolling boil, you'll add the pasta. While the water is coming to a boil, start the sauce: in a saucepan, melt the butter with the oil. When heated, add the onion and saute until soft and translucent. Add the garlic, saute a minute or two more. Add the mushrooms and the wine, and about 1/2 c of the pasta cooking water. Allow to simmer on the lowest heat while waiting for the pasta to finish. Season with salt to taste. As soon as the pasta is finished, drain it, add to the saucepan. Add the basil and the Gruyere at this point as well. Toss everything together well, and serve!

Notes: I thought maybe some cream would be good, but we didn't have any. It was very nice with just the butter and the cheese, though, still tasted creamy. I think the key was A LOT of butter.

Serving Suggestion: White wine?

Orecchiette a la Vodka

2009-10-14T01:17:00.004+02:00

Vodka really brings out the taste of tomato sauces. I especially like tomato-vodka sauces with peas. Traditionally, cream and bacon are also added. (Disclaimer: When I say "traditionally", I mean I've seen it done this way in many restaurants.) We just got back from a week-long conference and had almost no food around, especially no fresh food. This is what I made in that situation.

Ingredients:
Orecchiette pasta--I think I had about 6 or 7 cups cooked
2 small onions, diced
3-4 cloves of garlic, diced
3 canned roma tomatoes + a bit of the juice from the can
1 T tomato paste
A splash of vodka
1 t of sugar
1 c of frozen peas
About 2 T olive oil
A generous pat of butter*

*The butter is optional. Leave it out for a vegan meal. Maybe add a little more olive oil in that case.

Method:
Bring a large pot of lightly salted water to a boil. When it comes to a rolling boil, you'll add the pasta. While the water is coming to a boil, start the sauce: in a saucepan, melt the butter with the oil. When heated, add the onion and saute until soft and translucent. Add the garlic, saute a minute or two more. Add the tomatoes and juice, chopped, the tomato paste, the sugar and the vodka. Allow to simmer for a couple of minutes. The pasta's probably almost done (you don't want to over cook it). Add about 1/2 c of the pasta water to the sauce, and the peas. Let it simmer on the lowest heat while you wait for the pasta to finish. Season with salt to taste. As soon as the pasta is finished, drain it, add to the saucepan and toss well with the sauce. Serve!

Notes: The pasta water part really is important. It makes the sauce stick to the pasta. I saw it on an old-school Italian cooking show on PBS when I was about 16, and have always remembered it since then. Orecchiette is probably my favorite pasta. I've heard it's traditionally served with broccoli, but I like it with anything. My BF thought it wasn't the best for this dish, he thinks that orecchiette needs a creamier sauce. I think it would go nicely with many different types of pasta, for some reason I think that short ones would be better than long ones (linguine, spaghetti...).

Serving Suggestion: Maybe garnish with a little parsley? I thought it was a very tasty dinner. Since we visited Italy I've been inspired to try and do more interesting things with pasta lately.

Tasty (and very Swiss-French) White Pizza

2009-10-14T01:07:00.004+02:00

This is my attempt at imitating a pizza I've seen on to go menus here. It's not anything like pizzas I've seen on American menus, but it's really good! The real Swiss-French version of course includes lardons, i.e. bacon. But I don't eat a lot of meat, and I especially try to avoid pork (paranoid about tapeworms).

Ingredients:
Ready made pizza dough or pizza shell
Creme fraiche or sour cream (about 1/4 c)
2 medium mushrooms, washed and sliced
1 medium potato, baked
3 cloves of garlic, diced
1 small onion, sliced thinly
1/2 c shredded Gruyere cheese

Method:
Preheat oven according to instructions for your dough/shell. You can certainly use home-made dough if you want. Place the dough on whatever you'll cook it on. Cover with the creme fraiche, leaving the amount of crust you prefer along the border. Sprinkle with the garlic. Sprinkle about 1/3 of the cheese on top. Arrange on the pizza: onion slices, mushroom slices and slices of the baked potato. Now sprinkle with the remaining Gruyere. Bake until crust is done, it will be enough time for the cheese to get melty and parts of the pizza to be golden brown.

Notes: I can't tell you how tasty this was! Of course you can add more garlic or mushrooms. That's never a bad thing. I also think it would be tasty with wild mushrooms, but I just used champignons de paris (standard button type).

Serving Suggestion: This was eaten for dinner, but I want to try it for a dinner party as an appetizer, cut into small squares.

Really fast/easy dinner for 4

2009-09-09T01:52:00.003+02:00

So tonight we had 2 friends over (another couple) for dinner ... I had like 30 minutes notice to make something, with no help (my bf had to go get them from the airport). But it turned out pretty well, thank god for pasta. :-)

And this tasty herb butter I had made in advance also helped. A few weeks ago when I was chopping a bunch of herbs to season some fish, I chopped way too much. So I mixed them with softened butter and diced garlic, then spread the butter into a thin stick on some parchment paper and froze it.

Today I was able to make a tasty main course by thawing some chicken legs, seasoning with salt and pepper, then putting a generous piece of the butter under the skin of each leg. I put the legs in a glass baking dish, dumped some frozen wild mushrooms on them, added a little white wine and just baked them for an hour.

We also had spaghetti noodles, a simple tomato-feta-red onion salad, krakowska sausage (from Poland, traded for some Ukrainian kvass), Gruyere cheese, and pickles. Dessert was chasselas and muscat grapes, store bought butter cookies, and store bought Gateau St. Amour. With tea, of course.

I really adore the grapes in this area. The chasselas are commonly used for making wine. They're small, perfectly round, and range in color from bright, pale green to golden brown. They're transparent, which is so cool! The muscat grapes are heavenly. They remind me of Concord grapes, but they're better. I'm not even sure how to describe them, they have a strong, distinct taste that I love. This variety is dark purple. They both have seeds, which I don't mind. Crunchy!

Geneva Restaurant Review: Cafe de Paris

2009-08-04T20:34:00.003+02:00

Cafe de Paris is a Geneva institution, absolutely famous for it's sauce, which many people love. We decided to go there last night, because after being here a long time we hadn't actually tried it yet.

Service: Not great, even by Geneva standards. Not bad either, but definitely nothing remarkable.

Wine: We had a Gamay de Geneve. I don't know any more about it as it was served in a pichet, not in a bottle, but I'm sorry I didn't ask to see the bottle because it was a very nice wine! For 50 cL we paid 16.50 CHF, which I thought was a pretty good price considering how much I enjoyed it.

Dinner: This began with a green salad. The greens were nice, not limp and lifeless like in some places (although I encounter yummy salad greens more often here than in American restaurants, anyway). The dressing was not like the typical French-restaurant-dressing, which is kind of creamy in consistency and very mustardy tasting. This was much more like an oil and vinegar kind of dressing. I liked it. The bread they brought us was normal, rolls that were crisp on the outside, soft inside. They were served at room temperature. Next came the entrecote. We had both ordered it cooked saignant (rare) as we do at all restaurants. When it came it was instead quite bleu. It was served on a heated trivet, sitting on top of the famous sauce, and we were given plates of frites. Before trying the meat, I first dipped a little bread in the sauce, really excited to try it. Hm, I thought. It tasted strange. Right away, I remembered the first bite I took of the brownies that I made a year ago, inadvertently with butter that had gone rancid. Yes, that's right, I thought that the renowned sauce tasted like it was made with rancid butter. That can't be right, I thought. It must be some weirdness, I'll try it with the meat and the fries instead and then it will taste like it's supposed to. I tried it with the (very undercooked, and just a little tough) meat and the fries. Still tasted rancid to me.

It wasn't just me. I asked my BF how he liked it, and his response was, "It's ... interesting." We both agreed we didn't like it. I am hoping that that isn't how it's supposed to taste. He said that he didn't think it tasted like the butter had gone bad, that it was probably just some strange ingredient we didn't like, but I don't think he's every tasted butter like that before. I certainly hadn't until the brownie incident.

Additionally, the sauce was VERY salty, and had a little bit of a fishy taste, but not in a pleasant way. I consider "a pleasant way" to be as in the subtle taste of anchovies in a nice Caesar salad dressing.

The fries were quite standard. They give you more if you still have meat left but have finished your first portion.

The whole salad + fries + steak combo is 41 francs. I would say it's about 200 grams of meat per person.

We declined to take dessert. They were pricey. 10 francs for a coupe of fresh raspberries. Ice cream more expensive than you can get at Movenpick two blocks away. The people next to us got creme brulee and it looked pretty normal, nothing special.

Overall impression: Very disappointing! I will not go back. The salad and the wine were quite enjoyable, but the steak and sauce, just bad. I can understand they undercook it because it "cooks" some more on the hot trivet, but then you just end up with raw on top and well-done on bottom. If you want steak frites in the Geneva area, much, MUCH better to visit Cafe de l'Aviation in Vernier. Their sauce is spectacular (if also a little salty). It's served on a plate, and so it stays at just the "doneness" it's supposed to. There they give you endless refills on frites AND sauce. And the price is the same or cheaper. They also have excellent wine!

Kvass-Okroshka Update

2009-06-24T22:11:00.002+02:00

The Wasa kvass I blogged about turned out alright. When I shook my Snapware container, there was a little, well, not explosion, but leakage. Violent leakage, I guess you could call it. It wasn't unpleasant to drink, but it wasn't something I'd elect to drink if I had other options. It was more like beer than kvass, actually. Homemade kvass isn't as sweet as the store bought stuff, but this was not sweet at all. I think I added too much yeast, and that they ate all the sugar.

However, the kvass was perfectly fine for making Okroshka, which I did do.

And then I made kvass again, using Vollkornbrot, a dense German rye bread that is (very important) sold presliced. Remember, I'm lazy. Oh, and I also bought a 1.5 L glass jar with a screw-top lid to avoid leakage.

I baked the slices of bread, and this time followed directions a bit more closely. I still think there was too much yeast though, because even though this one was better, it still wasn't quite sweet enough. Oh, and I left out the mint, I prefer the taste without it.

So then, I made Okroshka again, using the new kvass. VERY DELICIOUS. We also drank the new kvass, but I dissolved a little sugar in a little water first and we sweetened it with that before drinking.

I also have made Okroshka several times using elben, which is the closest we have here to kefir. It's kind of like a thin kefir. Very similar to ayran, but no salt added. That was very good too.

So, why no Okroshka recipe?

I've been waiting till I take a picture of the stuff, but I just keep eating it as soon as it's served. Seriously, I haven't remembered till after the fact!

Ok, next time, I WILL take a picture. Next time meaning, the next heat wave we get around here (probably around July).

Palao

2009-06-24T21:43:00.006+02:00

I wanted to make Massur Palao, which is an Indian dish with rice, ground meat, and massur lentils. Sometimes potatoes can be added. It is similar to Biriyani, which more people have heard of, except Biriyani is made usually with chunks of meat and saffron is added. My grandmother was fantastic at making Massur Palao, and she used to make it every week for my sister. Seriously, it was for my sister, the rest of us were told, "You can't eat any ... well, maybe just a little, but only if she says you can!" My sister was her favorite and my grandmother was an interesting woman. :-)

It was never my favorite dish, but we had some ground beef and suddenly I wanted to make it. But alas, no lentils. So, here you have a Massur Palao-Biriyani hybrid. But I forgot to add potatoes (sad).

Equipment:
Big, heavy bottomed pot (I think mine was like 5 quart size) with lid
Wooden spoon
Knife
Cutting board

Ingredients:
1/2 c oil
2 small onions, chopped
1 large carrot, grated
4 cloves garlic, minced
3 bird's eye chilis (or whatever small hot chilis you have), minced
2 T minced ginger (fresh)
3 T gharam masala
375 g ground beef
3 c raw basmati rice
2 pods black cardamom
2 bay leaves
5 cups water
pinch of saffron
Salt

Method:

First, wash the rice very well, and then leave it in fresh water to soak for 30 minutes.

Warm the oil in the pot. When it's hot (shimmery) add the onion, let it saute until soft, then add the carrot, sautee a couple of minutes. Now, add the chilis, garlic and ginger, let them sautee a couple minutes till nice and fragrant. Push all this stuff to one side, pooling the oil on the other side of the pot. Dump the gharam masala into the oil and make sure it is all touching the oil. Let it fry for a minute, but you don't want it to burn. I have my electric stove on "7" (out of 9) during this process, if that helps. Stir everything together, and add the ground meat, stirring well, making sure that no large lumps form and making sure that no spices are burning. Add some salt. You may need to add a cup of water (deduct it from your 5 cups) to facilitate non-burning.

When meat is reasonably browned (so it is out of the "danger zone" as far as clumping goes) Add the rice and 4 cups of water (3 cups, if you have already added one cup). Salt. Don't stir. You want the meat to stay on the bottom, rice on the top. Once the liquid starts to bubble slightly (NOT a rolling boil), put the lid on and turn the stove as low as it will go. The remaining cup of water should be a warm one. The warmest that comes out of your tap is fine. Put this cup of water in a glass, or your cup measurer, and place the saffron in it. It will start to slowly color the water yellow.

Go do something else for like 10 minutes.

Check to see how the rice is doing. Poke your spoon in along the side of the pot, not disturbing the layers, but enough to check if the liquid is just about all gone. If it isn't, replace the lid and wait a bit longer. If it is, add the saffron water but again, don't stir.

Go do something else for like 10 minutes.

Again, check the rice. If the liquid has all been absorbed, remove the pot from the heat, leaving the lid on, and let it sit that way for you guessed it, 10 minutes. If the liquid HASN'T been absorbed, then let it stay on the heat until that happens, but keep an eye on it. A little moisture is ok, but it should NOT be liquidy.

Now it's done. The top rice should be light and fluffy, the rice that's touching the meat is more moist. Scoop it onto a plate and eat it, adding salt to your taste. You can eat it with yogurt (especially good on the meat part).

Notes and Serving Suggestions: You could add some dried fruit (raisins, sour cherries) when you add the rice, or some chopped herbs of your choice. I think that whole cumin seeds (add them when you fry the gharam masala) would also be good.

About the gharam masala: traditionally, this is not fried. That's because traditionally it contains things like cardamom, black pepper, cinnamon, clove need to be "warmed" (hence the name), but that aren't oil soluble so they don't need to be fried. However, most commercially prepared gharam masala contains cumin and coriander, which DOES need to be fried. My homemade gharam masala also contains cumin and coriander because I'm lazy and so that's two less jars I have to fish around for in the cupboard. The point is, for most people, fry it. But, if you have a gharam masala that doesn't contain cumin and coriander, then: instead of frying 3 T gharam masala, fry 1 T ground cumin, 1 T ground coriander. When you add the liquid, add 1 T gharam masala.

This is REALLY UNHEALTHY. It's fat and carb city. 1/4 of the pot, which you can easily eat, believe me, has like 1/2 a day's calories. The whole recipe is 3687 calories.

Kvass

2009-05-10T14:37:00.003+02:00

Kvass is a fermented beverage from rye bread. It's tasty, carbonated, refreshing, and just very slightly alcoholic (not enough to be sold as an alcoholic beverage). As I write, I am making kvass from Wasa bread. Am I brilliant, or just insane? We don't know (my boyfriend chastises me every time I try to open the container to taste, "It's not ready yet!"). I have snuck a few tastes and so far I am going with brilliant. It isn't exactly the best kvass for drinking, but I really don't care about that because the only reason I made it is so I can have some Okroshka. Which I have been craving for almost a year. It's a cold Russian soup, and now that it's getting quite warm here, I really want some.

And thus, we are making kvass from Wasa. Because it takes several days, and several days ago we didn't have rye bread. Here's what I did (notes on possible improvements at the end):

Wasa Bread Kvass

Ingredients:

Container that is airtight (mine is like 3-4 cups in volume)
2 Wasa toasts (make sure they are the original rye kind, not sesame or anything like that)
Boiling water
Couple tablespoons dry yeast
Few tablespoons of sugar (my boyfriend at first forgot that when getting the instructions from his mom, remembered a day later. You won't have carbonated or correct tasting kvass without it)
Few mint leaves
Few raisins

Method:

Let's start with the disclaimer that since I was already doing something very unorthodox, i.e. kvass from Wasa, I didn't follow the directions I was given precisely. I am lazy.

Break up the Wasa into chunks in your container. Pour boiling water to cover. Let sit for a while, and when the temperature has reached body temperature, remove a bit of the warm liquid to a glass. Stir the yeast (and the sugar, which we originally forgot and had to add later) into this, and then add back to the container. Seal container tightly, shake, and let sit for 24 hours, shaking every so often. Then add mint leaves and raisins, let sit another 12-24 hours. Before using, strain well.

