Stroganoff-stuffed baked bell peppers & Tomatoes

This was actually the first time I made the stuffed-tomato dishes as I also served on Christmas. Served it with some rosemary-garlic-balsamic marinated chicken legs that I then roasted in the oven till the skin got crispy. Made for a great meal :-)

A few steps in the making:
1) made a semi-enriched dough, scooped out the tomato innards, and made the mushroom-chicken stroganoff and let it cool a tad before stuffing it into the tomato
Filled the tomatos, then wrapped the dough around, making seams on the overlap and trimming off the excess, folding down the tops to look cute:

For reference, I did the stroganoff by sauteing some chopped onions in olive oil while boiling the sliced mushrooms in saltwater for about 5 minutes then straining them, then finely chopping a chicken breast, cooking that in with the onions, then adding a tidbit more olive oil, then flour, and stirring that till the flour is all mixed in and cooks for a bit, also adding some oregano and thyme, pepper and boullion for the salt, then slowly adding and stirring in some reduced-fat milk until it reaches a nice thick cream, then adding the mushrooms, and adjusting the creaminess to be the right final consistency. Turns out great each time :-)

Dinner on the 25th

I was lucky to have both my sisters in town for Christmas, and cooked up a celebratory 4-course meal for the occasion :-)

Menu:

Vichyssoise (Potato & leek pureed soup), served with mini cherry-tomato quiches

Lemon-dill Salmon and herb-cream pangasius filets with asparagus seared with roasted garlic

Chicken-mushroom stroganoff stuffed tomato baked in a soft bread, with a sundried-tomato roasted-bell pepper sauce and sweet potato cakes on the side


Raspberry mousse served in white-and-dark chocolate bowls

Whole wheat Tortillas

My first tortilla:

I made some tortillas for the first time this month--just using a standard flour-water-salt recipe out of The Joy of Cooking. :) They turned out great! A lot of work when doing them alone, having to hand-press each then cook it in the skillet. But they were so great for some mexican bean-and-rice burritos, busting out my last jar of tomatillo salsa from the US. :)
My sisters came and visited soon afterwards, and we made them again, which went a heck of a lot faster with 6 hands!

I'll definitely do them again, and maybe with cornmeal/masa to try out making corn tortillas, too.

Artisan Breadbaking

Inspired by my friend Bling Bling's account of baking breads from a Peter Reinhart bread book, I decided to follow a recipe from my own Peter Reinhart bread book "The Bread Baker's Apprentice" --really great book by the way! So I liked the sound of this meat-cheese-bread recipe, called "casatiello", so I followed that recipe (except it called for a lot of butter-- 2/3 cup of butter or so in the loaf, so I used half of that of extra virgin olive oil, and I think it had zero detrimental impacts on texture or flavor), and also instead of using pork sausages as the meat, I used a type of turkey thick-hot-dog-like sausage they sell here instead. And my choice of cheese to use inside was a sharp emmenteller (which was following the recipe as he suggested swiss cheese, or another flavorful meltable cheese).
It turned out great in the end! haha and it looks just like in the picture in the book :) Really delicious bread, of course pretty rich, being that it contains meat cheese and oil in the dough. One loaf was really quite large, too, and I ate it nearly all myself, but by the third day of eating it, it was getting pretty dry unfortunately. But fresh, it was really extremely soft, flavorful, delicious... will totally do it again (just when I have company to help me eat it!)

Awesome DOUGH!!

Now this dough was something....


This dough had the most unusual texture I'd ever worked with-- completely un-sticky, but incredibly soft, stretchy, pliable, and drippy... haha reminiscent of Dali's melting clocks!

I think one of the keys to it's texture was a new pretty high-glutin flour I was using-- Urdinkel-flour. I had made the same dough (contains some sugar, oil, eggs) using other flours before and didn't nearly get the same effect after similar kneading times. I am eager to try this one out for pizza crusts in the future--could give a really awesome stretchy-thin crust!

... and it made a really delicious batch of cinnamon rolls!

I baked half of them immediately, then with the second half was experimenting with freezing the un-risen dough spirals, as I was curious how well the dough really rises after being frozen, and it did really well! Just required sufficient thaw-time in a warm room, and then puffed up nicely! Good to know for future batches that I can keep myself from eating a dozen, by freezing the rest into one-evening portions to bake fresh :)

A selection of random dinners during the week...

