April 11th, 2010
Imagine the following situation: It’s Sunday, you’re hungry and you ate almost everything you have for cooking a proper dinner/lunch/whatever. You can’t go buy stuff because all the shops are closed. The only things you have left are some eggs and random vegetables. Why not make a beautiful and delicious frittata?
You can use tomatoes, zucchini, onion, mushrooms, fish, meat, bacon and so much more… It’s perfect! You just whip up eggs with some salt and pepper, fry the filling in an oven proof pan, pour eggs on top of it, sprinkle with some cheese and put it in the oven for 5 minutes. Done.
And you can give it any flavor you want. Isn’t that just fantastic? And the leftovers are even better!
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March 25th, 2010
Spring is here. Seriously, I don’t think i’ve ever been happier about a change in weather in my entire life. Berlin is just so much more charming, when not hidden under a dangerously high layer of ice and snow. Not to mention the temperatures.
When spring (and even better: summer) arrives, the actual Berlin suddenly shows. People sitting outside. Life: almost everywhere and almost all the time. Everyone’s heading to the parks, that were hidden below snow for far too long.
Berlin is just so charming. In summer you can even find a little used bookshop, that is still open at 2 a.m., the owner sitting in- or outside and having a nice glass of wine. It’s just fantastic!
Spring changes everything. Nature, people and of course: Food. This definitely is perfect spring food. The combination of the warm and crunchy crust of the pork and the refreshing ranch and vegetables is just divine. It leaves you deeply satisfied and filled, but in a good and light way.
I actually got the idea for cooking this dish in David Chang’s Momofuku cookbook (again). There is a dish of thin pork shoulder steaks with ramp ranch dressing and the big picture also showed some vegetables on the steak that were not included in the recipe. I actually didn’t have any pickled ramps and/or scallions here so I figured it would also be great with a kind of standard ranch dressing and some mixed vegetables. It was just what I was craving for.
It would be a perfect thing to prepare and just throw on the grill while sitting in the park. My flatmates and I loved it so much, we really felt like we should have bought a lot more.
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February 27th, 2010
Tarte Flambée is a very famous dish from Alsace, a region in France, next to the eastern border to Germany and Switzerland. It was traditionally just for testing the heat of an oven, before baking bread. The tarte was put into the very very hot oven and it was done after about 2 minutes. Often there were some deeple browned or even burned spots and this intense baking next to the flames gave it the name “tarte flambée”, which basically means “tart baked in flames”.
The dough is quite similar to a pizza dough, but it’s usually made without any oil.
It can be topped in a lot of different way, but the traditional alsatian way is crème fraîche, onions and fatty pork bacon. Crème fraîche, apples, sugar and cinnamon is also a very tasty way to enjoy it as a dessert. I like the traditional recipe with some cheese added.
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