What you're supposed to do (my boyfriend's mom's instructions):

First of all, you are not supposed to use Wasa. You are supposed to use nice, dense Russian rye bread, which you cut into slices and dry in the oven. That is work, people. Not a lot of work, but work. I will do it at some point, because it really does result in better kvass, but I really wanted to see if lazy-Wasa-kvass could work. You put the bread in a better air-tight container than I have. )A wide-mouthed jar is ideal. I have a Snapware container, which is great for lunch, but is not completely air-tight when it comes to shaking a carbonated beverage.) Now, you pour the boiling water as directed above. Let it sit until the liquid reaches body temperature. Strain out the bread. Take a bit of the liquid into a glass, add the yeast and sugar. Shake, let sit for like a day, shaking periodically. Add the mint, let sit for another 12 or so hours, shaking periodically. Strain well, then pour into bottles for refrigeration or canning. Add a few raisins to each bottle first.

My boyfriend's mom gave no quantities. I love her for that, she cooks like I do. :-)

I've heard kvass lasts for a week in the fridge, mine is not going to be around long enough to test that. I am making Okroshka for dinner tonight!

Rhubarb-Apple Compote

2009-05-08T22:30:00.004+02:00

We got some nice rhubarb in the store, and we still have a bunch of apples that aren't the best for eating (a little mealy/soft) but are good for cooking. I threw this together and surprisingly it was delicious.

Rhubarb-Apple Compote

Ingredients:

4-5 stalks of rhubarb
3 small apples
1/4 c dried sour cherries
30 roasted peanuts (unsalted)
A squeeze of lemon
Cinnamon stick (1"-2")
A piece of ginger root (1/2")
3/4 c of sugar

Method:

Wash and peel rhubarb stalks, also removing any leaves (they are poisonous). Chop. Core and chop the apples. Peel the ginger and slice into matchsticks. Combine all ingredients in a saucepan. Bring to a boil slowly, and then let simmer until fruits are soft and the mixture is not liquid.

Notes and Serving Suggestion:

We at this with crepes (blini). I use Yulinka's recipe, but with sour milk (is it the same as buttermilk?) and a bit more sugar. I especially liked the peanuts! It's kind of a breakfast dish (especially for week end) or dessert, but we had it for dinner.

The move to Switzerland

2009-03-29T17:53:00.002+02:00

We got a new apartment in Switzerland. It's more expensive, but let's just say that the standard of living between France and Switzerland makes it worth it.

I have two colleagues who lived in Switzerland while we were in France, and one in particular was always complaining about how much more expensive it is in the Swiss grocery stores. He's a bit of a complainer in general, but I still found myself a bit worried yesterday as we made our first grocery shopping in Switzerland.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that almost everything was cheaper. I think this is because the Swiss very much like to keep it local, especially with fresh things (meat, dairy, produce). Onions and potatoes were more expensive, but lettuces, strawberries, fresh herbs, fresh yeast and peppers were all much cheaper. The strawberries were an especially good deal, and I bought 1.5 kilos. (See Strawberry Salad with Balsamic Vinegar)

I also bought some more seeds for my future garden. I already have herbs: parsley, basil, cilantro, dill and chives. I bought peas and tomatoes yesterday. The seeds were cheaper, too!

I think I'm also going to grow lettuces, but then that's it. It's my first garden, so I don't want to get overwhelmed.

Strawberry Salad with Balsamic Vinegar

2009-03-29T17:42:00.005+02:00

I've been so, so busy. My cousin came to visit us, I've been swamped with work and we moved to Switzerland. All those were/are good things (even about the work), but the result has been that I have had NO spare time.

Also, I have not felt like cooking at all. I don't understand why, but for some reason I'm just loathing the thought of making anything more complicated than a salad.

So, here is the salad that I made today, with the lovely strawberries that are just starting to arrive.

Strawberry Salad with Balsamic Vinegar

Ingredients:

3 c mâche or baby spinach
6-10 strawberries, washed, tops removed, hulled and halved
1.5 oz fresh soft goat's cheese (chevre)
1 scallion
2 T balsamic vinegar
1 t olive oil
Salt and Pepper to taste

Method:

Wash the mâche/spinach and dry well. I like to use a salad spinner. They're cheap and fun (mine was $2 from Target), and effective. Arrange the strawberries and goat cheese on top. Season with salt and pepper, then sprinkle with the chopped scallion. Top with oil and vinegar.

Serving Suggestion and Notes: I know it is extremely basic, but that's pretty much how I've been cooking recently. I'm really looking forward to summer ingredients, and lots of simple but flavorful salads like this one. After winter, I am officially sick of soups (didn't think it could even happen)!

Vote for McCain!

2009-03-04T23:38:00.004+01:00

Not for president, but for pizza. I guess it's a Canadian brand, but they sell this delicious frozen pizza here, we simply call it "Pizza McCain." Although there are many flavors, it goes without saying that we are talking about the Supremania pizza with jambon et legumes.

Although BF wasn't fond of it, I also liked the Cheesymania with bleau cheese. Yummy!

We get it occasionally, though we've also started making our own pizzas using the same dough as for pirozhki. I've changed the recipe I use a bit, the proportions are pretty similar but there's less fat and I use buttermilk instead of water. I made a BBQ pizza which I thought was very tasty, and BF made one with Gruyere cheese and a really tasty cream sauce. I'll post recipes later.

I'm going to have a VERY busy next few days. My cousin is coming for a visit from Paris this weekend, so we will probably have lots of yummy French and Swiss-French food in restaurants. We'll be out of the office Friday to show them around. But, I have a big presentation on Monday. So, I have essentially tomorrow and half of Monday to finish it. Yikes!

Root Vegetable Soup

2009-03-01T12:24:00.004+01:00

This soup was light but tasty, with flavors of spring and late winter.

Root Vegetable Soup

Ingredients:

Water (I probably used about 6 cups)
1.5 cups lamb's lettuce or baby spinach
1/2 large turnip, cleaned, chopped into 1" cubes
1 small rutabaga, cleaned, chopped into 1" cubes
2 ribs celery, chopped
2 cloves of garlic, chopped
1 cup chopped oyster mushrooms (can use any kind)
2 medium-large onions, sliced into pieces 1/4"-1/2" thick
2 T oil
1 T butter
1 Bay leaf
Salt and Pepper to taste
Soy sauce to taste (about 1 T)
1 small bunch dill, chopped
1 T dried parsley

Method:

Warm the oil and the butter together in a large pot. I use my 3 Qt. pot for all soups. Add the onions, sauteeing them. It helps if you sprinkle some salt over them. I let mine get just slightly caramelized. Add the mushrooms, celery and garlic. Sautee until the celery is really bright green, a couple of minutes. Add the water, rutabaga and turnip. Season to taste with salt, pepper, herbs and soy sauce. Bring to a boil and allow to cook till turnip and rutabaga are soft to your liking (I prefer them not absolutely soft). Just before serving, stir in lamb's lettuce or baby spinach.

Serving Suggestion and Notes: I think the soup may also benefit from a little acidity, like some balsamic vinegar or lemon juice. It's tasty as is, but it's a subtle sort of tasty. The soup doesn't really take long to cook, either. Rutabagas and turnips take less time than potatoes, but if you want this to be more substantial you could add those too. I'm putting this in the "French" section because this just sort of came about from all the great French produce in (one of) my grocery store(s) yesterday. Everything in the soup was from France! It's not that common, we get a lot of produce from Africa and Spain. I try to buy as local as I can, though. *Edit* I just remembered that I put in parsley and dill as well. The dill was from Morocco, so I guess it wasn't a 100% French soup.

Celery and Apple Salad

2009-02-27T23:50:00.006+01:00

We had this tonight with boiled potatoes and baked trout. (I'm trying to eat less meat, but it's mostly for health reasons, and fish are pretty good for you.) It's an attempt of mine to make a salad similar to one from the CERN cafeteria. The food there can be highly questionable, but some of it is surprisingly tasty.

Celery and Apple Salad

Ingredients:

Dressing:
2 T nice mayonnaise
2 t nice mustard (I used a mild Dijon)
1 T apple cider vinegar
Squeeze of lemon juice
1 small bunch mint, chopped
1 T dried parsley

1 small apple, cored, quartered and sliced thinly
1/4 c cashew halves & wholes, crumbled
2 ribs of celery, chopped
4-5 cups lettuce, chopped
Salt and Pepper to taste

Method:

In a salad bowl, mix the ingredients for dressing together well. Add the celery, apples and cashews. Mix well, season with salt and pepper. Add lettuce, and toss before serving.

Serving Suggestion and Notes: It had nice, understated flavors. Really springtime-like. I think the kind of mayo you use is important, and mustard too. We get insanely wonderful ones here, nothing like the mayo I remember in the States. Actually, I never ate mayo when I lived in the States, because I didn't like it. This recipe makes enough for about 5 side salad portions, or 3 large meal-type portions.

Becoming Too Carnivorous

2009-02-25T23:43:00.002+01:00

We've been eating a LOT of meat lately, I noticed. I guess it's because it's winter time and there isn't much variety of produce around, but I've decided I should take that as a challenge and try to get back into a more or less vegetarian lifestyle.

I like being semi-vegetarian for health and ethical reasons. Ethically, I don't believe that a meat based or meat-heavy diet is sustainable, and I don't believe that animals can be treated with dignity in a society that practices factory farming. From a health perspective, I just feel better when I don't eat a lot of meat.

I also want to start cooking more Indian food, and learn how to cook things that my grandmother used to. My mom cooked several Indian dishes regularly when I was growing up, but the major source of the variety in the Indian food we ate was my grandmother. She's gone now, but I hope I can rediscover some of the things she used to make.

Last night we went to an Indian restaurant right next to CERN. It was awful. My boyfriend thought it was "ok," but I was only willing to call it "edible" and even that was just because I was hungry. It was also grossly overpriced. I knew I could make better at home, so I'm going to start trying.

There's a Russian restaurant we've heard about in Geneva that's also extremely overpriced, but they have a cheaper lunch time buffet. We're going to try that out, and I'm really curious if my boyfriend will think it's bad, and if I'll think it's good.

Tonight I let him bring kebabs from the local Turkish restaurant. By "let" I mean I let him bring one for me, too, he's of course free to eat whatever he wants. Now I feel awful; too stuffed and guilty. We were at CERN working late, and I was lazy at the thought of cooking, and unhappy at the idea of eating the cafeteria's food. I think I'll post about the CERN cafeteria later, I'm sure that some people may be curious to know how the physicists at arguably the world's most famous lab eat.

I'm finding it really difficult to eat healthily; I don't know if it's the season. I feel like I should have found some sort of healthy-eating-routine by now, like I was able to find the last time I moved. But it's been almost a year, and I still haven't found a groove that works.

Stuffed Tomatoes and Mushrooms

2009-02-24T15:52:00.004+01:00

I made these last night for dinner. We needed to eat, and so I just sort of made this up on the spot. It turned out well, though I undersalted the filling (I always end up undersalting things).

Stuffed Tomatoes and Mushrooms

Ingredients:

3 medium round tomatoes
3 large mushrooms
325 g ground beef
1/2 small onion chopped
1 clove garlic minced
1 T dried parsley
1 T dried basil
1 T dried oregano
salt
pepper
1 egg
1 c tomato juice (something tasty enough you'd drink it)
60 g fresh mozzarella cheese, sliced/shredded

Method:

Wash the mushrooms and the tomatoes. Slice their tops off and remove the insides of the tomatoes (a grapefruit spoon is awesome for this) and reserve for some other application (soup, salads, whatever). Remove the mushroom stems, chop them (just the stems) and place the pieces in a bowl. Arrange the tomatoes and mushrooms in a shallow baking pan or dish. Sprinkle them with salt and pepper. In the bowl with the mushroom pieces, prepare the filling. Add to the mushrooms the ground beef, garlic, onion, egg (beaten), herbs and generous amounts of salt and pepper. Mix thoroughly. Stuff an equal amount of the mixture into each tomato and mushroom cap. You can stuff them with less and make more mushrooms/tomatoes if you want. Pour the tomato juice over everything. Bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes. Cover each tomato/mushroom with cheese (you can use a different kind if you like) and bake for an additional 5-10 minutes.

Notes and Serving Suggestions: I cooked mine for 10 minutes more than is listed here, and they were just the tiniest bit dry. I think that the times I've written here are better. We ate this with a big green salad (romaine, olives stuffed with garlic, onion, apple cider vinegar dressing) and spaghetti. You could use bell peppers, too, or some other vegetable. If you want to use less meat, add some rice to the mixture. For a vegetarian stuffing, I'd use rice, mushrooms, onion and maybe some kidney beans.

I know that tomatoes with spaghetti sounds very Italian, but I've never seen Italian stuffed tomatoes. I have seen them in Russian and Balkan cuisine, and in French, too. However, I have seen Italian stuffed mushrooms. I dunno. I'm putting them in the "Russian", "Italian", and "French" categories.

Pelmeni

2009-02-22T10:50:00.006+01:00

Pelmeni are basically Russian tortellini. But different. Does that make sense? The shape is essentially the same, and they are basically pasta, but the filling is different and they are served differently.

The standard pelmeni filling is ground meat (it can be a mix of beef, pork, lamb, my BF's mom even puts ground chicken in sometimes), onion, salt and pepper. I've never seen a different filling, and my BF looked at me like I was from another planet when I innocently asked, "Does anyone ever make pelmeni with minced fish inside?"

We made a bunch of them last night, it was a really satisfying meal.

Pelmeni

Ingredients:

2.5 glasses* of flour
1 egg
1/2 teaspoon salt
water as needed (approximately 1/2 a glass)

1/4 medium onion
325 g ground meat (I used beef, 20% fat)
salt and pepper

*A "glass" is a measurement used in many Russian recipes. I believe it comes from the time when most household items were very standardized; everyone had glasses of pretty much the same size and design. The glass I used was a cup in volume, and it's very close to the size of the magic glass referred to in Russian recipes.

Method:

First prepare the dough. Place the flour and salt in a bowl, or if you're very awesome (which I'm not), on a clean dry surface, like a big wooden cutting board. Make a well in the center and add the egg. Start to mix, and add the water slowly, mixing as you go. You need to add enough such that you have a smooth, soft dough, but not too much or it will be sticky. If it gets a little too sticky, you can add extra flour, a little bit at a time. Knead the dough for a bit so it's supple and smooth.

Now prepare the filling. Mix the ground meat with chopped onion, add plenty of salt and pepper.

Roll out the dough very thinly on a floured large surface. Cut it into squares that are about 1.5" on each side. You can just use a "grid" method to do this, it's fast and efficient: make lines 1.5" apart going one direction, and then make them again in the direction 90 degrees away. Any pieces that are too small can be mixed together and re-rolled out.

Place a thimbleful of filling (about a teaspoon) on each square in the center. Now comes the tricky part, if you haven't done it before; the folding.

A___________B
|...................|
|....*******....|
|....********...|
|....*******....|
C____________D

Above is my incredibly nerdy rendition of an unfolded pelmen. To fold one, first make a triangular pocket, bringing point D to point A, and pinching well to seal sides A/DB and A/DC.

A/D
/.......\
/..........\
/.............\
C__________B

Once you have a triangular pocket (poorly rendered above), bring points C and B together. You now have a finished pelmen. Repeat for the probably close to 100 squares you have!

This site has non-keyboard-generated pictures of the finished product, and of the preparation steps. They cut the dough into circles, which is also an option.

To cook them, bring lightly salted water or broth to a boil, and place them in the boiling water. Once they float, you can check the filling of one to see if it's ready. But I just let them all cook for a couple more minutes after they start to float, and then serve them.

Notes and Serving Suggestion: It's tedious. That's why this is usually a family activity, and I strongly encourage you to enlist help where you can. You can serve them in the water/broth they were cooked in, kind of as a soup. Otherwise, they can be eaten with butter, sour cream, vinegar, soy sauce, chopped greens on top, ketchup, whatever you want! My favorite is to put sour cream and chopped dill and parsely on them, eat them with the broth, or to eat them with soy sauce and apple cider vinegar.

Last Night's Dinner 2.0

2009-02-18T20:35:00.004+01:00

The Tomatoes Stuffed with Eggs that I tried to make last night came out really nicely. They were a little crunchy on top, and nice and liquidy in the yolk, which is how I like my eggs. I think next time I'll try putting something more flavorful in the bottom, maybe a nice pesto.