For fun, here's just a random sampling of some casual dinners I made during a the week :) Every other day I'll cook up something "bigger", otherwise it's often some sort of vegetable soup, cause those are fun and easy after a long day of work. But here are the non-soup ones. Honestly, soup pictures are a bit harder, without dishing them up in nice bowls, and having garnishes, they can often look really un-photogenic! I'll work on making good soup pictures in the future.
I was really excited to find Stubb's BBQ sauce in the grocery store here--happy they started carrying a *real* one! So I celebrated that evening with buying one of the expensive bottles, for some bbq chicken skewers, with some roasted nuts on the side.

Then felt like something 'lighter' like sushi--so had this shrimp and salmon sushi rolls... I made a ton of rolls that time! So had leftovers for work which is always nice!

And some slipper lobster pasta carbonera, with multi-flavored noodles. That might not look like it from the picture but it was a ridiculous mountain of food!
We honestly daily eat far too much in the evenings. I'm sure I'm the one to blame for that!

Roasted Pumpkin Seeds

Sometimes I buy my pumpkins more for making the roasted seeds than for the pumpkin soup or pie or whatever I do with the actual pumpkin. Just love these!Only magic ingredient is a nice seasoning salt. I make this one, which has been a family favorite seasoning salt for decades:
~1/3-1/2 salt, then the second half of the seasoning made of these spices, in order of decreasing volume: onion powder, garlic powder, celery salt, paprika, very crushed parsley leaves, chili powder.

Spätzli !!

Quick notes on one of my swiss favorites, Spätzli!

Here is a pic of my favorite store-bought one, which also adds a fair amount of vegetables to the eggy bizarre noodles.I recently found in the classic awesome book "The Joy of Cooking" that they actually have a recipe for making Spätzli, which I tried out twice. The basic recipe for Spätzli is just:
2 eggs
1 1/2 cup flour
1/2 cup water
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp double-acting baking powder
you beat them all together, then boil small tubes of it in boiling saltwater.
The first time was pretty funny, because I was not aware of just how much it would poof up when boiling (due to the baking powder), so my normal-sized noodles I piped into the water ended up being bloated dumpling monstrosities.
One normally would use what's called a "Spätzli -cutter" which squirts them out in the right sizes, but I just did a pastry-bag type version of piping them into the boiling saltwater.

Still, the dumplings tasted good! :) I had also flavored mine with a bit of garlic powder and chili powder in the batter for fun. btu they were definitley weird amorphous dumplings.
So the second time I made them the appropriate size, and they looked great, until I needed to strain them out of the boiling water, then they really stuck to gether badly, and were a tad too soft to keep their form if trying to toss them in some olive oil or sauce to get them to separate again.
Overall, still working on perfecting a homemade recipe!

Thanksgiving meal!

My favorite holiday! But there's a challenging twist to celebrating here in Switzerland. Mostly that there is no such holiday, and trying to make a feast after you get home from a long day of work is tough. Even so, I was really pleased with the results of a very quick version of a Thanksgiving meal this year!
... with no meat on hand at first, I started off doing two dishes I ritually MUST do for T-day-- cranberry-marshmellow dessert salad, and green bean cascerole--so for the latter I steamed the beans, sauteed some onions and mushrooms, added it to some mushroom soup made 2x as thick (soups come here in powdered packages), so you cook it up with about half as much water as it calls for to make the equivalent of a canned mushroom soup. And they have something similar to the traditional fried onion topping for it, to top that off.

Then I made some mushrooms stuffed with chopped onion, bell pepper, and some sauteed diced chicken sausage, and seasoned with oregano, s&p, and Worcestershire sauce.

I had some things to make a stuffing, which then worked out well when I brought home the bacon... I mean, some chicken breasts. So then I had some bird to work with for the dinner. So I diced some olive bread into cubes, sauteed some onions and celery together with some more of the diced chicken sausage until they were medium-cooked, and mixed those with grated celery root, chopped red bell pepper, one diced tomato, and the remainder of the mushroom soup I didn't use for the green bean cascerole. Then I cut the chicken breasts into long flat filets, quickly seared them in a pan on one side to get a nice color: then took them out, and put some olive oil in the bottom, added the cubed bread, then the stuffing mixture over that, and then the chicken filets on top of that golden side up, then baked it in the pan the rest of the way, for another 30 min or so at 200 C, which I think worked out really well to stil get the chicken drippings down into the stuffing and merry the flavors nicely.

So overall I was pleased with having a 4-dish T-day :) (the cranberry dessert was still in the freezer then, and another favorite treat I got at the grocery is on the table-- "Quark Stollen" which is a dessert bread, lightly sweet with a sweetened quark swirl running through some soft bread.
Mmm.... I will definitely make the chicken and stuffing in this way again-- I was really glad that turned out okay!

