Busy in the Kitchen

 

This is a shorter post again since this is another busy week for me. I'm getting a bit tired of this and look forward to some slower times. Hopefully soon.

Cooking in the summer is not my most favorite thing to do, especially when it is hot. However, this year it didn't get hot until August and even then there weren't too many days with temperatures over 90F (32 C). Still, I had many days when I didn't completely enjoy cooking - and you know, usually I do. This was a bit of a surprise to me that the lackluster mood lasted for such a long time.

Nevertheless, I was busy in the kitchen. The cooler season was sent out the door with a delicious chili that you can see in the top picture. Another favorite with my family is lemon chicken with orecchiette; this time I added shiitake mushrooms which I got from my trusted "mushroom man" at the farmers market. I used chicken breast and I think this was the last time I used that. Chicken breast is just boring, becomes dry way too fast and doesn't have much flavor. Next time I will go back to boneless skinless chicken thighs.

Another evening I made creamy chicken with lemon and thyme. I had seen something similar somewhere (I can't remember where) and decided to just wing it. I added cremini and we had pasta with it. It was quite good. Chicken seems to be the only meat we still eat apart from ground beef every now and then.

Another chicken recipe I made just a few days ago since I wanted to use fresh tomatoes and nothing out of a can (I'm not a big fan of canned tomatoes). This is tomato basil chicken breast, a recipe I found in NYT cooking, and here the chicken breast worked very well. It was a very delicious dinner. It was asking for capers and red wine vinegar which I simply omitted. You can find the recipe here.

Surprisingly I did quite some baking - I'm not a big baker apart from baking bread. I don't like that you have to be pretty precise when baking and that is not something I enjoy too much. At least not in the kitchen. At "cherry time" I made a cherry almond clafoutis, using almond flour instead of regular APF. The recipe (here) also asks for almond milk which I don't have, so I used regular whole milk and instead of cornstarch I used potato starch.

You can make this also with other fruit; I tried it with plums once and it was very tasty. This is a lovely recipe that I have done several times. But then I found a raspberry almond clafoutis in NYT cooking, a little bit different, but also with almond flour. I first was a bit skeptical about the measurements because I thought it was a lot of liquid and the raspberries are moist as well. If I would have followed their baking time (30-35 minutes) it would have been a mess, however, I baked it for 45-50 minutes and it was perfect!

At the farmers market I bought super delicious blueberries and thought about what to do with them. In an AARP bulletin (of all magazines!) I saw blueberry oatmeal cakes and thought that was interesting. Maple syrup instead of sugar (I hope David will be delighted that every now and then I do use maple syrup), soaked rolled oats instead of flour and almost no extra fat except for two TB of canola oil - a real winner. It helps that the blueberries are delicious and not your usual supermarket fare. I freeze these and we pull them out whenever we want. Great for the Geek to take to work.

Of course I made several jars of tomato sauce that I put in the freezer, but I also made 15 jars of raspberry preserve as well as several jars of apple sauce (which I freeze) because my neighbor gave me a good amount of her apples.

Those peaches from the farmers market were to die for! Peaches are my favorite summer fruit, sweet and juicy. When the juice runs down your arms while you eat them over the sink (in order not to make too big of a mess) they are just right!

Of course I baked bread, hearty whole wheat bread. I'm still experimenting with the recipe, tweaking it until I finally will get a loaf with the perfect amount of moisture.

Do you have a favorite summer dinner? Ours is caprese with tomatoes and basil from our garden. We always take turns who gets the "tower" in the middle.

With it we enjoy a lovely summer drink - fresh strawberries in dry Riesling. Cheers!

This is for Bleubeard and Elizabeth's T Tuesday.

Snowed In

 

"Snowed in" is the topic this week at Rain's Thursday Art and Dinner Date.

