My Name Is Not Heidi: Cooking in Switzerland

Christmas 2010

2010-12-26T11:07:00.002+01:00

Gifts:
- Macaroons
- Spicy nuts
- Granola
- Sloe gin (with honey)
- Better than Ketchup (with added nigella seeds and ground coriander)
- Jam!

Christmas lunch:
- Roast potatoes in duck fat
- Glazed carrots in orange juice (very popular!)
- Stuffing balls (ditto)
- Roast capon with sage
- Green salad
- Christmas pudding with whisky butter and creme fraiche

Merguez: Better rude than red

2010-05-31T15:54:00.003+02:00

The problem with merguez is that they spit.

Which isn't always ideal.

The other problem with merguez is, bcause they spit, they dry up really fast.

And yet another problem with merguez is that it's much easier to find not-so-good merguez than it is to find the good stuff. The only way to find the latter, I've been told, is to locate a friendly halal butcher. Well, he doesn't necessarily have to be friendly. But halal is a must- because his will have the right ingredients, at least.

Notwithstanding this particular point, on Saturday, during our weekly shop, as I was feeling quite uninspired by what was on special offer (fricasee de porc? It's 25 degrees and sunny. I'm not cooking something that needs to braise in my Staub casserole for three hours!), and suggested to Peter that we fire up the barbecue (for the first time this summer), what went into the shopping trolley was.. a pack of merguez.

Nineteen of them, to be precise. Why they were being sold in packs of nineteen, I fail to understand. There's no way you can divide nineteen merguez and make it fair- unless of course you have nineteen guests. Not that one merguez each is fair either.

Sunday morning dawned... grey, cold, and rainy. A generally miserable day. A "curl up on the sofa, read a book, drink tea" day. Not a day fit to be the penultimate day of May. Nor a day to go pick elderflower and make jelly/syrup/champagne, which was what I'd wanted to do.

And when dinnertime came around... we didn't really feel like going out on the balcony and turning on the barbecue.

To go back to my initial point- in our last apartment, I'd ended up banning merguez from the balcony barbecue. Not only would Peter have to clean his glasses with industrial cleaning fluid afterwards (OK, a slight exaggeration, but not much of one!), but I'd then spend several days intermittently boiling water and pouring it on the balcony floor to get rid of the grease. I remember looking out there one evening to see fat swirling through the air- a sight which has not exactly remained one of my favourite memories! No wonder the merguez almost invariably proved to be dried out and pretty much tasteless.

Thus, the idea of having to start scrubbing the new balcony floor was not something that filled me with joy. Especially when I'm not going to be home much for the next three weeks.

I once fried merguez on the hobtop, on a similarly rainy day. Again, not something that I looked forward to doing again... as I had to employ cleaning solutions somewhat similar to a nuclear strike afterwards.

So, what were we going to have for dinner?

Merguez stew.

Ingredients:
- 1 pack of merguez, each cut into three
- 6 courgettes, chopped into thick slices
- 1 red pepper, in slices
- 2 onions, in thick slices
- 3 sweet potatoes, in chunks
- 1 bottle of passata
- olive oil

I heated the olive oil in the Staub casserole (!), added the onions and the red pepper, stirred, put the lid on for a couple of minutes, added the courgettes and sweet potatoes, stirred, put the lid back on for a few minutes, then added the merguez. Stirred them in, left the lid on again for a couple of minutes. (At this point, if I'd had any, I'd have added a tin of chickpeas, but, for some mysterious reason, I was out.) I then added the bottle of passata, a bit of water (to rinse out the bottle!), put the lid on until it reached a simmer, opened it, stirred it around, decided from the smell that I didn't really need to add any spices, and left the lid slightly open until the sauce was as thick as I thought it should be. After which the lid went back on tight, and I turned it all down, as Peter was putting Greta to bed.

I think that all in all, it cooked for about 50 minutes.

And very yummy it was- Peter had two bowls, I had the same, we left just about enough to make one bowlful, if eked out with some couscous and some extra fried onions! Next time, though, I'd add chickpeas and some salt.

As for the merguez, they were the best I've ever had. Soft, juicy, spicy... and no insane orange grease to spend days cleaning up!

Spanakotiropita!

2010-05-22T21:52:00.005+02:00

I've always loved this word. Say it again. Spanakotiropita! And again! Spanakotiropita! Woo-hoo!

I'm quite fond of the actual thing as well. And it's something I've wanted to make for a long while.

Spotting feuilles de brik (really thin North African sheets of pastry) in the supermarket earlier in the week was all I needed.

I knew I had spinach at home, as well as feta, so I didn't get anything else. When I got home, I dug out Diane Kochilas' The Glorious Foods of Greece, a cookbook I've had for about 8 years, and never made anything from, despite the best of intentions. Why I didn't reach for Vefa's Kitchen is something that only crossed my mind half-way through cooking this evening. Who knows?

Brik, however, isn't quite filo pastry.

And Peter eating half the pack of spinach for lunch when I was out wasn't what I had expected.

Nor was the fact that Diane didn't actually have a recipe for ... say it again... Spanakotiropita! in her book.

However, I browsed through, and came up with a recipe for Scallion and Feta Pie (Kremmydopita). I then headed off to the supermarket again, with nothing more in my head than the fact that I needed more spinach and some spring onions. Needless to say, I didn't come home with the "2 pounds scallions or spring onions" the recipe required when I had a look at it this evening. Nor did I have 1 pound Greek feta cheese, nor 1 pound myzithra cheese.

I did have, however, 1 1/2 packs of spinach, a pack of rocket (300g each, I think), 2 packs of 220g each of not-feta, i.e. feta-like cheese made with 100% sheep's milk but not in Greece, 5 spring onions, and assorted other bits and pieces.

Thus, my take on Not Really Spanakotiropita!

Ingredients:
- 1 pack of brik containing 10 sheets
- 2 x 220 g pack of "feta" (maybe a bit too much. One and a half packs would have been better.), chopped
- 5 spring onions with lots of green tops
- (about) 1 cup milk
- 300 g rocket
- 450 g (approx) young spinach
- the greens from the radishes that I'd also bought- very satisfying, that as I've always hated throwing them away!
- 4 large eggs
- lots of butter
- pepper, salt

Chop the spring onions, greens and bulb and all. Soften in a frying pan with some of the butter. After a few minutes, when beginning to wilt, add the spinach, cook until wilted. My frying pan wouldn't take all the greens in one go, otherwise I'd have had them all in- so I then cooked the rocket and radish leaves in the same pan, then tipped the first batch back in, added the milk, freshly-ground black pepper, and cooked that for about 5 minutes.

Tipped it all into a bowl, left to cool for a few minutes (would you believe I was also making strawberry and rhubarb jam at the same time?), then add the beaten eggs and the chopped "feta".

Then, working fast, as all the books tell you too, I layered the brik in a dish (actually the lid of my Pyrex chicken roaster), brushing each layer with some melted butter, keeping the rest covered with a damp (clean) dishtowel. Ms. Kochilas' recipe had 12 sheets, I only had 10, it didn't really matter, did it? I layered 5, making sure that there was enough overhang to fold over, then put in my filling (I should have mixed it a bit better- there were bits where it was mostly cheese, and other places where it was mostly greens), then layered the remaining five over the top, brushing them with more butter.

Into the oven at 190C for 50 minutes. Of course, at 50 minutes, I decided to leave it another 5, and then my jam jelled (well, I took the sugar thermometer off the side and put it in the middle and found that I was well above jelling temperature, argh!), so I had to jar that in a hurry. But I turned the oven off and opened the door on the way past, after it had been in for about an hour.

Verdict: Well, there isn't much left. It was yummy. Even Peter liked it enough to say that I should make it again. Not twenty times a year, he hastened to specify, but again.

As I pointed out- now that brik is available, I can make all sorts of fillings... If only I could find ground lamb! I think I need to find a good halal butcher.

I Can Has My Dream!

2010-05-21T22:20:00.000+02:00

Behold. A brand-new, copper, jam-making pan.

My jam brings all the boys to the yard...

Basics

2010-05-21T21:40:00.002+02:00

Lunch: organic whole-meal bread, home-made mayonnaise, noix de jambon (ham from the centre of the joint), and raw milk, six months aged Abondance.

It almost made up for Greta only having a post-prandial nap of a grand total of 26 minutes.

I Am Insane: Two Birthday Cakes in one day

2010-05-16T21:13:00.006+02:00

Greta's second birthday is next week- right in the middle of the week, which makes it awkward for people to come share some cake, bring her a present, and generally exclaim over how much she's grown since she took her first breath.

Therefore, we decided to hold it this Sunday. Which was made slightly awkward by the fact that it is Peter's brother's birthday.

Peter's brother, who is responsible for Greta turning up two weeks early (he had his birthday over three different evenings and three different parties, inviting us out to each one- with the result that in the early hours of the morning after the third dinner, I exploded), agreed to share his Special Day, on one condition.

He got his own cake. And it had to be chocolate. And have thirty-two candles. And have his name on it in pink frosting.

He thought he was being funny with the last one.

Well, he got what he wanted.

Giving it a second try, I turned once again to Baked: New Frontiers in Baking.

This time, however, the Flourless Chocolate Cake (copyright as above, slightly amended by me) was what grabbed my attention.

Thus, on Saturday afternoon, after spending the day in town and doing the supermarket shop, at 4 p.m. I girded my loins, and dug out the blender again.

Ingredients:
- 300g black chocolate (i.e. three chocolate bars. I bought the Migros organic chocolate, as I like it's caramel-sugar taste)
- 140 g butter, softened
- 1 cup sugar
- 7 large eggs, separated
- 3 vanilla pods, seeded (again, the recipe asked for pure vanilla extract, which I couldn't find)
- 1 tsp salt

Preheat the oven to 350F/180C. Butter and flour the sides and bottom of a 9-inch/24cm springform pan. Melt the chocolate and set aside to cool. In the bowl of the electric mixer, fitted with the paddle attachment, beat the butter and sugar together until pale, light, and thoroughly combined. Add the egg yolks, beating well after each addition (I did it in three batches). After they've all been incorporated, scrape down the bowl and beat again for a few seconds. Add the cooled chocolate, mix until thoroughly combined. Scrape down the bowl, add the vanilla, beat until just incorporated.

In a large bowl, whisk the egg whites and salt until stiff peaks form (stiff, you got it?). Now here I again had the problem with the bowl of my blender being too small to add the egg whites to the chocolate mix, so I shoved my egg whites to the side of my very large bowl (having planned this one in advance), plopped in about a cup of the chocolate mix, then folded that into the egg whites, gently, with a spatula. I then added the rest of the chocolate mix, and continued, very slowly and gently so as not to knock the air out of the egg whites.

Pour the mix into the pan and don't bother smoothing the top, even if the book says to, because it will even out in a minute. Bake for 30-35 mns (I set the timer for 35), until the top of the cake seems set or firm to the touch. The book says "Be careful not to overbake this cake", so I took it out at 35 mns, although as the top was firm, it still seemed a bit jiggly to me. This caused a little bit of trauma until it was cut and I was sure it was indeed cooked through.

Transfer to a wire rack and let cool completely before removing from the mold.

However, I also had Greta's birthday cake to make. And Betty Bossi had come up trumps again, with a recipe for Fraisier au yogourt.

Ingredients:
- 100g flour
- 60g sugar
- pinch of salt
- 55 g cold butter, in cubes
- 1 small beaten egg.

Mix the flour, sugar and salt in a large bowl. Add the butter, work by hand until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs. Add the egg, bring quickly to a soft dough, without working it.

Butter a 24-cm mold (I used a 20cm one), flour it. My recipe then said to roll out the dough- no way that this dough was going to be rolled out! So I just dropped it into the mold and smoothed it out with the backs of my fingers. Refrigerate for 30mns, says the recipe, but I didn't have time for this. Because we were going out for dinner at 6:30, and I was making two cakes at the same time!

Prick the base with a fork (erm... I did this, but I don't think it was necessary, mine was too soft!), bake for, according to the recipe, 15mns in the oven, preheated to 200C. I did mine an extra 5 minutes, because it looked undercooked. Leave to cool in the mold, then take out and leave to cool on a wire rack.

Yoghurt mix:
- 500g plain yoghurt
- 140g sugar (I used vanilla sugar, made from shoving de-seeded vanilla pods into the sugar and leaving them there)
- 3 vanilla pods, seeded

Mix the three together in a bowl. Leave to infuse.

At which point, with two cakes on the rack, we went out for dinner.

Which ran on much later than we'd thought it would- so I was back in the kitchen at midnight!

I unmolded the base for the fraisier, put it on a glass cake dish, then put the sides of the mold around it again.

Going back to the chocolate cake, I started the ganache.

Ingredients:
- 300 g black chocolate
- 1/2 cup creme fraiche epaisse
- 1/4 cup liquid sugar (the recipe asked for light corn syrup, which is unavailable in Switzerland)
(optional, and I didn't have any- 1 tbs coffee-flavoured liqueur such as Kahlua)

I started by making a mistake, putting the bowl of chocolate into the microwave to melt, then hauling it out fast after 20 seconds. Do not melt the chocolate!

In a small saucepan, combine the cream and liquid sugar/corn syrup, and bring just to a boil. Remove from the heat and pour the cream mixture over the chocolate. Let stand for two minutes (whilst doing things with strawberries for the other recipe), then stir the mixture together slowly until the chocolate is completely melted and the mixture is smooth. Whisk for another few minutes to cool the ganache slightly. (Add the liqueur and whisk again.)

To glaze the cake, the book says to put the cake on the wire rack, and glaze there, then put on a plate. As I had to use three spatulas and Peter to get my cake off the base of the tin without it breaking up, I put it straight on my cake plate. No way I was going to mess around with such a fragile thing.

Pour 3/4 cup over the cake, and smooth out to the edges. Place the cake in the freezer for five minutes to set the ganache. Remove from the freezer, and then the book says to slowly pour the glaze over the cake, "it should run down the sides and cover the cake completely". My ganache was much too thick for this, so I took my spatula and glazed the sides carefully, then put the last two tablespoons of ganache on top, smoothed them out, covered the cake, and put it on the balcony for the night, as there was definitely not room for "chill the glazed cake for two hours" in my fridge!

During all of this, I had continued the Fraisier.

900g (says the recipe, I used about 600-700 g, I think) strawberries. Slice in half enough strawberries to go around the edges of the cake, points pointing upwards, and cut side on the outside. Then fill the inside with whole strawberries.

This is when it got noisy, especially for a Swiss apartment at gone half-past-midnight!

- 2 sheets of instant gelatine
- 1 dl warm water
- 2 1/2 dl cream, whipped into chantilly.

At this point, Peter turned up, told me I was making too much noise, and asked me to whip the cream quietly. Do you know how much muscle control it takes to whip cream as quietly as possible? Well, it's a good thing that I carry Greta around so much, and have consequently impressive biceps. I did my best, but was still a bit noisy for a few minutes.

Soften the gelatine in the water, add to the yoghurt and vanilla mixture with the whisk (I've never dealt with gelatine before, and I didn't get it quite soft enough, unfortunately- there were some bits of it in the finished cake, as I found out the next day! Also, as this was a first time, I spent the next 15 hours or so worrying about it setting properly.). Add the chantilly cream, gently. Leave to sit for ten minutes. Pour over the strawberries, smooth the top, and leave for at least three hours, covered, in the fridge.

Or, in my case, go to bed, it being 1 a.m.!

The next day I brought the chocolate cake in off the balcony a couple of hours beforehand, and, with a tube of hot-pink icing with sparkles, wrote the above on it. And managed to fit two candles, one in the shape of a 3, the other in a 2, into the cake without anything catastrophic happening. I was still worried about the inside/middle not being cooked, but it seemed OK...

I was very worried about unmolding the Fraisier, and did it very slowly and carefully, convinced that the whole thing was going to collapse- but it didn't, hurray! I was so proud of myself that I did a little dance.

Unlike her cake last year, Greta actually ate a few mouthfuls of her slice- in between busily running around and showing off her amazing cuteness skills.

As for the chocolate cake, my brother-in-law was very happy. And impressed, as was everybody else. He took the remains of the chocolate cake home, and the Fraisier is in the fridge for us.

Verdict:
The chocolate cake went down extremely well. Even Peter, who isn't a big fan of sweet things or of chocolate cake, loved it. It was definitely a keeper recipe. The inside was soft, gooey, chocolatey, and definitely not undercooked.

The Fraisier is also a recipe I'll hang on to, as it makes a nice, simple cake, perfect for strawberry season. I had expected the base to stay crispy, but it had soaked up quite a bit of moisture, and was all soft, without, however, being soaked to the point of collapse. Maybe next time, a little pre-soak in some strawberry liqueur?

Thank you, last summer, for the tomato sauce...

2010-05-13T21:09:00.003+02:00

When you're home late, you're cold, you shouldn't be because it's mid-May, but it's been raining on and off all day... pasta with sauce made last August is all that anybody really needs.

Last summer, I made an utterly basic tomato sauce with tomatoes from the farm down the road. The pots had just sat in the cupboard all through winter, me periodically glancing at them, and thinking that winter hadn't got that bad yet.

Winter never did get that bad. But spring did. We had three weeks of spring, everything blossomed, flowered, there were drifts of petals swirling past our windows, then we had two weeks of glorious summer during which I got sunburned twice, and ... suddenly... it became early spring again.

By which I mean it got cold, started to rain, got colder, went on raining, and was generally unpleasant. Is generally unpleasant. I have had to put my sandals away and get my wellies back out! Brrrr...

And therefore, after spending the day outside at a barbecue, we were all cold, hoping that we hadn't caught cold, and craving something warm, smooth, and ultimately comforting.

There are few things more comforting than pasta. Pasta with lots of rich, oily tomato sauce. Pasta that you can bury your head in, and pull up over your cold feet like a lovely fleece blanket. Pasta that loves you, and loves your tummy, and doesn't care that it's been waiting in the cupboard for the last 9 months...

American Layer Cake- not Swiss enough!

2010-05-12T21:04:00.002+02:00

Acting on a tip-off from David Lebovitz, who said it was one of the best cookbooks this year (or last year), I purchased (from abebooks, I'm cheap), Baked: New Adventures in Baking.

A few days later, reminded that Peter's Annual Family Reunion was coming up, and having been volunteered to make a first course (not a difficult task- my faithful tabbouleh came to the rescue) and a dessert, I opened it up at the cakes section (real cakes, not French cakes!), and came up with The Whiteout Cake.

Which looked pretty nice. A long recipe, longer than what I'd usually make, but a challenge is always good. And I need to break out of my usual habits and recipes I've repeated so many times...

The problem was... I didn't start until just before 9 p.m.

Nor did I realise that I was going to end up using my blender (and wishing I had a second blender), four mixing bowls, two measuring cups, two measuring spoons, numerous other spoons and forks, several knives, both spatulas, and a heap of other tools.

Yeah. Well. A professional kitchen would have been nice too.

