Priceless Paintings from W7

Here’s a nice one for you: Smoked salmon and poached egg on toast. Really simple: Get some crumpets or thick toast, toast until crunchy. Add a generous slice of good smoked salmon on top of each toast, and top that with one tablespoon of sauce hollandaise. Prepare one poached egg per toast, stick it on top of the sauce, and decorate with cress, dill, or crispy fried bacon.

Serve with salad and a dry white wine.

For the sauce hollandaise, simply make a sauce Bernaise without the tarragon business. Or, to put it another way, prepare a thick custard from 50g butter, 150ml tick cream and 4 free range egg yolks. Season with a generous amount of black pepper, a pinch of salt, one teaspoon of mustard and and two or three teaspoons of white wine or rice vinegar – just be careful with the vinegar so that it doesn’t curly the sauce.

Almost to pretty to eat, don’t you think?

Food and Drink

Here is some of what we ate this week:

Smoked Salmon with poached eggs on toasted crumpets, with Sauce Hollandaise and its lovely lambs lettuce.

Sopa Espirito Santo

Galettes “Super Chevre”

Neustadt-style BBQ: Winzersteak (Riesling-marinated pork steaks), mixed salads, roasted potatoes. Creamy peach tartlets for pudding.

Food and Drink

Have a look at our new bike shed, isn’t it just great? Weatherproof, bolted down to the concrete foundations, and locked, providing convenient storage for our bicycles in the front garden.

No more carrying bicycles through the house, fumbling with locks in the garden shed at night, etc.

Doesn’t come cheap, and does come with some built Ikea-de-luxe experience: 17 large steel and aluminum parts, 37 medium sized parts, and 166 nuts and bolts and three hours total assembly time later… To do them justice, the assembly wasn’t difficult at all, and assisted with concise instructions and good drawings. All holes predrilled in the right locations, and no part missing.  I really could not have asked for more.

Thoughts

Along with the wall, the wobbly, broken and not very nice concrete path stretching all the way from the northern entrance, through the northern park, to our front door has also been replaced.

Reclaimed granite paving bricks in an odd assortment of colours, sizes and shapes. The brick layer had quite some jigsaw puzzle to solve at times, but we are pretty pleased with the results.

You won’t be surprised to hear that reclaimed granite bricks, essentially rubble from some demolition site, is more expensive than newly cut sand stone, for example. Modern robbery!

You should come along one day, though, walk our newly built and very own roman road and join us for a drink and a bite.

Thoughts

Here is some of what we ate this week:

Slow-roasted Lamb shanks on bed of spiced Mediterranean vegetables, with saffron rice (I *really* like saffron, did you ever notice that?)

More Crepes and buckwheat Galettes: “Super Chevre,” Forestiere and Iberico. Apple mash, chocolate spread and plum jam for the crepes.

Hot and spicy meat balls in tomato sauce, rice. Simple but tasty. Always a favourite.

Quiche with Salmon, prawns mushrooms and dill, and its lovely fresh and green lambs lettuce. Lots of lambs lettuce, actually.

Once again: Choucroute de mer with lightly smoked salmon, smoked haddock and langoustines, and its potato gratin. Panna Cotta with strawberries once more because it’s so easy yet so delicious.

Food and Drink Mediterranean

It’s very rare that I watch cooking programs on television. I zapped into this BBC program by chance, and ended up watching the whole broadcast.

It’s nice to see a TV chef, even though in need of a better script writer, who doesn’t do any of the usual cover-up nonsense of “having prepared one earlier” or using semi-prepared ingredients.

Ching-He Huang shows the nasty business of dealing with a large crab, explains why a Sea Bass ought to be steamed with its head on (because the idea of wholeness is important to Chinese cooking, and because you can tell when its done from the whiteness of its eyes), and identifies a fish as fresh by smell (doesn’t smell of fish) and touch (not sticky).

I thought her recipes a little monotonous, but enjoyed watching someone who knows how to handle fish and seafood. Check it out!

Food and Drink, Thoughts BBC

The front wall has been re-built and is no longer in danger of falling onto the pavement one night.

Nice job by Colin our Mauerbauer.

The ironwork needs brushing down and a lick of paint, but at least the structure is done at long last.

Nice to see how things start rolling, even if certain home improvement plans at times seem to get their very own dynamics.

Thoughts paint;

It’s one of those wonderfully simple and quick yet terribly rewarding dishes. Spaghetti Aglio e Olio has served us with many a quick meal on a Sunday evening, but with a small amount of extra effort, you can add an extra kick to it that catapults in into a different league all together:

Add moules or prawns or calamari or scallops for a seaside touch.

For Red Spahetti Aglio et Olio, prepare spaghetti Aglio e Olio as you would normally do.

Then dice a Chorizo sausage into pretty small cubes. Heat a little oil in a separate pan and fry the sausage gently, together with a generous amount of crushed chillies. Add King Prawns or Scallops if needed, but I don’t think you’ll find it necessary. Toss with aglio e olio pasta.

Serve with Parmesan cheese, a nice Red, and enjoy.

