Coconut Coffee Concoction

Finn promised I’d publish a coffee recipe, so being a good girlfriend I do:

1. Brew coffee whichever way you like it.

2. Heat milk (I use lactose-free, because I can’t for the life of me put soy milk in my coffee.. urgh.) and sweeten with sugar/stevia/sweetener

3. pour a dash of coconut milk into a huge cup

4. pour the warm milk into the cup (til about half full) and foam

5. add the coffee

you can also just leave out the sweetening and add sugar to the complete concoction when serve, it’s just that I like it when the milk foam tastes sweet 🙂

single dinner – no fun

the gf is passing on dinner today because she is not feeling well. and here I am not knowing what to cook. I’m not used to cooking for only one person anymore, and I like it about as much as I like eating dinner alone 😦

Veggie Hash

I recently bought a bag of soy chips and decided to try making veggie hash with it. here’s my first try, that tasted quite yummy but was maybe a bit too soggy. I’ll use less liquid next time.

prepare soy chips according to package instructions, in my case I cooked about 75 g of chips in about 120 ml vegetable soup. when the chips absorb the soup they should swell to about three times their original amount.

chop up an onion and sauté in some olive oil, if you like you can let them get really dark and sweet.

mix the softened soy chips with the onions and about two handfuls of porridge oats. add salt, pepper and marjoram and taste. when the mixture is cooled add one egg and mix thoroughly.

the aim is to get a mixture that can be molded and shaped without falling apart. you might need to add some water if it’s too dry or some spelt flour if it doesn’t stick well enough.

form small patties and fry in a copious amount of vegetable oil, flipping the patties over after half time.

serve with potato puree and salad or put them in a bun and serve as veggie burgers. I suppose they’re also good the next day with some dijon mustard an a slice of bread. Of course my veggie hash doesn’t taste like minced meat, but it’s yummy and a close thing to “real” meat if you want to/have to cut down on your meat intake, if you’re vegetarian or if you simply want to eat more soy products but don’t know what to do with it.

If someone tries this please tell me how it turned out for you 🙂

pumpkin muffins

I haven’t made any in a long time, but I still have the recipe. this one’s a special request delivery for shazza.

you’ll need

step one
50 g butter

–> melt

step two
250 g pumpkin, cut to rough cubes
90 g apples, peeled & cored–> steam pumpkin cubes for ten minutes and mash with mixer
–> steam apples and mash as well, add to pumpkin pulp and set aside to cool

step three:
150 g flour (I use spelt)
1tsp baking powder
90 g sugar
1/2 tsp Stevia (or another 90 g sugar)
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp cardamom
1 pinch of salt
1 pinch powdered cloves

–> mix all together

step four
mix the pumpkin and apple pulp with the butter

–> add
2 eggs and
4 tbsp acorn syrup

–> then add the flour mixture from step three

step five
fill into muffin molds and pop in the oven for 25 – 30 minutes at 190° C
baking time depends on mold sizes and oven type, so check regularly, even before the 25 minutes have passed (especially if you use small molds)

big pizza pie

soup day is cancelled today. we’ll just have a really huge pizza.
maybe I’ll make soup tomorrow though… after all we still have a whole chicken in our fridge.

the soup

A week ago gf and I decided to introduce a soup day to our everyday life. I never was much of a soup fan, but some of the varieties for rich, creamy soups could totally turn that around. So now every wednesday we think of a different soup to make.

one soup.
Last week I found this recipe. I decided to use spring onions instead of leek. But once I had looked around in my kitchen I realised I didn’t really have a great many potatoes either and ended up adjusting the recipe a lot.

Into the pot went:

a dash of olive oil
sliced spring onions
a good handful of peeled & diced potatoes

I Sautéed the onions with a bit of salt, then stir-fried a little after I added the rest of the vegetables, added chicken broth (from a cube admittedly, I usually can’t bother to make my own broth)
after some cooking time I added a handful of sliced white mushrooms

when all vegetables are almost done, take pot off the heat and process the soup until smooth. Put it back on heat and if you fancy stir in some cream before adding a handful of diced ham. I only had bacon, works fine too if you cut off the pure fat parts. cook a little longer until meat has warmed up. season with salt and pepper and a little rosemary. serve hot.

two soup.
This wednesday I made carrot soup. If you don’t have any leftover chicken remains like we did (so we made the chicken broth from scratch), this is a fast and low maintenance recipe:

sauté one diced onion with some salt
add sliced carrots (I think I used about 7 or 8)
stir-fry and then add chicken broth
(cover and) cook until done, then process
add lots and lots of grated ginger (or less if you don’t like ginger that much). you can also add it before you process to avoid those sturdy ginger fibres in your soup

season with a bit of pepper and a nice dollop of cream.

music: listen to this while cooking. and remember: soup is good for you. and yummy 🙂

long live the flea-market

journalists get sent sent loads of books to review. in one year a lot can accumulate. these books have to go sometimes. and thanks to a flea-market at the paper this last week, where they were throwing out all kinds of books, I scored three cookbooks. I think I payed for one (2 Euros), but the other two I got free.

