You Cook – I Eat Part 2: Supersoup

Supersoup is a nickname that I translated based on my friend’s Szilvi’s nickname for this soup (she dubbed it “miracle soup” but supersoup just sounds so much better in English.) Surprisingly enough, I actually learnt this from my sister. You may ask why that is so surprising, but trust me, you would have no further questions after seeing her “world famous” mashed potatoes. I mean, I love my sister, but mashies from a blender (yes, she actually puts the boiled potatoes in a food processor =/) without milk or nutmeg, or even salt for that matter is something that even the least picky person (my father) can only stare at with disbelief.

I have no idea where she got this recipe from, but I do know that I first saw her make it around the time when she started dating her last boyfriend (who is her husband of ten years or so now ;)) – but having seen some cookery in his family, I highly doubt she learnt it from them.

I’d love to say that it was me that perfected this recipe, but it’s not true. I do believe that this soup was pretty damn unbeatable by the time it first got onto my plate, so I really didn’t have to change anything to make it as delicious as it is. The other interesting fact about it that even avid soup haters can eat truck tons of it. If it so happens that I make it at home, Yuri will usually have 2-3 (or sometimes 4) bowls worth of it – and usually stops only because there’s no more left.

I really like the idea that there’s no tarragon or double cream involved in making this a ragout-like soup. A very similar taste is acquired via the lemon and the sour cream. Supersoup is the base pillar of all simplicity, there’s no roux involved, there’s no complicated tricks, and there’s also no high calorie impact ingredients. Without further ado, here are the ingredients for 2 people:

• 1 chicken breast cut into bite-sized pieces
• 250 g mushrooms
• 100 g rice
• 300 ml sour cream
• 2 slices of lemon
• Thyme (I prefer fresh but dried thyme also does the job perfectly fine)
• Salt / pepper
• Water
• About 2-3 tbsp oil (olive oil is not a good choice for this.)

First, throw the chicken in a pan, add salt to it and sautee it till golden brown. Take it out of the pan and put it into a cooking pot. Meanwhile, put the mushrooms into the same pan and sautee them until done (it’s important that all the juices come out of the mushrooms before they’re being put in the actual soup, otherwise they become too mushy.) Once the mushrooms are done, add them to the chicken and place the pot onto the stove. On high temperature, stir them well together and add the rice. Right before the rice would start sticking to the pot, add the water, some extra salt, the thyme, and the two slices of lemon.

The cooking time of super soup is rather short, since the chicken and the mushrooms are already done, so basically, the soup only needs to simmer on medium temperature until the rice gets done. Once the rice is soft, add the sour cream and stir well. I usually let the soup simmer for a few more minutes before I serve it so that the sour cream becomes nice and consistent within the soup (I dislike chunks of cream in my food.) Scoop the soup into a bowl, grind some pepper on top, and you’re ready to go.

Et voila :)

Making the most of your Leftovers – Chicken Skewers

It’s been almost two weeks since I posted something and it makes me feel bad. The reason for this is quite simple, it’s target setting period at work and there’s crap tons to do. Apologies, and here’s something to make up for it.

Unfortunately, this time around I have no funny stories or long long memories about making this dish, or how I learnt it, but I am sure the few people that read this won’t mind, since the previous posts were always fifteen times longer than I had originally anticipated. I am also trying to (not so) secretly please Kenny and post something without beef.

So it was one of those grey Sundays and I realised that I had plans with everything I had bought the day before. However, we were hungry, and I didn’t particularly feel like ordering or eating out (Sunday is my greasy hair and comfy clothes day) so I had to come up with something.

On top of everything else, the sausage I bought in Hungary last time I was home was quickly approaching its best before date, and since I feared it was going to go off, I had to find a use for it. So I took a closer look in the fridge and around the kitchen trying to find out what I can make for dinner, and found the following:

• 1 chicken breast
  
• 4 mushrooms
  
• Sliced bacon
  
• The aforementioned sausage
  
• Onions
  
• Potatoes and salad material vegetables as sidedish

I also realised that I still had quite a few of the bamboo skewer sticks lying around from when I bought them last year to try something out – so the solution was pretty easy. Chop-chop, stab-stab, bake and ready. The bamboo sticks of course have to be drenched in water for a couple of hours beforehand (and I still end up with a few spikes in my fingers while putting them together…) but other than that, this food is as low effort as possible.

The only thing you need to pay attention to when putting the skewers together is that you don’t place the high flavour and/or fat value items next to each but try to put them next to the low flavour/fat value items. This means, the sausage will never get next to the bacon and the mushrooms / chicken / onion sequence has to be broken by either a slice of sausage or bacon.