In other news, I'm seriously starting to consider kidnapping my boyfriend to Hawaii, where I will force him to cook that delicious roasted chicken and we will sell it to tourists for serious $$$. Ok, maybe not $$$. More like $. Sounds soooo much better than being a physicist, doesn't it? I think so, too.

Why Hawaii, you may ask? There are a couple of reasons. The first is that it's awesome, which should honestly be reason enough. The second is that I have a very fond memory involving Hawaii and chicken. I was like seven years old, and my family (mom, dad, sister, grandmother, grandfather) went on a vacation to Hawaii. I don't remember which island, because I was seven. I was pretty focused on being wary of the active volcano my parents thought it would be just fascinating to visit. Well, it was cool, but I was seven and it kinda freaked me out. Anyway, when we were driving around this island, I got to sit in the front seat and be the navigator while my dad was the pilot. Don't ask me how I scored that gig, but that's what happened. After lots of driving and not reaching our destination and reaching the end of the road, it was discovered that I had led us down the right road, but was holding the map upside down and we had gone completely the wrong way.

What's the point? The point is that at this end of the road was a stand selling the most delicious chicken ever. It was called "Huli Huli Chicken" and they had the things roasting over a spit and covered with some wonderful sauce. Needless to say, all was forgiven and I was branded the best navigator in our family.

Oven Dies at Inopportune Moment, or Tomatoes Stuffed with Eggs

2009-02-18T00:30:00.006+01:00

Actually, "Gas runs out at inopportune moment" is more correct. So no oven or stove. And we don't have a microwave. All we have is an electric teapot and a toaster. AND it happens as we have two things in the oven: My Boyfriend's Roasted Chicken, and a new recipe I'm trying, Tomatoes Stuffed with Eggs (Russian site). We noticed just shortly after putting them in, so no food-safety issues, simply disappointing. We put the things in the fridge to prepare tomorrow. We were going to ask our colleague/friend/neighbor upstairs if we could use her oven, but she was out rock climbing. She lives a more exciting life than we do. :-D

I'll post the recipe for the tomatoes here, for any who don't speak Russian. I made a couple of small additions, but unfortunately I can't yet tell you how this recipe tastes! I'll update it tomorrow, after we buy a new gas bottle from the store. Of course, as of 7:45, every place selling these things was closed. That's France for you.

Tomatoes Stuffed with Eggs
original recipe at: http://gotovim-doma.ru/view.php?r=571-recept-IAichnitsa-v-pomidorakh

Ingredients:
X medium-large tomatoes (where X is the number of tomatoes you want to make)
X smallish eggs (I buy large eggs, so I just picked the smallest ones from the carton)
X tablespoons ricotta cheese
X tablespoons chopped onion
X raw eggs in their shells
Salt and pepper

It's the first ingredient list that looks like a high-school algebra lesson! Yay! As for the tomatoes, you don't need like beefsteak tomato large ones, just a normal round tomato will do quite nicely.

Method:
Wash tomatoes and slice a thin slice off the top. Take out the seeds and inner flesh of each tomato. Using a grapefruit spoon works great. Don't discard the insides, use them in soup, a salad, eat them, whatever. Place tomatoes in a shallow baking dish, sprinkle all over with salt and pepper. Place the chopped onion and ricotta cheese at the bottom of each tomato, then crack a whole egg into each tomato. You can salt and pepper again, and then pop into the oven for 20 minutes at 180 degrees Celsius (350 Fahrenheit). From the picture on the site, the yolks will be runny and the whites set.

Serving Suggestion and Notes: To serve, plate and sprinkle over with chopped green herbs of your choice. I'm going to do dill and parsley, but basil, green onion, maybe coriander and mint, would all work beautifully. About egg size: assuming you use normally sized tomatoes, if you make a lot of these it may be worth it to buy a carton of small/medium eggs. I used large, and there was a little spillage over the edge, but since I only made 4 and since it was the first time trying it, I didn't buy any special eggs. I think this would be a good addition to a dinner (main course, with pasta, rice, or a big salad in the summer) or a nice little appetizer. Or even a breakfast.

The Original Recipe: What a great site! I look forward to trying many more from there. I spent a good hour and a half today just reading recipes on that site. I counted it as "practicing Russian" and not "shamelessly ogling tasty food." The recipe is for two tomatoes, but I don't think cooking time will change much. It also notes that you can add the greens before baking, to make them softer, and that you can add things other than eggs (as I did). It suggests ham, sausage or fried mushrooms (yummy!).

The CbG idea + food rut + Diet (Carrot and Feta Salad)

2009-02-12T19:14:00.004+01:00

So, I think that the Cheap but Good thing was a good idea, but I'm getting a little burned out on it. Maybe it's because for a while there, it was so essential to us to find the cheapest way to do things, but now that the euro isn't doing so well, we've relaxed a little. Anyway, my standard "bag of tricks" is getting exhausted. I'm going to continue the idea, but not hold myself to a once a week post; when I find something good, be it a recipe or an idea, I'll post. I'd rather post when I have an idea that I really want to share, than post just for the sake of posting.

We're kind of in a food rut here ... my boyfriend actually got sick of soups, and lately we're eating a lot of salads. Part of it is that I don't have the time at the moment for a lot of more complicated cooking. At least the salads are healthy, and easy to vary.

Bringing me to the last part, "me on a diet." Since I moved to France, about 7 kilograms (that's about 15 POUNDS) has mysteriously affixed itself to my body. Ok, so it's not so mysterious. I think it's mostly due to living with a man; he eats more and more often than I should, and I've fallen into the habit of eating when he does. (And eating what he does, not always a good thing). I've decided that I'd really like to get back to my old self again, if only for the reason that I'll once more be able to wear a good half of my wardrobe. So, food is probably going to get a lot more vegetable-y around here, for one thing. And that's not bad.

I made a salad last night that was really good. It was simple, but for some reason I found it really tasty. It was bright, slightly sweet, filling and satisfying.

Carrot and Feta Salad

Ingredients:

2 T apple cider vinegar
2 t honey
1 T olive oil
1 T dried parsley
1 large clove garlic, minced
1 large carrot, peeled and grated
1 small tart apple, cored and cut into matchsticks
50 g of feta cheese (I used full-fat sheeps milk feta)
4-5 c of lettuce, roughly chopped (I used Batavia lettuce, I think it's a butterhead variety)

Method:

In a large salad bowl, assemble the dressing: first the vinegar, then whisk in the honey, then whisk in the oil. Stir in the parsley (I crumble it slightly) and the garlic clove. Add the grated carrot and the apple, toss well in the dressing till it's all covered. Add the cheese, and mix. Now add the lettuce. You could toss it, or do what I did and just serve it at this point.

Notes and Serving Suggestions: I didn't toss the salad, it was nice to scoop it out and see the layers. I got a bunch of lettuce and the tasty apple-carrot-cheese mix on top. This makes enough for about 4 generous side/appetizer portions. I had 1/3 of it, with a boiled potato that had just a little sour cream on top. It was a pretty satisfying meal.

Calorie Count: In the entire salad, there are 461 calories.

CbG: Whole Chickens

2009-02-04T17:25:00.004+01:00

Have I mentioned before that my boyfriend can cook? I have? Well, I'll say it again: he knows his way around a kitchen, and there are some things he does better than I do. Not saying that I should be inherently better at it or anything, but I do get a LOT more practice.

Anyway, we are now adding "roasted chicken" to the list of things that BF is responsible for cooking. We've been buying a whole chicken for the past couple of weekends, and I've been using them to make a simple but delicious chicken broth. But this weekend, he wanted to take charge of the bird's lower half, while I made the broth with the breast as usual. The result was soooo good!

My Boyfriend's Roasted Chicken

Ingredients:

Lower portion of a chicken (the back, thighs and legs), reserve the upper (breast, wings) for soup
About 1/4 c mayonnaise
1 t garlic salt
1 t crushed black peppercorns
1 T dried parsley, or 1/4 c chopped fresh parsley

Method:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Sprinkle the seasonings all over the chicken, separating the skin from the flesh. Make sure that you get both the skin and the flesh. Now, spread the mayo all over, especially between skin and flesh. Roast, loosely covered with foil, until juices run clear.

Serving Suggestion and Notes: This was so good. When it finished, we had already eaten something else for dinner (this was intended to be for the next day). It smelled so great when it came out of the oven, that I told myself, "I'll just take a taste." A taste turned into half a chicken!

Simple Chicken Broth

Ingredients:

1 bunch of fresh dill
1 handful of fresh parsley
4 peppercorns
1 bay leaf
3 cloves of garlic
1 small onion
1 medium carrot
1/4 t celery salt
Upper portion of 1 chicken
Water to cover
Salt to taste

Method:

Peel and halve the carrot. Halve the onion and garlic cloves. Wash the fresh herbs, and I like to use a long sprig of dill to tie them into a bunch, to keep them all in one place. Sprinkle the celery salt over the chicken. Place all the ingredients in a large pot, cover with water. Allow it to come to a boil, and simmer for 2 hours, skimming any foamy stuff off the surface. Remove chicken and vegetables. Salt to taste.

Serving Suggestion and Notes: My favorite way to eat homemade chicken broth is simple. Place chopped fresh dill, parsley and onion in a serving bowl, and add steaming hot broth. Cooked rice and some of the chopped chicken is another nice addition.

Amy's Knock-Off

2009-01-31T02:17:00.004+01:00

I made the filling tonight for another round of pirozhki. As I said before, I was going for a knock-off version of the Amy's Roasted Vegetable Pizza topping. I think it was pretty successful!

"Amy's" Roasted Vegetable Pizza Topping

Ingredients:

8 small onions (I did 7 yellow, 1 red)
2-3 T oil (I used sunflower)
1/4 c nice balsamic vinegar
Salt to taste
2 roasted red peppers (make your own if you like, I used jarred ones)
About 4 artichoke hearts (frozen, canned, bottled, fresh cooked)*
1 1/2 cups of shiitake or oyster mushrooms (I used oyster)

*I didn't read the can on mine that carefully, turns out I actually bought artichoke bottoms. Also tasty, and much less expensive.

Method:

Caramelize the onions. When done caramelizing, deglaze the pan/pot with balsamic vinegar. Remove from heat. Chop the mushrooms, stir them into the onions. At this point: if you're going to use this for pizza, I suggest spreading this mix over your pizza crust, and then topping with strips of pepper and whole artichoke hearts (you may want to use more of them in this case). If you're going to use it to stuff a sandwich/pirozhki, or even to mix with pasta: chop the artichokes and the peppers slightly larger than the mushrooms and stir it all together. It's ready to go!

Serving Suggestion and Notes: I think this would be really nice on a pizza, or stuffed into a baguette for a quick sandwich. You could also easily use it as a dip at a party. It was tasty and easy! The most time consuming thing is slicing so many onions (and I sliced them pretty fine), and taking the time to caramelize them nicely. But, it is a great thing to make ahead and have around. You could even put it into small containers and freeze for fast use. As far as whether or not this tastes like Amy's version, well, I think it is very similar, but I think hers uses less red pepper. In my version, the red pepper over-dominated a bit. This may also be because her version uses tomatoes and a little lemon juice ... maybe the acidity balances out the pepper and the sweetness of the onions and balsamic vinegar.

Food in France

2009-01-30T00:55:00.007+01:00

In general, the food in France is of much better quality than what I usually had access to in America. The produce in grocery stores is more varied, generally of higher quality and often more "local." The cheeses are bountiful and exude flavors, smells and textures I have never experienced in their American counterparts. And the eggs. My god, the cheapest eggs here are better than the organic free-range ones I used to buy back home. Let's not even get started on the restaurants, which simply are not comparable in most cases.

However, this foodie paradise comes with one caveat, which is good, or bad, or just plainly a fact of life, depending on your point of view. That is simply this: food here is variable. This may be a difficult concept for many of my fellow Americans to understand, as it initially was for me. It may in fact be so foreign that you have no idea what I mean. Allow me to explain as best I can.

When I walk into either of the three supermarkets that I frequent, I do not see strawberries in the month of January. Why? Because strawberries are not in season, and people would not dream of eating them in January. Sure, they are in season in other countries, and you could conceivably ship them to said grocery store, in hopes of selling them. But I doubt you'd be very successful. And the reason for that is--brace yourself here--to the French, eating strawberries in January is equally as weird as the idea of strawberries not being available at any time of year is to you.

But when I say that food here is variable, I mean more than that. I mean that when I walk into the grocery store with "oyster mushrooms" or "plain oatmeal" on my shopping list, I may not be able to find it, even if I found the very same product on the shelves of the very same store only a few days earlier.

Then there is the question of "Why is it even necessary to go to three different supermarkets?" (Not on the same day, of course.) That would be because they sell different things, despite the fact that they are, theoretically, competitors. Realistically, that isn't the way it works here. People aren't turned off by the idea of doing their shopping in more than one place; they're used to it, as that is the way it's traditionally done. Even if all the supermarkets did carry identical stock, it's likely that shoppers would subconsciously not trust this, and visit more than one anyway.

When food on French grocery shelves runs out, it is not instantly replenished. If you want bread, you should shop right after work, or it will be gone. Likewise for the popular mushroom variety, Champignon de Paris. Show up at seven o'clock in the evening, and you will be left with a few damp, mushy and misshapen specimens to choose from.

Holiday marketing does exist here, but is a smaller scale operation, both in terms of the quantity of goods and the duration for which they are available. In the largest store I habitually visit, there are presently three aisles devoted to Asian products for the Chinese New Year. Or, I should say, there were, last week. Today, half an aisle remains. When that stock sells out, more will not be ordered until next year. This is likely true for even the very popular items. I estimate that the total time holiday-centric goods remain available is a month, but, like most other food related things here, I wouldn't count on that as a constant.

In addition to food here being variable, it is, of course, simply different in ways. This is due, in some part, to geographical constraints--species that thrive in Texas are not ideally suited to grow in the Rhône-Alpes region of France, after all. However, I am certain that cultural preference plays its role. Take two plant species, for example: malus domestica (the apple), and solanum tuberosum (the potato). While both of these plants, and the bounty from them that we ultimately consume, are readily available in both France and America, there are noticeable differences in the varieties one would actually encounter during a routine grocery shopping expedition.

In America, arguably the most popular incarnations of these products are the Red Delicious apple and the Russet potato. They do not exist here. This in itself means nothing. Far more telling is the fact that nothing comparable to them exists here. There are no apples, at least not for sale in stores, that exhibit the almost candy-like utter sweetness and flat one-dimensionality of the Red Delicious. As for potatoes, they are overwhelmingly of the waxy variety. I occasionally see floury types, comparable to the Russet, but I would not by any means say that they are widely available. And they are much, much smaller than the Russet. I can only conclude that this is simply due to a widespread difference in what is considered "good food," both in terms of what is tasty and what is visually appealing.

All these aspects of the local food culture--coupled with the fact that the concept of 24/7 does not exist here--were initially frustrating. But, now I think that these circumstances have shaped me into a better, more frugal and more daring cook. When things are not conveniently available, you learn to make them yourself. When items you usually use are nowhere to be found, you must learn which substitutes work and which don't. Perhaps most importantly, you learn to lighten up, and just enjoy cooking and eating that miraculous stuff we put in our mouths--food!--because, after all, what you're eating now may be a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

Weekend Cooking Project: Healthy Pirozhki

2009-01-29T00:00:00.000+01:00

I'm going to make pirozhki again, mostly because I'm crazy in love with that beautiful, yeasty dough, and also because I just plain like bread pockets with stuff inside.

In that vein, my mission is going to be to "duplicate" a certain Amy's product that I've loved for years, but that I think has now been discontinued (not that I get Amy's products here, anyway). That would be the pocket sandwich stuffed with the topping from the Roasted Vegetable Pizza. I don't have shitakes, which are on the ingredient list, and I'm not especially inclined to go out and find them. But I'll work something out.

Mainly, I plan on making the dough itself healthier by using 50% whole wheat flour, 50% white flour and slightly less vegetable oil. I also plan on not relenting to the sad face my BF will put on when he finds out I intend to bake these ones.

So, I'm going to have some that have the "Amy's" filling, some with the carrot and onion stuffing I loved so much last week, and lastly, some dessert ones. The chief reason for making dessert ones is to clean out the jam jars and some of the frozen fruit in my refrigerator. I kind of plan on mixing them all together, and possibly adding some ricotta cheese to the filling, too. We'll see how it turns out. If I'm successful with the "Amy's" one, it'll be a major victory, since those products are so good but very expensive.

