An oven & steamed broccoli!

I will start a new quest from today on. In the apartment I used to call my home we had a very nice oven: in fact, I may even call it the best electric oven I ever used in my entire life. I absolutely love baking cakes and I like the occassional deep fried pizza as well (a shame, I know!) so an oven is absolutely a must-have. So flash forward to when I moved into my new place. A somewhat larger (though messier) kitchen, gas instead of induction, and a microwave I can actually get along with. But no oven! Gah! Apparently, one of the former inhabitants of this apartment brought along a very fine oven that was used often by the housemates as well. But when she moved out she took the oven with her. Probably because it was a very useful oven, and an oven I would have loved to be able to use today. No oven dishes, no pizza... :(
So I am thinking of buying myself an oven. I just had a tax return so I might pull it off with that money, though I actually wanted to buy a new computer as well (luxury choices, how I hate those). I imagine the kind of things I would be able to do with my very own oven. Roasted shrimps? Baked salmon with a little bit of lemon? Potatoes and garlic with some more lemon? And the cakes! Especially the cakes I could make!

For now, however, I had to stick with just plain old boring cooking. Aside from the sumptuous dinner Sir G. & I had last Tuesday, I ate some jalapenos flavored beef (with coriander, some jalapenos) with lemon flavored risotto & broccoli steamed in garlic oil on Monday & the same jalapenos flavored beef but this time with a Japanese version of potato salad yesterday (= Wednesday).
The broccoli in garlic oil was one of my own ideas. For this, you need broccoli, some olive oil, some garlic, and some salt. Chop the broccoli while the water boils. Salt the water, then cook the broccoli for about three to four minutes. Heat the oil in a pan, put some chopped garlic in it and let it simmer for a while before throwing the broccoli in the pan and closing the pan off with a lid. Steam for about four minutes and you're done.
Now you're probably wondering why I cooked the broccoli first: well, I honestly had no idea what I was doing, and I thought that while experiments are great, you at least need to make sure the food is well heated to prevent bacteria from spreading. Sometimes when I only steam vegetables such as broccoli I seem not to take enough time, and it is still raw on the inside. So if I can prevent this by cooking it first, why not do exactly that? I hope that if anyone reads this they actually try to prepare this because I thought it was great! The garlic oil adds a little spice to the broccoli and if you finish it with some pepper it's even better.

Until next time!

Out for dinner again!?

Yes sir! My dear boyfriend, sir G., took me out to dinner yet again. I am such a lucky girl. And one prone for some weight gain too, after the number of courses I tasted yesterday. We made a reservation at the same Italian restaurant we went to last week for their themed dinner party and it was absolutely lovely!
First, we started with an appetizer of beans with pecorino cheese, served with a glass of prosecco and strawberries. The cheese was of really good quality and it was a perfect match with the beans. Our starter consisted of three smaller dishes. We had a roasted bean and tomato soup, with a tomato stuffed with rice, and a fig with parma ham. Served with it was a glass of dry white wine. The soup was absolutely lovely and I loved the combination of the fig and parma ham. I wasn't sold on the stuffed tomato, though. Overall, a good starter.
Then we had two seperate pasta dishes. Course #3 (because I do count the appetizer as a course since it was quite a lot) was a papardelle with a kind of stew. It tasted familiar so I am sure I have the name of the particular dish stored somewhere. It was delicious, I can tell you!
Course #4 was a variation on the classic spaghetti carbonara. It was a little salty, because the cook had used pecorino cheese in the sauce instead of an egg. Even though, it was still nice and I finished my plate with delight.
The main course was a lamb chomb, with roasted potatoes with rosemary, spinach with raisins and pine nuts, and saltimbocca. To complement it, the main course was served with a bardolino.
After this, both sir G. & I were feeling a little overwhelmed. So the sorbet with limoncello that came after the main course was a welcome diversion from the feast we had just consumed.
To complete the meal, we had almond cookies with fresh food and a dessert wine that luckily wasn't as sweet as I had expected.
We both felt very happy after dinner, so we took a nice walk home, talking to each other and looking at random bunnies playing in a field, and a strange cat that kept staring at us. How I love life at moments like these!

