Bacon wrapped Pork Belly

A very tasty way to eat pork belly.

Someone did a short tutorial on pork belly on Insta. The marinate blow me away and I grabbed a piece of paper. I did not expect that putting a bacon wrap on pork belly would make it even tastier.

The marinate stays under the bacon and it helps with the juiciness of the meat.

Marinate:

2 shallots, 2 garlic cloves

25 g parsley, 25 g dill, 1 stalk rosemary, oregano, majoram

3 tbsp ketchup, 2 tsp Dijon mustard, 3 tsp horseradish

Salt, pepper

2 tbsp olive oil

Put all ingredients, except the olive oil in a blender and give it a good first mix. Add the oil and mix again. Put the pork belly in a bowl and add the marinate. Set aside for 30 min.

250 g bacon

260 g pork belly

Preheat the oven 180 C fan

Overlay the bacon on a baking sheet. Depending on the size of the pork belly slices, you can either wrap the bacon around or cover top and bottom with it.

Stick in the oven for 30 min. Eat in a bun or on some toast slices.

It is important to keep as much marinate on the meat as possible.

Tartines aux Apricot é Burrata

Open faced Sandwiches are loved in France. 

A good wheat sourdough bread is the base. Toast it in a pan in butter and you have the perfect transport vehicle for scrumptious toppings.

I bought French apricots today in the supermarket and they called for something other then just eating them as they were.

A Burrata sitting in its brine was in the fridge. Creamy cheese and sweet hot fruits sounded great. These two ingredients need a bit of green to balance them out.

I have a pot of lemon verveine on the balcony. Nothing is better.

Recipe for 2 breads:

1 Burrata

2 thick slices sourdough wheat bread

Butter

5 Apricots

Olive oil, lemon salt, pepper, honey

Lemon verveine

Preheat the oven 160C fan.

Cut the aoricots down the seam and take the stone out. Brush with olive oil and season with salt and pepper. Put on baking paper and bake for 10 to 12 min.

Butter the bread on both sides and brown it in a pan. Break the Burrata in the middle and spread on both pieces of bread.

Put the apricots on top and chop the verveine. Sprinkle it over and drizzle some runny honey over everything.

Alb-Leisa Lentils

In the South-West of Germany Lentils were grown over many centuries. 

In the second half of the 20th century they were nearly extinct.

The harvest was small and it needed a lot of work to process the lentils to make them ready for sale. 1985 started the new era of lentil production on the Swabian Alb. 

Lentils in Swabian dialect are called Leisa. They are a basic food in the area with homemade pasta (Spätzle) and sometimes Wiener sausages.

This time I just had them with a mix of dried veggies, veg stock powder and barley. Preseasoned, I just needed to add some water to cook the batch. 

For some freshness I added spring onions, balsamic vinegar, pepper and a good drizzle of olive oil.

Fig Jam with Ginger

It is fig harvest time again. 

The last two weeks I could eat what has ripened on the tree. But today I needed 2 big bowls and a knife and took most of the figs down. Some of them will end up in this jam, others will find an other purpose.

There are so many different ways to give the fig jam a special taste. Two different recipes are already on the blog.

I used fresh ginger and some juiniper schnaps with 44% alc. this time. That helped to balance out the sweetness of the figs. Since figs are low in pectine, a whole lemon and pectine enriched sugar helped.

830 g fresh topped and tailed figs

1 lemon, 30 ml juiniper schnaps, 50 ml apple juice

3 small knobs of ginger

320 g  3:1 pectine sugar

 

Lemon Bundt Cake- small

When not enough people are around to eat a large cake, bake a small one. On my last holiday, I bought a 16 cm Bundt Cake tin. Now I wanted to check how it works out.

It is not so easy to get the right measurements for smaller cakes. To scale a recipe down is often a big pain in the ass. It took me some time to find an existing recipe for a 16 cm baking tin. But I got lucky.

No electric kitchenhelper is needed. Just a scale, a bowl, a spatula and a sieve. 

recipe:

200 g sieved AP flour

1 1/4 tsp baking powder

150 g soft unsalted butter

150 g sugar

2 Tbsp vanilla sugar

zest of 1 organic lemon

pinch of salt

150 g powdered sugar

juice of 1 lemon, Sprinkles

Cream butter, sugars, salt together. Add one egg after the other. Mix baking powder with flour and sift both in the mix, add the zest.

Butter the bundt cake tin and spread some breadcrumbs around. Fill in the batter and bake for 35 min at 180 C.

Let it sit in the tin for 10 min, take it out and let it cool down completely. 

Mix powdered sugar with lemon juice to a thick paste and spread it on top of the cake. Cover the top with some sprinkles.

Potatoes with Cheese Crust

The German Chef Stefan Henssler is often on TV. His quick dishes are famous. He calls them "Schnelle Nummer".

Not much work and lots of good tasting tiny bits. Good for parties or snacks.

There are many Reels with oven baked potatoes on the Internet. Squished or not, most of them a very tasty.

Small young potatoes are the best choice for it. I used Drillinge - triplets - they are called here in Germany. They have got their name, because they are the little ones on each plant. Between 25 to 40 mm in size. They can come from different kinds of potatoes.

Just one cut lengthwise and the raw potatoes are ready to be placed on a tasty bed of grated Parmesan and a couple of other things. 

Ingredients:

Little potatoes about 400 g

Olive oil

Parmigiano regiano

Breadcrumbs

Fresh grated garlic

Chili flakes

Herbes de Provence, salt and pepper

Preheat the oven 200C fan.

Splatter some olive oil on the baking paper. Take a box grater and grate Parmesan. Sprinkle some breadcrumbs on top. Now add garlic, chili and herbes.

Set the potatoes face down on top, brush them with a little oil and season with salt and pepper.

Bake for 30 min.

Pasta alla Zozzona

This is a typical pasta platter from Rome. It is a recipe from the Lazio area.

It combines three very different dishes: pasta cacio e pepe, carbonara and amatriciana. 

It is a meaty tomato sauce that is bind with carbonara egg yolks and cheese in the end.

There is a lot of mis on place to do and a bit of cooking time.

Recipe for 2:

250 g Rigatoni

160 g salsiccia sausage, 80 g Guanciale

200 g tomatoes, 1 can peeled whole tomatoes

2 tbsp olive oil, 1 yellow onion, 2 garlic cloves, 1 pinch of pepperoncini, 8 basil leaves, pepper

2 egg yolks, 50 g Pecorino Romano

I had a bowl of cherry tomatoes (1 of 3) sitting on the kitchen counter. I put them in a blender and took the seeds and skin out through a sieve. Then I added a can of organic whole peeled tomatoes.

Then I grated the cheese. Next I took off the peppery rind from the Guanciale and cut it in cubes. Then the sausage skin went off and I chopped the sausage meat.

Onion and garlic were chopped and that went in the pan with olive oil and the Guanciale. Aftet 4 min the sausage meat went in. That takes an other 5 min to cook. Now add the tomatoes and some pepper and pepperoncini.

 When it starts to boil, cover it and reduce the heat. Cook for 30 min.

Aftet 15 min cook the rigatoni. Mix the egg yolks with most of the cheese. Add some pasta water to it to make a smooth paste. Drain the pasta and add it to the pan. Shred some basil leaves on top.

Take the pan off the heat and stir in the egg cheese mix. Stir very good to bind the two sauces.