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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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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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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It’s a dreary winter here in Düsseldorf, with plenty of rain and snow. Also, it’s very, very cold, which always puts me in a nasty mood. To the surprise of everyone I know, I intensely dislike being cold. Throughout my life, whenever I complained about the cold weather, someone was bound to say: But you’re from Poland, aren’t you used to it? The answer is: No, I’m not! Being from Poland does not equip you with a furry skin or any supernatural resistance to low temperatures. Just because we have unforgiving winters does not mean that people enjoy them. What they do enjoy, is warming themselves up with vodka and eating plenty of hearty soups. I like soups. They’re my secret weapon against below zero temperatures and overall misery they induce in me. Also, soups are very forgiving dishes, you can throw anything in and they’re almost always guaranteed to taste good. And they taste even better the next day when the flavors had some time to mix and marry. Yes… soups are the best thing about suffering through winters.
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I first encountered black olive tapenade some ten years ago when I studied in Paris. My friend Gośka and I used to frequent this insane Australian bar in Châtelet called Café Oz. It was known for hunky bartenders with cute Australian accents and… well, that was actually all it was known for. This is where we met and befriended Tom who went down in history as the first guy to ever cook for me (well, actually, he cooked for us, which would indicate that he was possibly trying to woo one of us, only I don’t know which one). In any case, it’s been a decade since that dinner and I don’t remember anything of what he made except for those darling little appetizer sandwiches with black olive tapenade and goat cheese. They were seriously good and seriously memorable since they looked and tasted unlike anything I’ve ever eaten up to that point. Black olive tapenade is one of those foods that look completely unappealing (think mud or worse) but taste very satisfying and almost sensual with its richness and saltiness.
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