Twig door wreath

The kindergarten my children attended always has an Advent Bazzar in November. All the produce sold is made by the parents under the guidance of a very crafty teacher. One of the years they made these awesome wreaths made of twigs. They basically had a whole heap of someones garden trimmings and they molded them into shape and tied them together with brown wire.

Unfortunately I was not in the group that made the wreaths (I was busy managing the truffle making) so I don't know exactly how they made them. I did however manage to find a tutorial on YouTube that is pretty good.

Once you have the wreath the only thing that limits you is your imagination and wallet. I found some left over ribbon to make a huge bow for the bottom, bought a few cheap Christmas balls and used a string of plastic fall decorations to get a bit of colour.

I was very careful to use light weight things because we cannot nail anything into, or hook anything onto our door. It has to be held up with sticky tape!!

While decorating I found it best to hang the wreath up on a door so that I could see how everything fell (literally sometimes!). If using glass ornaments I would seriously advise you to put a thick blanket on the floor!

The whole thing is hung up by a matching ribbon (I ran out of left overs and picked up a new roll from IKEA, if I hadn't found it I would have just used wool) which is passed over the top of the door and stuck down with tape on the inside. Very, very heavy duty tape!

If your door can bear it the lights suggested in the tutorial are wonderful addition.

Recipe Index

This is not really a post! I cannot figure out how to make an index for my recipes, which I badly need. I could use a webpage instead of a blog but then I would have to pay for it (I'm a cheapo!). Note that homemade can be interpreted as being made from scratch. Everything is vegetarian, those marked with a V are vegan.

Soups:

Butternut squash soup
Mushroom soup
Pumpkin and potato soup - half an hour

Sri Lankan curries:

Bean curry V, gluten free
Breadfruit curry V, gluten free
Dahl, red lentil V, gluten free
Drumstick (Murunga) curry V, gluten free
Eggplant curry V, gluten free
Fried bitter gourd curry (karavila) V, gluten free
Potato and pea curry - tempered (fried) V, gluten free
Pumpkin curry V, gluten free
Sweet onion sambol - seeni sambol V, gluten free
TVP (soya chunk) curry V, gluten free

Breakfast:

American pancakes
Boiled eggs
Crows nest - half an hour
French toast
Granola - homemade V
Sri Lankan milk rice V, gluten free
Waffles (German style)

Mains:

Bi bim bap, gluten free
Caramelized leek quiche
Channa Masala (chickpeas) with spinach V, gluten free
Cauliflower bake - Cheesy
Cauliflower cashew curry with coconut milk V, gluten free
Eggplant Parmesan
Eggplant with tofu - Chinese V, gluten free
Fried eggplant quiche
Fried rice - fusion variation V, gluten free
Falafel V

Grilled mini-eggplant V, gluten free
Lasagna
Linguini in creamy mushroom sauce - half an hour
Mac and cheese
Makhouda D'Aubergine (or Batu Quiche)
No bake pan pizzas
Pad Thai, gluten free
Panner tikka masala, gluten free
Pasta with zucchini, mushrooms and sun dried tomatoes
Potato gratin
Persian omelet (with potatoes and spinach)

Phyllo pie V
Pot pie V
Pumpkin ravioli - homemade

Roast peppers, stuffed with spiced rice V
Spaghetti bolognese - half an hour V
Spinach pie

Stuffed Hokkaido pumpkin 
Stuffed zucchini V (if you omit the parmesan)
Tomato pasta sauce - homemade V, gluten free
Vegetarian stir fry (Chinese) - half an hour V, gluten free
Wirzing pie (savoy pie)

Sides & Snacks:

Bratkartoffeln - pan fried potatoes V, gluten free
Chapati V
Croutons - homemade V

Grilled mini-eggplant V, gluten free
Guacamole V, gluten free
Hummus V, gluten free
Mexican (Spanish) rice V, gluten free
Refried beans V, gluten free
Rosemary garlic focaccia
Salsa - V, gluten free

Summer rolls - Vietnamese V, gluten free
Thosai (urid dahl pancakes) V
Vegetarian Chili V

Sweets and Desserts:

