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.
Tag Archive: arugula
Zucchini Rolls with Goat Cheese
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.
Prawn Salad with Honey-Lemon dressing
I am always on the lookout for my next perfect recipe. To me, a perfect recipe fulfills the following five criteria: quick, uncomplicated, healthy, tasty and pretty to look at. So when I saw this simple shrimp salad recipe, in what I affectionately refer to as my German food porn (otherwise known as the beautifully illustrated and slobber-inducing Lust auf Genuss magazine), it was love at first sight. I have made this dish a number of times and it always stuns me how effortless and yet immensely satisfying it is.
