First cookbook entry!!

Whoohoo!!! I made it!! It’s now official. One of my recipes will be featured in the Foodista Cookbook! I just received the email confirming that I was one of the 100 lucky winners out of about 1500 entries. Now how cool is that? I just think it is fabulous..

The winning recipe is one of my favorites and is for chanterelles mushrooms. It couldn’t have come at a better time as it is almost time to have them again.

Here is (one of) the winning photo and you can pre-order the book here! (set to be released on October 19th) Recipe you can find under Chanterelles mushroom pie

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Making pasta!!

Pasta alla Charlotte and Simone

I am a little bit shocked to find out that it has been more then three weeks since I last wrote a post!! I must have been really busy to neglect my pour little blog so much. It’s not that I don’t want to write, it’s just that I hardly have time to cook, let alone blog about it. It’s sad but true…

And yes, visiting everyone’s blogs and commenting is even worse at the moment. It will get better at some point though. I can’t possibly keep this working schedule up or I will soon run into health problems… ( already have a slightly high blood pressure, so no need to make this any worse, no is there??)

And in the beginning there was....

Charlotte and I had been talking about making our own pasta for… well, almost for as long as we know each other, which is now a year. We met on our trip to Indonesia which is already a shocking year ago. Can’t believe how quickly the time is flying by! It wasn’t the first time that I attempted to make pasta either. My very first time was years ago during a cooking course for pasta at Oldenhof Cooking school and I hated it. Such a laborious process and the fact that we had 20 people or so in the class and only 4 or 5 pasta machines did not really help my perception of making pasta.

The second time was while we were at the kookstudio Amsterdam doing the last day where we had to prepare our own meals and funny enough when I asked Rob if he had pasta he gave me a bag of flour and eggs and I could go and make my own pasta. It was then that I realized that making your own pasta wasn’t really as hard as I had previously been let to believe, so it was about time that I gave it a serious other try. I can’t even remember if Charlotte began about the pasta or if I was the one who brought it up but either way, Charlotte was the one who owned the machine and had only used it once before herself.

We decided to have our pasta adventure on the friday and Tom was invited to taste the fruits of our labour at the end of the day… So you realize that we could not only make pasta but we had to make a starter as well. We already started out by chatting far too long so we suddenly realized it was late and we still had to start by grocery shopping… Ooops…:)

Initially the plan was to make tomatoes filled with cucumbermousse. However… the cucumbermousse turned out more like cucumbersoup, so we decided to switch the menu around and make – no surprise – an amuse with cucumbersoup (which quite frankly was not the taste we wanted, but ok…) and fill the tomatoes with a mixture that we thought of ourselves. The tomatoes were actually quite tasty as we filled them with mascarpone, little bits of sausages, chives and mmm, can’t remember, I think we put in red pesto or whatever else was in Charlotte’s fridge… Talk about improvising!:)

The making of the pasta was actually quite simple. I mean it doesn’t really need much ingredients and it only takes some time to make the dough and ofcourse flatten it in the machine and then making it into tagliatelle, but all in all I thought it definitely was worth the trouble. The biggest amount of work was cleaning the machine afterwards!

Drying on a rack... How clever!

The pasta sauce was based on a recipe from Jamie, which was then completely changed as we had to use other ingredients. We made it with garlic, bacon, carrots (very thinly sliced into long layers), some passata and ofcourse, parmesan. So rather simple but very tasty! Ofcourse key to making fresh pasta is to make sure that the sauce is ready before you cook the pasta as that literally takes a few minutes to get al dente. I’m not sure how long it was exactly but really very short. The weather on that day was so warm that we had dinner outside in Charlotte’s lovely garden…. All in all absolutely something to repeat soon!

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Cooking and the group process

Outdoor kitchen in Ahun

I’m sure we all have similar experiences where you meet with a group of strangers and in the beginning you’re thinking; who are these people and they really do not seem to be nice… Then after a couple of days, you realize that they are not as bad as you thought they were and then finally you realize they are a wonderful group of people… I think the best example of that was when we went to Thailand 6 years ago; the first night we met with the entire group of 16 people and we went to bed that night thinking we would be having a rather horrible vacation as it was such a terrible group of people only to end up with the best vacation ever and the most fun group of people we had been with in a long while.

In fact; we are still seeing some of those people today…! So what is that?? Why is that? Is it because we tend to stick to the people we know rather then meet new faces? But then; I love meeting new people, so that just doesn’t seem right. But still it sort of happened in a small way the cooking week as well. In the beginning it was a little akward, but very quickly we ended up having a great time with a fun group of people.

Maybe it is also the activity that bonds; cooking together is almost guaranteed a quick way to get to know people. Same as travelling really. I’ve been in situations where a group of strangers felt like people we had known for a long time, after something as little as one day. Ofcourse this all only works if you want it to work. There will always be those people that should not be travelling in a group. For the simple reason that they are anti social and don’t like to spend time with other people (it always baffles me why those people would chose to go on a grouptrip anyway? What are they thinking??)

Free style Gazpacho

While our cooking group last week was made up of quite a variety of people, I do think we all got along quite well and it was sort of sad to have to say goodby after such a relatively short time.  But hey we can always go back and cook some more next year!! All in all a fantastic week. So if you want to go and cook in France or be creative in France check out the website Kookstudio Amsterdam.

