Potato cakes

It’s been said before and I will say it again but sometimes the simplest things in life are also the best… Last night was our 6th session of our cooking club, with the fancy name of Kookclubbie (maybe we should come up with another name??) and it was great fun again, good cooking, lots of laughter and some serious things in between as well. The group is still in the original shape as it was a year ago when we started. One person left due to other priorities but we’re still with 14 men/women. The menu yesterday was:

1. potato cakes with creme fraiche and trout eggs
2. Mushroom veloute
3. Lemon spoom
4. Dorad with ovendried tomatoes and tapenade
5. Creme brulee with icecream

Ofcourse all those drinks are purely water or soda...:)

The menu was fairly laid back this time, so we had some time to catch up with the news after New Years. Our cooking sessions are only once every two months, so while we do see some of the people on a more regular basis, others we only see at the cooking club, so that means lots of things to talk about! Saskia and I were responsible for the potato cakes and truth be told, she did most of the work. Lol.. I think I whisked the eggs, does that count for anything? To make up for that lack of eh… cooking, I made the potato cakes again today for dinner. They were totally delicious and they fit well within a budget too. Yesterday we had these with trout eggs but since those are fairly expensive I left them out today and we spiced up the creme fraiche with spring onions, mustard and some chili pepper instead. Also totally delicious!

New Years, group hugs!

These cakes are easy to put together and we’re having them tonight with some fresh mackerel fillets (with an orange and harissa glaze) and  pak choi that will be quickly stirfried in the wok. All in all in a delicious dinner that costs a little and goes a long way. And it’s also within the budget for Mona’s living leaner challenge!

Potato cakes

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Serves:	12
Prep time:	10 minutes
Cook time:	30 minutes
Total time:	40 minutes
Allergy:	Egg
Meal type:	Side Dish
Misc:	Pre-preparable, Serve Hot
Region:	Worldwide

Ingredients

• 500g potatoes
• 6 pieces egg
• salt
• pepper
• 250ml creme fraiche
• 6 pieces eggs (hardboiled)
• 1 spring onion
• 1 red chili
• 2 teaspoons mustard

Optional

• few teaspoonstrout eggs

Directions

Peel and wash the potatoes and then grate them finely. Crack 6 eggs open and whisk together. Season with salt and pepper generously. Add the grated potatoes to the eggmix and stir everything together. Taste and add more salt and pepper if you want. If you do want to taste raw eggs, bake one cake and taste if it needs additional seasoning

Boil the other 6 eggs till hard. Peel and keep yolks and whites separate, mashing them finely with a fork.

Cut the spring onion and the chili pepper finely and stir through the creme fraiche together with the mustard. Add the trout eggs if you want. Since these are very salty, make sure you keep that into consideration when your seasoning your potatoes. Taste your creme fraiche mix and add seasoning where needed.

Heat a frying pan on medium heat, add oil to the pan and with a spoon form little rounds of your potato-egg mixture. You can use a baking ring if you want or go freeform. Bake until golden brown, flip and bake the other side until done and transfer to a baking tray.

Once all your potato cakes are done you can leave them on the baking tray until you're ready to eat. Heat them through in the oven and serve with the creme fraiche. Add the egg crumbles to your plate and - if using - you can also add some additional trout eggs too.

Note

At the cooking club we had these with the trout eggs, but at home I prepared them without since those eggs are fairly expensive. Instead of the eggs we added some mustard, spring onions and chili to the cream, which works just as well and makes it a vegetarian dish too!

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• Onion-cheese quiche

Have you ever tasted a really bad risotto? One that is mushy, overcooked and just terrible? Well, I have to confess that we managed to make such a risotto in our cooking club last friday.. Ofcourse I can also tell you that I did not personally cook this risotto and in fact a couple of us (including myself) were very sure that we should wait with the risotto… But that is just excuses right, since ultimately we were all responsible for the end result.

Filet of beef with tarragon sauce and juniper berries

We had an interesting menu this time with the main being wild duck with garlic risotto and red wine sauce. The entire menu was:

• Goose liver cappuccino
• Beef tartare with tarragon sauce and juniper berries
• Wild duck with mushroom risotto, red wine sauce and chanterelle puree (whatever happened to that puree by the way??)
• Spicesicecream with orange syrup and mango

Gooseliver cappucino with mushrooms on toast

Ofcourse the first item was immediately cause for discussion as goose liver is a controversial topic and a few people refuse to eat goose liver which is fine. I’m not a big fan of duck liver and/or goose liver but I did want to taste this cappuccino so I did eat it. I read this entire article the other day on goose liver and the fact that it can be sustainable and animal friendlier then it is currently produced but still… it remains a difficult one. I’m glad that a lot of the practices we have seen in the past have improved when it comes to animal cruelty and food production but there are still a couple out there, that really should be changed. In the end it is also for a large part down to the fact of what we are willing to eat and what we are not willing to eat. If no one buys it anymore, what’s the point of producing right?

