September, golden September~! While the sun is taking a very well deserved break right now, the month is still a golden one for me, my kitchen and our dinner plates. Wine harvest time, grapes and all the goodies that always tag along in their wake, forests brimming over with game, the first pheasants, mushrooms, and, amongst many other delicious seasonal things, enter the first representatives of the only “Golden Globes” I care about – quinces~!
Continue reading “Quince Jelly & Sweet “Quince Bread” Fruit Bites”
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Since this year’s berry seasons were completely out of whack thanks to what sunny meteorologists with a rather cruel sense of humor called a “Summer of the century”, farmers, biologists and botanists called a “severe draught” and sane people called “Hell’s Doorstep”, I had to wing a couple of berry-related cookoffs on the spot. On one particularly exhausting Saturday, for example, my favorite fruit & veg vendor at the Farmer’s Market grimly informed me that the batch of blackcurrants in front of me was all he had for this year.
Alright, it’s time. Time for a change in seasons. Usually I’d declare myself insane for wishing Autumn, or even better: Winter! would hurry the hell up when August has only just begun, but this year has been hellish. Literally. Compared to people around me, no matter their origins, I’m very heat-resistant. I’m comfy when most people are low-and-slowing in their own juices already, but this…? This year. I wholeheartedly agree with the masses. It’s been too hot for way too long – cozying up to 40°C for weeks on end with no reprieve at night hasn’t just put a stop to any sort of summer spirit, fun, outdoor activities, cooking, gaming and sleep, but the insane temperatures and the sun relentlessly burning out of the cloud- and therefore rain-less skies since May have, in addition, shifted all of the fruit and veg seasons forwards by about a month.
And this is it, the goal of the whole meal… or so my inner 5-year old self would say. You might wonder what possessed me to slap a “BBQ” sticker onto a deliciously fluffy and fruity mousse like this one. Sure, I could tell you there’s nothing better than a chilled cloud of fruity creaminess to finish off a hot and heavy evening around the coals, but true as that might be, it’s not my reason for picking this particular mousse to finish off this year’s BBQ special. If you’ve been following my posts for a while, you’ve probably been witness to hubby and me falling in love with the island of Madeira.
So, after last week’s mammoth post – here’s to hoping you guys enjoyed it anyways~! – I turned on my heel, so to speak, and crunched my grey cells for a while in order to find the speediest and possibly non-fussiest member of my Chocolates & Fruit Bites recipe collection.
Time to celebrate… good times, glorious times, delicious times for everybody with a sweet tooth for mother nature’s gem collection! Bushes, shrubs and other assorted types of greenery are bursting with berries this time of the year, just waiting to be picked, devoured and turned into yumtastic things – after the cook has taken his or her fill of the raw bounty, of course~
Now that the hot days of the year are edging closer, the many artisan ice cream maker’s shops that have been making a name for themselves around town during the last couple of delicious summers are opening up for the season one by one. While some of these Heroes of Summer have come up with specialities and signature yummies that you’d wish you could live on, all of their shops and cafés have one huge flaw: they’re shops. Tiny ones, most of the time, in remote’ish places, with exponentially growing lines in front as soon as the first ray of sun comes out.
In the aftermath of last weekends heat blast, I’ve noticed some of my circuits and tastebuds having obviously taken a more thorough scramble than I first thought. For example, even though the temperatures have dropped to reasonable levels, at least as far as end-of-April goes with close-to-zero-degrees night breezes, I can’t get myself to close the windows at night. Most of the members of my – admittedly small, but cherished – shoe collection have sort of a… sinister? Confining! look to them after just one weekend of flipflop-freedom for my feet.
As I’ve mentioned before, I roast my way through vast amounts of seeds, nuts and oats every once in a while – both to replenish my quick-grab stock of salad-toppings and guilty-pleasure snacks and to refill hubby’s ginormic jar of breakfast granola. Usually I do this on one of those days, when little to no motivation and drive to do anything whatsoever coincide with the type of weather that makes you all but expect a loud blast of fanfares announcing the end of all days to any minute now.
Birds singing, beautifully arranged flowerbeds all but exploding with colors, bees buzzing around, nosy bunnies zipping around every patch of green in town whenever they think nobody’s watching, temperatures rising… finally it’s that time of the year again~! I know “Easter” doesn’t necessarily mean “Spring” around the globe, but our corner of the world serves that pretty fairytale-painted cliché perfectly.