Breaded Fish Cakes

We recently had some delicious fish cakes at an Asian restaurant, so I was interested in trying my hand at the art - in the end these were quite different from the ones we had at the restaurant (but still delicious) so I'll probably return with further variations on this theme.

Ingredients
- 500 g (just over 1 lb) potatoes, peeled, cut in chunks
- 400 g (just under 1 lb) pollock fillet
- 2 dL (almost 1 cup) milk
- 1 green chilli, seeds removed, finely chopped
- 16 g (0.5 oz) fresh ginger, finely diced
- 3 scallions, green part only, sliced
- 20 g (0.7 oz) fresh basil, coarsely chopped
- salt
- 1 egg, beaten
- bread crumbs (to cover)
- oil for frying

The potato chunks were boiled tender in lightly salted water. After draining them thoroughly, they were put back in the dry pot and mashed on low heat to give a relatively dry mash. Care was taken not to let them burn (constant stirring/mashing while on the heat).

Simultaneously the fish was put in a frying pan with the milk and 1 dL (almost 1/2 cup) of water, covered, and brought to a boil. The heat was then reduced to allow it to simmer for 5 minutes before removing the pan from the heat. Still covered the fish was let stand 10 minutes in the warm milk to gently finish. Afterwards the fish was lifted out of the milk on to a plate to cool.

The cooled fish was drained, then flaked into the potato mash. The salt, basil, scallions, ginger, and chilli was added, and the the entire mixture was worked together by hand. [1]

The fish cakes were formed and flattened by hand, turned over in egg and bread crumbs and fried till golden brown on both sides in oil on a large pan.

Served with wild rice, cucumber salad and peanut dipping.

[1] I think if I try this again, I would spend an extra egg on the dish to see if the fish cake mass could have a little less tendency to fall apart.

Update: Using more fish relative to potato gives a better result - but you have to use more eggs.

Birra San Martino

When we were on vacation in Ticino this past summer we had the chance to try some local beer. Birra San Martino located in Mendrisio (we bought them in Lugano) makes three different beers of which we tried two.

The most remarkable thing about them was the unusually low level of carbonation. This on the one hand made them seem a little flat, but on the other hand was likely also one of the reasons they went down as fast as they did. For my personal taste, the red one was the more interesting of the two.

Chicken & Sausage (Okra) Gumbo

After being recently schooled on the subject of Gumbo, I decided to revisit the subject - sans the maligned Lima beans. However, I chose to stick with the okra as thickening agent this time around, but I vow to return and try out a roux based version.

Ingredients:
- oil
- salt & pepper
- 4 pieces of chicken - ca. 650 g (1.5 lb)
- 2 medium onions, coarsely chopped
- ca. 250 g fresh okra, finely sliced
- 2 red chillies, seeds removed, chopped
- 1 yellow & 1 orange bell pepper, chopped
- ca. 175 g (1/3 lb) sausage, sliced
- 2 cloves garlic, mashed
- water
- rice

Oil was heated in a large, deep, pan, and the chicken pieces were salted and peppered before being browned on all sides. The chicken pieces were removed from the pan and the onions and okra were added. The pan was covered for 10-15 minutes with occasional stirring (at which point the okra appeared to have exuded a clear, sticky liquid - this is what's needed for thickening the stew). Then the chillies and bell peppers were added together with the sausage, garlic, 0.5 L (2 cups) of water and the chicken pieces. The pot was brought to a boil, covered and allowed to simmer for ca. 40 minutes.

While the gumbo simmered, rice were cooked in lightly salted water. The gumbo was served with no more rice than for the overall texture to be that of a thick stew.

This was much more appreciated in the little home than the previous version.

More Swiss Beer

As the title promises .. more Swiss beer. Or maybe not? Studying the fine print, one notices that both of these beers are made by Heineken Switzerland (OK, I guess that still makes them Swiss) located in Chur. Calanda appears to be a reasonably big brand, I've noticed several places which have it on tap. It's a decent lager, no more no less.
The Swiss Beer Collection looks horrible, and since it's also amongst the cheapest around here (almost 3 times less than Calanda) I had my fears, but it's another surprisingly good purchase. No, it's not an outstanding beer, but it is not half-bad either...