Saskia, Mike, Tom. Winfried and myself were assigned to both the starter cappuccino as well as the main. The boys started on the starter while Saskia and I – for some reason – decided it would be a good thing to start to clean all the ducks… I had never used a wild duck before but there is a noticeable difference between a wild one and a tame duck. Usually when you buy duck breast it would be from a tame duck with a very thick fatlayer on the breast. Wild ducks don’t have such a layer unless it is shortly before winter.

Yep that is me not paying attention while Mathijs is showing us how to dissect the duck.. Ofcourse I had to ask him again later..

I also thought the taste of the wild duck was much ‘gamier’ then the tame one.. I definitely prefer the taste of the tame one to the wild one, but then again it could have been our preparation that was wrong. I just didn’t like the entire dish one bit… Bleh… And it was sooooo much work! We cleaned the ducks, removed the breasts from the karkasses as well as the legs. Then we started braising the legs slowly in duckfat, and the karkasses went into the stockpot. In the meantime we had to cook whole garlic cloves in milk for about ten minutes and then transfer to the oven to slowly roast to become soft and tender to go into the risotto. We chopped and we cleaned and we did lots of stuff and ended up with a shitty dish… O

Saskia looking so thrilled to clean the duck..lol

hahaha… Well we did learn a lot of stuff in the process but I was slightly disappointed by the outcome. The risotto had been on far too long. It takes only 20 minutes or so to make a risotto but we put it on before having the second course (of which I will give you the recipe below) and then it had to be kept warm in between meaning it was on the stove way too long. Then Winfried decided not cleaning the chanterelles was a good thing (…) so there was sand in them.. I didn’t like the taste of the duck and that was the end of our work..

Remco and Janis doing the filet of beef

For me the real winners were the filet of beef (see recipe below) and the dessert which was delicious (even though the spices in the icecream got sort of left out..lol and the composition split so it had to be reheated to come together again (which worked by the way) but was still very delicious! I might share that recipe some other day cause this post is already becoming very long.

All in all, we had a great time, lots of laughs and well not all food was as good as we hoped but that is what we’re there to learn right? (that and to drink wine and have fun…)

Beef tartare with tarragon sauce, horseradish and rocket

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Serves:	10
Prep time:	30 minutes
Cook time:	15 minutes
Total time:	45 minutes
Meal type:	Appetizer
Misc:	Serve Cold
Region:	Worldwide

Ingredients

• 600g Filet of beef
• 3 tablespoons Olive oil
• 1 bunch tarragon
• 1 piece sjalots
• 1 clove garlic
• white wine vinegar
• 1 tablespoon chicken fond
• olive oil
• 8g juniper berries
• 3g caraway seed
• 1 teaspoon horseradish (from a jar)
• rocket
• 2 slices dark rye bread
• butter
• seasalt
• pepper

Directions

Chop the filet of beef. Don't make it too fine, add a little bit of olive oil and leave in the fridge, covered until ready to use.

Remove the tarragon leaves from the stalks. Chop the shallot, put both into the magi mix and grind finely. Put in a bowl. Add the vinegar and chicken fond. Mix until well combined. Add the olive oil little by little until it starts to resemble a cream. Keep at room temperature until ready to serve.

Roast juniper berries and caraway seed in dry pan and ground once they cool down in a pestle and mortar.

Cut the second shallot into thin rings. Crumble the rye bread and bake until crispy in some butter.

For presentation: Use a big cold plate and either make a ring or square of your tartare. Divide rye bread, horseradish and shallot rings over the meat. Briefly drag the rocket through some olive oil and put 5 rocketleaves in a half circle around the meat. Drape some of the tarragoncream at the foot of your circle. Sprinkle some of the white spots on your plate with the juniper berry powder

Note

Delicious little dish which is great if you have a beautiful piece of beef. The horseradish here really adds to the dish so while you still have to use it sparingly (it's strong!!) it does bring out the flavors.

And here it is... the terrible dish from hell..

