Lettuce and Pea Soup

Our Summer is on vacation in the moment. It is wet and cool this week.

I had a head of lettuce in the fridge and frozen peas. I decided to use up lots of stuff in my fridge and prepare a soup.

For some basic taste I used Black Forst ham cubes, onion, leek, garlic and chili. Butter and oil heated up and all this stuff went in. I took a couple of minutes until the onion is translucent.

Next the defrosted peas went in and the veg stock. Cooking for 3 more minutes. To stabilize the soup, 2 tbsp of semolina. 

I took the cream out of the fridge and saw the small bowl with two cooked potatoes in. A good chance to get rid of them in the soup.

The washed and ripped to pieces lettuce went in next. It looked like a mountain of green in the pot. But like spinach it goes down to a small amount after some time in the hot soup.

Cook again 3 min and taste the soup if the seasoning is good. Use a stick blender and mix the soup.

I sprinkled garlic breadcrumbs on top.

Ingredients:

1 lettuce

1 onion

4 garlic cloves

1 green chili

5 cm leek

100 g defrosted peas

2 tbsp oil

75 g bacon bits

50 ml double cream

2 cooked potatoes

2 tbsp semolina

50 ml white wine

800 ml veg stock

Salt, pepper

Garlic breadcrumbs

Peach Agua Fresca

A cool Summer refreshing fruit drink - Non Alcoholic.

Take 3 ripe peaches and cut around the stone. Put them in a blender. Add lime juice, lime syrup and 600 ml of water.

Blend well and pour through a fine mash sieve in a container. Store cold and serve on ice cubes.

Chicken Thighs with Peaches and Chili

Fresh peaches in a hot honey and butter sauce are a good combination with chicken. It is done in less than 30 minutes.

I used boneless chicken thighs, they are the most juicy. A spiceblend with Pul Biber (Turkish chili), Italian dried herbs and salt and pepper is great. Use it on the meat and later on the peaches. A bit of lingering heat in the dish is wonderful.

A yellow pepperoni and a couple of garlic cloves for additional flavour are in the pan.

Just give the chicken pieces a couple of minutes on each side to take color, then take them out. In the same pan add the peach slices and more spices and let them soften. Then honey and lime juice are going in next. Add the butter.

Put the chicken pieces back in the pan, add white wine or chicken stock and cover the pan with a lid. Reduce the heat and cook until the chicken thighs are done.

I only ate a piece of bread with it to soak up the sauce. But use what ever side you like with it.

Ingredients:

5 chicken thighs

Pul Biber, Italian herbs, salt and pepper and smoked paprika

1 tbsp oil

1 yellow chili

4 garlic cloves

3 ripe peaches

2 tsp honey

50 ml white wine or chicken stock

2 tbsp butter

Beef Stew with Rice in One Pot

I bought 400 g organic beef goulash at the butcher. Just enough for 2 servings.

I decided to do it all in one pan and let the rice soak up the sauce and all the flavour. Checking my ingredients in the fridge, 1 carrot, a leek and a small piece of Speck (cured pork) was found. A jar of Ayvar and some tomato paste. The basic ingredients for any beef stew are onions, garlic and chili and beef stock.

I used a stock cube this time and a good amoubt of white wine.

The beef was cut in thick chunks. I halved or quarted them. No large chunks in the stew. The speck went in the oil first. After 5 minutes the beef went in. Just seasoned with salt. Since the amount was small, all pieces had contact with the heat. Let them sit undisturbed to brown for 5 minutes, then stir the first time. This way you can easily see the Maillard reaction on the chunks of beef. Let them braise until they are brown all around. Now in with onions and garlic. Then tomato paste and Ayvar. Now in with the veggies.

Wine and stock next. Now season with salt, pepper, paprika, smoked paprika, herbes de Provence. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat to medium low and cover with a lid. Cook for 90 minutes.

Wash the rice and check how much liquid is in the pot. The rice needs the double amount of liquid to cook.

Keep the heat on low and the pan covered and cook 15 to 20 min until the rice has soaked up everything and is done.

