Brown Bread Ice Ceam

I was in Scotland for the second time 10 years ago with a friend. We rented a car and drove from Edinburgh up north to the Speyside to visit various Whisky distilleries. We stayed a bit in Dufftown in a B&B. It was September but very rainy. In the evening we looked for a restaurant to eat. We found a place and were the only guests. Food was awesome and we saw that she made all kinds of jams and salad dressings herself.

The following evening we were looking forward to eat there again. But no sign was outside. But some light was seen in the back. We tried the door and it opened. She told us, she wanted to clean the oven and closed the restaurant. We begged her to be served.
The proprietress was very nice and made us a great salmon dinner.

For dessert was Brown Bread Ice Cream. It did not sound so appetising , but I tried it. Later I pestered the lady to give me the recipe. My understanding of the Scottish burr was not so good, but I caught the most of it. At home I tried it once and changed some bits to my liking. Then I forgot about the recipe.

On Christmas I saw some travel report about Scotland and Dufftown was mentioned.
I remembered the great food in the restaurant there and the ice cream came back. I looked for the recipe, I must have chucked it out.
A What´s App to my friend and she started to search for the recipe and got lucky.

recipe for 4:
80 g brown bread, I used fresh walnut bread from the local bakery
80 g soft Cantuccini biscuits
400 g double cream
150 g Greek yogurt
1/2 tsp vanilla paste
2 egg white
pinch of salt
2 tbsp Scottish whisky
3 tbsp icing sugar
50 g medium brown sugar

Preheat the oven to 180 C.
Rip the bread slices in small pieces and sprinkle the brown sugar on top.
Put in the oven  for 10-15 min.

Break the Cantuccini up and soak them with Whisky.
Put both breads into a small mixer and make a finer crumb.

In a stand mixer beat the double cream with the icing sugar to soft peaks, add the vanilla paste.
In an other bowl the egg whites with a little salt to stiff peaks.
Bring that together with the yogurt and fill it into the ice cream maker.

Let it run until soft ice cream stage is reached. Mix in both bread crumbs and put into a freezer box and freeze for several hours.

Okonomiyaki Osaka style

I know, I know , it is not truly the Osaka style.

But some ingredients are hard to find here and as always I love to make recipes my own way. I still have Savoy cabbage to eat and that is the reason for this Japanese pancake.
Usually a type of root vegetable is used for the batter that makes it very slimy. The root contains some kind of ooze, when it is grated. Ask someone here and they all shake their heads. Bonito flakes are not easily found here too.

Instead of the root I added some starch and hoped for the best.
The Tyrolian bacon is very well seasoned and smoked, a great ingredient instead of uncooked pork belly.

Recipe:
100 g flour
25 g corn starch
2 eggs
125 ml dashi stock
1/4 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp  salt
1/2 tsp sugar
3 tbsp soup pancake crisps aka tempura bits
1 tbsp sushi ginger
oil

Savoy cabbage
Tyrolian smoked bacon
Ao noori
okonomiyaki sauce
Kewpie mayo
Spring onions

Mix flour, corn flour, salt, sugar and baking powder, add dashi stock and eggs.
Stir in the batter bits and the ginger.
Cut up the cabbage in fine pieces and stir it in.
Cover and set aside to rest for one hour.
I seasoned it with a little more salt and sanycho pepper.

Use a wide non stick pan that has a lid.
Heat up some oil.
Drop the cabbage and batter mix in the pan and take two spatulas to press it together into a circle.
Close the lid and cook on medium to low for 5 min. Check if the bottom does not get to dark.
Place the bacon strips on top and flip with the help of the two spatulas.
Close the lid and give it good 3 min more.
Flip back and check for the batter if it is set.
Take it out of the pan, bacon side up and pour Okonomiyaki sauce on first, then Kewpie mayo.
Sprinkle with Ao Noori and spring onion greens.

Potato Waffles with Shrimp Salad

On St. Stephen´s Day I often prepare Waffles. It is a light meal after the Christmas dinners.

This time I wanted to make something that goes well with a shrimp salad. Sweet waffles were no option. I checked for other savoury ones.


There are a lot waffles with potatoes, but they often contain bacon. I wanted some without the bacon.

The green tinge comes from the parsley that is blended with the shallot and sour cream. I found a recipe that had blended spring onion greens in and that gave the tinge.
But parsley works well instead.

