Pasta with Asparagus & Tallegio

The sun reached Germany, wohooo!

Just in time for the 1st of may, the rays kiss everything they can find - especially my soul :) - and it smells like vacationtime in childhood.

All the flowers and leaves are popping out and I felt so much like cooking.

This one is very easy, you need only a few ingredients and not much time:

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Pasta with Asparagus and Tallegio/Goat cheese

(serves 2)
>> 120 grams of Talleggio (heavier) or soft goat cheese (softer in taste), whatever u prefer.
>> 400 grams green asparagus
>> 250 grams pasta (Tagliatelle is the best choice)
>> lemon juice, salt, pepper, good olive oil
>> 1/2 bunch fresh basil

1. Peel the asparagus with a vegetable peeler in thin slices (photos above)
2. Cut the cheese in little portions.
3. Mix 3 TBSP oil with 1 TBSP lemonjuice, add salt and pepper.
If you have a blender, mix it together with the basil to a herb oil. If not, save the basil leaves for later.
4. Cook the Pasta. One minute before they are ready, add the asparagus slices and let all cook for the lasting minute.
5. Drain the water, add the herb oil (and basil leaves eventually), put the cheese on top.

Add a LITTLE bit of salt and/or left over lemonjuice over the pasta.

Enjoooooy :)
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Nanas Plumcake

 

For Timo`s birthday I had a lot of wild thoughts which cake I could bake!

OMG, so many experimental and wonderful strange recipes in that world out there...

But finally I had to admit that - even if Timo loves to try EVERYTHING I create, because he is a handsome and curious man :) - it was HIS birthday, and what he loves above all other cakes is:

Plum-topped sheet cake! Like all our nanas did...ooh....smells like wonderful good old times.

So here we go! It was awesome ... so simple but so full of awesome awesome love!
(recipe at the end of the post)

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NANA`S PLUMCAKE (one oven sheet)
For the yeast dough:
500 grams flour
30 grams fresh yeast
125 ml milk, tepid
40 grams butter, unsalted
1 egg
50 grams sugar
pinch of salt

For the topping:
1500 grams plums (you can do that with every fruit you want, especially berries)
50 grams planed almonds (optional)

For the crumble:
350 grams flour
200 grams sugar
200 grams butter
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Give flour into a bowl, form a well in the flour.
Crumble yeast into it ans fill in tepid milk until it dissolved.
Cover bowl with a cloth. Let it leaven at a warm place until doubled in size.

Melt butter. Give it to the yeast dough you made.
Add egg, sugar and salt.
Knead all together until nice and smooth.
Cover bowl again and let it again leaven at a warm place until double sized.

Preheat oven - 200°C.

Half plums, remove stones.
Quarter the halves, but do not cut the thin skin through. That helps you later to lay the plums easier onto the dough.

Grease baking sheet with butter, toll the dough roughly out and put it onto the sheet.
You can do the final spreading of the dough with your hands.
Pick little holes into it with a fork.
Cover richly with plums.

For the crumble, knead flour, sugar and butter together and crumble it between your fingertips over the plums.
Spread the almonds above all.
Let all leaven 15 more minutes.

Put it into the oven for 20 to 30 minutes.

Tadaaaa! Wonderful cake is ready!
Enjoy it warm, with cream, that is THE BEST!

(Walnut-Rosemary-) Bread

I bought some kind of "treasure - book", I found it in amazon by chance.
It is called "Ratio" by Michael Ruhlman , and it explains, how you can learn to cook without sticking on recipes.


The first chapter is about bread dough, and it was so fascinating to read (I read it in bed before going to sleep), that the first thing after wake up was:
to try it out!
I bake this Rosemary-Walnut-Bread for breakfast.
And it was nearly perfect!...sure, there are always things you can make better.


But for my first try baking a bread without recipe, it was stunningly delicious.
Timo and me ate the first slices warm, freshly cutted from the loaf, enyoing the
morning sun - ummh! - just with butter. Nothing better!
The same day I gave it another try. With hazelnuts and cranberries.
It worked again. I am so glad I found this book and I am gonna bake a lot more
bread this year, I guess.

People always say, that baking bread is so complex...
But I didn`t make that experience at all.
The only thing is, that you have to be around for the time, the bread has to
rise and to be in the oven.
But seen from the work you have to invest: Not complex at all.


So, try it out!!!
And because you don`t need a recipe, I tell you how it works.

It is all about RATIOS (like the book says).


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A BREAD is always 5 parts flour, 3 parts water, some yeast and salt.
That means (in gramm) for example:

100 grams flour
60 grams water
3 grams (fresh) yeast
2 grams salt

You can extrapolate that. I took 300 grams flour, 180 grams water, 9 grams yeast and 6 grams salt
for a little loaf.