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• Potato cakes and cooking club #6
• Tarly salad with orange hazelnut dressing – living leaner
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Delicious spicy beef dish at Thai restaurant

When I met Ishay for the very first time during our Plate to Page adventure in Germany it became immediately apparent that she is a very socially engaged person. She is originally from South Africa where she lives with her Dutch husband (who came with her to Germany since they were on a vacation too and had just come from Barcelona (or they were just going to barcelona after Germany… sort of forgot the details) and she writes the fabulous blog Food and the Fabulous.

Now just before we left for home after that wonderful weekend in Weimar Ishay asked us all to think about contributing to WeFeedBack, an organization where she is rather active. I was initially a little confused as to what it was that was required of me, but after having checked out their website I became enthusiastic about participating in this great cause. WeFeedBack is all about fighting world hunger and then in a very simple way. Let’s say you organize a dinner for your friends and you decide to have a BBQ. What does a typical BBQ cost? Let’s say a low budget one would be € 10,= per person. If you have 10 friends over that would be a total of 100 euro.

The idea around WeFeedBack is that you basically give that amount back to kids around the world that are suffering from lack of food. For a 100 euro you could feed 500 kids! An if each of your friends brings 10 euro to the table it’s not a lot of money for a cause as good as this.

Wefeedback is an initiative of the World Food Programme as a means to use social media and social platforms to build a community. A community that can give back by donating the value of their meals and with that feed kids.

It doesn’t have to be 100 euro. Any little contribution is welcome; even your ham and cheese sandwich could already help 1 or 2 kids! The explanation on the site is much better then what I can do here, so I will let you check out the site and see for yourself how easy it is to contribute.

I kept it small and went for dinner with my good friend Hermin (who is featured in the little video above) She made a video of me too, but chicken that I am… she looks much better then me, so I thought I show her video instead of mine.. ‘m also rubbish at editing it, but well…. you can hear what she had to say!

For starters we had some lovely Thai snacks

We had a great Thai meal with lovely starters, pad thai noodles and spicy beef with spring beans. It was – for a change – a dry day so we could eat outside on a terrace (we were in Amsterdam).

Making that little video was sort of hilarious… I mean; I am not sure how many takes we did before we ended up with a video without a fit of giggles in between but it was great fun and all for a good cause too.
If you want to join wefeedback too, please use the link here

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Pheasant wrapped with coppa di parma ready to go in the oven

Let me first start by saying that this post is not for the faint of heart as some of the photos are quite bloody. If you are a vegan or vegetarian probably best not to read on! If you are – however- interested in finding out how to skin a hare then please read on..

I was a little anxious about this lesson as we could have gotten just about anything here and my fear was of walking in and finding an entire deer lying on the kitchen counter. It wasn’t a deer, but instead we had two hare, two pheasants and two wild ducks lying there completely intact as you can see below. There was also some pieces of wild boar meat and some deermeat, but that was both already processed.

Now I like to think of myself not being too squeamish, but hmmm, not sure about all these little furry and fluffy creatures on the table as I knew what would be coming next! You see; I grew up with a friend whose parents owned a farm and as a kid I used to be at that farm almost every week. If you live at a farm you know that chickens eventually get slaughtered and since they lived close to the an area with lots of bunnies you even realize that bunnies get shot too. So I had killed and cleaned chicken before and I had even seen someone skin a bunny before. Still…. that was all different from the experience of last night! Probably a good thing too that it was the last lesson and not the first. Someone even suggested of starting with this lesson in the beginners course; you’d would – for sure – not have any people left after the course..lol..

After Rob had explained to us the differences between the various types of game we went to the kitchen area to watch the skinning and cleaning process on one of the hares. Now before I go into that; there are people opposed to hunting and people that are ok with hunting. I will not go into the right or wrong here, just to say that I used to be really against hunting but I have come to see the other side as well and are a bit more relaxed about the whole subject. I mean; if you think about it; If you are a meat-eating person your anonymous piece of meat that you buy at the butcher used to be a live animal as well and I can bet that your cow or pig probably had a lousier life than the hare you see lying in the photo above. So in terms of animal friendly (not getting into the whole pro or con hunting discussion!!) the hare would win over the average cow anyday, right?

Skinning and cleaning a hare

But still…. I had to swallow once or twice when Rob started skinning the hare and part of that was due to the horrible stench coming from the hare. Apparently real game can smell that way when it has been hanging for the appropriate amount of time to tenderize the meat. In this case the hare was shot roughly ten days ago and you probably get used to that smell but it was disgusting! The first thing he did was cut a little slit into the hare’s neck so that you can put a finger underneath the skin. Then the process of stripping the animal of it’s little furry coat is remarkably simple. Just make sure you remove the lower part of all four of the legs otherwise you won’t be able to pull of the skin. Once skinned you can remove the head, which then makes it look a lot more like something you can buy at your butcher… But overall, a pretty bloody process! Also you can see where the hare was shot as those parts have  hematomas of where the coagulated blood is sitting. That is also where you will most likely find the little bullets that killed it, so make sure to remove those!