Ingredients (copyright Baked, as above; slightly tweaked by me as indicated):
- 2.5 cups farine fleur (cake flour)
- 3/4 cup flour
- 1 tbs baking powder
- 1 tsp baking soda
- 3/4 teaspoon salt
- 115 g butter (my apologies, but although I have an American measuring cup, and am quite happy to measure things like flour and sugar in it, I'm not trying to cram butter into it! Hence, I convert, with a handy online tool)
- 1/2 cup vegetable fat for cooking (vegetable shortening- I had to figure this one out by cramming it into the cup, and very annoying it was too)
- 1 3/4 cups sugar
- 3 vanilla pods, seeded (my change- I couldn't find pure vanilla extract, so couldn't put it one tbs thereof)
- 1 large egg
- 1 1/2 cups ice cold water
- 3 large egg whites, at room temperature (I then made mayonnaise with the yolks)
(- 1/4 tsp cream of tartar- in brackets because I didn't have any and have no idea what it is in French nor where to get it, so I didn't bother)

Preheat the oven to 325F/170C. Butter three (two, in my case) 8-inch (20 cm) round cake pans, flour them, tip out excess flour.

Sift the flours, baking powder, baking soda, and salt together. Set aside.

In the bowl of the blender, fitted with the paddle attachment (first time I've used that, and I've had the blender about 5 years!), beat the butter and vegetable fat together until creamy. Add the sugar and vanilla and beat until fluffy. Scrape down the bowl repeatedly. Add the egg whites, beat until "just" combined, whatever that means. Add the flour mixture, alternating with the ice water, in three separate additions, beginning and ending with the flour mixture (read that twice- it means you add the water twice, and the flour three times). Scrape down the bowl, mix again.

In another bowl (!), whisk the egg whites (and cream of tartar) until soft peaks form. Just soft ones. Not firm ones. Not hard ones. Soft. OK?

Gently fold the egg whites into the batter. Which, in my case, meant using a fourth bowl, as the mixing bowl of my blender wasn't big enough for the egg whites to go in too, besides having the great big paddle thingy at the bottom.

Divide the batter into the pans, and smooth the top. I did this by weighing my bowl at the beginning, then weighing my batter, dividing it into three in my small but perfectly formed head (OK, I did it on the calculator), and spooning it into the tins one by one, as they sat on the weighing machine. And only doing two tins, as I'd only bought two, thinking that I'd just do the third one afterwards.

Bake the cakes for 40-45 mns (I did 45), rotating the pans half-way through, until a toothpick inserted comes out clean. Transfer the cakes to a wire rack and let cool for 20 minutes. Remove the molds, slide onto rack, allow to cool completely.

Aren't my cakes pretty? And the tops, when I cut them off, tasted really good too. But I'm getting ahead of myself...

White Chocolate Frosting:
- 175g white chocolate, broken up
- 1 1/2 cups sugar
- 1/3 cup flour
- 1 1/2 cups milk
- 1/3 cup creme fraiche
- 340g (three. hundred. and. forty!!!) butter, soft but cool (erm, yeah, right, I just left it out for half an hour), cut into small pieces (torn into them, more like!)
(- 1 tsp pure vanilla extract- I didn't bother at all, thinking the cake had plenty of vanilla in it)

Melt the chocolate however you think best (I use the microwave), stir, and set aside to cool.

In a saucepan, whisk the sugar and flour together. Add the milk and cream and cook over medium heat, whisking quite attentively or you'll burn the bottom the way I almost did (OK, did in one little edge, as I paid attention to the book's instructions to "whisk occasionally"), until the mixture has come to a boil and thickened, which takes as long as it takes, no matter the book saying "about 20 minutes", because it was nowhere near that.

Now comes the really annoying part. As you'll have read ahead, you will have washed up your blender, since you only have one. Because you now pour the mixture into the blender, fitted-with-the-paddle-attachment, and, wait for it, you're supposed to "beat on high speed until cool".

Erm, yeah, right. How long is that supposed to take?

And, in my case, there was no way that it was going to cool like that. I kept on having to take the lid off to let steam out. I found the best way was to leave it with the lid off for a few minutes, then whisk the cool layer into the hotter layer, and repeat. It took... oh, quite a while. A good 40 minutes. In the meantime, I baked my other cake, and let that cool.

You then add the butter, mix until thoroughly amalgamated. Increase the speed and beat until the frosting is light and fluffy, whatever that is supposed to mean. I made a stab at what I thought it meant- spreadable, without being concrete.

Add the (vanilla and) white chocolate, and continue mixing until combined. The book then says that if the frosting is too soft, put the bowl in the refrigerator to chill slightly, then beat again until it is the proper consistency. Which is what I did. It also tells you that if it's too firm, set the bowl over a pot of simmering water and beat with a wooden spoon until it is the proper consistency. Me, I'd just turn the blender on again...

Assembling the cake: Refrigerate the frosting for only a few minutes, until it can hold its shape. Place one cake on a serving platter, and trim the top to create a flat surface. Um. Yeah. Sort of. Evenly spread about 1 1/4 cups of the frosting on top. Add the next layer, having trimmed it first (the book says to do it second, no, bad idea), frost it, add the third layer.

The book then says to "crumb coat" the cake, i.e. to put a thin layer of frosting on it to catch the crumbs, then put the cake in the refrigerator for about 15 mns to firm up the frosting. I did, but my layer had no crumbs in it anyway, so I wasn't too bothered. Frost the top and the sides with the remaining frosting.

Now, I'd also bought white sprinkles, as the book called this "whiteout", and said to decorate with white sprinkles or nonpareils. Well, my cake wasn't white. If I'd have been being nice, I'd have said "cream-coloured", but it wasn't, it was butter-coloured. White sprinkles would have looked awful. So I didn't have anything to decorate it with. It would have looked OK with multi-coloured ones, but I didn't have any. So I left it as it was. And went to bed. Because it was gone 1 a.m.!

The verdict:
I'd use the cake base again. Definitely. It was delicate, it was moist, it tasted delicious.

The frosting I'd make again, if I had the sort of sweet tooth that would render me toothless by the age of 40, instead of being 35 and not having a single cavity. It was... rich, it was gooey, it was sweet, it was like eating butter and sugar together, and although some older members of the extremely extended family liked it, once they got over the way it looked (I heard two different people ask others "What on earth is that?!?" when the cloche was taken off), it was just far too sweet for most of them.

Besides the way it looked. It was... alien. Too alien for a good, Swiss family. Too much of everything, in fact.

But I will probably use the cake recipe, in two layers, sandwiched with some home-made strawberry jam, and a dusting of icing sugar over the top. Because that would give a much nicer fate to the cake- instead of what happened to this one.

Just under half of it got tipped into the garbage earlier this evening.

Feeding the Beast

2010-05-08T20:56:00.001+02:00

If the kid is going to turn the food down... then it may as well look good.

And if you're going to eat your kid's dinner after they've gone to bed, you had better like lovely, buttery, young Gouda.

Pumpkin Gratin- when spring isn't living up to expectations!

2010-05-01T21:00:00.001+02:00

As I've mentioned in recent entries- spring came, passed, summer came, passed, and we went back to it being late winter. It's been cold, it's been raining, it's been generally the sort of weather where you wish it weren't.

As such, a Sunday dinner of roast lamb, roasted courgettes with thyme, and a pumpkin gratin is definitely comforting.

I love pumpkin. I love buying big slices of it- thick, green and gold ridged skin, bright golden-orange inside. Mm, all the things that can be done with pumpkin! Pumpkin risotto and pumpkin soup are ones that spring to mind immediately- not least because pumpkin with bacon is definitely a happy-making combination.

And it's an easy thing to cook- you peel it (I either use a vegetable peeler or just chop bits off with a sharp knife, depending on the depths of the ridules between sections), chop it, and you're ready to do whatever you want to do with it.

In this case, obviously, gratin.

Now, some of my older French cookbooks say that the problem with pumpkin, and other vegetables such as endive/chicory, when you gratinée them, is the amount of water they ooze out into the surrounding cream, diluting it and making the whole thing taste rather bleah. They therefore recommend a pre-cooking, followed by much squeezing-out of water, followed by the gratin process.

I'll go with that on endive/chicory, but I've never had that problem with pumpkin. I just chop it, chop an onion, chuck them into my dish, stir them around, add black pepper, pour cream over until just below the edge of the dish, and stick it in the oven. In this case, for as long as the lamb took to cook- about 70-80 minutes at 200C.

Result- nice crunchy sweet burnt bits in a few spots on top, and lovely, sweet, creamy pumpkin underneath.

Perfect for an evening when you should have been out all day, but couldn't be without wearing a sou'wester. And I don't own a sou'wester.

Strawberries in April. Dumb, or what?

2010-04-23T20:53:00.001+02:00

Why do we buy strawberries in April? Even though we know they won't taste of anything?

Because... well, because the weather tells us to. The glorious, warm, it-can't-be-summer-already weather. The weather that causes us to go out in a sleeveless vest-top, and get sunburned. Twice. In three days.

There is also the fact that Greta seems to like strawberries quite extensively. And, as I'm still watching everything that goes into her mouth (despite days where she appears to be quite prepared to devour the entire planet- as they're usually followed by several where she quite obviously thinks that I'm trying to poison her with all this horrible evil nasty stuff like Petit Suisses- I liked those yesterday, Mama, aren't you keeping up?), I'm quite happy to buy anything that is remotely healthy, and stuff it down her.

It makes up for the saucissons-apéritifs. Really it does.

Strawberries, however, rarely taste of anything much this time of year.

Not without applying various techniques to them- the main one of course being the addition of a certain quantity of brown sugar, and then leaving them to macerate for a while. My other semi-secret addition at the moment is an extremely generous dusting of freshly-ground cinnamon. It seems to do the trick...

Mayonnaise- not as hard as they said!

2010-04-22T20:51:00.002+02:00

Making mayonnaise isn't actually that difficult. As long as you have the right tools, and you're not in a rush.

I haven't made mayonnaise in years- quite literally, as I can tell you that the last time I made it semi-regularly was in 2002, when we were living in New York, and, for the life of me, I couldn't find what we consider "real" mayonnaise.

Hellman's, yes, but that's not real. It's not the right colour, it's not the right texture, and it's not made with the right oil.

As far as I'm concerned, anyway. I didn't grow up with Hellman's, that means that it's just Not Right.

Therefore, rather like the year before, when we were living in the Caribbean and the only bread I could find was steam-baked and tasted sweet, I started to make my own.

With, in this case, a bottle of sunflower oil, tracked down at vast expense. Why it was so expensive, I wouldn't know, but I remember it being something insane like 10$ for a 220ml bottle. Or thereabouts. No doubt that my brain has preferred to wipe the memory from my wallet.

So I made mayonnaise, a few times, and I remember it taking a while, being a bit tricky the first time, but being generally OK. My Larousse Gastronomique told me that everything ought to be room temperature, and I seem to remember that I only read that after making it the first time!

However, having friends staying who were stuck due to Volcano Ejs-something-or-other, I was determined to feed them properly in order to cheer them up. French and Spanish asparagus having finally hit the market, I fed them twice in three days on asparagus for a first course. Once hot, and once cold.

Both times, I made the mayonnaise about an hour or so beforehand. The first time, having forgotten about the room-temperature rule, I had to stick my eggs in warm water for about ten minutes beforehand. It really didn't seem to make much difference.

Mayonnaise for four:
- 3 egg yolks
- olive oil
- sunflower oil
- mustard ("prepared" mustard is, I believe, the technical term)
- salt flakes
- ground pepper

Making mayonnaise easily depends, very much, I think, on being comfortable whilst you work. Therefore, I use a small bowl with a handle, which means that I can hold the bowl without getting cramp in my palm, and also hold the bowl at different heights in order to give my wrist a rest. Also, you really need a whisk with a thick handle. A small whisk, obviously, as you're only whisking three eggs, but you don't want one with a thin handle- it will just give you cramp in your palm and make the whole thing uncomfortable.

Whisk your egg yolks briefly, to mix them and break them up.

Now, all the books say to start with a teensy drop of oil, whisk like mad, and work your way up very slowly from there. I don't hugely agree with this. A drop, yes, whisk, then keep going, but you really don't have to put in the teensiest drop at the start. As long as you whisk hard and fast, you'll be OK.

Take your time. The first five, six times, a small drop, then you can go for a teaspoon at a time. Not that you need to measure it out! Just what looks about right.

The whole thing shouldn't take more than ten minutes. And that includes breaks to rest your shoulder- you don't have to keep going the whole time.

Now, I haven't given measurements for the oils. This is because I have no idea. I taste mine as I go along. Olive oil gives quite a strong flavour, and you may not want this. If you've got to a flavour that's too strong, stick to sunflower oil from then on in. I tend to swap my oils about after 4-5 additions. But my finished product is probably about 2/5 olive, 3/5 sunflower.

At the end, I add mustard, salt, pepper. This dilutes the mayonnaise, and you have to add more oil. I also add the mustard to taste- whatever seems right to me, which seems to end up being about 3 tsp.

That was my basic recipe- however, the last time I made it (I didn't really mean to, but I had four egg yolks from a recipe I was making, so I stopped half-way through and made mayonnaise), I made some changes.

English mayonnaise:
- 4 eggs
- 2 tsp English mustard powder (Colman's!)
- 4 tsp white wine vinegar
- olive oil
- sunflower oil
- salt, pepper

This time, I whisked the eggs, added the mustard powder and white wine vinegar, then added the oils. Salt and pepper at the end.

It then went in a labeled jam jar in the fridge, and Peter has been very happily smearing it on bread and eating it like bread-and-butter ever since! It's funny- the olive oil taste shows up first, and it's only after you've swallowed that the mustard sneaks up and whacks you across the back of the throat. Which, I think, makes it fine for sandwiches, fine for eating on bread, but not quite so fine for eating with asparagus.

Cupboard Cake- Dried apricot and flaked almonds

2010-04-21T20:45:00.003+02:00

Why are you torturing me with this cake, Mama? Why?

I have mentioned Betty Bossi before.

Betty Bossi is the Swiss Betty Crocker. I understand that the identical first names is coincidence, although it is rather amusing.

Betty Bossi does not produce cake mixes. It primarily produces a little magazine, sent to subscribers ten times a year, with seasonal recipes. Of course, over the years, it has expanded into cookbooks, and into an online shop selling cake tins (d'you see that one just above?), measuring spoons, Useful Household Items (that are pretty useless in some cases), cleaning items, all that sort of stuff. Some of which I own, such as the sunflowers for putting in between your non-stick casseroles/frying pans, so they don't scratch each other.

Absolutely vital for the harmony of your drawers, I assure you.

I probably have about 15 Betty Bossi cookbooks, as I am a good, Swiss-emulating semi-hausfrau.

Really, I am. Honest. Pay no attention to my tattoo, OK? It was a youthful aberration, now safely covered over by the dirndl.

Well, not quite.

To get back to my point, and the cookbooks. Over the years, although I've collected them, I've never really been inspired by any of the recipes enough to actually cook from them. I remember one, the only one I made, being Poulet au Paprika, from a "Betty's Greatest Hits" cookbook, which was given such a write-up that I couldn't not make it.

I ended up making it twice, just to be sure that it really was as disappointing as it seemed on the plate. Basically, it was a lot of melted butter, a couple of tablespoons of paprika, and you basted the chicken with it multiple times during cooking, in order to ensure that the flavours sank into the chicken. Except that they didn't. It looked very pretty, though.

And yet... oddly... the last few months, I've been tearing out recipes to make from my semi-monthly magazine. Instead of flipping through it and dropping it straight into the recycling, which is what I've been doing for years.

The April issue had a section on "cake" recipes. I use inverted commas, as this is "cake" in the French sense, not in the Anglo-Saxon sense- namely a loaf, or a bread. Banana bread would be called a "cake" in French.

This section is made up of one basic recipe, and various recipes for additions to that basic mix- starting with chocolate, moving on to nuts, rhubarb, lemon and strawberry, blueberries, and ending with one including apples and caramels (as in sweets), and another with chocolate truffles.

The basic recipe is as follows:
- 150g butter, softened, in cubes
- 200g sugar
- 1 pinch of salt
- 4 eggs
- 250g flour
- 1 coffee spoon baking powder

Cream the butter, sugar, and salt. Add one egg after the other, mix for about 5 mn, until it lightens in colour. Mix the flour and baking powder, add to the butter mix, stir. Pour into the mold, bake for about 50 mns in a pre-heated oven at 180C. Remove from the oven, leave to cool slightly, remove from mold, allow to cool on a wire rack.

The other recipes just add ingredients to this basic mix, sometimes with an extra egg, occasionally extending the cooking time.

It's a pretty good base, I think.

And thus, when I had some friends call up from Italy with a cry of "Help, the volcano has stranded us, please take us in until we can fly home!", one of my first thoughts for their sustenance (both emotional and gustatory) was to make "cake".

Not having any of the ingredients in the variations, however, other than the chocolate, I made up my own version, using ingredients left over from my marathon baking sessions before Christmas. And using them up, thank goodness!

My version had
- 2 packs (300g?) of dried apricots, chopped into rough cubes
- 1 pack (200g?) of flaked almonds

It was very, very nice.

My friends got here at about 11 p.m. one evening a few days later, and we sat down and ate about half of it. I left the rest of it out (covered) to be snacked on, and it was gone by the next evening.

I then made a version using a left-over apple, chopped, and some dried cranberries, but it just wasn't as good.

No matter- it's a good basic recipe to have! Even if Greta... wasn't too impressed.

Pork Paprikash (sort of)

2010-04-18T12:12:00.002+02:00

I try to do a lot of cooking of the "What's on special offer at the supermarket" variety. As we all do these days.

The other day, ragout de porc being on cheap, that was obviously what we were going to be eating.

Last time I bought such packs, the meat was in reasonably large chunks- this time, each piece came with at least one long thin bone running right through it, and although I could have chopped them through with a cleaver and a call to Peter to come and use some muscle power, I didn't bother.

First I browned the pieces, then took them out of the casserole, and left them to sit whilst I tipped in onions in thick slices, softening them gently and slowly in the fat from the pork. I added a heap of spices: about 2 tbs of mild paprika (I find this has so little taste, I usually only use it for colouring!), 1 tbs of hot paprika, about a tsp and a half of cumin seeds, about 1/2 a tsp of cinnamon, black pepper, a couple of big pinches of marjoram, and a bit of herbed salt.

I let all the spices warm up with the onions, stirring, then added a whole bottle of white wine- a Petite Recolte from Nicolas, Cotes de Ceressou Moelleux from 2004. I really liked this wine back in 2004, so I had some crates of it, and this was the last bottle. I poured myself a glass before tipping the rest into the casserole- then tasted my glass, and poured that in too. It had no depth of flavour left at all- just a surface layer of "hello, this is a grape-based alcohol".

I have very little palate for wine, but I do know when there's nothing there.

I brought the stew up to the simmer, then added a bottle of passata- about 700 ml. Back up to simmer, put the meat back in, and simmered it gently, with the lid on, for three hours.

Very gently removed the meat, which was falling apart, and pulled out most of the big bits of bone. I then reduced the sauce like mad, boiling it fast with the lid off, and it thickened very satisfactorily. I had originally planned to add mushrooms, but once I'd put in the tomato, I changed my mind.

I really must use up those mushrooms.

Put the meat back in, warmed it all up, and served it over egg noodles. Yummy- it did Peter and I two meals, and a third one for him.

This week, there was a special offer of cote de boeuf (one bought for Peter, I will nibble around the edges and probably eat vegetables instead), and liver. I love liver. There are two lobes for each of us in the fridge... probably to be cooked dredged in seasoned flour, then fried quickly, and served in slices either with mushrooms and onions, or just onions, or maybe with egg noodles again.

