Potato Gratin, Easy-peasy and Delicious

I don't make enough of this stuff! It is so easy to make and every one just wolfs it down. So much so that this time I made two dishes of it so we could get a second meal out of it.

Preparation time: 25 min. Serves 4 

Ingredients:

6	Potatoes
200 ml	Cream (or soy substitute)
	Salt and Pepper
1 tbsp.	Finely chopped fresh herbs
1 cup	Grated cheese

Method:

Preheat the oven to 200 C, 400 F or 180 C if you have a fan oven.

Peel and slice the potatoes. The thinner you slice the potatoes the quicker it will cook and the better it will taste.

Arrange the potatoes in a heat proof flan dish.

Pour over the cream ( I use half whipping cream and half soy based cream in order to lower the fat content). Make sure that your potatoes are covered with liquid. They should not be swimming in it, but every potato should have something on it, else they will not cook properly.

Sprinkle with salt, pepper and the herbs. For herbs I used thyme and rosemary because I still have them in a pot left over from some other recipes, but you could use anything or nothing at all! Finally sprinkle with cheese.

Stick it in the oven and once you can stick a fork through the potatoes and the cheese is melted take it out and enjoy. I can't tell you how long it will take since I don't know how fat your slices will be or how large your potatoes were. Mine took about 20 - 30 minutes. Just wait for the cheese to melt, the cream to bubble and then try pricking it with your fork.

Sorry, it was consumed to fast to be able to take pictures of the final product!!

We enjoyed our potato gratin with vegetarian schnitzel and steamed beans. But they can be eaten with anything.

Cup Cakes - Simple and Delicious

My nephew is turning 1 and my sister-in-law asked me for a cake recipe. I told her where to find the recipe that I use and then turned to my blog to find out where I wrote down the European measurements. Turned out... I never did. How could I not have I've given this link to many people here in Europe. The cupcakes turn out absolutely wonderful and they are super easy to make.
So here is the link to the recipe I use:

http://www.glorioustreats.com/2011/07/perfect-vanilla-cupcakes-recipe.html

And here is the recipe with some European measurements:

Preparation time: 45 min. Makes 15 - 16 cupcakes/ twice the recipe makes a 9" round

Ingredients:

150 g	Flour
1 1/4 tsp.	Baking Powder
1/2 tsp.	Baking Soda (Natron/Sodium Bicarbonate)
1/2 tsp.	Salt
2	Eggs (large)
150 g	Sugar
1 1/2 tsp.	Vanilla (optional)
120 ml	Oil (sunflower, canola, etc.)
120 ml	Butter milk (or substitute with regular or soya milk)

Method:

Well please forgive me but let me just forward you again to the original website. That person spent so much time putting this recipe together she should at least get a few more hits!!

http://www.glorioustreats.com/2011/07/perfect-vanilla-cupcakes-recipe.html

Just waiting to be decorated

And then there were minions!

For the soccer fan

Fun with left over icing!

American Pancakes

My I think it is time for a new post, don't you? Some thing yummy for the cold weather that has just hit us. Last Wednesday I was sitting on the balcony enjoying a cup of tea and a cookie and this Wednesday I pulled out all my winter gear to beat the 0 degree temperatures.

Pancakes... the American kind. Piles and piles of hot pancakes along side some yummy toppings. Nothing to beat our unhealthy favourite of Nutella, bananas and whipped cream!

Preparation time: 25 min. Serves 2 (aprox. 8 pancakes)

Ingredients:

1	Egg
1 cup	Milk
1 oz (30 g)	Butter, melted
1 cup (150 g)	Flour
1 tbsp.	Sugar
1 tbsp.	Baking powder
1/2 tsp.	Salt

Method:

Pancakes are easy to make and there are all kinds of variations. Every country seems to have their own. I never used to eat American pancakes until I made them myself. I should credit this recipe to someone but I don't know where I pulled it from. Most definitely off the internet! If this is yours let me know.