I may also try to make paneer, but I'm a bit lazy to do so, since ricotta serves as a fine replacement for the unpressed version.

Cheap but Good: Explore your pantry, freezer and fridge

2009-01-28T00:00:00.003+01:00

I don't know about you, but I somehow always end up with half used quantities of food in my freezer and fridge. Usually this happens when I buy a food item, planning to use it to make a certain dish, and I don't end up using all of it. It also happens that sometimes I stock my pantry too well, and forget just what canned or dried foods I have in there. I got to thinking about this, and came to the conclusion that I would probably save a lot of money if I tried more often to cook from what I already have in my kitchen. To test how well this could work out, I examined my pantry, freezer and fridge with the goal of creating something delicious without making a trip to the store for anything.

Here's what happened:

Today I had a few mushrooms and 200 g of ground beef left from pirozhki making. I definitely wanted to use the beef, because there wasn't room in the (tiny French) freezer to freeze it. And I'm always a fan of mushrooms, so I decided to use those too. Besides, if I didn't they'd get mushy soon. So I put the beef and the mushrooms on my kitchen table. Looked around some more, but it seemed that everything else would keep pretty well (random cheese, cabbage, pickles) or was already assigned to be eaten for lunch (lettuce, green onions). Ok, moving on to the freezer.

There I found a bag of chopped frozen spinach left from making palaak paneer. It had started out as a 1 kilo bag and there was only 250 g left or so. The lump of spinach was taking up precious freezer space, especially due to the awkward shape. I put it on the table to use. Things were interesting in the freezer. That's because my BF is a total carnivore and buys random meat when there's a good deal. Or when he thinks it just looks tasty. Which brings me to the 500 g of Italian sausage that was sitting in there. I took it out, placed it on the table, and examined my ingredients.

Beef, sausage, mushrooms, spinach. I thought I'd go with something Italian due to the sausage, which I planned on taking out of it's casing and mixing with the beef. Ok, if we're going Italian, let's look in the pantry and see what's available in the way of pasta.

The pantry expedition was the deciding factor in what I'd make. There I spotted, shoved towards the back, a box of never-opened no-pre-cooking-needed lasagna noodles. Interesting. I didn't remember buying them. I asked BF, "Did you buy these?" It turns out he did ... before we even started dating (we're going on two years). :-D But I checked the expiration date, and it was fine. Besides, they'd never been opened.

Fine, it looked like I was gonna make lasagna. Beef, sausage, mushrooms, spinach, noodles. Well, can't really have a lasagna without cheese (or tofu), so I went back to the fridge to see what was available. There was an unopened tub of ricotta. Aw, I had wanted to eat that with canned peaches (I love ricotta with fruit)! But, now I was kind of set on lasagna, so I put it on the table too. But what about mozzarella to go on top? We didn't have any. But I did spot nearly 250 g of chaource cheese. I thought to myself, "If they can put reblachon on pizza, I can use that to top a lasagna." I also grabbed an egg to mix with the ricotta, 2 cloves of garlic and got a 800 g can of peeled Roma tomatoes from the pantry (we always have a few cans of those around).

Lasagna

Ingredients:

500 g Italian sausage, removed from casing
200 g ground beef
1 800 g can peeled Roma tomatoes
2 cloves of garlic, peeled and chopped
250 g frozen chopped spinach
3 medium white mushrooms, chopped
1 egg
1 250 g tub of ricotta cheese
20 no-cooking-needed lasagna noodles
Salt to taste
1 T dried parsley
1 T dried oregano
1 T dried basil
About 250 g chaource cheese

Method:

Mix the beef and the sausage. Brown, then mix in the tomatoes (chopped), with their juice. Reserve a bit of the juice (about 1/2 cup). Salt the mixture to taste. In a saucepan, warm the spinach and the mushrooms until the spinach is completely thawed. Cool slightly, and mix with ricotta cheese and chopped garlic. Salt to taste, then mix with beaten egg. Spread the bottom of a large baking dish with the reserved tomato juice. Place a layer of 4 noodles over this. Cover noodles with 1/3 meat mixture. Layer 4 noodles again. Cover noodles with 1/2 spinach mixture. Repeat: noodles, meat, noodles, spinach, noodles, meat. Sprinkle top meat layer with the dried herbs. Cut chaource into 8 even wedges; reserve for later. Place lasagna into oven preheated to 350 degrees F (gas mark 6 in France). Bake for 20 minutes, then remove and top with chaource wedges arranged in a 2x4 matrix. Put lasagna back into oven and bake for another 15 minutes. Remove and allow to cool slightly before slicing.

Notes: Placing sauce/juice before the first layer of noodles is important if you don't want the lasagna to stick. When you remove it from the oven, there will be a lot of liquid around the lasagna. If you let it rest, that won't be a problem. This will form sort of a sauce (just the right amount). For vegetarian lasagna, make a marinara sauce and cut zucchini or eggplant into slices. Instead of the meat layer, put a little sauce, then arrange the veg slices, then top with some more sauce.

Serving Suggestion: Technically I'm going to say that this makes 8 servings, although they are large servings. I think that 1/16 of the lasagna with a nice green salad would be enough for me on most days!

***********************************************
UPDATE: I just did a calorie calculation for this dish, and it is NOT a light-weight. One eighth of it has 575 calories. Yikes!
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Pirozhki

2009-01-26T21:03:00.005+01:00

So on Sunday I made pirozhki. I woke up early in the morning and started doing chores, including cleaning the kitchen to make sure I would have enough space to work. Then I trekked down to the local grocery store (along with 80% of the population of this little French town ... not much else to do on Sunday) to buy cream, and a chicken. I bought the chicken because I read on Yulinka's blog that pirozhki are best eaten with chicken broth. I decided, "What the hell, I'm already going to be in the kitchen all day, might as well do it right."

I decided to follow the dough recipe here, but my little cube of yeast was 42 grams, not the prescribed 30 grams. So, I followed the recipe roughly and ad libbed a little. Here's the dough that I ended up making:

Pirozhki Dough

Ingredients:

1 42 g cube of yeast (I got mine in the refrigerated section, so I'm pretty sure it wasn't dehydrated)
2 t sugar
2 t flour
4 T water
1 kg flour (I used type T45, which I think is pastry flour)
1 c sunflower oil, + a little extra (1 T?) that was left in the bottle
2 c water, + a little extra (about 1 T)
4 t salt

Method:

Combine the first 4 ingredients in a (large!) bowl, mix well. Cover with a dish towel and allow to rest for 10-15 minutes. It'll be noticeably more puffy when it's ready. Now, carefully mix with the rest of the ingredients to form a soft, moist (wonderful smelling) dough. If it's too sticky, add a bit of flour. Don't let it be dry though. You will probably have to use your hands to get it thoroughly mixed. Cover with a dish towel, let sit in a warm place to rise for at least 2 hours. My BF says his mom often makes dough the night before, and leaves it to rise over night, so I'm sure you can leave it longer than 2 hours with no ill effects. The dough will roughly triple in size! That's some kind of magic, in my opinion. And did I mention that it smells great? When you're ready to use it, knead the dough a little, then cut into small-ish pieces. I actually didn't cut it, just tore off balls of dough roughly 2"-2.5" in diameter. To make pirozhki, roll out a ball on a lightly floured surface, not too thin, but until the rolled out circle is about the size of a small salad plate. Place 2-3 spoons of stuffing in the center and close well. Arrange the pies on a baking sheet covered with parchment paper, leaving a couple inches between them. Let them rise again for 20 minutes. Then bake or fry in oil.

Notes: I had planned on baking the pies. My boyfriend had been hinting (he knew I was going to be making them) that he likes them fried. Well, I thought that I would bake them and have them done before he came home, but he came home early, just as I was about to start baking. He pouted. I fried. They were tasty, but a little too rich. I really do think I'd prefer them baked. Next time, I'll bake them, and I may try to use at least some whole wheat flour to make them a little healthier.

On to the fillings. I had originally settled on a ground beef and mushroom filling, as depicted here. At the last minute, I decided to make a second filling with carrot, onion and egg; it's pictured on the site I got the dough recipe from.

Pirozhki Filling: Carrot, Onion and Egg

Ingredients:

1 very large carrot, or 2 medium, peeled and grated
1 small onion, chopped
1 egg, hard boiled
1 T sunflower oil
Salt and (lots of) pepper to taste

Method:

Sautee the carrot and onion in oil until onion is translucent. Remove from heat. Allow to cool, and mix with the egg, peeled and chopped. Season to taste. That's it! Simple, right?

Notes: I was surprised, I have to admit, but the carrot ones were my favorite. The picture of the meat ones looked so good, and they were tasty, but the carrot ones were something special. I really recommend trying this! This filling can be used with the dough to make vegetarian pirozhki; leave out the egg, and you even have vegan ones (or use firm tofu cubes).

Pirozhki Filling: Beef, Onion and Mushroom

Ingredients:

400 g ground beef
2 small onions, chopped
3 medium mushrooms, chopped
Salt and pepper to taste

Method:

Brown meat with onions and mushrooms, stirring constantly so that meat remains in small pieces. When there is no pink left, salt and pepper to taste, and let cool before stuffing pirozhki.

Notes: Like I said, this was good, but not amazing like the carrot ones. I did like the texture of the mushrooms, though.

Overall Impressions: First of all, I'm in love with yeast. It was so fun making the dough. And I know I said it already, but that stuff smells great. I will forever think of yeast as magic in the form of a cakey, grey little cube. By the way, that cube yields to pressure really easily. When you try to crumble it into your bowl, don't push hard, lest to you want yeast everywhere. My mission now is to make a healthy pirozhok. Next time I'm going to make the carrot filling, a cabbage one, and maybe a mushroom and green onion one. Oh, and I'll give them different shapes so I can know what's inside each one. It's cheating, but so what? By the way, this recipe, fillings and dough, made 17 pirozhki (6 carrot, 11 beef) and 6 donuts. Basically I just split remaining dough into balls studded with raisins, fried and sprinkled with powdered sugar. Tasty, but not quite like Dutch oliebollen.

Mushroom Soup

2009-01-25T08:50:00.001+01:00

I've made several impromptu variations of mushroom soup, but this one was really tasty. We had it last night for dinner and today for breakfast. Only I'm worried that in a couple of days we'll be completely mushroomed out, since today I'm going to attempt pierozhki and I've decided on a mushroom based filling.

Oh well. Is it even POSSIBLE to be mushroomed out? I don't think so. At least, I've never gotten there.

Mushroom Soup

Ingredients:

15 g dried mushrooms (I used a variety)
6 medium white mushrooms
About 2 cups fresh oyster mushrooms
1 leek, white and light green parts, washed carefully
1 small onion
1 carrot
1 T butter
1 T oil
Water (I don't really measure, but I'm using my trusty 3 Qt pot if that helps)
Salt and pepper to taste
Bay leaf

Method:

First, place the dried mushrooms in a small pot or bowl, and cover with a couple of cups of hot water. They will need to sit for some time. Meanwhile, chop the onion and sautee in a mix of oil and butter (use only oil to make the recipe vegan). Peel and grate the carrot. When the onion is golden but not at all brown, turn the heat down, add the carrot and sprinkle salt over them. Let the veggies cook on extremely low heat and the salt will pull the water out of them. I don't know if it's the official term, but it's what I call "sweating" the carrots. That sounds kind of gross, actually, maybe I should think of a different word for it. Later. Chop the leek and add to the pot, stirring everything together and adding a little more salt. Chop the mushrooms, add them in, sprinkle with salt again. This routine of add a veggie to the pot, then sprinkle with salt helps take the water out, it also helps make sure the soup is salty enough. I've never once over salted a soup, and using this method I under salt them much less frequently. You can add pepper to taste at this point, too. You want to stir every so often to make sure all the veggies get cooked. By now the dried mushrooms should be soft enough to chop. Remove them from the liquid and add the liquid to the pot of veggies. It's a good idea to pour the liquid through a sieve to remove any grit. Chop the formerly dried mushrooms very finely, and add them to the pot. At this point, I add enough water to fill my 3 Qt pot almost to the top. A measurement doesn't really matter, you can add more or less liquid as your texture preference warrants. Add a bay leaf, stir well and check the taste. If it's good, allow it to come to a boil, and then you can serve it.

Serving Suggestion: This broth is really rich on it's own. BF added cream (goes without saying). I tried it and it was good but I preferred it without. Chopped dill and parsley sprinkled on top is tasty.

Notes: If you have a food processor, the longest part of this is sweating the veggies and soaking the mushrooms (at least 30 minutes, I would say). I guess it's not really a "fast" recipe, but it tastes so good!

Apricot Sharlotka

2009-01-24T08:00:00.003+01:00

Lately I've been crazy about canned peach and apricot halves. I'm not sure why, but I'm nuts about 'em. They're so juicy, and they remind me of summer. So yesterday, I got the idea to make a sharlotka using apricot halves instead of apples. This is what I did:

Apricot Sharlotka

Ingredients:

1 860 g can apricot halves
3 eggs
1 c sugar
1 c flour
1/4 t ground clove
1/4 t ground cinnamon
1/4 c whole almonds
Oil + flour to grease and flour a cake pan

Method:

Preheat the oven to 325 Fahrenheit. Grease and flour a cake pan. Drain the fruit halves from their syrup or juice; discard or save for other use. Beat eggs with sugar until well combined (I just use a wooden spoon for this). Stir in flour and spices carefully (or you'll make a mess). Resulting batter will be quite thick. Arrange apricot halves along the bottom and sides of the cake pan. Sprinkle almonds over the halves. Spread batter onto the halves that are on the bottom of the pan. Bake at 325 for 50 minutes to 1 hour.

Notes: This sharlotka is much wetter than the apple one, so I decided to bake it for a longer time at a lower temperature. It came out done nicely, the very bottom was a tiny bit gooey. It wasn't gross though; reminded me of peach cobbler. I had to place a piece of aluminum foil under the cake mid way through baking, because syrup from the halves was leaking over the sides, spilling onto the oven and making a mess (and smelling like burning stuff). Next time I will drain the fruit better. I think that will make the bottom more cakey and will prevent mess. Some other things I'll try will be to put a small layer of batter before the fruit goes in, or to just grease the pan instead of grease + flour. Like I said, the slight gooey-ness wasn't gross, but I would have preferred it be more like a cake texture than a cobbler one. That's what I had had in mind, really. My boyfriend and I both liked it, though. It would be good with a nice hot cup of tea! Another idea I have is to grease the pan and then coat it with roughly ground nuts instead of flour. I think I'm not finished experimenting with this recipe.

Serving Suggestion: I waited for the cake to cool, slid a butter knife around the edges, and then carefully tipped it onto a plate so that the fruit side was facing up. It was very easy to cut this way and keep the cake more intact. Then when I put an individual slice on a plate, I turned it so you could see the crunchy top side and the fruity bottom.

Spicy Beef Soup

2009-01-22T09:51:00.004+01:00

Last night I found myself confronted with a situation: I had about 1.5 quarts of an exceptionally rich and flavorful homemade beef broth, and no idea what to do with it. It's not that I don't have any soup recipes. I've got LOTS of them, but they're all ones I've tried before. And this broth was so good, I wanted to do something special with it. (How did it get so good, you may ask? Well, the answer to that is that I wasn't in a rush. I put it on the stove and forgot about it for 3 hours.)

This recipe is the result of that event.

Spicy Beef Soup

Ingredients:

Approximately 4 cups good beef broth, chilled, fat NOT discarded
Beef from the broth
Fat from the broth
1 carrot, grated
2 small onions, cut into semi-rings
About 1/4 c chopped pickled zucchini (you can use pickles if you don't have these)
1 c of the brine from the zucchini
2 T tomato paste
2 T ajvar (this is the brand I'm using, but any will work)
1.5 T dried parsley
Salt as needed
1 small potato, chopped into small cubes (I chopped mine to have about 1/4" sides)

Method:

While the broth is still cool and the hardened fat is sitting at the top, remove it and place in a skillet. Add the beef, removed and chopped before chilling, the parsley, and start to simmer the broth. Melt the fat in the skillet, and fry the onion and carrot until they are soft and slightly golden. Stir in the zucchini and the tomato paste. Allow it to cook gently for a couple of minutes, then add to the broth. Add the brine and stir in the ajvar. Salt to taste. You can add more brine and ajvar as your taste warrants. Add the potato, and serve when it's soft.