Move

So I haven't been a very faithful blogger, mostly because I had trouble getting myself a new place to live and actually moving in and getting stuff together. But it looks like I am all set now to continue talking about food!
In the mean time I've been so very lucky to go out for dinner no less than three times, and I only had to pay for it once. ;) The first time, my boyfriend invited me to dinner in a Mexican restaurant. Now there are Mexican restaurants and Mexican restaurants and this one was a mediocre one. I know of an exceptionally good restaurant in Den Bosch, but we wanted to keep it close to home so we ate out here in N. We both had roasted chorizo for our starter and it wasn't very good. The sausage itself was dry and I had to chew pretty hard to get through it. And it wasn't particularly large either. Normally, in case of fat sausages such as chorizo, roasting it would only enhance the flavor and make it rather crispy.
For main's, I had enchilada's (cannot remember what G. ate, but like me, he didn't finish his plate). The cheese used for the enchiladas was a rather cheap mozzarella. Usually, when I eat Mexican, I prefer a more ripe cheese such as a good cheddar. The beef the enchilada's were filled with was rather tasteless. Served with it were black beans and a salad with jalapenos. We left without opting for a dessert.
Then the second time, my mother invited me to dinner in a sweet little Italian place. It was a very pleasant surprise! For starter's I had shrimps in a tomato sauce. It seemed relatively easy to make. I tasted olive oil, basil and canned tomatoes. Perhaps grilling the shrimps in some olive oil and then make the sauce with some olive oil, garlic, a small onion, canned tomatoes, then mash it and put the basil in it? Idea idea!
For the main course I had ravioli (and it was freshly made!) filled with ricotta and spinach. To top it was a creamy cheese sauce. Jum jum! Then for dessert I had this huge bowl of vanilla ice cream, with chocolate sauce and advocat. (or whatever you call it in English :) )
The food was actually so tasty and relatively cheap that I decided to take G. with me to that very same restaurant, yesterday. First we had a nice glass of wine, with some olives and bread with tomato salsa. (The bread is roasted, then some olive oil is dripped on it, and they add a mixture of chopped red onion, chopped tomato and sometimes sliced fresh garlic) For our starter's he had a very simple shrimp salad. I ordered an antipasto plate with many delicious kinds of salami and Italian smoked hams. It was served with some additional olives and a rather mild, white, firm cheese. I tasted it somewhere before and I am now constantly thinking of it, trying to remember what it was called!
Then G. went all 'crazy' and ordered pizza carbanora. I had veal in gorgonzola sauce with mushrooms. Can I just say I love veal in gorgonzola sauce? The texture is just divine and! The sauce wasn't too heavy and tasted just right. And G. enjoyed his pizza.
For our dessert we both had a 'sorbetto': lemon icecream (I think?) mixed with club soda and limoncello. I topped it off with a decaf espresso.
We had a really great time and are opting to go to the same restaurant again next week! In fact, they are organising a Roman themed dinner, the menu looked so delicious, and we have too much money, so we made them save us a spot. :D I am already excited for it!

Salad for lunch

Yesterday I found myself without bread for sandwiches on a national holiday. Of course, all the shops were closed so I couldn't run to the supermarket to fetch me something to eat either. I didn't starve to death because I did have a few things left in the fridge, but no Hollandse broodjes kaas for me.
Basically, old farmer's wisedom says children grow strong and tall on Dutch cheese sandwiches {Hollandse broodjes kaas} ;). Dutch cheeses are certainly the most delicious kinds of cheeses in the world in my humble opinion. They taste fine on every hour of the day {and night, if you fancy a midnight snack}. The opposite is true for French cheeses. Somehow I can only eat those after 12 in the afternoon, but that's another story.
Now and then I get very nostalgic, and it is at that time that I want to eat cheese sandwiches. But yesterday I didn't have any sandwiches {or cheese, lol} at the crucial moment. So instead I made myself a salad. I do all my grocery shopping for the rest of the week on Monday. The reason I do this is a very pragmatic one, it is to prevent myself from going over budget. I write down what ingredients I have left in my cabinets, and then see what I can make out of it for the rest of the week. Usually, I don't pay more than 20-25 Euros for five days worth of food (that is breakfast, lunch, fruits and dinner, I almost never eat snacks). I thought I might as well eat a salad for dinner on Wednesday, but I had left overs to eat from Tuesday that evening, so all the ingredients of the salad were awaiting me in my fridge.
First I baked out some chopped mushrooms in melted butter in oil with some thime. I cooked 2 eggs {remember the eggs? I have to finish them before May 25th!} for ten minutes in boiling water. I then sliched the eggs, washed out the greens for the salad en mixed the eggs and mushrooms with it. To finish I used some red port dressing I bought at Oil & Vinegar. It was a great lunch, I tell you that! And then to think the mushrooms and eggs were actually left overs {remember my miserable omelet? yeah, that one, yeah}! I made a picture I might post later to show you. Nothing wrong with a luke warm salad. I'd suggest you try it!

