Sicilian Pesto on Spaghetti

This is the way our Sicilian tour gide makes the pesto. It is made in his family this way for a long time. Important are large ripe tomatoes and the almonds that grow on the island.

An other speciality are the red tinged garlic bulbs, they are not so intense and give a lovely flavour to the pesto. Olive oil and cheese are needed too. Our gide had a wine yard with his brother and he grows olives and makes his own olive oil.

recipe for 2:
250 g spaghetti
50 g unpeeled almonds
50 g pecorinoa 
a hand full of basil
pepper
2-5 red garlic cloves
50 - 75 ml olive oil
2 large tomatoes
a bit more cheese

Use a blender and chuck in almonds, cheese, pepper, basil and garlic in and enough oil to make it smooth.
Cook the pasta al dente and keep some of the pasta water.
Mix hot pasta water with some pesto, chop up some fresh tomatoes and bring it together and mix ith with the pasts.
Add some more cheese and enjoy-

Ayvar and Honey with Freekeh, Aubergine and Cheese

I stole the idea from SortedFood but did it my own way as always.

The freekeh I bought a while ago at our "WeltLaden" is an organic grain from Palestine , that is grown by small farmers from the north of the WestJordan Country. It is traded Fair and so the farmers and their families can live in  a graceful way.
After the wheat is harvested green and dried, it is roasted over fire. That gives it a smokey taste.

The aubergine and the cheese are coated in ayvar and honey and baked in olive oil.
And the rest of  the ayvar went into the freekeh in the pot.

recipe:
125 g freekeh
350 ml veg stock
100 g ayvar
1 tbsp sriracha
3 tbsp honey
1 red onion
2 cloves of garlic
3 tbsp olive oil
1 aubergine
200 g goat and sheep cheese


Peel and chop onion and garlic and sautee it in a bit of oil in a pot until the  onions are soft (close the lid, that makes it a lot easier), add 60 g ayvar and the sriracha and stir well.
Chuck in the freekeh and coat it well, the stock comes now, reduce the heat and close the lid.
Cook for 20 - 25 minutes.


 



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The original recipe called for Harissa and Spinach and Haloumi.

Peanut butter and Jelly Cookies

I found this recipe on YT by Cupcake Jemma.

I love peanut butter but I am not really a fan of eating it with Jelly on toast. A toast with either peanut butter or with jelly is fine by me, but both of them together- no thank you. I saw Cupcake Jemma make it and thought the combination as cookie dough sounds much more tasty so I gave it a try in January 2015. It went so well and they were gone so fast.

I brought the cookie jar filled with cranberry oatmeal cookies to the office on Monday morning and set it on my side board. Yesterday morning I filled in the rest I had still at home. My coworker is part time and she left at 1 PM yesterday, today in the morning she came in, looked at the side board - no cookie jar and shouted: who has eaten all the cookies yesterday!
It sounded so sad that I decided to bake a batch of fresh cookies when I came home from the office in the evening. All cupboard ingredients.

recipe:
110 g unsalted butter
135 g chunky peanut butter
110 g white sugar
110 g brown sugar
1 large egg
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
160 g flour
100 g dark coloured jelly - I used a homemade plum jam with lots of spices

Preheat oven 170 C
Beat softened butter and peanut butter together, add the sugars and the egg and vanilla extract.
Give it a good whisk until it is smooth.
Add flour with baking soda and salt and make a crumbly dough
Use 80 g of the jelly and just stir it in, not to smooth, just leave some chunks.

Use baking paper and with a spoon drop some batter on 12 cookies on each large baking sheet
Flatten them a bit with your hand and drop a little jelly on top.
Bake for 16 min.

Mushroom and Egg Rice Bowl

If you like Oyakodon (Chicken and egg rice bowl) and you love mushrooms, this is a dish for you.

Use button mushrooms, even if they are not the most fresh ones, it works. Just quarter the smaller ones or cut them into 6 pieces if they are a bit bigger. Just some onions and garlic, spring onion and chives. It takes some time until the mushrooms that covered a large pan shrunk down to a medium portion for 2 eaters.
Do it veagetarian and leave out any kind of meat. Just stir in eggs a bit after a bit and serve over a bowl of short grain Japanese rice.

recipe:
400 g button mushrooms
2 small onions
1 spring onion
2 cloves of garlic
1 tbsp chives
2 tbsp olive oil
chili salt, pepper
dried thyme

ev. 2 slices of cooked ham
2 eggs
2 tbsp Yakitori sauce
1 cup short grain rice

It is not much work to do. Just clean the mushrooms, chop onions and garliv and get them in a pan. It will take a while, add salt and peppet and thyme and cook a bit more.
Now you can either chuck in some cooked meat or you just add the spring onion and the beaten eggs- first half of it, let it set, then add the rest.
A bit of Yakitori sauce gives a nice flavour.
when you use a rice cooker the rice should be done by now as well.
finish with some chives

Cranberry Oatmeal Cookies

The original recipe was posted from SortedFood as Oatmeal Raisin Cookies.