Apfelkuchen, apple pie, apple tart
Brownies
Chocolate chunk cookies (soft)
Chocolate mousse, gluten free
Coffee meringue cake gluten free
Cupcakes
Cut out cookies - the best ever
Lemon slices

Mango coconut tart - dairy free
Milk toffee - Sri Lankan style, gluten free
Red velvet cake with cream cheese frosting
Rhubarb strawberry crumble
Scotch crispies

Miscellaneous:

Sri Lankan roasted curry powder V
Basic pastry
Sweet pie crust

2 minute spiders for Halloween

Tonight is Halloween and probably there are many more of you busy parents out there scrambling to find quick decorations. So I'm sharing the spiders I just made. Of course if you can make them in 2 minutes they are not going to be very detailed, however the effect is there.

For a basic spider all you need is 4 black, long pipe cleaners.

Bend the pipe cleaners in half to identify the middle

and then twist in the middle twice to secure the cleaners together.

Next take a "leg" from the right hand side and bend it diagonally over to the left hand side. Do this with all legs moving them from left to right and right to left. This will form the body of the spider.

Next bend the legs down in the middle to a 90 degree angle and then bend the bottom to 90 degrees in the opposite direction (up). Viola... you have a spider.

If you have googly eyes stick a couple on each leg and if you like tie a thread to the middle so that the spider can be suspended from her web.

Mushroom Soup

I was away for a couple of days and discovered a kilo of mushrooms in the fridge when I arrived home. Apparently they were on sale! This fact, combined with the sudden cold, wet and dark weather, called out SOUP. So I made a huge pot of mushroom soup. I'm halving the recipe here because it's not usual to buy a whole kilo of mushrooms unless you are cooking for a large number of people. Since you are making half of what I made it is also likely that you can make it in less than 1 hour.

Preparation time: 1 hour; makes 1.5 l  

Ingredients:

50 g	Butter
75 g	Onions, diced
1 tsp.	Garlic, finely diced
50 g	Flour
600 ml	Water
1	Vegetable cube
600 ml	Milk
500 g	Mushrooms
	Salt & Pepper, to taste
2 tbsp.	Lemon juice
4 tbsp.	Cream

Method:

The thing that took me forever was washing the mushrooms. I learned recently that you are not supposed to wash mushrooms because they absorb the water that you wash them in and don't taste as good. I'm still going to wash my mushrooms because they are always dirty, but apparently you could buy a special mushroom brush to brush away the dirt. Just another gadget to have in an already overstuffed kitchen! I think not.

Well once they are washed I trim off the ends of my now "soggy" mushrooms and then slice them roughly. If you want to have a chunky soup and don't want to run it through a liquidizer then you will have to dice them, or slice them, finely. I personally don't like chunky soups.

Then dice the onions and the garlic.

Heat the butter in a large, heavy bottomed saucepan on medium heat. If you burn the butter tip it out and  start again, else the soup will not taste good. Once the butter has melted add the onions and the garlic and stir (to prevent burning) for around 3 minutes, or until the onions are cooked. The next step is to add the flour to the mixture and continue to stir so that the flour does not burn or stick to the bottom of the pan. Cook it for about 1 minute. Next you have to slowly add the water. Add about 1/2 cup of water, stirring it in until you have a lumpless paste. If your Sri Lankan then the instructions would be... it should look like pappa (which is a glue made out of flour and water that we are all too familiar with)! Then continue adding water 1/2 cup at a time until all the water is used up. By this time your soup should be quite liquid. Now add the milk. If the soup is already liquid enough then just add the whole thing in there and stir it around. Also put in the vegetable cubes. 

If you are going to liquidize your soup then you don't need to be too worried if there are lumps of flour in the soup. 

Bring the whole thing to a boil (you can increase the heat to get it to boil quicker) and add the mushrooms and salt and pepper to taste. 

Be careful, the vegetable cube is quite salty so make sure you taste it before adding more salt. Allow your soup to simmer over low heat for another 10 minutes or so. Then it is almost done. All you have to do is liquidize it. I am a fan of the stick mixer with a metal stick. This can be inserted directly into the boiling soup and the soup can be pulverized. However, you must be very, very careful and know how your gadget works. Else you will end up with hot soup splashed all over you and some pretty nasty burns. If you are not sure allow your soup to cool first (this cooling is not accounted for in the preparation time. One way to decrease the time would be to add the mushrooms to the mixture once the water has been added, then remove the pan from the heat and then add cold milk to the mixture. This should bring it to a decent temperature to experiment with.) If you use a liquidizer then you have to cool the liquid all the way down before liquidizing. Again, the preparation time does not take this into account. Once you have the required smoothness, bring the soup back to the boil. 