Food and Drink

I learn something every day. Among the non-herbal teas, among those made from the leaves of the tea plant, I knew about black tea, and I knew about black teas. I also enjoy a variety of green teas, which often give me a much needed caffeine boost mid afternoon.

Interesting to find out there are also white teas and oolong teas. A friend bought some tea from China some while ago; I think this might actually be an oolong tea. More or less by chance, I recently bought a white tea (that’s how I discovered the existence of white teas to begin with), a Chinese Pai Mu Tan. It looks more like herbal tea, green-ish dried leaves and some stalks, basically. White tea actually closer to the harvest than green tea, with minimum oxidation.

Very refreshing!

I love a good coffee, but admit that I am increasingly fascinated about the variety of teas out there. Coffee seems almost boringly straight-forward in comparison.

Food and Drink China

Here is what we ate this week, or at least what one of us ate this week:

Flammkuchen

Steak Cheval with its chips and salades (in Switzerland) and rump steak with its tomato salad (London)

Galettes “Super Chevre” (ha – learned to make Crepes in a normal frying pan. Will tell you about it soon)

Lazy Chicken with Sage Butter Tagliatelle, Salad, and Panna Cotta dessert.

Spaghetti Carbonara

Food and Drink london, Switzerland;

Friend Linda declined the honour, but she gets it anyway as she introduced me to these very lovely Cranberry Pistacho Biscotti. Easy to make, lovely looking, perfect with the coffee after a meal, or just at any time.

So, it’s an American recipe, using handy cup measures. This is my version of it:

2 cups white wheat flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup soft butter (unsalted preferred)
3/4 cup sugar
2 large free range eggs
1/2 vanilla pod

1 cup shelled raw pistachos
1 cup dried cranberries, alternatively dried cherries
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

In a non-sticking frying pan, roast the pistachos lightly – use a little butter if needed. Set aside to cool down a little. Meanwhile…

In medium bowl, beat butter with sugar till light and fluffy. Beat in the eggs, one at a time, followed by the seeds from the vanilla pod. Mix in the flour, baking powder and salt.

Toss the cranberries or cherries with the cinnamon. Add the pistachos and the spiced dried fruit to the mix, stir in well.

Cover a flat tray with baking paper or a teflon baking sheet. Form two logs from the dough, about 1 inch high and 1 .. 2 inch wide. Leave 3 inches in between the logs.

Bake at 160C (325F) till golden, about 20 minutes. Let cool for 30 minutes or longer. Slice on diagonal into slices, bake the slices 7 minutes on each side or until they begin to color.

Food and Drink

I only have myself to blame. I have asked for it, and I must now suffer the consequences:

I have asked a few kitchen suppliers for a copy of their free brochures. As you might know, we are beginning to plan for a rear extension project, which will include remodeling our existing kitchen. As such, I am beginning to collect ideas as to what we should have and could have and want and don’t need and all of that.

Suppliers of fitted kitchens are apparently more desperate than I had imagined; every one of them rung right away and was hopeful to sell a fitted kitchen for not under the price of a middle class car within a week or so.

Offers included “we are in your area tomorrow” and “we have this 40% discount on until Thursday next week.”

I hope we can get our new kitchen for the price of a small car only, and without being hassled too much for too long a time.

Thoughts

You can tell that I am reading Fantasy again. Recently read Eragon by Christopher Paolini (which I only saw as the movie), and then read Eldest again. This is just so that I am ready for the third of the trilogy, Brisingr, which should be coming out this September.

Anyway. The witch and the werecat of Teirm made me think: if a fortune teller foretells a long life, does that constitute a blank approval for a life as wild and as dangerous as you like?

Too bad I don’t have such a prophecy.

Oh, and believing in it would probably also be required, so I better keep myself safe in the confines of my old sofa, awaiting the new one. Good survival chances on both.

Thoughts Christopher Paolini

Sofas might be boring, but some old ones are pretty embarrassing, too.

So, we persevered and found what we liked within… well… within reasonable prices, over at Supatra of Windsor. Nice chap there.
We then managed to convince ourselves that this sofa is so nice in fact, and the added benefit from partly being made from quickly renewable resources (water hyacinth) combined really outweighs the fact that poor Don Giovanni is going to endure some pretty serious piece of education with regards to scratchable, and not scratchable things.

Feel free to come around and have a look some some time in late August onwards. The ship is still in some southern Chinese harbour and our sofa still drying in the sun, but should be here late August.

Oh, here is a pretty picture.

Thoughts Don Giovanni, Windsor;

Here is what we ate this week, or what we could have been eating this week had I actually cooked four noteworthy meals.

Hanwell Goreng (a quick chicken and prawns stir-fry with Mango chutney and Thai fragrant rice)

Choucrute de Mer from creamy Sauerkraut with wild Alaskan Salmon, smoked Haddock and Langoustines.

Caldeirada (a portuguese hot-pot with fish, tomato and potatoes)

Green beans and slowly stewed lamb (always always always a favourite)

Food and Drink