Venison & black chanterelle whiskey cream sauce

Some years ago Mrs. Throat-Erator wanted to give me a special experience and took me out to dinner in Copenhagen at a nice place. It was quite the success, as I had the chance to try venison for the first time in my life. More specifically it was a steak of red deer, and it blew me away. So there was no hesitating when I recently found venison at a local supermarket. It was even a relatively good price... it must be hunting season or something around here. I figured it would probably go well with a black chanterelle whiskey cream sauce...

Ingredients:
- water
- 20 g (ca. 1 oz) dried black chanterelles
- potatoes
- oil
- salt & pepper
- venison
- 1 medium red onion, chopped finely
- 0.5 dL (1/4 cup) whiskey
- 1 dL (2/5 cup) cream
- the leaves of 2 twigs of fresh rosemary

Since I could only find dried black chanterelles the first thing to do was to put these in a bowl and pour ca. 1 L (1 qt) of hot water over them and let them stand for at least 20 minutes. When they were drained, the water was saved for later.

The potatoes were washed and boiled in lightly salted water.

The venison was cut like small steaks, which were seasoned with salt and pepper. In a pan with a little oil they were cooked to the desired degree (medium for us). After removing the venison from the pan the onion was added, and after a few minutes the drained black chanterelles. A few minutes later the whiskey and cream was added, and brought to a boil. After a few minutes 2 dL (4/5 cup) of the black chanterelle water was added followed by the rosemary leaves. After simmering briefly it was served.

The result was fantastic. I still really like venison.

With dinner we had a bottle of pinot noir from the canton of Vaud. I'm pretty sure this is wine made closest to here I've had so far. The colour was surprisingly pale, but it went well with the meat.

South American Beer

Curiously I found a bunch of South American beers in my local store Asian Spices here in Geneva. Not only curious because it goes to show that the store is selling exotic goods in a broader sense than merely what could be considered Asian, but most curious because I never saw any of these beers during the years I lived in Southern California.


Paceña from Cerveceria Boliviana Nacional S.A.) (5.2% ABV) and Cerveza-Aguila from Barranquilla, Colombia (4.7% ABV) are both comparatively pale, decent if not spectacular lagers. Cusqueña from Lima, Peru (4.8% ABV) is a little darker, a quite lovely golden, and a little more suited for my personal taste in beer.

Lapin au Vin

This week rabbit was on sale at the supermarket so we decided to have our hand at cooking it. Having no experience with this particular meat I sought inspiration in Tyler Florence's Eat This Book, although my approach was somewhat cruder.

Ingredients:
- ca. 650 g (1.5 lb) rabbit (4 pieces)
- 1/2 bottle of red wine
- flour
- salt
- pepper
- oil
- 2 cloves garlic
- 1 tsp honey
- Italian herb blend
- 0.5 L (2 cups) chicken broth

Side:
- 6 potatoes
- 1/2 celery root
- 2 beet roots
- 2 small onions

Salad:
- romaine lettuce
- capers
- sun dried tomatoes

The rabbit pieces were wetted in the red wine, then coated with a mixture of flour, salt, and pepper. The rabbit pieces were then browned in batches in oil in a large pot (turning them over with tongs). While browning the rabbit, crushed garlic, honey and Italian herb blend was added to the wine. After browning all the rabbit pieces (and all removed from the pot) the wine was added to the pot, brought to a boil while making sure to stir up any flour left in the pot from the browning of the rabbit. To this was added the chicken broth, and the rabbit pieces were put back. The pot was covered and allowed to simmer for about one and half hours.

While the rabbit was simmered, a mixture of crudely cut potatoes, beet roots, celery root, and onions (drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with salt and pepper) was baked in the oven at 225 C (450 F) - beet and celery roots require longer time than potatoes to become tender.

This left plenty of time for a quick salad: romaine lettuce, capers, and sun dried tomatoes were mixed in a bowl.