You mix the yeast and the water until the yeast completely dissolved.
Add it to the flour & salt and knead it, 10 to 15 minutes...it`s getting smoother and smoother.
The more kneading, the better.

Cover it with plastic wrap and let it rise until double size.
Then add your "special ingredients", if you wish (like nuts or cinnamon or whatever)
Knead it again, then cover it with a dish towel and let it rise for another 15 minutes.
After that, bring the bread into the shape you want, cover it with the towel again and let it rise for around one more 90 minutes. Preheat the oven (450°F/230°C).

After slicing a big X into the bread and coating it with olive oil and salt, put the bread into the oven, reduce the heat to 375°F (190°C) after 10 minutes and pull it out after 30 to 50 minutes (depending on the size of the bread...when you tap the bottom, it should sound hollow)

TIP: if you put a bowl in the oven before preheating and fill it with water after
pushing the bread onto the baking tray, you can create steam, what leads to a
wonderfull crispy crust.
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Well, this seems like a recipe, too.
But when you wanna learn something you have first to follow the basic rules.
If you bake that bread  2 or 3 times, you always can go back to the 5:3-ratio, and the bread will always be fine!

THIRSTY!

...by the way, we realized:
The Walnutmuffins make you very very THIRSTY!
The day I ate them, I enjoyed more than 4 liters of water! MAahhaha!

~~ Maple-Walnut-Weekend-Muffins

What a wonderful weekend!
Spring is coming, and we had a little bit of sun.
During my breakfast, I flipped through a cute magazine where I found this wonderful recipe here for MUFFINS.
It included only ingredients we have at home, so I didn`t have to go shopping. I could just start baking, yey!

The recipe comes from the "Barcomi`s" in Berlin Kreuzberg, a coffee roasters.
( >> www.cynthiabarcomi.com)

I changed it a little little bit.
PLEASE seperate the dry from the wet ingredients. It is important to get the best out of the final mixture.

MAPLE-WALNUT-MUFFINS
(12 pcs)

xtras:
40 gramms walnuts
70 gramms date (without pit)
1 pear (or apple, if you prefer)

dry ingredients:
280 gramms flour
100 gramms oatflakes (wholemeal, if u prefer)
100 gramms sugar
2 TSP baking powder
1 TSP grounded cinnamon
1/4 TSP grounded nutmeg
1/2 TSP baking soda
1/2 TSP salt

wet ingredients:
50 gramms butter
250 gramms buttermilk
125 ml maple syrup
1 egg (size L)
1 TSP honey (liquid)

>> Chop walnuts & dates (if the dates are too sticky, mix it with a little bit of the flour)
>> Peel pear and rasp it roughly
>> preheat oven 190°C

>> Mix dry ingredients in one bowl
>> Melt butter and mix it HOT into the other liquid ingredients
>> Mix the dry ingredients into the liquid ones - JUST A SHORT TIME, DO NOT USE AN ELECTRIC HANDMIXER! - mix it with a big spoon, or whatever. But only as long as the ingredients are just about mixed...not longer!

>> Quickly fold in the walnut, dates and pear into the dough and fill it in equal parts into the muffin cake pan.
After 22 minutes: out of the oven...cool out about 10 minutes.

YUMMYUMMMMMM!!!

Confession

When you have a Food (photography)-Blog, you have to do several things, before you can post something:

>> You have to chose a RECIPE (easy)

>> You have to go FOOD SHOPPING.... (easy when sun, not easy when rainy or cold)

>> You have to PREPARE the food (for that part, I have my boyfriend, you can see him perfectly   snip on the photo at the end of this post!)

>> You have to COOK or BAKE it (I could do that all day)
>> You have to ARRANGE the food (that one needs a hell of concentration!)

>> You have to TAKE PICTURES (loooove it!)

(>> when you finally eat the food, that cooled down in the meanwhile, you normally can`t stop to shout out ... "Oh , Timo Timo, stopstop...that bite was beaaautiful, hold it!! *click*"...a thousand times)

>> You have to PROCESS the pics you have taken (I love it, too!!)

>> If you are so smart, you have to WRITE DOWN the recipe....like you can see, I am not that smart, yet....this is often one step too much...but I will work at that!

>>Well, and then...then, you have to POST it.

Concerning my workflow, verything is fine, until the last point.
I cook and bake so much, I have so many photograpies...that I can`t keep up the writing-thing.
From all the things, I am at laziest in writing.

