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 have been bad, very, very bad… After a strong start, I have neglected Kitchen Crush and my readers. My only excuse is that a lot has happened in the past two weeks. There was a trip to Greece to visit the best of all husbands. Among other things, we went to Athens, walked through the city, climbed up to Acropolis and dined in a lovely Cretan restaurant called Alatsi (a review of the place and the food will follow shortly). After Greece, there was Poland, where I visited my family and I got infected with a vicious stomach flu, which not only put me off cooking and food for a good week and a half, but also resulted in a two kilogram weight loss. [While I generally wouldn’t recommend stomach bugs as a weight loss solution (I will spare you the gruesome details), I think that we’re even, that virus and I]. After a week at home, where my hopes to cook and photograph some delicious Polish foods with my mom have been dashed, I went to Warsaw, to visit my very, extremely, super-pregnant friend Gośka (hang in there, only four days to go). And then, I came back to Düsseldorf and started my new… tam-tam-tam-tam: job. That’s right, a couple of weeks ago a job offer was made and I accepted. Thus, I am no longer a lady of leisure or as my husband claims ‘bum extraordinaire’, I am now a member of the working class. I do not know what this will mean for Kitchen Crush… undoubtedly less time to cook and missed rendezvous with the perfect photographing light during the week. But on the bright side, I will have a whole week to come up with the most delicious and beautiful foods to cook on the weekends. This Easter weekend has already given me a head start. I have a bunch of beautiful recipes waiting to be posted. So without further ado, here’s the very elegant and delicious Red Wine Fig and Gorgonzola Cream salad.
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After I had dinner at Kanzlei Restaurant last month, I vowed to recreate some of its food at home. It’s a fun thing to do, trying to make something you’ve seen elsewhere and adding your own little twist to it. This is something I do quite often, and not only as it relates to cooking. When I see something I like in somebody’s approach to life or in their house décor or in their kitchen, I adapt it myself. Is it idea theft? Sure. But that’s my way of learning and evolving. I learn by observing and emulating others, just like a one year old would. Speaking of babies, one of my friends who is a new mother, had just created a Gmail account for her newborn son with his firstname.lastname as the username. I thought this was brilliant and hilarious at the same time. Totally theft-worthy. And since I do not have any children of my own, I have briefly considered ‘reserving’ some potential baby name plus our last name combinations. Which is a bit insane, I admit. My small-time idea stealing or should I say inspiration drawing from German restaurants pales in comparison. Anyway, one could hardly call cheese wrapped in bacon a unique or proprietary idea. Everyone knows that wrapping anything in bacon makes it taste better, right?
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I am writing this post from Greece, where I have been since Friday, visiting my better half. I have only been to Greece once before, in September of last year, when I came here to take part in the wedding of my Greek friends. I have to say that I fell in love with this country and its people at first sight. Sometimes you come to a place and instantly feel like you belong there, or at the very least, you feel good there and you know that this is your kind of place. Greece is one such place for me. My first trip here was quite magical. It was September, the weather was perfect, the islands were beautiful and the omnipresent vines of bougainvillea put me in the most poetic of moods. But most of all, I was charmed by the Greek people. They are very real, they love to eat and drink and dance, but above all, they love to talk, to laugh and to philosophize. And then, of course, they are obsessed with feeding you, in fact, they will attempt to feed you, till you burst. But it’s all good, you see, because the food is very good. One of my favorite Greek dishes (and the one which has made it around the world) is the Greek salad. It’s very simple yet very tasty. My Greek friend, Connie, tells me that the secret to a good Greek salad is to use very high quality, fresh, juicy and tasty vegetables… Well, that may be just the secret to making anything taste good… That may be just the secret to leading a meaningful life. In any case, here’s my tasty, Greek salad, with authentic Cretan olive oil and some Greek oregano.
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Thinking of things to cook and to feature on this blog is a lot of fun. It makes me think about food and about the role food plays in my life. It makes me think about what I do and do not like. Sometimes when I cannot remember why I do not like a particular food, it makes me want to try it again, in order to define the why. After all, as we say in Poland, taste changes every seven years, so I may actually end up liking something I thought I didn’t. But my favorite part about thinking about food is trying to remember the first time I had it and trying to recall what impression it made on me. With some foods this is quite difficult but then there are others, which bring back very vivid memories of the exact place, year and the company I was with. Hummus is one such food and black olive tapenade is another. In fact, when I was writing the black olive tapenade post, I wrote about how my friend Tom made beautiful little tapenade and goat cheese sandwiches. And of course, the mere fact of remembering and writing about them, made me lust after them, a feeling which hasn’t left till they were recreated and eaten. So here they are, the very delicious Black Olive and Goat Cheese Crostini.
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I have a huge weakness for visually stunning foods. I have a huge weakness for visually stunning anything. This, of course, is a snotty way of saying: I like pretty things. That’s right; I and some 99% of the world’s population suffer from this affliction. I don’t know about those 99% but I often (too often) base my purchases on the pretty factor. I bought my laptop because I thought it was pretty and I was convinced that its prettiness will encourage me to work on it often. If I had a car, I’d most likely go for pretty and I would ignore all other specs (is that what you call them? specs?). I am a master at finding and purchasing pretty and sometimes very impractical items (which is a big no-no in Germany, where to be practical is the highest of virtues). There is only one exception to my pretty rule: husbands… Those I like to be handsome, not pretty. But when it comes to cooking, I go back to pretty. Choosing what to cook next, involves leafing through my cookbooks and staring at luscious photographs, then looking at the recipe and evaluating the “will it be a pain in the ass to make” factor (henceforth referred to as the PITA factor). So, when I saw these zucchini rolls, I immediately thought they looked gorgeous and were composed of all the things I liked. The only problem was that, like many pretty things, they were very impractical to make. Let me rephrase, on a 1-10 PITA scale, they were a solid 7.5. But they looked so good and I’m just so unabashedly impractical.
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Tomato and Mozzarella Salad, also known to the initiated as Insalata Caprese, and to the even more initiated as the Tricolore (its three colors: red, white and green are the exact colors of the Italian flag), is one of the simplest and most delicious salads I know. In fact, this was my appetizer of choice in restaurants, before I became interested in food and determined to try out all sorts of different dishes. Trying out new dishes is definitely interesting, especially when I consider my proclivity for choosing the weird and the experimental. Fortunately, I manage to pawn off the food I don’t like on Tim, who, by the way, picks the best thing on the menu 99% of the time. He, consistently, outpicks me, even when I don’t follow the particularly adventurous route, and I, consistently, make him eat my food while stealing his. What can I say… he knows how to pick his food and I knew how to pick my man. Once in a while, I will still order Insalata Caprese, which while not adventurous or weird, is unusual in its simplicity and flavor.
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