We have some friends turning up on Monday night, rather unexpectedly, as they were on holiday in Italy and are now, due to the volcano, stuck there and can't get home. So they're coming here until they can get a flight out. So I'm going to have to do some food shopping and planning for the coming week, as I'll be feeding double the usual number! Besides having to plan it more than my usual "open the fridge, then decide what I'm cooking" method.

Palate me no palette!

2010-04-05T20:35:00.004+02:00

I've been busy the last week, rocketing around, dealing with the spring weather (i.e. the horrendous rain and cold winds), all of which combined has gifted me with an atrocious cold.

Really, an atrocious cold.

The sort of cold where you make a lovely Easter Sunday lunch for family, making a recipe that you've looked forward to making for a while, having saved it up... and you have to ask other people to taste for seasoning, because you cannot taste a thing.

How unfair.

I think most of it was due to being generally over-tired, but I certainly didn't improve matters by spending an hour on the balcony in a bitter cold wind on the Saturday, oiling my butcher's block. I'd sanded it down on Friday, looked around for my paintbrush to oil it, and realised that the brush had managed to vanish at the last move. So I had to leave it, and oil it on Saturday afternoon, in said cold wind, with Greta hurtling around on the balcony as well, trying to eat my lavender plant (No, baby! Eat the mint! Or the chives! Leave the lavender alone!), and I think that just finished me off.

And I'm not wildly happy about the butcher's block either. Before, it was a lovely soft, drift-wood colour. Now, it's quite aggressively golden. I strongly suspect that I might have to sand it down again in a few months... And even if the water does now bead off, it's still not as pretty as it was.

On Sunday morning, however, I bravely strapped on a box of kleenex, opened the book to page 441, and headed into the kitchen, to attack the braised pork in milk from Marcella Hazan.

Now, I'd read that this recipe was trickier than it seemed. That it didn't necessarily work. But I'm usually an optimist about recipes, and I can usually make things come out right at the end, and I really liked the look of this recipe, and Peter didn't say No, which is a definite step in the right direction...

I first browned my long, thick chunk of "cou de porc", to which the very nice butcher (not in the slightest bit inspired by my batting eyelashes) had added a large, and free, chunk of bone, "to thicken the sauce". Ooo-er, Mister!

Having browned my pork, I took a look at my Staub casserole, looked at the space around the meat, re-read the instruction about using a dish that was just bigger than the meat, and took out the Le Creuset casserole instead. I put my browned meat in there, poured a cup of milk, poured it over the meat, looked at it, and added about the same again. And then a bit more.

I really fail to see how you can "braise" a piece of meat in a pan with more than 2/3 of the meat out of the liquid. And I was right on that, as it transpired later...

Enough to say that I then brought it to a simmer, put the lid on slightly askew as instructed, and went in the shower.

The meat cooked for three hours. In the meantime, I knocked up a small gratin de cotes de bettes (Swiss chard), followed by a boiled salad of Swiss chard. All of which are on this webpage, btw. I wouldn't normally follow a whole menu like this, but there were lots of yummy heads of bettes at the supermarket, and we like them. Well, Peter and I do- Greta refused to even try a mouthful of one. No biggie, I will try again some other time!

(Cotes de bettes in my fruit bowl, as it normally lives on the butcher's block and said block wasn't dry yet.)

Normally, I'd have made a gratin by slicing the ribs and then adding them to a dish with a load of cream, some onion and garlic, and baking that, or I'd have cooked the ribs in a deep deep frying pan/wok in olive oil with some garlic until soft, then right at the end have added the chopped leaves and cooked them until wilted, and served that up by itself... Or amalgamated the two, cooking the stalks, then cooking the leaves, mixing them together and putting them in a gratin dish with cream... Anyway, it's certainly never occurred to me to gratin them "naked", and I don't think I'll bother again, as it didn't really work.

It tasted fine, but it didn't really work. Which was pretty much the leitmotiv for the whole meal.

After three hours, I took the meat out and set it to rest. In the mean time, I boiled the hell out of the sauce, reducing it down, but after ten minutes I'd had enough, so we served up.

The top half of the pork, that hadn't been covered by the milk (despite me basting it frequently with the simmering milk), wasn't cooked through. It was very pink and squishy. We cut around the outside, then I put the meat back in the remaining sauce, turned the heat up, and left it to cook whilst we ate.

The family said it tasted good. Me, I wasn't so convinced.

The second helping, with the meat cooked through, and the sauce finally reduced down to the "nut-brown clusters" (why couldn't she just say "cook until the milk congeals and separates"?), was much better.

Still, I'm not wildly happy with it. I don't think I'll bother again.

Dances With Baskets

2010-03-28T09:47:00.002+02:00

Peter and I went out for dinner on Friday evening to to the Auberge de Collex-Bossy, and had a very yummy dinner indeed.

The Auberge specialises in bison meat, from the farm at the other end of the village. And you've never seen impressive until you've seen 30 or so bison suddenly get up from munching buttercups, and pound across a field, determined to catch up with that damn bus!

It's... got a serious wow factor.

And they taste good too. I've never been the type to not eat something just because it looks good... I remember a girlfriend telling me a few years ago that she didn't eat lamb "because they're so cute!", which had me rolling on the floor in hysterics and pointing out to her that they're pretty damn tasty too. Not that she wanted to know!

The waiter remembered us, which was cool, as we haven't been there for over a year. We sat down, had a kir royal each (and mine lasted me right through until I'd finished my main course), and ordered.

We started off with an amuse-bouch which we argued about afterwards. It was definitely tomato-based, that was screamingly obvious, but Peter thinks it was a sort of tartare of bison, whereas I'm pretty sure there was fish in there- probably anchovy. Anyway, we won't agree on that, so moving on... It was a small canelle, with a slice of toasted pain paysanne next to it. Tasty, but I had to add salt. Not hugely exciting.

Then I had Terrine de foie gras maison aux poires confites et brioche au pain d'épices. The foie gras was delicious, melting on my tongue in seconds, with a heart of caramelised pear to share out through my portion. The brioche, I really wasn't wild about at first (and still think it was over-baked), but tasting the foie gras without it after eating about half my slice with it... yeah, it worked. Definitely. But it shouldn't have been quite so crispy on the outside!

Peter had the Saint Jacques rôties, with a yummy sauce. I'm not quite sure what it was. Nice and tangy. The menu says mousseline d'artichauts parfumée à la truffe. Maybe.

Then we each had entrecôte de bison, both saignant (bloody). Which came with a little pot of mashed potato (very nice, lots of cream in it, but mine the other week was better!), and a weird little mushroom thing which neither of us liked much (turned out to be a "crème brulée de champignons", and the waiter agreed it wasn't hugely successful). We also each got a little marrow bone... mine was good, I looove marrow bone, but there was nowhere near enough! The entrecôte itself was tender and tasty and mine had a melting ribbon of fat running through the centre... um. Diet? Oh, that was earlier in the day!

Then Peter had a plate of cheeses for dessert, no idea how they were as I was busy enjoying my "banane en trois façons"- banana ice-cream (the best banana ice-cream I've ever had, not that that's saying much, as although it was very tasty, I don't think I've actually eaten that much banana ice-cream in my life!), a mini banana crème brulée that was definitely more successful than the mushroom one but it needed the top cooked a little bit longer as it was still quite grainy, and two slices of deep-fried banana wrapped in filo pastry, on cocktail sticks balanced over (not touching) a very tart passion-fruit nectar... which was a damn good touch, as it cleared my palate every time I switched between the crème brulée and the ice-cream, once I'd finished off the deep-fried banana.

Peter drank two glasses of a wine called Fée Noire, a local assemblage, which he seemed quite happy with.

Home afterwards, the whatever-final of Masterchef, and then to bed.

Peter left on a business trip this morning, so it's carrots and apples and celery for me until he gets back. On the other hand, I went into town this morning and met Peter's father and sister at the market in town, and Peter's father is going to have a look at his spare saucepans and probably give me a copper-inox pan to make jams in, hurray! And I went to the puces (fleamarket) on Plainpalais, and found a basket which is just right (despite a small damaged area, which gave me grounds to bargain the man down a few francs) for me to take on foraging trips! I've mended the broken part with a ribbon, and it should do fine. We've had a wave of cold rainy weather for the last 3 days, but it should clear by next week, and I'll be down the hill in the nature reserve with Greta looking for elderflowers once it warms up again.

I also found two "draining cloths" for making cheese and for filtering berry juice, which means that I won't have to use Ikea's cheapest dishcloths any more... although, come to think of it, there's nothing wrong with the dishcloths! And I picked up a slightly larger Oxo Measuring Cup, as my one is the smallest version, which means every time I have to measure out my fruit/sugar/liquid in cups, it takes me forever!

I don't know why nobody came up with the slanted measure inside before. Talk about logical, Captain...

More of that Spring!

2010-03-23T20:56:00.005+01:00

A girl may be on a diet (well, this girl is), but it doesn't have to be all celery and apples. Even if that's what it feels like!

And, fortunately, it being spring, some of my favourite vegetables are re-appearing.

Such as green asparagus.

Peter and I far prefer green asparagus to the white, and prefer the really thin, whippy stems to the fat ones.

But this time of year, I'll take what I can get. Although I shouldn't have been indulging myself in these yet- I try not to buy anything that comes from further South than Morocco, and definitely nothing that has to be shipped across a major ocean. But, whoops, how did that end up in my shopping? Dammit. I'm going to have to eat it now...

I won't buy any more, though, I'll wait for a few more weeks until the local stuff starts showing up- and I'll be buying it by the kilo then.

What I usually do is boil a kilo quickly, until it's just soft but still got a bite to it (only way of checking that is by taking a spear out and eating it!), then I either drain it, dump it into cold water for a couple of minutes, and put it in a tupperware to be snacked on for the next few days, or, like this evening, drain it, pop some on my plate, drizzle it with balsalmic vinegar (who needs olive oil?), add some fleur de sel, and settle down with a knife and fork.

After which, as nobody else was around, I licked my plate clean before putting it in the dishwasher.

There's half of them left for tomorrow night, and with Peter away, I don't have to share.... that is, if my mother doesn't discover them in the fridge tomorrow morning whilst minding Greta!

In other things, I just booked the Auberge Communale de Collex-Bossy for dinner for Peter and I on Friday night. We need a night out together (I honestly cannot remember last time we had one, it must have been at least January), and his mother has offered to baby sit.

We're very fond of the Auberge. We used to live near there, and we kicked ourselves repeatedly after first going there for dinner one night- mainly as we'd lived 10 minutes down the road for three years already, and hadn't been before! Their specialty is bison, raised in the farm at the edge of the village. I used to walk with Greta past the paddocks, but she won't remember them.

It's pretty damn impressive when they take off running, though. And they're very curious beasts- I'd stop by the side of a field, and they'd invariably come over to investigate and look back at us.

Mm, bison entrecôte on Friday after work...

Shepherd's Pie and more jam!

2010-03-22T11:19:00.005+01:00

Saturday afternoon, after the reglementary Trip to the Supermarket (which didn't involve much food shopping, other than for Greta- Peter is away most of this week, and then most of next week as well), I started off by re-boiling my blood orange jelly, as it hadn't set.

I think I didn't get enough pectin out of the skins during the initial cooking phase- despite keeping it at 221F/105C for a while, it's still pretty gloopy. However, it tastes unutterably yummy, so I'm just going to keep it, and use it to drizzle on things (hey, my Citrus Cake!), and in things (yoghurt!). I've labelled it as Blood Orange "Honey".

Whilst that was boiling, I chopped strawberries and rhubarb up, weighed them (just over 2kg, about half of each), and put them in to macerate with the same weight of sugar. And the juice of (my last) two small lemons. One of them was getting a bit hard, but fortunately it was still pretty juicy.

I did surf around, looking for Rhubarb and Strawberry Jam recipes, but I couldn't find any that floated my boat- every single one I found used pectin, and I don't do pectin. Christine Ferber says that pectin is unnecessary, as long as you cook things down long enough, or use fruits that have a higher concentration of pectin in with ones that are low. I don't really like that sort of dogmatism on recipes, but it's worked so far (mutters darkly about orange jelly).

Thus, I made my jam without a recipe, adapting what I've been doing so far.

I did discover a couple of interesting other blogs, though, which I shall wander through before deciding whether to add them to my blogroll!

After setting my fruit to macerate, I peeled and boiled a kilo of potatoes, and put them on to boil. There was a whole thread on the Guardian Word of Mouth blog last week about mashed potatoes, and I found it all very interesting. I know about the discussion on whether to use a ricer or a masher when making your mash, if that makes it lighter/fluffier, but I must say that I've never used either. I boil my potatoes, drain them, then chop them with a knife in the saucepan, after which I add either milk or cream, then mash them with a fork. Then butter.

In this case, I added a tablespoon of mascarpone (using it up), then about 3-4 tablespoons of double creme de Gruyere (ditto), then a few slices of butter, then thinned it out with some milk. None of which I heated, although I do sometimes. I then salted it, and left it all to sit in the saucepan.

In the meantime, I'd taken the remains of the leg of lamb from last week out of the fridge, removed all the remaining meat, and cut it into mouthfuls. I put that in a frying pan with one onion, chopped, and a couple of tablespoons of olive oil. I fried them up until the meat, which had been very pink, was slightly less so, and the onion was translucent. I then added a bottle (700ml) of passata, lots of black pepper, some herbed salt, some herbes de Provence, and let it simmer until thick- but not too thick.

I then tipped the whole lot into a pyrex casserole dish, left it to cool a bit, and topped it with mashed potato. It all went in the oven at 200C for about 45 minutes that evening (with a piece of greaseproof paper underneath to catch the drips!), and we ate it with much pleasure. A surprising amount of pleasure, in fact, as it was absolutely delicious.

And, a definite bonus, Greta actually tolerated a few mouthfuls of mashed potato! Last time I tried her with it, she spat it all out in utter disgust. I so hope this new period of eating things continues- I'm going to keep trying her with all sorts of things!

(She did spit out a mouthful of cauliflower the other day, and gave me such a look for having snuck it in around the side! But at least she didn't burst into tears and refuse to continue to eat her chicken...)

On Sunday, I cooked my rhubarb and strawberry jam (having to use my friend Mousecatfish's casserole dish again, as mine is too small- reminding me that I really do need to get my hands on a proper dish to cook my jam in!) bringing it up to the boil and keeping it going until it hit 221F/105C, and stayed there. It was very bubbly at the beginning, and kept on threatening to boil over, but the last half hour it was calm enough for me to have my lunch, Peter and Greta having had theirs. And I got to finish off the shepherd's pie, yum! And eat strawberry jam scum for dessert, also very yum.

Of course, the whole thing was so relaxed that I burned the bottom of the jam, but I was careful and didn't stir it in- and it really seems to only have affected the very bottom level of the pan, and that layer has gone in the one pot, which latter is already in the fridge, not being full, and, actually, tastes pretty damn good.

I didn't want to stir it too much anyway, because my rhubarb and orange jam I stirred a lot, and the rhubarb all broke up, and various other recipes that I've read since (including Alice B. Toklas!) say to stir rhubarb jam as little as possible to avoid this. Nevertheless, the rhubarb seems to be pretty much mush, whereas the strawberry quarters have stayed in nice chunks. It is a bit darker than I expected, and a bit caramelised, but the flavour has a nice few layers in it- sweet strawberry (also sweeter than I expected, as when raw they were as tasteless as strawberries bought in March should be!), nicely sour rhubarb, and then this odd caramel layer.

Tonight I have to roast a chicken (for Peter's dinner, then to feed Greta with for the rest of the week), but myself, I shall be back to eating apples and celery, as I've had the most outrageous craving for chocolate the last 10 days, and have given in to it to an extent that I really should not have...

Feuilleté au poulet et paprika

2010-03-19T20:25:00.004+01:00

Greta has been thrown from pillar to post this week, and she hasn't liked it. This week she spent three days with the maman de jour, then a day with Peter's brother's ex-girlfriend's elder sister, who lives in the village down the road towards town, and who is also setting up as a maman de jour.

This isn't the place for my extremely well-practiced rant about the abysmal nature of childcare in Switzerland, so I'll spare you that.

Suffice to say that Greta has not been happy this week- she's used to being looked after by my mother when I'm working. Fortunately I only work half the year and my mother can manage for the other six months!

Today, she got to stay home with her daddy (who was working from home), and his aunt came over to look after her great-niece. And I went off to work.

However, as I've mentioned before, I do believe, Peter does not cook.

No. Not at all. Oh, he'll put on the water for pasta, but having rung him up once and told him to put the rice on, I'd be home in 20 minutes, and having come home to find the rice boiled into mush, I don't tend to bother asking him anymore. He loves to eat, but, other than the summer Homo Erectus ritual of "Man light fire, Man put meat on fire, Man eat meat", by which I snarkily mean that he will actually use the barbecue (and, TBH, he does barbecue vegetables too)... He does not cook.

Peter eats. Peter loves to eat. Peter is tall and skinny and if I ate what he eats, I'd be too big to get through the door. At one point, many many moons ago, I decided that, having a peculiar letch for a man with a belly, I was going to make him put on weight. I threw my healthy cooking habits out of the window, put the olive oil at the back of the cupboard, and started pouring butter and cream into everything.

Peter ate.

I ate.

Peter put on 3 kg. I put on 5 kg. Peter went off to the US for a conference for a week, ate like a horse, came back having lost more than the 3kg. It took me... too long to get rid of those 5kg!

At which point, I gave up.

To get (finally) to my point, I was going to have to prepare lunch for him, his aunt (who is lactose-intolerant, and when I remembered that bang! went my original idea to try making a chicken pot pie), and for Greta. It being Friday morning, and me having not been able to shop on Thursday, the contents of the fridge were as low as they tend to be when one does a weekly big shop on a Saturday, and just does small top-up shops during the week.

It was going to have to be something that could be cooked with no effort whatsoever, and made from the ingredients of the fridge- and, my secret weapon, the freezer. I had a look at the list on the whiteboard on Thursday night, pulled a couple of things out to defrost, wiped them off the board, and went to bed.

I considered getting up early, but as I already get up two hours before I have to leave in the morning (not that hard- I have to leave at 9, as I have to be at work at 10, and it's a 40-mn trip door to door), I didn't bother. I wake up early anyway at the moment.

Up, therefore, and I wandered into the kitchen in my nightshirt. I got out an oven tray, lined it with the reusable liner, got out a package of puff pastry I'd defrosted overnight in the fridge, took out a pack of chicken bits ditto, grabbed an onion, two big fat orange sweet potatoes, and got the bowl of tomatoes.

I chopped three tomatoes and the onion, put them in a bowl. Chopped the sweet potatoes, added them in, added the chicken. Plenty of black pepper, a bit of herbed salt (still trying to use that up!), a drizzle of olive oil, stir it all around, and then a thick dusting of sweet paprika. If I'd had a red pepper, it would have gone in too.

I unrolled the pastry half way, poured a small puddle of olive oil onto it and brushed it over the surface. Tipped the contents of my bowl on top, carefully spread it around, then brought the other half of the pastry over. I crimped it closed with a fork, then brushed the whole thing with a beaten egg-yolk. More pepper on top, and I covered the tray with tin foil, cleared a shelf in the fridge, put it in there, and gave Peter his instructions. "Turn the oven on to 200C, no fan, leave it to heat up, take the foil off, put it in the oven for 45 minutes."

