Ratatouille with banana peppers - joining the rataouille debate

Ingredients

1/2 onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 1/2 cups green banana peppers, seeded and diced
1 medium eggplant, diced
2 tomatoes, diced
1/4 cup white wine

Summer seems to finally have arrived here, and for some reason, in my mind, summer dishes always include either peppers, tomatoes, zucchini and/ or eggplant - don't ask me why! And somehow, they always come together as some variation of ratatouille, which got me into heated discussions with the santoku master of what has to go into a real ratatouille. Growing up, eggplant was basically unknown in my family, and many summer days were spent feasting on completely eggplant-free ratatouille (a paradox, as I am being told now).

Still convinced that any combination of the vegetables above can make a ratatouille, this time I opted for a combination of eggplant, banana peppers (less sweet and crunchier than bell peppers which gave the dish an interesting tangy note, and I also liked the light green color, a good color for early summer) and tomatoes.

To prepare the eggplant, I cut it into small cubes, salted them and let them sit for 20 minutes before rinsing them in water to wash away the bitterness. Then, my usual beloved ritual of sauteing onions and garlic in olive oil followed, adding first the eggplant and after another 5-8 minutes the peppers, and letting them more or less roast in the pan for 15 minutes before adding the juicy tomatoes and stewing the mix with the white wine. After seasoning with salt, pepper and herbs de provence, the first ratatouille variation of the summer was ready to be enjoyed.

What is your favorite ratatouille and what has to go in it?


Life is good!

Quadrucci - pasta dough leftovers

Ingredients

leftover pasta pieces from tortellini a la casa
1 bell pepper
1/2 cup frozen peas
1/2 cup mushrooms, sliced
1/4 cup strained tomatoes


Do you remember my afternoon of female bonding over the menial production of homemade tortellini a while ago? It turns out there was an unexpected bonus meal in the whole procedure, which I didn't want to hint at yet because I didn't know how it would turn out.

The story of the unexpected bonus meal begins the day of the laborious pasta making. I'm not sure whether it is only because of our lack of experience or if that's just what happens, but next to the pretty tortellini you saw on this blog, neatly folded from the squares cut out from sheets of dough, as you can imagine, there were a lot of less pretty, less neat looking pieces - some from the borders of the dough sheet, some from the middle - which we couldn't use as tortellini.

My original impulse had been to simply throw it out but then I remembered what I had preached about leftovers and reducing food waste. Reading your responses had made me proud of my ever so tiny contribution to making better use of the food we have, and it is with great pleasure that I am reading about an increasing awareness in that regard. So the idea came to my mind to dry the leftover pasta patches in their idiosyncratic shapes and forms, and try to make a different meal out of them.

And how wrong I had been to think that only the flawless tortellini could be pretty! The dried pasta patches (which we'll call quadrucci from now on to make it sound fancier!) looked so quaint in their jar that I left them on my shelf for weeks just to enjoy looking at them.

Of course, after a while curiosity got the better of me and I prepared my bonus meal. The quadrucci are quite straightforward to make - I didn't cook them in rolling boiling water, but just below boiling so as not to destroy the more fragile ones among them.

For the sauce, I sauteed onions, peppers, mushrooms and frozen peas (basically the leftover veggies I had that day), added a little bit of strained tomatoes and seasoned them with salt and pepper.

As it turns out, the delicate texture and flavor of the quadrucci was a real pleasure in itself, making it absolutely worthwhile keep them. They were so flavorful and special that with the tiniest hint of regret do I even recommend using a slightly less powerful sauce to accompany them. The dish was delicious but I can't help but wonder whether for example, a simple sage butter would not have displayed the quadrucci more prominently.

Life is good!

Soup of parsley root

Ingredients

2 parsley roots
1/2 cup parsley
3 parsnips
3 quarts broth (vegetable or beef)
chives

Being all about trying to eat as seasonal as possible, here is another recipe idea to make the switch of seasonal food from winter to spring. It is based on some of my beloved root vegetables which provided sweetness, earthiness and warmth during the winter months and comes in the form of a soup, perfect for a chilly spring evening but inspired by the fresh and light green of a day spent outside in the sun!