Going through my dry stock I found only a bag of cranberries. And I used the juice of a mandarine to soak them instead of an orange. But otherwise is is basically the same recipe.
I got 23 cookies out of the batter and used 3 baking sheets covered with paper.

recipe:
100 g cranberries
1 large mandarine juiced
60 g soft light salted butter
100 ml veg oil
1 egg
50 g honey
200 g brown sugar
1 tsp vanilla sugar
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp baking powder
120 g flour
240 g rolled oats

Use a big bowl, it is the only one to get dirty in the process.
Soak the cranberries ahead of baking so they get a little moist and wont burn during baking. Drain into a sieve, you do not need the juice.

Preheat the oven 170 C.
Add softend butter, oil, egg, honey, sugar and give it a good whisk until everthing is well combined.
Back on the scale and add flour, oats, baking powder, cinnamon, vanilla sugar and cranberries.
Combine well.
Stick baking paper on some baking trays- I needed 3 trays- because the cookies spread out.
If you have use an ice cream scoop and scoop the batter out. Flatten with you fingers to 1 cm hight.

Bake for 14 minutes and let them set on the baking sheet for 10 minutes before placing them onto a wire rack.

Tonkotsu Ramen Soup

A Japanese dish I came to love during my stay in Japan. And I love all kinds of meat based soups.

I have seen so many YT videos from people who visited Ramen shops in Tokyo and the different kinds of soups that are the base to this dish. They vary a lot and some are a bit unusual for my taste.
They cook the easiest one with dashi stock and soy sauce, then they have the ones based on the miso paste, others are fish stock and chicken stock, some are creamy others are clear. Then they serve the hot Ramen dishes with lots of chili paste in. People start to sweat all around you.

The shops with the Tonkatsu soup simmer their pork bones and meat for sometimes up to 30 hours. Huge pot simmer in the back for the next couple of days with lots of pigs heads and other pieces of the animal.


I bought a lot of pork belly and pork bones yesterday together with a kilo of vegetables. And after 6,5 hours on the stove, the endresult was awesome.
I just chopped some fresh veggies, cooked some eggs and soaked them in a mirin/soy sauce liquid and cooked enough noodles to eat with my friend at work tomorrow at lunch break.

I had to dilute the stock with water, it was too concentrated otherwise.

recipe:
1.3 kg pork belly with bones
3 marrow bones
1 kg soup veggies like carrots, celeriac, leek
1 large red onion
5 cloves of garlic
1 large piece of fresh ginger
1 fresh chili
1 tbsp peppercorns
1 1/2  tsp salt
3 bay leaves
2,2 l water

270 g organic Ramen noodles
200 g Daikon radish
100 g sugarsnap peas
1 spring onion
3 eggs soft boiled
soy sauce and mirin
Noori sheet
Char chou or pork meat 


In a huge pot in some water cook the bones and the pork belly until the impurities come out, with a slotted spoon and a bowl of water scoop all the muck out. It will take about 10 minutes until everything is gone.
Add the veggies and season and add the rest of the water.
Bring to a boil, reduce the heat to  simmer and cook for 3,5 hours.
Let it cool down completely and get it into the cold over night.
Scoop out most of the white fat sitting on top of the soup.
Bring it back to the stove and simmer it for 3 more hours.
Cook the eggs until they are done on the outside but soft in the middle, cool them in cold water. Mix soy sauce and mirin and put the peeled eggs in. Put a glass on top so they wont float.
Let it cool down a bit, scoop out meat and bones on one plate and the veggies on to an other. Discard the veggies. Use a knife to seperate the meat from the fat and bones of the pork belly and set aside.
Cook the noodles about 4 minutes and wash them in cold water. Heat up some of the stock, add some mirin and soy sauce 8from the eggs) and enough water to your taste, put the noodles in and warm them up again.
Chop the veggies and scoop the eggs out of the dark liquid and bring everything together in a bowl .
Half the egg and place a piece of Noori at the edge.
If there is still stock left, it is easy to freeze it or store it in a twist off glass for 2 weeks to enjoy an other time.

Curry Sausage - a German classic

Invented 1949 in Berlin by a woman who served the people from a small shack, it was called the steak of the poor. Sausages are eaten all over Germany for centuries and the combination of past war ketchup (or homecooked tomato sauce) and a mild curry powder started the boom of this kind of dish. Today even vegan curry sausages are well liked.

You can find lots of food trucks serving this dish.  The curry sauces have different types of chili content, you will get it from 1 to 10 on the  Scoville scale.
This streetfood spread from Berlin all over Germany. The kind of sausage used, varies a lot. Pure pork, mixed pork and beef and pure beef. Even chicken sausages are offered. Some are grilled without the casing.

The top German car manufacturer VW with his many production places has its own sausage production and they have their own brand of VW ketchup. All the workers can eat them daily if they like and a some are sold outside.
I have a friend who worked there and he sometimes bought a package of VW curry sausages and a bottle of VW ketchup for me. The funny thing is, the sausages are packaged in the same plastic foil, as all other original car parts are shipped to customers too.  The writing on the plastic wrap says: VW ORIGINALTEILE