The first thing you need to do is melt the butter. I melt mine in the microwave a bit at a time. The main point is that the butter does not get too hot. If it does it will cook the egg and the batter will not be smooth. So I cut it up into pieces and put it in for 30 seconds. I then take it out and stir it (if it is possible) and then put it back in for another 20 seconds. I repeat this until I have some liquid butter.

Now you can do this the easy way and take all your ingredients and put them in a food processor or a liquidizer. You could also use an electric mixer. But this time I decided to do it the old fashioned way with a mixing bowl and a wooden spoon. So if you are glutton for punishment or you just enjoy yourself in the kitchen read on. Otherwise mix everything together and jump to *.

Add all the dry ingredients into a large bowl and make a well in the middle into which you can pour the melted butter. The quantities in the pictures might seem a bit more than in the recipe. This is because I have to make twice the recipe to feed my family of four.

Then add in the eggs.

Now you have to do the age old thing and work in the fluid stuff into the flour by starting in the middle and mixing the flour slowly in with your wooden spoon. It looks something like this:

As you see one can't mix everything in because the batter gets to thick. At this point you have to start to slowly add the milk. Add a bit at a time and slowly incorporate all the flour. Once you have a sticky mess give it a good mix with the wooden spoon to get rid of any lumps. 

Then work on incorporating the rest of the milk. If you end up getting some lumps give it a beat with a hand whisk.

* And now it is ready to fry. 

I have special pancake pans. They are really cheap non-stick pans that I bought from Ikea a long time ago. Totally worth it because I can make 3 pancakes simultaneously.

Although the pans are non-stick they still need a bit of oil. I apply this to the pan using a paper towel. I put a bit of oil in a saucer, take 1/2 a sheet of paper kitchen towel, fold the towel about 3 times into half, dip it in the oil and then rub it on the pan. My pans I heat on medium heat but have to adjust them up and down depending on the size of the burner and the strength. 

Take about one soup ladel of mixture and put it into the frying pan (once the frying pan is hot of course) and swish it around until the mixture covers the bottom of the pan. Make sure your pan is not on the heat while you swish it around else you won't get very thin pancakes. Of course if you want real thick pancakes you should probably put more batter than one soup ladel full. Then put your pancake on the heat and let it sit. I can't tell you how long to wait before you flip it because it is always different but you can tell from what the pancake looks like.

Look at the pancake in the picture below. You can see that it has bubbles on it that are popped. On the left hand side the pancake is "dried out" and on the right hand side, although it is shiny, the batter is set. This is a perfect time to flip your pancake. It should come off really easily. Use a spatula to flip it or do it the old fashioned way by throwing it in the air. Throwing it in the air and catching it gains a lot of respect from your kids. It's like in the pancake fairy tale!

Once you have flipped the pancake it does not take long to cook. Remember the top side was almost already cooked. Probably it takes about 30 seconds but you can peek underneath with the help of your spatula to see if it is the done. No need for it to brown on the bottom all you want is for it to be cooked through.

Pile them up high on a plate. This will also help keep the first ones warm while you are making the rest.

And then serve them with what ever tickles your fancy. Jam, honey, marmite (yes, thats my little ones favourite!), fruit or the more traditional maple syrup and whipped butter. Oh and I should not forget my mothers favourite pancake topping ... sugar with lemon juice.

Before I had a smart phone I hosted brunch for some friends and made these pancakes but much smaller. They looked really cool stacked up. Shame I don't have a picture.

Mac and Cheese

I just found this draft sitting around. No idea why it didn't get posted!!

So I've been working now for a couple of weeks. It is a lot of fun teaching the little ones. Quite a jump to go from adult education to 3rd grade!! But at least there is no stressing over the content or the questions that come from the audience :) Cooking has been a bit tough but I've managed to put a hot meal on the table almost every day even though I only get home at 5 pm. Of course I've gone through all my half hour meals and they certainly came in handy when my husband had to cook one evening (afternoon staff meeting :( ).

