Not just pasta salad

Ben and I made soba noodles with cucumber and avocado yesterday. We used this recipe as a basic guideline.

Here is a group photo of the ingredients.

 We used about 200g of the Korean soba noodles in the center. That was two bundles.

 I cooked them for 8 minutes in gently boiling salted water. The recipe says you should toss them with toasted sesame oil after cooking, but I found they turn out less sticky if you add about half of the sesame oil to the boiling water and half of it after cooking and rinsing them under cold water. So I did that and put them into the fridge to let them cool.

Meanwhile, Ben took care of the scallions. He trimmed and washed them,

then he cut them into rings.

We reserved most of the green parts to be added raw later, while the rest was to get sauteed along with the shiitake, which Ben sliced next.

We use a bit more than just one cup of sliced shiitake. We tried that but found the shiitake had too little presence in the finished dish. The amount you see in the picture is about 350g.

I heated about three tablespoons of olive oil in a nonstick frying pan and added the mushrooms.

I went on according to the recipe: after the shiitake had wilted down a bit, I added the white scallion rings and two cloves of garlic.

Yes, I use a garlic press. And yes, a lot of chefs will tell you that the garlic will lose a lot of its flavor when pressed. This is entirely true. But handling a garlic press is so much easier than chopping up the clove with a knife. So, for most of our everyday use, we use the garlic press. I can only think of one dish where I really think the garlic tastes better in thin slices (we tried both).

I also added a good splash (about two to three tablespoons) of soy sauce and let simmer for a few minutes. Then I added two teaspoons of mirin to deglaze and let simmer for about two more minutes, until the contents of the pan looked like this:

 We let that cool for a while. Meanwhile, Ben had peeled, halved and sliced the cucumber and peeled, quartered and sliced the avocado.

We used neither yuzu (I looked for fresh yuzu at a large department store today, but no luck - I only found bottled yuzu juice which was due to expire next month) nor lemon, but lime.

Ben found out that the various ingredients of the dish mix best if you add the liquids to the soba noodles before adding the solids. So I mixed the noodles with 3 tablespoons of rice vinegar, the juice from both halves of the lime, and a rather generous teaspoon of Sriracha sauce (the one with the green lid).

 I added the sesame seeds, then the prepared shiitake, the green parts of the scallions and the cucumber. As a ripe avocado is very delicate, it gets placed on top after mixing the rest.

 

Yum! So good in this hot summer!

 

(Sorry, blurry photo).

Prawns and a fountain

We came back from a vacation in Sri Lanka a few days ago.

Food was mostly buffet style, and as I've said before, I'm not very fond of posting pictures of food which I have got myself from a buffet.

And if the food wasn't buffet style, it didn't look so spectacular.

I have one photo of a dish Esther ordered on the way to Sri Lanka at Dubai Airport, though, which I found rather impressive, even if the prawns are not straight ;)
 

 Hmmm. It looked more impressive in reality ;)

For a certain reason I would like to post photos of one fountain in Zurich-Oerlikon as well.

 

The two figures (a man and a woman) are each holding a fish between their legs, the water spouting from the mouths of the fish.

 

"Wasabi" Pickled Carrots

We are expecting guests on Sunday, and I decided to make pickled carrots in advance, using this recipe as a rough guideline.

I had 500 g of multicolored carrots:

I peeled and trimmed them.

 On the right in the photo above, you can see my favorite vegetable peeler. You might guess from its shape that it is intended for peeling asparagus. I like it because it is sharp and because it peels rather thickly.

So I used it to peel the carrots into strips.

Meanwhile, Ben had peeled the ginger and chopped it with the draw-knife.

This resulted in a lot more than one and a half teaspoons of finely chopped ginger. More like one and a half tablespoons. But when I used the amount stated in the recipe, the carrots didn't taste of ginger at all.

I added that to the carrots and this much chili flakes:

The container on the left is in fact a mill, to grind the flakes more finely.

I also added a scant tablespoon of regular household salt (not kosher salt). I used plain salt, not the salt with iodine and fluorides added. On top of that came four generous teaspoons of sugar and four scant teaspoons of this prepared horseradish:

I really wonder if the author of the original recipe was thinking of something like this when she advertised "prepared horseradish". She speaks of a "bottle" of the stuff - the concoction from Bavaria in the picture above is much too thick to put it into a bottle. It also contains sulfates, and I don't think that makes it better than the "wasabi" preparations readily available in Swiss supermarkets. One day, I think I'll use "the green gunk in the tube" and see what happens.

I used a pair of salad servers to work the seasonings into the carrots.

Then I stuffed everything into my pickle press.

While I was typing this report, it has sat in the fridge for - well, maybe a bit more than half an hour. I just took it out and transferred the carrots to a different container, setting some aside to try them.

They turned out really well!

Vegetable lasagna with shiitake

Yesterday, Ben and I made vegetable lasagna with shiitake for dinner. Last year in Austria, I had bought "Das kleine Pilzkochbuch" ("The little mushroom cookbook"), where the recipe is originally from.

First, Ben cut 500 g of fresh shiitake into quarters or sixths, depending on the size.

 As you can see, the fresh shiitake mushrooms available here are really large (and rather spongy).

500 g really is a mountain of shiitake!

 Ben also first trimmed and quartered one fennel bulb of 300 g, then cut the quarters into thin slices.

He peeled roughly 200 g carrots and sliced them thinly (1 mm) using a mandoline slicer.

And he diced two onions.

 I heated up a generous tablespoon of clarified butter...

...and sautéed the vegetables for about 5 minutes in that.

I removed them from the heat, dusted them with two and a half tablespoons of white flour and let them cool for a few minutes.

Then I added 400 ml cream, stirred to combine and simmered over low heat until the mixture had thickened a bit.

 

 I added black pepper and herb salt. I use this sort:

 Because there is so much cream in the mixture, I have to add quite a lot of that salt to create a savory taste.

Frying the shiitake briefly (for about 3 or 4 minutes) was the next step. Again, I used about a tablespoon of clarified butter.

 "Help, our frying pan is too small for all those mushrooms!" Luckily, Ben came to help me. He is more skilled at stirring the contents of overflowing pots and pans than me ;) But after the shiitake had shrunk a bit, I was able to continue. I seasoned them with herb salt and black pepper as well.

Meanwhile, Ben got out the lasagna form. I asked him to use clarified butter to grease it, but he said: "Mmmm... can't I use something else?" I answered: "Of course you can, use margarine if you like." He went on: "Have I never told you that I don't care much for the taste of clarified butter?" - He hadn't. But now I know ;)

So after he had greased the form, Ben laid out the bottom of it with 4 dry lasagna sheets (the "no pre-cooking" kind), spread half of the vegetables and cream on that, added half of the mushrooms and then another layer of lasagna sheets.

On top of that came another layer of veggies and cream, another layer of shiitake - and then Ben sliced two balls of mozzarella cheese (300 g in total)...

...and spread them on top of the lasagna.

 After about 30 minutes in the oven at 180 degrees Celsius, it looked like this:

 And this was my first portion:

 (I can tell you that it tasted much, much better than it looks in this photo!)