This is a very simple recipe - you just peel the parsley roots and and parsnips, boil them in broth until soft, add in the parsley and puree. Season to taste with salt and pepper and top with fresh chives.

Life is good!

Breaded beets on salad - transitioning to spring

Ingredients

2 medium beets, boiled and peeled
1 egg
flour
breadcrumbs
salt

for the salad:
whichever salad variety you like
olive oil
vinegar
salt & pepper


Spring is arriving with giant steps. Around two weeks ago, the singing birds came back from their winter retreat in the south, filling the air with beautiful song and waking us up in the morning with their music. Nature around us changes drastically with every day. Where yesterday there might have been a patch of dried up grass, today is it covered with flowers. First were of course the snow drops, then came the crocuses and now even the first violets and narcissus are blooming. Seared scrubs are coming back to life with hundreds of tiny blossoms, thirstily soaking up the first real rays of sunshine, like us.

With the changing seasons, now is the time to say goodbye to the root vegetables and cabbages of hearty winter, to gradually fade them out and move on to the lighter cuisine of spring and summer. This salad, which can also be eaten as an appetizer, eases into this transition, combining earthy beets with fresh greens.

Boil the beets like a potato and peel them when soft. Cut them in very thick stripes and pat them dry with a kitchen towel. Get the salad ready except for the dressing. While you can use whatever salad you have at hand, the occasion particularly lends itself to the first baby spinach of the year or if you are lucky enough to get your hands on dandelion greens, this is the place to use them.

Prepare three bowls, one with flower, one with the egg (scrambled and add a pinch of salt here) and one with breadcrumbs. Heat oil in a pan on medium to high heat. Cover each beet slice first with flour, then egg and finally breadcrumbs, and fry them on both sides for around 5 minutes total.

Now dress the salad with olive oil, vinegar, salt and pepper, and arrange on plates. On each plate, add two or three pieces of beets and enjoy saying goodbye to winter.

Life is good!

Lentils with vegetables - contingency meal planning

Ingredients
1 cup red lentils
1 onion
1 carrot
1 broccoli
1 tbsp white wine vinegar

Probably one of the biggest challenges of regularly cooking at home is planning ahead. You know from experience, if you wait for a sudden 6pm inspiration to decide what to make for dinner, you are as good as lost. I've tried the whole being spontaneous routine. It usually includes heading over to the supermarket crowded with other desperate after-work shoppers, frantically grabbing things (and it is a law of nature that I will not remember the milk for tomorrow's breakfast!) and getting into hyper stress mode in the endless check out line. Back home, I am already starving which translates into a level of grumpiness you don't even want to imagine...

On this very topic, I've read a useful blog entry over at Dinner a Love Story about planning ahead for your dinners, which I highly recommend having a look at by the way, detailing how to go about setting realistic goals and letting yourself off the hook from time to time with having your own frozen meals or eating out (and it includes a meal plan!) etc etc.

So far so good. In a perfect world, these strategies would be all you ever needed to have a perfectly planned week full of delightful dinners with your loved ones. However, I want to propose adding another strategy: contingency planning.

What to do on days when you come home and the key ingredient for the gourmet dinner you had in mind for that day has gone bad (or your dog looks innocently rueful)? What to do when you want to take out those carefully homemade frozen dinners, just to find an empty freezer and an innocently rueful looking husband? What to do when you simply don't feel like dragging yourself out to a restaurant? These, dear reader, are the days you need to have your contingency plan in place for.

My personal contingency plan are lentils. They are very easy to store in bulk, are filling enough to be the backbone of an entire meal and if you get the red ones, they cook up in 15 minutes. And they are so versatile that you can combine them with basically anything.

In my case, I was lucky to still have some onion and vegetables in my fridge. After sauteing the onions and carrots, I added the lentils until they were also mostly with the oil, then cooked them in water until nearly. Just before they were ready, I put in the broccoli and seasoned them with salt, pepper and vinegar (with lentils, it is important to season them at the end of the cooking process).

