Junglefrog Cooking » cheese

Onion-cheese quiche

Simone (junglefrog) — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 15:29:34 +0000

Onion quiche with cheese

Very slowly but surely there is some white fluff coming out of the sky. It’s not a lot but it’s cold enough for the white stuff to remain. The day has been grey and very overcast. Certainly not ideal for taking photos so that’s a bit of a nuisance really… Yes, ladies and gentlemen by the look of things, it appears we ARE finally getting something resembling a winter. If I’m totally honest I am ready for spring. I mean, I love winter, I really do, but then I like winter to appear when it is supposed to. For me that is around Christmas. And not at the beginning of February when all I can think of is spring! But if nature has proven anything lately then it is the fact that it cannot be controlled. So winter it is then. At least it is good for getting rid of some of the mosquito-eggs (I hope).

We have this thing here in Holland called De Elf Stedentocht. It’s a skating race across eleven cities (cities = steden) for a distance of around 200 km. It’s held on natural ice only, so that means that we have to wait for the weather gods to be with us, in order for the ice to be thick enough to hold masses of people at the same time. The last time it was held was in 1997! So you can see that it is rare for the ice to be of good enough quality. Every year, usually around this time, we do have some frost and as always there is this buzz going around for people that maybe this year we will be having the tour… Willem-Alexander, our crown prince even participated last time so you see, it’s a big deal here..

Ten yrs old.. getting skating lessons..

I’ve never been really good in skating… I found this picture of me at the age of 10 trying to do some skating..:) I’m the clumsy one on the left holding my friends hand and that’s my little brother behind her keeping an eye on things… I used to fall on my face quite a bit and I guess I never really learned it properly. See those skates by the way? Those are called Friese doorlopers and you can tie them under your regular shoes. This particular water (slootje) we are skating on was behind my parents house, as we were overlooking farmland.

Onion quiche

Now when it’s cold and dark outside, you want something warm and comforting, right? This particular quiche is perfect for that. it’s incredibly easy as it uses ready made croissant dough. The onions are slowly cooked in some dark beer giving it a hint of sweetness. We loved it! I used port salut in the recipe as I know Tom hates stronger cheeses (he hates all cheese but as long as it’s melted on something and not too strong he’s ok with eating it) but I would recommend using something with a bit more flavor. Blue cheese combined with regular cheese would be fantastic too. Recipe from Delicious Magazine

Onion-cheese quiche

Print recipe

Serves:	4
Prep time:	30 minutes
Cook time:	35 minutes
Total time:	1 hours, 5 minutes
Meal type:	Lunch
Misc:	Pre-preparable, Serve Cold, Serve Hot
Region:	Worldwide
From magazine:	Delicious magazine

Ingredients

2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
750g onions (in half rings)
100ml dark beer
1 can croissant dough (Here you can buy these in tins which have enough dough for 6 croissants. not sure how that would be in other countries)
100g ham
4 eggs
150ml double cream
3 tablespoons flat leaf parsley (plus a little extra for garnish if you want)
200g abbey cheese (for instance port salut or any other good cheese you want, rind removed)

Directions


Heat the olive oil in a frying pan. Add the onion rings and bake for about 8-10 minutes until they are nice and soft. Don't let them get too brown though! Pour the beer in and keep cooking until there is no moisture left in the pan. Preheat the oven to 200 C.

Roll the dough out and line a 10 x 30 cm tin with it or a round tin with a diameter of 24 cm. Make sure there are no holes in the dough. Line the bottom with the ham. Whisk the eggs, mix with cream, parsley and add pepper and salt to taste. Add the onions into the tin. Pour the egg-cream mixture over it and put the cheese on top in slices. Bake the quiche in the oven for about 30-35 minutes until golden brown and cooked. Sprinkle with a little extra parsley.

Note

While the recipe states that the qty's are for a tin of the size I have you I found there were far too many onions, so I actually made two out of the qty given. One of 10 x 30 cm and one round one. Which is fine but just thought I mention it!

Greek salad

Simone (junglefrog) — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 08:00:26 +0000

Delicious greek salad

Every single time we go to Greece the very first meal I order is a Greek salad. There is nothing better then the taste of those gorgeous tomatoes combined with the salty feta and the juicy cucumbers. Yes, even the cucumbers taste better in Greece! And then enjoying that while the only other sounds are the soft clinging together of the boatmasts in the wind.

