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Another cooking Sunday! Another Luxembourgish favorite: Rieslingspaschtéit, basically a meat pie/terrine with Riesling, a white wine that's very common in Luxembourg. First off, you gotta prepare the pastry. For this you need 75g lard (Schmalz, I prepared it simply by frying bacon), 75g butter that I melted, 375g flour, 50ml Riesling and 50ml water, some salt. You mix it, knead it and it will feel like a very crumbly dough, but that's ok, you put it in the fridge for 1-2h afterwards. Then you take 500g minced beef, add 2 eggs, parsley, mustard, 50ml oil, chopped onions (to annoy Pazit), salt, pepepr, worcestershire sauce, balsamico vinegar, breadcrumbs and some cognac (although I prepared it with Bushmills and it turned out perfect). You chop up a 400g porc steak into tiny pieces/cubes, do the same with 250g of ham and mix it, and add some more Riesling. You put this in the fridge for an hour or two. In the meantime, you prepare the pastry on a buttered form (take 2/3, the rest is for the cover. You add your meat into the form, add your lid and seal it with moist fingers. Then you add a hole in the middle of the form so that the water can evaporate during baking. Also you cover the outside of the lid with egg yolk. Put it in the preheated oven at 190-200° for some 90 minutes, then let it cool down for a couple of hours. Finally you prepare some aspic (Sülze, Jelly, you can use gelatine as well), heat it up with some white wine and bouillon cubes and pour it through the hole in the lid. Turned out pretty good.  

Yeah I know the title doesn't make any sense. Anyways, since I really like rhubarb pies, I tried getting a decent recipe from my mother last Friday. As usual, I wasn't too satisfied with the two I got, so I combined elements from them and other I found online. I liked the idea of combining raspberry with rhubarb, so here goes: I took for 1 pie two big rhubarb thingies, peeled them and cut them in 1cm pieces, which I covered with brown sugar for an hour or so. In the meantime, I prepared the dough from 300g white flour, 50g Saracen flour (Heidekornmehl, Welkeschmiel), 150g sugar, 180g butter, salt, 2 eggs, lemon juice and 3/4 of a pack of baking powder. Once the butter is warm, you can form a nice dough with your hands and plate it in a buttered pie form. Add the rhubarb and raspberries. Then combine 3 eggs, some 200ml cream, some milk and 100g sugar and pour in onto the pie (I didn't use all of this mix). Put the pie in the oven at 180°C for 50'-60'. Halfway thgough, I poured some more brown sugar onto the pie, which caramelised and formed a yummy crust.

Last Monday, we had nothing better to do than to bake 5kg of "Gromperenkichelcher", apparently called potato pancakes in the US, for some lucky 10 people joining Movie Mondays. This is a very famous recipe in Luxembourg and I was happy that I got some help from the busy bees that help me peal and grate a massive pile of potatoes. I added a big hand full of oat meal, some breadcrumbs, 8 eggs, parsley, 2 big onions, some garlic, nutmeg, salt and pepper, and fried them in a pan in lots of butter. In Luxembourg, you would traditionally serve them with salt or apple sauce, but to satisfy the Polish standarts we included sour cream as well. The Italian fraction suggested Nutella, and since I hve my own way of eating them, I also brought powdered sugar. I think (to my astonishement) that the salt/powder sugar mix enjoyed the most success.