And I just had to finish with one last photo of Frits… (I wrote his name wrong the first time around… it’s not Fritz.. but Frits…!)

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Markets and cooking

Yesterday we visited the market in Bourganeuf, which – thankfully – had a little more produce then the previous two markets. We had quite a large group so making decisions is always a little bit harder when there are 8 people with opinions… lol… But Jan-Willem was to be the chef of the day, so he had the final say in what we were gonna buy. The idea was to check what produce was available and with a reasonable price, buy that produce and in the afternoon come up with a menu.

Busy cutting

We have a large white board where the ideas are written down and once we all agree that is what we are going to make; we create a mise en place list and tasks are being divided among whoever wants to help in the kitchen that particular day. Not everyone is cooking every day; there are other activities being offered, so there are also people who prefer to go painting some days and work in the kitchen another day. So that means that the kitchencrew varies. Which is fine but it can be a little messy and unorganized as not everyone has cooking experience, but it makes it fun at the same time.
We ended up with a menu that went something like this:
Antipasti the french way (we had rillette, baked terrine of duck, tomatoes with mozarella and basil and grilled veggies)
Salmon tartar with lemon mayonaise and a sort of pesto (I ended up making it with salad (initially the idea was to make rocketpesto, but we forgot to buy rocket)
With a piece of Conquer eel
Roasted chicken with home made french fries, fresh green peas steamed with sjallots and saladhearts
Clafoutis with strawberries and mango

The chicken was from a local farm so a really good one and ofcourse; who does not like good fries…:)
The group of people that had to be fed keeps growing as a few family members also arrived, so in total we had 16 people at the table.

I was not too impressed with the fish; really too much bones and not enough flesh. So as good as the shark was the day before, as bad as the eel was… O well, it can’t all be perfect right?

Steamed green peas with sjalots and saladhearts

Tonight there is going to be an additional 6 people that come for a table d’hote (basically it’s paying customers) which makes it kind of scary, but also fun to be cooking for “real” customers…. We’ll see how that turns out!! I’ll keep you posted!

Checking to see if the fish is fresh

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Cuisine de marche

Fresh shark (yes, that is me and Mathijs)

I apologize for all the french people out here for not spelling the above  title correctly but it kind of sums up what we are doing here perfectly. I was planning on posting something here yesterday but…. unfortunately the internet connection was lost. The wifi was connected only the day before yesterday and we are sort of in the middle of nowhere (biggest places Gueret is 20 km from here and Limoges is I think about 80 km so not exactly close) so any regular connection is not existing. Rob had a special antenna placed so there is at least a better internet connection then via a telephone line, but it’s still a bit shaky..:)But if you can read this; that means we had a connection plus it has its charms to be out in the country right?

Yesterday we had planned to go to the market in one of the little places around here but one of the markets was not there and the other was so small that we only bought some goatcheese and nothing else. So we ended up going to the Carrefour again.

We bought loads of fresh produce and then once back we had to come up with a menu to make.

Smoked shark with rocket and lemon mayonaise

The menu for yesterday was as follows:

Soup of roasted peppers with creme fraiche and basil

Smoked shark with rocket and lemon mayonaise

Beefstew with red cabbage, pear and mashed potatoes

Pannacotta with mango

Now I don’t know about you guys but I had never had shark before (called saumonette in french and apparently it is sold as sea-eel in some countries)

and I totally totally loved it.

It was first rubbed in seasalt and left to rest for about 30 minutes, cut into portions and patted dry with kitchen towel. Then it was put into the big green egg with Jack Daniels wood for smoking…

Absolutely delicious; the lemon mayonaise it simple. Fresh mayonaise, with some lemon zest and about the juice of half a lemon and you’re good to go. The french mayonaise is quite good, so you can use that as a base or simply make fresh mayonaise from scratch.

The beefstew was maybe my favorite…. We used a large piece of beef (I think it was 2 kilo in total but then we are with 12 people) and first removed the tendons where necessary. The beef (at roomtemperature) was then marinated for about 30 minutes at least in red wine. Briefly sauteed in various portions (if you put all the beef in a pan at the same time, you end up cooking it, instead of frying it. That is not what you want!) and then we put it in the oven with all the marinate. The beef was seasoned with salt and pepper during the sautee part. We added some whole cloves of garlic (including the skin), onion and a little later in the process some mushrooms and crispy bacon bits. In total it simmered in the oven for about 2 hours (in a crockpot) but just check when the beef is done, as you do not want to overcook it.
I seriously think it was the best stew I have ever had and combined with the red cabbage and mashed potatoes it was a delicious meal.

The pannacotta was just big enough. The previous day we had made two cakes (one lemon and one chocolate ) and while delicious it was a bit tooo much after a rather heavy meal! So the pannacotta was a better portion and delicious as well. As a base for the pannacotta I used this recipe and then just substitued the cranberries for the mango. The sugar got reduced to 90 gr (for 3 portions of the recipe) and I mashed some of the leftover mangoes into the cream before pouring into their forms.

Beef stew

After such a meal it was time for some of us (…) to stretch their legs in a battle of tabletennis.:)And did I already show you our gorgeous sleeping room, which is in an old cowstable and one of the best things is that – while it is pitch dark inside with no windows – it is fabulously cool!! Totally love that… plus… we have no mosquitos!!

Our stable room!

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