Greek tiny restaurant by the harbour

It’s been too long really since we last went to Greece. It will always be one of my favorite countries and fairly close too. With the current economic situation not being all too positive I’m not sure what that will do to the touristic site of the country. Will people still go to Greece or will they all decide it is not a good idea? You never know how situations like this will turn out. A lot of people in Greece are depending on tourism to support them. I’m certainly no expert when it comes to economics so I’ll better stick to what I do know and that is food. Obviously; as I have learned since; the food we get served in the majority of the Greek restaurants is really not the best. Touristic stuff, quickly put together. Although that is mostly true about the really busy places you can find really good and fresh food anywhere in Greece if you look a little harder. We’ve had some amazing seafood (I learned to eat fish in Greece after all) gorgeous moussakas and well, the Greek salad of course.

Simple but delicious!

I might not have made it into a traditional Greek salad. I’ve been served raw red onions on top in many cases, but I just don’t like that. I’m not a big fan of raw onions, so I left that out here and just kept to the plan and simple basics that are o so delicious and lightning quick to put together for a healthy lunch!

Greek salad

Print recipe

Serves:	1
Prep time:	10 minutes
Cook time:	None
Total time:	10 minutes
Dietary:	Vegetarian
Meal type:	Appetizer, Lunch, Salad
Region:	Greek

Ingredients

4 tomatoes (Make sure you use really good tomatoes. Watery ones will not do here!)
1/2 Cucumber (Seeds removed and sliced)
100g feta (crumbled)
75g kalamata olives
2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
salt
pepper

Directions


Not much to describe here as it is basically cutting all the vegetables in biteable sizes, toss them together in a bowl, add the crumbled feta and olives, sprinkle with olive oil and pepper and salt and you're ready to go!

Note

Delicious and fresh and just for a minute - makes you feel in Greece again..

Couscous salad with roquefort and corn

Simone (junglefrog) — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 18:47:15 +0000

Delicious and healthy couscous salad

The alarm goes at 6 am and I fumble around to hit the repeat button. I need just a tiny bit longer… Ten minutes later the damn thing is going on again and with a deep sigh I swing my legs over the edge of the bed. Gizmo – always on the lookout for people movements – immediately comes to stand at my side, miauwing loudly. Logically feeding her is the first thing she has on her mind. And she makes sure it is also the first thing I have on my mind… She will walk in front of me all the way from the bedroom to the bathroom, so if I want to avoid falling over her… feeding time it is.

I walk sleepily downstairs to make coffee and breakfast and peer out of the window, expecting grey skies and falling rain. That has been the norm for the last couple of months with the occasional day of sunshine in between. So out of habit I peer outside and continue my walk to the coffeemachine and then it hits me… there is no rain!! I peer outside again and lo and behold… it is true; it is actually dry… It’s too early in the day to have the sun out but it looks promising.

All of a sudden much more awake; I quickly make a pot of coffee, pour some granola and quark in a bowl, add some blueberries that are leftover from yesterday’s shoot to it and go back upstairs. I wake up Tom and we have coffee in bed as we do every morning.

Red and beautiful; radishes

I check my Iphone to see if the weather forecast is predicting the same thing that I am seeing (not that the weather forecast is by any means reliable, but, as we used to say when I worked in planning; a forecast is by definition always wrong).

In this case however I am glad to confirm that we did indeed have a sunny day. Unbelievable but true. Even as I peer outside now from behind the computer the sky is bright blue and the sun is still out (it 6.30 pm.

Still it amazes me how the entire air seems to vibrate with autumn rather then summer. I had dinner with two friends on tuesday (at Gent aan de Schinkel) and because I was early, I decided to have a coffee outside on the terrace of the cafe in Amsterdam where we were meeting. And that’s when it hit me. You know what I mean right? At some point going toward autumn, something changes in the air, it’s the color, the smell and little things that make you aware of the fact that summer is over and autumn is moving in.

Even now, after having the wettest summer in history (and that means something from a country with plenty of rain to begin with) you can still tell the difference. The funny thing is that you need a sunny day to be able to sense it. Rainy days don’t work.

Naturally, because it was sunny and bright today, I wanted to make a salad. My photo shoot of the day was cancelled this morning so I had a little spare time and what better way to spend it then by being outside and eating this delicious salad featuring one of my favorite ingredients; couscous.

