Food to think about

While I named this blog in a reference for my love for writing eating has now truly become a thinking exercise for me. I have recently learned that in addition to my lactose intolerance I should now also watch my intake of wheat flour and sugar and even try to eat none of it at all for the next couple of months. as you might guess cooking and baking has now become quite an ordeal. not so much the cooking, but definitely the baking which I tend to do to make myself feel better. That usually does involve at least a little bit of sugar.

I am fine with using stevia, taste wise that is not a problem as I can easily live with a slight bitterness to the sweetness. But what I’m missing is the function that sugar provides; it’s mass, it mixes well with butter and eggs, it makes the whole thing fluffy and nice. So now my baking is at a point where I mostly experiment.  There is a sugarless pudding powder that works really well for pudding with lactose-free milk and stevia. Other things are harder. For instance I am currently working on finding the right balance for a cocoa cake, but I don’t yet know how to substitute the mass of the sugar. The first testing wasn’t bad, just a bit greasy (I used the normal amount of butter, forgetting that I had no sugar to soak it all up) and once I’d gotten rid of some of the fat it was too dense. we ended up eating it with some vanilla sauce made from the pudding powder and with stevia. I admit that on the third day of this no-sugar intake I decided to add just one tiny little teaspoon of brown sugar to the pudding mix. My body did fine with the digestion of that after all and it did taste way better than just with stevia alone.

I now use spelt and rye flours and they behave not much different than wheat. For those among you who have any problem with sugar too be it diabetes, intolerance or plain dislike of sugar (ultimately if you use artificial sweeteners your body is going to turn those into sugar as well, by the way): Stevia

I will post about both failure and success in my baking projects. for now I’m still working on that cocoa cake and spelt-cheese-crackers.

writer’s block, but for cooking

usually I have writer’s block. Now I have cook’s block (if such a thing exists). It is too frickin’ hot and my brain’s all mushy and my creativity is at its lowest. so I cook my standards (cous cous, pasta, …) or make puff pastries (still!) or the fake-but-almost-real hobnobs. I try to make them so they’ll last for a while but thanks to C. and finn (and maybe also to me) they’re usually gone pretty fast and I end up trying to make another batch ahead. call that a vicious baking circle.

we have friends over tonight though so I’m gonna make nigella’s penne alla vodka.
and right now I have just realised how much I LOVE rasperries. yummy! they’re about the only fruit I really really dig 😀

hobnobs for free – or almost

I shall out myself now: I love British food. And everyone who says that British food is tasteless shit is wrong. HA!

so I’m ever and anon searching for recipes, and trying to avoid going to Bobby’s Foodstore which represents the only means to get British or American foodstuff in Vienna – unfortunately shopping there will take you to the cleaners. it’s so fucking expensive! So I usually try to make some things myself. And while usually I end up with a gazillian useless recipes this time I was lucky. I found the following wonderful hobnob recipe here. I love it when the search engine spits out things like that 🙂

8 oz sr flour
8 oz sugar
8 oz porridge oats
8 oz margarine
1tbsp golden syrup
1tbsp hot water
1/2 tsp bic soda
mix flour, oats and sugar, melt marg, syrup and water in a pan stir in bic soda and add to dry mix, mix well, make smallish balls and put on greased tray and flatten slightly with a fork, 180oc for 15 mins, cool on the tray, you just want them golden in oven not brown

now 8 oz are 226 grams, I know that now, but before I made these either me or the conversion calculator made a mistake, because somehow I ended up with the figure 28. But everything turned out fine anyways, as I took (roughly):

56 g flour + 1tsp baking powder (we don’t have self-raising flour here)

56 g sugar

56 g oats flakes (not having enough oats flakes at home I had to adjust with a bit of organic spelt flakes, works just fine)

56 g margarine

2 tsp acorn syrup

2 tsp hot water

and no soda as I don’t have any

that made for 8 cookies, and boy did they turn out crunchily yummy 🙂

next time I might try using a little vanilla sugar too…

Do I need cooking therapy now?