So I am sorry for some breaks in updating...I guess, one day comes a FLOOD of pics...the one day, when I am in absolut perfect mood for writing. So keep up reading ! :)

***Thank you!*** :-*   *Fabia*

(I swear, I work at the recipe-write-down-thing!)

Pomegranate, oh Pomegranate

So are a few pics I have taken 9 weeks ago....
A wonderful salad with some of my most beloved ingredients:
POMEGRANATE and PINE NUT...

Aubergine and fresh mint are the other ingredients, yoghurt on the top....



And I made oven roasted chicken with aubergines,pomegranate, walnut and cinnamon...

The first one could be a summer salad, but the period when the pomegranates pop out of the ground here in all stores is round about New Years Eve, a little bit later.
But I newfound this wonderful fruit again and I recommend highly to everybody: EAT IT! It is looovely!
And it fits to many other ingredients.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Rainbowcake ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Since Noody started to work at our company and is my roommate, there is a lot of "rainbow-spirit" in the room. Here rainbowcolors, there rainbowcolors, everywhere! Inspired by her and a post she did at Facebook, I thought about baking a RAINBOW-cake...

Well, actually I didn`t know at all how to do that, because I had no recipe, so I laid awake some hours at night, thinking about how to prepare the best Rainbowcake!

I already realized: It would be a LOT of work, but I was so flashed by the idea, that I HAD to try it at least.

My luck: Timo had some meetings in south Germany, so I had a few days alone.

I occupied the kitchen after making plans about the pastry, the colors and something-around....

I am not that freak of decorating cakes, I like it more basic. What a luck! :)

With the new food coloring I bought in my favourite spend-too-much-money-for-cake-stuff-shop (>>KD-Torten) I started my crazy day.

At least, I spent 6 hours in the kitchen and I was so so so excited!

I had to bake every color-slice extra for 30 minutes...my feet were so so tired in the evening, but I was happy!

I created a nice covering with marsipan and dark chocolate ganache, and I was really curious about: how it looks inside!!!

But I had to wait for Timo, kind of a little surprise and some increasing of suspense for me :D

Well, when I cut the cake I was SQUEAKING happily - the whole neighbourhood participated, I guess (not from the cake, for sure!)

I will write down the recipe, I already promised it to Noody and Rebecca.

I need some time for that, but now I can already post the photos...

have fun with that!

Have a COLORFUL day!

Vanilla & Clove Panna Cotta with Honeyed Persimmon

I`ve got this recipe from Coco, from her Blog "roost" - a wonderful foodblog with very creative foodcompositions.
Inspired by her and Johanna, a friend vom Israel who found that recipe in the www, it sounded so so interesting to me, that I had to try it out!

It was very easy to prepare, even if it does not look like.
The only "critical" moment are the hours where you have to wait for the gelatin to solidify.
Nyummnyumm!

You can find the recipe here:
http://www.roostblog.com/roost/vanilla-clove-panna-cotta-with-honeyed-persimmon.html

Persimmon

Jewelled Rice

A brandnew experience for me was this recipe, which I found (surprise surprise!) in Jamie Olivers` newest magazine from January/February 2012.

I always change those recipes a little bit, depending on my mood and ideas coming through the kitchen window :)
I guess you cannot find out all the ingredients from the photos (?), so here they are:
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- red lentils
- red rice from the Camargue
- red onion
- roasted pistachio
- roasted pine nuts and a little bit of crumbled walnut (that is what I`ve added)
- dried sour cherries
- juice from a lemon
- fresh leafs of mint and parsley (normally it is fresh coriander...but I don´t like it at all!

- as a topping: natural joghurt (I added that, too), not too much.
__

...in the end I was sure that it had perfectly fitted to put some pealed orangepieces on it, or pomegranate seeds. For the freshness and the contrast to the rice, which is very firm compared to the Basmati rice we always use.

I have never eaten such an interesting composition, so foreign in taste and smell and bite. Very, very cool! Wonderful...Timo didn´t stop eating :) - so we will cook it again, for sure!

Little Chocolate-Beetroot-Cakes

Because I`ve got a bunch of other work to do, I have not much time for cooking. And  I have even less time for big photography arrangements in our kitchen, because we cook very late at the moment.

Weekend begins now, and I couldn`t wait to try out this recipe!
I had a lot of beetroot from the farm who sends me fresh stuff every two weeks in my fridge and I asked myself: OMG, what can I do with THAT??
Timo does not like it, and for me, well....4 beetroots are a little bit too much. I found that recipe and *tadaaa* - Timo liked it, because the beetroot is more useful for a rich, dark color and it takes out the heavy sweetness from normal chocolat cake recipes.

So it tastes more like a dark chocolate cake what helps not to eat too much ^o^ ...

