Feeding the Beast

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.

Strawberries in April. Dumb, or what?

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...

Too much beef

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.

Garlic for Greta

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 for little ones, quinoa for grown-ups

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

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

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.