Notes: Vegetarians can use vegetable broth and omit the beef, of course. Actually, I don't like meat in soup and avoided it. It was still really good. If you don't have ajvar, experiment with paprika, or baba ghanosh, or chopped roasted red peppers ... whatever you've got.

Serving Suggestion: I think it would have tasted good with a little dill as well, but we didn't have any. I liked mine plain, my boyfriend (of course) ate his with a spoon of creme fraiche on top.

Cheap but Good: Grow your own Victory Garden

2009-01-21T18:45:00.004+01:00

Lately I've been planning how to plant a garden (my first!) when it gets a little warmer. I don't want to grow flowers, rather, I'm dreaming of beets, spinach, kale, onions, potatoes, and--later on--tomatoes, peppers, zucchini and eggplant. I also want to grow several different herbs that I use often. I want to do this not only because many of those foods are tasty yet expensive, but also because I'm seeking a satisfaction that I can't get from my job. I want to do something physical, to make something, to be able to see results come from my work. I also want the joy of knowing that I am eating produce that has been grown in a way that is kind to my body and the earth.

The problem for me is that I don't have a very suitable space. Our shared yard is not very well taken care of, so it will be hard work to clear a space, if the landlord even lets me do so. On top of that, it doesn't get a whole lot of sun.

I'm hoping to overcome this by creating a container garden. I found a site that is great for gardeners who live in small places that don't really have a yard--apartments, condos, etc. I'm especially interested in the portion of the site devoted to growing vegetables.

I'm going to add the site to the list of blogs I follow. If anyone reading has successfully planted a container garden, I'd love to have your tips as well.

The title of this post refers to the Victory gardens planted during World War II. As Michael Pollan says in his letter to Barack Obama, who he calls the new "Farmer in Cheif", today such a garden could be part of "a new Victory Garden movement, this one seeking “victory” over three critical challenges we face today: high food prices, poor diets and a sedentary population." The article/letter is quite long, but is WELL worth the read. I also heartily recommend Michael Pollan's books.

Palaak Paneer and Looking to the Weekend (Paneer, Pirozhki)

2009-01-20T01:22:00.004+01:00

Tonight I made some tasty Palaak Paneer. This is Indian style creamed spinach, with cheese cubes. There were a few minor things I'll do different next time, but overall it was good. Traditionally, saag is greens (of any kind) cooked in cream. Usually mustard greens are used, or a mix of mustard greens and spinach. When just spinach is used, it is palaak. I prefer the version with a mix of mustard greens and spinach, so if you can get mustard greens, use them!

Palaak Paneer

Ingredients:

2 T oil
1 small onion
1 large clove garlic
1 T minced ginger
1 T gharam masala*
1 t tumeric
1 pod black cardamom
1 pod green cardamom
2 whole peppercorns
2 cloves
salt to taste
Squeeze of lemon
1 T cream
About 750 grams frozen, chopped spinach
Paneer cheese cubes-as many as you want

*Gharam masala is a spice mix. Usually, it has spices like cardamom, cinnamon, maybe clove, some black pepper. It's not 100% authentic to put cumin and coriander in, but most store mixes do it. I make my own, and I also put cumin and coriander in, because I happen to like them! I also put in a tiny bit of chili powder, some ground black pepper, some ground cardamom, and some ground fenugreek. You can basically experiment and find a mix you like. It's what I did. Once I found it, I made a big batch and put it in a spice jar.

Method:

Warm the oil in a pot. Chop the onion, mince the garlic and ginger. When the oil is shimmery, add them to the pot. Sautee till soft, but not brown. Push the mix to one side of the pot, and pool the oil in the other side. Fry the gharam masala and the tumeric in the oil for about 30 seconds, then stir everything together. Add the spinach and remaining spices. Allow to cook until spinach has thawed, heated through, and excess water has evaporated. At this point, salt to taste, stir in paneer, allow to warm through. Stir in cream, lemon juice and serve.

Notes: Make sure your ginger is minced! My ginger got frozen (dumb malfunctioning fridge--long story) and thawed. It was really tough to cut (but very easy to peel!), and I ended up with a couple of big lumps of ginger. I think I may add a little more spice next time. Maybe a split dried chili pod. We didn't have paneer. I've *tried* to use cubes of other white cheeses before and it fails. You see, paneer is special. It doesn't melt. That's why it can be cut into cubes and put into curries. We had in the fridge a block of fresh white pressed farmer's cheese from a recent trip to Holland. I thought, "Well, maybe, what the hell," since that's basically what paneer is--pressed farmer's cheese. It wasn't a failure. The cubes got mushier than paneer would've, but not really melty like with previous efforts.

Serving Suggestion: This is best with lemon juice, rice and roti. You can eat with yogurt too (it's important to have something a little acidic with it), but I prefer lots of lemon!

**************************************

Speaking of paneer, that brings me to the second half of this post, "Looking to the Weekend." This weekend I want to try something ambitious, cooking wise. I'm going to try to make paneer, which is similar to the Russian cheese tvorog. I also want to try and make something with yeast. I've been making Indian flat breads recently, and baking a little more (brownies, cookies, sharlotka). This is slowly but surely breaking my fear of bread and baked goods (even though I DID burn 3 cookies tonight).

So I want to try something more complicated than flat breads. I want to try ... something with YEAST.

I was thinking of trying to make Russian pirozhki. They look so good! Look at that mushroom filling! I love mushrooms so much. This site has a recipe that seems like it'll do. I've used (with a little tweaking) recipes from that site with favorable results. But I'm going to spend some time searching for THE ONE. I mean, it'll be my first time with yeast. It should be special!

Cheap but Good: Getting Experimental with Pasta Sauces

2009-01-15T00:02:00.004+01:00

Even though it definitely falls under the category of "cheap but good," I don't cook a lot of pasta, and not a lot of pasta sauce either. Not because I can't whip up something tasty, but because it's my boyfriend's "job." We have this sort of unspoken understanding that there are certain things that he cooks. Here's the list: fried eggs, mashed potatoes, pasta and associated sauces, pork. There are things that are "mine", too: soups, anything else done with eggs, beef, Indian food. Often I branch out and try to cook things that aren't on my list, but he knows what he is good at and sticks to it. I can honestly say that he does everything on his list much, much better than I do, even though I have more cooking experience.

Part of why his pasta sauces end up better than mine comes from his willingness to throw in everything but the kitchen sink. I tend to take a more cautious approach, selecting a few ingredients that I know will go well together. My result is always good, but strangely enough his is too. I keep waiting for one of his random sauces to fail and it hasn't happened yet.

His approach to making pasta sauce leads to a highly economical and tasty dinner, because what he does is take various odds and ends from the fridge--that may not have otherwise been used--and incorporates them into our meal. A few artichoke hearts left in a jar, likewise for some lonely green olives, the last splash of wine from the bottle on the table, the last tablespoon of cream in the tub, mixed with parsley that's just starting to wilt and that bacon that'll go bad if we don't use it the next couple of days. He usually throws in a dash of a couple spices too; sometimes unusual things, like cumin or coriander.

All these odds and ends combined with a can of diced tomatoes (or when we have them, a chopped fresh one) make a huge panful of sauce that we eat with whatever dried pasta we have on hand. All it needs is a tiny sprinkling of grated parmesan cheese to be perfect.

Cheap but Good: Tomato Soup

2009-01-07T03:49:00.004+01:00

This is easy, fast, cheap and good. It was the first thing I made for my boyfriend on my mission to prove that many American foods can be tasty, AND not make you die of heart disease. What's more American than tomato soup with a grilled cheese sandwich (which doesn't have to be unhealthy)?

Tomato Soup

Ingredients:

1 small to medium sized onion
1 medium carrot
2 T oil
3 T tomato paste
1 800 g can of peeled whole tomatoes (corresponds to US 15 oz can, I think)
2 cans of water
1 bay leaf
1 clove garlic
about 1 T dried parsley
about 1 T dried basil
about 1 T dried oregano
salt and pepper to taste

Method:

Chop the onion, begin to sautee it in the oil. Peel and grate the carrot, add it to the onion. Remove the whole tomatoes from the can and chop them, saving the juice. When onion is soft and translucent, stir in the tomato paste, the chopped tomatoes, and the juice from the can. Also add two canfuls of water, the bay leaf, the peeled and minced clove of garlic. Salt and pepper and herbs to taste. (I add about a T of each herb, but mostly parsley, second most oregano, least basil.) Let it come to a boil and then simmer it until the carrots are soft enough for your taste. For me this can be as little as 10 minutes if I'm in a rush, but it's best if you simmer for 20-30 minutes.

Serving Suggestion and Notes: I think this soup is best with a little sour cream or creme fraiche. I either stir it into the pot at the very end, or let each person put a little on their bowl. I don't sautee the garlic because I like the sharper taste; if you want it more mild, simply add it in when you add the carrots. This is very good even with just bread. I've also tried it with grilled cheese, which was great. Once I added noodles, and that was good, but the soup was much thicker. You could also try adding rice (cooked, or cook it in the soup).

***Cost Analysis***
Can of tomatoes: 82 cents
Carrot: 15 cents
Onion: 10 cents
Tomato paste: 50 cents
Garlic clove: 5 cents
Herbs:
I have large jars of parsley, basil and oregano that each cost about 2 euro and have probably 70 one T servings inside. So those three together cost 9 cents approximately.
The bay leaves came in a bag with like 100 leaves inside, and was also about 2 euro. So one leaf is about 2 cents.

Total cost of soup recipe: 1.73 euro, about $2.33 today

The recipe makes about 5.5 bowls, so that is 31 euro cents ($.42) per small serving (1 bowl), and 62 euro cents ($.83) per larger serving (2 bowls). Small serving is usually enough for me, with a bit of bread and a little sour cream.

Nutritional Info: Each bowl has approx. 110 calories (calculated using www.calorieking.com).

Amsterdam Trip

2009-01-06T04:11:00.002+01:00

Happy New Year to everyone! S Novum Godum!

We just got back from Holland, visiting mostly Amsterdam, but also trips to Haarlem and Utrecht.

It was a lot of fun meeting the New Year in Dam Square, with a bottle of "champagne" (really sparkling wine) and two plastic cups amongst thousands of others.

Let me tell you, Amsterdam is a veritable junk food paradise!

They have tons of small storefronts selling thick slices of pizza, hot dog carts are everywhere and the ubiquitous FEBO is found in every district. The latter is an ingenious junk food store, which has a service counter where you can order things like a burger or piping hot fries, but also has an entire wall that is basically a vending machine. It's the old-fashioned kind, where you put in money and open a little glass door to get your food. So cute! There are also many kiosks/small storefronts selling vlaamse frites. I don't know what vlaamse is, but I do know that I like frites. Most people seem to eat them with mayonnaise. Waffle and sandwich stands are dominant in the museum area, along with some hot dog carts. (I tried a waffle with cherry sauce, it was great).

My favorite find though, was "oliebollen", Dutch donuts. I had previously thought the donuts I tried in the Hamburg central train station were the best ever; I was wrong. These donuts are similar to those--round, approximately tennis ball sized, no hole, covered in sugar--but these were crispier on the outside and had an inner texture more reminiscent of an American yeast donut. The Hamburg ones were a little more cakey. Also, the oliebollen are rolled in powdered sugar right after you order, whereas the Hamburg ones came pre-coated in granulated sugar (they also tasted a little vanilla-y).

That is, they're served this way if you order just one to eat then and there. IF you order 5, which I'm a little ashamed to say I actually did once (but it was to share!), they put them all in the bag, toss in a BIG scoop of powdered sugar, and hand the bag to you. Very fun to shake the bag around and then eat the tasty donuts. (And if you're feeling the effects of a certain other Amsterdam sweet, this can be a surprisingly interesting activity as well.)

(Image from http://www.ad.nl/oliebollentest/article934666.ece)

I preferred the plain donuts, although they also had a version that contained raisins, both golden and regular. My boyfriend preferred whichever were hot. The first day we chanced upon hot donuts, and since then at every donut stand he prefaced his order with, "Do you have any HOT donuts?" This confused and slightly irritated most of the vendors. But hey, if the man only wants hot donuts, he's gotta ask.

On one hand, I feel like I've got to learn how to make these things, they were so good. I ate at least one almost every day we were there. On the other hand, I think it's probably better if I remain uneducated on the matter. Not just for my health, but knowing me, I'll make and eat them all the time, but then grow completely sick of them and never want one again. And wouldn't that be sad?

No, better to just save the experience for the next time I'm in Amsterdam. Some things are just better eaten from a street corner stand, anyway, and I think this may be one of them.

Aloo Paratha and Aloo ka Mattar

2008-12-29T22:01:00.006+01:00

So a couple of nights ago I made my first rotis. I was surprised at how incredibly easy it was! I was motivated to make them because I brought a dozen back from the States, and we discovered that my boyfriend really likes them. The thought occurred to me: "He's gonna eat all my rotis. I'm not going to have any left!"

And so, even though I'd always been intimidated in the past at the idea of making my own, I did so.

They came out ok. I decided to use only wheat flour and water, so they were a little brittle and definitely could've used some salt. But they made me brave, by coming out ok and tasting decent. Thus, tonight I felt up to making something a step up: aloo paratha.

This is a roti, basically, with spiced potatoes mixed into the dough before it's cooked. And lucky everyone, today I'll basically be posting 4 recipes: basic spiced potatoes, Aloo ka Mattar, basic roti dough, and Aloo Paratha.

First I made the spiced potatoes.

Spiced Potatoes
(I used 1/2 for the paratha, 1/2 for dinner):

Ingredients:

4 small potatoes
1 t cumin seed
1 t black mustard seed
1 chili
1 t tumeric
1 t cumin ground
1 t coriander ground
salt to taste
1 t chopped ginger
1 clove garlic chopped
1 small onion chopped
2-3 T oil (I used sunflower)
Fresh cilantro (1 handful)

Method:

Cut the potatoes into cubes, peeling if desired. Boil the potatoes till very soft (soft enough to mash). Drain and set aside for the moment. In a pan, heat the oil, and sautee the onions. When they become translucent, add the chili, ginger and garlic. Stir, sautee a little less than a minute. Now push all the stuff in the pan to one side, and let the oil pool on the other side. I like to position the pan such that the oil side is over the flame/heating element and the onions etc. side is cooler. Dump the spices into the pool of hot oil. You should be able to hear them cooking, and smell them becoming fragrant. Cook for about 30 seconds, then stir everything together in the pan. Add in the potatoes and stir well, mashing with a wooden spoon as you do it. Chop the cilantro, and mix it in too. You can now turn off the heat and salt to taste. Reserve a little less than 1/2, about 1/3 for the paratha. The rest you can eat, or you can make more paratha dough and use it all. I used the remaining to make aloo ka mattar (potatoes with peas), recipe to follow. Or you could just eat this by itself! Or use it to stuff samosas ... hm, that sounds like a future post! ;-)

Aloo ka Mattar

Ingredients:

Spiced Potatoes from above (you can use a portion, or all of them. I used about 2/3.)
1/2 a medium sized tomato
1 c frozen green peas
1 T oil (I used sunflower)
Salt to taste

Method:

Heat the oil in a pan. Chop the tomato. When the oil is hot, drop the tomato in it. It will sizzle and make the skin wrinkle. When the tomatoes begin to get soft, add the peas and the potatoes. Stir all together. You may have to add more salt to taste. We ate this with fried eggs, it was tasty.

Just before we ate, I prepared the basic roti dough, so it could rest during dinner:

Basic Roti Dough

Ingredients:

1/2 c whole wheat flour
1/2 c white wheat flour (all purpose flour)
Sprinkling of salt
Drizzling (about 2 t) of vegetable oil
water (no specific amount, depends)

Method:

Put the flours in a bowl with the salt. Mix well. Drizzle the oil uniformly, then begin to pour in water into the center of the mound of flour a little at a time, stirring as you pour it, stirring from the inside out. It will be sticky on your hand at first, stir in more of the flour. If there's not enough water it'll be crumbly. Add water, stirring/mixing the dough with your hand until it's not sticky, but not crumbly. You should have a silky ball of dough. Knead it a bit. The dough should start to spring back when you lightly push it with your finger. Let it sit in the bowl covered with a damp towel for 30 minutes at least. This isn't to make it rise like other breads, but to make sure the flours absorb the water. This is the basic dough! This can probably make about 6-8 rotis. To make them, split the dough into balls of equal size. Roll out with a rolling pin until they're about 8 inches in diameter. I do this one at a time. When I have the first rolled out, I put it on a very hot pan. I just use a large concave non-stick skillet (kinda wok-like, but not as sharply sloped at the sides). The roti will start to puff, which is fine. When brown spots start to appear on the bottom, flip the roti and cook the other side (about a couple of minutes each side). When it was cooking, I usually roll out the next one, so it's ready to go into the pan when the other one comes out. The one that's ready I put on a plate, and smear all over with butter (helps make it tasty and pliable). Continue till done.