I obviously wasn't here when it came out of the oven hot, but apparently Greta's Great-Aunt liked it very much. Greta didn't have any, but apparently ate the smoked salmon out of a small stack of breakfast sandwiches that her Great-Aunt had brought with her. Peter I think had a bit. They all liked it. I had some when I got home for my dinner, and it was indeed quite nice.

It's a handy basic recipe to have around, this feuilleté. I make it in the summer with a layer of onion topped with a layer of courgettes with a layer of red peppers and a layer of sliced tomato, and sometimes a layer of cooking mozzarella over that. I make it in the winter with smoked salmon layered with crème fraîche mixed with lots of chopped dill and plenty of black pepper. Sometimes I make it as though it were a cooked version of a salade niçoise- with tuna-fish, black olives, onions, tomatoes, sometimes potatoes, sometimes that's more than enough.

The trick, of course, is not to cover quite half the bottom with your ingredients, or you won't have enough pastry on the other side to cover it over with without having to stretch it. It's a handy recipe, as long as you keep puff pastry in the freezer. It unfreezes fast, and as long as it hasn't been in there too long, it's still pretty pliable when unfrozen.

Spring

2010-03-18T11:58:00.007+01:00

It's a beautiful day outside again, winter seeming to have finally given up its firm grasp on us, and I have a terrible craving.

What I want, what I really really want, is to be outside. Ideally with Greta. She needs to get to know the grass and the mud properly, she needs to stomp around in the flowers, pick them, no doubt try to eat them, shove them down her clothes so I find them in her nappy next time I change her (I really cannot figure out how she gets food down there whenever she eats!). And I really want to get my hands into the earth.

Our new home, however lovely it is, has a slight drawback. Although our balcony is huge, it is on an east-west angle, facing not quite south. So we do get the sun a lot of the day- but we have a vast sycamore just at an angle which ensures that from early to mid-afternoon, it's in the shade. Then the roof covers it, and that also keeps it in the shade.

In our last apartment, our balcony was about a quarter of the size, but it wasn't covered, faced due south, and was baking in the sun all summer. I grew tomatoes out there one summer, and they were so happy that I had to promise Peter not to do it again- we couldn't actually get out onto the balcony without pushing branches away from the door! I had eight plants, and except for one (Golden Grape, I think it was called), which, of course, was the tastiest one and the least producing, they grew to over two metres tall.

Imagine a balcony crowded with seven vast tomato plants, tapering down to pots that ended up looking tiny, with so many branches that each pot had at least three canes stuffed into it to support the plants...

And imagine all the tomatoes! I had as many different types as I had plants. I remember White Wonder, Red Plum, Yellow Plum, something Zebra, a purply-black one...

But it really was a bit much, even though they were delicious to munch on, and I did end up making different sauces with each one, including tasting notes so that I'd remember the next time I planted tomatoes which ones worked well. I bought the seeds from Tomato Bob, by the way- a sampler pack.

I'd do that again like a shot, but our balcony really isn't ideal for tomatoes. It doesn't really seem to be ideal for anything (although my olive tree, cherished for five summers and winters, now seems to be quite happy, and the Christmas tree is also much happier in the semi-shade). And I can't put up "window" boxes until the guys have come to repaint and repair the scratches and dents made by the scaffolding whilst it was all being built. So I'm thinking it could be a bit of a sad, bare summer out there...

If it weren't for herbs. I'm thinking thyme, rosemary, sage, definitely chives... I'm thinking lavender might also do well, and I do love lavender.

At least I'm getting rid of my spring fever in other ways- yesterday evening, whilst making blood orange jelly (which doesn't seem to have set very well- I have a small tupperware of it in the fridge and will see tonight if the cold has helped it solidify. If not, I'm going to have to boil it again), inspired by noticing that Apartment Therapy had a series on de-cluttering your kitchen... well, I de-cluttered a few drawers, resolutely taking out things that may have been gifts, but, quite honestly, are never going to be used. Things like the tool that cores and slices your apple into 8 in one movement- it always hurts my wrists to use it, and, unless the apple is absolutely perfectly aligned internally, you always end up having to trim a few of the slices anyway.

I also got rid of a couple of bamboo steamer baskets, which I've never used, and probably never will. A mini, battery-operated whisk. Who needs that? A mysterious piece of wood from the Philippines that my mother bought there and gave to me for Christmas, gleefully telling me she had no idea what it was for. A silicone brush for pastry- I have four, I don't need that many! Two for inside, one large one for the barbecue. And a few other bits and pieces.

On the other hand, I really need to get myself a new Oxo Good Grips vegetable peeler. I used to have two of these, and they've both vanished, to my disgust. It's the only peeler I've ever had that I could peel 2 kilos of potatoes with without getting blisters. Unfortunately, I can only find the Y peeler here, and I don't like Y peelers. I'm going to have to send off for a couple of them- and I'm currently browsing the Lakeland website.

I love Lakeland. They have lovely stuff. In particular these metal pie tins, which I really wish I already had, as Peter is working from home tomorrow and his Aunt is coming to keep an eye on Greta, and I need to make sure that there is lunch ready for all of them. What does this have to do with the pie tins? Well, I was thinking that I also need to continue to work through the contents of the freezer... and there's masses of puff pastry in there, as well as chicken, and a chicken pot pie could be an option.

Not that I've ever made a chicken pot pie, but these pie tins are inspiring me!

Either that, or the fact that I was reading Marjorie Kinnan Rawling's Cross Creek on the train this morning has me thinking about "traditional American dishes". I also have a copy of her Cross Creek Cookery book, and that, no doubt, will have a recipe in it. As, of course, will the Joy of Cooking, not that I'm that enthused about the latter, as I find the American system of cups and spoons for measuring things incredibly annoying. It's alright to measure something like milk in a cup, but butter?!? How on earth are you supposed to pack butter into a cup and get the same amount twice?

Give me a little weighing machine any day. Thank goodness there are assorted tools online that can convert "two cups of flour" to however many grams that is.

Back to Cross Creek, though, the fact that my copy is a first (UK) edition, and that my copy of Cross Creek Cookery is a rather garish modern paperback rather has me tempted to go on abebooks (again!) and find myself an old copy of the latter to go with the former!

Get thee behind me, abebooks. Thou art evil for my wallet and my lust for old, classic cookbooks. Deliver us not into temptation... Especially considering that I'm still trying to track down the copy of the Scandinavian Cookbook that my mother used to have and which vanished. Personally, I suspect my elder sister has it. The problem is, we're not quite sure what the actual name of the book was!

This weekend, there will be a trip to the DIY store, and much earth and seedlings will be bought. I must measure up the balustrade for window boxes, even if I can't put any up yet.

Recipes and Cookbooks

2010-03-16T14:02:00.004+01:00

Compiling recipes that I want to cook isn't the hard part. The hard part is getting around to actually cooking them!

I tend to send Peter a URL saying "What about this?", and he either responds non-commitally (by which I know that he doesn't really think so), or is enthusiastic, at which point I start adding ingredients to the weekend shopping list.

At the moment, I'm drooling over two recipes- Pork Loin braised in milk, and Baked Feta with Beetroot and Chickpeas. (Later edit: and Smoked bacon and mackerel cakes!)

I hope to make the first this weekend- the second, I don't know, as I am pretty sure that it will be a recipe that will make Peter grunt in an unimpressed manner. Mainly because Peter, despite being Swiss, isn't actually that enthused... whisper it... by cheese! He likes what he describes as "real" cheese, namely Gruyere, Etivaz, artisanal mountain cheeses, but confront him with a lovely runny Brie or Camembert, and he runs a mile! He even complains about my definitely non-runny Coulommiers, claiming that it smells much too strongly. Which it doesn't- being an industrial, supermarket cheese, it doesn't smell much at all. It's very nice in a sandwich, though!

I bought myself the most fantastic slab of cheese at the weekend. Unfortunately, I don't remember the name, and Peter threw the bag away whilst unpacking it, so I'll have to check this weekend what it was. All I remember was that it was an aged version of a cheese that I usually associate with runniness- and it was firm, yet still soft. It was so good that I actually ate almost all the entire slab in the space of two days! I have to get more. Have to. And make Peter try it. It was so nutty... (Later edit: it was a Vacherin Fribourgeois. Heavenly!)

Going back to recipes, I also have a large folder of recipes torn out of magazines... some of which I really need to sort through and plan out. After all, spring is coming, it's going to be barbecue season, it's time to start preparing for summer entertaining! Not least for Peter's Birthday Party- an event which we usually celebrate by me spending two days cooking and preparing for, after which a large bunch of people turn up, spend a good six hours eating, and then leave with doggy-bags, as I've made far too much!

We skipped holding it last year, as we'd only moved a couple of months earlier. But this year... I think we're back on. Not least because we've still not had our house-warming, so it might be a good idea to combine the two events.

Mm, time to start thinking about that. Making lists, doing trial runs of recipes...

I have just received a message from Peter saying that two book packages have turned up for me at home. I've ordered three books recently- one copy of Darina Allen's Forgotten Skills of Cooking, which I hope will be as good as it is reviewed, and thus very helpful... and two more copies of La Cuisine des Familles.

This is an odd little cookbook. It appears to be entirely local to Switzerland, which sweeping statement I base entirely on two factors- when searching abebooks for copies, most copies are available in Switzerland; when searching Ebay.fr, there are no copies at all.

So, why do I have two copies?

I don't.

I now have six.

I picked up a first copy, dating from I think 1925, about four years ago. A few months later, my parents gave me an earlier copy, from 1898. The latter was the eleventh edition- the 1925 one is, I think, about 54th. At this point, I thought it would be interesting to see if I could pick up other editions. I bought one last year, from the '40s, maybe the 68th edition. Then last week I picked up another one... and now I've been a Bad Girl and have been on abebooks, and have picked up two more.

(I've just noticed a 1961 edition available on abebooks. From a seller in Italy. I don't have one that late.)

I'm wondering quite how many editions this went through before finally going out of print. It really does seem that there was an edition a year! The first one seems to have come out in 1893, judging by the various 2002 re-prints of that edition that I'm seeing advertised.

I'm going to have to be careful over this- I know what I'm like when I get a bee in my bonnet over books, and I'm almost as bad when it comes to collecting something. Combining the two could be quite lethal to my wallet! But I do rather lust over tracking down more copies of this... and, after all, they're not that expensive... I would just love to see a shelf full of the different editions!

On the other hand, I have no idea where I'd put them- I already have an entire bookcase full of cookbooks, and they're starting to have to be double-stacked.

Blood Orange Marmalade

2010-03-15T07:16:00.007+01:00

I shot out of work during my lunchbreak last week and managed to track down the last three bags of blood oranges in the supermarket- hidden in a huge pile of bags of "oranges blondes". Three bags of 2 kg each- thus I had to haul 6 kilos of oranges up the hill (see my header pic!) from the train station that evening. Fortunately I bumped into a neighbour, and he carried one of the bags for me. Since I was also carrying 2 packs of four pots each, as well as three cookbooks... I appreciated having 2 kilos less!

The cookbooks I'd picked up at the second-hand bookshop. I had found a copy of the Alice B. Toklas Cook Book, a 1925 copy of Louis Maillard's La Cuisine des Familles (which will be the subject of a future post!), and a book about medieaval feasts.

I had hunted through the Internets, and come up with five recipes for blood orange marmalade/jam. I then realised that two of them were actually based on one recipe- so I pulled that up, and had a look. It looked like a very good recipe, with plenty of detailed explanations, and, after all, the books always say that marmalade is a tricky thing, so I thought we'd better go with that.

I then printed two copies off (by mistake), and, when my friend Mousecatfish turned up at about 13:30, handed her a copy. We divvied up the work, determined that the oranges were far too ripe to be zested before being juiced so we were going to have to do this the long way round, and started.

She juiced the oranges, measuring the juice until we had 8 cups- because, of course, we'd decided to double up! In the mean time, I removed the pulp and segment remains, dropping them into one bowl, and then cut off the white pith, julienning the peel. When she'd finished juicing, she joined me. I think that this part took us well over an hour!

We had 8 cups of juice, and... however many cups of julienned peel, it didn't really matter by that stage, we decided. We then realised that we'd forgotten to add lemons, and, as Greta had suddenly turned up in the kitchen, Mousecatfish played with her whilst I repeated the juicing and julienning with three nicely juicy lemons. We then tipped all the juice and the same amount of water into the big casserole dish, added the zest, I put the segments and pips in a cloth which I'd ironed and tied the top with some string, and we boiled the whole lot for about half an hour. Sort of. We weren't really paying attention- we just fished out a couple of bits of zest, tasted them, determined to cook them a bit longer, tried again, and took it all out.

We measured the juice and zest mixture, with Peter laughing at us in the background as we were saying things like "So that's one of however much this measure is, and another one... So that's 7 of whatever the measurement is, plus up to the two, so that means 7 times up to just about here, plus one up to the 2 on the other side of the measurement." He told Greta that she is to grow up to be an engineer, and take proper measurements.

Hey, these were proper measurements! We just weren't quite sure what the exact nature of the measurements was...

We then measured the sugar out into the cup, measuring seven times (we thought- maybe it was only six and we missed one) up to "just about there", and one time up to 2 on the other side, and tipped it back into the juice and zest mixture. There was some insane giggling here, as the last three jugfuls of sugar made the mixture bubble in a way that... was rather rude. I put on the thick rubber gloves, and squeezed as much pectin as possible out of the cloth bag, finding that although it was mostly juice at first, it was eventually oozing out thick clear/white stuff.

We then added my incredibly stylish and funky brand new sugar thermometer, and started the boiling. Whilst it heated up, we tried my blood orange curd (verdict- nice, tasty, tangy, but needed to be thicker), and my rhubarb and orange jam (verdict- despite only one orange in there, you couldn't taste the rhubarb, and it tasted only of orange. It was nice, but disappointing if you were expecting the taste of rhubarb).

At 18h, the temperature was going up and down by about a degree at a time, but was nowhere near the 220F recommended. As I also had dinner to cook, I took a head of garlic, a pack of thyme, minced them up together in the smacky/choppy, added a couple of slugs of olive oil, some black pepper and the bottom half of a pot of black olive tapenade, smeared it on a leg of lamb, chopped up a red pepper and put that underneath the lamb, and put it in the oven at 180C.

About 20 minutes later, Mousecatfish had to go. I went on boiling the jam, which was slowly creeping up to 217...

At 218 F, it started to try to boil over. I took it off the heat for a moment, turned it down a bit, tried again. It kept on trying to boil over, and I was having to juggle with the heat very carefully, stirring it to cool it a bit whilst making sure that the temperature went on rising, but that I didn't end up with a hob top covered in jam!

Of course, at this point, Greta, who had been sitting happily drawing at the table, wanted out of her chair and into my arms. Impossible! So I took her out of her chair, and set her down on the floor. Unimpressed with me, she stomped out of the room, and closed the door on me. I fiddled with the jam a bit, then went out to see what she was up to... at which point Peter leaned over the mezzanine to look at me- and Greta was in his arms.

We were both horrified. We'd left the stairgate open, and she'd gone upstairs. By herself. On the wooden stairs. With her non-non-slip socks. She could have fallen... But she didn't, thank goodness. Still, I think we'll be being even more careful with keeping that closed!

She stayed upstairs with her father, and I went back to juggling the jam's temperature. I'm very glad I got that sugar thermometer- it made this step a whole lot easier for me to understand! As at first it was boiling over at 218, then was OK at 218 but at 218.5 tried again, then the same at 219F, and I really had to stand over it and keep on turning the temperature up and down. Finally it got to 220F and stayed there, even up to 221 briefly, and I started to jar it.

The result is three big jars for Mousecatfish, and four smaller jars for me.

And a two-thirds full jar to go in the fridge and be tasted this weekend!

And I still have about 8 oranges left... I wonder if Greta would like blood orange jelly?

Blood Orange Curd

2010-03-11T15:25:00.002+01:00

Assured by my two source recipes (this recipe and this recipe) that cooking this only took about ten minutes, after putting Greta to bed last night, before Masterchef was due to start, I took up my whisk.

I had already got my ingredients ready, zesting my oranges, juicing them and the lemons. As my citrus fruits weren't very big, I had 8 blood oranges, and 2 lemons, coupled with four eggs, 250g butter, and 290g sugar.

I whisked the eggs in the dish, turned the heat on, realised that I had better get the other ingredients in soon or I'd end up with scrambled eggs, and poured in the juices and the sugar. Stirred everything around until it was well mixed, then added my cubed, room temperature butter.

I stirred that in until it had melted, and went on stirring... and stirring... and stirring. All in all, it took about 40 minutes and the use of a cold plate in the freezer to see if it was anywhere near setting, for me to be sure that it was ready to go in my pots.

I wasn't too pleased about that, but, on the other hand, it did ensure regular tasting- and it does taste very good. I've given one pot away to a colleague, and the other two pots are in the fridge. A tasting will be organised on Sunday morning!

It was still pretty liquid when it went in the pots, but this morning, having left it to cool, it had set sufficiently firm for me not to have to open them and cook it up again. It will no doubt thicken some more in the fridge.

Gratin dauphinois and Citrus Drizzle Cake

2010-03-10T22:06:00.005+01:00

These two are both old friends- long term standbys of mine, which both turn up regularly. As you can see, the gratin is very much appreciated- as potatoes and cream tend to be- this is all that was left after four people had been at it!

We had friends over for lunch on Sunday. It being cold and windy, and me trying to use up what is in the freezer, I dug out a ham that we'd bought when on half price over Christmas, and unfrozen it. There's one thing wiped off the board!

I paired it with a gratin dauphinois, made the way my father-in-law taught me, and a green salad. For dessert, we had a citrus drizzle cake, a recipe I've made so many times that I really shouldn't keep on needing to check proportions!

The gratin dauphinois is something I make quite often during the winter. When it's going to be a meal in itself, I add very finely sliced bacon (lard fume, or lard paysan, depending), and can increase the garlic at times... from a head to two!

Gratin dauphinois comme le fait Alain:
- 2kg potatoes (this, of course, depends on the size of your gratin dish!), peeled, sliced, praise all the gods for the invention of the mandoline! Note: do not put your slices into water to keep white
whilst you're slicing, it washes the starch off and your gratin won't "set" into a cake.
- 1 head (or two) of garlic, peeled, chopped, also thank the gods for the invention of the "smacky", which chops your garlic a lot faster than having to do it yourself!
- salt, pepper. Alain adds nutmeg. I'm not wild about nutmeg on it, but I do it sometimes. This time, I was using up a herbed salt that my mother gave me, so I didn't bother.
- optional: 2 packs of finely sliced bacon
- cream. Lots of cream. About a litre. At least.

Heat the oven to 180C. Prepare a layer of tin foil or baking paper to cover the oven tray, which will take the drips from the gratin dish. Don't miss this step, or you'll spend forever cleaning your oven!

Cover the bottom of your gratin dish with a layer of cream, season it with salt and pepper. Having peeled and sliced the potatoes, layer them over this in two layers. Please do it carefully- they can overlap, but not too much, and you really don't want to just chuck them in and swirl them around- if you do that, it won't set properly.

After two layers of potato, then strew all the chopped garlic (if using one head, if two, half) over the potato. Add a layer of potato, then pour cream over it all. Add salt and pepper. Add another layer of potato, then layer the bacon over the slices. Another layer of potato, then a layer of garlic if using two heads. Then layer the remaining slices until you use them up. Your slices should be just over the level of the sides of the dish. Add salt, and pepper, then pour cream over the top. The cream should reach up to the top of the dish!

