It all started a couple of years ago with a particularly irritating dream about a squeaking door and with my husband swiftly elbowing me in the ribs. I woke up disoriented and looked at the alarm clock to discover it was 4 am. Despite waking up, the squeaking from my dream continued and Tim insisted that I look at our balcony. The scene playing out in front of me was too much to comprehend at that time of the night. A weird shadow was walking back and forth on our cement flower bed. Upon closer inspection, it appeared that the shadow was, in fact, a duck. The setting of the night, the dispersing darkness and my mental haze made her look unreal and very dramatic, like a duck avenger or a duck superhero or some messenger of sorts. In the end, we took a picture and went back to sleep. The duck came back the next night and the night after and I became obsessed with figuring out what she was trying to tell me. Should I play the lottery? Invest in stocks of foie gras? Make duck for dinner? What did the duck want? It turned out pretty quickly, that all she wanted was to lay some eggs in our flower pot, which she proceeded to do… and then she made herself completely at home. After some research, Tim got in touch with the Duck Lady, a Düsseldorf woman who donates her free time to rescue ducks, which nest in weird places. After a 30 minute telephone conversation she managed to thoroughly scare him. It turned out that baby ducks cannot fly and if they fall from our fourth-floor balcony, they will be falling towards a certain baby duck death and if that happens, then Tim will forever be a baby duck killer. The discussion resulted in Tim spending 60 Euros in the home improvement store and another 3 hours in own engineering efforts to create a foolproof netting system to be put around the flower pot. A closed facility, if you will, for the most delinquent and curious baby ducks. The duck momma was christened as Zelda, provided with some hay and wheat, and the three of us sat, watched and waited.
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November 8, 2010 in
soups
My South African cuisine series continues today with a cauliflower-curry soup. I have never had cauliflower soup before attending this class. In fact, when I think about it, I haven’t had that much cauliflower in my life. Back at home, in Poland, the standard way of eating cauliflower, involved boiling it and drowning it in browned butter and bread crumbs (very delicious indeed). All other ways of cooking cauliflower were completely ignored and since one can only eat so much of boiled cauliflower with butter, in the past decade, I did not have cauliflower too often… which is a shame, because while doing some research on cauliflower, I have discovered that it is one of those magic foods, with extremely high nutritional content and all sorts of anti-inflammatory and anti-cancer properties. In short, even if you are anti-cauliflower, it (together with its buddy, broccoli) should be a regular staple in your diet. Cauliflower shouldn’t be boiled for too long, in order not to lose its nutritional value… it is, of course, difficult to get away with not boiling it when you make a soup. So let’s just say that this soup will be featured for its taste, while I’ll look into preparing cauliflower in other ways.
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Back in May, I blogged about the South African cuisine cooking class, I went to with my husband. I teased you with some photos of genuinely mouth-watering food, promised to post the recipes and then… well, then nothing happened. First, I was fighting with the lazies, then I was fighting a black hole and finally I was fighting with the mess in my house, the mess in the middle of which I have lost the recipes for all the delicious dishes from the South African cuisine cooking class. I realized that I couldn’t post without recipes, ahem, especially since I’ve already done exactly that back in May. So this entire Sunday was sacrificed at the altar of cleanliness, I cleaned, I washed, I sorted through documents, all in vain. The recipes were not on the pile of bills and papers, which I’ve been saving “for later” since early March, they were also not stuck in one of my cooking books, and they were definitely not in one the drawers or under the bed. My overall conclusion was that I must have somehow lost them or thrown them out. Sometimes I suspect myself of throwing things out without meaning to or even registering it. Anyway, just as I started to despair, it occurred to me to check in one place where I would have put it had I been an extremely organized person… and sure enough, there they were, in my filing cabinet, lying comfortably in a folder labeled “Recipes”.
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I recently went on a business trip to Helsinki, Finland. It is the second time I went there this year and so far I haven’t managed to discover much about the culture, the cuisine or the people. But from what I have gathered, the overall concept of this country seems to be about surviving in this weird no man’s land between Russia and Scandinavia, while speaking a language nobody understands, freezing your derriere off and coping with all this by consuming copious amounts of alcohol and meatballs. I admit that I generally associated Finland with unrefined food, especially after reading the Wikipedia entry on Finnish cuisine, and how it continuously got slammed by various European heads of state. It came as some surprise, therefore, that it was in Helsinki, where I’ve had one of the best meals of this year.