Aloo Paratha

Ingredients:

Spiced Potatoes from above
Basic Roti Dough from above
extra flour, about 1/2 to 1 c

Method:

Take your big ball of roti dough, roll it out into a big circle. Sprinkle a bit of flour, add the potatoes in the center, sprinkle a bit more flour, then fold the dough over the potatoes, closing the ball up well. Now roll the whole thing out again, as before, this will well distribute the potatoes. They are wet, though, and will make the dough a bit more sticky, so add flour to it as needed, to make it silky, not sticky, in texture again. Roll it into a ball. Now you have a ball of dough with potatoes well mixed in. Separate into 8 equally sized balls. Heat a pan, as described above for rotis. Roll out one ball at a time, you will need to dust the board and the ball itself with flour, likely. Roll till 6-8 inches in diameter, place in the hot pan, and cook both sides as directed above. Transfer to plate when finished and spread each side with butter.

Serving Suggestion and Notes: The parathas came out really well. I like the mix of whole wheat and white flours. You may use more white flour, or all white flour if you like for rotis, but parathas really benefit from the whole wheat. I think it's good, because they're traditionally a travel food, so they should provide tons of nutrients! You can eat them with some yogurt, or a raita, or by themselves. Rotis are better for curries and dhals because they're plain and don't distract from the flavor of the dish. Adding some fat (oil) to the roti dough makes them pliable, I find. I like my breads not very salty, but my boyfriend wants me to add more salt next time. To each their own, I guess. Rotis are also delicious with butter and sugar, or dipped in mango puree that's been mixed with some whole milk. That is a great breakfast! (So is roti crisped up a bit in the toaster or a skillet, served with eggs!)

Sour Cherry Rice

2008-12-26T20:16:00.004+01:00

Tonight I made this rice in an attempt to duplicate one of my favorites from a Persian restaurant in Dallas. It came out really tasty, but it just needed a little more lemon juice and some chopped fresh dill added in at the end. But I'm posting what I did:

Sour Cherry Rice

Main Ingredients:

1/2 glass of uncooked white basmati rice (about 1/4 c)
1 glass water (important ratio is 2 parts water to 1 part rice)
about 1/4 c (a small handful) of dried sour cherries (I get mine at Whole Foods in the bulk foods aisle)
one VERY small onion (or about 1/2 of a regularly small one)
1 clove of garlic
Salt to taste
1 T oil (I used sunflower seed oil)
Squeeze of lemon

Spices:

1 black cardamom pod
2 small green cardamom pods
2 whole peppercorns
1 "petal" of a star anise
1 small bay leaf
2 whole gloves
1 tsp. of cumin seeds

Method:

Wash the rice well, then set it aside. Have the water ready to pour into your saucepan. In the saucepan, warm the oil. When it shimmers, add the onion, chopped, fry till golden brown (careful not to burn!) and stir in the garlic, minced. Push the onion-garlic mix to one edge of the pot, and let the oil pool on the other side. Add the spices (except bay leaf) into the oil. The oil should be hot enough that you can hear a quiet sizzle. Once you can smell the fragrance of the spices (about 30 seconds), stir everything in the pot together, add the rice, let the whole thing lightly fry for another 30 seconds or so, and then add the water, cherries and bay leaf, salt and a squeeze of lemon. Let the rice gently boil until it's just almost dry, then remove from heat and let sit covered for about 10 minutes. Uncover and fluff with a fork. If your rice is still a little too wet, you can pop it in the microwave for a few minutes, or gently cook it on the stove, stirring, until it's drier.

Serving Suggestion and Notes: I thought this was really tasty, and a good approximation of the rice at the restaurant. Theirs is a little drier and fluffier than mine came out, and also less pink (from the cherries). Probably they add the cherries in just at the end, and they get kind of plumped from the steaming rice, but aren't cooking with it. Chopped fresh dill would've been great, but I didn't have any.

Cheap but Good: Convenience Food Make-Overs

2008-12-24T23:42:00.005+01:00

I generally try to cook things from scratch, but being a busy college student, sometimes I need to open a box and have a meal ready in 20 minutes or less. Usually--for myself and others in the same position--that means something like Ramen noodles, mac and cheese, or canned soups. That's also because these items aren't really very expensive; but there's a way to make them even cheaper, tastier and better for you.

The solution is really simple: add a bunch of other stuff, and by "stuff" I mean veggies. If you choose the right ones, it's cheap, and it makes more food so you get more leftovers, and hence more meal for your money.

Some ideas:

For mac and cheese, I like to mix in an equal amount of cooked frozen peas. I love frozen peas, so I buy a huge bag of them and it's very inexpensive. By doing this, I double the volume of the meal for much less money. I don't find that I need any extra cheese sauce, but if you do, then try stirring in a couple of tablespoons of sour cream.

For Ramen, there are a lot of options. Again, I often add the peas. :-) But thinly sliced cabbage is also very good. Cabbage is definitely not an expensive vegetable, and slicing it very thin means it cooks quickly. One of my favorite ways to enhance Ramen: I start with my favorite flavor, Beef and Black Pepper (I think beef flavor works best for this particular flavor combo). I put the water in the pot, add the cabbage, a few mushrooms and an onion also thinly sliced. I stir in the seasoning packet. I let the water come to a simmer. You'll need to use more water than usual if you want to maintain the same soup consistency, because you're going to be increasing the amount of "stuff" in the pot. If you prefer soup with less broth, maybe you don't need to adjust. When the cabbage is just soft (about 10 mins) bring the water to a boil, and then add the noodles and about a cup of frozen peas. Give it a stir, then turn off the heat. I don't like the noodles overcooked, so I let them sit there for 3 mins before eating. Usually just the seasoning packet isn't enough. I add extra salt, pepper, maybe a little soy and chili sauce. But I get easily 3 times the amount of food from one soup packet.

For canned soups (although making your own is cheap, tasty and fun, it's not really fast) you can add extra veggies, cooked rice or noodles, and then keep it's consistency by adding broth or water.

Beet Raita (Shakunder ka Raita)

2008-12-19T17:41:00.001+01:00

This is a tasty yogurt salad that's a nice twist on the classic cucumber raita. If fresh cucumber and beet isn't available in the winter time, skip the cucumber and use canned beets.

Shakunder ka Raita

Ingredients:

1/2 English cucmber
1 small onion
2 small beets
1/2 c plain yogurt
small bunch fresh cilantro
1/2 t ground cumin
salt and pepper to taste

Method:

If using fresh beets, boil them until tender, and then rinse under cool water, peeling the skins off. Allow them to cool completely. Cut them into circles and then cut the circles into half. If using canned beets, drain them well, and (they usually come already in circles) cut into half moons. Cut the cucumber into half moons (slice into rounds and cut into half). Slice onion into thin semi-rings. I think it's nice texture-wise if everything is kind of the same shape. Whisk together the yogurt, the cumin and the fresh cilantro (chopped). Stir in the vegetables, and then salt and pepper to taste. The beet will turn the raita a lovely pink color.

Serving Suggestion and Notes: This salad (like all raitas) for me is especially good in the summer time with kabobs straight of the grill. But since the yogurt is so cooling and soothing, this is a perfect side dish for any spicy curry, or biryani, or even for something non-Indian, like plain grilled meats (or baked meats, or pan fried). If you want the raita to be spicier, then you can add a chopped serrano chili.

Cheap but Good: Canned Tomatoes

2008-12-16T07:39:00.005+01:00

This post is early because I'll be very busy with work the next couple days, but I have some time now.

Let's start by acknowledging this: I love a delicious, fresh tomato--in the summertime. They never taste as good in the winter, that's my main complaint, but they're also (usually) much more expensive! This July I was paying 2.95 euro a kilo for some of the most gorgeous tomatoes I've ever seen in a store, in a bounty of varieties. Now the price is closer to 5 euros a kilo, and for tasteless, dull, homogeneous light red orbs.

That's in France: I'm back in the states for a week, and I noticed that here the price is more consistent. I haven't actually tried one of these winter tomatoes yet, but I remember from my time living here that they were not good.

So what to do? Many recipes that may otherwise be cost-efficient, like pastas with sauces, and various soups, require some amount of tomato, and are perfect for wintertime.

My solution is to substitute canned tomato products. Tomato juice, tomato paste, crushed tomatoes, diced tomatoes, whole peeled tomatoes--all these have been starring in my winter cooking. If you keep your eyes open for them, you can sometimes find a really good deal, too. I bought recently about five 765 g cans of peeled whole Italian tomatoes; they were on sale for 82 euro cents a piece! I use these in the following dishes on the site:

Sweet and Sour Schi
Golubtsy
Eggplant Dhal
Cheese Fondue (They're not in the posted recipe, but adding one or two chopped tomatoes to cheese fondue can be very tasty.)
Borsch (Uses tomato paste, in the recipe I posted. I've before used chopped canned tomato or crushed tomato when I didn't have paste. Or you can use a combo of both.)

Some other applications that I haven't posted (yet):

-Many other soups, including plain, simple and tasty tomato soup
-Meat curries
-Tomato Sauce for Pasta

I would say that you can safely replace fresh tomato for canned in any recipe that will actually cook the tomato. Some things, which call for the fruit to be eaten raw, are better saved for summer. It leaves something to look forward to, don't you think?

Borsch

2008-12-15T04:56:00.002+01:00

I made a big batch of this tasty Russian beet soup before I left, and left it in the fridge for the boyfriend. The way to a man's heart is through his stomach, isn't it? :-) Every cook has his/her own version of this, so don't be afraid to try someone else's! Mine's quite basic, but I love it anyway. And so does someone else!

Borsch

Ingredients:

*For stock:
*2 beef short ribs
*1 onion
*1 carrot
*bay leaf

1/4 small head of cabbage
3 small potatoes
1 carrot
3 small cooked beets
sunflower oil and butter for frying (a tablespoon or two of each)
1 tablespoon of sugar
1 tablespoon of vinegar
2-3 tablespoons tomato paste (I use roughly somewhere between the two)
salt to taste

Method:

*Start by making stock. I use my handy 3 quart pot for this (and for everything). Use a bigger one if you want more stock; I end up with about 2 quarts of quite rich stock. Place the ribs your pot with an onion peeled and halved, a carrot halved and a bay leaf. Add water (I add as much as my pot will take) and bring to a boil, then simmer for 2 to 3 hours, or until meat is soft. Fish out the onion and discard; fish out the carrot and eat it. :-) Remove the meat; take it off the bones and cube it, removing any huge globs of fat. Salt the broth to taste.*

If you already have stock, begin to warm it. For veggies, start with the cabbage; shred it. Cut the potatoes into 1/2 inch cubes (I peel them first). Bring the stock up to a boil, then add the cabbage and potatoes. Grate the carrot and beets. 20 minutes after the cabbage and potatoes were added to the stock, melt the butter in a frying pan and fry the beets. You can add broth from the pot if it's too dry. After the beets sautee about 10 minutes, add the sunflower oil and carrots (my boyfriend's mom fries them separately, carrots in oil, beets in butter. I mix it all together and it's fine). Sautee another 10 minutes. Now add the tomato paste and the sugar and vinegar (I stir them together first in a small glass). Stir well and sautee another few minutes. NOTE: If at any point during the sauteeing the mixture is too dry and may burn, add stock! Now, add the mixture in the frying pan to the pot with cabbage and potatoes and stock. Also add the cubed meat. Let it all cook together for a few minutes, then taste and add salt as needed.

Serving Suggestion and Notes: the best way to serve this is with a generous dollop of sour cream, and chopped dill and parsley scattered over the top! Also have some rye bread on the side. Delicious! You can make the stock beforehand; if you want to take the fat from the stock, just put it in the fridge overnight. The fat will rise and solidify and you can just scoop it off the next day. My boyfriend would be horrified if I did this, though. :-) You can play with the flavor by adding more/less vinegar and/or sugar; I find that the amount listed here works pretty well. You can also use lemon juice instead of vinegar, and experiment with adding a mix of crushed tomatoes, or chopped tomato, and tomato paste. For vegetarian borsch, leave out the meat and use a vegetable stock. For fast borsch, you can use boxed stock (I've used chicken with decent results) and just follow all the directions (except you won't have meat).

Food in America

2008-12-15T03:58:00.002+01:00

So, it isn't a recipe, but this is a food related post.

I came back home (to the States) for a visit starting on Thursday, after having lived in France for the past 7 months. French food is DELICIOUS, but naturally, there were some American foods that I missed. Surprisingly, a lot of them are fast food/restaurant food, which I never ate very often at all when I actually lived here.

I came here with a list of foods to buy and bring back, and a list of restaurants I wanted to go to. Now, after just being here a few days, several are crossed off, not because I've gone there and eaten the food/bought it, but because I've realized that my palate has changed and there are certain things that I don't want anymore. Also there are certain things (peanut butter and marshmallows, brownies) that I've been able to find or recreate in France in the past couple of weeks.

Here's what I've eaten so far being here, and what I've thought about it:

-Thursday: A reuben sandwich in Newark airport. It was great, but I had to take half the cheese off of it. The fries were disgusting! They were so different from the crispy French ones I'm used to now; they were so doughy!

-Friday Lunch: I had some refried black beans that I made, and some microwaved plantains (Goya brand). They satisfied most of my craving for Mexican/Latin American food.
-Friday Dinner: We went to an Indian chaat place. I had some pani puri, some dahi wada, some masala dhosa, and for dessert, gajar halva and rasgulla. The dessert was ok. The pani puri and dhosa were dissapointing, the dahi wada was the best dish (yogurt was good, the wadas were not). It was something I had been CRAVING, but I realize now that after India, no chaat in America will ever compare. A dissapointing realization.

-Saturday Lunch: We went to a new Vietnamese restaurant. I had very decent eggrolls and spring rolls, and the best pho I've ever eaten!
-Saturday Dinner: It was a religious holiday at my dad's mosque. I am no longer an observant muslim, so I didn't attend, but I joined my family afterward for the food (at my dad's request, I'm not freeloading here). It was biryani made with mutton or goat (I think mutton), and a really tasty salad (yogurt, beets, onion, cucumber and cilantro). The cake afterwards was tasty, just white cake layered with cream and fruit. The beverage was milk with tapioca pearls and rooh afza (sharbat). The sharbat was fantastic, as was the salad and cake. The biryani was ok. My portion had too much masala, not enough rice. The mutton was fatty and mostly bones.

-Sunday Dinner: My dad made steak, and my mom made mashed sweet potatoes, sauteed spinach and sauteed mushrooms. I feel bad saying it ... but tonight was when I realized I've become a much better cook than my parents. Things were mostly poorly seasoned and overcooked. :-( Sorry parents!

Things still to eat on my list: some good tex-mex, some more southwestern mexican food, my favorite thai restaurant, chik-fil-a, a burger from this place by my university, some lemon-chicken soup from this one Greek restaurant, sushi from my favorite sushi place and this one Persian restaurant. Out of all of them ... I think that only the sushi and the Greek place, maybe the tex-mex, will be disappointing. I've taken a few things off my list: Quizno's and Subway (which for some reason I was craving), several things that Mom makes that I can now make too. I think there were others, but I already deleted those so I don't remember!

In general I think the food in France is much better quality. I bought expensive organic eggs here, and they don't compare in color or taste to the cheapest ones in France. But there are some things that just AREN'T in France, like good cheddar cheese. I had a cheddar cheese pretzel today and it was great. Only in America: German pretzel, English cheese. :-)

Cheap but Good: Chana

2008-12-10T16:04:00.002+01:00

This is a very easy Indian recipe. It's perfect for winter: warming, cheap, good the next day, hearty. It's nice and spicy too!