Oh! And then also the cranberry dessert salad. I made that quickly by grating (in my food processor) 3 tart apples, and a package of fresh cranberries, then put those in a bowl, add some lemon juice and a good helping of sugar. Then, either use mini-marshmellows, or I had large ones, so I diced them even smaller than the mini ones, and you mix those in. Then beat some whipping cream until fluffy and stiff, and fold that into the whole mix. Then it's really best if it stays in the refrigerator for the whole day before eating, and teh marshmellows soak up the fruit juices and the whole thing turns a lovely creamy pink. Actually, I usually also freeze it, and then let it de-frost for many hours in the fridge or outside for an hour or two before eating it.. Something about having it pretty cold, like a soft cranberry-marshmellow ice cream, pleases me, though I remember the rest of my family liked it without any remaining essence of being frozen.

Fish kebabs for fish tacos!

This ended up being a pretty tasty fish-marinade: Lime juice, soy sauce, sweet chili sauce, garlic, ginger, and some spicy satay seasoning. I let it all soak in for the day, and that evening made some unusual-style fish tacos with them, including a garlic-aioli sauce, cabbage, and a mango-pineapple pico de gallo.
I didn't have any tortillas, so I quickly made some thin whole wheat pitabread to use instead... but fresh tortillas would have been a lot better... I should try to make my own tortilla sometime and see how that goes! Better than buying the one brand of odd-tasting ones offered in the grocery store! There's definitely room in the market here for some *good* Mexican food and ingredients!

Vegetarian fashion carpaccio

On my recent trainride back from meeting my sister in Baden-Baden, Germany for the day, I concocted a series of fun dinner menu's to try out. :) Here is the first of those, with one of those long restaurant-style titles:
A white wine risotto stuffed turnip with a celeryroot carrot salad and balsamic vinegar reduction with roasted eggplant carpaccioResult--- pretty pleased overall! BUT there was one serious set-back to this particular rendition of the dish. In my original on-the-train conception, I was planning to use a large kohlrabi as the steamed-vegetable to serve as teh risotto bowl, cause I love the gentle water-rich flavor of kohlrabi. .. unfortunately the organic kohlrabi in the grocery were 4 bucks per piece, while the turnips were 1 buck.... so I spared the ingredient! But that turned out to be an issue, because the steamed turnips retained a lot of bitter flavor, even when peeled, so it wasn't so pleasant to have the edible bowl afterall. Lesson learned-- the kohlrabi is still worth it! ... or I would need to cook the turnips in a different way which perhaps would improve their flavor and remove that bitterness.

The eggplant tasted great-- to make it I thin-sliced the eggplant, dipped the slices in some seasoned olive oil, and baked it at ~220˚C along with the bell peppers near the top rack to slighty broil them, and it got a great flavor. I separately carmelized some onions and baby celery stalks to add as more toppings to the 'eggplant carpaccio'.

Balsamic reduction went nicely-- I should have let it go just a hair more to get it a bit thicker like a syrup, but it still got to the right rich end-flavor I was aiming for for the celeryroot-carrot salad (and it also tasted nice with the risotto.) The risotto I just did with the rice, added a few dL of white wine in the beginning of it's cooking, some finely chopped onions, some boullion, and a few more portions of water along the way until it had swelled up to just the right texture.

Overall each portion of the dish was really easy to make and the process is embarassingly parallel (hahaha)! So as a plus, it was done fast, too! (First started the balsamic reduction, then began steaming the turnips/kohlrabi, start up the risotto in a pan, while all 3 pots are simmering, get the sliced eggplant and bell pepper in the oven, and then each component is done in a total of 45 min or so! I'll definitely repeat the dish, but definitely using kohlrabi :)

Fish Rolls!

This was the first one of them I made, in which I spread some herb & garlic cream cheese, and also used a dried cured turkey meat also on the inside, but I found that the flavor of that was too strong against the more subtle flavor of the fish, so I would need to use a less potent meat to pair to it in the future. But the broccoli-stuffed potato skins (on the right) topped with turkey bacon bits and gruyere were awesome! :)

I did the fish roll again last night, but this time just the cream cheese interior, nad then the exterior I dipped in egg, then a coating of ground soybeans, then baked them till the soybeans got a nice golden hue. I think that turned out much better flavor-wise compared to the one with the cured turkey.

Sooooo Delicious!

I just need to share this dish I had yesterday in a town called Brunnen... served at this hotel for lunch. It was so delicious! I need to learn to exactly replicate it! :)
Spätzli (a Swiss egg pasta, sometimes with veggies) served with a baked apple with tart berries, brussel sprouts, roasted chestnuts and an *incredible* red cooked cabbage...

... hopefully soon I can post my personal re-make of it!

