Our menu for july

A large bucket filled with cold fresh water is filled to the brim with shiny animals looking at us accusingly and every now and then creating a flurry of activity inside the bucket. We take turns carefully peering inside. Some of us wonder how on earth we’re going to eat them all, some of us are already dreading the moment they will have to inevitably be killed. It’s funny when it comes to live animals; we all know (or we should all know) that the meat and fish we eat originated from animals that were once alive. Be it fluffy little lambs (now I don’t really want to think about that when eating lamb though!) or a cow that has transformed into a gorgeous piece of beef.

And during all the cooking classes we had we sure had our share of bloody adventures (remember the rabbit??) cleaning animals but most of them were already dead.

Yes they were eventually cooked...

But I keep having this thing with lobsters and crayfish.. The opinions vary as to what is the best way to kill them, the most animal friendly way to kill them so to speak and boiling seems to be the preferred way for many as it should be fairly quickly and well, for me at least it is better then cracking a knife through the skullbut then again, what do I know?

Tom adding something to the presentation of the dish... Looks professional doesn't it?

In either case; it is not my favorite part of cooking but it has to be done and closing my eyes for that fact is not gonna make it any better… But maybe there was a reason I chose to do dessert last friday.. (seriously, that was a coincidence!..) Last friday was again the day our cooking club got together for the 3th official session and counting the extra’s in between this was the 4th time. We had a rather large group this time, with 14 people cooking but the kitchen is big enough really so that’s all fine.

As a starter we had the crayfish prepared in 3 different ways and made with a delicious homemade potato salad, then we had a gazpacho with some grilled vegetables, the main was absolutely delicious lambchops with a parmezan crust (I will share the recipe for that below) and we had a grand dessert of melonsorbet (now that I had made before..lol), a cherrypie and raspberry bavaroise accompanied by strawberry coulis and whipped cream.

All in all it was again a delicious menu and I am already looking forward to the next session. In a way once every two months seems like a really long time in between but on the other hand, time flies and we all have busy schedules so it’s not so bad. Plus we do special things in between, like the Indonesian cooking we had and for july there might be an additional lesson on cleaning fish. Technique and less cooking involved.

First the lambrecipe and then some more pics.

Lampchops Milanese

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Recipe type: Main

Author: Mathijs Klein

Prep time: 15 mins

Cook time: 10 mins

Total time: 25 mins

Serves: 10

It’s a very simple idea but sometimes it’s the best thing that are the simplest..

Ingredients

• 20 lambchops
• flour
• egg
• grated parmesan cheese
• pepper and salt

Instructions

1. Clean the bones of the lambchops and season them with pepper and salt. Have three bowls ready; one with flour, one with egg and one with the grated parmesan. Dip the lambchops into each plate, ending with the parmesan.
2. Do this shortly before you’re going to bake them.
3. Bake the meat in a mixture of butter and oil and eat immediately!
4. Bak het vlees in een mengsel van boter en olie kort aan en houd ze warm in de warmkast.

1.2.4

The crayfish were all caught by Charlotte’s dad. Apparently they’re some sore of pest in the rivers and can be caught very easily. I honestly had no idea it would be so easy to catch them yourself. There were loads but what you end up with is very little! Obviously you can use the heads and other leftovers for making stock or something like that.

Lambchop milanese

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Shrimps with salmon, cucumber and beurre blanch

I am sure you remember we were briefly part of a cooking club that came out of one of the cooking courses we followed a year ago. No offense to the people in that group but it was never really entirely our thing. When I go cooking I want to cook and what I don’t want is for most of the food to be prepared already before we start. Plus it was never entirely our kind of people. So when Mathijs approached us end of last year with the news that he was starting a location where cooking clubs could cook, we started thinking about making our own group.

Obviously choosing who to invite and who not is not as easy as it sounds; they don’t have to be superchefs but they sure need to LIKE cooking as that is the first reason you would enter a cooking club, right? So that was our first criteria; who do we know in our circle of friends that likes to cook? And do they – in turn – maybe have friends that also like to cook?

Before we knew it we had a list of people that might like to join and it wasn’t even that long after that, that we had to say no, as the list was already growing too long. The final list consists of friends, friends of our friends, family and people we met through previous cooking courses. A nice mix!

The official opening of the new cooking studio was in January when we were in Costa Rica, so we had no chance to see the place before our first session.

But then again we’ve know Mathijs for a while now and we had all the faith in the world that it would be ok… And well, let me tell you it was!! We all arrived rather early (eager to start!!) yesterday around 6 pm and after having a glass of wine to get into things, Mathijs explained a bit about the houserules and how we were gonna be cooking and then it was time to start. We had four courses and 12 people so we divided into 3 people per course. I was doing the entree together with Charlotte and Mike, who – if you’ve paid attention – both have featured on this blog before… O and if you’re a Dutch blog reader you might know Femke too as she is the author of the blog called Excellent Eten (and also happens to be Tom’s niece)

So what did we make? Our menu of the evening was this:

Gamba with salmon and beurre blanc

Vitello Tonnato

Duck with prosciutto and spring onion served with marsala sauce, pommes duchesse and tagliatelle of black salsify (schorseneren in Dutch)

Jelly of orange with melting chocolate cake and vanilla sauce

Hungry yet? I will just give you the recipe that I made myself together with my two other chefs otherwise this will be an even lengthier post..

Ingredients (serves 12 people)

36 gamba’s

1 cucumber

1/2 bottle dry white wine

2 sjalots, finely chopped

2 lemons

sunfloweroil

36 slices of raw salmonfilet

4 tbsp of diced fresh tarragon

3 dl double cream or whipping cream

300 gr cold butter in cubes

lemon juice

few leaves of mint

2 cloves of garlic

olive oil

First start chopping everything and clean the shrimp.