After the hare we got a demonstration of how to clean a duck (nightmare with all those feathers!) and then it was time to take it into practice… At which point I have to make a confession; I chickened out.

I am ok with watching someone dissecting a hare, duck or pheasant, but to do it myself I just didn’t feel like it! Instead I took photos and well, I did pluck a little bit of duck, but that is as far as it goes. I mean, the chance that I will ever be cleaning my own hare is not so big. Unless I am forced to live in the wild and will need to live of the animals that I catch with my bare hands; in which case the knowledge will come in handy.. lol.. In fact I was not the only one having a little bit of trouble with this lesson as only Arjen and Mike where brave enough to start on a pheasant and hare, respectively. Francoise cleaned a lot of the insides of the hare (to be used for something) which deserves an applause in itself as the stench was overwhelming but the rest of the group stayed with the safer meats that were already cleaned (the wild boar and deer)

The guys with their respective trophee...

And obviously at some point some of it had to be eaten. Now I found that the problem with the hare is the smell really. Once you have smelled that stench it stays in your nose and even after having been prepared in the oven we could all still smell it. And since taste is for a large part smell I had a hard time liking it! The boar wrapped with prosciutto was lovely and delicious, the filled boar was also great. The pheasant that Mike is holding on the left was delicious as well (that is the first photo of this post as well) and the coppa di parma really added a nice little crunch to it. The duck has a liver taste to it and I didn’t like the skin as that was thick and fat. Not so tasty, but the meat itself was ok. You wouldn’t expect a duck to have red meat now would you? But it does have red meat.

So in terms of our last lesson it certainly was a memorable one! It was the first time I did hardly anything in the kitchen though which is a little weird. Well I cut some veggies for a dish that we didn’t eat in the end, but that’s about it.

And now it is the end of our course again, such a shame really. There is still sooooo much more to learn, so I hope there will be another one after this.

Rob also gives summer courses in France where you spend a week cooking and/or doing other fun activities (painting, fishing etc.) as well. You go to the market in the morning and learn what to buy and then how to prepare all that in the afternoon. Sounds like a lot of fun and definitely something we will be doing next year. At the moment the farm where this will all be taking place is still under renovation to make it suitable to host guests but it should be finished beginning of spring next year. Courses start somewhere in june, but you can check the website for more details if you’re interested!

Pheasant with hare feet...

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Gorgeous breads

I know I have complained many times already about the lack of ingredients here in Almere, but not too far from here, there is Amsterdam… And well, what can I say; Amsterdam is simply food-heaven, certainly compaired to these parts. The only problem is really that the parking in Amsterdam is so outrageously expensive that the food automatically also becomes very expensive. It’s – if traffic permits – only half an hour drive and then a short walk from the Central Station (where you can park the car) and that walk alone brings you through the Haarlemmerstraat which is also a fantastic street if yoou’re looking for any special foods. Getting to Amsterdam by train with two people is about 28 euro’s, parking costs are 4 euro per hour, so technically it’s cheaper to go by car, although we tend to stay in Amsterdam for a couple of hours making the bill go up drastically.

Noordermarkt

But again for the produce you can find here, it’s worth it, although it does take you the better part of the day. The market is very busy (also lot’s of tourists go here) so navigating around takes time.

I needed to find certain things (I cannot tell you what yet!!) for this months Daring Cooks challenge and I knew there was absolutely no way I could find some of the things in my hometown, so Tom and I went over to Amsterdam and spend a few hours at the market (well, we had lunch ofcourse somewhere as well..:) )and wow, what a joy to walk around there. It’s a farmers market, but a really large one. Lots of different fruits and vegetable stand and they even have a whole stall with nothing but fresh herbs!

Muffins

So while this is definitely not a market to go to if you just quickly need something, it is worth taking the time to go there on a saturday if you really need something special.

Or ofcourse, if you’re visiting Amsterdam on a saturday, then definitely go to the Noordermarkt! The market is there every day of the week, but only on the saturday it also doubles as a farmers market. I have all the stuff I need for my Daring Cooks recipe, which I will be making tomorrow, but… your’re gonna have to wait untill the 14th of next month to see the results of that!…..

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