Advent

And so the year is slowly coming to an end and the days here are getting shorter and shorter. Not to mention that it is getting COLD. As I always say, "I come from the tropics, I don't like this weather", but there are some advantages to the cold, grey weather in Germany and one of those is the ability to celebrate advent.

In Germany advent goes on for at least 4 weeks and starts 4 Sunday's before Christmas. The first thing that you have to do is get yourself an "adventskranz" (advents wreath). This year I made one using some of the evergreen that our landlord chopped down a few days before the first advent.

Then once December the first comes around you have to have an "Adventskalendar" (advents calender). Easier said than done. When I first got to Germany I thought that this was a great idea and so I made one for my daughters. Now every year I have to come up with 24 (times 2) gifts to put in the calendar. Which reminds me that after tomorrow their calendar is empty so I'd better get on with it! If only they would agree to a shop bought Adventskalendar, so much cheaper and less work!

An angel washing peg to hold up the presents

On the 6th of December St Nikolaus arrives leaving the children chocolates, sweets and presents. Hmmm more presents? Yes! I've gotten mine used to getting just sweets. Every year they get a large chocolate Santa put in their stocking. Okay, it's supposed to be put in a boot, but then what am I going to do with the stockings that I embroidered when we were in the USA!

Chocolate Santa's

Well Nikolaus has come and gone and we still have to buy the kids presents for Christmas. It's a stressful time for the present buyer i.e. me! But I get my kick out of it because Advent means that I can bake to my hearts content and distribute it to all and sundry.

The first advent we were supposed to celebrate at a friends but they fell sick :( That meant I was left with a huge cheesecake and only 4 people to eat it. So I decided, what the heck, lets just have it for dinner together with some lime cookies, macaroons and pancakes. Here is our spread:

Table with advent calendar in the background

Vanilla Chocolate Cheesecake

Lime Meltaways

Macaroons

Snowflake Pancakes

The second advent came around and my girls decided they wanted to make biscuits. My youngest received some cookie cutters and a recipe for performing with the Bochum Symphony Orchestra. So these just had to be used. I decided to try the recipe out and it turned out to be perfect. I've been looking for the perfect recipe to use with cookie cutters for years and now I've found it. I'll share it with you some time soon.

But then I had some pastry left so I tried out a new cake. It's a very German type of cake and I topped it with frozen blueberries, the only berries I had at hand. It turned out delicious and I'm going to try making it with caramelized apples next. I'll be sure to take lots of pictures and post them.

So that's all I wanted to do today, share some of our yummy advent Sunday tea's. I hope you all have a very warm and bright Adventzeit and that those of you celebrating Christmas have a wonderful time.

Lemon Slices

I don't know why I bought a heap of lemons, but I did and so I had to find some way to use them up. I wanted to make a lemon meringue pie but it was just a bit too damp for it and there wasn't really anyone around to eat it. So I settled for some lemon slices from my Martha Stewart holiday cookie book. I've never tried them before and they turned out super delicious. The recipe says they last 2 days in the fridge but mine are still good a week on.

Ingredients:

Crust
	6 oz	Cold butter
	1 3/4 cups	Flour
	3/4 cups	Sugar (fine)
	3/4 tsp.	Salt
Filling
	4 lrg.	Eggs, lightly beaten
	1 1/3 cups	Sugar
	3 tbsp.	Flour
	1/4 tsp.	Salt
	3/4 cup	Fresh lemon juice
	1/4 cup	Milk
	Icing sugar, for dusting

Method:

I made the crust just like all my other crusts, by hand! First I cut up the butter into little pieces and then added it to the flour and the salt. 

I left the sugar until the end because I wasn't looking forward to rubbing sugar between my fingers. I guess in retrospect my fingers would have been well exfoliated!

Once I had my breadcrumbs I added the sugar and mixed it well. 

For this recipe it is important that you have the correct sized dish because the filling is liquidy before it is baked and you will have a big mess if you pour it into a shallow dish. I used a 9 by 13 inch cake tray which I lined with parchment paper. 

