Category: Savory

Elivs’ Meat Loaf. Pure Rock’n’Roll.


Meat loaf is a classic dish in German and American culture and there are tons of variations: my grandma used to put in a hard-cooked egg, my mom puts in tons of herbs and spices and my friend Nadine makes kind of a Greek version with rosemary and feta. But somehow I have settled on the version mentioned in my mother-in-law’s Elvis cookbook: glazed with ketchup and with bacon on it. It somehow tastes like home and it tastes even better with a cold beer and some loud rock’n’roll.

ELVIS’ MEAT LOAF

1 cup rolled oats
1/2 cup / 125 ml cream
2 tablespoons butter
1 large onion, finely diced
2 garlic gloves, crushed
2 celery sticks, finely diced
1 kg / 2 pounds ground beef
500 g / 1 pound ground pork
2 eggs
1/2 cup fresh parsley, chopped
1 tablespoon dried thyme
1 tablespoon dried sage
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon ground pepper
1/2 teaspoon hot sauce
1/2 tablespoon soy sauce | tamari
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
1 hard boiled egg (optional)
vegetable oil
1/2 cup ketchup
4-6 bacon strips
1 kg / 2 pounds potatoes, peeled and halved


Soak the oats in the cream and let them sit for 15 minutes. And preheat your oven to 180°C / 350°F.


Meanwhile, chop up the parsley, onions, garlic and celery and cook everything except the parsley in the butter on low heat until they everything starting to get soft. Then set aside to let it cool.


Get a large bowl (the Kitchen Aid bowl is just perfect) and fill in the meat, eggs, all the spices and sauces (except the ketchup), the soaked oats and the softened onions.


This is the hot sauce I used – it’s really crazy hot, that’s why I reduced the amount to a 1/4 teaspoon.

By the way, I like to keep my measuring spoons separated – I only have one set and I don’t see why I should put everything into the dishwasher when I used just one spoon. So each one got it’s own keyring and they hang right next to my stove.


Mix the meat with the other ingredients either by hand – or if you have RSI like me from using the computer all day – use the paddle attachment on your Kitchen Aid on the lowest setting. Let it mix for a minute or so, it should just be combined.


Take a big casserole dish (mine is a Pyrex lasagna dish) and and lightly cover the bottom with oil. Then form a loaf out of the meat mixture and place it in your casserole dish. And if you were my grandma, you would place a peeled, hard-cooked egg inside the meat loaf. She called it “Falscher Hase”, meaning something like bogus bunny – traditionally served for Easter.

See the crack on the side? Make sure to seal all the cracks or all the beautiful meat juices will run out and leave you with a dry meat loaf. Nobody really likes that.


Next, cover all the surface of the meat loaf with ketchup. This will result in a nice, caramelized crust. And remember, everything caramelized is good by definition.


Lay on some strips of bacon and arrange the peeled potatoes around the meat. Put it into the oven for about 1 – 1 1/2 hours – until the crust is golden brown and (if you happen to have a thermometer) the internal temperature is over 65°C / 150°F.


Get it out of the oven and let it sit covered for 15 minutes – like any roast, all the good juices would run out if you cut right away. Cut into slices and serve with roast potatoes and ketchup. And sneak some of the brown stuff from the bottom of the pan on your plate.

And the next day, make sandwiches: toasted ciabatta bread, some homemade mayo, more ketchup, a slice of meat loaf and some lettuce.

Parmesan-crusted chicken. Perfect with salad.


This is one of the recipes I found on the internet, lost it and then found it again on a totally different site. Turns out I found the original recipe. And turns out, there’s no such thing as Italian-flavored breadcrumbs in Germany – so I just decided to add some Italian herbs myself. And some chili flakes for an extra kick.

I imagine this chicken would also work very well with a Caesar Salad – in fact, this chicken basically is a Chicken Caesar Salad without the salad…

PARMESAN-CRUSTED CHICKEN
for 2, adapted from Hellman’s

CHICKEN
2 boneless, skinless chicken breast halves (about 250 g / 1/2 pound)
1/8 cup | 2 tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese
1/4 cup | 4 tablespoons mayonnaise (I used homemade)
1 teaspoon dried Italian herbs
1/2 teaspoon dried chili flakes
dash of Worcestershire sauce
2-3 tablespoons bread crumbs

SALAD
1 package/head of your favorite salad, in this case lamb’s lettuce
3 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
3 tablespoons soy sauce | tamari
6 tablespoons cream


Cut the chicken breasts into nice medallions, about finger thick. I’m super picky about fat, silver skin and veins, so I cut it all away.