Continuing my series of Luxembourgish national dishes and gastronomic specialties, I present you today the Liewerkniddelen, which you could probably translate by liver dumplings. It's one of my favorite dishes, and for a very long time I could not prepare it because I was lacking a proper meat grinder. Well Xmas was my lucky day, and I must agree that while not many people would be happy to find a mincer under the Christmas tree, I was. It was a Alexanderwerk Fleischwolf inherited from my great-great grandparents. The quantities will be enough for 2 person. First I bought a cabbage head because I could not find any Sauerkraut, chopped it up in thin slices and incubated (yeah I do too much science) it overnight in the fridge with tons of salt. You need 300g fresh calf liver, 2 eggs, white bread and milk, parsley, onions, bacon ("Fette Speck" instead of "Moëre Speck", meaning the fattier the better) and potatoes (small ones). I began by carefully washing the cabbage in order not to get a salt shock, and then I cooked it for an hour in bouillon. I made "Gebootsche Gromperen" with the potatoes, so you peel them, take your bacon (around 70g) and fry it in an adequate pot (teflon coated is excellent for this), then remove the bacon but leave the liquid fat, add the raw potatoes and put on medium heat with a closed lid (no not your eyes!). Every couple of minutes, you shake the pot without opening the lid. So for the dumplings I chopped up the liver in thin slices, put them in the mincer, added the milk-soaked bread (100-150g) as last to get it all out. You have to pass it through twice, the second time adding the bacon and parsley.You then mix it with the eggs and some breadcrumbs (depending on how liquid it is), 2-3 chopped onions, season it (salt and pepper etc, use enough salt) and bring some bouillon to cook. You form fist-sized balls and place them in the boiling water and let it cook for some 10 minutes. Taste the cabbage, if it is still too salty wash it again and heat it shortly before eating in a pan with some oil. You can add some fried bacon (Gréiwen) on the potatoes and liver balls. They go great along some mustard!

Well not really, but good enough for me! The perfect breakfast on a lazy Saturday morning. You need for 1.5 person (huge portion): 2 eggs, 330ml milk, a bit of cream to add, 3-5 Tablespoons of sugar, a pinch of slat, 230g flour, raisins (I could only find tinned cherries in my kitchen), a bit of rum, some vanilla sugar, some sparkling water to add to the milk, 1 teaspoon of baking powder, and plenty of butter to fry it. You separate the egg white and make snow of it, which you carefully add at the end to the dough. Then you pour it all into a frying pan like a huge pancake and rip it all apart every minute or so until you get nicely golden brown clumps of dough. You serve it with plenty of powdered sugar.

I tried this recipe for the first time last Saturday, and although it takes some time, it was more than worth it. Also called Königinnen Pasteten in German, these are one of my favorites, so all the better I now know how to prepare them. For this, I used some carrots, leek, onions, garlic, one chicken, some white wine, mushrooms, parsley, some filo pastry that you'll fill with your chicken, flour, butter and milk for the roux. I wanted to add some calf thymus, which is also traditionally added, but the Coop Fleischwarenfachverkäuferin just gave me that Fuck off Weirdo look... So you'll start by preparing your chicken by adding the vegetebales to some 3 L of water, add some salt and your chicken and let it cook for 2-3h, depending on the chicken. In the meantime you can prepare the pastries. You let the chicken cool off a little, remove the meat from the bones (especially the white meat is what you want) and put it onto a plate. Separate the soup from the bones etc. Fry an onion, add your sliced and peeled mushrooms (champignons) (I also added some bones I had left for the taste), add the chicken and some of the soup and let it cook some more (make sure that either you use not too much soup, or that you'll let it evaporate a little), finally prepare separately your roux by heating butter, adding flour and finally some milk until it gets a nice viscosity, then add it to the chicken. In the meantime, heat your pastries, fill them and put a slice of lemon on top, then add it to the oven for some time and you're done!
 

Got bored with Gipfeli, that's why I decided to do a lazy Sunday morning (after an exhausting week) eating homemade brioches and watching the Simpsons. Things was though that the dough has to be prepared a day earlier, that's why I traveled back in time to yesterday evening to prepare it. I used 300g flour (in Switzerland they have special "Zopf" Mehl), added 15g dried yeast in a couple of spoons of warm water and some sugar. I added the yeast into the middle of my flour volcano and let it do its thing to some 15 minutes. Afterwards, I added some salt, 2 eggs, 200g of butter and formed a nice dough clump, which I let settle for some 2 hours. Then I gave another gentle massage, before wrapping it in some foil and putting it into the fridge overnight. Today I formed balls of around 70g in the usual brioche way (like a small snow man) and tried some other forms, covered them with an egg yolk/milk mixture and baked them for 12 minutes at 230°C.