Remove it from the heat and add the lemon juice and cream. You can also add the cream later into the individual bowls to make it look fancy. No time for that over here. Soup has to be served piping hot. That means that it cannot be served in the kitchen and then left to sit on the dinning table!

NOTE: This soup freezes pretty well. So if you happen to return to a fridge full of mushrooms you know what to do.

Chef friendly version

Breadfruit Curry - Sri Lankan Style

On the weekend I had to drop off my eldest at a lazer tag establishment. We were surprised to find that it was right down town! Since we were the first there and had a few minutes to spare I dropped into an Asian store that was a few doors down. I was happily surprised to find that they had breadfruit in their vegetable section, and one good one too! As I picked it up one of the people working in the store, who was of South Asian decent, asked me what I would do with it. It always surprises me that the people selling these things don't know what they are! Sometimes in the Sri Lankan store in Dortmund I have people ask me what I do with the vegetables I buy. They are usually rather embarrassed by the question since I look German and they look Sri Lankan!! Maybe I should have a little card with my blog address on it and tell them to check up in a few days to see what was done with it :)

Breadfruit is one of my favourite vegetables. Unfortunately it is never in season when I visit Sri Lanka so I have not had it for years. I also love kiri kos (jak fruit in a milky curry) and have no recollection when I last ate it. A very sad state indeed. I have hope though. Maybe eventually I will be able to get unripe jak fruit here in Germany. I can already get ripe jak fruit, although it does not taste as good as the stuff in SL.

If you happen to find a breadfruit, buy it and cook it. It is really easy to prepare and delicious to eat.

Preparation time: 1 hour; serves 4 if served alone with rice 

Ingredients:

600g	Breadfruit
1 sprig	Curry leaves
3	Green chilies, roughly chopped
1 tsp.	Salt
1/2 tsp.	Tumeric
1 cup	Water
1	Onion, diced
12	Black pepper seeds
4 tbsp. (heaped)	Coconut milk powder
2 tsp.	Roasted curry powder

Method:

The hardest part about making breadfruit is the cutting and cleaning of it. As you can see above I cut mine into quarters and then cut the middle piece out (kind of like I would take the core out of an apple). It is possible that white milk will leak out of your fruit. This did not happen to me but I think it is because the fruit was probably not very fresh (as it had not been picked just yesterday!). The best way to deal with this white milk is to wipe it off with newspaper. If you get it on your hands or knife clean with oil and newspaper. If you try to wash it off everything will just get stickier.

Peel the fruit with a potato peeler and then cut it into cubes. You don't want small cubes else it will disintegrate. So nice big cubes about 1.5 inches wide. Then I sprinkled mine with tumeric and salt and rubbed it well. It's kind of like using a scrub on your vegetable. This 'scrub' will take off anymore milky stuff that is on your fruit.

Wash the fruit and put it in a saucepan. Now add all the ingredients except the 1/2 the water, the coconut milk powder and roasted curry powder.

Cover the pan and bring to the boil. Then reduce the heat and cook until the water has been absorbed (about 15 minutes). Mix the remaining water with the coconut milk powder. It helps if the water is luke warm. You can also use thick fresh coconut milk or coconut milk from a can. The canned milk tends to be quite  thick so you may have to dilute it a bit. Add this to the pan and bring back to the boil. Allow to simmer for another 15 minutes.

Once the fruit is cooked it will be soft, like over boiled potatoes. Remove it from the heat and add the roasted coconut powder. It is now ready to serve.

The method is relatively simple and I'm guessing if you are not being neat and pretty and taking photographs that you can probably put this together in less than an hour. The big time consumer is letting it simmer at the end for 30 minutes, but this gives you time to make other delicious things (and if nothing else at least your rice).

NOTE: I have found that breadfruit curry tends to turn very quickly. It's best to eat it within 24 hours.