It may not produce the most delicious meal in the world. It is wonderful if you are so good a planner that the situation never arises to require falling back on this contingency plan. But on days when you are really desperate, this strategy will deliver a nutritious dinner.

Life is good!

Vegetable fried rice - a delicious way to mindfully reduce food waste

Ingredients

1 cup brown rice, boiled with 1 star anise
2 stalks lemongrass, finely chopped
1 leek, finely chopped
2 spring onions, finely chopped
1 red bell pepper
1 cup sugar snap peas
1 1/2 cups bean sprouts
5 shiitake mushrooms (soaked according to package instructions)
soy and Sriracha sauce to taste

No, the Life is good kitchen has not converted to being a specialty food blog about Asian cuisine (I wish!). However, as my latest culinary excursion into the world of Vietnamese Pho noodle soup had included a trip to an Asian supermarket and left me with all kinds of exotic perishables in my fridge that needed to be used up quickly. For the sakes of economy and ecology, it would have broken my heart to throw it all away, but what to do with the lemongrass, the beansprouts, the sugar snap peas and the shiitake mushrooms?

There's been quite some media coverage lately regarding the waste and throwing away of food, and in my opinion, thinking about how to reduce the amount of wasted food is also part of the concept of mindfulness. Once sensitized to this topic, I noticed that my mom's old cookbooks from the 60s and 70s featured whole chapters with suggestions on how to turn leftovers into whole new dishes - a consideration that is, sadly, completely missing today.

But back to my splurge in the Asian supermarket! Luckily, what stew is for the Western cook, using up all the leftovers and transforming them into something delightful by itself, is fried rice in (wanna-be) Asian cuisine. The more the merrier!

The recipe itself was pretty straightforward and a nice break from the long and elaborate recipes I'd tried during lent. First, I boiled the brown rice with a star anise to give it an extra of flavor. In a large pan (see, if this was turning into a food blog about Asian food, I should at least own a wok!), I began with sauteing the finely chopped lemongrass and spring onions in a little bit of oil. One after the other, I then added the leek, bell pepper, sugar snap peas, mushrooms, the bhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifean sprouts and last but not least the rice. Finally, I seasoned the mix with salt, pepper and the now ubiquitous soy and Sriracha sauce.http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
It may only be tiny baby steps, but enjoying my bowl of fried rice that night is a small contribution to the goal to reduce by half the amount food thrown away in Germany and my personal goal of being more mindful. And if you're a fellow blogger, consider linking to Love_Food_Hate_Waste.

Life is good!

Squid Fettuccine and play time for my inner child

Ingredients
1 clove garlic, chopped
1 serrano pepper, chopped (including seeds)
1 ½ cups julienned zucchini
1 cup julienned carrot
½ cup milk
½ cup white wine
⅓ cup grated Parmesan
Squid Fettuccine


One of the latest additions to my kitchen gadgets is a julienne slicer, and so far, I hadn’t really started using it. As you can imagine, my inner child on the other hand could hardly sit still because of all the giddiness and wanted to play with her new toy!

Experience has taught me that said inner child would not start nagging before she got her wish, and so play we did (I hope to remember this wisdom when I have children of my own). Oh and the fun we had, creating piles of beautiful strings of vegetables that looked stunning on the wooden cutting board, melting every veggie-lovers heart....

But what to do with all the colorful goodness, asked sternly my inner voice of reason? Have you been playing with precious food just for playing’s sake? So with her ponytail between her legs, my inner girl created the following dish.

In a heavy pan, I sauteed the serrano pepper and garlic in hot olive oil. After the garlic had turned golden, I added first the carrots and a couple of minutes later the more fragile zucchini, stirring from time to time to prevent burning. While the medley was still crunchy, I poured in the white wine and the milk and reduced the sauce by cooking it another five minutes and finally thickening it with the Parmesan.

Fortunately, I’ve had some squid ink fettuccine which had been sitting in my cupboard for a while already and which are just made for white, creamy sauces. To the utter delight of the Santoku master, they contrasted well with the colorful vegetable stripes. And my inner little girl is officially allowed to keep her new toy!