Place them in an oven-proof dish, for example a non-stick pan or a glass/ceramic casserole. And set your oven to 425°F / 220°C.


Mix together Parmesan cheese and the spices. Be creative! Maybe some sun-dried tomatoes or fresh rosemary would be nice.


Measure in the mayonnaise, I prefer homemade.


Stir it all together and give it a taste.

This is also a great dip. And you can make awesome garlic bread with it. Just smear it thickly onto the bread and pop it into the oven until golden brown and delicious.


But back to the chicken. Spread the mayo-cheese mixture onto the chicken bits. Try to coat everything evenly.


Then sprinkle the breadcrumbs on top and pop it into the oven for 10-20 min. – until it’s golden brown and cooked through.


Ah. Golden brown deliciousness!


While the chicken is in the oven, wash your favorite salad (Romaine lettuce would also be nice).

And it’s time to make the dressing. Super simple, really! Just mix together soy sauce, balsamic vinegar and cream.


Just mix them together and you’ll have a perfect salad dressing.

And if you think about it, it’s even low-fat… You will say: “Cream? Low-fat? Yeah right.” But look at it this way: Oil is 99% fat, cream has 30% fat. Do the math.


Arrange salad, dressing and crunchy chicken on a plate and tuck in!

Spaghetti Bolognese. Hearty, chunky, highly aromatic.


Isn’t curious that half the world eats Spaghetti with Bolognese sauce, except the Italians? They think we are all crazy eating fine, delicate noodles with a thick and chunky ragú. Or even worse: with meatballs.
I admit, getting the appropriate amount of pasta and sauce into your mouth is not really easy with this combination. Either you roll the spaghetti on your fork and all the ground beef falls off. Or you try to scoop up some sauce and the long pasta strands falls of. Feel free to cook rigatoni, ruote, conchiglie or whatever you like. But I stick with Spaghetti, because nothing beats the taste of childhood memories.

PASTA ALLA BOLOGNESE

1 kg / 2 pounds ground beef
2-4 tablespoons olive oil
6 thick slices bacon, diced
2 onions, chopped
2 carrots, diced
1/2 cup tomato paste
1 cup / 250 ml red wine
1 tablespoon sugar
salt and pepper
Parmesan rinds
bay leaves
rosemary and thyme
chili flakes
a splash of balsamic vinegar
125 g / 1/2 pound of your favorite pasta per person


This depends on what you like – I prefer buying grinding the meat myself. That’s because I recently had the bad luck of getting gristle and bone bits on store-bought ground beef.


Cut the onion and the bacon into chunks. No need to chop everything into tiny bits. Also, cut the carrots into cubes. I like to quarter them and cut away 5 mm thick slices.


Take your biggest and heaviest pan and heat it up on medium-high on the stove.
This one: Le Creuset. I love it.


Fry the ground meat. I like to put in half of it and then the other half. I sometimes happens if I put all in that the pan cools down too much – and that results in water being sucked out of the meat. That’s bad.


If the meat is cooked done and you see some brown bits, add the bacon, the onions and the carrots. It’s getting kinda full, but that’s OK. Let it all cook for a couple of minutes until the onions are getting soft.


Now add the tomato paste, the red wine, sugar, salt and pepper, the herbs and a splash of balsamic vinegar. Top off with enough water to cover it all. Let it cook at least 30 minutes on medium-low and add more water if too much evaporates. Meanwhile, cook your pasta in salted water.

The Parmesan rinds simply the rest of your cheese pieces that not even a Microplane grater can persuade to give away tinier bits. I collect them in my fridge in a Tupperware container and they keep for ages. They not a must in this sauce, but if you cook the sauce for quite a bit (more than an hour), they will give the sauce a deep, complex flavor – just like the bay leaves. So it’s kind of a secret ingredient.


Serve the pasta along with the sauce and top it off with huge amounts of Parmesan.

Tortellini. Simply with cream and ham.


Cream? Again?