What with having to cook quickly I haven't had any time to take pictures of what I've been cooking and of course without pictures what is the use of a blog! But I do have some reserve so now that I have the time I can post them. And so here is one of my kids favorites "Mac and Cheese". When we lived in the USA I just opened up a box, boiled the macaroni, poured in the powder, milk and butter and voila I was ready to go. Here in Germany you cannot buy Mac and Cheese in a box. I'm guessing there is a good reason for this but I can't figure out what. I think it has something to do with the cheese powder because we can't get goldfish either. It makes me wonder what I was eating back in the USA. So now we make it from scratch.

Hmmm... I remember back when I was a kid I visited a friends house and we had mac and cheese for dinner. It was the most delicious thing ever. I wish I'd been wise enough to get the recipe but I was only 8 years old.

So here is my recipe. Hopefully it creates happy memories for you too.

Preparation time: 45 minutes; Serves: 6

Ingredients:

10 oz/250 g	Short-cut macaroni
1.5 oz/45 g	Butter
4 tbsp./35 g	Flour
1 pint/500 ml	Milk
1/8 tsp.	Freshly grated nutmeg
1 tsp.	Salt
6 oz/175 g	Tofu
5 oz/140 g	Frozen peas
6 oz/175 g	Cheddar cheese, grated
2 tbsp.	Bread crumbs

Method:

First of all this is not your traditional mac and cheese. For additional nutrition it has tofu and peas in it. My kids love the peas but you can feel free to omit them. The tofu can be omitted too.

What makes mac and cheese mac and cheese is the creamy cheese sauce so this is where all my effort goes. Before I start with the sauce I put a large pot of water on the cooker on high heat. This is to boil the macaroni. Since this takes forever I make the sauce in the mean time. My fan oven also takes a while to get heated up so I pop it on at 180 C (200 C conventional, 400 F).

In a small saucepan over medium heat I melt the butter. Be careful not to burn it. If you do happen to burn it, toss it and start from the beginning again. Once it is melted I add the flour and stir it until it is cooked, about 2 minutes. 

Then I add the milk. There are various ways to do this and it doesn't really matter which one you use as long as you aren't left with any lumps. I do it the way my mum taught me to and that is to gradually add the milk stirring all the time. So I add my first little bit, and the milk sizzles as it hits the flour/butter mixture. I stir it vigorously until it is all incorporated. Then I add a little bit more and stir again. I keep doing this until I have a mixture which is liquidy enough that there is no way lumps are going to form. Then I dump in the rest of the milk, stir and bring the sauce to the boil stirring all the time. Your sauce should get thicker and look like this:

Remove it from the heat.

Don't lose hope if your sauce does get lumpy. You can save it by using a stick mixer or a food processor. You can also pass it through a sieve. (Oh my, I remember doing that when I was a child and we didn't have any fancy gadgets!)

Now the worst is over, not much can go wrong from here out. My water is boiling so I carefully dump in my macaroni and let it cook as per the packets instructions. I always let the water re-boil after adding the macaroni and then start the timer.

Back to my sauce. I grate the cheese and crumble the tofu.

And then put 2/3 of the cheese into the sauce and stir it well. Then I add everything except the breadcrumbs and mix it all together.

Now for a bit of down time while I'm waiting for the pasta to finish boiling. Hmmm the options are endless, either a nice cup of tea or clean up the mess. Unfortunately I have to go for cleaning up the mess :(

Once the pasta is done it is well drained, rinsed under cold water and drained again. Then it goes straight into the sauce and everything is mixed together.

I then take out my favourite baking dish, which is rather large, and pour everything into it. At the end I mix the remaining cheese with the bread crumbs and sprinkle them on top.

This baby gets popped in the oven and baked until it is golden brown about 20 minutes.
And will you look at that I forgot to take a picture of the finished product. Probably because it was devoured before I could pull my phone out!!

BlauPause and Seahorse Cookies - Part 2 - The Recipe

I decided that today was the day I was going to bake the seahorse cookies. Anything that can get baked early for next weekend is going to get BAKED EARLY. In addition to BlauPause next Sunday is my daughters birthday and of course her birthday party. We are doing polka dots. I will make sure I post all the details later. The food is all going to be very dotty!

Here is my very cute seahorse cookie cutter. Bought on Amazon, of course!