Sauce:

Cook the white wine together with the diced sjallots, reducing it to 1/3 of the original volume. Pass through a sieve and add the cream. Cook again until you have about 2 dl left. Put away until further use. Before serving slowly heat until about 50 C. Mix in the butter bit by bit until it becomes a thicker sauce. Add a little bit of lemonjuice to bring to taste.

Gamba’s

Cut the cucumber and dice into small squares (brunoise) about 0,4 x 0,4 cm. Since the cucumber itself is bland in taste, make sure you add pepper and salt to taste and add a few very finely diced mint leaves to it. Clean the gamba’s and make sure to remove the intestines from it’s back (little black line). Once the gamba’s are clean, add finely diced garlic, pepper and some olive oil to bring them to taste.

Bake them in a pan on or a grillplate just shortly before serving. Remember they are done quickly. Once done wrap them in a slice of salmon.

Finishing:

Finish the sauce. Put a little bit of cucumber on each plate. Add 3 gamba’s to each dish and sprinkle this with a little bit of seasalt and lemonzest. Sprinkle the tarragonleaves around the gamba’s and cucumber and add the sauce. Enjoy!

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vealtartar, mixed salad and chicorysoup

I promised you I would give the recipes of our cooking club, didn’t I? Well here is the first part with the starters. Very simple recipes but very tasty. If I had to pick one then my favorite is the soup which was lovely and went really well with the scallops inside. I did like the veal but you have to make sure you cut the meat really really fine as otherwise it is too much like …. well, how shall I put this… like naked meat… That sounds a bit weird but I hope you know what I mean!!

Here are the recipes!

Chicorysoup with baked scallop

300 gr chicory

50 gr of butter

3 dl chickenfond

1,5 dl cream

pepper, salt

6 scallops

Clean the chicory and remove the bitter heart of the vegetable. Cut into small strips. Sprinkle with some lemonjuice to prevent discoloring.

Heat 25 gr of butter in a pan and saute the chicory. Deglaze with the fond and the cream. Put the mixture into a blender or handblender and blend until very smooth. Put the mixture back into the pan and add salt, pepper and extra butter to taste.

Heat some oil and very quickly fry the scallops lightbrown on both sides. Put the scallops into a small cup and put the soup over it and serve.

VEALTARTAR

400 gr escalope

1 sjalot very finely chopped

handful of chopped parsley

2 tbsp mayonaise

2 tbsp of ketchup

1 tbsp of sharp mustard (dijon or otherwise)

2 tbsp of worcester sauce

pinch of cayenne pepper

salt

capers

Cut the veal escalopes in very small cubes (and very small is very small but don’t puree it!)

Cut the sjalot very very fine as well. Mix all ingredients in a bowl and mix well together.

Well, how simple can it get, right? To present you can put some in a ring, press it and take the ring off.

We also had a little salad with the three amuse dishes we had but I didn’t think the salad was very special. It was nice but really not nice enough, so I will not be giving you that recipe…

We had a lovely white wine with this as well which is the one on the left!

The mains and dessert will be coming later too! Now I really need to go and check on some of you guys as I am sooooo behind in reading!

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Kort Lontje results

Remember back in March when we started for the first time with the cooking course at the Kookstudio Amsterdam? Well, out of that fun group we created a cooking club and last night we came together for the first time to cook in a new location. You have to realize that it is not simple to find a place where you can cook with 9 people at the same time. Initially we had wanted to do that in the Kookstudio where we all met, but due to schedules that was not possible to do, but our dear friend Christine found a place we could use.

The name of our cooking club is “Kort Lontje” which is kind of a fun reminder of Rob, as that was one of the first things he said to us, that he had a bit of a short temper sometimes. Which is what kort lontje means….

Obviously the purpose of the group is to get together and cook something fun but also to relax and have a good meal together with friends. It’s therefore very different from our cooking workshops we did in the kookstudio, but I shouldn’t even be compairing those I guess….

The space we used is beautiful and light (and therefore better to take photos!!) and is in kookstudio K.O.K.S. in Amsterdam as well. It’s also a kitchen design shop so you can imagine that the kitchens where equipped with the latest materials, among which very impressive ovens! I forgot to take a photo of one oven in particular but will do so the next time.

As you can see from the photos at the top we had a lovely meal; we started with little shrimp croquettes on a  bed of rocket with lemon mayonaisse. Delicious! Then on to the course that Tom and I prepared which was Dorad with beurre blanc sauce with chives and a red onion compote (I love, love, love red onion compote! Sooo good (and simple to prepare too), then deer with a layer of chestnuts on top served with brussels sprouts and potato gratin and to finish we had tarte tatin with chestnut icecream and a – not so good – sauce of tarragon and something else…

On to the main course

All in all we had a great evening and we have already made a new appointment for the next time. Because we don’t want to only be cooking from recipes we have decided to work with a schedule where each one of us gets to pick a theme or a specific dish that we will be making for that particular evening. That person is then also responsible to create the menu together with Albert and Pieter, the owners and two lovely guys.

If you would like to try and make the red onion compote (and you should!) here is the recipe:

Ingredients:

5 red onions

50 gr butter

0,5 dl creme de cassis

0,5 dl raspberry vinegar

1 dl red wine

Cut the red onion into small pieces and saute them with the butter until they are transparant. Add the creme de cassis, the raspberry vinegar and the red wine and some salt and pepper to taste.

Leave to simmer for about 1 hour on a low heat.

It works really well with fish but also with some good meat or bloodsausages also nice!

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