Beef in Red Wine

Goulash in all it´s different forms is something you will find in many restaurants through out the country and on many Sunday dinner tables.

Often prepared with pork or a mix of pork and beef, often only with beef. But you can find it with turkey as well. lamb as goulash is rare here in Germany.
Very popular are the Hungarian Goulash here, but that is called Pörkölt in Hungary. Lots of paprika and onions are the base to that.
The other version is from France and made with red wine. The most famous one is Boeuf Bourguignon á la Chef Bocuse. That recipe is on my blog too.

Recipe:
400 g organic beef for braising
150 g tomatoes
2 carrots
1 12 cm piece of white leek
1/2 bunch parsley
1 onion
2 spring onion
3 cloves if garlic
2 tbsp hot tomato paste
1 tbsp tomato paste
650 ml red wine
200 ml water
50 ml Jim Beam
2 tbsp flour
2 tbsp ghee
1 red chili
2 bay leaves
Salt and pepper
1 tsp herbes de Provence

Peel and chop the veggies.
Salt the cubes of beef.
Heat up the ghee and on high heat sear the beef cubes all around.
Add the onions and garlic and both tomato pastes.

Stir well and roast a bit more, sprinkle the flour on top. Stir and add the rest if rhe veggies.
First the Jim Beam then the red wine and water.

Bring to a boil and reduce to simmer and cook for 2 hours.
Add some parsley and serve with pasta, rice or potatoes.

Paneer Tikka Masala

It is rare to get Paneer in a supermarket here. In the Asia Go Supermarket I got lucky.

Now I was looking for a new way to prepare it.
Tikka Masala usually is prepared with chicken
The vegetarian version is as good.

I watched an Indian couple of YT preparing it. Since I do not have all the spice blends, I made my own version of the dish.

I grow some chilies on my balcony. I harvest them when they are bright red and dry them. But I needed a green chili this time. I picked one and tried a little piece of it. Very fruity with a nice kick to it.

Recipe for 2:
1 red bell pepper
2 medium tomatoes
1 medium onion
200g Paneer
175 g Greek yogurt 10%
3 cloves of garlic
1/2 tsp salt
1 knob ginger
1 lemon juiced
1 tsp coriander powder
1/2 tsp tumeric
1 tsp garam masala
1/2 tsp cumin
1 tsp chili
2 tsp olive oil

1/2 cup tomato passata
1 tsp potato starch in water
1/2 cup double cream
2 tbsp olive oil
1 cinnamon stick
4 cloves
3 cardamom pods
1/2 tsp salt
1 fresh green chili
Coriander chopped
1/4 tsp ground fenugreek
1/4 tsp ground ginger

Marinate the paneer first:
Cut up everything into bite size pieces and in a bowl combine the upper ingredients well and cover and let it sit for 20 minutes.

In a wide pan in oil fry off the pieces until the paneer gets some colour. Do it in two or three batches.
In a pot heat up oil and toss in cinnamon, cloves, cardamom and green chili. Give it 2 min and add the tomato sauce. When it cooks, add cream and potato starch. Season and pir in the paneer vegetable mix.
Stir well and reheat, add ginger powder and fenugreek and some fresh coriander.

Serve with Naan or bread.

Matcha Coconut Rice

I wanted something sweet and creamy on this hot late August day.

Pancake or sweet rice, always difficult to choose. I wanted to prepare a meal without a lot of hassle. Cooking in the Thermomix means reducing the hassle by 80%.
I used thick coconut cream and added the same amount of whole milk. The texture is wonderfully creamy even when the rice retains its light bite. Use some good risotto rice for this dish.

I finished the rice with an egg yolk and 1 tbsp of yuzu.

