With the days getting longer and the water getting warmer, last week we started sailing again. We being 40 kiddo’s and I (and a bunch of other instructors). It totally fun! A couple of years ago I got involved with the youth sailing classes at our yacht club. I always work with the little kids. The 6 and 7 year olds who are in their first or second season of sailing.
Seriously fun!
The whole ‘adding sailing to my week’ however pulls a strain on my daily cooking. Especially when there are days that I have to work in the evenings as well.
Chicken like this, brings the solution. It literally takes 5 minutes to make, after which I lie myself down on the couch and take a mini-nap until the timer rings and we get to eat.
Seriously THAT easy!
All you need is those special plastic oven bags. And well, drumsticks. And maybe the rest of the ingredients too. Using all the ingredients tends to make life slightly easier.
Go! Buy yourself those weird oven bags!
Make this dish! You will thank yourself… and me!
Rosemary-lemon drumsticks (recipe makes 8 drumsticks)
- 8 drumsticks (skin on or off, doesn’t matter)
- 1 lemon
- some rosemary
- some thyme (optional)
- pepper
- salt
- oven bag (Reynolds makes them, probably other brands too!)
Place the drumsticks in the bag. Slice the lemon in thinnish slices, add those to the bag. Pour some dried rosemary into the bag. Some thyme too if you like that. Add pepper and salt to taste (not too much). Close the oven bag. Wiggle it around a bit to get the seasoning divided. Place bag on top of a cookie sheet, or casserole dish or anything but directly on the oven rack. Place in the oven (about 180-200 degrees celsius, it really doesn’t matter all that much, check the package if your bags have a maximum temperature) until they’re fully cooked. At least 25 minutes. It doesn’t hurt if they’re in there longer. They won’t dry out! Take bag from oven, let it deflate a bit, open the bag and enjoy!
Now the bag will inflate while the chicken is cooking. Once the bag is out of the oven, it will deflate again. There’ll be a lot of ‘liquid’ on the bottom of the bag. That’s what keeps it nice and moist while cooking. It will contain a lot of fat, which is good, fat in the bag instead of your stomach, while all the flavor will go into your mouth. 
What else do you want?
Me?? All else I want is more, longer naps!!
So I thought my cantuccini were totally screwed up. I was wrong. Yes, they were a little on the thin side, but that’s mainly because they were so wide. If I’d started out with thinner strips of dough, maybe made sure the dough had been a little firmer, they would’ve been perfect.
They tasted really really good dough!
Next time I’ll omit the extra drop of vanilla extract I added (not in the recipe). And I’ll make sure I’ll have enough whole almonds to cover the entire batch, instead of replacing part of them with slivered almond. But all in all, I can’t really complain. First time trying and the taste is awesome.
Yes, I already tasted more than 1.
For those of you who think these are biscotti. They are! No, I’m not confused about the name. Biscotti is basically Italian for biscuits. Biscuits as in cookies. Biscotti, therefor are cookies. And cantuccini are a style of biscotti. Capisce?
Look at them while I was cutting them.
And while I had them placed on the cookie sheet, cut side up.
And after I’d flipped them.
And when they were done.
Yummmm. Will definitely make them again. And will look for more cantuccini recipes. Every Italian region has their own regional recipe. Kind of like pasta sauces. Which means I can keep on trying more recipes. And keep on eating fresh cantuccini. I will not mind this! (And I’m sure neither will L… or my co-workers… or my friends…)
So here goes the recipe:
Cantuccini alle mandorle (Italian crispy almond cookies)
- 250 grams plain white flour
- 200 grams fine sugar (caster preferred)
- 2 eggs
- vanilla
- salt
- 100 grams whole almonds
- 1 tsp instant yeast
- butter and flour to coat the cookie sheet
First off, traditionally you knead this dough by had. I’m lazy and use Anne-Sophie.
Mix flour, sugar, a good pinch of salt and vanilla (I used home made vanilla sugar and replaced about a big spoon of caster sugar with home-made vanilla sugar that’s been standing for 3 days, so hasn’t reached full flavor yet. If you used store bought vanilla sugar, use half a pouch! If you use vanilla extract 1/2 to 3/4 tsp of extract should do the trick.)
After this is mixed well, add 2 eggs. Keep mixing and add the instant yeast. When the yeast is mixed in, add the almonds. By now my dough turned out to be soft and sticky. Next time I will place it in the fridge for a while to stiffen it up. (If you’re kneading by hand, make a little pile of these dry ingredients, make a dimple in the middle and add the eggs in there. Then knead. Then first work in the almonds and finish with the yeast.)
Butter your cookie sheet, sprinkle some flour over it too. Put your cantuccini dough on there in thin rolls, 3 or 4 cm (1 to 1 1/4 inch). Make sure the strips of dough don’t touch. If during baking they sag out and do touch, cut them apart with a knife and try to keep them separate.
Bake the cantuccini in a pre-heated oven (180 degrees celsius) for 30 minutes. Remove from oven and cut into thin (1cm) slices (diagonally). Place them on the cookie sheet cut side down. Bake for another 5 minutes, flip over and bake another 5 minutes.
When you take the finished cantuccini from the oven, they’ll be crispy from the outside, but still slightly soft/chewy on the inside. If you’re patient and don’t eat them all before they’re cool, they’ll transform to the really hard, crispy cookie we all know and love!
And I have no idea what I did wrong here.
I started out using an authentic Italian recipe. Definitely authentic, as it was even written in Italian. I’d already asked L what the 1 word I didn’t recognize meant (lievito, yeast) and so I started baking.
They’re in the oven now.
