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. :)

Lentil Soup

Doesn't win awards for prettiness, but hearty and fulfilling!

Simmered 1 cup of lentils with 3 cups of water until soft. In a skillet, sautee 1-2 medium onions in olive oil, then add 1 cup of white wine, and simmer that down till the alcohol is done evaporating. Then add 1 hearty cube of boullion (here, 1 cube means enough for ~1 liter), which provides more than enough salt for the whole soup. And add 2 cups of water, some fresh thyme, 2 cloves crushed garlic, and the lentils into the skillet, bringing to a simmer again. All of it into the blender, along with some chilli powder, and cumin (for a kind of turkish-soup flavor) and a few tablespoons of sour cream--pureed till a smoother texture, but I leave some mild chunkiness to it.
Despite being an awkwardly colored brown soup, I'd definitely serve it at a dinner party (garnished something like this of course to try to compensate for the chunky brownness)..
maybe I should also try it using red lentils sometime and see if that results in a 'prettier' soup :)

Cookies that turned out surprisingly good....

Made these last night, also an eye-balling process getting the job done quickly, but man they turned out great! I'll probably try them again tonight to see if I've correctly replicated the recipe for what I did to make them just at that texture..

Essentially a normal chocolate merengue cookie, with folded in ground walnuts, ending up with a scrumptuously crunchy exterior shell, and chewey-nutty interior, a lot like the small cookies they use to make macaroons, or as they're called in Switzerland, Luxembürgerli... here's pic of those from an indulgence session with my dear friends last week ;)


In any case, after they turned out well, here was my jotted down approximation that I'll have to try again asap..

3 egg whites
~1/8 ish tsp cream of tartar (just shook some in...)
pinch of salt
somewhere between 1 - 1.25 c raw grain sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 Tbsp dark cocoa powder
several Tbsp of well-ground Walnuts to the point that they were kind of moist but still not a walnut-paste

Preheat oven to ~160 C (around 320 F)
Put the first 4 into a large metal bowl set over a large pot with a bit of simmering water (double-boiler arrangement), and over a medium-boil beat it till very fluffy and stiff peaks for about 5 minutes, remove from heat then quickly beat in the vanilla, and cocoa powder just until incorporated, then dump over the ground walnuts, and fold the batter over itself a few times to just barely mix it in. Into a pastry bag of sorts, and pipe out small rounds onto parchment paper. Baked for roughly 20 minutes, rotating once mid-way to check on them and evenly bake if your oven is hotter on one side like mine :)
They should be done when they've got a crispy outter shell when you tap on them

I should try to make a nice cream filling and actually construct those Luxembürgerli out of them next time, too! .. alone they were really tasty though, I ate way more than I know I should have :D