Chana

Ingredients:

1 large can garbanzo beans
2 small onions or 1 large one
1 t cayenne pepper
1 T chili powder
1 T cumin
2-4 T oil
about 5 cups of water
salt to taste

Method:

Open your garbanzo beans, and drain them and rinse them well. Set aside. Sautee chopped onion in about 2 T of the oil. Let them get really nice and brown (but not burned). If you don't let them caramelize, this will have almost no flavor. So be patient. When they're ready, push them to one side of your pot. Pool the oil on the other side by tilting the pot a little. You may need to add a bit more oil if the onions have soaked almost all of it up. Ok, put the pot back on the burner now, and dump your spices into the oil pool (not on the onions). Let them fry for about 30 seconds, and then stir everything in the pot together. Dump the beans into the pot, and stir them well. Let that cook for about a minute, then add the water. Allow it to come to a boil, then simmer for 30 minutes. It can cook longer if you want, but should cook at least 30 minutes for nice soft beans. Add salt to taste. You can also add a bay leaf when you add the water.

Serving Suggestion and Notes: This is perfect with a loaf of French bread ... soft on the inside, crusty on the outside. And soup + bread makes for a pretty darn cheap meal. To make the soup more or less spicy, you can change the amount of spices in it. The important thing is the ratio: 1 part cayenne pepper to 3 parts chili powder and 3 parts cumin (ground).

Cheap but Good: Don't buy flavored yogurt!

2008-12-03T03:38:00.001+01:00

I'm always kind of wary about buying things that come in portable, individual packages, when I have several small plastic containers at home. I also don't like to buy flavored stuff if there's a plain option available, unless there's a flavor I really like.

So, I don't ever buy flavored yogurts. Instead, I buy a 1 kilo tub of delicious plain yogurt, and take it to work in a small 1 cup container. I can make it taste different by adding nuts, honey, dried fruits, or fruit jams/jellies. These are things that I have on hand anyway, for snacking and breakfast.

This is also great because then I can use the yogurt in savory applications. I can serve it with rice and dhal, or make a sauce to go with kebabs. I can use it in a salad. If I had bought vanilla or strawberry, I couldn't, and would have to buy twice as much--one plain, one flavored. This would make a lot of it go to waste.

When I was in the States, I compared the prices of individual cups of yogurt, and the plain ones were 10 cents per cup cheaper! Besides that, in the large (cheaper) tubs the available flavors are usually only plain or vanilla.

So, I don't buy flavored, or individual cups, of yogurt. The only exception for this is that I sometimes treat myself to cups of Wallaby Mango Lime flavored. It's so good, and the consistency is more like kefir.

Spicy Eggplant Rolls

2008-12-01T22:09:00.001+01:00

These are a really tasty and simple appetizer. I had them in Ukraine this summer at someone's dacha (countryside home).

Spicy Eggplant Rolls

Ingredients:

1 eggplant
1 T oil
1/4 c flour
sprinkling of salt
1 tomato
1 bunch of parsley
2 cloves of garlic
2 T mayonnaise

Method:

Cut the eggplant into long thin strips. I do this by cutting it top to bottom in half, and then each half into half (top to bottom again), progressively until I have eggplant slices (cross sections of the whole veggie) that are about 1/4" thin. I then cut those in half to make 2 strips from each cross section. Sprinkle with salt on each side, and toss in a plastic bag with the flour so it coats them lightly. Pan fry the strips in the oil on medium-high heat until soft and golden brown on both sides. Set aside on paper towels to drain and cool slightly. Dice the garlic finely, and cut the tomato into strips that are about the same length as the width of the eggplant strips. Rough chop the parsley. To make the rolls, take a fried eggplant strip, spread with a little mayo, sprinkle a little of the garlic over that. Put a couple of the tomato pieces at one end, then roll up. Stand it up like it's a piece of sushi, then sprinkle parsley over the top. Complete procedure for all eggplant strips.

Serving Suggestion and Notes: For thicker slices of eggplant, you may need to use a toothpick to keep them rolled up. For thinner slices (or if you can cram a bunch of rolls into a bowl) it's not necessary. These are really tasty, they're kind of a summer food, which I'm missing. They were so good on a hot summer day, eating in the backyard of a house near the sea.

Pumpkin Pie and Thanksgiving Report

2008-11-29T23:23:00.001+01:00

Saturday Thanksgiving was a great success. The turkey legs came out awesome! Actually, everything came out really good. Here's the basic report:

Turkey legs: Rubbed the outside with butter, put butter and homemade poultry seasoning under the skin, cut slits into the flesh and stuffed chunks of celery in there. When 1/2 an hour of baking time was left, made a huge mound of stuffing between the legs and baked some more. Link to recipe
Stuffing: Sauteed 1 white onion, 1 red onion, 2 ribs of celery in a ton of butter. Added a melange of mushrooms, a mix called forestiere that is popular in France. They were frozen and the juice from them smelled great. Added cubes of bread from a baguette, some poultry seasoning and one beaten egg.
Apple Cake: Link to recipe
Mashed potatoes: Boyfriend took care of this. They were GOOOOD. He mashes them with onions sauteed in oil and lots of cream, salt and pepper.
Glazed sweet potatoes: Used a recipe that comes out of the Betty Crocker cookbook. My mom's been making it for years. Sweet potatoes in an orange juice glaze. REALLY good. Found a really similar recipe online. Link to recipe
Cranberry sauce: It's crazy expensive here, so we used lingonberry jam from IKEA. Just as good!
Gravy: Skipped it because we couldn't wait to eat! Spooned the juices over turkey and potatoes instead. Didn't miss it.***UPDATE:*** Made gravy the next day using leftover pan drippings, flour and milk. BF was sorry he wasn't patient the day before!
Pumpkin Pie: recipe follows.

My family came to visit me here in August, and my mom brought two 15 oz cans of pumpkin specifically for the Holidays. :-) She's a cool mom. People here do eat pumpkin, but I've only seen it as a savory side dish, and I prefer my pumpkin with at least some sweetness. My mom always buys the Libby brand canned pumpkin, or the canned pumpkin pie mix (already is sweetened and has some spices in it). She also always uses the Libby recipe on the back. The pumpkin she brought with here was a different brand (not that it matters), and I didn't look up a recipe before cooking because I figured it would be on the can as it always is. When I started cooking today, I made the pie and cake first (pie before cake). When I read the recipe I realized that it was different than the one I was used to, but decided to give it a try. I'm glad there happened to be a can of sweetened condensed milk around! I hadn't been planning on using it.

Pumpkin Pie

Ingredients:

1 15 oz can of pumpkin puree
1 14 oz can of sweetened condensed milk
1/2 t cinnamon ground
1/2 t nutmeg ground
1/4 t ground clove
1/4 t ground ginger
1/2 t salt
2 slightly beaten eggs
1 9" deep dish pie crust

Method:

Mix pumpkin with the spices. Add all other ingredients. Pour into pie shell. Bake at 425 Fahrenheit for 15 minutes. Lower heat to 350 Fahrenheit and bake for 30-40 more minutes.

Serving Suggestion and Notes: I made mine without the pie crust. I'm weird, but I hate pie crust, so I didn't feel like making it. I cooked this in a nonstick pan, and the sugar in the pie made the bottom just slightly caramelized, so it was kind of like a crust anyway. I had to add about double the spices though, except for salt; I really like to taste them! (The recipe presented is what was on the can). The recipe mom has always used takes sugar and evaporated milk. I thought this was so much simpler, faster and tasted great! The pie will be puffy when you take it out, but then it will fall. It's really a more typically custardy pie than the usual recipe, not only does it have a "crust" on the bottom from caramelized sugar, there is one on the top, too. I loved this pie and was really happy with it. The only thing I was missing was whipped cream! Then it would have been perfect.

Thanksgiving!

2008-11-27T15:30:00.001+01:00

Today is American Thanksgiving! Canadian one was last month. ;-) I'm planning on cooking it on Saturday though, or Sunday, since I don't get today or tomorrow off. It's not a holiday here, after all.

We'll have roasted turkey legs, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, stuffing, gravy, pumpkin pie, and apple cake.

I hope I can cook it all ...

Cheap but Good: Tuna Salad with Rice and Corn

2008-11-26T00:30:00.002+01:00

This is a really tasty salad, and it's very filling, too. I use tuna packed in oil, because I ALWAYS use tuna packed in oil. I find it much more flavorful.

Tuna Salad with Rice and Corn

Ingredients:

1 can of tuna packed in oil, 160 gram can
1 can of corn, 300 gram can
2 cups of cooked white rice (I prefer long grain)
2 hard boiled eggs
Salt and Pepper

Method:

The rice should not be hot, warm is fine, or room temperature. Cold is fine too, but I prefer it warm or room temp. This is a perfect use for leftover rice! Combine the rice with the (drained) corn and the (undrained) tuna. I guess if you're really watching your fat grams or whatever you could toss the oil from the tuna, but it seems like such a waste! :-) Roughly chop the hard cooked eggs and add them to the bowl. Stir everything together well, salt and pepper to taste.

Serving Suggestion and Notes: You can also add chopped fresh herbs, or dried ones, like parsley or dill. I hear thyme is tasty with corn. I don't eat a whole lot, so for me a small plateful of this is a complete dinner. If you're compelled to have something green in there, I'd stir in some peas or some baby spinach (that sounds really good). My boyfriend also considers this as a complete meal, but he needs about 3 times more than I do, and he *always* has to have bread. With anything. :-)

****Cost and Nutritional Analysis coming soon!!!!!****

Sharlotka

2008-11-24T00:00:00.002+01:00

Sharlotka is a delicious Russian apple cake. I made it last night because we ended up buying 6 kilos of apples yesterday. I love apples, and it's apple season ... there are several varieties in the stores here. We went to the grocery store today (along with everyone else in the village, it seems) and I saw a 3 kilogram box of a type I know I like. I bought them, despite my boyfriend was whining at me not to. He's been saying he knows of a guy right by our apartment, who sells apples, onions and potatoes in bulk. But, he's been saying it for weeks, and we haven't actually gone there, so I bought my apples. After the grocery store, we walked by this place he knew about, just to see, we didn't think it was open because it was Sunday. But it was! So we got some gorgeous onions, a mix of white and red, and 3 kilos of different tasty apples. The guy let us try a bunch, too. We already had about a pound of apples at home, so now I've got to think of what to do with nearly 15 lbs of the things. Step one: Sharlotka. I love it because it's so simple and good. There are very few ingredients, and the numbers are easy to remember.

Apple Sharlotka

Ingredients:

3 apples, tart kind best
3 large eggs
1 c sugar
1 c flour + a bit for dusting
oil to grease pan

Method:

Core and slice the apples thinly. Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit (180 C), on my oven this is gas mark 6. Crack the eggs into a bowl, beat with the sugar. Add the flour, stir until flour is incorporated, then beat a bit until the mix is nice and smooth. Grease a cake pan with a bit of oil, then dust flour all over to prevent sticking. Arrange apple slices in a thin layer on the bottom of the pan, and pour the batter over (it'll be kind of thick). You can do more than one layer if you like. Bake for 25-30 minutes, or until a toothpick in the center comes out clean. Allow to cool, and then remove from pan. Serve warm or at room temperature.

Serving Suggestion: This is a really yummy cake. I like it for breakfast sometimes, or with tea.

Stuffed Trout

2008-11-21T09:40:00.001+01:00

Whole trout was on sale last week, and so I made this tasty dish. My boyfriend loved the rice stuffing.

Stuffed Trout

Ingredients:

2 whole trout prepared for cooking (scales off, insides out)
1 lemon
1/2 c chopped herbs (I used a mix of parsley, dill and tarragon)
olive oil (enough to drizzle)
1 T butter unsalted
6 medium white mushrooms
2 c cooked white rice
1 small onion
2 cloves garlic
salt and pepper to taste

Method:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. On the stovetop, prepare the stuffing. Melt the butter in a pan, and when it is melted add the onion, chopped. Sautee until it's soft, then add diced garlic and chopped mushrooms. Sprinkle with salt and sautee gently; there's nothing worse than burnt garlic. While the veggies cook, place the fish in a shallow baking dish. Sprinkle salt and pepper on the inside and outside of the fish. When the mushrooms are soft, add the rice and 3/4 of the herbs to your pan of stuffing. Mix thoroughly, the herbs will start to wilt. Remove from the heat. Fill the fish with the rice stuffing and lemon slices (about 4 slices each fish). You can put extra stuffing in the baking dish surrounding the fish, or you can just save it to serve at a different meal. Drizzle olive oil over the fish and rice, sprinkle the remaining herbs over the fish and top each one with two more lemon slices. Put the pan in the oven on a middle rack. The time will depend on how big/small your fish are. Mine took about 18 minutes (I was cooking 4, I don't know if that affects the time). The best strategy is to check frequently; take it out when it looks not very done and then let it rest for five minutes. I said there's nothing worse than burnt garlic, but I think that's not really true: there's nothing worse than dry, overcooked fish.

Serving Suggestion and Notes: I didn't think I could eat one whole fish by myself, but I was wrong! Trout aren't very big, so I would assume 1 per person. There's about 1/2 c of stuffing in each one. I think that 1 stuffed trout is a pretty complete meal. The extra stuffing in the pan gets all the juices from the fish, the oil, and the lemon, so it's really tasty. This meal was also fast; the fish took about 20 minutes to cook including some rest time, and the stuffing didn't take even 10 minutes.

Cheap but Good: Buy plain oatmeal in bulk!

2008-11-19T03:39:00.003+01:00

I love to have oatmeal for breakfast, a hearty snack, or even for a light dinner on a cold winter night. But I hate buying those little pre-made packets. Why? For me it just doesn't make sense. I don't like the extra packaging, most of them have too much sugar for my taste, and the ones using simple, natural ingredients can be pretty expensive!

But buying a large container of instant oats is definitely not expensive.

I like to do just that. The oats can be combined with other things that I already regularly buy to make many varieties of tasty oatmeal. Ideas for things to put in your oatmeal: almonds, dried fruit, hot cocoa powder, honey, ground spices, milk, other nuts, peanut butter, molasses, jam, applesauce or sliced apples.

In all cases I use 1/3 c of dry instant oats. I add the ingredients I want (except wet ones like milk, molasses, jam or honey) and then add enough boiling water to just cover the mixture. Stir, and cover the bowl using a plate or a pot lid. Let it sit for about 3 minutes, stir, and add your wet flavorings (or a little more water if you don't want any wet flavorings). If the oatmeal is too thick, add hot water a tiny bit at a time, stirring as you go.

Some of my favorite combinations:

-About 10 dried sour cherries, 10 almonds, 1/2 t ground cardamom, 1 t sugar/honey/molasses, 1 T milk
-A generous dash of cinnamon, 1 T milk, 1 T honey
-15 raisins, 4 crumbled walnut or pecan halves, 1 t hot cocoa powder, 1t sugar
-1 t peanut butter, 1 t molasses, 1 T milk

This really is just as fast as opening a package. I don't know if you'll save money if you're currently buying the cheapest oatmeal out there. But if you're buying one that is high quality and has natural ingredients (like I was), this will probably be a more cost-effective option for you, especially since you probably have many of these things on hand for snacking or cooking/baking. In fact, it can help you use up things that you otherwise wouldn't! Maybe you have a jar of pumpkin pie spice from holiday baking, but you never use it the rest of the year. You can put it in your oatmeal! Maybe there's a banana that's all mushy inside, and you don't really want to eat it on it's own. It's also perfect for oatmeal. What I like best about this, and another thing that makes it money saving, is that it doesn't leave me with a bunch of flavors I don't like or eat. When I used to buy the packets, I had to buy a combination box to get the one or two flavors I like, and the rest I hated, so those would go to waste! Plus, if you have plain oatmeal in bulk, you can combine it into breads, muffins or cookies. You can even coat chicken breasts with it to make an easy fried chicken.

Tamago: Japanese Omelette

2008-11-17T03:27:00.005+01:00

I think this omlette is so pretty and different!

Tamago

Ingredients:

6 eggs
1 T soy sauce
1 T mirin (very sweet rice wine)
1 T rice wine vinegar
2 cloves garlic
2 pickled hot peppers (optional)
note: can substitute 2 T white wine for the mirin and vinegar
a fairly large pan, something like a non-stick griddle is best (I use a crepe pan)
a little bit of oil to grease the pan.