What's your favorite kitchen gadget right now?

Life is good!

Refreshing with ice cold cauliflower salad

Ingredients
1 cauliflower
¼ cup cauliflower broth
canola oil
red wine vinegar
salt & pepper
½ parsley, chopped
1 teaspoon nutmeg

When visiting my grandmother for weeknight suppers, she had always made us a salad, changing with the seasons from beet to cabbage, cauliflower to celery root, carrot to tomato. Tirelessly she would work with what was available in her little vegetable garden and on the market, using always the same recipes and the same techniques she had learned as a young girl in winter school. Abundance nurtures creativity, austerity values the well-known.

On the way to my grandmother’s house, we’d speculate which salad there would be that day, the choice of vegetable being the only unknown variable in the predictability of suppers consisting of thick slices of bread, cheese and cold meats. She lived at the top of a steep hill, and the last ten minutes walking up there in the glittering evening sun got us panting and grasping for air.

The first thing to do upon arrival was to run into the kitchen and go right for the fridge, where the salad of the day would have been cooling for a couple of hours in a beautiful bowl. My day was made if it was cauliflower, my favorite, the cauliflower florets gleaming seductively in their oil and vinegar dressing. With the savage appetite of a still growing teenager, often I could not wait for everyone to sit at the table, instead shoveling one refreshing forkful after the other into my greedy mouth.

Nowadays, cauliflower is sadly underestimated, much like its relative, cabbage. There is nothing glamorous about it, maybe because it grew in our parents' gardens and was cheap, or maybe because no matter what you do with it, it will always stay down to earth and refuse all pomposity and gaudiness? That is what I adore in cauliflower and what I adore in my grandmother’s timeless recipe. It is simple but does bring out the flavor and is as refreshing as a cold lemonade.

To prepare the cauliflower, you just have to wash it, cut the head in half vertically and cut a little cross into the two stalks so it cooks more evenly. Then it has to be boiled in salt water for around 15 minutes, depending on its size. I have noticed that the custom prevails to eat vegetables nearly raw, but this is not what this recipe calls for. The cauliflower shouldn’t be so soft it can be mashed, but tender enough to offer only a little resistance to the bite.
http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
In the meantime, you can prepare the dressing: some of the water the cauliflower is boiling in, mixed with canola oil (or any neutral tasting vegetable oil), red wine vinegar, salt and pepper, the chopped parsley and a little bit of nutmeg (which complements cauliflower well in general). Once the cauliflower is done, cut it into medium pieces, cover it with the dressing and let the salad rest in the fridge for some minutes (the longer, the better; in fact, this salad tastes even better on the second day). Relax and enjoy ice cold.

Life is good!

Radish fast food or how to make dinner art

Ingredients
1 slice of bread
butter
radishes, thinly sliced
sea salt

There are the days when I love cooking. The days when already in the morning, I come across an interesting recipe in one of my favorite food blogs or I know that a certain ingredient is sitting in my fridge waiting to be prepared; the days when I can’t stop picturing myself in the kitchen having fun and I can’t wait to get home and get started.

Then, there are the other days, fortunately happening more rarely. Work might have been all-consuming and stressful or I just don’t feel like cooking. Usually, I am still hungry as a wolf, and yes, there are those rare days when I give in, pick up the phone and order some pizza for delivery.

Luckily, there are many options in between. As people are beginning to realize, food doesn’t have to be complicated or take a lot of time and effort to prepare, and sometimes the most heart-warming and delicious dishes are as simple as toasting a slice of bread (a note on the bread: I love whole wheat sourdough bread, but you can make this with all kinds of robust breads; toasting gives the bread more of a crunch and melts the butter so it is absorbed into the bread) , putting some butter and radishes on it and sprinkling it with a pinch of salt to create a colorful little piece of dinner art.

Life is good!

Bacon and beer revisited

Ingredients
2 leeks
2 tablespoons pancetta cubes
½ cup white wine
1 pinch of lightheartedness

Sometimes, heavy clouds are weighing down the sky, immersing the whole world in grey and sucking out the color and with it, the joy. Is a thunderstorm in the air?