At the end of last week, the sky dumped an enourmous amount of snow on Bavaria, the most southern state in Germany. There was so much snow, that all the trains were cancelled. This was bad news for Kaefer, who was in Venice at that time and had booked the night train back to Germany which had to pass Munich which was completely closed down. So she stayed another night in Venice (not the worst place to get stuck) and then was finally able to get home on trains passing through Switzerland. It took her 18 hours to finally arrive at her appartment.

This reminded me of the snowy winters we used to have when I still lived in Germany. Our home was the area between the Black Forest and the Swabian Alb and that meant very cold in the winter and often tons of snow. I wasn't particularly fond of driving in the snow, but when you live in one of the last houses at the end of a street up a steep hill which wasn't on the priority list for snow clearing and you had to leave at 6 o'clock in the morning in order to go to work, then you don't really have a choice. Snow was still better than black ice and this way I became a rather experienced driver in snow. I also didn't like snow shoveling - but I did love the beauty of snow.

Therefore, today I want to show you some photos of our winters in Germany from more than 20 years ago. I apologize for an overload of pictures, but am hoping that you will like them.

Walking in the woods provided a lot of photo opportunities.

No one was going to sit on this bench...

Snow on grasses is just fascinating.

Today I don't have a dinner to share with you. Instead, I baked a German Nusszopf (hazelnut braid) a couple days ago. It's from my trusted Dr. Oetker baking recipe book that my students gifted to me several years ago.

It's an easy recipe - the only "challenge" is to braid the dough with the filling and then transfer it to the baking sheet. This is what is looks like before it goes into the oven...

... and this is what it looks like after being done baking (no, my silicone baking mat did not change color in such a dramatic way, only the light had changed).

As soon as it had cooled down, we cut a slice and tasted it - oh delicious!

Ukrainian Rogalyk

 

In one of my earlier posts I wrote about supporting individual people in Ukraine by buying digital files from their Etsy shops. Those files you can download just a few minutes after checkout. There are recipes, knitting and crochet patterns, Lightroom presets, and paintings. The digital files of paintings you can send to a place where they will print them for you in the size you want.

Among others I bought a recipe for Ukrainian Rogalyk. They looked delicious in the photo (of course!) and the seller assured in her listing description that they are easy to make. Okay, I thought, I go for it, and if it doesn't work, who cares?

Let me tell you that I am a pretty good cook, but I am not a baker. But my word of the year is "explore", so I decided to explore my baking skills.

The problem was that the recipe was written in a mix of metric and imperial measure. Before I could even start I sat down with my calculator, trying to get everything in metric. I then realized (which I didn't know before, call me ignorant) that UK cups are slightly different from US cups. I figured since Ukraine is in Europe that the seller was probably thinking of UK cups. In the end, I went for a number in the middle. Remember, I was exploring...

I made the dough, let it rest in the fridge and then got to work. First I rolled out the dough.

Usually when I roll out cookie dough, it either is bumpy in places or it sticks to the rolling pin (or both) despite the flour I put on in order to avoid this. With this dough none of this happened - it was smooth and didn't stick to anything.

Then I had to cut triangles, fill them with jam and roll them into "croissants". I still have quite some jars from last year's raspberry preserve I made and it worked beautifully.

My shapes were pretty crooked and after the first batch came out of the oven, I realized that I had put too much jam in the dough. But hey, who cares if it doesn't look like in the picture?

Odd shapes are easily hidden under powdered sugar...

We let them cool and then tried the first one. Oh - they were delicious. There is almost no sugar in the dough, all the sweetness comes from the jam and the powdered sugar. This recipe was for 50 pieces - I must have made my Rogalyk too big or rolled the dough too thick, because I only got 29. I brought some of them to German School for our break and they were a hit.

I am not posting the recipe, because I want this Ukrainian seller to make all the money she can and that she needs. I don't know where she is right now, whether she is still in Ukraine or was able to get into another country, but I do know that she and her family need the money. If you are interested in this recipe (it costs only a couple bucks), you can get it here. I am happy to help you with the measurements.

I'm linking with Kathy's Food Wednesday.