TORTELLINI WITH CREAM AND HAM

500 g / 1 pound / 2 packages fresh tortellini, either filled with meat/ham or spinach/ricotta
1 large onion, diced
200 g / 1/2 pound cooked ham, cut into strips
200 ml / 1 cup cream – maybe more
60 ml / 1/4 cup white wine, optional
nutmeg, freshly ground
salt and pepper
fresh parsley, chopped


Dice the onion your favorite way. Not too fine though, you still want to taste it afterwards.


Next, cut the ham into strips, I like them 2 cm / 1 inch long and 5 mm / 1/4 inch wide. It’s really easy: cut the ham slices into inch-wide long strips, stack them on top of each other and start cutting away 5 mm slices.


Get out your largest non-stick pan, heat it up on medium-low and let the butter melt. While you’re at it, heat up a pot with lots of salt water for the tortellini.


Gently cook the onions in the butter for several minutes, you want the soft and translucent, but no color. Add the ham and let it heat up in the pan – no need for browning here, either.


When the water boils, throw in the tortellini and cook them. The ones I bought were fresh and only needed 2 minutes. Tortellini are so easy, they start floating to the top when they are ready.


Fish the floating tortellini out with a slotted spoon and put them into the pan. Mix with the ham and the onions.


If you have a little rest of white wine sitting in your fridge, now’s the time to use it. Add to the pan and let nearly everything of it evaporate, then add the cream. If you’re not using wine, just add the cream. Yeah, all of it. And a couple of glugs extra.

Season with salt, pepper and quite a bit of fresh ground nutmeg – and let it cook for a couple of minutes until the cream thickens a bit. If you like, you can season with a dash of lemon juice.


Sprinkle with parsley and enjoy!

Zürcher Geschnetzeltes. Stroganoff the Swiss way.


Did you know that sweet sherry is a total pain to clean up? Some years ago, a bottle broke with less than half a cup of sherry left. It might not sound so much, but it was a tremendous disaster. Sweet syrupy drops rolling down in slow motion, sticking to everything in their way and running into every little groove. Photo albums, books, shelves, parquet floor, the TV set and various video game consoles got their share. Up to this day, the reset button of the Nintendo N64 still needs a bit of extra persuasion. Not to mention that some weeks ago, when I disassembled book shelves to replace them with new ones, I found various remnants of the sherry fiasco on those hard-to-reach places.

Sherry is a key ingredient in this dish, though I – ahem – stick to the medium-dry variety nowadays. You can leave the mushrooms out if you want to, even the green pepper corns if you must. And binding the sauce with cream cheese is such a clever trick: it brings a certain discreet acidity and as it is thick and often contains a little amount of starch, that saves you from stirring up a slurry. In my hands, corn starch always makes a mess. Luckily, no comparison with sherry.

ZÜRCHER GESCHNETZELTES
for 4

1 package cream cheese (200 g / 7 oz)
1/4 cup / 60 ml medium-dry sherry
500 g / 1 pound chicken, turkey or pork, cut into strips
2-3 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 jar / tin of mushrooms – or 250 g / 1/2 pound fresh mushrooms, sliced
1 onion, diced
2-3 tablespoons paprika powder
1-2 teaspoons green or red pepper corns in brine
salt
nutmeg


Put the cream cheese into a bowl and stir it with the sherry so that there are no lumps left and it has the consistency of a good mayonnaise.


Drain the mushrooms if you’re using a glass or can. And peel and slice them if you’re using fresh ones.


Dice the onion. And cut the meat into finger-thick strips.


Heat up a non-stick pan on high, then add the oil and just before it starts to smoke, add the meat and let it brown on all sides. Be patient, the meat will come loose as soon as it is brown enough. When the meat is done, get it out of the pan and onto a plate.

You may be wondering why I always heat up pans and pots empty. I don’t know how and why this works, but if you’re using non-stick pots, this is the way to have a quasi non-sticking surface: heat up empty and once in while, drop in half a teaspoon of water. If it just boils, the pot is still too cold. If if looks like a bubble and hovers of the surface, then you have the perfect temperature – pour in the oil, let it heat up and add the things you want to cook. And if the water splits up into dozens of hovering little balls, the pan is too hot. Remove from the heat and let it cool down for a minute.


In go the mushrooms and onions – let them also get a bit of color.


Now, the meat goes back in, then add the paprika powder and let the paprika get a tiny bit of color until you can smell the paprika. Be careful not to burn it though, or the whole dish will taste terrible.