Put it in the oven, and bake for about 2 and a half hours. You're cooking this slowly so that it absorbs a maximum of cream, and sets like a solid, albeit layered, cake.

Serve with a green salad with a nicely sharp vinaigrette- you'll need it to cut the fat!

I adapt this recipe to make a gratin of other vegetables, such as pumpkin (with onion, otherwise it's too sweet). The cream is totally OTT, but then for a dish which you make once a month, what the hell.

It also freezes very well, either in one slab or in portions, and reheats very well either in the oven, or in the microwave. The only disadvantage of the latter is the nice crispy top just stays soft!

Citrus Drizzle Cake

I got this recipe originally from a magazine. I've fiddled with it quite a few times since, and I think I'm finally getting there!

Ingredients:
-150g butter, softened
- 200g brown sugar
- 200g self-raising flour
- 6 tbsp tangerine juice (this is where you can fiddle- I also can just use orange juice, sometimes it's blood orange juice)
- zest of one orange
- 3 eggs

For the syrup drizzle:
- juice of two oranges (again, it could be blood oranges, or tangerines, etc)
- juice of 1 lemon
- 100g sugar

Heat oven to 180C. Cream the butter and sugar, add the flour and zest, stir, tangerine/orange juice, stir, eggs, stir. Scrape into loaf tin, bake for about 45 minutes to an hour, depending. Leave in the tin.

Warm syrup ingredients until the sugar is dissolved. Stab the cake all over with a toothpick/fine skewer. Pour the syrup over. Leave to cool.

Serve it with creme fraiche, and, ideally, warm. The creme fraiche is just sour enough to cut through all the sugar- so don't serve it with regular cream, it doesn't work.

Now, last time I had left-over syrup, so I heated that until it was thick, and then served the slices of cake with that syrup poured over as well, making a nice semi-topping. That worked well, and I'm going to experiment with that in the future!

However, one thing that gets me is that the first few times I made this, the syrup all soaked right down to the bottom of the cake, so it was lovely and moist all the way through. For a while now, however, just the top half has soaked it up, then it is a nice, but dry cake below. I need to sort this one out, it's annoying!

Rhubarb and Blood Orange Jam

2010-03-09T22:01:00.003+01:00

I took this recipe from my Larousse des confitures. The recipe called for regular oranges, but as I had blood oranges, I figured that it wouldn't make too much of a difference. What it has done is ensured that my jam is a glorious pink, and tastes absolutely delicious. I'm looking forward to putting this on toast on a Sunday morning in the summer!

It has, however, inspired me to make blood orange jam/marmalade some time very soon, whilst they're still cheap in the supermarket... and
the search for recipes for that has me also drooling over a recipe for blood orange curd, which I think I will definitely be making equally soon, if not sooner!

What always gets me about jam recipes is the "cook for 20 minutes, then test for set" line. NONE of the jams I have made so far needed cooked for less than an hour. I really ought to give myself two hours of cooking time each time, because I keep on getting caught out making jam in the evenings, and then getting to bed later than I planned.

Ingredients:
- 2 blood oranges, sliced very finely
- 1.3 kg rhubarb, chopped into 1cm long pieces
- 1 lemon, sliced very finely
- 1.2 kg sugar

Put the oranges, rhubarb and lemon in a bowl. Add the sugar, stir to coat, leave for twenty-four hours.

Put in a saucepan, cook until it sets!

And it really is absolutely delicious...

Organisation

2010-03-02T08:45:00.002+01:00

I am, despite not being Swiss, disgustingly organised. Neurotically organised. My spice and herb shelf is divided with herbs on one side, and spices on the other. To the far left are the spice jars that haven't yet been opened. To the far right are the herbs that I use more often than the others. There is no section for herbs that haven't yet been opened, so it is indeed thought out.

Mess, disorder, untidyness- these are things that get on my nerves. One of the first things that Greta learned to do independently was tidy up at the end of her day, before being put to bed.

The fact that she also shouts at me if there are crumbs on the floor until I clean them up- she gets that from her father. The Swiss parent. Because I'd be quite happy to leave them where they are for a while longer, until I get round to it.

Suffice to say, I like things to be sorted, divided up, and tidily put in their allocated space.

Which is why I don't understand why I left my freezer so untidy for so long. I think it's because when we moved I was so un-used to having a freezer bigger than two pathetically small drawers and an ice-cube tray that whatever I put in there was just rattling around in an empty drawer!

Now, we have a full-length freezer. And now, eleven months after moving in, it was getting pretty near full.

I therefore tidied it. I took out the drawers, listed what was in them, organised it a bit, and then put everything away tidily.

The picture above is the white board on the kitchen wall. It usually has recipes held to it by magnets, but I took the opportunity to tidy those too. I need to get a ring binder to store my recipes-torn-from-magazines, really I do!

However, what the tidying up process showed me was that I really need to start to work my way through the contents of the freezer. Things need unfrozen, cooked, and eaten.

The two drawers of Greta-divided portions also need unfrozen, an attempt made to get her to at least taste them, and then, no doubt, thrown out.

I need to make risotto, or even soup, with my home-made chicken stock. I need to use up the "vegetable water" and make vegetable stock with it. And then use that for a risotto... or even soup.

I think that a couple of weeks with minimal food shopping, just sticking to fresh fruit and vegetables, might be a good idea. That way I could also start clearing out the food cupboards and drawers... which... come to think of it... could also do with being tidied.

Apple and Ginger Jam

2010-02-24T19:55:00.005+01:00

My Larousse des Confitures has a recipe for Confiture de pomme au gingembre.

About last October, a friend came over with a bunch of apples from a tree in her garden, and we made our own version, basing it on the Larousse recipe, but adapting it a bit as per the fact that I suddenly realised that I didn't actually have any powdered ginger, although I had thought that I did.

Ingredients:
- 2 non-treated lemons
- 70 g (approximately) ginger preserved in syrup
- 1.2 kg apples
- about half the syrup from the jar (well, my jar is 200g, 140g drained weight, so I make that about 30 g of syrup, which is an odd way of measuring it)
- 1 kg sugar
- 30cl water (I remember doubling this, as our apples weren't very juicy)

Remove the zest from the lemons, and chop finely. Juice the lemons. Chop the preserved ginger quite finely.

Peel the apples, slice them, and put them in the pan, with the lemon juice. (The Larousse says to add the seeds of the apples, wrapped in a little muslin packet, to the pan. We did this the first time we made it. We didn't the second time, since we forgot, and it made no discernible difference.) Add the lemon zest and the water.

Cook until the fruit is tender. Add the sugar and the ginger syrup, stirring gently, until it's completely dissolved. Bring to a boil, skim (we didn't bother, again, it didn't seem to make much difference.), and cook until it sets.

The Larousse seems to think the above step will take 10 minutes. It took our jam about an hour.

When the jam is ready, take it off the heat, add the preserved ginger, stir it in, bring it back to the boil. Put it in pots and, according to my friend, stand back and watch your family fight over them! As for me- well, my dad loves it.

Also last autumn, having identified the berries growing down at the bottom of the hill as sloes, I attempted sloe jam. I used this recipe, using about 80% sugar to 100% fruit. Suffice to say that the result is so tannic that its only use could be in a sauce for duck- which is not something I cook very often! I thus have two pots sitting on the window ledge, waiting for the day when I get the strength to open them and tip the contents out. Which will take a while, as I've tried, and just can't get the lids off. A shame, but next year I'll probably make sloe gin instead for a Christmas present for my mother-in-law.

I also made sloe and apple jelly, but since I haven't opened that pot yet, I can't report!

Fish Pie

2010-02-23T09:58:00.006+01:00

Last weekend's experiment involved something that I very rarely cook (other than a couple of "steaks" baked in the oven for the necessary length of time, sometimes crusted with something like sesame seeds, other times just naked).

Fish. For some reason, I hardly ever cook fish. Or even with fish, although I have occasionally had a craving for pasta with tuna, cream and capers over the last few months.

However, I came across this recipe from the ever-delicious, ever-reliable Nigel Slater, and I had left the tab open for a few days, thinking that I really wanted to make this. Fortunately, there was a family event, namely Peter's Uncle visiting, and I had an opportunity to give it a try.

Despite Greta waking up right in the middle of the tricky part of the bechamel- whisking a sauce whilst holding an eleven-kilo baby in the other arm is tricky, to say the least!

And, of course, I made a few changes, and adapted to what I found in the supermarket fish aisle.

Crumble Crust Fish Pie

Serves 8.
1kg firm white fish fillets
500g smoked fish (I used smoked trout fillets)
a little butter for the dish
1 litre milk
4 bay leaves
12 black peppercorns, 2 pink, and a green one
ground nutmeg
150g butter
150g flour
2 packs of dill, chopped
1.5 packs of parsley, chopped
5 leeks- white part only

For the crumble topping:
190g butter
160g plain flour
150g rolled oats
50g finely grated parmesan

Lightly butter a baking dish or shallow pan, place the white fish in it, skin-side down (if any- my fish had no skin), and pour over the milk, topping up with a little water to just cover the fish. Add the bay leaves, peppercorns and a very fine grating of nutmeg. Place over a moderate heat, turning it down just before the milk boils. Leave to simmer gently for 5-10 minutes, until the fish is opaque and tender.

Nigel says you should cook the smoked fish together with the white fish, but when I opened the packet, I decided that it was already pretty well cooked by the smoking process, so I didn't bother.

Turn off the heat, remove the fish and strain the liquor to remove the bay leaves. Remove the skin from the fish and discard. Break both types of fish into large pieces. Chop the dill and the parsley.

Melt the butter in a saucepan, add the flour and cook till pale biscuit-coloured, stirring almost constantly. Pour in the strained cooking liquid from the fish (adding more, if necessary, to make 1 litre- I had some milk left over, and used this later on), stirring over a moderate heat till smooth. Cook over a low heat for 10 minutes, then with salt and pepper, and stir in the dill and parsley. I was a bit wary of this step, thinking that it would "cook" the herbs and change their colour, but they stayed a nice bright green right through the cooking process.

While the sauce is cooking, slice the leeks thinly, give them a thorough rinse, then let them cook with a chunk of butter in a deep pan, covered with a lid, until they are soft. It is important that they don't colour, Nigel says, and suggests putting a round of greaseproof paper over the top. I didn't bother with that, just cooked them very gently. And I had half a finely chopped onion in there too, as I'd been making guacamole earlier (no spring onions available in the market!).

Gently fold the cooked leeks into the sauce. I then put a layer of the sauce in the bottom of a big Le Creuset pan that I was given for Christmas, put a layer of the white fish over the top (not a solid layer), then more sauce, a layer of smoked fish, a layer of sauce, a layer of the white fish, and then finally a layer of sauce. Over this, I poured some of the milk that was left from poaching the fish, just to make sure that my sauce didn't get too thick as it baked. I only had a few tablespoons of the milk left afterwards, so I didn't mind tipping that down the sink.

Set the oven at 180C/gas mark 4. To make the crumble, rub the flour, butter, parmesan and oats together.

My pie then sat for a couple of hours before everybody turned up- I put the crumble on top just before putting it into the oven.

Distribute the crumble over the top of the dish, and bake for 40 minutes in the preheated oven until crisp and golden, and the filling is bubbling, says Nigel- I think it would be better to cook for about 50 minutes at 200C, as although my topping was nice, I think it would have been better a bit crisper. I reheated some for myself the next evening, and it was definitely improved. I froze the rest, and think it should work well as a freezer dish.

The result was very tasty, but I think I should have had a heavier hand with the black pepper in the sauce. I will probably make this again- it went down very well with the family. Maybe next time I'll add a handful of prawns or mussels, as Nigel suggests. In the meantime, with a green salad, it was deservedly popular.

Too much beef

2010-02-22T13:55:00.009+01:00

What am I going to do with my Boeuf Bourguignon?

Last week I was over the border in France, and came across a special offer of "collier de boeuf". Special offers are always good for weekend cooking, so I grabbed two packs (normally I'll pick up three, but for some reason I stuck to two- a good thing, as it turned out!)- which then sat in the fridge for the rest of the week, which wasn't necessarily a good thing.

Nor did it turn out a bad thing, fortunately, but I really should have been more careful. Having to throw it all out would have got me very cross with myself! I so try not to waste food...

I meant to cook it on Saturday, whilst I was cooking my fish pie, but as I was also roasting a chicken for Greta (who has discovered that she really likes chicken, to the extent of stuffing herself with it with both hands), I didn't quite get around to managing a third dish.

I had to put it off to Sunday- which was the beginning of what I think caused the problem.

I was alone through Sunday lunchtime, so I started assembling. I cut the collier into slightly smaller pieces, and browned each one in a frying pan, taking my time and not over-crowding the pan. I still had a problem towards the end with too much moisture in the pan, but that was remedied by removing my very soggy paper filter/lid, and replacing it with a fresh one. I should remember to do that sooner!

In the meantime, I chopped four sweet potatoes (the orange-fleshed ones) into large chunks, and added those to two large onions, in reasonably thick slices then cut into four, all of which I tossed into my Staub casserole on top of two packs of lard fume, which I'd cut into very thick lardons. I put the lid on, turned the heat on low so the fat from the bacon would start to melt before anything burned, and got on with searing the beef. Every so often, I opened the casserole and gave it all a good stir around.

When all my beef was browned and my vegetables were soft, I added thyme, oregano, and freshly ground black-green-pink pepper to the casserole, after which I tipped in the meat, deglazed my frying-pan with some water and added that... and then poured a bottle of red wine on top. As this didn't quite cover the meat, I added some water.

I put the casserole on to simmer- and then realised the time! Resulting in me turning it all off and almost running out of the door to catch a train.

I was out late that evening, but when I got back I turned the heat on and simmered it for about two and a half hours before I went to bed, leaving instructions for Peter to turn it off when he came to bed. I suspect he left it on for about another half hour.

The next morning I turned it on again, and it simmered for another three hours.

Peter was supposed to have some for his dinner (I was out for mine, enjoying a minestrone which I really must try to recreate), but he got caught up in feeding Greta, at the end of which he wasn't hungry. Nevertheless, he'd turned it on again, so it cooked some more! I tasted a bit when I came in- and the meat itself is fine, the problem is the sauce, which is pretty uninteresting.

This morning I spooned a large quantity of fat from the top (and should do it again this evening- it is very fatty). However, I'm wondering what to do with it now. Peter isn't around tonight. Greta, as I've mentioned, is currently fixated on chicken (and she's eating much better these days, so I'm really not going to complain! She now eats Weetabix for breakfast, as well as the occasional pain au chocolat, and I can even convince her to swallow some apple sauce now and again. As long as it's in a tube, of course, and not hand-made!), so she won't be eating any.

Me- I'm on a diet. There was a bit too much Christmas this year- we had three!

The freezer is the obvious solution, but although I know that I will freeze half of it, I'd like to do something to improve it first.

My options:
- strain the meat and remaining vegetable pulp from the sauce, thicken the sauce by simmering it down and probably with the addition of a bit of Maizena, re-combine the two. It would work, but I think that there might still be a very one-dimensional flavour to the sauce. Something else is required, and I'm not quite sure what. Some serious spices, I suspect!
- strain the meat from the sauce, shred it, freeze some of it, use the rest to make a pasta sauce. Or just use the rest to flavour a few dishes over the next few days.
- give up on the sauce, and just serve the meat with fresh vegetables and plenty of mustard.
- use the strained sauce as a base for a soup, with plenty of fresh vegetables in it and no meat. I'd really have to do some serious de-greasing first, though.

--
Update a few days later: next time I make something like this, I think I'm going to adapt the last trick to this post from FoodJunta, namely "set two or three slices of French bread, crusts removed and spread with whole grain mustard, on top of the stew. Over the two hours of simmering the bread flotilla sinks and dissolves, thickening the stew, and leaving behind the sharp taste of mustard." I like the idea of this.

Rhubarb Crumble

2010-02-18T14:57:00.002+01:00

Rhubarb has just made its appearance in the supermarket here in Switzerland. A joy, as the rest of the fruits available are getting quite tired- the apples aren't as good as they were earlier in the season, pears always turn soft so unexpectedly that I rarely buy them, and as I do try to keep us eating seasonably, other than the occasional "oh gods but I'm craving something sweet and different and pineapples are cheap!", there isn't much around.

Rhubarb.

Peter loves rhubarb. He tells me he used to eat it freshly-picked from his grandmother's garden, just dipped in sugar.

I don't think I'd eat it that way myself, even though I'm a big fan of bitter and sour. The reason, actually, would be the sugar- I just can't bring myself to eat sugar without disguising it in some way!

"Pure, white, and deadly", is what my mother always says about sugar, and however much it makes me roll my eyes every time she says it, I've quite obviously absorbed her opinion. It makes me invariably cut a proportion of the sugar out of most dessert recipes! And, when it comes to rhubarb... to cook it with as little sugar as possible.

Thus, when I'm making a crumble, I don't add any sugar to the rhubarb itself- I put it all in the topping instead.

Chop enough washed rhubarb to fill your chosen dish in two tidy layers.

Rub together enough butter, about half oatflakes to half flour, brown sugar mixed with a generous tablespoon (and maybe a bit more) of quatre-epices (ground cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg and ginger), until when you squeeze the mixture together, it stays in a big lump in your hand, but then when you move your fingers, it falls apart into clumps and lumps.

Drop over the rhubarb, making sure that there are plenty of the afore-mentioned lumps and clumps. You don't want this layer to be too thin, or the rhubarb will bubble up and cover it over, so be generous- about a centimetre is a good minimum. But you don't want it too thick either, so don't go over the centimetre and a half!

Now, this is the bit where I make allowances for the bitterness of the rhubarb- I drizzle honey over the top of the crumble. Not all over it, and not too thick- but it adds a nice layer of flavour.

Pop it in the oven at 180C for an hour. Or a bit less, depending on the colour of the crumble- you want it golden, not brown! The rhubarb will be cooked and bubbling up the sides, and that's fine.

Serve with a spoonful of mascarpone!

Any left-over rhubarb can be cooked in this way- chop as for the crumble, put it in a Pyrex dish with a lid, add a chopped apple (with the peel), a few spoonfuls of honey, and microwave on high. Keep an eye on it, as it produces a lot of liquid, which might escape out from under the lid.

It should be soft after about 5-10 minutes, depending on the microwave. Open it carefully, tipping the water back in. Stir with a fork, breaking it all up. This can then be eaten either on its own, with the rest of the mascarpone (!), or stirred into yoghurt. Don't try it on Greta, though, she'll spit it out. She likes the crumble topping, though.

Using up the Brandy Butter

2010-01-30T12:12:00.003+01:00

I always make the brandy butter for our family Christmas. It's rare, however, that it actually is brandy- it's usually whisky butter, or, the last couple of years, rum butter. The latter two spirits tend to be more what I have around than brandy, although I have used it back when I still lived with my parents.

I use a 250g pack of unsalted butter, to which I add soft brown sugar, or Cassonade. Always brown sugar, anyway. I also add the zest of a lemon, and its juice.

I leave the sugar out to soften, then stir in the zest. I then add enough sugar (tasting!) for the mix to be half-way through gritty and almost sandy. It needs to crunch! I then add about 2 tablespoons of my chosen spirit, stir it in, taste, and usually add more sugar.