One. Germany’s young top chefs

42 restaurants, 42 cooks, 42 fancy recipes, that I’ll probably have a better look at come christmas season and the time for heavier food.

These 42 are part of the Jeunes Restaurateurs d’Europe, a pretty renowned guild of up-and-coming young chefs in Europe. Unfortunately it’s 41 men and one woman, no comment on that…

two.  verdiSapori – il gusto entra in scena

This one’s by Giorgio Ferrarini (ritu can probably tell me if he’s any good or not). the title means something like VerdiTastes – the appetite enters the scene. It’s in Italian, so it’ll probably take me way longer to figure it out than just christmas. It looks pretty fancy though.

three. Kochen nach Zonen

This one’s by far the cheapest looking. It’s Austrian and what intrigued me about it is that it goes back to the postwar period in which Austria was divided into four zones – the British, the American, the French and the Russion zone, as was the capital Vienna itself. This book – Cooking according to zones – feature (as far as I could glimpse modernised) recipes from all four countries liberator/occupator countries. Well, they definitely liberated Austria from the Nazis (at least to those who weren’t Nazis themselves), but when they stayed for so many years life for many wasn’t so easy either. I.e. while the Americans and British were supposedly mostly really nice, especially to kids, giving them chewing gum and the likes, my dad can tell you stories of the Russians nicking watches and everything else that wasn’t nailed down. (No offence to any Russians reading this, I know it wasn’t you, and I also know that most soldiers were in need themselves.) He can actually make those stories sound really funny. if we should once meet, oh faithful reader, ask me for the machinistr kaputt story.  *chuckles*
Anyhow, this book cherishes all influences of that period in Austrian history – from bortscht to burgers and I’m darn going to appreciate it.

noodles. and soup. chicken and clear.

Due to my almost binge-eating at my bosses going away party the pumpkin soup is off the menu today. instead we settled on simple chicken broth from the cube (do I look like I have time to actually boil a chicken? lol) with noodles in it… I rarely resort to these instant food methods, but sometimes it’s just best not to fill your tummy with even more food. just something warm.

pumpkin soup

I got hold of a sunburst yesterday. it’s not totally pumpkin-time yet, but hopefull it will make for a nice pumpkin soup. I just haven’t decided yet if I want to go traditional Styria style or rather leaning thai with it…

Ode to a season

I admit to this being a double post but it has a lot to do with how I feel about food, so I thought I’d put it here as well. Also work is being really slow and boring today, so I have a lot of time on my hands to spend on the internet. I’ve finally had time to look around a bit at 101cookbooks.com. Now I know heidi’s famous in the blogosphere, but I was new to her site and gazed in awe at the recipes. fabulous pictures as well, that’s where a lot of the gazing happened. It took about only two or three somewhat autumn themed recipes to make me yearn for the best of all seasons. basically it had me at caramel apples…

I love autumn. fall. call it what you will. it’s just my all time favourite season. if I were to have it my way, the whole year would consist mostly of autumnish times. indian summer followed by a couple of golden gleaming months of autumn. leaves falling, pumpkin soup, lots of warm spices and teas, loads of slow food, fireplaces (if only we had one) and long walks in woods and parks and gardens, rooky skies. I really like wearing light jackets. I look good in jackets, but you can’t wear those in summer and in winter you’ll just freeze your ass of.
maybe top it all of with a wee bit of winter. But a proper one like we don’t get them anymore, with enough snow to go for a sleigh-ride and a proper week of skiing maybe, ice skating, lots more of evenings with tea and fireplaces. No slushy, muddy snow (fuck global warming) and warm weather in which you actually feel stupid wearing your winter’s coat or jacket. I want to freeze my ass of for a couple of weeks around christmas. But a couple of weeks is all I need. Then a bit of spring should be fine, but while at it may I ask for a lot of rain, please? or not. just keep summer to a minimum, will you? after that we can go back to the indian summer and start anew. Is it too much to ask?

Today the weather is very autumn-like (after all we’re approaching September), and I’ve been hearing crows for a couple of weeks now (no, not just in my head, they’re really there, outside my window) but I fear it might not last very long. It doesn’t usually, not the last couple of years. I worry that there won’t be enough autumn-time for me to annoy my sweetheart with every pumpkin dish possible (mostly because she won’t let me), make caramel apples, spiced tea and all other autumn recipes I may find and take a liking to. Enough time and place for cosy evenings on the couch and warm lighting in the living room, time to use the melancholy to write, be creative. Oh my, I really love this season.