The (mostly) horrible things my daughter eats, part 4

I'll post about another staple of my daughter's menu: Pizza Prosciutto. Unbaked, it looks like this:

And this is how it looks partly eaten:

 

Coop (one of my local supermarkets) sells it refrigerated. Migros (the other big local supermarket) used to have an organic pizza with cooked ham which Esther liked even better (because of its thick, crunchy dough), but they don't sell it here any more.

And there is also another thing featuring meat which Esther likes. Toast with Bündnerfleisch.

 

The toast I use is made in part with wholemeal flour. And Esther doesn't eat butter or margarine below the Bündnerfleisch.

Bündnerfleisch is air-dried beef (a specialty of the Swiss canton of Graubünden).

 

 Two slices of toast with Bündnerfleisch are a snack. But four slices qualify as a full meal.

Note that I don't think toast with Bündnerfleisch horrible (I won't eat it myself any more, but on occasion I have done so in the past and liked it). The pizza is a different case, though.

 

"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."

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.

Root vegetables in salt dough

Couple of days ago, our local supermarket had multicolored carrots, and parsnips. So tonight, we made vegetables in salt dough.

You need this much flour:

 

and this much salt:

 

and this much water:

 

  Mix flour and salt, and add the water 100ml at a time. Knead thoroughly, until you have a firm dough. Let that sit for 15 minutes.

Meanwhile, you can take care of the root vegetables. You will need 1 kilogram of them in total. I used multicolored carrots, and parsnips. Parsley roots work well, too.

 Trim and peel the carrots and parsnips. Cut large roots in half so all pieces are roughly of the same thickness. Put into a bowl and mix with 2 tablespoons of olive oil, freshly ground pepper, some fresh rosemary and thyme.

Preheat an oven to 180 degrees Celsius.

Now you can roll out the dough. Cut the ball of dough into one slightly larger and one slightly smaller half. Roll out the smaller half first.

 Put baking paper on a baking tray and place the rolled-out dough on it. Scatter some sage leaves on the dough and place the veggies on top.

Roll out the other, larger half of the dough and place it over the vegetables. Use a fork to "sew" the edges together.

Put it into the oven (2nd rail from the bottom) and leave it there for 50 minutes.

While the veggies are in the oven, you can fix the sauce. You will need this:

 

Vegetable stock, a medium-sized potato, a small onion, and 4 teaspoons of prepared horseradish (in the bowl on the left). We used a rather thick concoction from Bavaria - the finished sauce cleared our noses immediately ;) You will also need 100 milliliters of half cream.

Finely grate the onion and the potato.

 

Put the grated onion and potato and the stock into a small pot and bring to a boil, stirring. Cover and simmer for 10 minutes over very low heat. Then add the horseradish and the cream, and blend using a hand-held blender. An ordinary blender should work, too. Add salt and pepper to taste.

At this point, we also fixed ourselves some couscous. Rice or potatoes are other options.

The unopened salt dough fresh from the oven looks like this:

And this is what my first plate looked like:

Ben says this dish is missing a (vegetarian) schnitzel, but I don't agree.