Spargelzeit…

In Germany, there is a fifth season. During the spring, there is a time dedicated solely to asparagus (Spargelzeit), which in Germany is the absolute symbol of spring. A huge deal is made out of this by marketers and consumers alike (speaking of marketers, I now have the stupid jingle for Thomy hollandaise sauce for Spargel in my head, and I know everyone who has ever watched TV in Germany in the spring knows what I am talking about), and this was very intriguiging to my husband when he moved here, since every single restaurant was advertising it and you could
eat it just about as ubiquitously as Berlin’s n°1 food — the curry wurst. The region around Berlin is particularly known for a thick white asparagus, the Beelitzer Spargel; but I personally really like the green kind, which has only been available for a few years here.

Anyway, enough silly stories. I like asparagus in a risotto, so here goes.

Asparagus Risotto with Herbs

prep time: 10min, cooking time: 20-25 min

heavy saucepan

a bunch of asparagus (about 500 g), washed and roughly chopped with heads reserved
3 tbsp of various fresh chopped herbs (I used basil, parsley and cilantro)
1 small onion, diced
2 cups of risotto rice
5 cups of chicken/vegetable broth, hot
2 tbsp of butter
lots of parmesan
olive oil

Break of the ends of the asparagus, remove the heads and chop into bits. Melt 1 tbsp butter with some olive oil in a heavy saucepan and add the onion and about half the herbs. Fry on low heat until translucent. Add the rice and stir until translucent. Add the chopped asparagus, stirring until everything is well coated in the butter/olive oil.

Slowly add about 1 cup of the hot broth to the rice, stirring until the liquid has been absorbed. Kepp adding broth while stirring, until the rice has softened. When the rice still has some bite to it, add the reserved asparagus heads and the rest of the herbs. Turn of the heat, add the other tbsp of butter and parmesan to taste. Cover and let it rest for a few min before serving.

This is my basic way of doing risotto, you can subsitute the add on ingredients and some wine/vermouth for one cup of liquid if you like. You could also be extra indulgent and serve it with a dollop of mascarpone

A Trifle for Easter

Easter sunday in Berlin was looking a lot like Christmas what with the snow and the cold, and my hailing of spring a few weeks ago was feeling more ridiculous by the minute. To make matters worse, nearly all of our guests cancelled due to illnesses of all sorts, and we were left with an enormous lamb shoulder and only 3 1/2 people to eat it.

Everything turned out well in the end, however. The shoulder was nearly entirely eaten, as were the easter eggs and the trifle of sorts that had been planned for dessert. I still had some poundcake left (ok, I didn’t just happen to have some left, I actually had to pry it away from my husband’s hands who wasn’t too pleased about it!) and I had an idea to make a white chocolate whipped cream and raspberry fool to go with it.

The chocolate whipped cream I made up as I went, helped by this recipe. The dessert wasn’t really a trifle, more a sor tof layered dessert thingie — which sounds absolutely tempting, admit it — and so I layered away and am calling it a trifle for the purpose of google searches (Oh, I must share those some day, BTW. Hilarious what people google before they end up here!).

‘Trifle’

prep time: 15min

mixing bowl, saucepan

100 g white chocolate
1 cup of whipping cream
1 Tbsp mascarpone
a good handful of raspberries fresh or frozen or more to your liking
pound cake, sliced.

Set the raspberries to defrost slightly if they are frozen. Melt the chocolate with 2 Tbsp of cream in a double boiler until dissolved. Set to cool. Whip the cream together with the mascarpone until soft peaks form. Pour one half of the cream into the cooled melted chocolate to temper it. With the mixer beating, pour the chocolate cream into the bowl with the mixed cream in a steady stream and beat until whipped to your liking. Chill, covered in the fridge until serving.

Arrange the pound cake slices, cream and raspberries in layers on a plate or in a pretty glass. Serve.

More From the Healthy Ones

After having made this salad (and yes, I am quoting myself — sue me!) approximately 100 times in the last weeks, we all got a little bored of broccoli. This is when I remembered a similar take on raw vegetables with fennel. It’s more of a guideline than a recipe and (i feel supremely pontifying typing these words) you can use the base with many different vegetables.

The fun thing about this salad and the other one, is the classic combo of acid and salt, somewhat like a salt and vinegar chip. You could replace the fennel with carrots, or green beans or cooked potatoes even.

Fennel Slaw with Toasted Sesame

prep time: 10min, marinate for as long as you can stand!

1-2 fennel bulbs cut in thin slices, with a mandoline if you have one you showoff, you!
juice of one big lemon
1 tsp salt
2 tsp sesame seeds
olive oil

In a salad bowl, mix the lemon juice and salt. Add the sliced fennel and toss to combine. Heat up a pan on high heat and toast the sesame until fragrant. Sprinkle still hot over the fennel and add olive oil. Eat straight up or let it marinate a while.