Cooked mashed and cooled down potatoes as a base. Sour cream as part of the liquid together with 2 eggs.  A bit of flour, baking powder, salt and pepper, parsley and one shallot and a hand full of grated Emmental cheese .

ingredients:
320 g cooked mashed potatoes, cooled
1 shallot
20 g parsley
120 g sour cream
salt and pepper
80 g flour
1 tsp baking powder
2 eggs
50 g Emmental cheese

Mix half of the sour cream with the parsley and shallot.
Get all ingredients together and make a thick batter.
Let it rest for 20 min.
Butter or oil the waffle iron.
Bake about 6 waffles.

Shrimp Salad:
Use cooked and peeled artic sea shrimp. Make a sauce or buy a ready made shrimp cocktail.
Add a fine sliced red apple and some parsley. Season with pepper.

Goose Breast with Mulled Wine Sauce

Goose is one of the traditional meats eaten here in Germany on Christmas.

Many people buy the birds frozen at the supermarket. These geese are often sourced in Poland or Hungary. There they are often force fed and the feathers are plugged while the birds are alive. When you look for organic raised birds, it is wise to look close to home.

I bought my piece of goose breast at my local butcher. They get them from a farm near by and they are raised in the open. But that means, you pay 4 times the price to the supermarket ones. But it is worth it!

I did not need a whole goose breast. I just wanted to eat some today. I was lucky to get a quarter of a goose breast. With all the fat I rendered from it, I can prepare lots of roasted potatoes and red cabbage in the next year. Yum.

But first came the mulled wine or Glühwein sauce.

recipe:
3 tsp sugar
125 ml red wine
zest of a lemon
juice of 1/2 lemon
1 cinnamon stick
3 cloves
1 tbsp brown rum

Make a light brown caramel, add the wine and let the sugar dissolve again, add the spices and take it off the heat. When it has cooled down, add the rum.


The time in the oven depends on the size of the goose breast. Whole breasts have between 800 to 1200 g. That means 1 hour to render down the fat from the skin, and 2 - 3 hours for the meat itself.
Since I had only a 265 g slice of breast, the cooking time went down a lot.

It is necessary to put the breast skin side down into the oven proof dish. Best is on a rack. But a small portion in a small dish is complicated to find a rack. I helped myself by building a trivet. When you have carrots, use these. I only had an apple and that went well. I cut the apple in halves and put that skin side up in the baking dish. The salted breast went skin side down on the apples.
After 50 min on 180 C I took the dish out and scooped all the fat out and seasoned the breast again with salt and pepper and poured the mulled wine in.
I put it back into the oven for 25 min.
You can bind the sauce with some potato starch and water.

Korean Oxtail Soup or Sokkoritang

This is a recipe from my favourite Korean YouTuber Maangchi.
As always, I made my own version of it.

I saw the video a couple of weeks ago and I knew I had to make this soon. This is Christmas Eve here in Germany, the day the presents are given and the kids get bright eyes waiting for the Christkind ( Child of Christ). No Santa Claus with the sleigh and the reindeer's. Well, it gets mixed up here a lot now. Santa is taking over the old traditions.

Since I have time to cook, I don' t do the traditional potato salad and wieners as others do. I started to prepare most of the dish yesterday. It needed time to cool and set.
I have to reheat the degreased soup later, set up the rice cooker and prep the dip. And the egg omelet.

I am eating this alone. So instead of the oxtail I bought a calves tail. Veal is much softer and needed less cooking time.

Recipe:
750 g calves tail
1 daikon radish
5 cloves of garlic
6 cm white of a leek
1 bay leave
Salt and pepper

Dip
2 tbsp dark soy sauce
1 tsp sesame oil
1 tsp Korean hot pepper flakes
1 tsp Gouchujang red pepper paste
1 tsp Chinese black vinegar
Sesame seeds

Sides
3 spring onions
Pickled savoy cabbage

2 eggs
pinch of Dashi stock powder
2 tbsp carbonated water
olive oil
salt and pepper

2 cups Jasmin rice

Soak the meat in cold water for 2 hours to get out the impurities.
Wash it and take off excess fat.
Put it in a big enough pot for the soup later. Add just enough water to cover it and bring it to a boil.
Reduce the heat and blanche it for 15 min.
Drain, get the scum off the meat and clean the pot thoroughly.
Get the meat back in.
Peel the radish and cut it into 2 inch pieces. Clean the leek and cut it in halves. 4 huge cloves of garlic get roughly chopped and all these ingredients together with the bay leaf into the pot. Pour in enough water to cover it all, season with a bit of salt and pepper.
Bring to a boil, reduce the heat and cover it with a lid. Cook for 90 min.
Get the meat and the large pieces of veg out and cover it and let it cool down.
Cool down the soup as well. The best is over night. Skim the fat off and reheat it.
warm up the meat and veggies in the soup.
Cook the Jasmin rice.
Make the dip.
Chop some spring onions
Cook the omelet and cut it up.