One year I whipped the butter so that it stayed soft, even after being in the refrigerator. My family was so unimpressed, I've never even considered it since!

The whole then gets put in a dish, plastic wrap pressed down over the surface, and it gets to sit in the cold for the flavours to meld for at least 24 hours before being placed on the Christmas table. We each carve off bit to put on our hot Christmas pudding, allowing it to melt onto the slices.

Yum. As far as I'm concerned, the high point of my Christmas meal.

Nevertheless, and despite repeated helpings as the chunks of butter melt in and don't provide that contrast of cold and crunchy over hot and soft, there's always a lot of brandy butter left over, which I then take home, thinking that I'll probably be sticking a knife in there and (look away now!) sucking the knife blade clean several times over the next few days.... until it's all gone.

Which, fortunately for my waistline, I don't tend to do. I'll stick the knife in a couple of times, but then I tend to forget about it, and the dish slowly gets shoved to the back of the fridge, hidden by the post-Christmas salads.

Late January or mid-February, I find it again, and think that I better do something about it. Fortunately, brandy butter makes great cookies- not least because the sugar is already mixed in to the butter! So all I have to do is take it out of the fridge, and either leave it to soften on the countertop, or stick it in the microwave for enough seconds to soften it up.

I then finally cream the butter and the sugar, add a couple of eggs, some flour, some ground almonds (not ground too finely), a couple of handfuls of oatflakes, and stir it all together until it makes a not-too-firm and nicely sticky cookie dough. I then add a couple of handfuls of raisins, stir them in.

Preheating the oven to 180C (my default temperature!), I put tablespoonfuls very widely apart on a baking tray, knowing that they will spread hugely, and bake for about 18 minutes.

It's a tasty way of using something up, and the addition of the oatflakes means that it's healthy. Really it is.

Quiche Lorraine

2010-01-25T11:54:00.005+01:00

Quiche is a dish that I have a particular fondness for. And, as it turned out, Greta quite likes it too, which is, as I continue my quest to find things that she will tolerate being put into her mouth, is helpful.

Peter, however, never seems particularly enthused. I usually either end up throwing the last quarter out, or eating far more quiche than I want to, as it's been sitting long enough for the pastry to not be particularly crisp any more.

The latter, however, is a problem.

I always make my pastry "by eye"- by which I mean that I dump what looks like enough flour into the bowl, then add enough butter for it to make fine breadcrumbs (with a few clumps, which, I am assured by the best cooks, are necessary), and then add cold water to bring it together. Not too much, of course, as it allows for shrinkage, but just about enough. I hope. When making something like quiche lorraine, I like to put grated parmesan in the mix as well. And black pepper.

I then shape my pastry into a disk, wrap it in plastic, and put it in the refrigerator for at least half an hour. After which I take it out, dust my marble counter-top with flour, and roll it out. For some reason, I always have to roll it out twice, as the first time it invariably sticks, no matter how much flour I've put down. I then fold my pastry into four, place it in the baking dish, and unfold it before pressing it into place very gently. Having had a few too many cases where my pastry shrank right down to the edge of the filling, leaving very little crust, I now then just cut off whatever would hang right down and drape over the oven tray, but leave plenty of pastry hanging down the sides of the dish.

The problem, to be succinct, is that although the sides are fine, the base of my pastry is often not soggy, but not crisp either. I'm wondering if I need to pre-bake, or maybe instead of putting the dish on the grille, put it on a pre-heated oven tray, to give it that blast of heat... or whether I need to turn my oven up above 180C to maybe 200. Or I could try turning it to 220 for the first 20 mns or so, before turning it back down.

I must do more work on this. Especially as I know that this is a damn fine crust- so fine that I find myself eating the edges that I cut off, even though I always mean not to!

For the rest of my quiche, I chopped smoked bacon into quite thick lardons, and fried them with some finely chopped onion. I then whisked eggs together with some cream, added black pepper and some more parmesan (I know, Elizabeth David would be most unimpressed with me, saying that it's not a quiche Lorraine at all, as the strict interpretation has just bacon and eggs in it), drained the fat off my bacon and onion and spread it on the pastry, poured the eggs over, and baked it for about an hour at 180 C.

Result- well, it always tastes fine. But it's not satisfactory. I really need to get this problem with my pastry sorted out. Which means more baking, oh dear...

Greta, however, as I've said, loved it. She ate it for a meal every day for three days, and was very happy about it- even leaning forward towards the fork!

Christmas Baskets

2010-01-23T11:35:00.005+01:00

What I made for people's Christmas baskets this year:

- Ginger and Carrot pickle
- Ginger syrup
- Fruit cake bars
- spiced nuts
- baked muesli/granola

My father has a passion for ginger. He loves ginger so much, I think you could put ginger on a piece of cardboard, and he'd eat it with a smile. That somewhat themed the baskets, which I gave to my father, my brother, my father-in-law, and my brother-in-law.

I tweaked a few of the above recipes, naturally.

The fruitcake bars, I had to add four eggs to instead of just the one, even though I was doubling the recipe and should have had to use two. And, as I made it several times over three weeks, I ended up with a really Christmassy version- with dried cranberries in it as well as apricots and dates (I did half of each), and a generous couple of tablespoons of quatre-epices. I also was up to 1.5 tbs of vanilla syrup.

These went down so well, I must make them again.

The spiced nuts I found very disappointing, nowhere near as spicy as I'd hoped. Next time, I'll double the spices, and add some more chili powder. My sister-in-law liked them very much as they were, however. I didn't put pretzels in- maybe that would have made the right sort of difference.

The baked muesli my brother liked so much that I had to make him some more about a week after Christmas- by which time I was using flaked almonds instead of whole ones (too big for muesli, in my opinion- they should be chopped a bit), and putting in dried cranberries instead of raisins. And I used sunflower oil instead of canola, as I have no idea what canola oil is. I used about 2 tbs of vanilla syrup. My other sister-in-law ate my father-in-law's box as a snack, without milk, and liked it very much.

I've also had to make the ginger syrup again for my father. As there is so much sugar in it, I've bought a sugar substitute suitable for cooking, and will try that next time, which will be soon. He told me that he's out, and I'm a dutiful daughter!

As for the ginger and carrot pickle, this was the disappointment of the bunch- I don't think anybody knew what to do with it, and I'm pretty sure that my parents just threw it out last week (as they gave me the empty jar back! They also gave me the empty tin which had the cake bars in it- I wonder if that's a hint too?).

All in all, however, it was a great success. People were very appreciative- and I'll definitely be doing this again. Although I'll have to find different recipes for next year!

My best Bolognese

2010-01-09T14:43:00.000+01:00

I made this for a family and friends lunch party during the holidays, and served it on fresh fettucine. I was asked for the recipe from all participants- and both husbands insisted on me giving it to their wives! (Peter just smirked.)

Well, I'm a nice girl...

about 750g minceed beef
about 350g minced pork
2 packs of 3 thick slices of lard fume, cut into lardons that aren't too thin (if you cut them too thin, it just melts, and I like the odd bit of bacon in my sauce!)
3 big carrots, peeled, diced
2-3 onions
1/2 a head of garlic (or a whole head, up to you), sliced, it melts into the sauce so you don't need to cut it too finely
1 bottle of red wine
2 litres passata/coulis de tomates
some water
pepper, no salt because of the lard, oregano, other spices, chili flakes
cooking olive oil
some full-fat milk- about 1 dl

In a big casserole dish, heat some olive oil gently, add the oniongs, garlic and carrot, season with pepper, herbs and chili, put the lid on and cook gently. When the onions are translucid and the carrot softening, pour the bottle of wine in.

At the same time, in a frying pan cook the lardons without adding any oil. Put the meat into the casserole, leaving the fat in the pan. Cook the other meats in the fat (you might need to add some oil for the last batches!). Cook the meats separately, as you will need to keep on prodding the pork to make sure that it doesn't go into lumps, and don't put too much in the pan at the same time, or it will steam and won't brown. Add as you go along to the casserole.

Pour the passata into the caserole, add a bit of cold water for the sauce to cover the meat. Stir, bring to a boil, turn down, and simmer for at least three hours. Longer is better- five hours is perfect!

Turn the heat off, leave overnight. The next morning, spoon the fat off- you'll understand why when you take the lid off! Heat it gently, for about 40 minutes to an hour, until you are ready to serve it up. Season with pepper, and, five minutes before serving, pour in the milk, stir it in.

As I said- I served it with fettucine, as I understand that the traditional way of serving involves tagliatelle, but I didn't want to be fiddling with dried pasta and fresh pasta takes hardly any time to cook! We also had a big green salad.

Garlic for Greta

2009-09-13T11:57:00.004+02:00

What I usually do, cooking for Greta, is to make large-ish batches of things, divide it up into portions, and freeze them. I then put them into ziploc bags, labelled with what it is and the date, and feel secure in knowing that I just have to pull something out of the freezer in the morning and microwave it for 45 seconds in the evening.

Her dishes always have to have some garlic in it, or she'll turn her nose up and spit it out at me.

This morning, her busily making a mess around my ankles, I took a head of garlic out of the drawer, started to take it apart, and realised that it was made up of about 5 cloves! I peeled those, cut them into four, and put them through what I call the smacky- the chopper with the piston you pump up and down. I put plenty of olive oil in a saucepan, and when that was hot, I tipped in the garlic and took it off the heat, stirring it all around as it cooked. I then left it off the heat whilst I continued preparations.

I took out a medium-sized courgette, sliced and chopped it, put that through the smacky as well, added it to the garlic, stirred, put it back on the heat, and added some black pepper.

Now, as she will only eat a little of most things, it's a case of having to get as many food groups in as possible, so I took out a block of tofu, repeated the chopping and smacky part, and, when the courgettes were soft, added the tofu. I stirred that around, let it heat up again.

When it was bubbling gently, I added passata, and cooked it down for about 10-15 minutes. I also added some of the cooking water from the pasta I was doing on the side.

We'll see tonight whether she tolerates this latest effort of mine.

And if not, I also made peach and greengage compote with saffron honey for her to spit out and make faces at.

Quinoa AGAIN, Mom?

2009-09-11T11:50:00.004+02:00

Why are we having quinoa again? We had it last week! Well, yes, but Peter likes quinoa. And I have a pattypan squash that needs eating.

Not that Greta had to eat it- as she has a small cold that is giving her an excruciatingly runny nose, she got pasta with courgette sauce with tofu. About half of which she ate. But it had me thinking about children and food, and a story that my father used to tell about when he was a boy.

I went through a phase when I was still in primary school of having an egg for breakfast every morning. And it inspired my father to tell me that when he was a boy, back in the early 1940s, his father used to go out and get him an egg in the morning- even when there was an air-raid on. My grandfather used to go out, braving (as my father told it) the bombs, to fetch his only son an egg for his breakfast- and of course, my father would then refuse to eat it. My grandfather would tell him that there were plenty of starving children in Germany who would love an egg. And my father gave him the perennial response of ungrateful children everywhere: "Well, why can't we send it to them?"

Yes, this is a totally irrelevant story to the tale of my pattypan squash... but I was thinking about it whilst I was preparing it. Ungrateful, picky children. I guess my girl is just taking after her grandfather! Although, to be entirely truthful, I suspect that this tale is a conflation of several episodes, and I also doubt considerably that my father was allowed to get away with not eating his egg. It also surprises me very much that the man I know today was ever so rude to his parents, let alone so ungrateful!

But to get back to my muttons...

I've never bought pattypan before. I've read about it, but hadn't worked out either what it looked like, nor that it was available around here... nor that it was called patisson in French. Last weekend at the Migros, in the bin of pumpkins/squash, there it was, a big white thing, shaped not quite so much like a UFO as it is generally said to be, but still quite pretty. I picked a nice big one out... got home, did a bit more research, and found out that if they're bigger than the palm of your hand, they're supposed to be tasteless.

Bother.

However, there were many recipes for stuffed pattypan knocking about on the Internet, a few of which I read, but none of which I retained among my tabs. I kept in mind, however, that sage and breadcrumbs and cheese featured heavily among them.

I'm out of bread. Hence, no breadcrumbs. I'm also out of fresh sage, although I do have (and have only just remembered) dried sage. As for cheese... well, Peter may be Swiss, but he isn't a big fan of cheese in cooking. Unless of course I sneak it in without telling him, then he's fine with it.

I knew I needed funky flavours for this squash. However, we're at the end of the week, and there's not much left in the fridge other than the usual vegetables. I should have unfrozen another slab of bacon, but I didn't.

However, after a perusal of the contents of the fridge, I pulled out a packet of jamon serrano (on special offer last week), and the chunk of parmesan that sits at the back at the top and gets hauled out when I make risotto.

I then cut the pattypan in half, the hard way- and that I ended up with a lid and a base rather than two equal halves wasn't particularly important. I took out the seeds and fibres, and whilst I was doing that I had the idea of the quinoa. Well, to be honest, first I thought of bulghur, but then I opened the cupboard.

I'm out of white ("regular") quinoa, as I mentioned previously. I had asked my mother to pick me up some whilst she was at the Migros in France, as I know they had it there. I told her not to get me red quinoa, as I had some... and she turned up with two packets of red quinoa (and one packet of red mixed with amaranth, which should prove interesting some other meal). So I now have four packets of red quinoa in the cupboard, and one half-used packet. Bulghur, I have one packet of. Quinoa it had to be!

A small cupful of red quinoa was therefore put on to cook, whilst I scooped out some of the flesh of the squash. I put that in a mixing bowl, adding roughly chopped jamon Serrano, and a lot of black pepper. I took the block of Parmesan, cut off all the... biological bits, and grated a lot into the bowl. I also grated some into the base and lid of my squash, and more black pepper over that.

Looking into my bowl, I thought it was a bit uninteresting, so I went into the fridge again. I came out with a pot of sundried tomatoes. I'm not a big fan of sundried tomatoes by themselves, finding their taste quite simply weird, but cooked and as a single component of a dish, well, they're OK. I chopped five of them and added them in. And I wish that it wouldn't have looked unbalanced to put in six, because the pot went back into the fridge with one tomato in it!

I also added a bit of the oil from the pot to the mixing bowl.

When my quinoa was just undercooked, I drained it (not too much), put it in the bowl, stirred everything around, stuffed the base of the pattypan, put the lid on, and put the whole thing in the oven at 200C for an hour.

Verdict:
It didn't quite work. It was OK, but it would have been better with bulghur and with bacon- and definitely better with a melted cheese in it, something like taleggio. I won't be bothering with it again, and instead will go back to baking little orange pumpkins brushed with truffle oil and with lardons.

The patisson, however, was an interesting taste. It wasn't bland, and was oddly like green melon. I think I need to come up with something else to do with it.

The bunny died happy

2009-09-06T20:16:00.004+02:00

My camera's battery having suddenly died just as I was taking photos of Greta being amazingly cute (i.e. throwing all the tupperwares out of the drawer onto the floor with as much noise as possible), so there are no pictures of the redcurrant jam I made yesterday. Sadly, as the 2 tablespoons that wouldn't fit in the jar were very tasty! I'm thinking that redcurrant jelly would be a good idea for Christmas, so I'll start that up soon.

Currently simmering in my lovely Staub cocotte (large casserole dish) is two half rabbits (on special offer at the supermarket, and I really must remember that rabbit is usually cheap anyway), which I brushed with mustard and then "gilded" in a frying pan. In the mean time, I cut 2 slabs of lard fumé (smoked bacon) into lardons, put them in the Staub, added 6 medium carrots, cut into 5mm thick slices, 1 big, 1 medium, and 1 small white onions, sliced similarly, and about 8-9 cloves of garlic, chopped into bits. I put the vegetables on top of the bacon, turned the heat up, and when the bacon was sizzling, I stirred in the vegetables. I cooked that for a few minutes, then turned the heat off, and poured over a bottle of white wine (Cotes de Ceressou 2005).

When my rabbit pieces were nicely gilded, I put them on top of the vegetables, added a little bit of water, black pepper, thyme and three bay leaves from Peter's father's garden (it sounds like Mr McGregor should turn up too!). The whole lot is supposed to simmer for 40 minutes to an hour, after which I shall remove the rabbit and as much of the vegetables and bacon as I can, turn up the heat, boil the sauce thicker, add cream, return the bunny to the pot, reheat, and serve up. Peter wants potatoes, and potatoes he shall have!

This semi-recipe is adapted from the following three from Dans la cuisine, Marmiton, and Gourmandines. Mostly the Marmiton recipe, as I read it to Peter and he liked the idea of a whole bottle of wine. Although none of them contain bacon- but I can't help feeling that most dishes of this sort can do with being enriched with a little bacon. Even more so as I want this one to last through until Tuesday dinner!

My next non-jam project is involving the pattypan squash (patisson) that we bought at the weekend. I love the way it looks! Almost as beautiful as romesco, which I always have a hard time eating, I just want to admire it so much. I'm currently looking at this recipe from Chocolate and Zucchini for stuffing the squash, but I'm not sure.

Post-dinner verdict: It's a nice way of doing rabbit. I think, however, that it will be better tomorrow, reheated- and next time, I will make sure I have smooth mustard, which will coat the rabbit pieces better, as all I had this time was grainy mustard! And maybe add some button mushrooms right at the end of the cooking.

Quinoa for little ones, quinoa for grown-ups

2009-09-04T13:50:00.005+02:00

Continuing on my efforts to feed Greta, stubborn little child that she is, yesterday's attempt was a variation on curried lentils with coconut milk- a dish which I've made for her before, and which she oddly quite likes. Enough to open her mouth when I bring the spoon towards it, that is!

I still have some of the latter in the freezer, but I thought I'd make some fresh yesterday evening, at which point I discovered that I'm (almost) out of green lentils. I had a quick look through my grains shelf, and dug out the quinoa instead.

Peter is very fond of quinoa.

The Internet in general appears to be very fond of quinoa. Which is not, according to my Peruvian friend, pronounced KEEN-wah, as most websites have it. She says you pronounce it as it's spelt (reassuring me, as that's how I pronounce it)- ki-no-wa. I have a couple of varieties in the cupboard- "regular" quinoa, which is white, and "royal" quinoa, which is red. Further differences will be mentioned further on.

I've made tabbouleh with quinoa a couple of times, but I don't think it works right. It's too small. Curried quinoa with peas and cashews, however, is a tab which I had open for a while without actually getting around to cooking the dish (mainly due to the fact that I never buy cashews).

For Greta, therefore, I cooked a small mug of white quinoa in a mixture of water and coconut milk, to which I added a chopped onion (chopped very small), and a (heaped) teaspoon and a half of a curry powder mix that I got in Migros. It isn't a very strong curry, so it's fine for her- just strong enough to taste! Looking at it, I can see chili flakes, so it's odd that it's so comparatively weak. The dish as a whole turned out quite creamy, as I added a bit more coconut milk at the end.

I gave it to her like that, and she ate about half the plate-ful before starting to spit it back at me. Not bad. But I think I'll have a better result tonight- as whilst Peter was bathing her, I took half a big carrot, diced it very small, and cooked the dice until almost soft, then adding them to the quinoa. I should have done that in the first place, as it is now a whole lot more interesting.

No doubt she'll spit it all straight out tonight.

Once she'd gone to bed, I took a mug of the red quinoa, sliced and rinsed a pack of leeks (about 6 leeks, the white part), a red pepper cut into strips, the remaining large carrot plus two others, peeled and sliced, and returned a huge courgette to the fridge.

