Cabbage casserole and Banana fritters…

Aaargh, who ever claimed to be catching up with recipes? It wasn’t me, was it? Nooo, definitely not me! Anyway, I’m back home with Buzz again, which means more cooking than usual, and therefore more pressure on blogging about it as well…

I already arrived on Thursday and was lucky enough to be able to sit down at a laid table – we finished Buzz’ chicken soup and chicken salad on Thursday and Friday, had a Pizza on Saturday and a Cabbage casserole with blue cheese on Sunday and today. Actually, officially it’s a Savoy Cabbage and Mince Meat Casserole, but we ended up using Chinese cabbage anyway.

 

Savoy Cabbage and Mince Meat Casserole

1 cabbage head (appr. 600 g, but 1 kg will be fine as well); use savoy or chinese (or any other) cabbage
2 tomatoes
1-2 onions
500 g mince meat
300 g Roquefort or any other blue cheese
200 g cream
2 eggs

Clean the cabbage and cut into 1-2 cm thick slices; boil in salted water until done but still crisp; this may take around 10 min for savoy cabbage, says my cookbook, but the chinese cabbage was done within 5-6 min. Drain the cabbage in cold water so that it doesn’t continue to cook.

Drop the tomatoes into boiling water, then peel and de-seed them and cut them into chunks. Chop the onion and fry together with the mince meat. When that is done, add the tomato and half of the blue cheese (in crumbles), and let the cheese melt; but be careful not to let it get burned!

Grease a casserole and fill with half of the cabbage. Mix the eggs and the cream, season with salt and pepper, and pour half of the mixture on the cabbage. Then add the mince meat mix and top with the rest of the cabbage, pour the other half of the cream-egg-mix and scatter the rest of the blue cheese on top. Pop into the oven and bake at 220°C for about half an hour.

 
Notes:

I quite enjoyed this casserole. I was a little sceptical about how the blue cheese would blend in, but I was pleasantly surprised. Nonetheless, the taste of the blue cheese was quite strong; I suppose it might not have turned out that way if we really had used a Roquefort and not a stronger (and cheaper) Danica Blue, so it’s definitely worth it to either choose a milder blue cheese, or mix the blue cheese with another mild and creamy cheese (Buzz’ suggestion is a goat’s cheese, but somehow that doesn’t really fit my definition of creamy mild cheese…)

Serves 4-6; adapted from Cornelia Adam’s Aufläufe, Gratins und Soufflés.

 

Banana fritters

2-4 bananas
a little flour
more cold (very cold!) water
   (try 1 part flour and 2 parts water to begin with)
2-3 tbsp. sesame seeds
a few tbsp. sugar
a dash of salt
oil for deep-frying

I’m sorry that I can’t give more precise measurements for this recipe. I’ve seen it somewhere recently and really liked the idea, but I can’t remember where I’ve seen it, and so I had to go by memory and intuition.

Anyway. Make a batter from all ingredients except for the bananas. The batter should be relatively liquid. I started out with only a tablespoon or so of sugar, but I kept adding at least two or three more tablespoons of it as the bananas became crisper and less bland. The batter should be cold, so consider placing the bowl in a larger one filled with cold water to keep the temperature down.

Peel and slice the bananas, cover them with batter and fry them in small batches, and serve (warm, preferably).

 
Notes:

Make sure that the batter is liquid, and that it is cold; that will ensure that the bananas are only surrounded by a thin, light and crisp batter. Furthermore, add enough sugar (but not too much, remember that fried bananas release sugar as well!) if you find that your fried bananas are not yet crisp enough. Writing this, I think that letting the batter rest for a short time (anything between 10 and 30 minutes) might have a positive effect as well, so be sure to prepare the batter before sitting down for dinner.

I also rolled the last two banana slices in sesame seeds before covering them with batter – I can really recommend that! But you have to like sesame seeds…

Oh, and one last thing: these are Banana fritters, NOT Finger fritters, so keep you fingers outta there!

Serves 2; adapted from, ehm, my memory.

Know what you’re doing, II.

Finnish Meatballs turned Spaghetti Bolognese…

Yesterday I planned to have Tessa Kiros’ Finnish Meatballs for dinner. That is to say, I intended to make them first, and then to gobble them before anybody else had the chance to get between me and my meatballs. Alas, it would never come as far.

Of course I began with my typical mistakes, beginning to cook when I already felt hungry, and not reading the recipe before that. Big mistake. The recipe said that I would need soak some bread in milk for half an hour, or until all milk is soaked up. There was no way I could wait as long. Additionally, the bread that I had planned in for the meatballs, I had, uhm, already devoured for lunch. Luckily I still had a breakfast roll I could use that took up liquid very quickly. Next I discovered that I had forgotten to buy eggs – and making meatballs without eggs is a nearly impossible task. So I left, bought some eggs in the nearby supermarket, returned and proceeded according to the book: add minced meat, chopped onions, allspice (which I did not have and left out), salt and pepper to the soaked bread and form small, walnut-sized balls. Hmm. How should you be able to form balls from a mass that resembles a liquid more than anything else? I tried it, squeezing the meat into meat balls with the help of two spoons, and then fried them in a pan, but in the end they would inevitably fall apart when I turned them. Finally, I gave up and fried the minced meat as it was until it was cooked, boiled pasta instead of the planned potatoes, added tomato sauce and oregano to the meat and made a simple, tasty spaghetti bolognese.

