It looks like I’ve neglected this blog lately. Nothing is less true though. I looked at it at least daily, only to find out that I still couldn’t upload anything. Fortunately last night, as I got cranky about it and was researching other webhosts, Laurens found a way to fix it. [...]]]>

It looks like I’ve neglected this blog lately. Nothing is less true though. I looked at it at least daily, only to find out that I still couldn’t upload anything. Fortunately last night, as I got cranky about it and was researching other webhosts, Laurens found a way to fix it. Gotta love having your own IT-helpdesk at home!

While I couldn’t post I did cook, and wen’t out to dinner, and did things in the garden. This summer has been exceptionally crappy though, so my usual summer meals have not been all that present, unfortunately.

On one particularly crappy-weahtered late afternoon I decided I wanted soup. And not a nice, cold, summery soup either. I wanted full bodied, warm wintery soup, or at least fall soup if such a thing exists. Not having had onion soup for quite a while I decided to go for that.

Onion soup is one of those marvelous things in life which you can make as easy and as complicated as you want. You can spend hours upon hours caramellizing onions before adding broth or you could throw raw onions in said broth and if you heat it long enough, they’ll soften after all.

My prefferred method is something in between. I don’t fully caramellize the onions, but I do cook them for quite a while until they’re nice and soft and glassy before I add broth. Seasoning whise I can go many ways as well, but this particular time I’d just received that beautiful bag of herbes de provence so that was an obious choice. Depending on my mood I like to add some red or white wine, or some balsamic vinegar. This was a vinegarry day.

The soup cooked for quite a little while and smelled up the entire house. Once dinner time came around I cut up some baguette and grated some cheese and added both atop the soup in my le creuset ramekins. Under the broiler they went, for a couple of minutes, and voila, perfect soup for a cold, dreary winter summer evening.

I participate in a recipe exchange once in a while. It’s good. I get to try completely new recipes. Things I’d never thought of making before. The theme for the exchange this time was Mexican food. I love Mexican food. Loved it since I first ate at Rose’s [...]]]> Recipe exchange

I participate in a recipe exchange once in a while. It’s good. I get to try completely new recipes. Things I’d never thought of making before. The theme for the exchange this time was Mexican food. I love Mexican food. Loved it since I first ate at Rose’s Cantina and  loved it even more since the first time I had Mexican food in Colorado. Now Rose’s Cantina still exchanged, but they’ve changed their menu and turned terrible, so while in Amsterdam I have to resort to making my own. A new recipe, therefor, is always welcome!

The recipe I received was Sweet Beginning’s Enchilada Lasagne. It’s cheesy goodness with turkey and taco sauce layered with corn tortillas. I was in for quite the challenge. The recipe called for grated cheddar or mexican mix, for corn tortillas, for low-sodium cottage cheese, ground turkey and taco sauce. Now the only cheddar I can get here is real, English cheddar. The actual good non-plastic cheese. Mexican mix doesn’t exist – we’re in the land of real (farm) cheeses, ‘cheese product’ is not allowed to call itself cheese. Taco sauce and chunky salsa are the same things, low sodium cottage cheese is nonexistent (cottage cheese itself can be hard to find). Now I can grind my own turkey and figure out the rest, but the biggest issue were the corn tortillas.

The only tortillas I can get here are crappy flour tortillas and masa harina is another thing not sold here, so making my own corn tortilla’s was proving to be difficult as well. I wasn’t about to give up on trying this delicious sounding casserole. Fortunately I found Hillbilly Housewife’s cornmeal tortilla recipe. With that on hand I was good to go!

I replaced the canned tomatoes in the recipe with fresh ones to counter the fully salt cottage cheese I did find. I mixed a well melting grated Dutch cheese with some mild English cheddar which I grated myself. I ground the turkey, and I used the chunky salsa instead of the taco sauce. And I made the tortillas.

Besides making the tortillas, which took way too much time to fry them all, the recipe was super easy. It was different from anything I’d made or had in quite some time, but different in a very good way. It was extremely tasty and will definitely make it again. I might wait until I get someone to bring me corn tortillas from the US though!

Sometimes simplicity really is the key to a wonderful meal. Sometimes you don’t really have to do anything, to make something delicious. That’s the case with this zucchini recipe. Actually, I shouldn’t be calling it a recipe. Honestly, I don’t feel this is a true recipe. A [...]]]>

Sometimes simplicity really is the key to a wonderful meal. Sometimes you don’t really have to do anything, to make something delicious. That’s the case with this zucchini recipe. Actually, I shouldn’t be calling it a recipe. Honestly, I don’t feel this is a true recipe. A recipe to me is something where you actually need to follow directions, have a number of steps and create something totally different from the ingredients. Or something like that. I probably don’t explain it correctly, but for something to be a recipe, it needs to be more difficult than this dinner.

I know not everyone thinks about this the same way. I honestly saw a ‘recipe’ written out somewhere, the other day, for an almond butter and apple sandwich. It had an ingredient list and steps stated. Take bread, smear almond butter, then put slices of apple on top. Ooh dang, now I’ve committed plagiarism, or not, I’ve shortened it, significantly, and I’m not one known for writing short.

Oh well. Recipes.

The dinner I made, which the zucchini and cheese was part of, was simplicity in it’s purest form. It was embellished by a simple, fairly thin pan grilled boneless pork chop and some potato croquettes which I still had in my freezer.

The zucchini really is the simplest thing in the world. You cut your zucchini in half, so you have 2 somewhat even round pieces. Then split those in half, so you have 4 pieces with 1 flat side each. You then slice those in 2, horizontally, that way you can make a ‘zucchini sandwich’. Put some slices of good cheese (I used a medium aged farm cheese) in between your zucchini sandwiches, sprinkled them with some fresh ground pepper and popped them in the oven until the zucchini was mostly tender and the cheese was melted. Easy peasy. Do we call that a recipe?

So was this a simple dinner? I say yes, most definitely. All in all the prep work took me about 5 minutes, maybe less, and besides that it was just waiting to take the zucchini out of the oven.

It’s not worth typing up an entire recipe though. If someone can’t follow ‘slap cheese between slices of zucchini’, I doubt they’ll be coming to me for a recipe anyway.