A Quarter Pounder By Any Other Name

Hmm, ok, maybe the title is a bit misleading, since the photo is clearly showing a cake! This cake is called a four quarter cake in french, and a pound cake in english and it’s so simple, a child can do it.

And a child did, since the big boy was instrumental in bringing you this cake today: his poor little hands replaced the coveted kitchenaid standmixer as he was allowed to hold the whizzing and mixing machine ALL BY HIMSELF, all the while telling me that he was a BIG BOY NOW!

Despite warnings by She Who Shall Not Be Named (my self-appointed blog consultant — you know who you are), that it was a boring cake and recipe, I actually really really like the quatre-quart. It’s simple in taste, you can use it as a replacement for bread at breakfast, have it with tea in the afternoon and use it as backdrop for layered trifles of any kind.

It’s also the perfect recipe for someone who has never baked anything before, because there is no way that you can mess it up! You can also add some vanilla, lemon zest or dried fruit, but then it wouldn’t really be a pound cake anymore, or would it?

Simple Pound Cake

prep time: 10min, baking time: 50 min

mixing bowl, loaf pan

4 eggs
weight of the eggs in butter plus more for the pan
weight of the eggs in sugar
weight of the eggs in flour
half a pack of baking powder (about 7 g)

Preheat the oven to 180° and butter and flour your loaf pan. Mix the butter and the sugar until fluffy and white. Add the eggs one by one with the handmixer still running. Sift the flour and baking powder over the Mix and fold in. Pour into the prepared pan and bake for about 50 min or until a knife inserted in the center stays clean. Let cool in the pan before unmolding. The cake is great warm, cold, the next day and even toasted!

the Gwyneth Salad

Lately, we’ve been having lots of dinners that we were so impatient to eat, that i forgot to take pictures of them. Or that i was too embarassed to blog about for lack of a ‘recipe’ to share. These dinners having all been on the fattening side of life (I am talking ‘Raclette’, here people!), this is where i seem to still be stuck, too.

Enter: the gwyneth salad

I saw this salad when it appeared in the ny times dining section and was strangely appealed to it. Really, though who wouldn’t want to it a salad involving raw broccoli? I can hear my sister making gagging sound all the way from Switzerland (wave! hi!) and frantically trying to tell me not to make ANYTHING involving broccoli.

Good thing I learned long ago that it doesn’t always pay to follow directives from your older sibling - one incident involved me eating soap after having been told it was chocolate. I was 2, and no, no bubbles appeared out of my mouth and nose, contrary to one particular tintin album - and followed through with the recipe. Of course, I couldn’t help but substitute a few things here and there, for instance 4 raw garlics cloves and raw broccoli sounds like something only a crazy person on a macrobiotic diet would eat (hence the ‘gwyneth’ for all you trashy magazine readers out there). And 3/4 cup of olive oil seemed equally excessive in light of our recent raclette-fest, so i used enough to cover my pan. oh, and I only marinated it for about 40 min, because I couldn’t stop myself from eating it!

Marinated Raw Broccoli Salad

prep time: 10min, marinate for 1h, I dare you!

1-2 heads of broccoli, cut in florets with the stalks sliced a few mm thick
1 1/2 tsp red wine vinegar
1 tsp salt
2 tsp cumin seeds
1 peeled garlic clove, halved
pinch of dried red pepper
1 tsp toasted sesame oil
olive oil

salad bowl, saucepan

Mix the vinegar and salt in a salad bowl and toss through the broccoli. Cover the bottom of a saucepan with olive oil and heat the cumin seeds and the garlic clove until fragrant.* Add the sesame oil and the dried red pepper. Pour the mixture over the broccoli, combine and marinate at room temperature for 1 h. The salad keeps in the fridge for about a day or so. don’t forget to take out the garlic before serving!

*oh, and if you feel like swishing some hot oil around your pan chef-style… don’t do it. Olive oil doesn’t look really great when it’s splashed on a white wall…

Spring!

my day so far:
- hoping that the little boys would stop teething and thus be able to go to daycare.
- my hopes being shattered as I changed the n-th diaperblowout.
- getting a cancelation of my lunchdate by a friend who I have’t seen properly in months
- changing another diaper
- deciding to make something out of the rhubarb I had bought on saturday
- forgetting the rhubarb on the stove because of, you guessed it:
- changing another diaper
- making a load of laundry
- changing another diaper…
You get the picture.

But i digress, back to the rhubarb: after having forgotten it on the stove and nearly reduced it all to what closely ressembled the content of the above mentioned, I managed to salvage some of it and set about making a crumble - similar to when one frosts a cake because it just looks somewhat… unpleasant. I had high hopes for this crumble, considering the day I’d had so far, thankfully, it didn’t let me down!