I put olive oil in my big gratin dish (I do a lot of cooking in this, as works both as a frying pan and a saucepan- it's designed to be able to start off a dish on the hob-top, then put it in the oven, so it really is endlessly versatile), fried the leeks and the pepper for a minute, added the carrot and about a tablespoon and a bit of the curry powder, stirred it and cooked for a minute more, added the quinoa, stirred it in and cooked again for a minute, then added water and coconut milk (it would have been more, if I hadn't put more than half the tin in Greta's supper!), and cooked the whole lot for about 15 minutes.

It turned out very well- the red quinoa stays crunchier than the red, so it wasn't as creamy as Greta's. And a mouthful of crunchy red seeds surrounded by soft soft leeks... is very close to what I like best to eat!

This was also a clearing-out-the-fridge dish- quite handy for finishing things off. As we were away last weekend, we didn't get around to going to the supermarket, so this week I've been trying to finish things off and clear things up. It's resulted in one disappointing dish (egg noodles with a semi chicken-paprikash- I liked, but Peter didn't), one very yummy Salade Nicoise (2 hard boiled eggs, a whole pack of green beans, a pack of rocket, a tin of tuna, three spring onions that were getting very wilted), and the quinoa dishes.

I've also been cooking down tomatoes from the farm to make tomato coulis, and made plum jam. I won't share the recipe for the latter, as it was pretty much the same as the greengage jam, except that I used white sugar (which I never use), and, for somebody used to cutting any amount of sugar in a recipe by 1/3, it was pretty scary to use almost a kilo of sugar!

Jurassic Cooking

2009-08-31T17:10:00.006+02:00

Greta, as I do believe I have mentioned several times before, is a toddler with... particular tastes in food. She likes what she likes, and most of the time, she doesn't like whatever it is that I'm waving in front of her mouth, hoping like mad that she'll actually open up and try a bite.

Except for things like garlic sausage, cheese with garlic, Cenovis (Swiss Marmite/Vegemite), old gruyère, radishes (the hotter the better), and assorted other foods that babies are just not supposed to like. On the other hand- mashed potato is disgusting, mashed banana is beyond even contemplation, cooked carrot is evil, and all the usual baby foods recommended in the books are utterly rejected.

Greta therefore spent her first few months of "solids" being fed out of jars, as I got tired of her throwing everything that I cooked for her with love and devotion onto the floor. At least with jarred food, when she screamed the place down at every spoon, I didn't feel like she was rejecting my cooking! However, once we moved, I decided to try again. And to add garlic.

She started eating a bit more, but then the warm weather intervened. Greta, rather like her parents, is a cold-weather person. And for the last couple of months, whenever the temperature went over 25C (i.e. most of the time), well... Greta didn't want to eat. We managed by feeding her Petits Suisses at every meal, but that's not hugely healthy. I did usually manage to get the odd spoonful of apple-sauce into her to salve my vitamin-conscious soul, but more than that, well, NO, Mama! And so my carefully crafted home-made portions of baby food have been either washed down the sink (in the case of, for example, courgette risotto with chicken), or dumped in the bin (pasta with tomato sauce and tofu).

Finally, praise the lords and pass the biscuits, the weather has begun to cool. And the effect on Greta's appetite has been quite impressive. From an average daily consumption (excluding milk and water) of maybe 2 Petits Suisses, 2 tablespoonfuls of fruit, and a couple of mouthfuls of something else random, usually all accompanied by howls and much struggling... she's suddenly chomping down on 200g of food at a sitting. The only reason it's not more is that I find myself holding back, worried that she's going to throw up!

On the way back from the walk today I stopped off at the farm, and picked up another 3kg of tomatoes, as well as some plums and some mirabelles. I intend to make plum jam later in the week, but as I'm out of sugar, it won't be today.

I put aside about 1kg of the tomatoes for salads and sandwiches- the others I skinned, de-seeded, chopped extremely roughly, and put in a pan. I cooked them for I think about 45 minutes, crushing them with a wooden spoon, adding only a bit of salt and pepper. In the mean time, in the water I'd used to briefly boil the tomatoes to help with the peeling, I cooked some small pasta shapes. Next to that, I steamed a chopped courgette.

Having bottled most of the tomato coulis, once it was thick enough (this is going in the basement for winter), I added what was left to a small bowl of the pasta, with some of the courgettes, and a good dollop of olive oil. Let's see what she makes of that for her dinner.

My food plans for this week, other than the aforementioned plum jam, includes making a lot more tomato coulis, as well as tomato sauce, for jarring and stashing for the cold season. I'm thinking tomato and basil sauce, tomato and courgette sauce, tomato and aubergine...

--

Later edit: She did not like it. She spat out five teaspoonfuls one after the other, making a face, then started shaking her head NO and preparing to cry. I gave up. Peter ate it instead, and said it was delicious.

Back to the drawing board!

Swiss stocks and spinach salad

2009-08-27T20:10:00.005+02:00

A couple of mornings ago, I was listening to Swiss radio with half of a quarter of one ear, distractedly, whilst trying to get Greta to eat a yoghurt for breakfast, and failing utterly to do so. She did, however, have a few pieces of dry muesli. I swear the child will drive me to distraction...

On the radio, they were interviewing somebody from the Office Federal pour l'approvisionnement economique du pays (Federal Office for National Economic Supply), about how Switzerland is going to manage in the case of a global pandemic- which will, of course, be affecting the food supply. He said that the Office publishes a brochure which lists all that you should have at home, and made a few jokes about having updated it recently, as food tastes had changed. For example, he said, they removed the "choucroute garnie" (sauerkraut with sausages and slab bacon) from the list.

As it sounded relatively useful, I dug up the website, and ordered a copy of the brochure.

The list, however, is available here. And a right giggle it is too, it being the old list, with sauerkraut (listed as Berner Platte, under 10: prepared meals). I looove that it includes one packet of fondue mixture! And that jam and chocolate are emergency rations.

Now I just need to get all of this together (as if), and then store it in the nuclear bomb shelter, like a good Swiss housewife.

Of course we have a bomb shelter! It's still the law here- whenever you build, there needs to be a fallout shelter. The fact that most of them are used as storage areas is irrelevant. They Are There In Case Of Emergency. And that makes all good little Swiss persons happy.

Rather like the annual test of the country-wide siren to warn everybody to get to the shelters now, the... erm... foreigners are invading. It's time to blow up the (mined) autoroutes and bridges! And for the men to take to the mountains with their guns and helmets so that they can fight a rearguard guerilla action. Presumably whilst we poor women stay in the valleys and either offer comfort to the poor misguided enemy, or emulate Judith and Holofernes.

Back to food...

For dinner tonight, having snacked on Italian salami and Manchego with Greta whilst she had supper (made up of said salami, Manchego, a couple of mouthfuls of cucumber, 3 spoonfuls of yoghurt and one of mashed strawberries, which only went in because I promised her it was the last one), Peter and I will be having a spinach salad.

We eat a lot of salads.

This one will include, besides the spinach, hardboiled eggs and walnuts (Greta discovered walnuts today, and decided that she likes them- I really need to manage to get her to eat cereal bars). Normally I'd also add some lardons, but I stopped buying bacon regularly at the beginning of the summer, and haven't needed to start again yet.

Chicken casserole with Orzo

2009-08-26T21:02:00.007+02:00

Despite a leaking under-sink and a dishwasher suffering from reflux, I managed to cook a three-course dinner last night for Peter, a colleague, and myself.

And quite pleased I was too.

The weather has broken recently, and it's been quite a bit cooler, due to the absolutely incredibly beautiful thunderstorms. I therefore did not cook too much "height of summer" food, but didn't go too far in the other direction either.

We started off with a traditional insalata caprese- buffalo mozzarella, tomatoes from the farm, and basil that I was given by a neighbour. A drizzle of olive oil, some cracked black pepper, and a nice seed-covered crunchy baguette.

This gave me a chance to practise my presentation skills- which, quite frankly, suck. I'm working on it!

We then moved to the East, and had a main course from Vefa's Kitchen, which I've been meaning to peruse in detail ever since I got my hands on a copy about 3 months ago. I love Greek food- its flavours appeal to almost all of my tastebuds at the same time! Mm, I'll never forget having dinner with Peter in Nafplio and having grilled octopus tentacles- they were absolutely delicious. The suckers were all crunchy, the meat soft, and the lemon and olive sauce on top was just perfect...

Back to last night's dinner!

Chicken Casserole with Orzo (adapted from Vefa's Kitchen)
- 3 small aubergines, cut into bite-size pieces
- olive oil
- 1 humungous courgette, given to me by the same neighbour who gave me the basil, sliced
- 1kg skinless, boneless chicken breasts, cut into bite-size pieces
- 3 small-ish onions, chopped (there should have been 2 cloves of garlic, but my last head had dried out so went in the bin- and I'd have put in probably at least half the head to boot)
- 5 large Roma tomatoes, seeded, chopped
- 1 red bell pepper and 1 yellow, julienned
- 1 cup orzo
- dried thyme, oregano, and marjoram

Sprinkle the aubergine with salt and leave to drain in a colander for an hour. Rinse, squeeze out the water, pat dry.

I've read that instead of this step, which is pretty much pointless these days as our aubergines are not as bitter as they used to be, you can stick them in the microwave for a few tens of seconds. As the other point of the maneuvre is to bust the cells so that the aubergines don't gulp all the olive oil as soon as you drop them in.

Heat the olive oil in a casserole dish, add the pieces of aubergine, cook over medium heat, stirring frequently, until lightly brouwned. Remove, set aside, add courgette slices, do the same, remove. Heat some more oil if necessary, add the chicken, cook 6-8 mns until lightly browned, stirring. Add the onion (and garlic!), cook stirring frequently until softened. Add tomatoes, peppers, aubergines and courgettes, season, add herbs, cover, simmer until the vegetables are half cooked.

Heat olive oil in a small frying-pan. Add the orzo, cook over high heat, stirring constantly (like you'd start off rice for a risotto) for a couple of minutes, then stir into the pan.

Vefa says you should add stock here- I added a little bit of boiling water, not much, covered, simmered until the orzo was tender, and served it up in the dish.

It was perfectly pleasant- but it needs a little something. I'll definitely be making it again, once I've figured out what that little something is. A friend has suggested lemon juice, and that might be it.

On the other hand, Peter and I finished it for dinner tonight, and, re-heated in the casserole dish over the gas, with plenty of fresh olive oil, it was absolutely a perfect dinner.

For dessert (which we also finished tonight), I had made a fruit salad- left-over greengages, nectarines, muscat grapes, and watermelon. And we had it with crême de Gruyère, which my parents had brought us on Monday, as they were in Gruyère over the weekend. This is one of Switzerland's great specialties- a thick, very sweet cream (although it's not sweetened), which is often served with meringues. An absolutely lethal dessert, but very yummy.

I was quite pleased with the meal. It could have been better, but, for a mid-week supper which I hadn't had more than 24 hours to plan, it wasn't bad. And the fact that I had to stop half-way through cooking the courgettes and rescue Greta from a glass-covered floor (she had knocked a glass off the kitchen table and we were both standing in the middle of it in bare feet) and put her to bed didn't do more than make it all a bit later than I had planned!

Fortunately, the sink and the dishwasher were fixed today.

Roast lamb with preserved lemons

2009-08-24T17:07:00.008+02:00

Yesterday, Sunday, was very busy. The village throws a meal for all inhabitants once a year, just before the kids go back to school, and yesterday was the day. Peter, Greta and I walked across the road to the village "square" at about 12:15... and didn't get home until after 17h. It was a very enjoyable way to meet the neighbours and talk about things- and the meal wasn't bad either.

With the aperitif (white wine, of course, that's usually what is served for the "apéro" in French-speaking Switzerland), we were given cubes of a rather nice pizza bread, a smear of tomato and a thin layer of crunchy cheese on top of what I think was sourdough loaf. Then the first course was melon with jambon cru, followed by what we think was longeole, served with polenta with four cheeses and an onion sauce. Very nice. Then a green salad (a shame they were running low on the salad dressing when I got my second helping!), a berry tiramisu for dessert, and finally coffees and limoncello.

At about 16h I inquired of Peter whether he was still expecting me to cook roast lamb- it turned out, to my utter lack of surprise, that he was.

We'd picked up a half leg of lamb on special offer on Saturday, and, as I'd been reading food magazines in bed and come across this recipe for lamb with preserved lemons, and had liked it, I'd torn it out.

Incidentally, in the same article, there was a recipe for 6-8 servings, which called for, among the rather extensive list of ingredients, 3/4 of a teaspoon of lemon zest and 1/4 of a teaspoon of lime zest. When I read ingredients like that, I can't help wondering who on earth would actually do that. It's the sort of ingredient that makes me skip to the next recipe. As I do with most recipes with more than ten ingredients.

Often, it's American recipes that seem to have ridiculous numbers of ingredients. Which explains why I cook very few American recipes. When I do, however, I know several things- first of all, I'm going to estimate a number of things (a stick of butter? and how much is a cup of butter?), as I'm used to weighing things... and second, I'm going to at least double the spices. Most American recipes seem so woefully underspiced, half the time, you can barely taste them. The recipe for oatmeal and raisin cookies in the Joy of Cooking, for example- that needs a serious tripling of the amount of cinnamon and whatever-the-other-spice is.

Anyway, going back to our dinner, which we ended up having at 22:10, very late for us, as the lamb had to cook for 4 hours, and I didn't get it in the oven until 18h.

I cut the meat off the bone, and cut it roughly into chunks. In my blender, I put 3 slightly-bigger-than-small onions, 1.5 preserved lemons (all I had left), 1.5 heads garlic, the leaves off 4 sprigs of marjoram from my father-in-law's garden, and the leaves from 2 sprigs of rosemary from the same place (the recipe specifies coriander leaves, which seemed odd, as after 4 hours, they'd just not be there any more!). Blended that, then added 1/2 tablespoon cumin seeds, blended again, then added about 100cl water. Maybe 150cl. I tossed the lamb together with the mix, put it in a pyrex dish (the top half of my chicken roaster, put some slices of butter on top (unnecessary, I think), then popped it in the oven at 150C.

It cooked slowly for four hours, after which I spooned some of the fat off the top, and served it up with boiled potatoes. It made the whole apartment smell deliciously of garlic (despite me having the kitchen windows open and the door closed)- but I noticed that about half way through the cooking, the lemons started to come out. Mm.

The meat just fell apart at the prod of a fork, but could maybe have done with another forty minutes. Or a slightly fattier cut. Notwithstanding this, it was very nice, and I'll be making it again. Peter had two helpings, I did too! The crusty bits on the top of the lamb, where it was poking out of the mush, were just delicious.

I do think that next time it deserves a far more assertive side-dish- something with a bit more kick. A rocket salad might be an option, or at least a salad with quite an acidic vinaigrette, in order to cut some of the fat.

Greta didn't have any, as she was long in bed- for the last few days, she's refused anything other than bread, cheese, and garlic sausage. I've been lucky and got her to understand that one quarter slice of garlic sausage is a fair exchange for one spoonful of yoghurt/vegetable/fruit. I should probably put garlic in her fruit mush- but I don't think it would go with the apricot and blueberry compote I made her yesterday morning!

Green Queens

2009-08-20T20:24:00.006+02:00

Last night, I made greengage and vanilla bean jam.

I never stick to recipes, normally, but as I'd never made jam before, I thought that it would probably be a good idea to do so this time. Even if that did seem like an awful lot of sugar! However, as the jam has turned out... oooh, lip-puckeringly tangy, it definitely wasn't too much sugar.

It took a long time to cool down last night, so at 21:20 I headed over to start making it... at which point I remembered that I was supposed to macerate the fruit and sugar together for an hour. Botheration. So I chopped and pitted my greengages (which have the lovely name of reine-claude in French, named after the wife of Francois I), put them in my Le Creuset casserole dish, poured the sugar over the top, added the lemon juice, stirred it around, put the lid on, and went off to do other things for an hour.

When I came back, a lot of juice had come out of the fruit. I added the vanilla, having split and seeded the pods, adding both the seeds and the pods in, and then turned the gas on. I'm so glad I had a gas hob-top put in! It's so much easier to control the heat than it was with the electric top I had before.

I cooked, stirring, until the sugar had melted down, then wandered off. I came back to stir a while later, and found there was a thick foam over the top. I know that in some recipes you skim this off, but as it had lifted most of the vanilla seeds with it, I certainly wasn't going to do that, so I stirred it back in instead.

I pretty much left it to its own devices, coming back to stir now and again as it simmered, and discovering that boiling jam, when it spatters on your skin, is indeed rather painful. And when you stir simmering jam, it bubbles up a lot harder than it was, and spits at you. Ouch. Fortunately I only got a couple of very minor splashes on me.

After about an hour, I started to test. I'd read, heavens knows where, it seems that I've always known it, despite never having made jam before, that the best thing to do was to put a plate in the fridge, then drop a teaspoonful of jam on it to see if it was thick enough (the cold plate cools it faster, so it thickens). I tested a couple of times before it was right- which gave Peter and I an opportunity to taste it. Mmmm...

He went to bed before I'd finished. At 23:30 I started putting it into pots, ending up with one large and one small pot... and half a small pot to go into the fridge. Most of which has already been eaten, as even Greta, who is not a fan of being fed anything from a spoon early in the day, had several spoonfuls at breakfast time.

As you can see, from very green fruits, it came out a lovely gold. It rather worried me, at one point! I wonder what colour other fruit jams will turn...

I need to make more of this. It's perfect for Christmas presents... although I do have so many other jam recipes begging for attention! And a friend was telling me earlier via chat that the plums in his garden are almost ripe, and he has a kilo ear-marked for me. He better make it two kilos- one for him, one for us!

Greengage and vanilla jam, courtesy of Chez Pim
- about 1kg Greengages, pitted and chopped
- 500g sugar (in my case, brown, organic, fair-trade sugar- making it Worthy Jam!)
- juice from 1 lemon
- 2 vanilla beans, cut in half, seeded

Summer dishes

2009-08-19T20:28:00.000+02:00

For a day when it's been over 34C, I've certainly done a lot of cooking! Fortunately, however, other than the bulghur for the tabbouleh, it was all chopping and mixing and stirring.

Peter was making calf's eyes at me last night, reminding me that I'd promised to make tabbouleh and guacamole for him this week. These two are some of our default Summer Foods, and we get through a lot of them over the hot months.

I stopped by the farm on the way home from Greta's daily walk and picked up another three kilos of tomatoes. They're so good, I can't get over how much flavour they have. I was speaking to the farmer's wife (and the farmer, who was boldly displaying a grey-haired torso and fuzzy belly), and she told me they have masses more tomatoes, even in the "cold room", as well as mirabelles and plums. I might have to make more jam than planned, as I have a feeling that mirabelles and honey might go very well together.

Even more so as there's a place across the road and along a few metres advertising local honey... and I should also go up the road in the other direction to the Domaine and buy some of their peaches.

But to get back to what I did with the tomatoes. After I staggered in and put Greta down, gave her plenty of water to drink, gulped a couple of pints myself, I started chopping.

First up, gazpacho, adapted from Not Derby Pie. What is Derby Pie, I wonder?