They look like this. (Bad picture, I know, taken through the oven window with a point-and-shoot…)
I doubt this is going to change into actual cantuccini. They might taste like cantuccini, a bit, but there’s no way they’re going to look right! Right?
I won’t bother adding the recipe here, as they didn’t work out. I will keep trying and as soon as I have a recipe that works, I will post it.
For now all I can say is the dough did taste very good. It was very sticky, so lots of cantuccini dough left for me to eat. There’s an upside to everything, right?
I made soup!
It was very tasty. And simple. Loaded with veggies and mini meatballs and small pieces of meat. I love making soup. It’s so easy and effortless to make. Especially when you have the nice little wire thingie in which you can place your shank, a boy leaf, whole cloves of garlic and such.
Just fill a big pan with water, add the wire thingie with the piece of shank and seasonings, add the little pieces of beef to the pan and a little salt. Leave it to boil, or just simmer, for an hour or 2. Maybe add a bouillon cube. Add a tablespoon (or 2) of tomato paste. Boil a little longer. Add your mini meatballs, add vermicelli, add some thin sliced veggies, remove the wire thingie and serve!
Yumm, a big bowl with a slice of bread – - this actually is a full meal! (or a lunch if you take a small bowl)
I really do love soup!!!
I’m so, so, so sorry I haven’t found a way to make smelly-pictures yet. I would really love to let you smell the food I made today!
Indonesia once was a Dutch colony. Now the whole colony thing obviously was (and is) frowned upon. The basic rule should be ‘don’t invade countries and take over their land and resources as your own’. Despite the fact that it’s all kinds of politically wrong, it did bring the Dutch a lot of good. (Yes, money and all, but I’m not talking about that.) It brought us fantastic spices and Indonesian cuisine. And Indonesian cuisine is awesome! And not even that hard to make. (And it smells GREAT!!!)
Sure there are tons and tons of Indonesian recipes that I haven’t tried making. And to be brutally honest, I don’t cook much Indonesian food. But once in a while, cooking Indonesian specialties is very awesome!
Now the Dutch actually do cook things with Indonesian influence pretty regularly. They forget the heritage though. Saté (satay) is something that’s eaten here very often. Not just the skewers of meat which people put on the grill (or in the oven), but also just the satay sauce that’s served with anything and everything. Satay sauce almost sounds Dutch to many Dutchies. It – however – originates from Indonesia.
When grabbing a bag of lettuce from the produce refrigerators at the store, I saw gorgeous looking bean sprouts placed next to the lettuce. A shelf lower there were bags of green beans. It suddenly dawned on me that I could make Indonesian-styled food. There’s an Indonesian dish, gado-gado, which can vary greatly, but it always has bean sprouts, green beans and satay sauce. I figured if I’d be making satay sauce, I should make satay (meat) as well. After that just add rice and ‘kroepoek’ and you’ve got yourself a meal!
The gado-gado I made was the simplest version there is. The satay sauce was easy-peasy too (I didn’t even bother thinning it into a real sauce, taste is still wonderful!), most of the work was actually marinating the pork. Not that marinating is hard. It’s not. It just takes the most time of all the dishes (and a little gathering of the right spices, possibly…)
Pork satay
- Pork (leg steaks of chops or so, preferably a darker cut)
- Sambal (chili based condiment, any style)
- onion
- garlic
- ketoembar (ground coriander seed)
- djahe (groeund dried ginger)
- djinten (ground cloves)
- vegetable oil
- soy sauce
- peanut butter (organic, basic stuff, no additives/sugar!)
- water and/or milk
- wooden skewers (prepared, optional)
If you like your satay on skewers, you need to start by preparing your wooden skewers. Place as many as you need in a bowl of water and keep them there for many hours to prevent burning them when grilling.
Start with the marinade. Combine a good amount of soy sauce, some vegetable oil, sambal (to taste, the stuff is HOT), 1 onion (chopped) and 4 or 5 cloves of garlic (chopped). (Make sure you have enough to generously cover all your meat.)
Add a generous amount of djahe, ketoembar and djinten. Mix everything together.
Cut the pork up in smallish pieces (a good size to place on skewers) and add to the marinade. Mix well, so everything is well coated. Place in the fridge and don’t touch it for at least 4 hours.When you’re ready to start grilling, remove the marinating pork from the fridge and take the meat from the bowl, but save the marinade. Place the meat on skewers (optional) and grill until they’re completely done.
While the meat is on the grill, prepare the satay sauce. Start with the marinade, pour that through a food processor or grinder or something like that. Just make sure it’s all smoothed out and you don’t have pieces of onion or garlic anymore.
Pour the processed marinade in a pan and heat it (to a boil). As soon as it’s boiled, turn the heat down. (The only reason it needs to boil is because there was raw pork in there for 4+ hours.)
Add a large amount of peanut butter to the warm processed marinade. (I use a small jar.) Stir vigorously. Taste, taste, taste. Add more soy sauce, sambal, or spices if you think it needs a little extra taste. It’ll be very thick. Add a little water to thin it a bit (this doesn’t alter the taste, but doesn’t make it much thinner either). Heat it through and serve over the grilled meat. (If you want a real thin sauce, add milk, works like a charm, but does make the taste a little milder!)
The same satay sauce can be used over chicken (replace pork with chicken breast) and over the gado-gado (just steam the green beans, stirfry steamed beans and bean sprouts and pour satay sauce over them) or eaten with rice. You could always just make a marinade without placing meat in there and using that as the base of the sauce. In Holland people even eat thin satay sauce with their french fries. It’s good, I promise!
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