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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One of the coolest wedding gifts we received was a cooking class for two with a German celebrity chef Mathias Ruta. I’m not sure how much of a celebrity this guy actually is, but for someone who is not mentioned by the German Wikipedia, the dude was a gargantuan ass. He made numerous Polish jokes throughout the class, which while not a crime in themselves (husband totally guilty of this, on occasion), turned out to be an ugly thing to do. You see, at that time, I didn’t speak or understand German, and, thus, I could not smack him back with some witty repartee. Fortunately, the cooking class had an all-you-can-drink wine station, which I duly abused, while murmuring what I thought meant “you’re mean” in German, but which later turned out to loosely translate into “you are evil”. So what made this class absolutely fantastic? Well, for one, Tim learned how to properly cut and clean a bell pepper – a skill which he proudly demonstrates to anyone willing to look (it is ironic, really, taking into consideration that he hates bell peppers even more than he hates pancakes). But most importantly, we learned two outstanding dishes, one of which was the honey-glazed roasted duck breast with lentils. Not only is this dish quite simple to make and impressive-looking, tastewise, it is absolutely exquisite, stunning really… and this actually comes from someone who doesn’t even like duck.
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The first sentence of Chuck Klosterman’s great novel Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs reads: No woman will ever satisfy me. That pretty much sums up my feelings toward salads. You see, I do not come from a salad-eating culture… we, Poles, have always been the potato, vodka and kielbasa people, not green salad people. And although I’ve lived in America for a while, where salads are considered meals in themselves, eating a salad has always felt weird to me. It’s not only that it made me feel like I’m a cow, chewing on a handful of grass, with pieces invariably sticking in all possible directions, refusing to fit in my mouth all at once, falling down and sprinkling me with dressing… no, that’s not the only thing. What made me most uncomfortable about eating salads is that I always felt like a fraud. I would order a salad because I’d be in a healthy mood but what I secretly wanted to eat was bacon. Halfway through my salad, I didn’t feel like finishing it or being healthy anymore, I only felt like stabbing myself in the eye. I finally came to peace with salad eating when I discovered that I do like salads when they incorporate some of my favorite foods and if they have a tasty dressing. The below is a very simple salad which fulfills these criteria beautifully, plus… it contains bacon.
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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.
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