Initial attempt at Jerk Chicken!

John and I had a funny conversation watching (on TV) the track world championships going on in Berlin this year... since in essentially every sprinting discipline, the Jamaicans were cleaning up! So he was pondering "what it is in that country-- good water, good air? good food? or is everyone just sporty so they really get to pick the cream of the crop?"

Well, I ran with the "Good food" and decided to try my hand at Jamaican jerk chicken, and see if it made John run any faster than his already break-neck speed.
Not sure about that, but it was a damn good marinade, which I'll use again many times for sure!
A hodge-podge of jerk marinade recipes from the internet of:

Ingredients (all into the blender or food processor):
- one small onion
- a big bundle of green onions
- a half-thumb size of ginger root
- a few spoonfulls of fresh thyme
- 3 cloves of garlic (okay, I put in 6... i love garlic!)
- some *HOT* peppers to your heat-preference
- 2 spoonfuls of soy sauce
- 2 spoonfuls of olive oil
- 1-2 spoonfuls of molasses
- juice of one lime
- 1-2 teaspoons salt
- ground pepper
- a teaspoon of something like allspice
...I can't find allspice here, so whenever that happens (also like in carrot cake or spice cake recipes) I make a mix of nutmeg, cinnamon, ground cloves and maybe come ground corriander.
It tends to get the 'right idea' of spicing :)

Then blend--yes it's fairly 'dry' so in a blender would require some coaxing to get it to become a paste. But the higher the concentration (ie, not diluted with watery things) of the paste, the more flavor it will infuse into the meat.

I rubbed it in, some under the skin, and left it to marinate with the chicken for a good 6-8 hours or something. I just baked it in the oven for convenience-- hot enough to get it all crispy! so 200˚C for about 45 min- 1 hr 15 min depending on how big your pieces of chicken are :)
Mmmmm....
Really tasty marinade I have to say, but for some reason I don't feel it was fully Jamaican-style jerk chicken. Maybe cause I didn't slow-smoke grill it, or whatever else, so I'll still play around with other ways of doing it, too.

Special Sandwiches

These flavor-packed sandwiches are one of my top favorites! The concept was invented by my mom a good dozen years ago... I remember it being the first time that I discovered that the intense flavor of sundried tomatos can be truly amazing in the right situation!

Here's how it goes!

A nice bread, chicken (sliced thin or get some chicken tenderloins), your favorite chicken seasoning, a jar of olive-oil preserved sundried tomatos, goat cheese, any variety of lettuce, oregano, a few cloves of garlic and pepper.

For my chicken seasoning, I generally will sprinkle the cuts of chicken with salt, pepper, garlic powder, celery salt, cayenne pepper, paprika and ground rosemary.
Then heat up a skillet to mediumish heat with some olive oil, and sear the chicken on each side till getting some golden brown. (Actually this time I thin-sliced a big turkey breast, cause turkey is actually far less expensive than chicken here and they had a great huge cut of turkey breast today on sale!)

Then prepare the sundried tomato paste, the real magic to this sandwich!
Take the jar of sundried tomatos, something like this:
I like them preserved 'wet' like this rather than the dry ones because (A) it skips the step of having to rehydrate them, and (B) they're turbo flavorful having been soaked in herbed-seasoned olive oil for however long. AND when you get the can, you don't use all the olive oil, so you're left over with a turbo-seasoned olive oil which you'd be paying up the wazoo for to buy separately in its own jar, and using that sundried-tomato olive oil in another context can be awesome, too. So unload the tomatos into a food processor, including a bit of the olive oil. Add some oregano, pepper, and crush a few cloves of garlic into it (crush them in advance otherwise you might end up with biiig chunks of garlic. Not a bad thing, but nice to have the consistency right :) Blend that together, adding a bit more of the olive oil back into it to get it to the right blended texture. Voila--sundried tomato paste! (honestly it'd taste really good just purely blending up the sundried tomatos if you want to make it more simple! I just love garlic, oregano and pepper, and think it gives it an extra kick!)

Layer your sandwich!!
Sundried tomato paste on one slice of bread, goat cheese on the other slice, and lettuce and chicken in the middle. Enjoy!!!

What do you do with 8 kilos of apples?

.... what DON'T you do!?!?

Another thing I love about Switzerland:
Public parks that are beautiful, midly maintained, which also are adorned with fruit trees and bushes that hence are free to the public upon harvest time!