I made puff pastries – AGAIN!

This time with a mozzarella/tomato/basil filling and some with an experimental spring onion/feta cheese/tomato filling. Also I found out one has to work fast with the dough in this heat…

I NEED HELP! therapy! I don’t even WANT to make any more puff pastries… 😦

savoury puff pastries

I was in the mood for cooking and without a cause to cook for so I made a batch of these puff pastries on tuesday afternoon and within minutes we had eaten half of them, that’s how yummy they were.

 the puff pastry I bought at the supermarket, I can’t be arsed to make that myself! and the filling was quite easy and fast to make. chopped up an onion, two carrots and some white mushrooms and defrosted a cup of peas.

sautéed the onion in a pan with olive oil, added the carrots, later the peas and at last the mushrooms and let it simmer for a while. once the excess fluid from the shrooms had evaporated I crumbled in some feta cheese and stirred until the cheese had melted. off the heat comes the pan.

I cut the pastry into squares, put a blob of filling in the middle of each and then it took some time until I found a folding method that wasn’t a complete and utter mess. as you can see on the photo I mostly stuck to simply folding in two opposing corners and sticking them together, subsequently folding the other two opposing ones over them and pasting those together. until I GOT there everything was a bit messy though …

whisk an egg and brush the pastries with it. into the oven at 200° C for about 15 minutes. if the pastries in the back don’t brown turn the pan around! horizontally I mean 😉

from our own experience: let them cool a bit or you’ll frickin burn your tongue and your fingers and everything else that comes near these pastries. they’re also really good (if not better) on the next day cold from the fridge btw!

Edit: I tried filling them with cheese and ananas the second time around – also very yummy, if you can appreciate the sweet with the savoury 🙂

fun with food: the friendly turnip

as promised: the first installment of fun with food. this is what happens when the gf and I try to cook together…

meet mr turnip.

he’s a nice guy

in the short time he was with us…

… we became fast friends.
 

 unfortunately we were wrong. mr turnip isn’t a nice guy at all. he’s a bloody backstabbing – erm… – fingereating bastard.

 in the end we had to end his life to save our own.

… and subsequently eat him with some carrots and yummy pasta and white sauce 🙂

just steam some chopped up turnip and carrot and cook some pasta in a seperate saucepan. when veggies are done, set aside. when pasta is done drain and rinse in cold water. chop up an onion and sauté in olive oil in the saucepan previously holding the pasta. through in the veggies, add salt, pepper and either thyme or rosemary. trust me, good plus good is not better, so don’t use both. actually thyme is better but if you eat this dish a lot you might want some change, so for that rosemary does well. add cream and let it bubble for a bit, throw in the pasta, stir and voila – there’s the turnip massacre turned into something really yummy.

preview: fun with food

tomorrow on this… ahem… channel: the first episode of fun with food!
prepare for the turnip (again!). we bought a new one though.

equilibrium in all its glory

The whole last week was very fruit and pudding affected. it all started the frozen rasperries that had to make way for ice cubes in our mini-icebox, so I made a rasperry crumble. while double-checking my recipe with nigella lawson’s crumble recipes her rhubarb crumble caught my gaze again. see, the gf doesn’t like rhubarb whereas I love it, but I thought what the heck, I’ll just make her something else then. so I bought some not-so-pink but otherwise good rhubarb and when the in-laws announced themselves last sunday afternoon I thought “well, I can’t serve them crumble, that’s an evening kinda pudding and not something you have for coffee.” So I rang up my dad and asked him what goes into his equilibrium cake, knowing it was easy and fast to make.

my father used to make this cake a lot in the summer when I was a kid, with all kinds of fruit. actually that was the only way one could make both of us eat any fruit at all. it’s called “gleichgewichtskuchen” in german gleichgewicht meaning equilibrium, balance. basically it means that you just have to weigh the eggs in their shells and all, and say they weigh 200g you then take that same amount of everything else. 200g sugar, 200g butter, 200g flour. NO baking powder, you’re just going to beat the egg whites separately – that makes for the fluffyness of the cake.