Ingredients

	250 g	Butter (@ room temperature)
	200 g	Sugar
	1 pkt	Vanilla sugar
	2	Eggs
	2 tsp.	Baking powder
	500 g	Flour
	150 g	Ground almonds

Method

The instructions that came with the recipe (which, by the way, I have amended) go something like this: Mix into a dough. Cut out cookies. Bake. So here are some more detailed instructions!

First of all I doubled the recipe. I needed as many as I could get because who knows how many people are going to show up. Probably not as many as we would like because the publicity for the event is terrible. There is not a single flyer, poster or banner up any where where we live (which is practically next door to the university). Good thing that these cookies last for ever!

I decided to put this together in the order of a regular cake. So first I beat together the butter and sugars until they were light and fluffy. Then went in the eggs one at a time, beating each time to make sure that the eggs were well incorporated. Next came the dry stuff ... and oops ... my mixer was not made for such a huge amount of batter. I had to stop and take the whisks out otherwise it would have gone up into the mechanism! So I just mixed the rest of it the good old fashioned way... NO I did not use my hand... I used a spoon! Now usually I would use my hands to mix such a dough but this was going to go to people that I didn't know so I figured I better be a bit more hygienic!! 

There was too much dough to make one ball so I made 4 balls. Hang on a sec I had to use my hands to make the balls. So it would not have made much of a difference, I should have just mixed everything with my hands. A bit late to realize that now, isn't it?

The dough was then wrapped in cling wrap and put in the fridge to rest. I think for about an hour. I really like to let my cookie dough cool off. It makes it much easier to cut and the cookies seem to keep their shape much better. In an ideal world you would cool it, cut them and then cool the cutouts for at least half an hour before baking them. I never have enough room in my fridge for cookie trays so I never bother about this. Unless, of course, it is winter and then I put the baking trays out on the balcony to cool. 

I wanted the cookies to be a bit thicker because I didn't want them to break apart and I wanted each cookie to be substantial. But you can roll these cookies pretty thin and make them really crisp if you like. The plan is also to decorate them but if I get around to that it is a whole different blog!

I rolled the dough out on a floured surface to about 4 mm thickness and went about cutting my seahorses. I ended up with just over 150 pieces! Then I baked them in the oven at 160 C (fan oven) for 20 minutes. The result was the perfect cookie. 

I really wanted to decorate these and I even experimented. But given all the other things I had to do for this weekend I didn't get round to decorating all of them. In fact I only decorated 20 :( 

Come over during the BlauPause and enjoy one on the house.

BlauPause and Seahorse Cookies - Part 1

Next Sunday is BlauPause (which literally means "blueprint"). It is an event to celebrate the Ruhr University's 50th Anniversary. The plan is to block of the main road that passes by the university which by no mistake is called "Universität Straße". A similar stunt was done a few years ago when they blocked off one of the local highways, the A40. There will be tables along the road with a lot of them featuring the universities work. Kind of like a big PR, or an outreach, event.

Ref: http://www.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/rub50/_content-docs/faq-anreise/RUB50_BlauPause_Streckenplan.pdf

Hubby dear has had to organize a table too. It is somewhere by the Uni Brücke which is at the subway station "Universität". You're getting the picture here, right?

We've spent a long time brain storming what should be done and how to reach out to regular people and educate them about memory and the brain. My husband specifically studies the hippocampus and "hippocampus", coming from the Greek word "seahorse", led us to the decision to make Seahorse cookies for the kids who pass by. And to make it really cute they get to play a specially made game of memory with our kids. Of course only those who play get a cookie. Needless to say we are hoping for clear, sunny skies and temperatures which are more representative of summer than those we had this weekend.

I haven't made the cookies yet but I wanted to do a bit of a PR stunt so that more people come out to visit us!!

What I do have for you is an amazing cookie recipe that I got this one from the Bochumer Kinderchor after my kids participated in their Christmas concert with the Bochum symphony. It is finally the sugar cookie recipe that I have always been looking for. It keeps it's shape, it tastes great and it keeps fresh and crisp literally for ever. My husband was still eating the ones we made over Christmas in February!!