Omelet

I hate to admit it, but even though I think I am pretty good at cooking, I suck at making omelets. I had this great idea to make myself an omelet yesterday since I had about six eggs left which I could only use until the 25th. I am not a big egg eater so I thought I might as well give it a try. Well, the project utterly failed.
I found a recipe in one of the few books I own myself, I guess you could roughly translate it as farmer's omelet. You were supposed to cook some chopped potatoes, then bake out some bacon, leave the grease in the pan, then bake the potatoes in it, throw the bacon back in with some peas and herbs and pepper and bake it just a little further before adding the egg. (Which you had to, by the way, mix with some milk beforehand) Piece of cake, right? Well, not for me. Perhaps I am a little too impatient. The recipe mentioned baking the egg at low temperature so I did. But the egg never got firm enough and I was hungry so I just grated the whole shebang out of the pan and ate it like that. I have a picture somewhere of the 'omelet' still in the pan (I took it when I still believed I could actually make this omelet thing work) so I might post it later so you can see that it actually did look like it would work (and taste nicely!) . Sigh*.
Maybe a cooking course would do the trick?

7-up

I've learned something today: if you are nervous, do not drink 7-up, because it will make you burp. The burping was probably not the reason why I didn't end up being accepted into a new house {searching for a new place to live here} but it more or less points at the kind of state I was in. I don't like being confronted with five or six people shooting questions at me. Especially not when I constantly feel like I need to repress the burps. :D
So now I feel a little down. The only thing that keeps me from becoming really moody is the thought of cheesecakes. Yum. I really feel like making myself {ok, and my friends} one. Here's the deal: my birthday was a good 6 weeks ago, but I still haven't celebrated it properly, while it was my 21st. Important number! A few days ago one of my friends proposed to celebrate it together. She turned 21 about three weeks after me. We have a few common friends so it could work. If we would do this, I would be making a cheesecake, and she a carrot cake. Dreamy! It would probably be the best birthday party ever.
Ever since I turned 18, I've prepared all the food for birthdays myself. It sometimes involves cooking five course meals for 25 people. With cakes. The strange thing is: I actually enjoy it. I actually enjoy standing in the kitchen from two days in advance, and to stress out over really trivial things like burned chocolate. It's a big relieve from everyday stress.
So, I wonder, would it be a good idea for me to start making a cake right now? It's more likely I won't {it's 23:28 here} but tomorrow is another day. Without the 7-up, of course.

The queen & her sateh

A few years ago, my mother nicknamed my grandmother 'the queen'. With good reason, of course: my gran gran doesn't have a very royal appearance, but she is the queen of her kitchen. She celebrated her 78th birthday last Saturday, in style of course, with an old fashioned barbecue. My cousin had organised the entire party. There was beer, Russian salad, lontong and... sateh.
For those of you with no immediate knowledge of the Indonesian kitchen: sateh {pronounced SAH-tay, the Dutch usually pronounce it sah-TAY but they're wrong, trust me} are pork skewers {or chicken, or shrimp, or goat, but pork has my preference}.
The pork is cut in pieces of about two by one centimeter, and then marinated according to my gran's recipe, in a mixture of ketjap manis {the Indonesian version of soy sauce, a little thicker than say Chinese soy sauce}, chopped garlic, a slice of lemon, some black pepper and a snif of vetsin. After about two hours, the meat is ready to be skewered. In my family we use bamboo sticks to do this. The sticks are quickly put into ice cold water, after which they're good to use!
Since the weather was rather nice past Saturday, we were able to roast the sateh on charcoal, which definitely improves the taste. Sateh can also be prepared in the oven but nothing beats charcoal. Lovely, lovely.

To do it right, though, the sateh needs to be served with peanut sauce, lontong {= sticky rice} and some veggies. Delicious. It immediately reminds me of home, of sunny days, and of course, of the queen. :D

Experiment

Since I'll be off for the weekend, I decided to make a little something to strengthen my spirit for the long journey home {it involves a train ride of about 70 minutes, but it's the most boring in human history, I promise}. I personally don't have a lot of cooking books but I grew up among about sixty titles my parents had collected through 18 years of marriage. Most of them had Italian food as its subject which explains my great love for Italian cooking. What I learned first and foremost from these books is that a little experimenting is never wrong. You can be a total cook book purist and do everything according to the recipe, but to be honest, it's a little boring.

Take the recipe I chose to prepare for myself today. It's an oven dish based on leek, and the original recipe involves coffee cream and cheddar.

Now, I do like coffee at certain times, but I know for sure that if I'd buy a bottle of coffee cream I'll never ever finish it. It's typically one of those ingredients you buy to make one dish and then forget to ever take out of your kitchen cabinets ever again (well at least, it is for me). So instead of buying myself a useless gimmick I went with crème fraîche. Great in almost all oven dishes, and also very tasty in combination with homemade rice porridge. Money well spent, I'd say.

Then the cheddar. I absolutely love cheddar but helas, I couldn't get my hands on it. So instead I chose to go with Kernhem.