Here is my first taste of spring:

Rhubarb Crumble

prep time: 15min, serve hot or cold

For the Rhubarb

5/6 stalks of rhubarb
brown sugar, to taste

saucepan

Peel the rhubarb, cut it into bits and put it in a saucepan. Cover with a lid and cook until it starts to soften up. Add sugar to taste. Eat as is, or:

For the Crumble Topping

1 cup of uncooked rolled oats
1/4 cup of flour
1/2 cup of brown sugar
75 g of butter (room temperature)

mixing bowl, 20×20cm gratin dish

Preheat the oven to 180°. In a mixing bowl, combine all the ingredients for the topping until ‘crumbles’ start to form. You can do this by cutting into the mixture with a knife, or with your hands.

Pour the precooked ruhubarb into the gratin dish, cover with the crumble topping and bake for 40 min, or until the top begins to look golden.

Serve hot or cold, with ice cream, cream, yoghurt or just straight up.

You can substitute any fruit for the rhubarb, and you mostly need to precook only the tougher ones such as quinces etc.

Still Going Strong!

alright, that’s the third post in three days. Am i on a roll, or what? are you taking bets as to whether I will disappear again for a few weeks after this one, blaming another ‘technical malfunction’? Well, who cares, I had a backlog of a few dishes, and haven’t posted anything savoury in a while.

The dish I am about to post is the dinner equivalent of that awesome top/jeans/jacket that you got on sale at h&m and that gets you compliments each time you wear it. A dinner that you will get everybody ooohhing and aaahhhing on you, while you can be all like ‘oh, that old thing? Psshaw, it was done in no time!’. Seriously, all you’ll ever do for this dinner, is slapping some fish in tinfoil, sprinkle some glitter here and there, and open 2 cans of beans.

You can also totally decide to get all pretentious with the name and call it Fish Pillowed in Smoked Hot and Sweet Paprika with its Canellini-Cilantro Mash. Notice how that little fish pillow thing has ITS very own mash? Fancy, huh? In that case, I recommend taking the oohs and aahs very seriously as well as waxing about where exactly the smoked paprika is from, and how you imported those beans yourself, and soaked them. And gently boiled them in kabbalah water or something. Anyway, you get the picture. This dinner, it is dead easy, anyone can do it and so they should. On to the ‘recipe’.

White Fish Fillets with Smoked Paprika

Prep time: 5 min, Cooking time: 12 min

2 white fish fillets (mine amounted to 500 g, and easily served 4)
1 tsp of smoked paprika*, hot or sweet, depending on your taste
some olive oil

tin foil to make ‘parcels’

Preheat the oven to 180°. Take enough tinfoil to make an envelope for each piece of fish. Place the fish on the tinfoil, sprinkle some oilive oil and half the paprika. Close the parcel as hermetically as possible. Repeat with the other fish. Stick in the oven for about 12 min. When the fish is done, it will be all tender and fallin apart. Be careful not to burn yourself when you open the packages.

White Bean Puree with Cilantro

Prep time: 2 min, Cooking time: 5 min

2 cans of white beans, drained.**
100 ml (a scant 1/2 cup) of chicken broth
lemon juice, to taste
cilantro, to taste

saucepan, masher

Pour the drained beans into a saucepan, add the broth. Heat up until the beans are hot. Mash up, add some lemon juice and the cilantro. Serve.

Arange the fish and the purée on a plate and reap the reward of your hard work!

* I had to really, really look for smoked paprika powder — Berlin isn’t exactly full of gourmet supplyiers. In the end, I found both sweet and spicy smoked paprika, and generally use a mix of both.
** You really don’t need fabulous beans for this. The simple storebrand will be enough, no chichi-italian import necessary!

If Your Are Still Reading…

So. The best thing - in my opinion - about this lovely cake from my last post, was the frosting. One taste of it, and all I could think of, was making marshmallows. Real, honest-to-god selfmade chamallow as they are called in France. And being the only girl in our family of five, it was instantly decided that these mallows, they HAD to be pink.
Luckily for me, others before me had ventured into marshmallow teritory, so all I had to do was check my favorite sources for all things american as well as decide on wether I was going to make marshmallows with, or without egg whites.

In the end, I chose to make them with egg white. Somehow they seemed slightly less indulgent with egg, as if the egg whites made them nearly as virtuous as the famed egg-white omelets favoured by so many south-californians! On a culinary level, making something purely out of sugar, corn syrup which is essentially just more sugar and gelatine somehow wasn’t gastronomically acceptable! So, between this and that recipe, I muddled my way through, and chose to add raspberry purée as a pinkifying agent.

pretty, no?

