Not Yet There

There are not always AMAZING SUCCESSES in the kitchen when it comes to my cooking. :-P But what I like is that I have the feeling that I am always learning at least. So I had this vision of what I would cook this weekend/evening - I wanted to try some pumpkin...and some spinach...and some scallops...all layered with different complementary flavors. And in general I got the flavors right - I am pretty sure about this. At least most of them. But the textures were off. I wanted crispier drier pumpkin. And the parma wrapped around the broiled scallops was WRONG. In general, a bit too mushy. Nice presentation, but something was a bit off - need to figure out how to optimize.

These were all MY recipes...so it stands to figure...that even if I have logged the 10,000 expert hours (in any discipline if you log 10,000 hours, you are generally considered an expert - at least according to Malcolm Gladwell, and it seems like a reasonable conclusion to me...), that I am an expert in following recipes, but perhaps not yet an expert in creating them...at least not a really EXPERT expert.

So, Emily my dear, this is not yet ready for your test kitchen, but I will be sure to alert you if I get it to that point.

We have: pumpkin and baby corn and leek saute, spinach and pinenuts with a squeeze of lemon and broiled scallops wrapped in parma ham...which I will NEVER EVER broil again. Parma was ruined, although scallops were edible.

Needless to say, no publishing of the recipe quite yet.

Free iPad...sorta

I apologize, but I have taken part in this drawing and that means some of your email addresses have been sent off....:-)

I mean, if they gave me a freebie, I would hardly turn it DOWN!

Mediterranean

Another great recipe recommendation. I am a little embarrassed because I don't remember which blog I found this one on. Lately, I have subscribed to an aggregator blog called Foodgawker. It's a blog of food photos - if you click through you get taken to the blog on which the original photo and recipe was published. For those among us who are inspired by visuals rather than words (yes, me...at least when it comes to food....), this is the place to peruse.

And some days back (yes...i think just days), I came across a fish recipe where I thought - "yup, gotta try that one." The original name of the recipe was: Pan-Roasted Sea Bass and Couscous with Clementines, Olives, Dates and Chickpeas. But....I made a bunch of changes to the original recipe. (And the original was already an adaptation from a Gourmet magazine recipe.)

What is really nice about this one is that it is relatively fast. You could theoretically have this one on the table in about 40 minutes from start to finish. Interested? Ask, and I will make the effort to type up my version of the recipe.

Some modifications from me included: halibut instead of sea bass (but halibut was extremely mild and sea bass might have been even better), thyme in addition to mint, far less butter than called for, bulgar wheat instead of couscous and a fennel and preserved lemon salad on the side.

The local fans were impressed with the flavor and went back for third helpings.

So...you are looking at: pan-fried halibut on a bed of bulgar wheat and chickpeas flavored with clementines, dates and olives with a drizzle of an orange juice and thyme reduction, and a salad of fennel, olive oil and homemade preserved meyer lemons.

9 out of 10 points if I do say so myself. Nice, subtle mild perfumey flavors and a rich buttery undertone from the fish and dates.

Secret Addiction

I admit it, these days I peek at my iphone way too often to quickly take care of my cute little farm and cute little ranch. Take a look - I have quite a little plot, and now two sheep on the ranch!!!

Yes, a number of people make fun of my geekiness on this particular count (and yes, here is the little video that parodies the ridiculousness of this game),



BUT!!!! WAIT!!!!

While I am not the only zombie busy planting grass for her sheep and harvesting ridiculously expensive eggs, there are actually people out there making this game somewhat USEFUL.

And in fact...if I were to begin a business of my own (which I think about on occasion and should really begin to think about more seriously perhaps), I think my business would somehow go in this direction: linking the virtual world to the real world.

Check out these two REAL businesses that are doing just this.


The first one is a farm in Italy (beautiful webstie, btw) that lets people purchase plots of land in a virtual way, and then the farmers there plant vegetables, harvest them, and send them to the people who have paid for the land for the year. It's a bit pricey, but I think for a particular target group a very entertaining prospect. One has to buy vegetables anyway, so why not this way if it tickles your fancy? Here's the description: Users first select a garden size based on the number of people they'd like to feed; 30m2 is sufficient for 1–2 people and costs EUR 850 per year. The virtual gardener can then choose from 40 different types of vegetables, using a highly intuitive interface that includes information on expected yields and harvest times. Optional extras include a photo album of the garden's progress (EUR 49), herb and fruit beds (EUR 50/75), and even a scarecrow with a picture of the customer's own face (EUR 39). Once the garden has been designed and fees paid, planting begins on the farm, which is located between Milan and Turin in northern Italy. As the organic produce grows, it's picked and delivered to the customer's door within 24 hours. Weekly deliveries are part of the package.