Add enough water to just cover everything in the pan, season with salt, peppercorns, nutmeg and let it simmer for 15-20 minutes.


Reduce the heat and stir in the cream cheese.Then let it cook for another minute or so. It should thicken up nicely.


Give it another taste and season it. And then you’re ready!


Serve with your favorite carbs – there’s a never-ending discussion between my husband and me: pasta or potatoes? My very nice mother-in-law settles it by cooking the favorite side for each of us.

Pork tenderloin with onions and red wine. Heaven.


A couple of years ago, there was a cooking show on TV, called “Schmeckt nicht, gibt’s nicht” – which translates to something like “no yummy, no way”. Host was a guy named Tim Mälzer and I liked the 20-minute show because he actually managed to have his meals ready in 20 minutes, mostly without saying the dreaded sentence “and here we have it prepared in advance”… It gave you a kind of down-to-earth feel when a TV cook actually starts to peel an onion in front of the camera, instead of being surrounded by an endless number of thick-rimmed glass bowls, one for each cut and measured ingredient. What a waste!

Sadly, because the show was canceled some time ago, all the recipes were taken off the TV channel’s website – not even the wayback-machine could bring them back. I was really happy when I found a printout of this recipe when I browsed through my binder! I hope I remember to print out more recipes from the Internet, they vanish so quietly…

PORK TENDERLOIN WITH ONIONS AND RED WINE
Adapted from Tim Mälzer

300 g / 10 oz / 1/2 pound red or white onions
3 garlic gloves
4 tablespoons olive oil
500 g / 1 pound pork tenderloin
salt and pepper
125 ml / 1/2 cup red wine
80 ml / 1/3 cup port
1 tablespoon honey
2 bay leaves
fresh rosemary


Peel the onions and cut them into 1,5 cm / 1/2 inch thick slices. It seems a bit crazy, but no this is not too thick! Be careful with them so that they stay intact.

Peel and mince the garlic and measure the wines. Oh, and preheat your oven to 200°C / 400°F.


Cut the pork tenderloin into 5 cm / 2 inch thick slices and flatten them a bit. Gently.

Heat up your largest and ovenproof skillet – or even a roasting pan if you’re doubling the recipe – on high, then add the oil and then quickly sear the meat on both sides. And don’t worry if the meat is not done, we’ll get to that later…


Get the meat out of the pan and let the onion slices get some color on both sides. Let the garlic get the tiniest bit of color.


Then add the honey and let it bubble up and caramelize for half a minute or so. Sounds strange, but honey and garlic together smell divine!


Now deglaze with port and red wine, put the tenderloin slices back into the pan (wiggle them in so that they touch the bottom of the pan) and add the spices – salt, pepper, bay leaves and rosemary. Cover with some foil or parchment paper and put it in the oven for 15 minutes.


Serve with your favorite kind of carbs, mine favorite being oven-roasted potatoes.

Roast Chicken. Leaping frogs and butterflies.

ROAST CHICKEN
(adapted from Alton Brown, on youtube: part 1 and part 2)

1 chicken (mine was around 2 kg)
1 1/2 teaspoons black peppercorns
4 garlic cloves, minced
1/2 teaspoon coarse sea salt
1 lemon, just the zest
2-3 tablespoons olive oil
fresh parsley, chopped
6 carrots
1 leek
1/2 celeriac
2 cups red wine (white wine also works!)
lemon juice
salt


This is a chicken I bought at my supermarket. And I realized that the whole chicken is much cheaper than buying just parts of it. Another big advantage: my husband and I never argue, because he prefers the breast meat and I the legs.

You can roast the chicken whole, but I for my part can never remember if you should put up first the breast or the back side. And on the bottom side, the skin will always be soggy instead of crunchy. Apart from the trouble cutting up a whole, piping hot chicken. In my case, that ends often in disaster – much to the joy of Henry and Nala. 

Before you start anything at all, preheat your oven/broiler to the highest setting.


When I saw Alton Brown’s Good Eats episode on spatchcocking/butterflying a chicken, I thought “genius”: all the skin is facing up and I don’t have to go through all my chicken recipes to find out if the breast or back side should go up first. And a bit later, I discovered the “leaping frog” method of cutting up a chicken on the internet.. I find it even better: you just cut it up, not cutting things away (like the backbone). Head over to Gourmet for detailed pictures, but no worries, this is really easy.