I had so much fun in taking photos finally again and I hope you enjoy!
Have a wooonnnnderful weekend! Love!

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 Little Chocolate-Beetroot-Cakes

(4 portions)
>> 150 gramms beetroot
>> 85 g dark chocolate (min. 70%), chopped, best quality for sure
>> 2 TBSP Rum (if u want)
>> 3 eggs
>> 2 TBSP brown sugar
>> 2 TBSP unsweetened cocoa powder, good quality again

- Preheat oven - 200°C
- Grease 4 oven-safe forms, each about 150 ml
- Cook beetroot until soft (that can take time - cut it in dices before cooking, so it`s getting quicker)
- Mix hot beetroot, chocolate and rum in a blender until smooth
- Mix eggs and sugar with the hand-held mixer 5 to 10 minutes - the color should get light and the
   mass should be threefold.
- On the bowl edge, fill in carefully the chocolate mass into the egg-sugar-mixture. Scatter cocoa-
   powder over it. Mix it caaarefully with a wooden spoon - it must not be perfectly smooth and
   homogenous
- Fill into forms, put into oven.
- Bake it 7-9 minutes - 7 minutes is more for a liquid core, 9 to 10 more for a cake.
- After baking, let it cool down in the forms for 2 minutes. Then turn them out.
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The recipe is from the new Jamie Oliver magazine, german version, "Januar/Februar 2012".
It was invented by the british Foodstylist Anna Helm-Baxter. She came to the U.S. to live there and realized, how much sugar is added in the American foodstuff, so she decided to create "sweet" recipes with other things than sugar. This cake for example has only 2 TBLSpoons sugar in it. And a lot of beetroot, but you don`t taste it that much.
I think the idea of Anna is great!
We don´t need that much sugar for desserts...it can be sweetened through fruits and so on.

Here is Annas Website:
http://londonfoodieny.com/

Sandwich - Freestyle

Yesterday, after I hopped through one of Hamburg`s farmer`s market, we had a more or less simple dinner - just sandwiches.

I freestyled a little bit, so the first one was spread with Ajvar & Harissa , I added mackerel, olives, chopped salted  lemon (which I prepared one and a half month ago already, yumm!), salad and roasted pine nuts.

Normally, I would have used tuna, but because tuna is one of the most endagered and overfished fishes, we decided already 6 month ago, not to eat it anymore.
(You can read that here: http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/fishwatch/species/atl_bluefin_tuna.htm ...
We always watch out for the logo of the MSC, the Marine Stewardship Council - they look after  natural and healthy fishing...>>>>

The other one was with peanut-cocoa-sauce, chicken breast with roasted fennel seeds and cinnamon, olives, chopped salted lemon and apricot.

Happy, happy evening.

Spitzbuben - christmas cookies part 2

Don`t think I am lazy and my kitchen stays cold...noonooo!

I made a lot of christmas cookies, cute packaging and gave them all away...
But I always have to prepare the whole kitchen for photography sessions, and after hours of baking, well...there is sometimes no power left for that.

But I have been in Brandenburg, where my parents enjoyed the pre-christmas time...in a house in the forest..., and I used the opportunity to bake cookies with my mum, what I didn`t for years!...All the good old childhood cookies...mmmmh!

So here are some pics of  my favourite ones: "Spitzbuben" .. so it is called here.I guess, everybody knows this kind of cookies, it is so so simple, and every part of every country has a different name for it.
But everywhere, they taste delicious, I am sure!

For all of you:
MERRY DELICIOUS CHRISTMAS,
whatever you may eat during the holy days!

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Nut slices - christmas cookies part I

Not only winter is coming...also christmas!
I love christmas! Not only because of all those memories of my childhood and the snow and the smell of tea and hot chocolate... but also because of all the christmas cookies!
I love to taste those from others, and I love to bake them me myself.

The first session began with nut slices. The big ones taste awesome, so I tried them in small - and they are much better, because you can have little bites of - but more often...

Conchiglie with Brussel sprouts

Winter is coming.
The temperatures here gonna reach 0 C° this weekend...well, I confess: I really hate to freeze, and I hate these empty trees, no leaves at all, no birds, light is dull... it`s always a time, I have to overcome.

But this season has also its good parts.
For example all the seasonal vegetables, cole and so on.
Brussels sprouts is something very common in the winter here. ...well,...opinions differ on this point :o)
People hate it or love it. Timo for example hates it. I love it.
So I was happy, when he had to left for one day to Berlin, so I jumped right off into my clothes and went shopping.


 With my prey, I made this wonderful  Conchiglie, with Brussels sprouts, bacon crumbs, cream and Parmigiano.
OMG, it was wonderful! So easy and so well tasting!