Then, with my hands, I pressed the mixture into my baking tray and then ... popped the crust into the FREEZER for 15 minutes. It might be prudent to check if you have space in the freezer before you start. If you're experiencing winter, then just throw it out on the balcony or the windowsill. 

Time for the oven to go on and the filling to be made. I set my oven to 160 C because I use a fan oven, with a regular oven I believe it is 180 C or 350 F. 

The filling is also relatively easy. The worst part is squeezing the lemon! I needed 3 1/2 large lemons to get 3/4 cup. I'm assuming that you could use lime juice too, (I always substituted lime juice for lemon when I'm cooking in Sri Lanka) although I think you'd need quite a few limes. Since limes tend to be more citric than lemons you might also want to consider using less than 3/4 cups. And I just had a brain wave, why not use any citrus fruit. I'm sure it would work with orange, grapefruit, etc.

Then I hand whisked the eggs, sugar, flour and salt together.

Stirred in the lemon juice and milk and voila! The filling was done. Really simple. In fact a great recipe for those little chef's in your house. Up until now there were no sharp utensils and no heat involved. I think I'm going to add this to my daughters recipe book.

The pastry was now ready and so was the oven so I popped it in and baked it for around 18 - 20 minutes. As you can see it was getting a bit brown in places when I took it out. Once you get this thing out of the oven you need to reduce the heat by about 10 C (25 F) so that the oven is ready to cook the lemon filling.

Onto this hot pastry, I poured my lemon filling and then carefully put it back in the oven for around 18 minutes. At around 18 minutes the filling was set and so I took the thing out and let it cool for a bit. Then, very carefully I tried to take the whole slab out of the pan. I was really freaking out at this point because I was sure it was going to break. But it didn't! I think that if I hadn't pressed in the dough so well at the beginning that it may well have cracked.

I left it on a wire rack to cool and then once it was cool cut it into rectangles. I don't remember how many I got out of it. You can cut them smaller if you are serving them together with a lot of other things and larger if they are being served by themselves. Use a really sharp knife to cut them because the bottom is crispy. Finally I dusted the squares with icing sugar. I did this by putting the icing sugar in a sieve and then shaking it over the squares. It didn't last long though. The squares are rather damp and absorb the sugar almost immediately so it wasn't pretty for long. If you are serving them for a special occasion (or photographing them!) I would recommend sprinkling them just before you serve them.

Find your Chef friendly version here!

Scotch Crispies

My goodness the last time I made these sweet treats must have been around 20 years ago! I discovered them in an old Sri Lankan exercise book of mine. And just to prove how old this book is, it has 120 pages and cost just 15 rupees! Now what can you buy for 15 rupees nowadays? A Dot toffee maybe???

I picked to make these because I needed to put together something simple and quick to take to a friends place for tea and I was not in a cake mood. Turned out to be a good idea because my kids really like these things (and they are not too unhealthy).

Makes 16 to 20 pieces; Preparation time 1 hour (15 mixing, 45 baking)

Ingredients:

2 oz	Self-raising flour
or
2 oz Plain flour + 1/2 tsp baking powder
8 oz	Rolled oats
1/4 tsp.	Salt
1/2 tsp.	Baking soda
4 oz	Butter (or margarine)
4 tbsp.	Black treacle
2 oz	Sugar

Method:

Set your oven to 150 C (300 F).

This is an easy peasy recipe. It's great if you have a little cook in the house. My little cooks were all occupied making loom bands for their aunts, uncles and cousins for Christmas. Not a bad thing, they have a list of over 20 people, it's going to take a while!

So my first step was to put a pan on the cooker and drop in the butter, "black treacle" and sugar. So the "black treacle" makes this sweet a very Scottish thing but I'm not going for Scottish, I'm going for "unique"! That means instead of 4 tbsp. of Scottish stuff I put in 2 tbsp. of Goldsaft (some kind of fruit molasses) and 2 tbsp. of Kittul Pani (Sri Lankan honey from the Kittul tree). I know I've made it with 100% Sri Lankan honey and I'm guessing bees honey would work too. You just have to figure out how you want it to taste. The Goldsaft is nice and dark but it is way too strong for my taste that's why I only used half the amount and made up the rest with the Sri Lankan treacle.