The rabbit was very tender; the meat was practically falling off of the bones. The texture and taste was somewhat reminiscent of chicken, although more 'game'. Overall it became a fall/winter style dish which fitted well with the pouring rain outside. With dinner we drank the other half of the bottle of wine.

Røget Rullepølse

Røget Rullepølse ("smoked rolled sausage") is a Danish speciality I sometimes ask people to bring me when I have visitors from the home country. I love it, but I've never even contemplated making it..

Basically pieces of meat (usually pork) are boiled, rolled with herbs and spices, pressed and smoked. Simple, no? Honestly, I don't even know the details. What I know is that good butcher shops usually have this delicacy (but forget about the cheap stuff you find in supermarkets all over Denmark).

Anchovy Pizza

Pizza with tomato sauce, red onion, canned anchovies, capers and mozzarella - no extra salt needed. The irony (considering how close to Italy we are) is that the pizza dough we bought in the store here isn't as good as the ones we used to buy in Trader Joe's...

Coop Beer

As it turns out, the supermarket chain Coop sells a few beers that you won't find anywhere else, so I thought I'd give them a post here.

Interestingly, we see here an example of something I alluded to earlier: While Prix Garantie Coop is cheaper than Tell (0.60 CHF vs. 0.90 CHF per 0.5 L can) the former actually has a lot more taste than the latter. In fact, while Tell was a disappointment, Prix Garantie Coop was better than I expected - nothing fantastic, but certainly decent at the price.


The most interesting of the pack however is the Bio Bier - an organic beer made for Coop by Brauerei K. Locher in Appenzell, Switzerland. The can says it is unfiltered and the beer is slightly hazy (although nothing like a good hefeweizen). And at 1.50 CHF for a 0.5 L can you can't even fault it for being more expensive than other (non-organic) beers of similar quality.

White Corn Tortillas

Not too long ago I made my first home-made flour tortillas, but of course I also had to try to make corn tortillas. Fortunately I found a store that sells corn flour suitable for this purpose.

Ingredients:
- 2.5 dL (1 cup) water
- 2-2.5 dL (ca. 1 cup) white corn flour
- pinch of salt

The water was placed in a bowl together with the salt. The corn flour was added little by little while stirring with a spoon. The recipe on the pack recommended a 2.5:2 ratio of water:flour but I found that it needed a little more flour in order not to be too sticky. In the end the dough was kneaded by hand for 1-2 minutes and shaped into 8 little balls.

The recipe called for a tortilla press, but since I'm against the owning of too many unitaskers I do not have a tortilla press. I do however have two wooden cutting boards and kitchen wrap. The dough balls were placed one at the time between the cutting boards (each protected with a piece of wrap) and flattened by pressing. When the top board was removed the pressed dough would stick to one of the pieces of wrap, and it could be carefully transferred to a hand by lifting and turning the wrap over the hand so the dough lets go of the wrap by the assistance of gravity (trying to lift the dough off of the wrap still lying on the table was very unsuccessful). The dough was flipped onto a hot (maximum setting on my stove), non-greased pan and turned over a couple of times until the tortilla puffed up (indicating the right amount of water had evaporated). The tortillas were stacked (which kept them nicely warm until eating time) while cooking them one at the time.

They were perhaps a little thick, but I think they turned out quite well anyway.
Served with red beans and guacamole.

Update: Now that I've made them several times, I should add here that they do not always puff up, so one should keep an eye on how 'done' they look as well.

Also, as mentioned above they are relatively thick, which I think goes at least part of the way towards explaining why they are somewhat stiffer (tending to break if one tries to roll them too tightly). The stiffness gets a little worse upon storing and re-heating, but other than that storing and re-heating works fine.

Feldschösschen Beer

OK .. now it's get a little complicated. If I've understood it correctly, both Anker and Cardinal are produced by Cardinal Brewery in Fribourg, Switzerland - but Cardinal is owned by Feldschösschen in Rheinfelden, Switzerland (and let's just forget for the moment that Feldschösschen is now owned by Danish Carlsberg Group...).

