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 :)

So… What have I Learnt in the last few Weeks?

Other than the fact that for some reason, I find it difficult to copy my pictures from the camera to my machine, which also explains why there haven’t been any posts for almost a month, I have had a rather interesting time during the last couple of weeks. Yes, I have also cooked bazillions of things, including lentils, pea stew, lasagne, meat balls Hungarian style, various soups, falafel, etc. etc. – I’ve been a bit behind as far as writing posts is concerned.

These are some of the things that I learnt while being inactive (at least as far as blogging is concerned):

• Ground cumin (unlike its non-ground counterpart) is not the creation of Satan as a part of his evil master plan to take over and conquer the world.
• Tarragon, however, is.
• Juniper berries are very nice in gravy, even if it’s not venison you’re having the gravy with.
• It is a sad fact that steaks cannot only be eaten super well done. They are actually quite tasty when they’re only medium. I stand corrected. (It’s not that I’d never tried medium steaks before… it’s more the fact that either the meat or the cook was very bad, because I just had this feeling of immense gagging as soon as I cut into my steak. It also didn’t help that they served me a medium steak when I ordered well done. However, I actually took the courage to order a medium steak the other day and it was quite nice. QUITE.)
• There is still a hope for Hungarian culinary art. By this, I mean that you can actually cook good Hungarian food without the 9 litres of compulsory fat, and the 15 kilos of onions.
• Not every restaurant taking part in Torkos Csütörtök is an epic fail. The one we chose was actually really really good. Really. (More about this later, perhaps…)
• It is close to impossible to get non-fresh coriander in Zürich. I was looking for it for 3 days, went to approximately 9 stores, no joy.
• I am an obsessive compulsive buyer of cook books. I bought six cookbooks during a 5 minute visit to the post office (no comment.) I don’t have bookshelves, so my entire apartment has various cook books lying around.
• As time passes, I get the feeling that I’m going to die a horrible death if I don’t make a stew or casserole anytime soon.

P.S.: a new post is finally done. Just need to wait for the images to transfer to this machine from the PC at home.

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.

“You Cook – I Eat” Part 1 – Spaghetti Bolognese al Forno

“You cook – I eat” is a long standing agreement between me and Yuri, and it goes back to the beginning days of him moving in with me. From the very beginning, I had been pestering him with asking him to help me find out what the heck it is that I want to cook during the weekend, and what kind of things he wouldn’t mind having during the week, so that I could do the shopping accordingly. The answer was always “I don’t know” or “I don’t care,” and it frustrated me endlessly after a few weeks, which is when he came up with the term. This basically frees him up from the responsibility of helping me find out what the heck I should be making – as he’s fine with anything, because I’ll make it so well anyways. He also knew that I wasn’t going to go shop for the things he utterly despises just to spite him, because the mother in me always wants to make sure that everyone around me is well fed.

When I say “you cook – I eat” nowadays, I usually refer to the things that he loves the most from my recipes, and this one’s a prime example for that. There are of course others, and some of them are actually waiting to be posted – I promise I’ll get to it someday.

My love for spaghetti Bolognese comes from when I was a little child. I already mentioned that it went under the name of “cat stew” in my family, which is a reference of the silly stereotypes that Italians eat cat meat. It is not a generally well known stereotype and as such, the term did cause some funny moments in my family’s history. One day my aunt was taking my cousin home from school and they got onto the super busy underground. My cousin had this really low and loud voice for a child, so when he turned to my aunt and asked “Mom, when are you making cat stew for dinner again?” the entire car heard it. Needless to say, my aunt got approximately 300 killer looks, and people swiftly moved away from near them. So there she stood with a 6 year old child in the middle of the car with nobody around her in a 2 metre radius, all because of the silly cat stew. I think that’s pretty funny. :p

I am not going to give tons of details of how my mom makes spaghetti, but let it be said that she actually never buys ground beef for it – nor does she grind the meat at all. She will spend about half an hour cutting the beef into miniscule cubes and only then can the cooking begin. When I was a kid, I used to eat Bolognese with ketchup on top (I am really ashamed of this now) and I didn’t know better until I was 16 and went to Canada. The lady I stayed with in Canada decided to make Bolognese one day, and when I asked for ketchup to go with it, she downright refused and said that ketchup probably ruins the entire taste, and insisted that I try without. And how right she was!! I’d like to mention at this point that my father still puts ketchup on his spaghetti, and every time I am there to witness it, I argue with him about it. But oh well, old habits die hard. :)