Impatiently I put my cooker on high heat until the butter was melted (I stirred it all the time) and then reduced the heat to medium to dissolve the sugar. I kept stirring the thing so that the sugar dissolved quicker and because I was worried that the butter might burn. This step doesn't take too long and it's not an exact science so if the sugar does not dissolve 100% don't worry too much.

I took it off the heat and set it aside. My recipe says to let it cool but I don't have too much patience for that. At least I let it stand while I mixed the other ingredients. Actually that would be all of the other ingredients: I measured them all out into one big bowl and then stirred them up.

Since I was supposed to let the butter/sugar mixture cool I took the time to line my baking sheet with parchment paper. You could also butter the tin. As per my recipe I used a 9" by 11" tin. Turns out that I really should have used an 8" by 8" but it wasn't too tragic as you will see in a bit.

Next I dumped the flour/oat mixture into the butter/sugar pan and stirred it until it was well combined. Then this went into the baking tray.

Now you could use the back of a spoon to press the mixture into the pan but a clean hand works much better. The result is a nicely compressed crispy!

The thing went in the oven for 45 minutes. As soon as it comes out cut it into pieces. Later it will be too hard. Then let it cool.

Okay it can be, and was, eaten hot but then it is not crunchy. Let it cool before storing it else it will get soggy. And then enjoy with a hot cup of tea!

Find your Chef friendly version here!

Half an Hour Vegetarian Spaghetti Bolognese

After I was totally taken over by my blog I went and totally neglected it! I don't think I've been here for a week now. I haven't really cooked anything special either :( I tried making pol (coconut) toffee but that didn't work out. Everything else has been same old, same old.

Yesterday I got to pig out! I took my Asian noodle salad to the chivara pujava and got to eat an awesome Sri Lankan lunch. The salad didn't turn out too well, not something that I would try again, but the rest of the food was delicious! I don't know when I last had gotukola sambol, it tasted so good. Needless to say I am still stuffed a day later.

But this post is not about Sri Lankan food, it's about Italian food and to be specific our all time favourite spaghetti bolognese. My kids absolutely love spaghetti bolognese just like all the other kids. Mine has a bit of twist and contains some vegetables as well. This recipe is one of those keepers. We've been eating it for at least 8 years now. Unknowingly my oldest helped come up with the recipe when she was about 2 years old!

Serves 4; Preparation time: 30 mins.

Ingredients:

250 g	Spaghetti
2 tbsp.	Olive oil
100 g	Vegetarian mincemeat
1/2 cup	Corn
1/2 cup	Peas
500 ml	Pasta sauce (tomato)
1/4 cup	Whipping cream
1/2 cup	Cheese

Method:

Oh this is the simplest of recipes and it gets consumed so fast that I had to wait to post this until I could get a photo of the finished product!

The first thing you need to do is to boil the water for the spaghetti. If you want to speed up the process then boil the water in the kettle and then transfer it to the pot. Another way I speed up this recipe is to use super fine spaghetti (called capellini) that cooks in 3 minutes. With both of these tricks I can actually get the dinner on the table in 20 minutes.

Once the water boils put in the spaghetti, give it a stir to make sure all the past is covered with water, bring water back to the boil and set a timer according to the instructions on the packet.

Now comes the tedious job of making the sauce. Put a heavy bottomed saucepan on the stove and put it on medium high. Once the pot is hot add the olive oil and then the vegetarian mincemeat.

Just a note about the vegetarian mincemeat: There are many types of such "fake" meats out there. Some are fine and some are not. I prefer the fine fake meat because you don't notice the texture so much. In Germany I've found two types. The first is produced by Eyckeler Malt and I'm not a fan of their "granules".