Oh, and yet something else that went wrong: I was lucky to find one can of tomato sauce, but that was not enough. As I still had some sour cream left over, I added some of that. I fear, though, that no self-conscious Italian would still call it a Spaghetti Bolognese…

The 55p meal

Roasted Vegetables with Poached Eggs and a Slice of Bread

I found myself a really cheap meal this weekend. My supermarket had reduced the price of a bag of vegetable selection (potatoes, carrots, turnips and onions) to 69p, which was enough to prepare two portions of roasted vegetables. Cube the vegetable, add some extra garlic (whole), place in an oven proof dish, add a marinade of honey, lemon juice, oil and some salt, stir and pop it in the oven. Or, in my case, into the microwave – it was the first time I prepared something with the microwave-grill-combo function, so I was glad that all went well. In the mean time, poach one egg per person (see my – very very very – basic description), prepare some bread, wait until the veggies are cooked and crispy, and enjoy.

Creamy Lemon Puy Lentils with Poached Eggs

2-4 spring onions
2 garlic cloves
1 can puy lentils
rind and juice of one lemon
4 tomatoes
1 teaspoon mustard (or more, if wished)
2 eggs
1 large blob crème fraîche

Ok, do your homework first. Chop (or slice) the spring onions, chop the garlic (or use a garlic press), open a can of puy lentils (or, *gasp*, cook them until tender, preferably including a bay leaf for extra taste), rind and juice the lemon and seed the tomatoes.

Then go on to fry the spring onion and the garlic until not-yet-burned. Add the mustard, the lemon rind and juice, and the tomatoes and cook for a few minutes.

In the meanwhile, prepare a saucepan with salted, slightly simmering water (you can also use vinegar instead of salt) and poach the eggs for 2-3 minutes.

Add the lentils to the spring onion mixture, add the crème fraîche, warm up a little, season, and serve together with the poached egg.

Serves 1 1/2; adapted from Nicola Graimes’ 330 Vegetarian Recipes for Health

The usual lazy dinner…

Pasta Carbonara with Walnuts

I’m back in London again, and returned to an empty bed and an empty fridge. Which is worse?

Because I didn’t care to look up anything before leaving the house, I decided to keep matters simple and make a simple Pasta Carbonara with Walnuts – just chop 2 small onions and some walnuts and fry them with some bacon, and finish the sauce with an egg. And don’t forget the pasta of course. Keeping with New Year’s resolutions I bought some wholewheat pasta, for a healthier lifestyle (I fear a lot more will have to change, though…)

Mango and Cardamom Crème Brûlée and Meringue

I hope you noticed that the title of this post is Mango and Cardamom Crème Brûlée and Meringue, not Mango and Cardamom Crème Brûlée with Meringue. You have noticed, haven’t you?

Well, basically, although I had no plans to serve the Mango and Cardamom Crème Brûlée with meringue, it was a good way of using up the three egg whites with which we were left with after having prepared the brûlée.

But let me begin at the beginning. As I’ve written in the earlier blog post today, we had Pomegranate Ginger Saffron Braised Lamb Neck, accompanied by roast winter vegetables and mashed potatoes for dinner yesterday. Remains the question of dessert. For as far as I can remember, I have always only had one favourite dish: crème brûlée. Or to be more truthful: my all-time favourite dish was dessert, and my favourite variant of it was crème brûlée. Astonishing only that I waited until now to wish for a blow torch to make my own brûlées for my birthday. Lucky for me, my wish was gratified and Buzz’ lovely sisters gave me my Hotery Professional Chef’s Torch.

Shortly afterwards, Buzz cooked for me, and we decided to make our own first crème brûlée (together, that is – you wouldn’t expect me to leave something so interesting to him alone?). The crème went fairly well, although it took a lot longer to set, and was covered by a top layer of cream that was slightly thicker than the rest. Still, it was enough to convert Buzz to an equal crème-brûlée-addict as I am, and this, then, quickly settled the question of dessert as well.

Normal crème brûlee has been on our menu only three weeks ago, so we decided to go out and explore brûlée-land, making a start with Mango and Cardamom Crème Brûlée. Again, all went fairly well – until we discovered that even after 40 minutes of au bain marie, the cream wasn’t set. There wasn’t much we could do, as we really needed the oven for the roast vegetables, so we shoved them into the fridge and hoped that the cold would do the rest.

Of course it didn’t. The cream was still too liquid, and it was too late to do anything about it anyway. In the end, we had some mandarins for dessert; I baked the meringues over night and we devoured them even before breakfast, and we’ve given the crème brûlée a new bath this morning and are now waiting for them to cool down.

Has anything like this happened to anybody else? Any other brûlée-experiences?