Ingredients:

400 g organic beef

60 g Speck

2 tbsp oil

2 yellow onions

4 garlic cloves

1 chili

1 carrot

50 g leek

2 tbsp tomato paste

2 tbsp Ayvar

50 ml white wine

400 ml beef stock

1 1/2 rice cooker cups long grain rice

water

Salt, pepper, paprika, smoked paprika, herbes de Provence

No Bake Fig and Panna Cotta Cake

Harvesting a bunch of figs calls for a new recipe.

I was lucky to give some figs to the lady that lives on the othet side of the street and some to the DHL delivery girl. But I still had enough to work with.

My BFF knew my struggle with making figs in to something else than jam or dried figs and sent me a cake recipe. NO Bake cake sounded good. But it is a bunch of work and needs long cooling times. Don't do anything special on this day, just spend time in the kitchen cooking and cleaning. 

Cake bottom:

100 g crushed digestive biskuits

100 g cornflakes

50 g butter

150 g milk chocolate

100 g Nutella

Cream:

8 sheets of Gelatine, soaked and squeezed

200 ml whole milk

600 g double cream

1 vanilla pod

200 g white chocolate

6 to 8 figs

Topping:

15 g cornflakes

50 g white chocolate

In a microwave bowl add milk chocolate, butter and Nutella and heat it up to 50 C. Stir well until the stuff has melted. Toss in the crushed biskuits and the cornflakes and start combining it.

Use a 26 cm loose bottom tin and place baking paper on the bottom. Press the mix down with a large spoon or a glass. Put in the fridge for 90 min.

Cut the figs in discs and place them around, leave a small place free in the middle. Back in the fridge for 30 min. 

Soak the gelatine leaves in cold water. Add milk, cream and vanilla to a pot and bring to a boil. Take off the heat to cool down to 70 C. Squeeze out the water from the Gelatine and stir it in until dissolved. 

Cool down to 50 C and toss in the white chocolate. Melt it. Pour just  bit over the figs to cover them slightly. Put the cake back in the fridge to set. Later add all the panna cotta and it needsbto set about 6 hours or over night.

Mix cornflakes with chocolate and cut up more figs. Decorate the cake.

Snicker's Ice Cream "healthy"

This is a recipes I needed to get rid of the leftovers in a jar of 100% ground peanuts. I used the jar for an other dish and then the jar sat on my kitchen counter. Waiting!

Einfach Tasty is the one who posted it. But I changed it to my liking. I found it when I googled recipes with cottage cheese.

This cheese together with Skyr are the new hyped protein bringers. Some of the dishes where it it used are good, but often they are meh. I've tried a lot of them and they can be found on my blogs.

In my storage is a very heavy UNOLD ice cream maker, a compressor that does not need any precooling.

But the mixed ingredients were thick allready and the machine had no chance to churn it. I packed a Tupperware container and put that in the freezer.

Recipe:

400 g cottage cheese

2 tbsp runny honey

3 large or 5 small dates

2 tbsp ground peanut paste (no salt no sugar no additives)

2 tbsp bashed unsalted peanuts

3 tbsp chocolate sauce

In a blender mix cottage cheese, peanut cream, honey together. Add the dates and mix again.

Fill in a container and sprinkle the peanuts on top, then drizzle with chocolate sauce and freeze.

Pollock in Cucumber and Herb Sauce

Served with potatoes. This is a quick fix and tastes of Summer. 

I still had 2 slices of frozen Pollock in a package and wanted them gone. A cucumber was sitting in my veg drawer of my fridge since last weekend and I wanted to get rid of it too.

A good forage of fresh herbs from different pots on my balcony and some dried dill went in the sauce. To make it a bit richer, creme fraiche helped a lot.

Recipe for 2:

1 large cucumber

200 g pollock defrosted

2 green onions

A hand full of herbs

1 tsp dried dill

40 g butter

40 g flour

60 ml milk

200 ml veg stock

3 tbsp whole grain mustard

1 tsp agave syrup

1 tsp lemon juice

65 g Creme fraiche

Salt, pepper

Melt the butter and sauté the onion. Add flour and cook it out. Now in with the milk and stir a lot until the lumps are gone.