Basically they rot too quickly and frequently grow mold before their expiry date. But once upon a time that was all I could get. Now I buy this type:

The granules are much finer and it's much better packed. The only deal with this one is that it is so tightly vacuum packed that I have to first break up the "meat" with my fingers. And no it doesn't make it any easier when the stuff is warm. I thought that it might fall apart once it was in the pan and heating up, but it doesn't.


Now back to the pot! The vegetarian mince does not have to cook for long. 2 - 3 minutes should do the trick. Next add in the corn, peas and pasta sauce and stir everything up. Bring the sauce to the boil and add in the cream.

The cheese can either be added to the pasta sauce or saved to sprinkle on top. I usually sprinkle Parmesan and any other cheese I put in the pot. If you have any herbs you could add them now. I usually have basil growing near by so I throw a bit of that in, or maybe some dried oregano.  But herbs are not a necessity.


By now the spaghetti is done so drain it, wash it under cold water and then put it into the pot with the sauce and mix it all up. Heat it through and it's ready to be served.

Now I'm really sorry about the lack of pictures but it got consumed to fast and I haven't made it again since.

Eggplant Parmesan

It's been a busy week and I haven't gotten round to cooking much. Okay, I did cook yesterday but that was just caramelized leek quiche and a pumpkin pie. The first I've already posted and the second... well let me say that no one except me enjoyed it :( Unfortunate for the "others" they are stuck with it for dessert until it is over :)
Today was busy too but the eggplant was not going to last much longer. I figured eggplant Parmesan would be a good option to use it up. I search for the recipe on food.com (that's where I first found the recipe). But oh my, our internet connection has been really slow for many websites (thank goodness not blogger) and I could not download the recipe. I had to kind of go at it blind. So what you have here is not a traditional eggplant Parmesan but some modified version of it!

Serves 8; Preparation time: 1 hour 20 minutes

Ingredients

1 kg	Eggplant
	Salt for sprinkling
1	Egg
1 tbsp.	Flour
3 tbsp.	Milk
2 cups	Bread crumbs
	Oil for frying
800 ml	Pasta sauce (tomato)
3 tbsp.	Cream
1/4 cup	Basil leaves (loosely packed)
2 tbsp.	Thyme
125 g	Fresh mozzarella
1/2 cup	Grated Parmesan

Method:

I'd decided on eggplant Parmesan pretty early in the afternoon. So I took a break from my work and sliced the eggplant into slices about 1 cm thick. (Note this is a European eggplant so it's big and fat. If you have the Asian variety I would slice it lengthwise instead of crosswise.) Then I sprinkled it liberally with salt and put it in a colander to rest. I went back to work and literally forgot about it!

Next there was the rush... 15 minutes to move dinner along before running out of the house to pick up my youngest one from Viola lessons. What could I possibly get done in 15 minutes and without a recipe? So I just guessed. I put two skillets on the cooker on high heat (with one I was never going to be done in time). Then I washed the salt off the eggplant and beat up an egg with some flour and milk. I didn't measure anything precisely but I know that I used 2 heaped teaspoons of flour, which is probably the same as in the ingredients above. I must have put about 3 tablespoons of milk in. But you know what, it's not a precise science. I just needed something that would stick the breadcrumbs to the eggplant. Anything that you use to make a cutlet or Chinese roll should do too. I do believe that the egg makes it crunchy so don't leave that out. 

To fry eggplant you need a lot of oil. There is something about eggplant that makes it only taste good if it is doused in oil! So I poured some oil into the pan then one by one patted the eggplant dry with a kitchen towel, to remove some of the dampness so that the batter adheres better, dipped them in the batter then into the breadcrumbs and fried them. When I turned them I added extra oil to the pan else the breadcrumbs would not become golden brown. And I reduced the heat else the breadcrumbs start burning and that is a mess. Here is what they looked like:

It took me 15 minutes to finish all of them and get out of the house. I was in time to pick up my child. Phew!!