I think the key to a good Bolognese is to not be afraid of investing time into cooking it long enough. It usually takes me 3-4 hours to be done, and I really don’t regret that I’m taking my time. Over the course of years, I have changed many things in the original recipe that I took from my mom (i.e. I try to completely avoid ketchup when making the sauce, and have also significantly reduced the amount of spices and salt that I used up until a couple of years ago) and I think it has evolved into something really exquisite by now.

I also use mushrooms (although standard Bolognese doesn’t have that) and fresh herbs, especially since I moved to Switzerland. Having said that, I have also found it reasonably difficult to find good enough meat here for Bolognese. The ground beef that you buy at the store has a horrible after-taste, which just won’t go away with cooking, and until recently, I just simply couldn’t find meat that was the quality that I needed. It was either not juicy enough (the Swiss like to remove every single trace of fat from the meat, which is normally great, but not when you’re trying to make something that needs not totally lean meat.) I buy the meat for the sauce in either slices or as a single piece nowadays, luckily I managed to find an acceptable quality after all these months of being here.

So without further ado, here’s the recipe and the ingredients – this does serve 6-8 people, depending how hungry they are:

• A few slices of bacon (cut into small pieces)
  
• 2 big onions (finely chopped)
  
• 4-6 cloves of garlic depending on the size of the clove (crushed)
  
• 1 kilo of ground beef
  
• 500g mushrooms (thinly sliced)
  
• 2 carrots (grated)
  
• 1 turnip (grated) (If you have no access to turnip, you can use half a celery)
• 500 ml tomato puree
  
• Fresh marjoram, rosemary, thyme, oregano and basil (finely chopped)
  
• Salt, sugar (to taste)
  
• Spaghetti
  
• Tons of cheese (grated)

In a large pan, sautée the bacon until golden brown. Add the onions to it and crush the garlic on top of the bacon-onion mixture. Stir carefully and add the marjoram, the rosemary and the oregano. Stir for another half a minute, turn the stove on to high temperature and add the meat. This is when you start stirring like crazy and stabbing the meat (that just gave me a very bad mental image :)) to make sure that it mixes well with the onion-herb mix and that it actually falls into crumbs rather than stick together in a huge patty. Once the meat has browned and is crumby enough, stir the mushrooms into the mix, put the lid onto the pan and leave them there for about 5 minutes.

After about 5 minutes, the mushrooms will have released enough juices and reduced in size to be ready for the tomato puree. Pour the puree into the pan (obviously after removing the lid, no Dutch jokes today :p) and stir everything well together. At this point, you can do a preliminary taste check and add salt and sugar, however, since carrots and turnip will be added to the mix, they’re going to significantly change the taste of the dish.

Add the carrots and the turnip, and if you think the sauce is too thick, add some water. Now is the time to leave the kitchen and do something else for the next two hours. Of course, you can check on the sauce every once in a while (I’m an obsessive compulsive taster, I have to taste the food every half an hour to check whether anything else needs to be added.) After about 2 hours, you can be sure that even the grated turnip is soft, moreover completely disappeared in the sauce, you can now add the thyme and the basil, alongside the salt and sugar, if necessary.

In the meantime, cook the spaghetti (al dente, otherwise it’s going to turn into a big mushy mess while being baked.) – and make sure you keep to the basic rules, fools (as Mr. T would say) – do not put oil into the cooking water, and for god’s sakes don’t rinse them in cold water when done aaaaahhhhhhhhhh!!! When the spaghetti is done, get a decently sized porcelain/glass baking dish (I have no idea what these are called in English, I don’t even know what they’re called in Hungarian.) and put a layer of noodles onto the bottom. Add a layer of the sauce on top (I usually make sure that it’s evenly spread all across the spaghetti, and then I mix the pasta with the sauce.) – continue until you run out of pasta.