Recipe:
180 g Carneroli Risotto Rice
400 ml coconut cream
400 ml whole milk
pinch of salt
1 Tbsp vanilla sugar
2 Tbsp brown sugar
40 g butter
1 tsp Matcha powder
1 Egg yolk
1 Tbsp yuzu

Get the butter in the Thermomix and add the washed rice, close the lid and on 100 C on speed 2 cook for 2 min.
Add salt, sugar, vanilla sugar, coconut and milk and close the lid.
On 90 C and backwards speed 1 cook for 20 min.
Open and sprinkle the matcha tea through a fine sieve over it.
Close the lid and cook for 15 min more.

Tomato Harvest

This years tomato harvest starts late. The plants in the garden without any protection have suffered a bit. The seedlings were late to grow.  The ups and downs with the heatwaves have done their part too.
But now it has finally started on all 12 plants.

Since the last 2 years I develloped an allergie to raw tomatoes. That is so mean! I am looking forward to eat my own grown tomatoes all year long. The tastes are so much better and the different kinds are so unique. The Supermarket veriaty is no nearly as good.

I have to come up with different ways to use my tomatoes. I can eat just a hand full of tomatoes some days in the week. The others have to be processed.
Tomato sauce time will come soon.

But I spurched yesterday with a plate of different coloured and sizes of tomato. With a bit of leftover arugula salad and olives. They went into a Tapenade or olive paste. The combination with Fresh tomatoes works great.

I bought some Chinese Chili Pickle Sauce in a bottle. The taste is strongly of Chinese Shaoxing cooking wine with chili flavour.
I added sugar and salt and a little white wine vinegar to it and cooked it for 1 min..

My cherry tomatoes went in a pot with boiling water for 60 seconds. I  poked some holes into them with a needle. They went in 2 jars. The liquid on top and I closed the lids.

Chicken in Lee Kum Kee Soy Sauce

I went to our Asia Go Supermarket today and loaded up my shopping cart
I wanted  the Lee Kum Kee Products and did not find them on the shelfs
But I needed Dark Soy Sauce and some Premium Soy Sauce. I found a special offer in a sealed bag with 3 bottles. At home when I unpacked it, I was very surprised to find 3 bottles of the brand I was looking for.

The aromas from cooking were filling my whole place. The ingredient I used mostly was spring onions. The other was ginger.

The ginger sauce with the Szechuan oil on top was my favourit.

Recipe for 4:
1 chicken
2 Tbsp oil
2 inch knob of ginger
6 large spring onions
2 star anise
1/2 cup Chinese cooking wine
3/4 cup Lee Kum Kee Premium Soy Sauce
3/4 cup Lee Kum Kee dark soy sauce
1/2 cup sugar
1 tsp salt
5 cups water

Ginger onion sauce:
5 tbsp grated ginger
3 cloves of grated garlic
6 large spring onions
1 tbsp red pepper flakes
6 Szechuan pepper corns
4 tbsp rapeseed oil
1 tbsp sesame oil

Separate the chicken in two halves and look for a pot where you can submerge both pieces in liquid.
Cut the ginger in thin slices and cut the spring onions in rings.
Heat up 2 tbsp of oil and fry the ginger until it turns a little brown. Add the spring onions and give them a minute. Pour in the cooking wine and bring it to a boil and reduce the alcohol for 3 min.

Now get in the 2 kinds of soy sauce,water, sugar, salt and star anise. Bring to a boil and cook for 5 min. Submerge the 2 chicken pieces, bring back to boil and cook for 40 min.


Get the chicken out and let it rest for 10 min. Cook some rice.

While the chicken is cooking, prepare the ginger sauce. Finely grate all the ginger and garlic. Finely chop the spring onions. Press the ginger garlic mix through a fine sieve over the onions and add some Chili pepper flakes.

In a small pan heat up the 2 oils with the Szechuan pepper corns. When it starts to smoke, pour in through the sieve over the onion pepper ginger mix. It will sizzle.
Serve with the rice.

Apricot filled Curd Dumplings

Rolled in ground poppy seeds and icing sugar with a bit of melted butter. In Austria you would call them Topfenknödel

That was too long for the title, but it describes the whole dish.