Once I got home again I had to put everything together. I first set the oven to 160 Celsius and then got to work. I picked my largest casserole dish and poured in about 300 ml of pasta sauce from a jar. Then I arranged the fried eggplant on top of it. Since I had so much eggplant I put two layers of eggplant. Then I used the cream to clean out the empty pasta sauce jar and poured that on top.

There were some herbs that still had not died! A basil plant, which is on it's last legs and the thyme plant which was bought for the quiche. Actually the thyme has been doing really well since I started watering it. I didn't bother picking off the leaves of the thyme because the stalks were really soft so I just kind of broke it up over the dish. I did the same with the basil leaves (no stalks please!).

Then the rest of the tomato sauce was poured over and evenly distributed. Finally on went the cheese. The fresh Mozzarella was shredded and the Parmesan finely grated. All of this was popped in the oven for around 30 to 40 minutes. At some point I felt like the cheese was not browning quickly enough so I increased the temperature by 10 degrees. This helped speed up the cooking.

And while that all was cooking I managed to clean up the kitchen and make some pasta to eat with it. I took the opportunity to finish the linguine that I used for the half an hour pasta with mushroom dish. You can also eat it with bread or rice and serve a nice green salad with it if you want to be fancy.

Half an Hour Vegetarian Pumpkin and Potato Soup

Well this one was never truly meant to be! My shopping schedule is all off due to the kids vacations and as usual I forgot that on Sunday the shops are closed. Something that I have never quite been able to get used to. The fridge was almost bare except for some butternut squash and a few potatoes. So I decided to throw them "all" together and make a soup. I happened to have half a loaf of bread left over from yesterday and a few cheeses so I figured we could manage.

Oh and I forgot to mention it was day 2 of the girls musical performance so I only had ... yes, you guessed it, 30 minutes to prepare dinner. When we picked up the girls their first question (as always) was "what are we having for dinner?". They were not too happy when I said soup and bread.

I pretty much grew up eating soup. My mum's soup is famous! I remember my aunt, uncle and cousins coming to visit one evening and they joined us for dinner quite sporadically. My mum made soup and my aunt asked my mum what she put in it because it was delicious. The reason that this stuck in my mind was that my mum made the soup from the beans left over from lunch! Actually whatever was left over from lunch went into the pot together with onions, garlic, water and a vegetable cube. It was then boiled, put in the liquidizer and served with bread and butter. Hmmm delicious... if you only knew! Okay that's not to say that my mum didn't make soups from scratch. She did that all the time, with spinach soup being our all time favourite. Always made with organically grown spinach, freshly plucked from the back garden. And in case you are wondering left over soups really do taste good, depending on what was left over of course!

Serves 4; Preparation time 30 mins.

Ingredients:

3 tbsp.	Olive Oil
1 small	Onion
2 cloves	Garlic
500 g	Butternut squash or Pumpkin
250 g	Potatoes
750 ml	Water
1	Vegetable cube
12 stems	Thyme
	Salt & Pepper

Method:

Soup is ultra easy to make. First peel the pumpkin and potatoes and then cube them. The smaller the better because they will cook quicker and be easier to pulverize at the end. Also dice the onion and the garlic.

Then take a large saucepan and heat it on high. Throw in the oil, onions and garlic and stir fry until soft. Around 1-2 minutes. Then add the pumpkin and potatoes and mix it well. Let it fry for 5 minutes or so, stirring to make sure it doesn't stick to the bottom of the pan and burn. 

Add the water, vegetable cube, salt and pepper stir it all up, put the lid on and let it boil. Reduce the heat as necessary. 

Now I have this thyme plant left over from making the caramelized leek quiche so I decided to put some of that in too. But I really could not be bothered with picking the leaves off so I just took around 12 stems of about 7 - 8 cm length and chopped them up. I picked out a few of the harder stems once I was done chopping and threw the rest of the leaves into the bubbling pot.