Couscous salad with roquefort and corn

Print recipe

Serves:	1
Prep time:	10 minutes
Cook time:	None
Total time:	10 minutes
Meal type:	Lunch, Salad
Misc:	Serve Cold
Region:	Worldwide

Ingredients

75g Couscous
75g roquefort
150ml Chicken stock
5 pieces radishes
3 tablespoons corn
20g alfalfa

Dressing

2 tablespoons olive oil
1 tablespoon lime juice
salt
3 leaves mint (Chopped finely)
pepper

Directions


Put the couscous in a bowl and bring the chicken stock to the boil. Obviously if you want to use vegetable stock that is possible too. That would also make this a vegetarian dish. Leave this to stand for about 4 minutes or per package instructions

Once the couscous is cooked, add the corn, chopped radishes and crumbled roquefort to the couscous and stir.

Make a dressing with the olive oil, lime juice, chopped mint and salt and pepper. You need only a tiny bit for the salad and it even tastes good without using the dressing at all. I just find it difficult to mix and taste dressing with teaspoon measurements. You can always use the dressing for something else later if you have leftover (and you will have leftovers)

Put the couscous on a plate and drizzle a little of the dressing on top. Finish your dish with a bit of alfalfa on top and some lamb's lettuce around the couscous. Enjoy!

Note

Delicious recipe that is perfect for a quick lunch and can be adapted to suit your taste quite easily. Use a different kind of cheese such as feta or halloumi if you prefer

It’s delicious and you can easily substitute the roquefort for a lot of other salty cheeses, such as feta or hmmm fried halloumi cubes. I actually wanted to do this with halloumi but that is hard to find in Almere (if anyone knows of a place in Almere then let me know!) so I used roquefort and that was delicious!

Here are some other couscous recipes I made:

Couscous salad

Couscous salad with feta and basil

Hoisin chicken with couscous and asparagus

Watermelon salad – madness part 2

Simone (junglefrog) — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 16:38:53 +0000

Watermelon madness or color madness??

Do you need sunglasses yet? Sorry, I just love this photo and it’s probably wrong for whatever gazillion color reason but I couldn’t resist posting it to make sure you were all wide awake… See the thing with these Plate to Page people is that they are never satisfied… Seriously… I post my watermelon icecream perfectly on time looking slick and shiny and guess what my dear friend Astrid cannot resist mentioning… “Where is the photo of the raw watermelon??” See what I mean? I had forgotten to take a photo of the raw thing… Simply because I was too busy using it in salads and icecream. And technically, if you think about it, in none of these cases was the melon ever cooked, baked, grilled or otherwise prepared, so technically you are looking at a photo of a raw watermelon right now… See it? The one in shocking pink, blue and red? Pretty isn’t it? Ofcourse – as much as I hate to admit it – Astrid was ofcourse right, so just for everyone’s peace of mind; here is the damn raw thing…

A raw watermelon...

It doesn’t look so very different from the one above, but I sort of took the idea of Ilva to make the watermelon into balls. Which incidently I left my melonball-cutter in the studio so I did this with a teaspoon measure. Works fairly ok.

Because Astrid made me take the photo on your left I felt I needed a new bowl to complete the task, so this afternoon after having lunch with my sister in Hilversum I made a little visit to the cookery shop (we don’t have one of that size in Almere, which is probably a good thing) and I ventured upstairs to have a look at the selection, only to be blinded by stunning, stunning plates, bowl, cups etc. They’re made in Portugal and the brandname is Mateus and I sort of fell in love with all of it. The problem is that one small bowl costs the shocking amount of 22 euro. And I bought two; the blue one above and the pink one on the left… That’ll be 50 euro’s please.. I know it’s ridiculous but I have only or mostly white bowls and that gets boring after a while. I have also decided I want to have the entire series for my regular plates. I’ll just buy a few each month… *deep sigh*… On the bright side; I really don’t spend that much money on shoes… So I can do the occasional splurge on plates, right?

Watermelon salad with feta, tomatoes and mint-vinaigrette

Now back to the salad at hand; delicious, fresh, summery with a slight salty taste due to the crumbled feta bits. I’ve had it twice already this week so it must be good. It’s so good in fact that Gizmo almost dove into the bowl before I could pull her out. (see the last photo below) It’s the bits of feta she was after, not the watermelon nor the tomato mind you.

