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What's for Dinner?

Testing @Kitarra 's recommendation. Roasted sprouts with pistaccios and cranberries. Next time I'll do that with roasted almonds, and add something sugary as the berries were a bit too sour (honey? pommegranate syrup? hmmm)

Pommegranate syrup works great! My brother likes that variation best. I just prefer a sweeter fruit. I like cherries. I change the nuts around a bit. This works well with pecans as well. Let me know how it is with almonds!
 
So last Thursday was thanksgivings. For my family this holiday is especially important because that is actually the day when we finished our emigration journey and finally landed on US soil after years of paperwork and waiting. The get togethers are normally at my aunt's house and I am always expected to bring 2 side dishes (one of which is always my lentil salad and one of my choice) and dessert. This is this years entry:

Side dish: Butter roasted Sweet potatoes with a garlicky blue cheese dip. This was gone so fast that I managed to get 1 little potato round. I don't even know where the sauce container went it just disappeared.

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For dessert: Individual Apple Shortcakes with Marscapone Cream

I always prefer to make individual desserts, I think they are prettier and because there are a lot of people everyone gets to try a bite. These were very popular and opening the box got oooohs and aahhs. The apples are macerated in a solution of honey, lemon and cardamom but are not actually cooked.

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Another view:

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And because I had some ingredients left over from that on Sunday I decided to do a different version of the shortcake this time served family style. My family definitely preferred this version to the apple one. Also because I had made the shortcake several days in advanced, I decided to toast the cake in the oven which gave it a lovely roasty flavor:

Toasted Raspberry Shortcake with Marscapone Cream

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It's been uncharacteristically quiet in this thread. Alrighty. A glögg afternoon-evening chez my niece (glögg = mulled spiced wine). Seven different sorts, plus some vodka and cognac in case the non-alcoholic ones needed spiking, as they tend to be too sweet. Also, my niece's partner was playing in the swedish team at the chess olympics in Georgia, and he brought back with him what used to be Stalin's favourite wine - we couldn't let that pass without opening it. Not bad at all, vintage 1986, maybe a smidgen overaged, not as sweet as a dessert wine but still a bit too sweet for me, lots of cherry.

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In no particular order, all new things, some of them a bit experimental:
  • Zaffaroni - a saffron-blueberry ricotta cake
  • Breakfast scones, Scandinavian style
  • A French cider, one of the few decent ones in this cider desert
  • A thing - I had a yearning for fugazza and there, in the back of the fridge in the Cemetery of the Forgotten Foodstuffs, I had buffala mozarella, a bit of vaccarossa parmesan that had been lingering for almost a year, and bacon that needed to be eaten before it came awake and ate me. Still, with less than enough hamsters to make real pizza dough, I also had a store-bought puff pastry(1) ; so I put my Dr Bag von Katze lab coat and created(2) this er, thing. I gave it a name too, Fugazzetta von Quichenstein (cue mad cackling)
(1) actually, a demi-feuilletée, whatever it's called in English
(2) I use the term advisedly, electricity was involved
(3) the eggs and butter were only two weeks past the best-before, which in the case of eggs and unsalted butter doesn't matter at all, they had a couple more weeks to go, by my reckoning

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For the Scandinavians, Bishop's is having a Danish week with Amager Bryghus. We were there today. Arctic Sunstone and Unicorn Pink Farts. The Sunstone was OK, summery, but we had the farts before, which was a disservice to the stones, as farts are so much more flavourful (as everybody knows). Not so pink as to have earned the qualifier, but bitter and zesty. Quite good. I'll have Unicorn Pink Farts again, no doubt. And a very nice burger, from someone called Chuck, which kind of goes with the theme :D

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This weekend is my mate Matsuo Basho's anniversary (also a mate of @Skerina), so I decided to make something simple and still special, as it should be for haiku lovers, Fettuccine Carbonara, made with the real deal: a lightly smoked and peppered guanciale. On the side, one of our beers, Campos de Jalapeño - an IPA very subtly flavoured with home-grown and home-smoked jalapeños (I'd call them chipotles, but they're a lot lighter in flavour), which has a tinge of the green in the jalapeño on a background of the smokiness. No heat at all, it's barely distinguishable from the carbonation, although it gives the beer a very long aftertaste:
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can't have a brithday without cake, so I decided on an experiment: mascarpone pound cake, with orange zest - here immortalized with my trusty kitchen assistant, who convinced me adding a few drops of white truffle balsamico would make cake great again. I don't know what they smoke when I'm not around... luckily the balsamico didn't make any difference, and the cake is good, a successful experiment. Next time, with lemon zest and some cranberries, this one seems to be missing a smidge sourness.
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Try adding a little bit of sour cream! Looks like it has a great crumb!
Absolutely! Sour cream is cake's bae. I use sour cream in all cakery and muffinery. This was an experiment as I had mascarpone in the fridge and came across a recipe for a standard cake with just mascarpone and eggs, no cream, no butter. And it does work, although I can say it's very time-critical: five minutes too much oven an it morphs into a dry boring thing ;)
 
But then you can just toast it, cut it into cubes, add whipped cream and macerate fruit and call it a charlotte and no one will ever know! wink
 
It's been a while. Almost a year! Working too much just now - but I found this new African foods shop and they had maize (impossible to find around here), so yesterday I made a locro, very basic and missing som ingredients, but I just had to test it, no time to go out hunting for other things :)
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The son got back with phat lootz (a whole crudo ham and Morgon wine) from his climbing expedition to France and Spain,. We welcomed him back with a 'traditional' dinner: fresh strozzapretti, a moose sausage ragú and flan with a sherry caramel sauce
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