Polenta with Savoy Cabbage

This is one part of my Christmas dinner.

I recommend it to prepare it in the fall, when savoy cabbage is at its best. I am not a huge fan of polenta. I haven´t made it in years. But the combination with the cabbage inside and the bake in a pan with some Grana Padano made it very good. I will make this recipe again with other meat or veg sauce soon.

I saw the polenta recipe on the TV a while ago. Chef Andreas Hülsmann made it, but with other main dishes. The recipe stuck to my brain and I knew I wanted to prepare it. For me the part of the goose was the perfect partner for the dish.

You can prepare it hours before you need to finish it. It takes time to cool down completely to set.

Baking it in a pan later does not take much time and you can make it while you finish the rest of your meal.

recipe for 3:
125 g polenta corn meal
3 times the volume in good veggie stock
150 g shredded savoy cabbage
3 spring onions
1 tbsp oil
salt and pepper
nutmeg
50 ml veggie stock.

Prepare the cabbage first. Cut out the middle stem of the leaves and wash them. Set a whole bunch of leaves over an other and cut 1 cm strips.
Chop the onion and start it in the oil in a pan.
Add the cabbage, season it well and stir a couple of times.
Add the stock, close the lid and reduce the heat to medium low.
Cook for 20 min and stir a couple of times.

In a pot heat up the veggie stock and stir in the polenta, mixing nicely.
Reduce the heat to simmer and stir often and then reduce the heat to low and cover it with a lid.
Let it rest for 10 min.

Stir in the savoy cabbage and transfer to a plate about 1 inch high. Cool down completely.

Cut into strips or rectangles and fry in a pan, add some Grana Padano cheese and finish.

Button Mushrooms with herby cream dip

Leftovers to the table please.

I had 220 g of white large button mushrooms sitting in the veg drawer of my fridge since Saturday.
They were still in great condition and needed to be eaten and not going to waste.

Here in my hometown we have a large summer festival in downtown called the Heinerfest. It is a nightmare for all car drivers who are banned from driving through the city for 10 days. Lots of backed up traffic during rush hours is the result. But we all do not want to get the festival out of the inner part of the city. So we curse about the congestion and stick with it.

One food truck there sells portions of cooked champignons. Button mushrooms in large frying pans with some onions, garlic and herbs. The food truck is on the festival every year and more or less on the same spot.
They sell the mushrooms with a herby cream sauce. With all the other foodstuff you can get there, it is something quite nostalgic.

ingredients:
220 g button mushrooms
2 spring onions
1 clove of garlic
1 tbsp oil
salt and pepper
parsley
chili flakes
50 ml veg stock

dip
50 g curd
mixed fresh herbs
salt and pepper
20 g sour cream

Mousse au Chocolat - French style

There are so many light versions and easy versions for the Mousse au Chocolat. You can buy lots of these at the supermarkets. Some are tasty, most are just boring. But the old fashioned way of preparing it yourself with the best quality of ingredients is more my way.

The last time I prepared that recipes I lived in an other town and did not have a dishwasher. I used a plethora of bowls and utensils and I wrote a comment on the side of the recipe: absolutely decadent, but wait to make it again until you have a dishwasher.
I waited more than 20 years, because I have a dishwasher for as long as that.

I have an old French cookbook that has got yellow tinted pages over the years. I checked it for some Christmas recipes and found my note. That inspired me to make the Mousse au Chocolat for the festive season.

Now I have finished it and the jars with the Mousse are outside on the balcony to chill. 6 C is the best temperature and I do not need to stuff my fridge with them. And the dishwasher is loaded and ready to start.

recipe for 5 jars:
150 g 85 % dark chocolate
70 g patissier´s milk chocolate
75 g unsalted butter
3 medium size very fresh eggs
250 g double cream
pinch of salt
3 tbsp sugar
1 tbsp Brandy or Cognac

1/2 lemon

Fill a small pot with 1/3  of water and bring to a boil, reduce the heat to medium.
Use a metal bowl and set it on top. Be careful, that the bottom of the bowl is not touching the water.