Apple season is beginning!! Sunday morning climbed up and got 2 sack-loads, ie, 8 kg of apples, and that afternoon began the "now, what do you do with it" process :)

1) You eat the ones that are perfect!
Mind you, these are organic apples, no farmer comes in and sprays pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, and you can also tell this because then yes, you are going to run into some with scars on the exterior (of the type unsightly for grocery store shelves), and some that have little caterpillars inside, which are predictable by a tell-tale mini hole they leave on the exterior. So you specially set aside those that are large, luscious and with perfect exteriors.

2) Apple crisp! (or Apple pie if you prefer)
Easy recipe! If the apples are sweet enough (for me, that means still quite tart, as I like the contrast of a tart apple part and the sweet crisp on top) then you just thinly slice them (I even leave the skins on cause they're healthy and they don't bug me in the product), topping with some lemon juice and cinnamon. Then the crisp, I use a whole wheat flour, like 2 portions flour, 1 portion sugar, a pinch of salt, and then mix it using beaters on low, drizzling in enough light olive oil till it gets the crumbly "crisp/cobbler" topping texture. Top the apples in a pan, and bake at 350 for about 45 minutes. Voila!

3) Jar them!
I'll both make some applesauce (stewing the apples in water--usually peeled here, but I've done it non-peeled and then at the end blended it up to cut the peel into small pieces-- seasoned as you like, and cooking in a pot till they're mushy fall-apart soft and you got apple sauce!), and then also stew some apple slices with cinnamon, lemon juice, and water until they're cooked soft, and the sauce gets thick from the apples' pectin.
To jar something in a preserved way, you just fill the jar with your cooked product. Then put the lid on gently--so it's just barely screwed on but leaves a path for air to escape. And steam them in a big pot for at least 20 minutes. Then immediately use hotpads to close the lid tightly, and it'll suck in the lid as it cools indicating that there's a proper air seal, and that your interiors were "boiled" at the steaming temperature for 20 minutes hence contain no live bacteria that can survive boiling temperatures. Like the good ol days -- Canned summer harvests for the cold winter! :)
I'm looking forward to using my jars of apple-slices as crepe fillings with whipped cream on top in winter.

4) Juice them!
John loves fresh apple juice so of course I can make him a ton of tart juice using our juicer.

5) Apple bread (or apple muffins)
Make your favorite muffin batter, and add in finely-diced apples!

... the list goes on but that's what I started with :) and about 2 more kilos are still waiting in my fridge...

Whole grain sushi

I'm so glad that it works out still to get an acceptable texture of rice, and still use a whole grain rice (ie one that doesn't have the rice grain shell fully removed). Hence you get more nutrients from the rice, an extra helping of fiber, reduced glycemic index, and still darn tasty sushi. This rice just needs to be cooked a bit longer, but I've had no problem with it achieving the right sushi-sticky texture needed, even after adding the seasoned vinegar.

This time was just some vegetarian rolls-- seared tofu strands, cucumber, woodear mushrooms, avocado... yep guess that's it, simple eh?!

Lentil Soup Act II

Another lentil soup last night!
... haha... currently these lentil soups were the inspiration of one of my kitchen cleansing activities. I feel I have far too many ingredients in storage, so I'm doing no grocery shopping (except for single critical ingredients..) for still another 1-2 weeks, hence demanding creative application of only the ingredients on hand, reducing my pantry volume. So I found small portions of two colors of lentils--brown and orange--so decided like with bell pepper soup, to make a bi-color lentil soup. Those orange lentils are sure more tender and cook up much softer faster than the big brown ones I used, which practically made refried-bean-like puree without twice as much broth to dilute the thickness.
Anyway, I also supplemented the orange ones with one red bell pepper to help the color, and nice flavor, too.

Prettymuch the same recipe as what I last did, except used different seasonings for the orange one-- no cumin or sour cream to make it more turkish-flavored. Just did that one with the bell pepper, onions, garlic, paprika, boullion, the reduced white wine, small amount of thyme... can't remember what else. :P

Patterning those two-color dishes is kind of fun :D and I have to say doing the two-color does make it a more presentable dish for a party..

A bread that kneads spicing-up

hah... pardon the bad pun.
In any case, given my love for artichokes I definitely enjoyed this bread, but felt it was still lacking that special *something* to make it a home run.

In general I made a Ruchmehl (a dark protein-rich flour) bread very light in texture due to enough yeast and rising time, and pre-final-rise kneaded into it some chopped preserved/seasoned artichoke hearts.
Next time I would also add another mix-in of some sort... whether parmesan, or something with more pizzaz like the pungent flavor of sundried tomato, or maybe it needs something spicy like hot peppers also added in. Or maybe just 2x as many artichokes to make it richer in that specific flavor?
It was a really nice fluffy bread though, serving as some part of my meals the whole next day. :)