"Pasta with pesto? ;)"

Today, I discussed on chat with Ben what to have for dinner tonight. Ben said: "The other day, I had been thinking about onion soup." And I replied: "Mmmm... I want to have something that really fills my stomach." So Ben suggested: "Pasta with pesto? ;)"

Pasta with pesto is the classical dish we had when we didn't really want to cook and thus pored over the Italian delivery service menu. Very often, we got stuck on pasta with pesto - and decided we could make that at home cheaper, which we did.

Funny enough, the hotel in Austria had one such dish on their lunch menu. Tortellini filled with spinach and ricotta cheese, and tossed in homemade basil pesto. I had had that twice and liked it. So I suggested recreating it at home to Ben.

The hotel kitchen's pesto was a wonderful grassy green - so green that I suspect they use actual grass to make it ;) So I set out to get pesto of a similar hue. I also needed tortellini (as there was no need to make them from scratch) and crema di balsamico. (And parmesan cheese, which I forgot to put into the photo.)

It hurt a little bit wanting to use such high-quality condiments on the very cheapest sort of tortellini. But there was only one bag of 500 grams left of the tortellini that were closest to those in Austria, and that wouldn't have been enough for Ben and me.

Okay, directions:

1. Cook tortellini according to package instructions. (We add salt and olive oil to the water.)
2. Drain and rinse briefly with cold water. 
3. Toss with pesto.
4. Put in deep dish, add some splashes of crema di balsamico and some finely grated parmesan.

 
Not bad, but after dinner I said to Ben: "Next time I say I want something that fills my stomach, tell me to buy ingredients for okonomiyaki."

Learning Japanese, part 2

As there is not a lot to do in Austria in the mountains if you don't ski, I have a lot of time to catch up on kanji and katakana.

I had to transliterate this from hiragana to the proper katakana and kanji:

Here is the translation: "There are four avocados, eight papayas, one melon, nine kiwis, five lemons, three limes, ten oranges, seven pineapples, two mangos and six passionfruits."

That is going to become one strange fruit salad ;)

The (mostly) horrible things my daughter eats, part 1

For a long time, I have been reluctant to post in detail about the food my daughter eats. Why? Because I am more than a bit ashamed that my daughter lives almost exclusively on junk food :(

In two of the Austria pictures, you can see her at the edges of the photos, reading a book on her Kindle or playing on her Nintendo DS. (I wonder if this is also a reason I should be ashamed of myself. On one occasion, I told her that she was being a bad example for other kids, whose parents don't want them to read or play while the family is sitting together at the dinner table. And those kids ask their parents: "Why is that girl allowed to do that and I am not?") In fact, if she wasn't allowed to read or play, she wouldn't be sitting with us at the dinner table at all. She would be bored to hell if she had to watch us stuffing ourselves with what to us is gorgeous food, while she suffers from Hot Dog withdrawal.

And when I say Hot Dog, I mean hot dogs like these:

 

The sausages are the vegetarian sausages I mentioned before in this post, heated briefly in hot water. Well, at least the buns are made in part with wholemeal flour.

You can count the foods/dishes my daughter likes on the fingers of three hands. And both Ben and I have the impression that they become less and less over time. Sometimes, we try to advertise food to her saying: "You used to like that! We have photos of you eating that!"

And she always answers: "Have you forgotten? I have lingua geographica!"

Lingua geographica is a condition of the mucosa of the tongue. I first noticed the large red blotches on Esther's tongue when she was three, and the pediatrician who looked at them said that it was nothing serious, but this condition could affect her sense of taste. Things she likes may become suddenly unpleasant, while she may suddenly like things she didn't like before. (But she is not so eager to explore the latter possibility.)

Read more about lingua geographica here.

In my first post from Austria, you have already seen one pasta dish she likes: Spaghetti Bolognese. She also likes pasta with tomato sauce. But after two days of feasting on that here in Austria, she has temporarily lost interest.

In the past week, she had private skiing lessons, while this (second) week she has group lessons the whole day, and lunch is provided. She is more likely to eat properly if there is some peer pressure :)

And yes, of course I am concerned about whether she will develop properly and whether she gets all she needs via her food. I appease myself by giving her these:

  

 Vitamin gummy bears. What else can I do?

Austria, part 5

I haven't posted anything for a few days now. Let me check if there are any photos available.

This was Ben's main course on Friday. Feta cheese and spinach strudel on tomato sauce.

And this was my main course on the same day. Fish (I can't remember what kind) with mustard sauce, carrots and black and white linguine.

I also have one photo of one plate of starters I got from the buffet. But that was on Thursday.

On that day, the hotel offered a buffet of Italian specialties, for starters, soup, main course, dessert and cheese. Clockwise from the top: tomatoes and mozzarella with balsamico sauce and pesto, tuna salad, marinated salmon, pickled artichokes, pickled black salsify with sundried tomatoes.