  • Place the chicken on the cutting board with the legs facing you and upwards. 
  • Cut the skin in the crease between the drumsticks and the body. Try not to cut the meat, just the skin and connective tissue – let gravity help you! 
  • Flatten the drumsticks, so that they lie flat on your cutting board. OK if you hear the joint pop, but don’t worry if you don’t.
  • Take your sharpest knife or kitchen shears and cut the ribcage in half, parallel to the backbone. No need to be too exact.
  • Flip the bird open like a book, lay it on the board with the skin side up and press down on the breast and backbone with the heel of your hand. Done!

My cutting boards are all way too small, I know.


Next stop: the spice mix. Put whole pepper corns in your mortar and crunch them up a bit. Add the peeled and chopped garlic and coarse salt and make a paste.

If you don’t happen to have pestle and mortar at home, crush the pepper corns on a cutting board with a meat hammer or something else that’s heavy and has a flat bottom. Search your house and be creative: marble slabs, corn cans, mason jars work just fine. Or just fill your pepper mill with 1 1/2 teaspoons pepper and grind it all on the coarsest setting. Puree or press the garlic and mix with the pepper in a bowl.


Grab a lemon (and read the label before buying it – be sure that it’s not been chemically treated so that you can eat the peel). Run it over the zester to get just the yellow part of the peel, not the white stuff – it’s bitter.

No zester at home? Any other fine grater will do. Or a vegetable peeler and then chopping the strips up very finely. But let me tell you – buy a microplane zester. It works wonderfully on citrus peel and parmesan and it is incredibly sharp. Don’t ask how many fingernails I ruined.


Mix the lemon peel with the garlic/pepper paste and thin it with olive oil. Chop a small handful of parsley and mix it with the rest.


Mr. Brown says to use a teaspoon, but I made a little piping bag. Just fill the paste into the corner of a regular freezer bag, twist it closed and – in the last moment – cut away the tip of the corner.


Wiggle your index finger between the meat and the chicken skin to loosen it. Be gentle and try not to tear the skin. You don’t need to get it all loose, just the breasts and the drumsticks are fine. Pipe in around 1 teaspoon of the spice mix and massage the skin so that you spread the spices under the skin. Don’t worry if you have some of the paste left.

Why under the skin? Basically, skin is there to keep the good things in and the bad things out. But I guess you want the meat to get a taste of the spices and that would not happen if you put the spices on the outside of the skin. And of course in the hot oven, all those delicate spices would burn and leave you with a taste of charcoal.


Cut the vegetables into finger-long pieces and cover the bottom of an ovenproof pan or roasting pan. I used my favorite, a cast iron Le Creuset pan. But work with anything you have – even a disposable aluminum pan works fine.

Use whatever vegetables you happen to have, even if they’re not at their best anymore and as long as they don’t tend to get mushy when cooked. Potatoes and whole onions would also work fine. In Germany, you often find “soup vegetables”, that is celeriac, carrots, leeks and parsley bound together. The perfect combination for this.


Lay the chicken on top of the vegetables and massage some olive oil onto the skin. You want a crispy skin, right? Put it into the oven for 20-30 minutes – you want a crispy brown skin and an internal temperature of both breast and drumstick of 165°F / 74°C.


While you’re at it, wash some small potatoes, brush them with olive oil and sprinkle with coarse salt. Pop them into the oven on a roast underneath the chicken. They should be ready just the same time as the chicken.


The meat was done, but for my taste, the skin could have been darker. Seems my oven does not get really hot anymore. Anyway, when the chicken is done, get it out of the oven and let it rest on a plate, cover with foil or another plate.


Crank up the heat of your largest stovetop and pour in the wine, let it cook and reduce a bit. While it cooks, scrape the bottom and sides of the pan to dissolve all that brown, crunchy stuff. This is what makes the difference between a good sauce and a really, really good sauce. Stir the vegetables so that the brown parts are submerged in the sauce. After 10 minutes, you can fish out all the vegetables if you don’t like them – in fact, I liked the wine-soaked carrots very much.

Give it a taste and season with lemon juice, salt and the leftover pepper-lemon-paste. Tastes good? OK, you’re done!