Watermelon salad

5.0 from 2 reviews

Recipe type: sidedish or lunch salad

Author: Simone van den Berg, adapted from Good Food

Prep time: 10 mins

Total time: 10 mins

Serves: 4

Sweet with a slightly salty touch due to the feta. Fresh, delicious and perfect for a hot summer lunch or (very) light dinner

Ingredients

2 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp white wine vinegar
2 tbsp chopped mint
cherry tomatoes in different sizes and colors about 200 gr
500 gr watermelon, cut into chunks
150 gr feta, crumbled

Instructions

Make the dressing by mixing the vinegar, olive oil and mint and season to taste if needed.
Put the tomatoes (keep smaller ones whole and cut larger ones in two) and watermelons in a bowl. Pour over the dressing and leave to stand for at least 10 minutes so the fruit can get really juicy.
Crumble the feta over the top and serve.

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Gizmo dipping her nose in my salad

Tomato spaghetti with roasted tomatoes and mustard

Simone (junglefrog) — Sat, 11 Jun 2011 07:00:28 +0000

Pasta I can eat just about any day of the week. I think I have said it before, but I will tell you again; it is the perfect meal for using leftovers. Tom and I have had a fabulous weekend with lots of sunshine and a really nice foodfestival called “the weekend of the rolling kitchens” which was held in Amsterdam. The festival was held from the 2nd of June till the 5th of June and we were wise to pick the saturday to go there as the weather was perfect, nice and sunny while on sunday it rained the entire day. It was a fun festival where I was surprised to see what people where able to cook up in a caravan, old trailer or some even on an old bike! Believe it or not… We had dumplings (delicious ones I might add) that were prepared in a wok (as you would expect) but that was heated in a small wood fired oven inside an old bike!

Stove inside a bike cart

We had some really good food too and some lovely wines as well. We did a little wine tasting where we each got three different wines to taste. I picked the white ones and Tom had the red ones, but I think we all loved them. We will definitely be buying those!

Anyway, on our way back we started talking about food and the amount of food we waste on a year basis. It’s quite shocking really. I go to the supermarket (remember we don’t have anything else here in the neighbourhood!) and buy groceries for the week, including vegetables, meat and such. I pop whatever we have to into the freezer and the only thing I still have to buy are some vegetables. But what happens at the end of the week is that a lot of stuff is leftover. We didn’t cook on tuesday or we had an unexpected

Rolling kitchens

invitation for dinner with friends on thursday and so on. I’m ashamed of it really, as it is good food that goes bad just because we are too lazy to come up with some way to use it. I know everyone does it and I know most people feel bad about it, but that doesn’t mean that it is ok. So we decided then and there that we’re gonna be using up our supplies in a better way.

So to start of on my new good intentions I decided to dive into our fridge and see what needed to be used urgently. It was tomatoes; I had loads of tomatoes in the fridge, from small ones to big ones and they would not last much longer. So tomatoes it was… And then my obvious choice was to ad that to a good pasta.. I told you I could eat pasta with anything…

I asked Tom to pick up some fresh pasta on the way to home as well as some smoked chicken. From our cupboard I added tomato cubes, some wholegrain mustard and some German Schmand (creme fraiche) that I brought with me from Plate to Page. I roasted the tomatoes in smoked salt and pepper with olive oil and a beautiful little dish was born.

Tomato spaghetti with roasted tomatoes and mustard

5.0 from 3 reviews

Recipe type: Main

Author: Simone van den Berg

Prep time: 10 mins

Cook time: 20 mins

Total time: 30 mins

Serves: 2

Quick, delicious and good for you too!

Ingredients

300 gr fresh pasta
150 gr smoked chicken
1 can of cubed tomatoes
2-3 tbsp of creme fraiche
1 tbsp of whole grain mustard
500 gr tomatoes
smoked salt
pepper
some cheese grated

Instructions

Preheat your oven to 200 C and put your tomatoes in a baking tray. Sprinkly generously with olive oil and smoked salt (if you do not have smoked salt, regular seasalt will do just fine) and freshly ground pepper.
Put the tray into the oven and roast for about 15 minutes.
In the meantime put on your water for the pasta with generous salt.
Cut the smoked chicken in small strips.
Heat some olive oil and bake the chicken briefly. Add the tomato cubes to it and the creme fraiche.
Add 1 tbsp of mustard and taste. Season where needed
Cook your pasta per the package instructions, drain and add to the sauce.

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Junglefrog Cooking » cheese

Onion-cheese quiche

Onion-cheese quiche

Ingredients

Directions

Note

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Greek salad

Greek salad

Ingredients

Directions

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Couscous salad with roquefort and corn

Couscous salad with roquefort and corn

Ingredients

Dressing

Directions

Note

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Watermelon salad – madness part 2

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Tomato spaghetti with roasted tomatoes and mustard

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