Usually I have a plan set up, or at least some hazy idea about what I’m looking for on our saturday stroll across the big farmer’s market in town. This time… nothing. Nada. Zilch. Blanks and some cobwebs in the food section of my head, but not much else. Trying to force an idea of what I wanted to eat out of my skull gave me a headache and the very non-helpful adjective „colorful“. Hubby added the similarily helpful word „vegetables“ to the fog. Well, the market sure is the best place to find inspiration in the neighborhood of „colorful vegetables“ and something to go right along with them.
Continue reading “Summery Zucchini Salad & Tomato-Ricotta “Pizza””
Chilli con Carne. In 35°C weather. You might think the heat in- and outside of the kitchen has finally taken it’s toll on my sanity. Well, believe me, I’ve considered an extended trip down to the looney bin on several occasions myself. This isn’t the result of slowly-stewing grey matter though, this is the result of the GW2 recipe list rudely kicking a part of my subconscious, usually hibernating during heatwaves, to life without offering it some coffee first.
It’s time for a sweet bite again! This one is as healthy as it gets, more of a power-snack than a sweet, actually. Brain-Food, if you will, which is closely related to how I came up with this one in the first place. During the nightmarish depths of exam-prep hell I could really feel myself burning through any and all sugar reserves in my body. Not wanting to resort to unhealthy or useless types of sugar-boosts, I dug up a dried-fruit-and-lots-of-seeds truffle recipe I had picked out – and forgotten about – months before.
Several of the food-related reasons for me to love a good heatwave every once in a while are provided by the unending variety of cold soups, just asking to serve as a refreshing, speed-of-light-quick-fix tummy-filler when it’s too hot for anything else. A few weeks ago I was trying to figure out a way to skip the traditional baguette/chiabatta/toast deal and replace it with something on the healthier side of things without loosing the filling-factor of the soup – after all, I was trying to make dinner, rather than serving a bowl of… well, juice. After a couple of moments, twiddling my mental thumbs, pondering all kinds of gazpachos, juices and green smoothies, it hit me. Avocados! Oh, oh! River crabs go well with avocados! And grapefruit! Apples? <insert visual of mental sock-drawers being turned over here>.
After one particularly long and fruitful night of binge-WvW’ing, I was facing a whole lot of leftover junk food scattered around our desks. All of them came in those annoying amounts of stuff, just not enough to store away for some later point, but too much to really justify throwing them out. I racked my brain for a little while, once again cursing the oven-less state of my kitchen – I found myself looking at a bunch of leftover dried cherries, and the first thing that came to mind was the Tyrian Cherry Cookie recipe. Waaait a minute… Cherries? Check. Cookies? Check. Chocolate? Double check! Within 10 mins I had a batch of chocolate coated Cherry Cookies V.2.0 sitting in front of me and no leftovers in sight!
I never know whether to laugh or to cry when I read or hear about some airhead chef trying to sell Thai cuisine as the quickest way to prepare food known to humankind. That’s true… to some extent. After you’ve finished chopping, grinding, cleaning, slicing and all that jazz… yes, after all that, everything’s a quick-fix. Must be nice to have hordes of kitchen underlings to do the prep work for you…
Just a couple of months ago, two of our friends moved away. As „away“ as it gets actually – they moved to Argentina. Ever since they raised that topic I’ve been rubbing my hands and practicing my Evil Plan Chuckle™ while waiting for the BBQ season to come closer. One of my absolute favorites, condiment-wise, is the argeninian Chimichurri which goes exceptionally well with anything you could possibly throw onto hot coals. That’s me… a food-geek, if you will, drop the name of a country on me and I start flipping recipe pages in my head.
As I was trying to get some sort of order into my personal collection of recipes, marking the ones I wanted to use for specific months or seasons for the blog I realized I might be running into some minor snags down the road, during the summer stretches in particular. The last couple of summers quite literally left us standing out in the rain until halfway through, then came crashing in with record temperatures without even as much as a „How do you do?“, causing havoc left, right and center for 2-3 weeks, just to poof out of existence with temperature drops from 40°C to 12°C in a matter of 1-2 days.
I’m aware that a fruit salad isn’t exactly a sophisticated dish worthy of writing down a recipe for, but for one, it gave me the perfect excuse I needed to plate up the coconut quenelles I was craving for a couple of weeks now – they, or rather this type of fluffy dumplings in various types of flavors, are the usual suspects to top off my compotes during the autumn and winter months but a rather rare guest in the summery department. Plus, trying to stick to the GW2 recipe for once made me use a combination of fruit I usually don’t mix, or wouldn’t use in a fruit salad at all for that matter, and it turned out to be delicious.
Nahdala's Kitchen 