And here is a spontaneously created business which addresses an immediate need: donate money to the Haiti relief fund and get "virtual" money in exchange. For those who planned to donate anyway and who are simultaneously farmville freaks, here is added impetus for donating. Crazy, but who cares if it benefits the relief effort and this is what it takes to get money from the public?

Product Imitates Nature

You know that time you were in Thailand or India or Bali...relaxing on the beach with a great book in hand, sun shining down on you, crabs scuttling by, the office a million miles away. But you were suddenly very thirsty and at that moment, a guy came by selling green coconuts which he very willingly cracked open for you and stuck a straw in. And at that moment, as you took your first sip of the coconut water, you realised you could drink coconut water for the rest of your life and never miss any other liquid....

Well ok, maybe you have not yet experienced that moment.

But JUST IN CASE YOU DO....and you do not happen to be on a beach in Thailand or India or Bali, or walking around Little India in Singapore, or in fact anywhere near a place where coconuts grown wild and people sell them as a refreshing drink on the street, you can BUY a product which fulfills the same purpose.

Check it out.


Just found these at one of the local asian stores. And...I am a sucker for great packaging. (And yes, I suppose we need to admit that this is a big waste of natural resources for many many reasons so I swear I won't buy another one ever again and I will keep the package from this one for many years and admire it forever....now I feel guilty for buying it and only spending a measly 2 Euros on it based on the fact that it has obviously cost our environment far more...) But I am sitting here drinking 100% coconut water from a super cute little plastic replica with a straw in it.

And now that I have written this blog entry...and processed the fact of my actions while writing...I realize I can no longer enjoy the coconut water or the packaging. Very sad.

Back to work. :-(

iNakedScanner

Quite a funny cartoon from a German website/blog...:-))) I guess they have solved the whole debate over how to get people to want to go through the naked scanners at the airport.

The german can be translated: "People can barely wait ever since we stuck the stupid apple on the machine"


tee hee...

Apple Tablet Rumors

Reposting this one from Mashable, which is reposting from The Green Room Blog...but I like the visual explanation - easy skimming to quickly see the rumors around the apple tablet condensed in one space (rather than reading the 500 articles a day about it...) along with a nice key that tells you how likely the rumors are. Wonder how they managed that one. Maybe there is a correlation between the likelihood the rumor is true with how often it appeared in the press. Anyway...just a few more days until January 27th and then all will be revealed.

Ah...and they also have this similar visual around the next generation iphone rumors...

Red and Green

I've been sitting here all weekend waiting for "Daisy" to strike with her mountains of snow - a snow to end all snows - to stop all traffic, be it land or sea or air, to send millions to the markets to stock up on non-perishables for the weeks-long wait for the snow to slowly disappear and life to return to normal. Still waiting. We have only gotten a drizzly sleet that is coating everything with a treacherous layer of ice. Daisy, you are late - no dinner for you!

And to further reject the white beast who did not bother to visit us in Munich, I made some lovely spinach and ricotta gnocci with a tomato sauce for dinner last night. It was a Marcella Hazan recipe rather than my tried-and-true Suzanne Goin. And I gotta say...Marcella whooped Suzanne's butt. Compared to the gnocci with wild mushrooms I made some months back from my ever-favorite "Sunday Suppers at Lucques," (which at the time I thought were divine) the spinach and ricotta gnocci were much lighter and tastier. On the other hand...they were also a bit harder to handle. The dough was barely a dough - there was no rolling out and cutting it into 3/4 inch lengths. It was more of a sticky gooey process of tentative shaping and hoping that it would all be ok in the end. But it was. They were lovely - little pillows of cheesy green covered with a bright tomato sauce. Looking forward to making them again. Total time to make? About 1 hour start to finish.

As usual, the photos do not do justice. Ranjith commented on Friday..."hey, Julie, I need to give you a photography lesson...your New Year's food looked great, but the close-ups were terrible." But if I got serious about the photography I guess I would have to transform this into an only-food blog rather than a technology and food blog and that...would be really strange! Because OBVIOUSLY technology should be paired with food.