On my way home from work I was going through the Rolo Deck of my inner food storage and "found" some apricots on the way to spoil, a package of curd that was good until today and a bit of everything else. I do not mind, if food goes over the shelf life. I have eyes, nose and a good sense of food to know if I can eat it still. But the apricots in the container looked a bit sad and I had to chuck the bottom ones into the organic waste. The rest got thoroghly washed and went on the chopping board.

I made apricot filled dumplings before. They were coated in potato dough. This curd and flour dough is a lot less manageble  than the other one. Very sticky.

recipe for 6 dumplings:
3 large apricots
250 g curd
120 g flour
30 g semolina duro
1 egg or 4 quail eggs
1 package of Dr.Oetcker vanilla pudding powder
flour for the board
salt
butter
ground poppy seeds
icing sugar
cinnamon

In a bowl mix curd, flour, semolina, vanilla pudding, egg to a soft dough.
Flour your hands and press a 6th of the dough and put one half of an apricot inside. Close it and wait until all are rolled.

In a large pot with salted water bring the dumplings to a boil. Be careful, they should stick to the bottom, just swirl them around. When the dumplings are floating, they need 8 min until they are done.

Drain them and toss them through the poppy seeds. Pour melted butter on top.

Apricot Tart with Rosemary

When I bought ready made French Tarte Brisee dough on my last grocery shopping trip over the border, I wanted to bake a mirabelle tart. But this year is not a mirabelle year. But you can get apricots everywhere, but mirabelle are nowhere to be found.
I changed plans and baked a French tarte aux Apricot et Rosmarin.

To get no soggy bottom, it is essencial to blind bake the dough first.

recipe for a rectangular baking dish:
1 premade shortcrust dough
6-8 apricots
200 g Greek yogurt
80 ml double cream
2 tbsp rosmary needles
Ground vanilla bean
60 g sugar
2 medium free range eggs

Heat up your oven to 175 C.
In a small pot heat up the cream with the Rosemary. When it boils, take it off the heat and let it sit 5 min.
Butter the baking dish
Fit in the dough and put holes in it with a fork.
Place baking paper on top and ceramic beans.

Bake for 12 min.
Discard the beans and the paper.
Make the filling and clean the apricots.
Pour in the filling and set the halves of the apricots on top.

Bake for 25-30 min. Cool down and get it out of the baking dish.

Merlot Spaghetti - or drunken Spaghetti

Consider it a meal you wont drive a car afterwards.

I saw that last Friday on the German version of "Come dine with me". 5 people from the Tessin Region of southern Switzerland cooked. It was the first time the show was at the Lago Maggiore.
The last candidate served the drunken spaghetti as a first course at the dinner.

The moment I watched it, it was pretty clear I had to recreate it. I bought two different Italian Merlot bottles. One had one Liter wine in it. Since you need 750 ml to cook the pasta, there was still something left to drink with it. Good or bad idea!

The preparation is easy and wont take much time. That is great, when you have a couple of people around the table and don´t want them wait too long for the first course.

The Gimmick of that presentation was the pasta in a wine glass. Steamed up and great to look at.

But serving it straight on a serving plate will do too.

recipe for 5:
400 g of Spaghetti
750 ml Merlot
3 cloves of garlic
1/2 tsp peperoncini
1 stalk Rosemary
3 tbsp olive oil
salt and pepper

Rosemary and Grana Padano and high Quality olive oil for serving.

In a pot in salted water cook the Spaghetti for 2 min, or until you can move them around without breaking them. Drain.
In the same pot heat up the oil, add garlic and peperoncini and rosemary. Flavour the oil and add the wine. Bring it up to boil.
Gradually add the Pasta, a bit after a bit, stirring in between.
You have to stir often, because you cook in a small amount of liquid.
Drain.

Serve with rosemary, cheese and more oil.

Panna Cotta Two Tone with Coffee and Caramel

I bought some Silicon moulds. One was for my friend as a Birthday present, the same one went into my storage boxes for kitchen utensils. This is the first time I am using it.