Here are our Christmas cookies:

Never been quite happy with the icing though. This time I will try royal icing, the one I've been using kind of makes the cookies soggy (but they still taste good). 

But now it is time to go to bed so I think I'll post the cookie recipe some other time :)

Sri Lankan Dahl. Red Lentils. A Staple.

My husband has been finding this blog very useful. A quick call from me to tell him that I'm stuck in the worst back up ever and am not going to make it in time to make dinner, sets the ball rolling. He checks the app we share to see whats on the menu, opens up this blog and cooks us dinner. Sometimes adding his own ingredients in to the mix.

Because of this I really had to get my act together so that he can cook one of our main staples - red lentils, dahl, parippu. What ever you may call it we can't have Sri Lankan food without it. It's marvellously healthy and terribly popular with the kids. It seems to be one of those universal foods kind of like fries and chips. We've never had a kid who does not like it, neither in the USA nor in Germany!

Serves 4; Preparation time 30 min.

Ingredients

1 cup	Red lentils, Mysore dahl
2 cups	Water (approx.)
1/2	Large red onion
1 sprig	Curry leaves
1/2 tsp.	Dill seeds
1 inch	Rampe (pandan)
1/4 tsp.	Turmeric
1/2 tsp.	Salt
1/2 tsp.	Chili powder
2 tsp.	Sri Lankan curry powder (unroasted)
3 tbsp.	Coconut milk powder
1 tsp.	Sri Lankan roasted curry powder
1 tbsp.	Lemon or lime juice

Method:

First of all I wash the lentils twice or thrice just like one washes rice. From there on there are several different options: temper first, temper in the middle etc. But I've been using a much simpler way for many years, cutting out the tempering and thus the oil!

I add water to cover the lentils (around 2 cups) and then put in all the ingredients except the coconut milk, the roasted curry powder and the lime juice. Then I simply put the lid on, put the cooker on high and let it boil. Putting the lid on is very, very important. It also helps to use a heavy bottomed saucepan.

Once the curry boils, I whip of the lid, give it a stir and put the lid back on again. The heat now is turned down to an amazing very low (2 on my cooker) and I allow the lentils to cook. I also check every now and then to see if there is always enough water in the pot. If there is not enough water the lentils will stick to the bottom of the pan and burn. Very yucky! Once most of the water is absorbed I add in the coconut milk, either from a can or powdered coconut milk powder. If I'm using the powdered sort (3 tablespoons) then I stir it in to the lentils and then add some water. This helps prevent any lumps forming. However, if this is the first time you are making this I suggest dissolving the coconut milk powder in 2 tablespoons of lukewarm water and then adding it. If using canned coconut milk the amount will depend totally on how thick the coconut milk is. The stuff I've been getting here in Germany is so thick that I add 2 heaped tablespoons in and some water (a few tablespoons). You can adjust the amount of water depending on how liquid you want your resulting curry to be. If you don't have coconut milk you can use regular full fat milk.

Then let the whole thing come to the boil and it should be done. If some of the lentils are not yet done, just give it a stir and let it cook for longer on very low (with the lid closed). You may need to add water to the curry to prevent it from burning.

Once everything is cooked remove from the heat add the roasted curry powder and the lime juice (you can use lemon juice instead) and cover until needed. Stir and then serve.

Garnished with coriander leaves and chilli flakes

This curry is totally forgiving. I've made it without onions, without curry leaves or rampe and it's still great. You can add tomatoes to it and/or garlic. If your a fish eater some Maldive fish tastes great too. Another favourite Sri Lankan variation is to add spinach to it (careful though, the spinach adds a lot of water to the curry). I've added coriander leaves to it and my cousin makes it with mustard seeds instead of dill. Everyone has their own variation. The one really important ingredient is the turmeric, without this it looks a bit weird. Having said that, my mother always makes it without turmeric and it tastes fine to me!

And finally, my little one loves it when I sprinkle fried onions on top. Try it out and add your own little twist to it. Tastes great with any kind of rice or with thick chunky bread. Kids love it in a sandwich too.

(Well not quite finally... you can also use any other lentil to make this curry, but from my experience it doesn't taste as good).