Ingredients:
- 1 chunk, about 3 cm thick, of stale wholemeal pain de campagne
- 5 garlic cloves
- a couple of big pinches of sel de mer aux herbes de provence
- 2.5 tablespoons vinaigre de Xeres
- 1 teaspoon sugar
- 1/2 teaspoon cumin seeds
- 1.3 kilos ripe tomatoes, cored and quartered
- 1/3 cup extra-virgin olive oil (I used a really nice olive oil that Peter bought from his caviste in Gland)

I soaked the chunk of bread in water for a couple of minutes, then squeezed it dry-ish. Put that in the blender, with just over half the tomatoes (what was left was one whole tomato of about 600g!). I put the cumin seeds in my mortar and pestle, bashed at them a minute or so, then added the garlic cloves and the salt, and pounded them down together. Put that and the sugar in the blender, then turned it on. It took a bare half minute to be nice and smooth, so I then added the rest of the tomato, blended that in, then slowly poured the olive oil in through the top.

That then went into the fridge to meld and settle.

Peter and I had a bowl each for supper (well, he had two), and it was very good. Richly flavoured, punch-y with the garlic, and, as Peter put it, "It's smooth, but it has texture. It scrapes across my tongue in a good way."

I might knock up a jar (with half the garlic) for my parents some time soon, they'd like it.

I then cooked just under a mug-ful of organic bulghur. It would have been a mug-ful, but it was the end of the packet!

The trick to making a good tabbouleh, I am convinced, is to not overcook your grain. I was at a bbq last weekend where the one salad that stood practically untouched was a tabbouleh made with couscous that was so wet that the whole thing just looked like a bowl of mush. It's a good idea to actually slightly undercook the grain, as it is going to be snuggled up to tomatoes and cucumbers, as well as having olive oil and lemon juice poured over it.

Unfortunately, I had a small squally Greta clinging to my ankle at this point, demanding to be picked up before she got eaten by hyenas, so I overcooked the bulghur a bit. Annoying, but not the end of the world, as I think I got it just in time.

To the cooked bulghur, I added:
- 2 large (the size of my fist and a bit over!) tomatoes, seeded, and diced
- 2/3 of a cucumber, seeded, diced
- a handful of golden sultanas that I had left over from making chutney- normally I'd put in a couple of handfuls of raisins, although I have put in mango at times, which works well
- a chopped spring onion (it should have been two, but I only had two left, and needed the other one for guacamole)
- 2 packs (0.020 kg each) of mint, leaves sliced finely into a chiffonade
- 2 bundles of flat parsley, leaves chopped extremely roughly- sometimes I use rocket instead
- juice of two lemons
- plenty of olive oil
- salt, freshly-ground black pepper

All mixed together, and left for a couple of hours. I make this for summer parties, and it always vanishes very fast! I think the difference to how tabbouleh is usually made around here is that I stick to a more "traditional" interpretation, i.e. I make sure that there is lots and lots of green herbs, whereas when you buy it ready-made here, it's usually a lot of couscous and a few flecks of mint, so that is how most people make it.

Peter says that I did catch the bulghur in time. As he had two bowls of that as well for dinner, I suppose he's right. He did complain that I hadn't chopped the parsley small enough, though. What is left, I will split up into individual tupperwares, and stack in the fridge, as otherwise he'll eat all the rest of the bowl in one sitting. If it's divided up, he's a bit more reasonable!

Having finished making the tabbouleh, I handed Greta over to her father for long enough for me to make the guacamole, as it's a bit difficult to chop coriander with a toddler in one arm.

I also make a relatively "traditional" version of guacamole. Instead of the absolutely smooth green paste that for some reason some people seem to think is about right (I blame the back of the Old El Paso packets of spice for guacamole, which say "take two avocadoes, mush them up, add this packet, you're done"), I make quite a chunky one.

- 3-4 avocadoes, as ripe as possible before going off (and I've had some "guacamole" served to me where the avocadoes were so unripe that they were actually diced!)
- 2 spring onions, chopped (I only had one left due to using the other in the tabbouleh- often I put the white part of just one in, and the green of two)
- 2 packs (0.020 kg) of coriander, thick stems removed, chopped
- 1 medium tomato (or a handful of cherry tomatoes), seeded, diced
- lime juice (a few tablespoons)
- and... erm... the Old El Paso packet. Because I've tried making my own mix, and this is the best. But I do add chili flakes to it.

Tip the OEP packet contents into a small bowl, add the lime juice and chili flakes, stir. Leave whilst you remove the avocado flesh and put it into a bowl (I put it straight into the tupperware I'm going to keep it in). Mash, not too smoothly, but not leaving any big lumps. Add the lime juice and OEP, stir well. Don't beat any air into it, however- air is what makes the colour turn, and you don't want that! Add the onions, tomato, and chopped coriander, and a bit of salt. Mix it in, smooth the top, cover it with a layer of plastic wrap smoothed down onto the surface to keep the air out, put the lid on the tupperware, put it in the fridge for a couple of hours.

These days, I serve it with pita crisps. It used to be chili tortilla crisps, but pita crisps are a nice change. Unfortunately, we're out at the moment, so we didn't have any tonight. I shall try and pick some up tomorrow at Coop.

My jam is currently at the steeping stage in the saucepan. I'll start cooking it in about 45 minutes, now that the weather has finally cooled down enough to be bearable!

Salmon trout with coriander

2009-08-18T20:58:00.000+02:00

On Saturday, Peter bought himself a salmon trout. He didn't get me one, because I didn't want it. Ever since I had Greta, I've had a hard time eating things which were manifestly killed for me to eat them. Not that I've gone vegetarian- I love my saucisson sec far too much! But I'm eating even less meat than before.

I put off cooking it last night, as I was making chutney, but it needed cooked today, or it was going in the bin.

I wasn't feeling particularly inspired, but I dug around, and ended up doing the following:

I turned the oven to 175C, and lined the roasting tin with parchment paper, which I brushed with olive oil and then ground the pepper mill over. I sliced one of the huge tomatoes from the farm, and put most of that underneath the fish, which I stuffed with sliced preserved lemon (I made some a couple of years ago- they're a great standby, and you can keep on renewing it by dropping in bits of lemon) and a few more bits of the tomato. I then put crushed coriander inside the fish, and dusted the rest over the top. (Thinking about it now, I should probably have put harissa inside the fish, but I forgot that I had some- I only bought it today!). I then baked the fish for 40 minutes, which was longer than planned.

I could have served it with a grain, but he's going to eat the whole fish, so he really doesn't need any more than he's got! Even more so as he named the fish Bob.

I didn't have any, but he says it was quite nice. Here's the finished beast:

I went over to Thoiry in France today, and went into the Bio-Santoriz shop for the first time. Not only did they have a little restaurant which gave us a lovely lunch (and was sufficiently clean for me to be quite happy to allow Greta to toodle around barefoot) with beetroot gazpacho, a delicious salad with all sorts of grains in it and a very yummy lentil and rice vegetarian paté, but I also found yet another range of products that I haven't seen around before, including seaweed called "sea spaghetti", miso paste in a pot and not in powder or cubes (which I bought to make soups for Peter, who has a passion for miso soup when he's home alone and there's nobody to cook for him), organic black chocolate, and a mix of spices to go on tabbouleh. Because I promised Peter I'd make him tabbouleh (and guacamole) this week...

Peach Chutney, Tomato Chutney, Watermelon Rind Pickles

2009-08-17T20:49:00.000+02:00

This evening, I made four pots (two half-litre, two 250 ml) of tomato chutney, having finally managed to find nigella seeds in an organic/diet shop in town. I'd spent the last week trying to find nigella, having identified them variously as onion seed, kalonji, and black cumin. People mainly just looked at me strangely when I asked if they had it- I tried Globus, Manor, Coop... Then on Saturday morning I bumped into my best friend in town, told her what I was looking for, and she suggested an Asian shop up near Placette (sorry- Manor!). So I went there on Monday morning. No luck, but I did find that it has all sorts of things that I had no idea I could find around here- such as tamarind. I've been reading recipes with tamarind in them for a couple of years now, but always assumed that it hadn't made it to Switzerland yet. Serves me right for not poking around more! However, on the way to the shop, I walked past the above-mentioned organic shop, so I stepped in there on the off chance. I found all sorts of other things there too, such as teff (to make injera with- I've only had injera once, but I loved it), and dulse. Will bear the two shops in mind in future!

So that was my final ingredient for the chutney. I've been making chutney on and off for about two weeks now. It started off with a white peach, ginger and chili chutney which I made up due to having too many white peaches that were turning too fast to mold. I put two red chilis in there, making it lethally hot- hence the single pot was handed over to my parents with instructions to let it mature for a few weeks! Since then, I've made it again, with yellow peaches and only one chili.

Ingredients:
- peaches
- mustard seeds
- chili
- red wine vinegar
- onion (I think)
- brown sugar

Chop peaches, without skinning them, put in large enamel casserole dish, simmer until softened, add the other ingredients, simmer until thick. No doubt not at all the right way to make it, but sometimes you just make things up as you go along...

Having made a watermelon and feta salad for a family party, I remembered reading about watermelon rind pickles. I then spent a few days trying to round up what I needed for that- and now have two jars sitting maturing in the cupboard. Not so sure how that's going to go. They look... interesting. Probably more interesting than tasty. But I might be pleasantly surprised. I more or less used this recipe.

The tomato chutney, I had an urge towards making due to the farm around the corner selling some glorious big red tomatoes that looked absolutely yummy. And we've been meaning to start buying fruit and vegetables in the village anyway- can't get less food miles than that! Assuming that it would be "cooler" at about 16h, I waited until then, popped Greta on my back, and walked down the road.

It may have been cooler than earlier... but it was still incredibly hot, about 32C. Thank goodness it was only a 3 minute shuffle, or we would have melted away, leaving nothing but a pile of clothes and a baby carrier on the road.

The farmer's wife (why do we always assume she's the farmer's wife and not the farmer herself?) was having a nap, but a little old lady who turned out to be my neighbour-from-across-the-road hauled herself out of the shade of a parasol under a tree to sell me three kilos of tomatoes for very cheap, and have a chat about who she knew in my building. I'd have loved to stay and be friendly, but we were standing right in the sun, and although I'd smeared Greta with sunblock before coming out, I wasn't happy about it. Besides that I was also slowly wilting!

So we said our goodbyes, Greta waving politely, and walked back home. Of course, I wanted to start up my chutney immediately, as you do when you've finally got all your ingredients together, but Greta got very clingy and didn't want put down when we got back. I managed to measure spices out and tip them into a bowl, ditto the sugar, and I even managed to par-cook and then skin 2 kg of tomatoes (1 kg saved for salads and sandwiches), which was pretty impressive with only one hand. But then, as I've discovered since having Greta- most things can be done with one hand. Including breaking and separating eggs. As long as you don't mind egg white all over your fingers!

After she went to bed, I had a final review of my two source recipes. I'd picked this recipe from Becks and Posh, and another from allrecipes, and had decided to pretty much meld the two.

Ingredients:
- olive oil
- 2 tsp brown mustard seeds
- 2 tsp nigella seeds
- 2 tsp fennel seeds (a leap of faith, this, as I dislike anise flavour intensely!)
- 2 tsp cumin seeds
- 6-8 cloves garlic, chopped finely
- 2 inches ginger root, chopped finely (I put the ginger and the garlic through the mini-chopper together)
- 1 cup golden raisins (which was too many- it should have been about half)
- 4 dried red chilis (not quite dried- I used ones I bought in a pack a few weeks ago when I was making a proper red Thai fish curry, and hadn't used these ones, so they've been sitting out drying)
- 1 tsp piment d'Espelette
- 2 cups organic cane sugar
- 2 1/2 cups apple vinegar
- 2 kg tomatoes

I heated the oil, added the spices and chilis, stirred, left a minute or two, then added the garlic and ginger, stirred that around briefly, then added the vinegar followed by the sugar. Stirred until the sugar had dissolved, then added the tomatoes and the sultanas. I simmered the pot for just under two hours. Becks and Posh said that it should be sloppy, and it was. Much sloppier than I had thought it would be, even with the warning! I spooned out one half litre into a jar, then the two 250ml jars, then did another half litre, and that was it. Inverted the jars, left for a bit, then labelled them with these great labels that dissolve in the dishwater, and left them to cool over night.

I'm now contemplating either plum or greengage jam (or both) with vanilla. Probably based on this recipe from Chez Pim.

Easy Summer Fruits Cake

2009-08-15T20:47:00.000+02:00

We had a birthday party to go to today. The son of a friend- said friend said we could only come "If Heidi bakes a cake". And since I'd been looking at this recipe from Everybody loves sandwiches, I decided to make that. Only with my usual tweaks. First of all, as strawberries were out of season, I used peaches. And second, since I have no idea what canola oil is (rape-seed oil?), I used about 150g melted butter instead. I forgot to put the lemon zest in... and I put a tablespoon and a half of vanilla in. Because I wasn't paying attention!

The batter wasn't as thick as advertised, which was a shame, as I'd saved a sliced peach to go on top, and it just sank into the batter. Not so bad, as my presentation skills are, not to put too fine a point on it, pretty crappy, and something I really need to work on.

I also managed to put my thumb in the top of the cake when I took it out of the mould. Not the end of the world, but inconvenient.

I handed the cake over when we got there. I'd had to put it in a covered dish for the transport, so the top wasn't crunchy any more... but it was still devoured. Two people asked me for the recipe, and several people asked what was in it. One guy was convinced that there were several types of fruit in it, and was surprised when I said there were just peaches. And another thought there was almond in it (now that's a thought for next time).

It turned out to be a very moist, very soft cake. Not one that would age well, I don't think- definitely one that would need eaten within two days of baking at the outside. I'll definitely be making it again!

(Apologies for no pictures- I'm new at the food blogging!)

Easiest Cake In The Galaxy
1 cup flour
1 tbs baking powder
3/4 cup sugar
2 eggs
150g melted butter
1 1/2 tbs vanilla
5 peaches (or equivalent in other juicy fruit!)
1 tbs sugar

Preheat oven to 175C. In a large bowl, stir the sugar into the melted butter. Add eggs, stir to combine. Add flour and baking powder, stir. Add fruit so that it bulks up a bit, because it looks like there's not much there! But don't worry. Butter and flour an 8 or 9 inch cake pan and add in batter. Maybe decorate the top with fruit (hoping). Sprinkle with sugar to make a crunchy top. Bake for 1 hr or until a cake tester inserted comes out clean.

Heidi, Peter and Greta make their bows

2009-08-14T20:44:00.000+02:00

My name is most definitely not Heidi. I do not live in a farm on an Alp, nor do I live with a grouchy grandfather. I do, however, live in Switzerland. In a small, wine-growing, farming village; from my kitchen window, I can see goats and orchards- from my living-room window, I look across the road at the village school, behind which vineyards cover a steep hill going down to the train station. On one side of the house, it's the edge of the village- on the other, the centre. It's that small.

I live with my husband, whom I'm going to horrify by referring to as Peter (just to continue the Heidi idea- in case you've never read it, Peter was the goatherd), and our little daughter, whom I'm going to call Greta, because it's Germanic and fits with the other two names.

We moved to the village about four months ago, in April 2009. Before, we were living in an apartment in the growing suburbs of our Swiss city. A very nice apartment, but with a kitchen, alas, in one corner of the living room. An "open kitchen".

I hate open kitchens. Every time you fry an onion, you have to run around closing doors, or your pillow smells of fried onions. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but isn't always desirable. And as every good recipe (in my book) starts with "chop an onion"...

Peter, having a Lyonnaise grandmother, would point out that every good recipe then continues with "add 250g butter, half a bottle of white wine, half a litre of cream, then figure out what you're going to cook tonight", but then he doesn't cook. He just eats. Fortunately for me, he's actually quite happy with a salad for dinner too.

Greta, to our occasional despair, would probably say, if she were suddenly to figure out how to talk, "who needs all that stuff, take it away, just add garlic!" Our baby girl has a passion for garlic. Regular baby food, such as mashed potato, banana, apple sauce, is rejected with a wave of the hand that sends it hurtling to the floor, and any spoonful that has tricked its way into her mouth (nasty tricksy things, Mamas are) is spat out with disgust, as likely as not accompanied by wails and howls of despair, angst, and suffering.

Give her half a pot of Boursin, or Tartare, and she's very happy. When I make her risotto or pasta, I find myself adding 5 to 6 cloves of garlic... Come to think of it, after I portion it all out, she usually ends up with at least a clove of garlic per meal.

She is also very fond of radishes (the ones that make you sneeze, they're so strong), garlic sausage, raw carrots, and very expensive, well-aged cheese. Oh, and black chocolate. Milk chocolate, not so much, but she'll tolerate it. And she does love her Petit Suisses. After all, she is a little Swiss Miss!

As for me... well, other than fennel or anything that is aniseed-flavoured, I'll eat anything. But, oddly, I'd rather cook. Cook, and watch people eat what I cooked!

Hence this blog, which I hope will be a good record of what we eat.

We eat pretty healthily as it is- a lot of organic food (relatively cheap and very easy to find here), I try to not buy anything that has been shipped further than North Africa (but I do sometimes slip up), pretty seasonally (I don't buy apples in summer, for example), and, now that we've moved to the village and there are a number of farms selling their own produce... with the smallest number of food miles! None of this is really for health reasons- it's just that this is the food that we're both happy to eat.

I've also started foraging- blackberries from down by the river, mirabelles, apples, damsons and plums from trees growing wild nearby. I'm hoping to be able to pick mushrooms in autumn, but I will definitely be taking them to be identified by somebody who knows what they're doing.

As I was able to design my own kitchen (within certain limits!), I was able to cater to some long-cherished fantasies, and have put in a humungous freezer. And a similar fridge- here in Switzerland, most refrigerators are big enough for a litre of milk, a litre of juice, a hunk of cheese, a carton of eggs... and a lettuce takes up a whole shelf! Refrigerators for a person and a half! As long as they don't like cooking. So my new fridge is a joy, being taller than I am... and the freezer ditto, as I can now cook for Greta and freeze individual portions (instead of trying to fit half a portion down the side of the ice-cubes).

How do I cook? I cook a lot of vegetable-based meals- we're not vegetarians, but I tend to do one big meat meal every week, on a Sunday, and hope to extend it out over a few days. In the winter, this is often something like boeuf bourguignon, blanquette de veau... In the summer, more roast chicken. We eat a lot of pastas, a lot of risottos. In summer, a lot of salads for dinner- with Peter's only contribution to the cooking, an absolute gift for making the perfect dressing, and without measuring anything!

We hope to entertain more now that we have a bigger home, so there will be recipes there. I try to surprise our guests with dishes that they wouldn't expect- either going the very traditional route, as the above-mentioned recipes show, or going quite in the other direction! Being "anglo-saxon", most people around here expect me to be an atrocious cook (prejudice is alive and kicking!)- but our friends know that I'm really not that bad.

Especially when it comes to baking. I'm good at cakes. And I love to bake. Not that it does me much good- Peter isn't interested in "sweets"- he by far prefers savoury. Last weekend we went to a birthday party for a two-year old, whose father had invited us "on condition that Heidi bakes a cake". My cake was devoured, two people asked me for the recipe- and Peter didn't even bother trying it. Oh well- his loss!

I don't bake bread- I have in the past, when we lived in the Caribbean and I could only find steam-baked sandwich bread (which always tasted as though it had had sugar added to it!), and I might start again.

So you can expect a good hodge-podge, with links and photos where I can fit them in, of everything from Christmas pudding (I'm planning to make my own this year), to baby/toddler meals, and the occasional restaurant meal.