Life Disrupted

Since midnight we are under an shelter-in-place order, joining six or seven other counties in the Bay Area. I just received the Nixle alert that Napa County will follow suit the day after tomorrow. We are supposed to stay at home for the next three weeks, and I have called it "house arrest". Of course it isn't anything like that. We can still go to the grocery store and the pharmacy; we can walk in the neighborhood or take a hike as long as we keep a distance of six feet to anybody else. The goal is to slow and hopefully eventually stop the rapid spread of the coronavirus. While this step should have been put in place weeks ago if the threat had been taken more seriously by our government, I'm glad that our local politicians have acted decisively.

While other people panic bought and hoarded toilet paper I went to the nursery yesterday and bought some plants so I can play in my garden. Yesterday I planted a pomegranate tree, something that had been on my mind for quite some time. The orange blossoms make my heart sing and the fruit is delicious. I still remember fondly the freshly pressed pomegranate juice in Turkey.

The garden has been waking up - the daffodils are long gone. My tulips came back, the peonies are pushing through the soil and the lilac is close to flowering.

I'm currently on spring break, but the high school will remain closed as well and teachers and students are getting ready for online teaching. As of today I don't know whether I need to go back to work next week since we're only two employees working in the library; I wouldn't mind going into work since I still have many textbooks to process and could do all the things that I haven't found the time for during the past several weeks.

Our German School has closed as well, but I'm keeping in touch with my students, sending them worksheets etc. Next week we will start online teaching - I'm currently figuring out the platform for it and will then test it with the staff at our campus. Ah, never a dull moment.

Apart from that there is lots I can do. Knitting, for example. I just finished this bird hat (and already sold it in my Etsy shop; I'm currently working on another one) and this pair of striped mismatched socks. Fortunately I have a good stockpile of yarn, and if I ever run out I can just email my local yarn store to get more.

I have also started to paint again. What a coincidence - I've signed up for a free five-day course called "The Layered Page" by Kellee Wynne - the tutorials are short videos of about 20 minutes, packed with ideas and techniques. I haven't painted or done any kind of mixed media art for two years or so and thoroughly enjoy this endeavor. Finally I've worked with the Gelli Plate that I got two or three years ago and hadn't used until this class. It's so much fun to create paper and collages.

And there's time for baking! Today I baked a loaf of whole wheat bread and a German hazelnut braid. Both are delicious - I'm afraid this "shelter-in-place" will result in a few more pounds on my hips.

We're also still getting mail - just today I received two gardening books that I had ordered. You can never have too many gardening books. The title under Kibeau's tail reads "Deer Resistant Design".

Do you think I will hit boredom anytime soon?

Sweeten My Day

Apart from baking bread, I am not a frequent baker. However, sometimes there are days when I feel restless and not quite myself. Those are the days when I think I need to sweeten them up a little bit, and baking seems to be a good way.

I found this recipe for orange chocolate chip shortbread on Pinterest and thought it a good fit for that particular day. I had oranges, but no mini chocolate chips, so I substituted them with regular ones. The dough, when rolled out, is so thick that it easily holds the bigger chips.

Here's what you need:
1½ sticks unsalted butter, softened
1¾ cup all-purpose flour
½ cup sugar
zest of 2 large oranges
⅛ tsp salt
½ tsp vanilla extract
¼ cup semi-sweet (mini) chocolate chips

Start by combining flour and salt in a small bowl.
Place sugar on a rimmed plate and add the orange zest. Use the back of a spoon to mash zest and sugar together until the sugar is moist and fragrant. Put in a mixer bowl.

Add butter and vanilla, and mix on low for 1 minute.
Add the flour with the salt and mix until just combined.
Fold in chocolate chips.
Form dough into a flat disc and chill for 30 minutes.
Preheat oven to 350 F.
Roll dough out until it has a thickness of about ½ inch.
Use any shape cookie cutter and cut cookies from the dough, putting them on a baking sheet.

Chill for another 10 minutes in the freezer.
Bake for 25-28 minutes or until bottom of cookies are golden brown.

Cool completely and enjoy.