Anyway, here's Marcella's gnocci recipe - gotta share this one. Enjoy!
Ingredients:
1 lb fresh spinach or 1 10-ounce package frozen leaf spinach, thawed (Euro readers, 10 ounces = 283 grams, I used frozen and it was just fine)
2 Tablespoons butter
1 Tablespoon onion chopped very fine
2 Tablespoons chopped prosciutto or boiled unsmoked ham (I left this out - and didn't miss it.)
Salt
3/4 cup fresh ricotta cheese
2/3 cup all-purpose flour (I think i ended up using over a cup - I kept adding - just to get it to a reasonably solid consistency...)
2 egg yolks
1 cup freshly grated parmigiano-reggiano cheese
Whole nutmeg (I cheated - put in a pinch of pre-ground)

1) Cook the spinach in a covered pan with salt (VERY IMPORTANT) for about 5 minutes (I did about 3...) Drain it and squeeze all the moisure out of it, chop it coarsely (here's where i messed up - I didn't squeeze out enough water...but just resulted in adding more flour, so ok in the end...)

2) Saute the butter and onion in a small skillet until it is pale gold, then add the chopped ham. Cook for a few seconds. Add the chopped spinach and some salt and cook for 5 minutes, stirring frequently. Take off the heat and let cool.

3) In a bowl, combine the spinach mixture, the flour and ricotta and stir. Add the egg yolks, grated Parmesan, and a grating of nutmeg (about 1/8 teaspoon) and mix with a spoon. Taste and correct for salt.

4) Make small pellets of the mixture, shaping them quickly by rolling them in the palm of your hand. Ideally they should be no bigger than 1/2 inch across, but if you find it troublesome to make them that small, you can try for 3/4 inch. If the mixture sticks to your palms (IT DOES), dust your hands lightly with flour. (I tried the flour, but that did not help. So instead, I wet my hands with water and then rolled them - and THAT WORKED).

5) Drop the gnocci, a few at a time (about a dozen or so) into boiling SALTED water. Cook them for about 3 minutes - or for about a minute or two after they return to the surface of the water. Remove with a slotted spoon.

Serve on a platter covered with your sauce of choice and sprinkle liberally with Parmesan cheese.

Yum.

Bavarian Breakfast

To say goodbye to our guests this morning we fed them a traditional Bavarian breakfast: Weiss Beer, Pretzles, Weisswurst, and sweet mustard. Gerd REALLY enjoyed it. Here are the before and after photos - before two beers and around 3 weisswurst and....after.

Snow is Back

And spent the day at the lake. Thankfully in warm saunas for a good
portion of the day. Where i was not allowed to take photos...

...although I took ONE. A very decent one where no naked bodies can be seen. From the upstairs floor of the facility you can look out onto the lake. There were a whole variety of saunas to visit - even a crazy one outside on the lake. They had transformed a boat into a sauna. So you go sit in it and it is set to 90 degrees. The boat rocks back and forth in the waves as you sit there in sweat. Afterwards a lot of people jump in the lake, but I was not that brave...

Before going into the place, we walked around Tegernsee a bit freezing our butts off in order to REALLY want to go into the sauna.

Feeding our Brains

In order to distract ourselves yesterday from our somewhat sore heads and flagging energy, we headed over to the museum district to check out the new Museum Brandhorst and afterwards to the Pinakothek der Moderne, where we spent an hour looking through the product design galleries.

The first photo is a picture of an electric water boiler from France, made at the turn of the century. Looks a bit different than the one that I received as a Christmas present this year. ;-)

I liked the BMW motorcycle from 1928 - somehow a cross between a bicycle and a motorbike.

The green room was interesting - a room brightly lit with these green lights. Your eyes play a trick on you when you are inside of it - the white walls outside look pink when you are standing in the room. But the green light didn't fool the camera...although there is a bit of a pink tinge to the white.

Finally - we called it quits when we saw Gerd and Delphine collapsed on the steps towards the end of the day. ;-)

Headed out for Afghani food last night, which our guests enjoyed a lot.

Today: off for massages and sauna near Tegernsee and then...probably...ethiopian food for dinner.

And then one more day of vacation...ouch.

Happy New Year

We had a nice evening last night with Gerd and Delphine. Started the 6-course southeast asian tasting menu at around 7 and finished at around 10:30. Goal: tasty and attractive food that was not rich but still very enjoyable and which would leave no one too tired to move afterward. Goal accomplished. But...everyone is a little bit slow this morning...effects of champagne and wine. :-)

Today, the plan: museums. Tomorrow: spa/massage.

Cats didn't seem too disturbed by the fireworks last night, but we were surprised that they were so loud and prominent here - I guess we have never been in Munich for New Year's, although that seems almost inconceivable.


1st Course:
Scallop and Mango Spoons with Thai Basil

2nd Course:
Water Pepper Leaf wraps with coconut marmelade

3rd Course:
Banana flower and duck breast salad with star fruit and pomelo

4th Course:
Granny smith apple and lemongrass sorbet

5th Course:
Rice flower and tumeric crepes with lemongrass shrimp

6th Course:
Coconut flan with longan, pomegranate and physalis