Now all you need to do is carve the chicken breasts, cut away the drumsticks and serve with potatoes and the sauce. Steal the skin from your husband’s plate and enjoy with a glass of wine.

Dates and bacon. Only better with parmesan.


In foodie questionnaires, one question that almost always pops up is: “sweet or savory?” Seems that I belong to the rather small group that answers: “both! at the same time!” I have always been a fan of sweet/salty combinations, like cheese and membrillo, toast Hawaii or arroz a la cubana (fried rice, eggs and bananas). As Flo finds those combinations ranging between barley edible to downright revolting, I sometimes make myself something he really doesn’t like – when he’s not there. For example, dates rolled in bacon, then fried until crispy. This is a classic combination, just like prunes rolled in bacon. Then I read somewhere about filling them with Parmesan. And let me tell you, this takes this party classic to a whole new level.

Side note for you fructose malabsorption guys: dates contain sorbitol, which deactivates the very few fructose transporters you have. For me, 4 dates are just the limit.


DATES AND BACON
for 1 (multiply as needed)

4 large dates
2 thick slices of bacon, halved
2 thick slices of Parmesan cheese
4 toothpicks


Slice the dates open on lengthwise with a knife and get out the pit.


Cut the Parmesan into sticks and replace the pit with cheese. Squeeze the date shut.


Wrap the bacon around the filled date and secure it with a toothpick.


Heat up a little pan and gently fry the dates until the bacon is brown and crispy.
Get back to the couch and watch your favorite TV show while nibbling away…

Fondue sauces. A rainbow of colors and tastes.


Fondue is our standard meal for special occasions. We have it almost every Christmas and New Year’s and some other times of the year, too. I like it because it’s festive, you get to eat beef tenderloin and for the fact that you can prepare everything in advance. So on the great day, you only have to heat the broth, set the table and everyone is cooking for himself and having fun. Not to mention the romance, coziness and warmth an open fire brings into your house.

And in fact, we prefer the “fondue chinoise” variant, that means cooking thin slices of meat in a broth. As opposed to “fondue bourginonne”, which means cooking the meat in hot oil. That is, of course, tasty like everything that has been fried. But your house will also smell for days as it has been fried. And I’m really not the one to count calories, but food cooked in oil and served with mayo-based sauces simply is too fatty for my taste.


For FONDUE, you’ll need beef tenderloin – and I like to cut it into 5mm-thick slices – a good wine, crispy french bread and lots of different sauces. And of course a rechaud, that means some kind of tripod with an alcohol burner, so you will have a cooking station in the middle of your table. Heat your favorite kind of broth on your stovetop and when it starts simmering, set it on the burner. Everyone around the table picks up one of those large forks and places it with a piece of meat into the broth for as long as he wants. Then you dip it into your favorite sauce an eat it. I like it when every bite you take tastes different.

Here’s a collection of my favorite sauces:

SAUCE CUMBERLAND

1 orange, juice and zest
3/4 cup port
3/4 cup redcurrant jelly
pepper
1 tablespoon mustard powder


For this sauce, you’ll need an untreated or organic orange, as it is about the peel. Peel the orange with a vegetable peeler and try not to get too much of the white stuff. It’s bitter.
Then cut the orange peel into thin strips.


You also want the juice of the orange, it should be around a 3/4 cup. Mix the juice with the peel and let it cook together for a couple of minutes until the peels have softened a bit.


Mix the orange juice with the port. This alone smells incredibly.


Put the jelly into a pot and heat it up to make it more liquid. And yes you can use the pot you used to cook the orange juice without cleaning as it’s going to end up mixed together anyway. Mix the jelly with the orange-port mixture and then season with a healthy dose of pepper and mustard powder. Let it cool completely before serving.

ORANGE SAUCE

1 orange, juice and zest
3/4 cup port
1 cup mayonnaise (best homemade)


Just as with the Cumberland sauce, peel and juice an orange, then cook it for some minutes. Mix with the port and let the juice simmer for several minutes more until it has reduces significantly and looks like syrup. Let that syrup cool and mix it with the mayo.

SALSA GOLF / RUSSIAN DRESSING / COCKTAIL SAUCE

1 cup mayonnaise (best homemade)
1 cup ketchup
1 tablespoon Cognac


This is one of my all-time-favorites. Just the same amount of mayo and ketchup and a bit of Cognac.