Here’s what the skewers looked like when I was done composing them:

And here is the glorious end result: :)

It also needs to be said that since the bacon and the sausage are by default salty, you really needn’t add extra salt to the chicken, otherwise the end result will be close to inedible. I have tried this before by adding “grilled meat” spice mix to the meat (although I generally dislike spice mixtures because of all the extra crap they add to it which they don’t want you to know about) but it works for me much better without the extra spice.

A Giant Slap to Haute Cuisine – Noodles with Cabbage

So, after a busy weekend of cooking everything that was left in the fridge, and more, I finally have time once again to post something. I guess this is truly one of those recipes that

a./ are impossible to mess up

b./ require low effort

c./ get done in no time

I have already complained about the fact that I have rather interesting office hours (this means anywhere between 9 and 14 hours a day) – I am also very reluctant to buy fast food, especially so late in the evening. Mind you, I am not going to lie, I do go to the Turkish in the corner every once in a while, and yes, McD too once a month, or every two months, but whenever possible, I try not to do fast food or order from a home delivery service (especially not after last time’s overcooked penne with the super salty Napoletana sauce, which was basically uneatable.) So, yesterday, I had one of those funny hour office days again, and have decided that it’s no use warming up leftover stuff from the weekend (too heavy) – too late to get stuff from the Turkish, and as an extra, I still had some cabbage in the freezer from last time.

Yes, I know I gave myself away… it does happen from time to time that I cook in advance and just put stuff in the freezer. Cabbage is actually perfect for this. So I took it out, cooked some noodles, and ta ta, it was done!

Of course, I will explain how to prepare it, however, I felt the need to share why there’s not going to be imagery about the raw ingredients.

Noodles with cabbage takes me back to my childhood – it was a very popular dish at school canteens and also a much dreaded course for kids, as it featured a “K” vegetable, which most kids severely dislike.

“K” and “B” vegetables is a Hungarian term, or at least something that has been frequently used in my family – rumour has it that any vegetable whose name (in Hungarian) starts with a K or a B will have a horrendous smell while being cooked, and a unique (I’m being politically correct here) taste once it’s done. The following vegetables belong to this category:

• Cabbage (red as well, but especially white)
• Broccoli
• Cauliflower
• Brussels sprouts
• Savoy cabbage
• Potato
• Kohlrabi
• Beans
• Peas
• Chinese cabbage (or Bak Choi)

Is there something like this existing in English? I wonder…

But anyway, Mondays and Wednesdays were typically the noodle dish days in the canteen. They’d take the same kind of noodles (similar to tagliatelle, except it was cut short) and cook them completely tender in very salty water (no comment) and then they’d put something on top – grits and marmelade, potatoes, poppy seeds, curd cheese, walnuts, or cabbage. I despised this at school (since salty noodles + sweet toppings are disgusting in my opinion and especially the curd cheese noodles were the height of culinary experience with cooked pork skin (which they referred to as bacon) mixed in with the noodles and SUGAR on top of the curd cheese…) and I never quite recovered. Until this very day, I can’t process any of the sweet noodle types and I really don’t have fond memories of the school canteen because of these. I think this is also the reason why I still hate poppy seeds (unless they’re baked onto the top of bread) and don’t particularly like walnuts either.

I guess it’s a small miracle that I like the cabbage version but it also has to do something with the fact that my mom obviously had a totally different approach. Basically, there are four ways to eat noodles with cabbage.

a./ by itself with nothing on top

b./ with sugar

c./ with pepper

d./ with pepper and sugar

Of course, the canteen never gave an option and they always smacked a spoonful of sugar on top (and had no pepper added to the cabbage at all) – but at home, we had all the goodies, so we could just choose how we wanted it. So when I got older, I just took my mom’s approach to it, and eventually totally skipped the sugar on top.

Enough small talk – let’s see how it’s actually made. You take a small white cabbage and grate it – you have to grate it with the smallest holes on the grater. This usually takes a long time, so I usually end up asking Yuri to do it, as he has the raw power (and patience) that I don’t. I guess I could also chop it up in one of those universal blenders/chopping machines, and maybe I will in the future, but this time, it was all Yuri’s work. Once the cabbage has been grated, you add salt to it and leave it lying around for a while. Eventually (I usually give it an hour or so) squeeze the juices out of it and then the cooking process can begin.

Heat some oil and caramelise some sugar in it (I can’t give exact measures, I’d say about 2 tbsp of sugar for half a cabbage, but if it’s not sweet enough, you can always add more) and put the cabbage in it. Stir it continuously to make sure the caramel doesn’t stick together into huge inedible sugar balls, and after about 10-15 minutes, it’s ready – taste it and add salt and/or sugar to taste. I usually add black pepper to it at this point, because it’s just lovely.

In the meantime, cook the noodles. In Hungary, we usually use traditional square-shaped noodles for this (it’s referred to as “cube noodles” if translated directly, although the shape is obviously nothing like an actual cube :)) but since I couldn’t get those in Switzerland, I bought some fettuccine (alla casiligna), which was cut short and was certainly much thicker than what I’m used to.