Bratkartoffeln - Fried potatoes

This is a simple recipe that my children love. The only problem with it is that it cannot be really eaten alone, except maybe as a snack. When I make it we have burgers, sausages, or schnitzel together with a vegetable (last night it was carrots).

Preparation time: 45 minutes; serves 4

Ingredients:

1kg	Potatoes
1 tsp.	Salt
	Oil

Method:

Peel and wash the potatoes and then cut them into small pieces about 0.5 cm thick. For smaller spuds I cut them in two first and larger ones into four.

To fry these potatoes it is important that you have a heavy bottomed frying pan, preferably a cast iron one that is well seasoned (i.e. nothing sticks to it). If you use a non-stick pan the potatoes will not get as crunchy and brown. Heat the pan on medium heat and add enough oil so that the bottom of the pan is covered (I need about 1/4 cup). Don't put so much oil in that the potatoes are swimming. You need just enough so that they all get coated with the oil. Once the oil is hot you put in the potatoes, sprinkle them with the salt and toss them in the oil so that they are all coated with oil. If there is not enough oil to coat them just add some more.

Continue frying them, stirring every now and then until all the potatoes are cooked and are as brown as you like them. This takes me 20-30 minutes. If you feel like your potatoes are sticking you can pour in a bit more oil. Scrape the bottom of the pan while you are frying to ensure that nothing sticks to the pan and burns.

You can sprinkle a variety of other things on top of your potatoes once they are cooked through. Roasted onions, garlic powder, cheeses, chilies, herbs are a few that come to mind.

Serve hot.

Guacamole

Yesterday I took my youngest grocery shopping with me. I usually do this all alone while I am waiting for my eldest to finish her gymnastics training. I am so used to doing it alone, which  makes it difficult to do it any other way. I get so distracted by the company and they get me to buy all kinds of things that I don't want and cause me to forget half of what I do want.

Well yesterday I was made to buy avocados and tortilla chips. The demands were very clear: "Can we have guacamole for dinner?" There were other demands made like "Can we have salad with pomegranate? Can we have Oreos? Can we have Jaffa cakes?" but only some of them were granted, including the guacamole.

We love the stuff, and I am not sure why I have never made it in Sri Lanka given that avocados are so cheap and good and all the ingredients are available. It either is because I don't have the recipe with me (no more excuses now) or due to the lack of chips to dip. A few years ago I had guacamole in Arugam Bay and they served it with papadum which is a brilliant idea (might be best to bake them though instead of frying!).

Preparation time: 30 minutes; Makes a big bowl

Ingredients:

1	Onion
2-3	Garlic cloves
2.5 cm	Ginger root
4	Haas Avocados (about 2 Sri Lankan avocados)
2	Limes, juice and grated rind
4 tbsp	Coriander leaves (cilantro)
2 tsp	Ground coriander
2 tsp	Ground cumin
1 tsp	Chili powder
2	Ripe tomatoes, diced
1/2 tsp	Salt (to taste)

Method:

So there are two ways to make this. You can either have the chunky variety or the smooth variety. We usually go for chunky.

If you want to go for smooth just put the onion, garlic and ginger into your food processor and pulse. Then put in everything else except the tomatoes and pulse until smooth. Stir in the tomatoes and serve!

You might consider chunky to be a bit more time consuming but you save on cleaning the food processor!

So I first put the avocado in a bowl and smash them up to the size that we like. Then grate my ginger and garlic into the bowl. The onion I dice finely and add that together with all the other ingredients.

You can adjust the spices as you like and I was very tempted to add some finely chopped green chili but I didn't have time. If your tomatoes are watery dice them, let them sit for a few minutes and drain off the water. The tastier your avocados and tomatoes are the better your guacamole will taste.

As you probably all know avocados turn brown very quickly. To keep your guacamole a bit longer you need to stop the surface coming in contact with the air. To do this I take some cling wrap and press it down onto the surface of the mixture making sure to press any air bubbles out. Then to be extra careful I put another layer of cling wrap on top. The guacamole should be chilled before using so pop it back in the fridge until you need it. In my house it never goes back into the fridge (unless we are having visitors) but straight into some warm tummy's!!!

This is half the recipe