My love for experimentation does not stop when leaving the lab... No don't worry, I'm not synthesizing LSD in my bathtub, although I have been known for building explosive perfume distilleries from old chemistry sets (to my defense I was 10 then). No I'm talking about cooking. Good almost always leaves room for improvement, therefore I try to optimize and document my gastronomic explorations. Which can be hard at times, as I use to cook by following my gut feeling without going by recipes or intermediate tastings...
A while ago, I cooked and published a recipe for Magret de Canard with Orange Sauce. Last Saturday, I optimized my protocol. You'll need (on top of all the stuff from the old recipe) some pastis, fresh oranges for the juice and a sterile syringe & 19G needle... You'll get those in a research lab or at your nearest drug dealer I suppose. I'm pretty sure some Grand Marnier would have done well there as well, but with all that duck hunting I didn't have any time or money to buy a bottle of otherwise disgusting tasting liquor. So for the changes: You recover the juice from the oranges and fill your syringe (without the needle), put the needle on top and inject it on several points into the muscle. You can also mix the juice with Grand Marnier. You proceed like before, but you flambé it twice. Once after the frying, but with Pastis instead of Cognac, and once immediately before serving with a pinch of Whisky after covering the fatty skin with a thin layer of honey. Hmm...
 

Recipies, Duck, Magret

Last weekend, Jim and Trixy came over from Luxemburg and Strassbourg respectively, and thus I decided to honor their visit by trying to do a Baumkuchen, which truly must be one of the best cakes there is, if you find a good one. Usually, we would only eat them on special occasions such as communions etc. They are multilayered cakes, which will usually be made on a cane rotating in front of a special oven or fire. I helped myself out by using a plain rectangular cake form, into which I made one layer after the other. For the dough I used 200g butter, 220g plain sugar and 60g iced sugar, 150g flour, 100g maizena (corn starch), 2 packs of vanillin sugar, 7 eggs, 1 small flask of rum flavour, 3 teaspoons of baking powder, 200g of chocolate for the icing along with some cream. Noteworthy is just that you separate the eggs and add the egg snow at the end very carefully. You gotta have a very powerful oven, I put mine at the maximum (250°) plus grill (grill helps a lot). You make a VERY THIN layer of dough into the form, let it bake for 2-5 minutes (until brown), then add the next one. Don't bother doing this if you don't have the time... The chocolate icing is completely optional, I felt it helped preventing the cake from drying out... Sorry no pics, it was gone way too soon!

recipe, cake, dough, baumkuchen

A couple of weeks ago, I suddenly felt the urge to eat snails, slimy little creatures that would freak most decent people out. Every now and then, I love them, so after a nearly desperate search in the Coop in finally found some frozen ones, prepared with their shell (which I don't like too much, it's such an inconvenience). I prepared them on a fine Julienne which is fancy for saying I chopped up some carrots, leek and celery, added tons of garlic and even more butter. Fried them for some 30 minutes in the oven, and devoured 24 snails with a nice cup of liquid garlic butter, vegetables (see, it's healthy for you!), a good loaf of bread and a very good Portuguese white wine. Goes perfectly along watching the Deer Hunter with Robert the Niro by the way.

Recipie, Snail

As I had stolen my parents noodle machine when coming to Basel, I decided yesterday that it was time to worship the FSM. The recipe seemed straightforward, 100g of flour per egg, though I couldn't resist adding some Saracen flour and a pinch of maizena, as my flour had already been mostly used in the fantastic pizzas I made on Friday. I had some difficulties in handling the noodle machine at first, which could be resolved by mounting it properly on the kitchen table and following the recipe (fold the dough ONCE after the first couple of passes on the broadest cylinder setting, then each run make it a little thinner). I decided to make my favourite spaghetti, only problem remaining was where to dry them... Finally, as you can see, I found a 5m long composite AV cable that I spanned across the kitchen. Noodles were yummi by the way!

home made, noodles, recipe, spaghetti

Since I've been to Luxemburg this weekend and since the Berbuerg woods are covered with one of the best edible mushrooms there is, namely the Cep or Procino or Boletus (Steinpilz in German). I thought my parents had exaggerated, but it was really true. After some 30 minutes, we had collected so many that I barely managed to get the basket home. I dried some of them, since they are excellent for a risotto e.g., and the most beautiful I took to Basel. Marco suggested yesterday to try a cheese fondue with ceps, and so I did. Oh man, it was gorgeous... I ate 'till bursting (well almost). You basically do your traditional cheese fondue (fondue cheese, garlic, white wine and maizena) and add some fried ceps. After some 300g of cheese, 300g of bread and probably 150g of mushrooms I had a very pleasent night... but it was worth it!