Once the noodles are done cooking, stir them very thoroughly into the cabbage, to make sure that it’s evenly distributed and there you are, the dinner’s done.

Oh, by the way, I found this nifty feature on my camera called "FOOD MODE" - so now I won't have to take pictures as if I were taking close-ups from flowers anymore. Granted, this is not going to turn me into a new Annie Leibovitz or Stéphane Sednaoui but you might see a slight increase in image quality. :)

How Football Fever Inspired the Sandwich of Awesomeness

You may ask why I say “cookery” and then proceed to post about a sandwich as my very first recipe. Well, it’s because my best friend Szilvi has been drooling over this sandwich for quite a while now and I thought I’d show her what it actually looks like. But here’s how I came to the idea of making this at home, and how it evolved from a simple idea into the most amazing sandwich I’ve ever eaten. (On a side-note – I generally don’t like sandwiches, and also avoid bakery products. Maybe a bad childhood experience, I don’t know.)

A couple of months ago, the whole of Switzerland was in complete football fever. Yes, football, not soccer. Soccer is what Americans call it, we, the rest of the world refer to the sport as football, because, well… that’s what it is. The country co-hosted the European Championships with Austria, and had truck tons of tourists attending, which also meant that the Swiss service industry, including the restaurants, bars, and even the grocery stores had to come up with new ideas, inspired by football.

My guess is, as the Austrians probably grabbed every single idea that is connected to the Wiener Schnitzel, given it’s one of their national dishes (although, I hate to break this to you Austria, it’s actually of Italian origin, boooo) – the Swiss also had to think of some things that they can use as their football food. Now, I highly doubt that the Berner Rösti can be stuffed into a bun, nor can a Fondue Chinoise so, they thought of other things, and for this, I shall be eternally grateful.

One day, I had some stuff to do around lunch time, so I hopped out to the nearby Migros (more about the Migros later) to grab a sandwich. Of course, it was super crowded, especially around the area where you could get the sandwiches and canapés, but it still beat the canteen in time efficiency. I noticed that they had ”Fussball EM” Specials, which were basically sandwiches created for the occasion. And there it was – I swear it was one of those movie moments where you can see Arthur grabbing the Excalibur, or finding the Holy Grail – I totally picture it with the little sparklies around it, and angels singing in the background. The sandwich.

It was quite simple actually – they took a Tomatenbrot (which is basically a Focaccia with dried tomato pieces in it, and tomato sauce and oregano on top) – cut it in half, put some crème fraîche onto one side and some pimento sauce onto the other, stuffed baked courgette, cheese and dried tomatoes in it, and off you go. I bought two. Because it’s light, right? Well, after having the first, other than the fact that it was a rather intensive experience in taste, I also felt totally full. I gave the second one to Yuri (an avid vegetable hater) and to my greatest surprise, he actually loved it, too. This is when I realised that this sandwich was a keeper, and decided to go back every day to buy some more for lunch. But... the Migros thought otherwise and they took it off their selection after a week and replaced it with some not-so-nice salami/green pesto/rocket salad crap. :( Nonetheless, since I had all the ingredients down, I decided to recreate it. I changed a couple of bits and pieces (I use younger cheese and added ham, and skipped the pimento) – but here it goes, ingredients and everything for 4 sandwiches, which is more than enough for two very hungry people.

• 2 pcs tomato bread (I either buy this, or cheat and make my own focaccia)
• 2 slices of young cheese (I used Fol Épi for it, but I’m pretty sure it works with say Gruyere or Trappista as well, if you’re Hungarian) per sandwich, if you’re a cheese lover, if not, one slice will do perfectly.
• 2-3 slices of Black Forest ham per sandwich (I think my dad will hate me forever for having such easy access to the original Schwarzwaldschinken since I live here, and my God he’s right... the ham is just exquisite!)
• 1 small courgette, sliced thin
• 4-5 sundried tomatoes per sandwich
• 1 tbsp sour cream per sandwich (I use sour cream from the Coop, because it’s pretty much the best you can get around here.) I chose sour cream instead of crème fraîche for the soury taste and simply because crème fraîche is too heavy for me, especially since the tomatoes are oily by default.

Here’s a picture of the ingredients:

So, I split the breads in two and then sliced them through the middle, and meanwhile, started grilling the courgettes on the stove (obviously in a pan :p) – spread sour cream on one side and put the dried tomatoes on the other. I covered the tomatoes with the ham and the cheese, and then just waited till the courgettes were ready. I placed the hot courgettes on the cheese, and closed the sandwich, and voilà, you have your dinner ready!

This is what the sandwich looked like before I closed it:

And this is the end result:

I was quite happy with it – maybe the pictures give at least a slight view of how great it was, despite the fact that I’m not exactly a genius photographer.