The recipe is fairly straightforward. Despite all warnings, I whipped up the mass with my handmixer (if anybody wants to donate a kitchenaid to a just cause, I promise tasty rewards!) and it turned out just fine. Now, get to your mixers, the marshmallows turned out to be really really tasty, and fun to make. They would also make a great project to do with kids on a rainy afternoon, although the fact that the mass has to dry overnight might make for a disappointed toddler - don’t say I didn’t warn you!

Pink Raspberry Marshmallows

prep time: 15min, cooling time: 12 h

16 sheets of gelatine
3 egg whites
2 1/2 Tbsp glucose or corn syrup
1 1/4 cup of sugar
100 ml of water
4 Tbsp of raspeberry purée, sieved
corn or potato starch

saucepan, 20 cm square cake tin, cutting board

Place the gelatine in a bowl of cold water to soften it up. Line the cake tin with oiled parchment paper - I oiled both sides of the paper to make sure it would really stick to the tin. Crack the egg whites into a big mixing bowl, the mass will triple in volume. In a saucepan combine the water, syrup and sugar. Bring to a boil and simmer for about 8 minutes, or until the mixture is dissolved.

While the syrup is cooking, whip the egg whites to soft peaks. Drain the gelatine sheets and squeeze out as much water as possible. Add them to the hot sugar syrup, and pour the whole thing gently over your whites while still whipping the eggs. This is the point at which you might realize that yes, you only have two hands, and that a helper might be of use. Once the whole syrup is combined into the egg whites, add the raspberry purée and keep mixing until the (pink!) mass reaches room temperature

Pour the mass into the prepped cake tin, and wonder for a brief moment if you just inadvertently made latex. Let it cool over night.

The next day (before even having breakfast if you are anything like me!), sieve a little starch onto a cutting board, and some more onto a plate. Invert the marshmallow onto the cutting board and dust it with some more starch. With a sharp knife or a pizza cutter.

I recommend letting the cut up marshmallows dry up some more before you package them, as they tend to hold a lot of moisture and will stick together despite the corn starch if you package them too soon. Or you just eat them straight up!

Anybody There?

phsshhht (blows dust+cobwebs of her blog). Hi!
Sorry for not posting, but as I already explained to my 3 readers, our camera was broken, and whats the point of blogging about spareribs, lemon risotto and coffee cake if you have no photos to show for!

My camera is safely back in my hands, and the weekend was spent trying to make up for lost time: we bought a fresh coconut at the market, and I was thus hoping for a cake that would be like a bounty. I didn’t succeed, but the result was crazy nonetheless: behold, the fluffy, cloudy Chocolate-Coconut-Marshmallow Cake
The cake is simple chocolate, filled with marshmallow-coconut-filling and frosted with seven-minute-frosting. It looks very impressive ( If i do say so myself!), and isn’t too heavy, despite the large amounts of sugar. In fact, the cake was gone in two days. Two days, and only gave one piece away to a friend!

Chocolate-Coconut-Marshmallow Cake

for the sponge cake
adapted from Trish Deseine MY CUISINE
prep time: 10min, baking time: 15 min, cooling time: 5-10 min

225 g sugar
225 g butter, softened
4 eggs
225 g flour
2 tsp baking powder
4 Tbsp cocoa powder, diluted in 4 Tbsp hot water

2 25 cm round or square cake tins

Preheat the oven to 180°C. and line your buttered cake pans with parchment paper. In a mixing bowl combine the sugar and butter, mixing until white and fluffy. Add the eggs, mixing well inbetween each one. Sift the flour and baking powder into the bowl and add the cocoa mixture. Mix until just combined.
Divide the batter between the cake tins and bake for 25 minutes or until the cake feels springy to touch and a knife inserted to the center will come out clean. Cool in the pan for 5 minutes then invert unto a rack.

While the cake is cooling off, prepare the marshmallow frosting (also called seven-minute-frosting)

Marshmallow Frosting

1 1/2 cups of sugar
1/2 tsp salt
2 egg whites
2 tsp vanilla extract
splash of white vinegar
prep time: 9min, cooling time: 10 min

metal mixing bowl or saucepan, pot of simmering water for a waterbath

Mix all the ingredients together in a metal bowl or saucepan set over a pot of simmering water. With an electric mixer, whip the mixture until the frosting stands in stiff peaks - about 5-7 min. When the right consistency is achieved, take the bowl of the heat and keep whipping until the mixture cools down, about two more min. Let the frosting cool completely for 10 more minutes.

Marshmallow-Coconut-Filling

1 cup of Marshmallow Frosting
1 cup of shredded unsweetened coconut

Mix until combined.

Assembly

Spread the Marshmallow-Coconut-Filling on the first cake and top with the secind one. Set the cake on the plate or stand you want to serve it in. Stick pieces of parchment paper underneath the cake to catch any drips from the frosting. using an offset spatula or a big knife, spread the Marshmallow Frosting all over the cake and sprinkle some shredded coconut on top.
The cake is best eaten cold.