The vegetables didn't have to boil for more than 10 minutes and they were done. I then pulled out my Kenwood stick mixer (Stab or Bamix depending on where you live and your age!), stuck it in the pot and mashed everything up. If you want a lumpy soup you can just use a potato masher. If you only have a liquidizer your in for bad luck because you can't put hot liquid in a traditional liquidizer. Actually there is a way around it. If you prepare the vegetables with a minimum amount of water you can then add cold water to them once they are cooked. This is usually cool enough to use in a liquidizer. However, afterwards you have to heat it up again. 

The girls just looked at the soup and said "what is it?" After I explained what was in it our oldest agreed to having one soup spoon full and the youngest demanded half a spoon. But half spoons don't exist (according to my husband) so she had to make do with a whole spoon. Then they tried it and couldn't get enough of it! I had to fight to have some left over so that I could pack it up as a school lunch for the next day!!! So it was successful (otherwise I would not be sharing it here, no?).

Half an Hour Vegetarian Linguini in Creamy Mushroom Sauce

I was not planning on cooking so many quick meals in a row. After all it was the weekend. Weekends usually equal a quick lunch and an elaborate dinner. But I totally forgot that the girls were performing this weekend and would be out of the house from 1 to 4.30 pm. This meant that us adults got some time together. And what a wonderful weekend it turned out to be with bright sunshine and warm air. On Saturday we visited a flea market and picked up some CD's, puzzles and books for the kids. Then we had a huge ice-cream and went shopping. But all this meant that there was only half an hour to get the dinner on the table by 5:30 pm! Good for you :)

So this was Saturday's dish. One I have not made for ages because the spaghetti is so cheap here and the linguini, which is called Tagliatelle here (and might be different), is so expensive (comparatively). If pasta is not readily available or extremely expensive then stay tuned and I'll post my favourite pasta recipe. It's easy to make but it increases the time needed to make this dish exponentially.

Serves 4 (if you have a hungry lot you might want to serve a quick green salad with it); Preparation time 30 mins.

Ingredients:

250 g	Linguini
2 tbsp.	Butter
1 small/medium	Onion
2 large cloves	Garlic
500 g	Mushrooms
1	Red bell pepper
2 tbsp.	White wine
250 ml	Whipping cream
1/2 cup	Grated parmesan
	Salt & Pepper

Method: 

I first put a large pot of water on the stove to boil. If you want to speed up the process put a little bit of water in the pot on the stove and while this is heating up boil the rest of the water in a kettle. Once the water boils add it to the pot. I use this method when I'm in a real hurry!

After putting the water to boil I peeled the onion and sliced it and then peeled and finely chopped the garlic. 

Then I washed the mushrooms and sliced them rather thin (<1 cm). 

For the red pepper I used some frozen char broiled peppers, but you can use a regular red pepper instead or leave it out altogether. If you are using fresh pepper now is the time to wash and cut it. Next I took a large wok and melted the butter on medium heat. Once it was melted I put in the onion and the garlic and fried it for about 1 minute. Then I added the mushrooms (add the bell pepper if you are using a fresh one) and fried them until they were fully cooked. 

At some point during all this the water for the pasta boiled and I threw the Linguini into the boiling water. I then brought the water back to boiling point, stirred the noodles so that they didn't stick to each other and then set the timer according to the recommendations on the packet. I always use a timer with pasta. Hubby does not like over cooked pasta it has to be just right! 

Once the mushrooms were cooked I added the char broiled peppers and increased the heat to high. Then I added the wine. I actually don't like alcohol and that's why I increased the temperature to high. This way the alcohol will all burn off leaving just the taste of the white wine. I'm always careful not to inhale the fumes otherwise I would be drunk before dinner! 

Once the alcohol has evaporated the rest of the ingredients are added. The sauce is then done and if you are lucky your pasta will be done too. 

I always drain my pasta and wash it under cold water so that it doesn't stick together. Then I added it to the sauce and mixed it all up, tasting for salt and pepper and adding accordingly.

And I forgot to say that I happened to have spinach tagliatelle so that's why my noodles are green. 

Serve immediately! Does not reheat well.