Yesterday, we chose not to have dinner at the hotel. We went to Bregenz to visit a museum. I took this photo of one work of art in the atrium:

 

It was a high tower of enamelled pots made in Africa.

For dinner, we got some food from an Asian fast-food place and ate it sitting on a bench by the lake. (Yes, it was that warm.) Our daughter wanted to have salmon maki and forced Ben to do without the cheese spätzle we could have got at the hotel. I had deep-fried prawns - which were straight, not curled :) - with sweet-and-sour sauce and rice, and Ben had vegetables with fried noodles. While Esther (our daughter) was very happy with what she had, both Ben's noodles and my rice were much too salty. (The prawns were good, though.) We have a saying here that when the food is too salty, it means that the cook is in love. May the cook and his beloved live happily ever after :)

Austria, part 4

Yesterday's main courses. Ben had Serviettenknödel (literally: napkin dumpling) with mushroom cream sauce and black salsify.

I had trout fillet on a bed of sauerkraut with potatoes.

Ben thinks the photo of my dessert (which I got from the buffet) looks nice enough to be published, so here it is:

 

Topfen (milk curds) strudel with vanilla sauce and red berries.

We tried to advertise the Topfenstrudel to our daughter, saying that it tasted just like cheesecake - the German kind of cheesecake which she really loves - but she was feeling to queasy to try it. 

Austria, part 3

Yesterday, only the main course was served at the table.

Unwillingly, Ben let me take a picture of what he had.

Vegetable-filled thin pancakes (palatschinken) on cream sauce with chives.

I had poached sole rolls filled with spinach, white wine sauce and tagliatelle.

It was good :)

One starter and one main dish...

...in Austria.

The starter was sheep cheese parfait with beetroots and pink grapefruit.

The main course was ocean perch with dill cream sauce, rice and broccoli.

 

(There were also three other courses, but I had to get them from a buffet, and I am not able to serve myself in a visually appealing manner when I am moving along in a line.)

 

Austria, part 1

Yesterday's food was pretty unspectacular, so I'll start with a picture of today's lunch:

 Back: Spaghetti Bolognese
Front: Zucchini Piccata on spaghetti with tomato sauce

The zucchini piccata tasted very "green" :)

Dinner today was a grand affair.

Bread:

 

Amuse-bouche (to eat with the bread):

 

First course was prawns fried in tempura batter with salad.

 

 

 Second course was cheese and cream soup with toasted dark bread.

Third course was passionfruit sherbet.

Main course was giant ravioli with chopped tomatoes and walnuts on a bed of steamed vegetables.

 

Sorry, you can't see the vegetables. They were carrots and turnip cabbage.

Dessert was marbled mousse au chocolat.

 

Sorry, no picture of the cheese.

Sushi, again

Today, I didn't really have time to go grocery shopping. I met my daughter in Oerlikon and we took a train to yet another little "village" to visit a certain drugstore. Among other things, we bought Russisch Brot (literally: Russian Bread), a very crunchy type of cookies in the form of the letters of the (Latin) alphabet.

These cookies seem to be available in Switzerland only at the drugstores of that particular German chain, Müller Drogerie.

So I thought I might as well pay a visit to Negishi Sushi Bar at Oerlikon Station and get some sushi to take away. When we arrived there, I was delighted to find that they had put up a poster saying that their sushi chefs are now working the whole day (instead of just noons and evenings).

This was our haul:

 

From top left to bottom: Matsuyama Salad, the usual shake maki for my daughter (plus some kampyou maki for Ben), a Fukuoka Box for me and a vegetarian assortment for Ben.

Matsuyama Salad is basically wakame with a sesame oil and vinegar dressing.

My daughter will only eat shake maki. If she can't get them, shake nigiri are also okay. She used to like kappa maki and tekka maki, too, but I'm not sure if she still does.

I like any kind of sushi, except maki containing cheese and/or creamcheese (*shudder*). That's not so uncommon here, the best example being the obnoxious California Rolls.

Every time we get sushi at Negishi, they throw a ton of these little shoyu bottles into the bag:

I should really start to squeeze them out into our regular shoyu bottle. (I'd rather not risk using any of the little bottles that have piled up on our spice shelf - they may be years old.)

That being said, I would like to say that I don't know if I will post more things before we go on vacation on Saturday. (I have all the ingredients for nama fu in the house, gathered from various shops, but there is still some work to do before we leave, and probably not enough time to cook such an elaborate dish.) Maybe yet another quick fix or a post about a drink. From Saturday on, I will try to take pictures of the most spectacular food at our hotel in Austria.