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So the last time I posted something on this blog was back in May. I treated you to some story about how after a month of lazy bumming I will now post regularly. I obviously lied. To my defense, what has happened in the past months can only be characterized as me falling into a black hole. You know… time warp. It happens to all of us periodically. Some of us realize that they’ve been black-holed after five months and others realize this after fifty years. What happens then, you may ask. Well… Option 1: You crawl back into your black hole. Depression ensues, followed by amateur philosophizing about the nature of time and men… or Option 2: You decide to fight against the black hole. In the immortal words of Bridget Jones
, you choose vodka and Chaka Khan. Or in my case, you make French toast for breakfast. Delicious, fluffy, cinnamon-scented, black-hole-combating French Toast to be precise. The announcement that I will be making French Toast has been met with some resistance from the husband, who promptly announced that he hates French Toast and if I decide to make it after all, it should be without cinnamon because he hates cinnamon. This later got reduced to the demand of not putting cinnamon on his share (which is kind of perplexing, because after he announced that he hates French toast, I kind of assumed that he wouldn’t have any at all and the black-hole French toast will be mine and only mine). In any case, husband’s objections have been promptly ignored on both counts. I have been taught from experience that when he claims to hate innocent foods such as pancakes or lentils or French toast, it soon turns out that the opposite is the case… as evidenced by the mhmmm mhmmm sound he makes while eating. This time was no exception.
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My last birthday was all kinds of special, primarily because it was the last birthday of my roaring twenties. It was also the day of Kitchen Crush’s official launch and finally it was a birthday when I made out like a bandit in terms of culinary gifts. Among the things I received were: the cutest heart-shaped crème brûlée ramekins and a kitchen torch (thank you, Axel), a gourmet meal at Dusseldorf’s Monkey’s West restaurant (thank you Mimi and Ned), a book on the history of taste
and a DVD of Julie & Julia
(thanks Gosi), a set of beautiful amuse-bouche spoons and a beautiful cookbook by Tessa Kiros called Falling Cloudberries
(thank you, Marion and Uli) and finally the coolest gift of all: a South African cuisine cooking class (thank you, the best of all husbands). This last gift was finally consumed last weekend and it reminded me just how much I love to cook. It has also motivated me to get off my derriere and start posting again. I have been neglecting Kitchen Crush for the past month, mostly because I was just so absorbed by my new job, and somewhat because I have caught a severe case of “the lazies”. I can’t explain it, but the fact that I started working and being productive in one area of my life, sent a treacherous signal to my brain which said “it’s okay to bum around for the rest of the time”. And so I bummed, and I bummed, and then I bummed some more, all the while feeling guilty about abandoning Kitchen Crush and my readers. A month has gone by and I think that the bumming period is over… it is high time to get back on track and to keep on doing what has made me so happy throughout February and March. So, I thought I would start the month by writing a bit about the cooking class that gave me that little kick I needed to get back on track.
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For the past two months, I have been completely obsessed with rice pudding from the store across the street from our house. Actually, I have been also obsessed with the store itself. Not only is it right across the street, but during the week it is open till midnight and on Sundays it is open till 8pm. This is a big deal, you see, since I live in Germany, a country which is currently at war with consumerism. This is clearly demonstrated by the fact that all stores, even grocery stores, are closed on Sundays. So if you run out of butter or milk or coffee, or any necessity really, you’re in a big doodoo. I begrudgingly started accepting the doodooesque Sundays, when something wonderful happened: a store called Frischwerk opened. The opening of Frischwerk, which, I’m not sure if I already mentioned it, is right across the street from our house (!), was a big event for me. In fact, it was one of the best things to have happened to me since my arrival in this country. And then, something even better happened. I discovered their rice pudding… creamy, perfectly balanced, with a hint of cinnamon and just enough sweetness, in short, heavenly, addictive stuff that inspired me to cook something equally divine at home. Now, I often have a feeling that when I describe particular dishes on this blog, I make them sound super easy, and for the most part they are easy to cook. Sometimes, however, I tackle a dish that gives me trouble. I make it and remake it and make it again, till it looks and tastes just as I want it to. Such was the case with the deceptively simple rice pudding (how can something with only three ingredients give one so much trouble?) At first I cooked it according to the recipe in the Andalusia book, the same book I once contemplated stealing from my parents-in-law. My first reaction upon trying the pudding was: Holy cow, do these Andalusians have a sweet tooth! I tried it again with much less sugar, but then I didn’t like the consistency, as it was supposed to be finished off with whipped egg yolks (and more sugar) and it turned into a sickly sweet and weirdly sticky mess (this was even before stirring in whipped cream, as recommended). Finally, when I almost gave up on making my perfect rice pudding, I came across a rice pudding recipe in a Polish cook book that my mom gave me for Christmas. I combined it with the other recipe and what came out was pretty damn good, not quite as good as the original, but I will keep on trying.
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