Put the bazillion tons of cheese onto the top (I usually use standard mozzarella, or gratin mix) and put it into the oven at 250 degrees for about 10 minutes, which is when the cheese turns golden brown and crunchy on top, and you’re good to go!

Needless to say, serving can be quite tricky, I usually end up happy if I only mess up the first plate. :)

These are the terms that Wordle found interesting in this blog.

Clickie for a bigger image! :)

How other People’s Friends Influence your Life

My father told me on Friday that a very good friend of my sister who happened to be English passed away earlier on last week. Normally I really don’t like to write about my private life, but I can’t really pass by this without saying anything. Not because I’m mourning, because, well, he wasn’t my friend, we didn’t even get along until I became much older. I think they befriended each other when I was about 10 – and well, my English wasn’t particularly good at that point. :p

When I got older and my English got better, I think Dave (because this was his name) could not believe that someone like me could be the sister of someone like my sister. Our characters are very different, and obviously his preference lay in my sister’s character, so we spent most of the time ignoring each other. And when not, it was usually him making provocative remarks (I’m guessing this was to help me see my sister’s end of the story better,) which I then shrugged off or responded to the way I felt appropriate.

What I found very interesting about him was that I never heard about him work – I know he had a job and that he was successful, so successful that he retired early, but I have no clue what he had been doing. I also don’t remember his last name (shame on me) – but I do remember several other things.

He was a handyman – he built and restored furniture, he had this old English house that he pimped out pretty nicely, etc. etc. He also traveled a lot, and if I am not mistaken, also for the purpose of charity work. (I’m going to check with my sister about this as I’m not sure this is true.) He was a very good photographer and a very keen one too – I think this was one of the things that really bothered me when I was a teenager – I couldn’t quite understand why you’d want to take pictures of everything and everyone. (Let it be said right here - he took one of the best portraits ever of my grandmother and my sister together (and also separately.) I think he really had talent for photography, good for him. :p)

In the year 2000, while I was living in the Netherlands (I didn’t dare to write Holland in case any Dutch person reads this and yells my head off since Friesland is not in Holland :p) – my sister and her then brand new husband took a year off to live with Dave in the UK. And since my sister celebrated a nice round birthday in 2000 (not sure she’d like me to tell how old she is) – Dave was nice enough to invite my whole family to stay in his house for a while. The house was very nice (as I already pointed out) but what amazed me the most, and this is the one thing I had absolutely no idea about – he was quite an excellent cook.

And when I say excellent cook, I don’t mean it in a fish & chips or penne with tomato sauce way. He made 2-3 course dinners that suited about 15 people every night, and it looked to me like he was leading a traditional English kitchen. I must admit that Dave single handedly restored my faith in English cuisine - don’t laugh, it actually exists beyond the Woolton Pie and the Cornish Pasty or however you spell it.

He was a great inspiration to me in some aspects. I know for one that his recipe allowed me to make a mean Shepherd’s Pie. Mmm… that was actually quite amazing, even though I expected it to fail. He also put new ideas in my head about how to make roasts. He’d either marinade his roast in treacle or stick cloves into the meat. I tried both, they were both really tasty. He also cooked carrots in orange juice with fresh ginger added – maybe this wasn’t his invention, maybe this is totally common, but I’d never had it before, so I’m obviously always going to connect this to him.

Unfortunately, I will probably never find out what exactly he put into that one pork stew (casserole, more like) that gave it its spicy hot taste. I am pretty sure it wasn’t chili peppers, or cayenne pepper, but it was so good, even for a person that doesn’t like spicy food (me) that I will never forget it.

So, I guess this is my way of saying thanks to a guy that was probably a better person that I ever credited him (and vice versa) – I know for a fact that he touched many people’s lives, although possibly not through his cooking, which was what touched mine.

So long Dave – safe travels.

Slacker Extreme

I know, it's only been two weeks and I already started slacking. This is inexcusable.

I have been a busy bee in and outside the kitchen, to be honest, and I've also been heavily documenting everything I've done. But to write all the posts... I wish I were a millionaire so I could just take the time and do nothing but the things that I actually find exciting. :)

I'll try harder from now on.