Sake! (part 2)

Originally, I had planned to buy expensive sake at my local supermarket today. But I had to go to the train station in the next "village" (called Oerlikon) today to change seat reservations for a train trip, so I thought I might as well pay a visit to the Asia Store there.
Besides rice wine from China, they sell these bottles:

Choya is perhaps the single best-known brand of Japanese sake in the West. I remember times about 15 years ago in Germany, when Choya was all you could get if you wanted Japanese sake.

Sometimes I wonder if Choya is known in Japan at all. (I don't really remember if I have seen Choya Sake in Japan.) If so, what is its reputation?

On the back of the bottle, they write that their sake is good for cocktails and for cooking. Strangely enough, they don't say that it is also good for drinking it pure ;)

Vegetarian Oden

There is not much to say about tonight's oden.

I tender-prepped the daikon for 10 minutes in gently boiling water (about as gentle as if you were cooking pasta).

 The simmering liquid of the oden was as follows:

1 liter stock (I used 400 ml which were left over from making the ganmodoki earlier, plus 600 ml water and one paper tube of instant kombu dashi - about 2 teaspoons full)

1 tablespoon sake
1 tablespoon mirin
2 teaspoons light-colored soy sauce (usukuchi shoyu)

I put that into the donabe and added a piece of Hidaka kombu (about 2 by 5 cm).

When the liquid started to boil, I put in 2 hard-boiled eggs, the daikon and thick chunks of carrot. After 10 minutes, I added the ganmodoki.

 

Sorry, the kombu is not at the bottom of the donabe as it should be ;)

I also had prepared mugi miso dengaku sauce (kind of ;) ). I will talk about that another time.

I preferred this mustard to that sauce, though I had some of the sauce as well:

 

  (I had meant to buy Japanese mustard, but got this Korean mustard by mistake. The packages look very similar. Now that it's in the house, it must be eaten up...)

This is what my bowl looked like:

The green smudge on the egg is from the kombu.

Ben said: "What has happened to the tofu balls? They feel hollow." It was a bit as if there was some hollow space below the crust which had filled with the simmering liquid. Really, I have no idea how that came ;)

I had thought about making kale rolls to put into the oden, but when I saw the kale at our supermarket, I doubted that I would be able to wrap anything in these leaves:

(Sorry for the blurry photo.)

Too late, I also hit upon the idea to put potatoes into the oden ("hit upon" means found it in my cookbook in this case). Next time. Or I might look around if I can find chikuwabu.

Homemade ganmodoki

For dinner tonight, I had planned a vegetarian oden. I had been looking for ready-to-use (or frozen) ganmodoki in the stores, but had found none. This cookbook, however (I presume this is the English version), had a recipe for making ganmodoki at home.

These were the ingredients we used:

200 g firm (momen) tofu. We used this sort:

 It is really firm (it won't disintegrate when simmered in broth) and rather dry (it's not sold swimming in liquid), and we chose not to try to squeeze out more water (in contrast to what the recipe said).

2 pieces of Hidaka kombu, about 2 inches square in total
2 dried shiitake mushrooms
half a liter of warm water

1 medium-sized carrot (about 50 g)
1 tablespoon of grated ginger
1 egg white, beaten stiff

1 teaspoon light-colored soy sauce (usukuchi shoyu)
1 teaspoon mirin

Salt (to taste - I simply forgot to add it!)

Vegetable oil for deep-frying

Directions:

Soak the kombu and the shiitake in the water for half an hour.

 I wanted to use the soaking liquid as stock for the oden later, so I removed the shiitake and the kombu and strained the liquid through a paper coffee filter.

And I decided to coarsely grate the carrot (instead of finely chopping it).

 

I chopped the kombu and the shiitake, though.

Contrary to the original recipe, we crumbled the tofu into a rather high plastic jar, added the carrot, the shiitake, the kombu, the grated ginger, the soy sauce and the mirin (and I should have added some salt - I forgot the salt!) and blended everything together using a hand-held blender. Only then did we fold the beaten egg white into the resulting mixture.

Deep-frying was Ben's job.

 

I asked him: "Aren't they a bit dark?"

 

And he simply said: "No!"

I asked if I might try one, and he said: "Only over my dead body!" He was only joking, of course. When he wasn't looking, I ate one of them. It had done them no big harm that I had forgotten the salt. But I told Ben to fry them at a lower temperature and for a longer time the next time.

Matcha

As I've said before, I wanted to try if my new bowls were suitable for making matcha.

I still have this instruction leaflet from Japan:

(Note that it has a typo. They mean "foam", not "form".)

This is the matcha I used:

And this is my gear:

Okay, matcha into bowl:

 

Add very hot, but not boiling water:

 

And whisk:

 

Success!

 In lieu of proper wagashi, we used this, bought at the new Turkish supermarket three bus stops away from us:

 

Unpacked, it looked like this:

 

For those who don't know lokum: it is a firm, rather chewy kind of jelly. This kind is flavored with rose petals and dusted with powdered sugar. It went very well with the matcha!