so beat the egg whites, then in another bowl beat the yolks with the butter and the sugar (i’m sure you can use a food processor for that, only I don’t own one) and then fold in the flour and the beaten egg whites with a spatula. you’ll end up with the yummiest of all doughs ever. I had to keep the gf from having a go at it and leaving nothing to bake with, so from now on I just make a little more than I need and leave it in the bowl and on the spatula for us to lick clean. the rest of the dough, the part that I actually want to bake i put on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper and spread it evenly. this part is a bit of a bummer but I usually manage to get it smooth in the end.

line the dough with cut up fruit and into the oven it goes at about 200° C for about 20 to 30 minutes (depends on how done you want it). you can use rhubarb like I did or all kinds of stone fruit like apricot or nectarines, cherries, peaches, plums, my dad put grapes on it a couple of times in autumn, very yummy. just cut the smaller fruits in halfs and the bigger ones into slices. and leave the stones out of course. you can probably use apples and pears if you like, i guess that’s more “wintery” then.

so I made a rhubarb cake that even the gf and her father – who both claimed not to like rhubarb – enjoyed. if you use a fruit as sour as rhubarb you can put a little more sugar in the dough or sprinkle some sugar over the cake right before it goes into the oven. and don’t forget to peel the rhubarb of course or it could get ugly 😉

I used up what was left of the rhubarb in a crumble (which the gf liked as well!) later in the week, so I made a second batch of equilibrium cake yesterday with peaches. let me tell you this: don’t use whole flour. I had to use it up, it had been standing there in the cupboard forever and the cake’s not bad at all, but it’s just not as good as it is with white wheat flour. and that’s also why it is a little darker in the pictures, so don’t worry if yours actually looks a little lighter.

OK then, so that was our sweet week 🙂
Tell me in the comments about what fruits YOU used if you happened to try out this recipe or tell me about your favourite summer baking recipes!

the turnip accident – this one wasn’t me

the gf is in the kitchen making dinner: pasta with carrots and stem turnip and “white sauce”, which is essentially a bit of cream seasoned with salt, pepper and herbs. now I love this dish but I love more what my gf managed to do with it.

prize winning question: if the gf is attacking the turnip with a kitchen knife, trying to split it in two in a lumberjack way (because it’s fun and we can) – what does she hurt herself with – the knife or the turnip? well it wouldn’t be funny if it was the knife 🙂

Nigella Lawson’s taking over my cooking & the first OUCH!

i’m still discovering nigella lawson. last week i made involtini, a delicious mixture of feta, mozarella, parmesan cheese, raisins, pine nuts, dried mint and breadcrumbs rolled in grilled slices of aubergine only i used courgettes instead of the aubergines. it then goes into the oven topped with tomato juice and mozzarella. incidentally i had also made tuscan white bread that day and it matched the involtini perfectly.

 yesterday i turned to lawson’s tomato couscous recipe and served it with a fillet of plaice that i had sprinkled with sea salt, pepper and chopped greek basil, adding half a lemon’s juice and one chopped spring onion that i had stir-fried before to the pan shortly before serving it. absolutely loved it.

today we’re gonna have spinach-feta-strudel, which is finn’s domain so i will simply be enjoying it 🙂
but i’m gonna serve the rice-pudding that i made last night for dessert. i discovered that i can make sweet stuff without using sugar, or so i thought, finn thought different of that, but i actually managed in the end by cooking half an apple with the rice and adding some honey when it was done – and it actually tastes sweet now. and it will taste good once we top it with cinnamon or cocoa tonight. hopefully 😉

btw: i just opened a new category called “unusual kitchen accidents”.
nr 1 (i’m sure there are plenty to come): i hurt myself with a courgette. yep, you read right, your eyes are not failing you, it IS indeed possible to do this … i managed to get a hematoma under my thumbnail when i got a piece of a courgette stuck under it. i’m telling you, the sticking part was violent! it’s drained by now, but OUCH!