Sunday 30 December 2007 at 6:20 pm
There's one thing I absolutely hate since I started my new life in the working class... dinner. Although I love to cook, I just can't get myself to do something creative in the kitchen after a full day of work. (It's hard enough to get myself to do something in the kitchen after a full day of work, let alone something creative.) The problem isn't the cooking itself, it's the thinking part... what're we going to eat, how am I going to make it, what should I do first, which pots and pans are needed, watch out with the knife and more of the basics of cooking. He isn't much of a help either... fair enough, he will do his share of chopping and cleaning, but his doesn't provide creative thinking input in the kitchen.
Every now and then, mainly when he's not at home to talk me out of it, I can't resist the urge to visit the snack bar. Quick food. No cooking (and especially no thinking) involved. But it has been a while, more than six weeks since the last visit... and now I remember why... It tastes horrible, like chewing cardboard which has been soaked in fat for at least a day. A 'meal' with absolutely no nutrients, which I really regret at the moment. I can feel my bowels complaining and my arteries clot...
Next time I've this urge for quick food, please remind me the stuff they sell in snack bars doesn't qualify as food and hand me an apple.
Saturday 29 December 2007 at 12:36 pm
Various people tend to complain about my cooking, not because i'm a bad cook, but because i cook with lots of herbs (and other flavours). So the food tends to have a strong taste, and, especially if one isn't used to it, it can be a bit of an overload on the taste buds... Therefore, i always have to contain myself when cooking for others. But with this year's xmas dinner i was able to use as many herbs and flavours as i liked, actually the more the better. She loved it, cos she was finally able to taste some (70-80%) of the food.
Maybe i've found my cooking niche?
Monday 17 December 2007 at 1:24 pm
Last summer, we started to cut in our meat consumption, resulting in half a week of vegetarian cooking and half a week of 'regular' cooking with fish or meat. (Hey, I still come from a family of carnivores.) But in the last weeks, I've had more and more trouble buying meat... it's just dead animal, which has had an unnessecary poor life, which we don't really need to eat, which is bad for the environment, which stimulates world hunger by not being part of the solution, which is full of stuff we don't need and which is expensive. So I stopped buying it.
Now, I've got a totally new challenge... how to cook vegetarian all the time? Some cookbooks helped, and some friends did too. At first, I tried a lot of veggie-burgers and things. But they're expensive too, while plain tofu is cheap. But what to do with plain tofu? Surfing the internet, I found some great sites... tofu 101 explained everything you need to know and everything you don't nessecarily need to know. And for recipes, always trust the BBC.
So what did I do with it? I've made some gnocci with herby-tofu-tomato-sauce, some pasta with spinach-garlic-tofu-sauce and wacked the remaining tofu in our smoker oven (10 minutes, wood: pure maple). Made a smoked-tofu-salad and a pasta with smoked tofu-pesto-broccoli-pine nuts sauce.
I hope to keep myself busy with this tofu-thing for the next seventy years...
Monday 10 December 2007 at 10:01 pm
It's my favorite restaurant. Biological. Wood burning stove. Environmental friendly. Really, really good food. And when it was struck by a serious fire six weeks ago, we counted the days 'til the reopening. However, the service last week was a bit off. He served the wrong dish, which was absolutely delicious, but not what we ordered. He fixed it perfectly, by sending us a selection of the ordered dish just for the taste (no charge off course.) Tonight, we tried again... (luckily, we're persistant) and he managed to forget our drinks (twice!). Logically, I was getting pretty pissed. (Mainly 'coz all the mistakes were made by one person.) At the end, it all became clear. He served coffee (on the house) with some beschuit met muisjes. He had just become a father, his son was sleeping upstairs, so his head wasn't thinking straight. I can only imagine, with the recent fire and a pregnant wife...
If you know the whole story, some annoying things loose their importance.
Saturday 08 December 2007 at 7:52 pm
Tonight, we've tried out our new smoker oven (thank you, sinterklaa-aa-aasje). After a quick search on the internet, we decided to start with something easy: smoked mackerel, and leave the experimenting with vegetables, cheese and eggs until we get the overall principle of smoking.
Sadly, there aren't any recipes for 'warm' smoking at home (unless you buy a book which I will do soon but haven't done yet) so I created my own at the spot. First, I marinated the fish in a mixture of salt, lemon zest, parsley and garlic for 10 minutes, then rinsed it with water and let it 'dry' for 2 hours. The tricky part was to decide which type of wood (I settled for half oak, half maple) and the exact smoking time (20 minutes on and 10 minutes off the heat).
Dinner time! Judging by the look on his face, the home-smoked mackerel was a success (he was...ehm... reaching new highs while eating)
And the fire alarm didn't even noticed...