I was looking for a caramel mousse and found several different recipes, but I found some with coffee too. Now I had to decide, which of these recipes was the right one. I choose a mixture of coffee and caramel.
It took a while for it to set in the fridge, but my surprise was great, when I saw that I had two different layers in the mould. A nice coffee flavour on top and good strong caramel on the bottom.

But I have to work with the Silicon mould more often. It was not so easy to get the mousse out in one piece. I had to cut around the top of the moulds to loosen it. And it is not good to overfill them and spill over, that will stick and make it difficult to get out. Best pour the liquid into a measuring cup with a spout and pour it in.

recipe for 4:
300 ml double cream
100 ml whole milk
100 g sugar
1 tbsp vanilla extract
1 small sleeve of good Quality instant coffee
3 Sheets of Gelatin
pinch of salt

Soak the Gelatin in Cold water for 10 min and squeeze out the water.
In a microwavable container pour in cream, milk, vanilla extract and instant coffee and heat it up. Do not boil it.

In a casserole melt the sugar until it turns Brown, do not stir it, just swirl it around.
Take it off the heat and pour in a bit of the hot milk mix. Be careful, it will rise and bubble a lot. Take it back on the stove and pour in the rest of the milk mix. Stir constantly until the caramel has dissolved completely.
Get it of the heat and stir in the Gelatine. Pour in a jug and fill in some moulds. When it is cooled down to room temperature, put it into the fridge over night.

I put a strip of Mulberry syrup on the serving plate. That goes great the mousse.

Polpette al Pomodoro - Pork Meatballs

I found this recipe in an Italian cooking Magazine issue. My Italian vocabulary is good enough to understand the list of ingredients and the cooking method.

As always, I made my own version of the recipe and I can recommend it. Meatballs are so versatile, when some are left, put them in the freezer and use them for other dishes.
Make your own SUBWAY meatball Sub!

Preparing the tomato sauce was easy for me, I still have some frozen packages of last years tomato Sauce season. Just two more are left, they will last until this years crop is finally ready to be harvested. This years heat waves and ups and down and cold spring were not so good for tomatoes outside without any cover or protection. But the vines are hanging full of green ones and there are still flowers for more. Now the middle of August is cold and wet here and not much sun to be seen. I hope to harvest more then just a hand full soon.

recipe for 4:
660 g pork mince
150 g Italian Mortadella thinly sliced
1 egg
2 bead rolls
milk
2 tbsp Grana padano
2 spring onions
3 cloves of garlic
nutmeg
2 tbsp flat leaf parsley
1 tsp Italian herbs
salt and pepper
1 1/2 tbsp breadcrumbs
flour
olive oil

Tomato Sauce:
400 g jar of passata
400 g ready cooked Sauce
2 cloves of garlic
2 shallots
1 Hand full cherry tomatoes
2 tbsp balsamic vinegar
1 tsp Piment d`Espelette
1/2 Cup water
salt and pepper

First, start with the dry bread rolls and soak them in milk until soft. Squeeze out.
Grate some cheese.
Finely chop the parsley, the White of the spring onions and mince the garlic through a press.
Finely chop the Mortadella slices. Put all that with the  pork mince and he other ingredients in a bowl. Season and make a good mix with your hands. Rest in the fridge for half an hour to firm up again.

Defrost the tomato sauce in a bigger pot. Add onion and garlic and .the fresh Tomatoes and wait until everything is defrosted. Pour in the passata and the balsamic vinegar and season to taste. Add water for more sauce and let it cook a while.

Make meatballs the size of golf balls and roll them in the flour.
In a wide pan with a lid, get in the oil and on medium high heat fry off the meatballs on all sides.
That will take up to 15 min.
Get them out of the pan and pour the fat into a container to discard later - do not pour it down the drain!
Transfer the tomato sauce to the pan and put the meatballs back in. Bring back to simmer and close the lid and reduce the heat to cook as long as you will need to start and finish your Pasta.

Serve with a bit more cheese and parsley.