Mix it together and you have a sauce that goes with almost everything.

BANANA CURRY DIP

1 large and ripe banana
1/4 cup yogurt
1/2 cup mayonnaise (best homemade)
1 tablespoon honey
1 teaspoon curry powder
salt and pepper


Peel the banana and mash it. You can either leave some chunks or use a stick blender to make a smooth paste.


Mix the banana puree with yoghurt and mayo, and then season with honey and curry powder.


Give it a taste and see if it needs some salt and pepper. I like a lot of pepper.

AIOLI

1 cup mayonnaise (best homemade)
crushed garlic (amount depends on how much you like garlic, I use 1/2 a bulb)
freshly ground pepper


Peel the garlic and crush it. I like to use my garlic press but you can also use pestle and mortar. Mix with the mayo and season with a good bit of salt an pepper.


This is divine. Nothing better than Aioli on meat or just on some bread. Or grilled vegetables.


Here you see all the sauces mentioned above. To help you identify them, from top to bottom:
aioli
banana dip
salsa golf
orange sauce and
Cumberland.

And of course, I eat the tenderloin cooked medium rare, not raw.

Mushroom Sauce. Perfect with Semmelknödel.


Last week on the Semmelknödel post, I promised you a recipe for mushroom sauce. This is a classic combination in Bavaria and in most cases, the only vegetarian option in traditional restaurants. I’m really not a vegetarian, but I sometimes wonder about the “meatless” menus in restaurants – accompanied by gravy, lard or even bacon. Personally, I think humans are omnivores (just ask a biologist about our teeth sets), but I deeply respect the choices people make. You never know what’s really behind it. For example, when I was a teenager, there was a year when just the sight and smell of meat made me feel sick. And it even happens nowadays that I prefer a meatless meal. Just like on other days, I crave a steak. Medium rare.

Note for you fructose malabsorption guys out there: those white mushrooms contain mannite/mannitol and if you can’t handle sorbitol you can’t handle that one either. Apparently, I can’t. Lesson learned.

MUSHROOM SAUCE
for 2

250 g / 1/2 pound / 2 cups sliced mushrooms (I used champignons de Paris)
1 small onion
2 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons flour
3/4 l / 3 cups liquid (half milk, half your favorite broth)
salt and pepper
lemon juice


Wash the mushrooms and peel them. At least, I like to peel them. And yes, you can wash mushrooms with water, they will not soak up all the water. That’s an old myth.


Slice the mushrooms and measure generous 2 cups – and freeze the rest. Mushrooms freeze wonderfully. I like to grab a handful of frozen mushrooms for pasta sauces or risotto.


And you’ll need and onion, finely chopped.


Heat up a pan on high, then let the butter melt and after that, throw in the mushrooms. If possible, just in one layer. They will draw quite a bit of water – whether you washed them or not. Just keep on cooking until the water evaporates.


That looks about right – the water is gone and the mushrooms are staring to get brown edges. Add the onions and cook them until they are golden and soft.


Now, we’re basically making a Béchamel sauce. Just dump in the flour, stir and let it cook in the butter.


This is the point when you can start to add the liquid: there are no lumps of flour left and the butter-flour mixture has a very pale golden color. Reduce the heat to medium-low and add about half a cup of milk and stir quickly – this will thicken up in a couple of seconds. Keep adding small amounts of liquid and stirring until you have a nice thick sauce.

As for the kind of liquid to use: I like half milk, half beef broth. But I would use vegetable broth when I cook for vegetarians. And you could also cook the mushroom skins in water to get a mushroom broth. And if you like an especially creamy sauce, use all milk and add some powdered broth. For a lactose/dairy free version, just leave out the milk entirely. The sauce will not be as creamy and velvety, but delicious nevertheless.


This looks great, now give it a taste and add salt, pepper – and most importantly – lemon juice. No, the milk will not curdle, but this kind of sauce NEEDS some kind of acid or it will taste creamy and flat.

By the way, it’s also a myth that reheated mushroom sauce is poisonous. At least, if you follow some simple rules: cool it down quickly (eg by putting the pot into an ice water bath) and keep it covered in the fridge overnight. Eat it the next day or throw it away. 

Serve with Semmelknödel, egg noodles and/or your favorite kind of Schnitzel.