Beetroot a.k.a. red pasta

We've cooked another simple but very yummy and fun recipe: beetroot pasta.
 You'll need:

• 1 onion per person
• curcuma (yellow powder)
• water and soup cube
• beetroots
• 50ml cream per person
• pepper
• pasta

Let's start:
-Cut the onions
-Peel and cut the beetroot into thin long slices (German Stifterl)

Your hands might get red :-) Not to worry, it washes off with soap.

Peeled.

Sliced.

-Fry the onions

-Add curcuma

-Add some water and the soup cube

-Add the sliced beetroot

-Mix and let it simmer for 20min
-Meanwhile, cook the pasta (yes, in a different pot!)
-Add 50ml cream per person
-Take of the hearth, add pepper to your own taste.
-Add the pasta

Looks nice, huh?

Mahlzeit, everyone!

ps: also good to take with you in your lunchbox (^-^)

Amazing how red the pasta turns, huh?

Almost-chicken curry masala

Last weekend we made some curry. That's a really simple thing to do, and you can put in many different things. To give you an idea, here are some of the things you'll need:

• Curry powder. There are many different variations. Get one that looks interesting and just try it.
• Onions.
• Something else to add: vegetables, meat, chicken, ...
• If you want to "enhance" the meal, calory-wise, or e.g. plan to cook for many people, you might also wanna cook some rice. Goes well with the spiciness of the curry.

Many packs of curry powder have a suggested recipe on their back. You can take this as a guideline/inspiration for the ingredients needed. But don't be afraid of being a little creative on your own. We also added some salt, as suggested on the curry masala pack.

Our curry masala powder this time. As you can see, it's supposed to be cooked with pieces of chicken.

Whatever curry you aim for, start by cutting up some onions.

 

Fry them with some oil in a pan big enough for all curry ingredients. When they turn glassy or whatever that look is called in English, you can start adding more stuff. Vegetables or meat, whatever needs more frying goes first. 

In our case, we've added some cut-up carrots.

We simultaneously started to cook some rice. Rule of thumb: half a cup of rice per person should feed any mouth. We could write several blog entries about how to cook rice... we'll assume you know how to do it :-) We wash it several times and then add lots of water and cook it on slow heat for quite a while.

Use big pots and lots of water for cooking your rice.

Back to our curry. The spice pack itself suggested to use chicken. We opted for turkey. Just bought a nice piece of meat and sliced it up.

After all the fresh vegetables and the meat was properly fried we added mashed tomatoes out of a tetra pack and a can. If you have fresh ones, even better (unless it's winter and they taste mostly like water...). All in all it started to look and smell nice, mmmh. Time to add our curry powder. Be careful if you're not too keen on spicy food. The amount needed depends heavily on the curry powder you chose.

 Don't forget to stir it a bit all the time, especially after adding any new ingredients in the whole process.

Our recipe suggested to add some lemons in the end. We didn't have fresh lemons, so we added some lemon juice out of the bottle. Same thing as you would add to tea. Up to your personal taste. One more time stirring through, and then leaving it be on low heat and wait till the rice is done.

Yummy, yummy, yummy! It was so good that we only remembered to take a picture when almost nothing was left:

Mahlzeit, everyone!

Zucchini Pickles

We've never tried to pickle our own vegetables. And since a friend gave us a humungous homegrown zucchini - thanks! - we've decided to try it out, following this simple recipe. Ingredients:

• 1.5 kg zucchini
• 5 big onions
• 2 tablespoonful of salt
• 3 cupful of vinegar
• 3 cupful of sugar
• 1 teaspoonful of curry
• 1 teaspoonful of sweet paprika powder
• 1 teaspoonful of mustard seeds
• dill (we omitted that one because we don't really like it)

 From now one we plan to share our experiences with more pics, so here we go:

Almost all ingredients. And two glasses for pickles :-)

The onions that we forgot in the first photo...

Start by peeling the zucchini.

Cut the zucchini. We want to have bite-sized pieces.

Cutting in process :-) we removed the seeds, but that's up to you.

Cut the onions into slices or rings.

Put zucchini+onions into a big pot with a lid.

Add the salt and mix it through.

 Now close the pot with a lid and wait 3 to 4 hours. No kidding! Let the salt do its magic...

4 hours later: add all other ingredients and mix again. Now heat it up until it boils for a moment.

Start putting the still-hot pickles into your pickles glasses. A ladle comes in handy ;-)

First glass filled, on to the second...

All filled and closed, still hot.

Our zucchini pickles the next day.

 So, that was fun. And easy to do. We'll let them stay in our shelf for a while - in a dark and cold place - and tell you later how yummy they were.

Update: we've opened the smaller glass about three weeks later. And it was yummy! We'll definitely prepare them all in smaller glasses the next time - because you can't really stop once you've opened one of them, and that big one is quite big. Mmmmh...

Mahlzeit, everyone!

Pancakes afternoon

So, yesterday we had our first 'real' meeting, meaning that we met with the intention of cooking together. And having fun ^^

We decided to start with something very simple to cook: pancakes! Yippiiieee!

Not that it's really necessary for pancakes, but still, we looked up 'official' ingredients in an Austrian cookbook:

• 3 eggs
• 1/8l milk
• a pinch of salt
• 100g flour
• butter for frying
• apricot jam, icing sugar, ...