Link: http://amusesbouche.canalblog.com/

I'm not sure if I posted this site before, but every now and then, I like to pay it a visit to get some mouth watering inspiration. It's a French blog about mostly sweet goodies, with very nice pictures and interesting recipies. Mhiam!

For this bouillabaisse fest (for 12 portions), you'll need: around 10 pound of white meat fish (redfish (ocean perch), red snapper, blue-mouth, rockfish, sea robin (gurnard), monkfish, cod, porgy (scup), grouper, halibut, haddock, dab, turbot, wreckfish, ocean pout (ling), cusk, wolffish (ocean catfish), tautog (blackfish), tilefish, sculpin), 4 pound of oily fish (bluefish, moray eel, conger eel, mackerel, shark, dogfish, striped bass, sea bass, kingfish, Spanish mackerel, mahimahi (dolphinfish)) (you should have at least 4 different kinds of fish), 2 pounds of mussels or clams, 1 lobster or 500g shrimp, 4-5 big onions, 2 garlic heads, a couple of fresh tomatoes, 1 red pepper, some dry white wine (Muscadet or Sancerre), 4 stalks of celery, 1 fennel head, 3-4 bouquet garnis (fresh thyme, black pepper, bay leaves and parsley), a couple of cloves (Nelkenköpfe), 1 orange, safran, clam juice, lemon juice, an egg, olive oil, french bread (baguette), red chili grounded, butter, 3 leeks, tomato paste, anise liquor (Ricard, Pernod, etc)

Try to get the gutted fish with heads and carcasses. If you can get nothing but filets, you'll need only a total of around 4-5 pounds and some fish broth. The preparation time takes 4-5 hours.

Filet your fish into byte size, then let them marinade in a saffron olive oil mix, chop the carcasses into pieces. Clean the shrimp and cut along their back removing the dark (and bitter) digestion tract and marinate them in olive oil with lots of garlic, add the shells along with the carcasses, fish heads and some of the fish meat into a big pot and cover it with 3-4 l of cold water. Add 2 of the bouquet garnis, fry some of the onions and add them to the pot. Add 200-300ml of the wine. Skim occasionally, after some heavy boiling let simmer for 2-3 hours. In the meantime, you can clean the mussels and put them back into cold water. If the broth is done, get some of the baguette, remove the white part, soak it in the broth, add it in a food processor, add lots of garlic, 300ml olive oil, 200g butter, red chili pepper powder, salt, an egg yolk, some fresh pepper and saffron and process for 30 sec. Then put to the fridge, this will be your rouille.
Strain the broth through a strainer, set aside. Heat lots of olive oil in the pot, add the onions, leeks, celery and fennel, the tomatoes and the garlic. Add the broth, squeeze in half an orange, add some of the clam juice and saffron steeped in some wine, and the rest of the bouquet garni. Bring down the heat, cook for an hour or so, add the clams and shrimp, then after 15 min the fish. Add the tomato paste and the anise liquor. Cook for another 10 minutes, then serve. Put the toasted baguette with some rouille on top. Enjoy! And remember, this is a very rich soup, so don't eat to much, or you'll thank me. Tastes even better one day later!

If you're ever has to much chicken and wonder what to do with it, try making these chicken nuggests yourself. They'll be dipped into a beer pastry and fried in a large pot with boiling oil. It could be a bit heavy on the stomach though. You'll need:

• 1/4 l beer
• 180g flour
• 2 eggs
• spices
• a sip of soja sauce

Best is to separate the yolk, add it to the beer and flour, mix, then slowly add the egg white beaten to snow, and the spices (I like chili, salt and basil). You can move it to the fridge for a couple of minutes. Fry the chicken breast till it's half-way through, cut it into pieces, heat the oil. The oil must be really hot, around 160°C (you can test this by sticking a piece of wood into it. If bubbles start forming, it's ready to go). Add the meat, and remove it when ready / crisp.