Feldschösschen and Cardinal are - as far as I can judge so far - the two most widely available Swiss beers. Both are decent lagers, nothing special, but OK. They typically sell for around 1.5 CHF pr. 0.5 L can, but on sale the price comes down around 1 CHF pr. can in which case neither is a bad deal if you're looking for a standard lager. Feldschösschen was the beer previously used to roll flour tortillas.
Anker, however normally sells for exactly 1 CHF pr. 0.5 L can, but IMHO that isn't money invested nearly as well: I found Anker to be too pale, and too weak in the taste (although it holds the same alcohol percentage as the others: 4.8%) so can only be recommended if you like to drink beer without being without your taste buds reminding too much you of this fact.

On the other end we have Feldschösschen's Hopfenperle, which is a bit stronger (5.2%) and arguably a more interesting beer - although perhaps not so much better than ordinary Feldschösschen to justify the price difference (Hopfenperle at 1.40 CHF for a 0.33 L can).

Green Eggplant Stirfry

Near to my new home I've found a lovely little store called Asian Spices - all kinds of exotic goods from all over Asia are crammed into this small store and I quite like perusing their shelves. On a recent visit I noticed these little green eggplants in the fresh food section, and I decided to try them out.

Ingredients:
- oil
- 1 chicken fillet (sliced)
- salt
- 1 clove garlic (mashed)
- 1 scotch bonnet chilli
- 1 onion (boats)
- 1 mild green pepper (diced coarsely)
- 5 green eggplants (quartered)
- fish sauce
- soy sauce

Served with brown rice.

Oil was heated in a wok, and the chicken was stir-fried with salt [1] and finely chopped scotch bonnet chilli [2]. When the chicken was cooked through, the onion and the mild pepper was added and a few minutes later the green eggplants. Finally was added fish sauce and soy sauce before reducing the heat and covering to let it simmer.

The green eggplants look nice, taste a lot like eggplant, but seemed to me to hold their texture better than ordinary (large) eggplants, although this might be a function more of their size than anything else.

[1] Given the amount of soy sauce I used, I should have left out the salt.

[2] Without a hood over the cooker this is downright inadvisable - it's a bit too much like pepper spray while cooking (which correlates nicely with the fact that the end result wasn't as spicy as I expected).

Nutty Spread

Years ago in a store I saw a jar of peanut butter mixed with chocolate hazelnut spread [1] .. a kind of spreadable Snickers bar, if you like to see it that way. Since, I have been forever hooked on the rich, salty, and sweet mixture. I've never really re-encountered said product, but it's too easy to just spread peanut butter and then a layer of chocolate hazelnut spread on top, if you have both.

I try not to indulge in this guilty pleasure/heart-attack-in-the-making too often.

Please enjoy responsibly.

[1] Amongst chocolate hazelnut spreads Nutella is probably the most famous, but by no means the only one.

A Different Avocado (Guacamole Update)

One day while shopping at a small local store I noticed these avocados, which were somewhat bigger than those I normally get (shown next to a standard sized lime in the picture)... of course I had to get some. At first I assumed I needed to put them in a paper bag together with a banana while waiting for the skin to darken and the flesh to soften, but then I noticed that they were already quite soft with the skin green. Apparently it is a variety where the skin doesn't darken upon ripening.


Once I cut one open I noticed that the pit was also quite big, and the flesh was more yellowish than what I'm used to - it still made for a very nice bowl of guacamole..


The only significant adjustment from the previous recipe is the inclusion of fresh, hot chilli.

Cragganmore

This is the first bottle of whiskey I've bought since I'm back in Europe, and it served a couple of purposes: For one thing it's sort of a graduation gift (at least bought for money I was given on that occasion), but I think of it also as the bottle I bought to celebrate that I found a good apartment to live in here.

The label boasts of "the most complex aroma of any malt" and talks of "sweetish notes with a smoky maltiness on the finish". The latter two are true, and it does make for a nicely complicated taste, which I find very pleasant. Don't get me wrong, this is good and I do like it, but on the other hand I do seem to prefer my whiskeys more raw, so I don't think I'll ever be quite as fond of this as I am of stuff like Caol Ila..

