Over here, you know winter is com… no…. edging closer! when fresh, plump and pretty-in-orange things are popping up in the fruit section of stores and markets left, right and center. One of my favorites in that area, running a close second to tangerines, are Persimmon fruit, also known as Kaki. While they’re just as orange as any of their display-neighbors, they’re the odd one out, not a member of the citrus or pumpkin gang. Kaki or Persimmon are the fruit of the “Dyospyros Kaki”-tree, so, going by their scientific name, they’re actually the Fruit of the Gods. How’s that for a humble salad topping~!
Continue reading “Lamb’s Lettuce, Persimmon & Harzer Cheese Salad”
As autumn is making itsself at home around these parts, the outdoors’y evening activities are getting rarer and, thanks to that, the time spent in front of our screens grows longer. Being parked at the desk for a comfy nighttime gaming-spree calls for a special type of dinner, a non-fussy and non-messy type that doesn’t need much in the cutlery-department and poses a low hazard for keyboards and screens and, most importantly, a type leaving behind leftovers that can double as a snack later that night, should excessive adventures in Tyria speed up time up to midnight-cravings’o’clock in the blink of an eye… as usual~
Coming back home from a heavenly vacation is never easy I suppose, but this time was exceptionally nasty. We boarded our airplane on Madeira at comfy, sunny temperatures around 28°C just to be rudely dumped into the 9°C nighttime ick of Frankfurt Airport. After a week of absence, our appartment was bonechillingly cold as well, of course, so we took the chance – after we had avoided to have both PCs running for a longer period of time during the summer in order to avoid major heatstrokes – for one hell of a content crawl through the new chapters of the GW2 living story.
We’re back from our trip to the little piece of heaven on earth that is Madeira~! We’ve just returned last night, so I still need a bit of time to get my feet back on the ground and sift through the mountain of pictures hubby and I took – prepare for some scenery shots of showstopping proportions and, of course, some dinner-time yum-shots in the near future.
On our usual Saturday trip to the farmer’s market a couple of weeks ago, I was over the moon as something really large, round’ish and pale yellow blinked at me from one of the large displays of beautyful produce. Since our summer this year, with the exception of 3 horrendously intense heatwaves of 2-3 days each, was cold and wet enough for most of our regional yumtastic mushrooms to start shooting up 2 months early, I half expected those pretty-in-yellow balls roughly the size of my head to be early quinces. Quinces are one of those seasonal things, like asparagus, I look forward to all year in a ticking-days-off-the-calendar-kind of way, I simply love them.
Just a couple of months ago, when I was going through the Soup section of the Tyrian menu, I realized that, as much as I love beets, I’ve never, at least not that I’m aware of it, had them in a soup’ish kind of context before. Well that’s one blank that should be filled in sooner rather than later, if you like the pretty purple bulbs, don’t you think? I decided to start the beet’y soup experience with a light and summery gazpacho when, just a couple of days after making GW2-induced beet soup-related plans, the first heatwave of this year’s summer hit the mark, rather than to go with the creamy, soul-food’y recipe I had initially picked out.
This year’s Barbecue Season is, at least for the casuals amongst us, slowly approaching its end. This is causing a huge variety of BBQ’ish goods to flood stores, butcher’s shops and markets like you wouldn’t believe. One thing I’ve encountered in truly obscene amounts recently is Tofu – styled, chem-bombed, colored and shaped to work out as a meat substitute. One ridiculous specimen I’ve found in a store nearby was a brown’ish kind of tofu-goo wrapped around a bone’ish type of theoretically-edible-don’t-worry-about-it, looking like a cartoon version of a drumstick from hell, sporting a label along the lines of: „Almost tastes like real meat! Almost feels like real meat! Even with real skin and bone-marrow substitutes, flavored to almost taste like the real thing!“
As the berry season is coming to an end in our corner of the world, there’s a rare type of late strawberries popping up all over the farmer’s market – deep red and very intense „Blood Strawberries“ as the vendors call them. They have a flavor to them that immediately made me think about using them in a savory dish when I first tried them – something with a little bit of a zing to it, something not quite meaty… Before I could even finish wrapping my head around the idea of combining fish and berries – really good or ridiculously bad idea? – I found myself making a beeline for the Fishmonger’s stall, not really sure what I was actually looking for.
I’m aware you guys might not think of a bowl of granola or muesli when someone drops the term „Trail Mix“ on you, but seeing this one, or rather the ingredients listed in the recipe, at the Chef’s Station immediately made me think of my personal blend of seeds, nuts and dried berries that has been playing an important role in our regular diet for years now. Like its Tyrian counterpart, my blend places the blueberries, sour cherries, walnuts and almonds at the front and center of the stage, highlighting the rest of the blend with intense flavors and contrasting textures. While hubby usually munches on a handful of this with some milk or yoghurt in the morning, I sprinkle a couple of teaspoons over a bowl of fruit every once in a while, as a kind of seasoning for a fruit salad, if you will, or have a few pinches when I’m feeling a little peckish… just because. So, you see, it’s actually closer to a trail mix than one would expect at first glance~!
Nahdala's Kitchen 