Add part of the stock and continue to stir and cook. Pour in all of the stock and add the peeled and deseeded cucumber, chopped.

Cook for 5 min and add the herbs and stir in the creme fraiche. Season and add lemon, syrup and dried dill. The pollock gets cut in wide chunks and added to the pot. Turn down the heat to low and cook for 3 minutes or until the fish is done.

Serve with potatoes.

Holiday Apartment Food Bits and Bobs

I am at the Green Hell again to drive 3 evenings at Tourist drives on the Nordschleife. 

A holiday apartment is a good way to spend the days here. Going out and visiting places during the day, cooking and having some time to relax before going out on track. I brought tomatoes from my plants at home and used them with spelt pasta.

I took a couple of things with me from home. Dry store goodies like pasta and spices, salt, pepper and small bottles of olive oil and vinegar. 

Buying at the local supermarket in Adenau all the perishable goods. And attached to the supermarket is a good bakery. They have a cafe too.

I visited a Roman Quarry and after that drove to a Coffee Roast Shop. 

Rice Noodles with Tom Yum Sauce

A Thai Kit from my local supermarket. 

Rice Noodles, prawns and lots of fresh veggies made a great noodle dish. The kit had a bag of coconut milk, red Thai curry paste and a sachet of dried kaffir lime leaves, chilis and lemon grass.

I soaked the rice noodles for 4 minutes in boiling water and then drained them. I took the kernels off a fresh sweetcorn oar and chopped a red bell pepper. A hand full of defrosted peas were next.

I took a couple of frozen prawns out of the freezer and thawed them cold water. I seared them in a pan with a garlic clove. They went in the pot together with the rice noodles at the end of the cooking time. 

Cooking is very easy, dump the coconut milk in a hot and heat it up. Squeeze the curry paste in and stir well. I added some milk to get a little more sauce. But use veg stock or water if you like. The dry stuff went in next. 

All the veggies went next to get them a cooked. Fish sauce, lime juice, coconut syrup were the Thai way of flavouring the sauce.

It ended with noodles and prawns.

Figs and Feta filled Filo Pastry

4 sheets of Filo pastry were sitting in my fridge. The leftovers from the Pea Pie.

In the morning I harvested some very ripe figs from the tree in front of my house.

A block of Bulgarian Feta was in a tub in the fridge too. Taking it out together with the pastry dough was the first thing I did. Then the butter. I put a good amount of it in a microwave container and melted it.

Dried Oregano and young garlic completed the packages. 

A dash of olive oil spray and some black and white sesame seeds and the parcels went in the oven at 180 C for 15 minutes.

Some Italian fruity and spicy condiment went well with it.

Ingredients:

4 Filo pastry sheets

50 g melted butter

100 g Feta

3 Figs

Slices of young garlic

Oregano, pepper

Olive oil spray

Black and white sesame seeds

Eating out at Cafe Restaurant "Sleeping Beauty"

I was out to meet ex coworkers in the deep of the Odenwald in Annelsbach. It is about a 50 minutes drive East from where I live and it is very small and off the beaten pass. The Hotel and Restaurant is called Dornröschen aka Sleeping Beauty.

It is a family run place. The husband is the Chef and the wife is a well known Pastry Chef in the area.

There are some very traditional old dishes offered on the menu beside the usual stuff like Schnitzel and fried fish. I took the chance to eat one of these almost forgotten dishes. And I was very pleased about my choice. 

Pork in aspic with raw onions, mixed pickles and hash browns. Very delicious and a portion big enough to satisfy, but not too much not to have room for the in house fresh baked cake.

It took a while for the cake to cool down, but we had time and a lot ot talk about old times at work.

It was a crumble cake with apricot and apple filling, served with vanilla ice cream. The other one was a coconut chocolate cake.

I think I need to go there again to taste other old fashioned dishes and enjoy freshly baked cakes. Even it takes a longer drive to an area where you are not close to the end of the world, but from where you can see it.