Herbs - Update

Some weeks after posting this we had to admit that the balcony herb garden wasn't doing perfectly. True: the basil, mint, oregano, and parsley were standing strong and producing prolifically .. but the chives were a sad sight to behold and the coriander appeared to be using all its energy producing flowers rather than leaves.

We decided to cut the coriander down, move the chives to a different "field" .. and sow more coriander. The chives regained a bit after being replanted but never came came to their former vigour. Not all of the new coriander adapted, but we're back at a reasonably production rate (although they can't keep up with the other 4).

Fish, New Potatoes & Parsley Gravy

New potatoes are a special treat - especially for boiled potatoes are just more delicious this way (the boiling process is usually also shorter). Traditional dishes in Denmark in the early summer include new potatoes with white gravy and either bacon or fillets of fish.

Ingredients:
- new potatoes
- water
- salt
- fillets of white fish
- margarine
- flour
- fresh parsley

The potatoes were boiled in lightly salted water, and when done the water was separated, but not discarded.

The fillets of fish were seasoned with salt and pepper and fried in a pan.

In a small pot, margarine was melted (not browned). Then enough flour was stirred in to make a thick paste. On medium heat with constant stirring the water from the potatoes was added in small portions (waiting for the gravy to thicken after each addition) until there was a suitable amount of gravy - once the correct thickness was obtained, the pot was removed form the heat. Then seasoned with salt and pepper and added fresh finely cut parsley.

Setting up a kitchen

As I've mentioned in a few posts over the past couple of months, the apartment I got was with an empty kitchen (as is the norm around here). Well... I guess I should not say empty: there was a tall cupboard, a sink, and a few dirty shelves above the sink - but apart from that it was empty. With a little planning ahead we made sure to buy a fridge that was ready to be installed and turned on from day 1.

Then the planning started. I've never before had the option of designing my kitchen, so I tried to think about what I would have like to change about the past kitchens I've had (if anything). Apart from such issues, the planning was strongly influenced by the shape of the room: A longish, rather narrow room. Putting both an ordinary dining table (even a small one) AND a stove and a table for working would transform the room into some sort of weird obstacle course. Instead, we decided to put in a bar along one of the long walls: this would go well with a couple of stools (which can handily stand under the bar when not in use) and leave room for manoeuvring while working at the sink, the stove, and the counter top.

This meant putting the fridge near the entrance to the kitchen, but that works quite well - the kitchen is not that long after all - and even seem logical right across from the tall cupboard where we store the rest of our stuff.

The rest was details: we put up a small shelve for spices above the stove and a magnet for knives next to it.

Stirfried Duck

OK, I don't actually have a wok here, but I have a large non-stick pan which is sort of wok-shaped and I figured this would be a nice way to make duck and cabbage, so I thought I try to use it for this kind of a meal. The use of cow's milk is perhaps not super authentic to the Asian kitchen, but hey..

Ingredients:
- duck fillet (ca. 300 g, 2/3 lb)
- 1 medium large red onion
- 2 cloves garlic
- 1 mild, large green pepper
- 1 scotch bonnet [1]
- 1/2 head savoy cabbage (ca. 250 g, 1/2 lb)
- olive oil
- salt
- milk

The fillet of duck was cut in thin slices and fried in the wok/pan in oil, with salt, mashed garlic, and finely cut chilli. When the meat was fully cooked the onion (in boats) and the large pepper (coarsely diced) were added and stir-fried. After a few minutes long strips of cabbage and some milk was added before covering and turning down the heat. When the cabbage was steamed to a nice texture, the whole thing was served with brown rice.

[1] These are sold as piment cloche here and as far as I can figure out they are what is also known as scotch bonnet i.e. a variety of the habanero chilli. They are quite potent and as far as my taste goes 1 of them is quite sufficient for 1 meal, which makes it all the more interesting that the store sells them in packs of 25 or so.