Those are the days when you need bacon! Blessed are those who can find true happiness in food and blessed are the foods that deliver joy in its purest form. Health-conscious as we are, nowadays the mere thought of bacon has something nearly obscene to it. Health conscious as I am, I wouldn’t recommend pure bacon to you. However, as always in life, it is all relative. Various civilizations with only limited supplies of bacon have come up with ways to integrate its flavor into dishes without actually using too much of the thing itself.



For indulgences like this, I like pancetta, but it could be replaced by speck or bacon cubes. On medium to high heat, fry the pancetta to render the fat and make the remains crispy. Today, my fridge reveals some beautiful leeks, so that’s what for dinner tonight. While the pancetta is frying and filling the kitchen with a smell so delicious and inviting that even the newspaper cannot compete for my fiance's attention, I (or should I say the Santoku?) cut the leeks into razor-thin rings and add them to the pancetta.

After 3-5 minutes of frying the leeks in the rendered fat, I pour in the white wine, as the texture I am going for here should be crusty but not burned. It promisingly sizzles when coming in contact with the hot fat, emitting another yield of delicious fragrance. Once the whine has evaporated, the crispy golden leeks are ready to carry all the flavor of the pancetta to your plate and palate. Anyone up for a cold koelsch?

Life is good!

Monday night blues or when to make Green Vegetable Curry

Monday night blues or when to make Green Vegetable Curry


Ingredients

3 tablespoons green curry paste
1 can coconut milk
drop of vegetable oil
½ onion
2 small carrots
1 cup snow peas
1 cup sugar snap peas
1 small bok choy
1 Serrano pepper
fresh cilantro leaves
1 teaspoon soy sauce
salt and pepper
Basmati rice


The best thing about Monday night is that Monday morning is over. That horrible moment when the alarm screams next to us and that second in which the realization kicks in that I have not forgotten to turn off my alarm on the weekend, but that it’s really time to get up... the full inbox of unread emails that wait for me at work and the idea of that long week ahead of me - by Monday night, all this is over.
I have successfully gotten up, coffee helped me over the first tired hours, my inbox is sorted and most emails replied to and the week ahead is only four days long now.
So for my dinner on a Monday night, I need something soothing and comforting, but also energizing and hopeful. Something quickly prepared so I can enjoy as much leisure time that evening, recreating that weekend feel of freedom. Luckily, the fridge is still bursting with fresh produce from my big weekend shopping trip two days ago, waiting to be diced, chopped and sliced.

Green vegetable curry it is, and because the veggies taste better the fresher they are, I am going to use up as many as I can, making a little extra food to go into the freezer to be heated up whenever neither my partner nor I feel like cooking. My latest gift to him was a Japanese Santoku knife, and ever since, he’s prancing around the kitchen playing Samurai. For me, the advantage lies at hand - I have a over-eager and willing human food processor! While I heat water for the rice and a few drops of vegetable oil in the dutch oven (one of the great loves of my life), he happily chops away the onion, which goes into the oil first, then the carrot, Serrano pepper, the peas and finally the bok choy.

Is this even cooking, slicing vegetables, throwing them into oil and boiling rice? Well, yes, after a while I add the coconut milk and some of the curry taste (best to start with a little and gently increase the spiciness), and stir the mixture, and season it with salt, pepper and the soy sauce and add the chopped cilantro. And yes, the order in which the stuff is added to the pot somewhat counts, beginning with releasing the sweetness of the onion and carrots first, then building onto those flavors with the Serrano pepper and finishing with the more “fragile” vegetables like the peas and bok choy.

The final big decision is whether to put the rice in with the sauce or serve it separately. For the later freezing of the leftovers, I prefer the former option, although I have to admit that it looks fancier to put rice and vegetables next to each other. To each their own.

Later as we sit on the balcony, enjoying the freedom of our Monday night, the delightful exotic treat and a glass of a crisp white wine, I can help but think “Life is good!”.