Kernhem wouldn't be the most obvious choice to use instead of cheddar in a dish like this one. The texture of both cheeses differs greatly. Usually, if you'd have a firmer cheese like cheddar, you would want to replace it by a similar cheese. Gouda would be an option. But then again, I really love Kernhem and experiments, so what the heck...

Kernhem is a so-called 'modern' Dutch cheese: it has no significant history whatsoever. In fact, it was created by an official food research institute. Glamour? Nah. If you forget about its history a few seconds, and just focus on its appearance and taste, Kernhem wins a few points. It's a crusted cheese with a soft yellow colour and a subtle taste with a bit of spice to it. Have a look for yourself: *now look at picture at the top*.

The point of the recipe was to cook the chopped leek in melted butter, some olive oil and wíth some chopped garlic and thime until steaming. Then I put the leek into a bowl, spread the crème fraîche over it and grated some of the Kernhem over it all. It took another 20 minutes in the oven (180 degrees Celcius) for it to be done. The result: *see picture under picture of Kernhem cheese*. Voila!

Of course, you are now super hungry and want to try the recipe for yourself. No problemo. For just me I used:

2 leek

125 ml crème fraîche

some thime

olive oil

butter

about 50 gr of cheese

Now go out into the world and start cooking!

Lazy days

So Thursday is usually the kind of day I just want to sit back and relax and enjoy my dinner without standing on my feet for extended periods of time. Then again, I love myself a little too much to just go with fries or any other 'easy' meals. The solution: cooking in advance. Most stuff definitely tastes better if it's been prepared the day before. The flavours get time to mingle and it's easy enough to just reheat it. In most cases, the food tends to get a little dry though. To prevent this from happening, I usually add a drop of olive oil or butter {depends on what's being prepared}. You do not want to use too much since the food will get greasy and well, less tasty. {BTW, I almost never use a micro wave. Micro wave and I are not friends.}

My success recipe for the kind of situation I've described above is ribollita. It's an Italian vegetable stew and delicious if prepared well. You can serve it in combination with pretty much everything. I prefer just a little bread and parmezan cheese, but pasta is also good. I might just try it out with some gnocchi. Jummie!
So what you're going to need first and foremost are beans. I am personally a fan of fava beans, though I can imagine any Tuscan to immediately feel insulted by the mere suggestion of using it in this dish. The rule with Italians and beans usually is: the more colourful the bean, the better they like it. {over generalisation on my part, scusame!} I am usually lazy, so I'll just get myself a jar and use my biceps to open it - enough effort if it were up to me. Then I'll put the beans in salted boiling water together with a few leafs of laurel, a potato {love Eigenheimers!} and a tomato. You have to make sure the potato is really mushy {takes about 20-25 minutes} before you take the tomato, potato, and laurel leafs out and throw them away. Yeah, no more need for them. You keep the beans, and about 20 cl of the bouillon. While your tomato, potato and laurel leafs have been so gently cooking with your (fava) beans you prepare a so-called soffrito.
A soffrito is the base of, well, all Italian food, but in particular for tomato based sauces. You heat some olive oil {not the premium quality one, just keep it behind for salads please!}, and then add chopped garlic, chopped onions, chopped celery or celeriac, and chopped carrots. Of course, in the South of Italy, they do it very differently, and insist it's the only possible way to do it.
When the veggies in the pan have softened you add some canned tomatoes and let it simmer for a couple of minutes. It's around this time that I get impatient and throw my beans and bouillon in the pan. At this point, you're supposed to add bread {not too fresh} and cavalo nero.
So far, however, I've had absolutely NO luck finding cavalo nero. I live near five supermarkets, a market, and about three greengrocers. No cavalo nero. I know exactly what I am talking about, but my greengrocers seems to have no clue. Too bad. The only solution for now is to do without this specific kind of cabbage and just get on with it.
I'll let the stew cook for about 30-40 minutes and then just put it aside to cool down. I've even been known to just leave it in the pan on the furnace overnight because I don't feel like scraping it out into some bowl to put it in the fridge. The next day I'll just add some salt and pepper, olive oil and reheat it.
Usually I just throw it all into a deep bowl, put lots of parmezan cheese on it and make myself comfortable on the couch. Nothing's better, I swear!

For those of you who wish to start cooking right now, here's the ingredient list:

300-400 gr. of beans
laurel
1 tomato
1 potato {I prefer Eigenheimer, but that's just me}
1 or 2 red onions
1 carrot
some celery or celeriac {it should be in ratio with the onions and carrots}
3 garlic {come on, be brave!}
olive oil
1 can of canned tomatoes
300-400 gr. of cavalo nero {if you can find it, good luck!}
white bread
salt & pepper

Enjoy!