Well, that's a start for getting an idea of how much you might need of what. The recipe didn't specify for how many portions the given amounts would last. We were three, so we planned to do double of what was written there. Anyways, for pancakes you don't have to follow any recipe, just have all ingredients at home and start mixing like this: put flour and milk in a big bowl and mix them until you're satisfied. Add the eggs and the pinch of salt. It should all be quite liquid still.

Then, on to the stove: you should have a frying pan at least as wide as the pancakes you want ;-) We had a shiny new Teflon pan. The great thing about Teflon is that you'll hardly need any fat for frying. Meaning that you won't need the butter mentioned above in the ingredients list. We still melted a tiny piece of butter in our pan as a start. Then we used a ladle to drop our liquid-pancake-dough into the pan. Make sure you let it run around the pan as far as you want your pancake wide - yes, by moving the pan around ;-)
As soon as it solidifies you can flip it, wee-hee! We did so with wooden kitchen tools, in order not to scratch the Teflon, well, duuuh... if you feel like, you can flip'em more than once, and also flip'em through the air if you're bored... do that until the pancake looks like you want it. Put it out of the pan, on a plate where you'll collect all your pancakes.

Blablabla way too much text for the simple task of making pancakes already! Here's a shot of our lil' pancake factory:

In front there's our bowl of pancake-dough with the ladle. Behind it the pan with a pancake in production, and the plate with the already finished pancakes.

At the end of our cooking session:

 In the pan you can see The Last Pancake. Its already-done brothers hadn't left us with enough dough, so this one was a little diminished in size... and the plate on the left is filled with the ones that got away, uuuhm, well, let's say: that's our Kaiserschmarren output of the day. Big secret: if your pancakes don't stay in one piece when trying to flip them, just cut them up and say it's Kaiserschmarren, Emperor Franz Joseph I.'s favourite dish. No harm done.

 And our prepared table, just before we dug into our lovely pancakes:

The big yellow glass in the back with a spoon in it contains something we almost haven't mentioned yet: something to put onto our pancakes before we roll them up and eat them! In the 'official' ingredients we've mentioned apricot jam and icing sugar, but you can use basically anything you like. In this photo you see vanilla sauce from France that one of us had personally imported. Mmmmh. Classically you put some jam on them, roll them up and then put some icing sugar. But of course any kind of sweet sauce is fine. Really, whatever you like. The French and Belgians even put salty stuff on their crepes. But those are thinner than the ones we managed to do :-D

Oh, and another good Austrian thing about pancakes: whatever you have leftover after the meal, well, keep it in the fridge for tomorrow. Then you'll cut them into stripes, and put them into beef bouillon, or any other kind of clear soup you like. Just be careful, you might enrage a French person if she/he was involved in the cooking and calls your pancakes crepes ;-) They don't seem to like cutting them up and putting them into soup. But it's just so good!

That's it for now. Looking forward to our next cooking session, when we'll finally cook something non-sweet - or so we hope.

Mahlzeit, everyone!

Let's start! (incl.cake^^)

Hello world,

Three weeks ago some friends came over for a chat while eating a Gugelhupf I made. I followed a simple but very yummy recipe for a cake that I had already blogged about in German years ago. Yesterday I met up again with those friends for cooking and chatting. And since that's quite a fun activity we've decided to do this on a regular basis. And blog about our experiences :-)

And to make it interesting for the world out there, we'll share the recipes we try out. And our stories of success (or not...). And pictures. Not that there's a lack of recipe sharing places around the web. But since cooking with friends is so much fun, we wanted to share. Who knows, some of you might enjoy it, just like us.

So, as a start, we'll give you a translation into English of that simple cake recipe:

Aunt Chef Cake

A simple but good cake, using a cup of yoghurt as ingredient and as a measuring device :-)

Ingredients:

• 1 cup of yoghurt, 250 ml
• 3x the same cup, filled with plain flour
• 2x the cup with sugar (one cup is enough unless you want it really sweet)
• 1x oil into the cup, one finger high (1-1.5cm)
• 2 eggs
• baking powder, 1 pack
• vanilla sugar, 1 pack

Mix everything together into one homogenous mass. Grease a cake pan with oil or butter and sprinkle it with flour (so the cake won't stick). Pour the mass into it and put it into the oven for about 40 minutes at 150 degrees Celsius.
To check if the cake is ready, you can put a thin skewer into it. If some of the dough sticks to it when you pull it out, the cake still needs more baking.

Variations: add half a cup of grated hazelnuts or almonds. Or coconuts. Or cacao.
Especially with cacao: do a marble cake! Mix the cacao into the second half of the dough after putting the first half into your cake pan. Then pour that cacao-half on top of it, and go through the whole dough with a fork once or twice. Mmmh, marble cake!

Anyways, since we want to blog about our experiences here: three weeks ago we just the did the classic version with none of the variations. Even after years of baking this cake, it's amazing to see how fluffy it turns out. And how yummy it is to eat!

Mahlzeit, everyone!
(explanation: the English language doesn't have a proper way for saying 'Bon appetit!', so we will use its German short version here, i.e., Mahlzeit!)