Method:

Mince the garlic cloves very finely, and slice the peppers into very thin rings. Beat all the ingredients together as you would for an omelette. I use this method for greasing the pan: dip a sort of balled-up paper towel into about a tablespoon of oil. Wipe the towel on the surface of the pan, which you should heat to medium/high level. When it's hot, spread a very thin layer of the mixture on the pan. When the egg is pretty set, roll the omelette. begin with the edge closest to you and roll it up like you would a rug. You'll end up with a log on the side of the pan away from you. Now, wipe the pan again with the towel, and spread another layer of egg mixture, keeping your log where it is. The new egg mixture will sort of flow under the log and stick to it. That's good. When the second layer is pretty set, roll the log towards you. The new layer will be incorporated, and you'll have a thicker log on the side of the pan closest to you. Repeat the process as many times as you can. You may have to alternate the heat between medium and medium/high to keep the omelette from burning. The recipe will give you about 6 to 7 layers. When you have the finished log, cut it into equal pieces. I like to do this by cutting the log in half, and then cutting each half in half, and so on, until I have 8 pieces about 1 inch in thickness.

Serving Suggestion and Notes: These are really pretty on a plate, I think they look like the rings in tree stumps, you know, the ones that tell you how old the tree is. You can serve them with stir fried veggies, cooked rice, or a simple clear soup. They have an interesting yet familiar taste, and I like to add the sliced hot pepper. It adds just the right amount of heat.

Cheese Fondue

2008-11-16T03:25:00.005+01:00

I absolutely love cheese fondue! I like meat fondue too, but something about the taste and the smell of the cheese combined with the alcohol drives me crazy. It's traditional to the Rhone-Alps (and some other) regions of France and to Switzerland.

Cheese Fondue

Ingredients:

1/2 Gruyere, shredded
3 c Emmental/Swiss, shredded
1/2 Comte
1 shot cognac
1/2 c white wine
2 cloves garlic
2 T flour or cornstarch
2 t lemon juice

Method:

Peel the garlic and chop it very finely. Warm the garlic and wine together in a pot you'll use for the fondue (non-stick is best). In a small bowl, mix the flour well with the lemon juice and a bit of the warmed wine until it's smooth. When the wine starts to boil, turn the heat to medium/low and add the shredded cheeses, stirring. When the cheese becomes melty, stir in the flour/starch mixture and continue to stir. It'll help make the mixture smooth. When the mixture is smooth, stir in the cognac. It's ready to serve now.

Serving Suggestion and Notes: You have to keep this warm. If you have some way of suspending your pot over a tea light or two, that works. Traditionally you dip slightly stale cubes of bread or pieces of baked potato into the cheese and eat a piece at a time. Dipping vegetables and apple chunks is also really tasty. You could also pour this as a sauce over asparagus, steamed broccoli, or baked potatoes. In Switzerland, the folk wisdom says that it's bad to drink water with fondue. This is because it supposedly makes the cheese harden in your stomach, leading to a stomach ache. So, you're supposed to drink wine, or hot tea. I've had room temperature water with it without any stomach ache, though.

Mattar Palao: Rice with Peas

2008-11-15T03:28:00.006+01:00

This is a very basic Indian recipe that you can serve on it's own or with curry or dhal.

Mattar Palao

Ingredients:

1.5 cup basmati rice
3 cups water
1/4 t salt
1/2 t cumin seeds
2 whole peppercorns
1 bay leaf
2 whole cloves
optional: 1 cardamom pod
1/2 c frozen peas
1 T oil

Method:

Wash the rice very thoroughly, until the water runs clear when you rinse it. Set it aside. Warm the oil on medium/high heat in a saucepan that you'll use to cook the rice. When it shimmers, fry the cumin seeds, but keep aside the clove, peppercorns, and if you're using it, the cardamom. Fry the cumin for about 30 seconds, you'll be able to smell them cooking and they may pop. Put the rice, water, salt and bay leaf and other spices into the pot. Set the heat to high, and let the water come to a boil. Once it boils, set the heat down a little so it's still boiling, but very gently. When almost all of the water has evaporated/absorbed, and small "holes" may appear in the pot of rice, stir in the peas, turn off the stove, and cover the pot for 10 minutes. After 10 minutes has passed, you should open the pot up and stir/fluff the rice with a fork. If the rice is still too wet, turn the heat back on to a low setting, stirring everything till it's not too wet anymore. Probably it'll be just right, though.

Serving Suggestion and Notes: This recipe can easily be expanded/scaled down. For basmati rice, the important ratio is 1 part rice to 2 parts water. You can add more spices to your taste or as needed. For a complete (and inexpensive) meal, I like to scramble some eggs and combine them with the cooked rice, especially the next day. You could also add cashews or some other nut. It's also good garnished with chopped cilantro and/or a squeeze of lemon. Serving this with plain dhal (recipe posted earlier, just leave out eggplant) makes it a bit more complete.

Cucumber and Cauliflower Salad

2008-11-14T03:00:00.002+01:00

I made this for the first time a month or so ago, because we had a cauliflower head, and we always have cucumbers and onions. I read a recipe on some site, I think cooks.com, but I can't find it now. Anyway, this is only loosely based on that, so I hope I'm not stealing anyone's recipe without giving credit. :-)

Cucumber and Cauliflower Salad

Ingredients:

1/2 medium head of cauliflower
1/2 small onion
1/4 english cucumber

2 t salt plus extra to taste
2 t balsamic vinegar
black pepper to taste
1/2 c cream or sour cream
fresh dill

Method:

Cut the half head of cauliflower into 2 quarters, and then cut each quarter into half. So you'll have 4 equal sized wedges of cauliflower. Now slice the cauliflower as thinly as you can and put it into a salad bowl. Slice the onion into semi-rings as thinly as possible, and also cut the cucumber as thinly as possible. Add them to the bowl. Sprinkle some of the 2 t of salt, then mix the veggies, repeating this process until you've added the whole 2 t. Move the bowl to the refrigerator and let it sit for a 2-3 hours. When the time is up, rinse the vegetables and drain them really well. The salt will have softened the cauliflower. Now you can add the balsamic vinegar (you could use lemon juice if you don't have it), the cream, chopped fresh dill (about 2 T, or more if you like it) and pepper and extra salt to your tastes.

Serving Suggestion and Notes: The longest part of this is the waiting for the veggies to soften. I must emphasize that rinsing is important, otherwise the veggies will be very salty. I learned that the hard way. I like to eat this with one or two other salads (like the Simple Tomato Salad from yesterday) and a piece of baguette.

Simple Tomato Salad

2008-11-13T10:00:00.001+01:00

This is one of my favorite salads. My boyfriend made it for me when we first started dating, and I was surprised by how delicious, yet simple, it is. In the summer when fresh tomatoes are at their peak, this salad is also inexpensive. Right now tomato prices are higher, and the tomatoes aren't as tasty, but it's still a nice recipe.

Such salads are traditional in many parts of Europe. This particular rendition is a common summer recipe in Russia and Ukraine. There are variations adding more stuff; mozzarella cheese, olive oil, garlic, cucumber, different herbs, apple ... but I prefer this most simple version.

Simple Tomato Salad

Ingredients:

3 medium sized tomatoes
1 small onion
1/2 c cream (we have creme fraiche easily available and inexpensive here in France, but you can also use sour cream. Some people use mayo. I think you could use thick Greek yogurt with excellent results.)
salt and pepper to taste

Method:

Dice the onion very fine and place them in your serving bowl. Chop the tomatoes and add them, making sure that you add the juice to the bowl too. Mix the cream into the mixture thoroughly.

Serving Suggestion and Notes: This salad is best eaten the same day, because fresh tomatoes change consistency dramatically if you refrigerate them (which you shouldn't do!). It is, however, tastiest not immediately after preparation, but after it sits for maybe 20-30 minutes. This allows it to come to room temperature (assuming your cream was cold), and the salt extracts juices from the vegetables. These juices combine with the cream to make a delicious sauce that you can dip nice bread into! In the summer, I think this is a perfect accompaniment to burgers. The rest of the year, I like to eat it for dinner or lunch with a few other salads. It's great for parties, too.

Cheap but Good: Sweet and Sour Cabbage Soup

2008-11-12T16:25:00.006+01:00

This soup is delicious, low fat/calorie, and full of vitamins! It reminds me of the sweet and sour cabbage soup I used to get at a Jewish Deli style restaurant (Ella's Deli in Madison, WI) when I was a kid, but without the meat. Actually, this recipe came from an attempt to recreate that taste. I use a 3 quart pot to make this.

Sweet and Sour Schi

Ingredients:

1/2 medium head cabbage (I used what was leftover after making Golubtsy)
1 small onion
1 medium carrot
1 T oil
2/3 of a 765 g can of peeled roma tomatoes packed in juice + juice from can
3 T balsamic vinegar
3 T sugar
water
bay leaf
sprinkling of caraway seeds
salt to taste

Method:

Warm the oil in a pot. When it shimmers, you're ready to sautee veggies. First add the onion, sliced thinly in semi-rings, and sprinkle some salt. When it is soft, add the carrot, peeled and diced, and sprinkle salt. While it's cooking you can cut the cabbage. Add the cabbage sliced into thin strips about a handful at a time. Sprinkle salt after each addition, and don't add the next handful until the one in the pot is soft. I do this because I have a small pot; if I put it all in at once, it would be too much. At this point, the salt has caused the vegetables to release their juices, and the veggies are stewing. When the cabbage starts to become soft and translucent, add tomatoes chopped and their juice. Add about a can and a half (using the can from the tomatoes) of water, the caraway and a bay leaf (basically, I add enough to fill the entire 3 quart pot). Bring to a boil and simmer until the cabbage is soft enough to your liking. Stir in the vinegar and the sugar. You can add more sugar if you want it sweeter, less if you like it more sour. Likewise with the vinegar; more if you like it more sour, less if you like it sweeter. Add salt to taste. Serve hot. You can serve it with sour cream (I prefer it without), a lemon wedge, or chopped herbs like parsley or dill. Приятного Аппетита!

Serving Suggestion and Notes: I think that this soup is filling enough that 1-2 bowls is a complete dinner. My boyfriend needs a couple of slices of bread with it. We had this last night for dinner with black (rye) bread. For dessert (and tea today) we had pancakes, the thick kind Russians call oladi. Americans will recognize them as silver-dollar pancakes. Было очень вкусно! You can also serve this with crusty bread or grilled cheese sandwiches.

***Cost Analysis***
Cabbage: 1 head = 1.30 euros. 1/2 = .65 euros
Carrot: 8 carrots = 1 euro. 1 carrot = .125 euro
Onion: ~100 onions = 5 euros. 1 onions = .025 euro
Oil: 500 mL = 5.67 euro. 1 T = 14.79 mL = .168 euro
Tomatoes: 1 can = .82 euro. 2/3 can = .547 euro
Balsamic vinegar: 1 bottle= 250 mL = 1.70 euro. 3 T = 44.36 mL = .302 euro.
Sugar: 1000 g = 1.80 euro. 2 T = 24 grams = .043 euro.
Water: 0 euro
Bay Leaf: ~50 leaves = 2 euro. 1 leaf = .04 euro
Salt: cost negligible

Number of Servings: 8 bowls

Total cost of recipe: 1.90 euro = $2.40 at today's currency exchange
Cost per Serving: .24 euro = $.30

Nutritional Info:
Calories per Serving (calculated using info at www.calorieking.com):70
Calories in Recipe: 559

Cheap but Good: ideas, tips and recipes for eating well without spending a lot

2008-11-11T11:45:00.002+01:00

I want to start something on this blog that I'm going to call the "Cheap but Good" series. The idea is to feature bi-weekly a recipe that costs under 1 euro per serving. The cost will be based on what I pay where I live. On weeks I don't post a recipe, I'll post a tip or an idea for saving money but eating well. So this means that each week there will be a "Cheap but Good" blog entry. I think I'll go for doing this every Wednesday, with the first entry being tomorrow.

Golubtsy (Cabbage Rolls)

2008-11-11T03:00:00.002+01:00

Cabbage is a staple food in Russian cuisine. These cabbage rolls are really delicious! Use a high fat content ground beef; it makes the rolls more juicy. You can also use a mixture of ground meats or substitute cooked chopped mushrooms for a vegetarian and vegan option. I use canned whole tomatoes in this dish and chop them up. I prefer to save fresh tomatoes for non-cooked applications, since they're expensive.

Golubtsy

Ingredients:

1 medium head of green cabbage

3 cups cooked white rice
600 grams ground beef
1 large or 2 medium/small carrots
2 small or 1 large onions
3 plum/roma tomatoes or 1 medium/large tomato
salt and pepper (lots)

caraway seeds (optional, but they keep you from farting all night)

water

Method:

Place the cabbage in a large pot and cover with water. Add some salt and the caraway. Bring to a boil, and then let simmer. It's going to need to simmer for about 20 minutes on each side (put it in core side down, then flip it over. Or the other way around.), so use this time to make the filling. Mix the cooked rice with the raw ground beef, grated carrot, onion and tomato chopped small. Add tons of salt and pepper. Mix thoroughly; use hands! When the cabbage has cooked for about 40 minutes, drain the water (you can save it for soup). Rinsing under cold water makes it easier to handle but isn't required. Carefully peel leaves off the cabbage. You'll need about 20 leaves. The remaining cabbage can be used for something else. Leaves: there will be a very tough, thick stem at the bottom. You can mash this a bit with the bell of a spoon to make it bendable, or you can cut it out and eat it like I do. Your call. Basically, you'll have a little cabbage cup in your hand. Place about 2 T of filling (about the size of a hard-boiled egg) in the center, more towards the bottom. Fold the sides in together first, then roll the lump of filling from top to bottom. You should have a neat little roll. Place it in the now empty pot you were cooking cabbage in. Continue making rolls and putting them in the pot; when a whole layer is formed on the bottom of the pot, start a new one. Stacking doesn't hurt. When you're done, add water to the pot, enough to cover at least 2/3 of the rolls, more if you like. You can also add more caraway. It's tasty! Bring to a low boil and then simmer until cabbage is translucent and soft; about 2 hours.

Serving Suggestion: Serve these warm/hot with sour cream, chopped dill and parsley. The cooking water is also delicious; it tastes like soup. You can serve the rolls in deep plates or shallow bowls and add a little of the broth. People can cut open their roll and add some broth to make it juicier.

Eggplant Dhal

2008-11-10T02:50:00.003+01:00

Dhal is a staple food in India. It is made with many kinds of lentils. I usually use red dhal, because it cooks quickly and doesn't need soaking, or chana dhal (garbanzo beans), because I can buy it canned and I like them. This recipe uses red lentils (dhal). The original recipe, my Mom's, is an adaptation from the book A Spicy Touch. Both those use yellow lentils.

Rozmin's Red Dhal With Eggplant

Ingredients:

1 tsp. fresh ginger
1 tsp. fresh garlic
2 Tbsp oil

½ tsp mustard seeds
½ tsp cumin seeds
2 – 4 whole cloves
1 – 2 whole hot peppers, split in half
1 small tomato, chopped
¾ tsp. cumin powder
¾ tsp. tumeric
¾ tsp crushed red pepper

about 500 g red lentils
water
1 eggplant

1 Tbsp. cilantro leaves
2 Tbsp. lemon juice
salt to taste

Method:

Sautee garlic and ginger in the oil. Cut the eggplant into cubes (you can leave the skin on). When the ginger and garlic is soft, push them to the side of the pot and let the oil pool on the opposite side. Fry the spices in the oil for about 30 seconds. Set heat to a low simmer. Mix the contents of the pot together, adding the tomato. Let cook for about 30 seconds. Add the eggplant and stir well, coating all the eggplant with the mixture. Add the lentils and immeadiately add water to cover everything (probably about 4 or 5 cups). Keep an eye on the dhal, stirring from time to time, and adding 1-2 cups of water when it becomes too thick to stir; this means all the moisture has been absorbed into the lentils and it'll burn if you don't add more. You can cover it if you want to lose less moisture to evaporation. Make sure the heat is on low so the bottom doesn't burn. It's ready when the lentils and eggplant are completely soft; when red lentils are cooked they turn mushy and yellow. Salt it to taste.

Serving Suggestion: Serve garnished with lemon juice and cilantro. It's also very tasty with plain yogurt.

First Post

2008-11-10T02:46:00.000+01:00

Since so many of my posts are about food, I decided to make a separate food blog. Cooking is one of my main hobbies. I really enjoy it, and I especially enjoy experimental cooking: cooking with whatever's around, or maybe with only an idea, or a general recipe. Sometimes my creations are delicious, most of the time they're not bad to pretty good, but once in a while things don't turn out so well. Part of the motivation for this blog is that I want to remember what I did when I make something damned good. I especially enjoy cooking Indian food and Russian food. I also like to cook with a focus on eating well without spending a lot of money.