Break the chocolates in pieces and cut up the butter.
Let it melt slowly and stir some times. Take it off the heat.
Add the Brandy to the chocolate and stir.

While the chocolate is melting, separate the eggs. 
In a bowl add egg yolks and sugar and with a whisk beat it until white and creamy.
Add the sugar egg mix to the chocolate. Stir softly.


In a stand mixer beat the double cream until you get soft peaks.
Mix into the chocolate.

In an other bowl for the stand mixer press in the lemon juice and clean the bowl and the whisk to prevent fat to get in the egg white. Dry the bowl and beat the egg whites until stiff.
First add 1/3 of the egg white to the chocolate and stir, now fold the rest in completely.

Fill into jars and chill.
Slurp the rest of the Mousse out of the bowl and pack all the stuff into the dishwasher. 
Finished!

Mashed Potatoes and Mustard Soup

Do you like mustard as much as I do?

From all the condiments my all time favourite is mustard. There are so many different kinds. My friends know that and when they bring something from a holiday trip, it is often mustard or honey. My other favourite.

I have an apple and mustard soup already on the blog, but this recipe is a total different kind.
Instead of a roux, the soup gets its structure from the mashed potatoes.
The leek is a great combination with the potatoes, they dissolve and the strips of leek stay intact.

I used 4 different kinds of mustard. A Bavarian sweet mustard with Weizen beer , a Dijon and a Dijon à l'Ancienne or whole grain muxtard. A bottle of Heinz American mustard was the last one.

The best thing is that I did not have to throw out the small leftover bowl of mashed potatoes.
Not enough to be a side for an other dish, or a lunch break. I could have warmed it in the microwave and spread it on bread
But not for breakfast on a Sunday morning.

Now I found an other way to use it.

Recipe:
150 g mashed potatoes cold
10 cm leek
20 g butter
400 ml veggie stock
3 Tbsp whipped cream
Nutmeg
Salt and pepper
2 Tbsp  wholegrain mustard
1 Tbsp Heinz American mustard
3 Tsp sweet Bavarian mustard
2 Tsp Dijon mustard
Mixed seeds toasted

In a pot heat up the butter and saute the chopped leek for 5 min. Add the mashed potatoes. Pour over the stock and heat it up.

Air Fryer Chicken Wings

I am getting my work out with my newest addition of kitchen gadgets. I had some thinking to do, what kind of thing that is and how it actually works.

Air frying sounded like a kind of deep fat fryer you take the oil out and magically it fries the food.
But no, it has really nothing to do with a deep fat fryer. The thing works like a convector oven, you will find in restaurant kitchens in bigger dimensions. Very hot air circulates in a closed off compartment. That cooks the food. And yes, you need just a tiny amount of fat for it.

The last Saturday before Christmas is the day for me to get most of my food for the 3 Christmas days. I hate to get to the supermarkets on the last day, it is crowded, people are stressed and it is no fun.
I plan ahead and got my stuff today. The only things I will by on Christmas eve are fresh bread, flowers and a some fresh fruits.
When you see the shopping carts here, you could imagine that there is no chance to buy any food until the new year. Or that all these shoppers have very large families.

Chicken wings are so easy to prepare at a short notice. Cooking them in a pan does not offer the same crispiness as deep frying them. Now in comes my new Air Fryer.

I saw Chef John make chicken wings and he added some baking soda to the wings. I had to try that today. With the potato flour and the baking soda the wings got a very crispy skin.

recipe:
6 chicken wings
2 tbsp potato starch
1 tsp baking soda
garlic granulates
salt and pepper

dressing:
3 tbsp soy sauce
2 tsp sesame oil
2 tsp rice vinegar
1 tsp Agave syrup
1,5 tsp Korean Gouchoujang
toasted sesame seeds
chives

Separate the chicken wings in two pieces ans take the tips off.
Salt and pepper next.
Place them in a bowl and add garlic, potato starch and bakind soda.
Let them sit for a couple of minutes.
Chuck them into the Air Fryer and cook for 20 -25 min, turning them after 10 min.

Prepare the dressing and pour it over the wings, add sesame seeds and chives.