Alp Garfiun in Winter

It has almost become a tradition that we (my parents and any brother, sister-in-law, nieces and nephews that are around) take a horse drawn sleigh to Alp Garfiun on 26th December.

Pferdekutschen Flütsch

www.pferdekutschen.ch

www.garfiun.ch

Once there we eat a hearty Bünder Gerstensuppe with sausage, some Alpine cheese, Bündnerfleisch and Salsiz. I can't think of a better way to spend the second day of Christmas!

Some light, culinary Christmas reading

I've just started reading a new book and am thoroughly enjoying it:

Reise zum Geschmack by Christian Seiler

Seiler is clearly a well traveled man and enjoys food. The book is split into 12 chapters, each one representing one city, eg. Vienna, London, Naples, Munich, Istanbul... And each chapter is filled with stories about local foods, restaurants and food related experiences specific to the location. I highly recommend!

Trout again

Clearly I like to eat trout - it's pretty much the only fish I ever write about.
I recommend the trout dish they are currently serving at Restaurant Volkshaus in Zurich:

http://www.restaurantvolkshaus.ch/

The best burger of my life and other Geneva tips

I recently spent a couple of days in Geneva for the wedding of two friends of mine. The wedding was a culinary delight but I was so busy taking pictures of the wedding for the couple that the camera's battery was empty by the time dinner was served (luckily I wasn't the official wedding photographer!).
So all I have are a couple of links:

1) Dinner was at Les Bains des Paquis, which is part of the Lake Geneva Lido, where people swim in summer and go to the hammam in winter. They serve Champagne Fondue in their pop up restaurant during winter. Service is chaotic but the atmosphere lovely - the tiled changing cubicles serve as mini cloakrooms. And the fondue is one of the best I've ever had - the champagne makes it much 'lighter' than normal fondue. http://www.buvettedesbains.ch/pages/fondue.html

2) The wedding cakes (s - there were three huge ones, no chance that we could eat them all. Luckily we were given some to take home the next day, which we ate in the car while stuck in traffic between Geneva and Zurich...)

The wedding cake was definitely the best I've ever had! I'm not that into sweet things, especially not creamy, chocolatey cakes, but this one was a whole different story. It had one layer that tasted a bit like the filling of Kinder Schokolade and a lovely crunchy, very moreish layer.
It seems that the Chocolatier who made the cake doesn't have a website, so here a link with all infos: http://www.itaste.com/list/restaurant/de/geneve/christophe-berger-confiserie-patisserie.html

The day after the wedding we sat in Cafe Remor all day with people, food and coffee coming and going. They had the normal selection of bistro type food like soups, hot and cold sandwiches, salades, quiche, croque monsieur and a selection of burgers with special ingredients: lamb burgers, different chutneys and sauces, grilled peppers etc. All burgers were served in a poppy seed bun and with salade and baby potatoes. It was by far the best burger I've ever had!!!

http://www.remor.ch/

Thanksgiving III: a 10kg turkey and a whole lot of other stuff...

In preparations of our Thanksgiving Dinner Garrett and I spent the entire day in his kitchen, chopping, cooking, baking while chatting, listening to music and drinking Champagne... Pretty much a perfect day in my books...

Garrett was responsible for the 10kg turkey he had bought from an organic farm in Germany the day before. To keep it moist he stuffed fresh cranberries under its skin. It worked! Personally I find turkey a bit boring and it tends to be a bit dry. But this one was amazing! We also filled it with stuffing I made inspired by a recipe I found on Epicurious (http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Chestnut-Prune-and-Pancetta-Stuffing-236422). The recipe uses chestnuts, prunes and pancetta. I also added some sausage meat. It was so good we couldn't stop picking it straight out of the turkey...

Garrett's 10kg Turkey

Stuffing

We couldn't quite decide what side dishes to make we had so many ideas, so we just made them all...
Gravy, cranberry sauce, green beans with fried onions, mashed potatoes, mashed butternut squash, sweet potatoes, brussel sprouts, kale with pinenuts...

Brussel sprouts

For the Brussels sprouts we friend onions, garlic,  bacon and parsley. The sprouts we cleaned and halved, mixed them with the onions, garlic,  bacon and parsley, put everything in oven proof dishes, poured some cream over everything and sprinkled Gruyere cheese on top. Then we baked the Brussel sprouts at 180 degrees until soft.

Sweet potato wedges

As the oven was occupied by a huge turkey we had to figure out a way to make other things without using it. So we cut the sweet potatoes in wedges and then briefly boiled them. We then fried them sprinkling brown sugar and drizzling honey on them.

Yorkshire Puddings

Finally we made Yorkshire Puddings, my favorite to go with roast dinners. And so easy to make - mix 500 ml milks with 3 eggs, 150 gr of flour and a pinch of salt. Leave to rest for half an hour. In the meantime pour a bit of oil in all the holes of a muffin tin and heat in the oven until piping hot. Pour a bit of batter into each hole of the muffin tin - not too much otherwise you'll get small, dense and uneatable puddings. Put back in the oven and don't open for 15 minutes - they should be big and fluffy and perfect.

I'm looking forward to next year's Thanksgiving! Until then I'll be cooking many a Sunday Lunch Roast!

Thanksgiving Pies II: Apple Cheddar Pie

The second pie I made for the big Thanksgiving Dinner was an Apple Cheddar Pie. The recipe again came from First Prize Pies.
Most important here is to keep the ingredients for the dough really cold and not to integrate them too much. This was quite hard to do - especially with the strips of dough to cover the pie. I had to roll the leftover pieces together a few times and eventually everything turned into a normal dough with no butter lumps left in it. Hence the crust wasn't quite as crunchy as I hoped.

 

Ice cold butter chopped into the dough so lumps remain

For the last fifteen minutes of baking I sprinkled a mild Cheddar, which I bought at The British Cheese Centre in in the Viadukt Markthalle, over the pie. The combination of the tart apples, brown sugar and salty cheese is amazing!!!

http://firstprizepies.com/

/http://markthalle.im-viadukt.ch/

/http://cheeseclub.ch/

Thanksgiving Pies I: S'mores Pie

My friend Garrett and I cooked Thanksgiving Dinner together this year. Garrett is partly American and I have family and friends that live in the US so we have both celebrated Thanksgiving many times before. Yet I'm still no expert and consulted a few friends before deciding what to cook.
I volunteered to make the pies (first time in my life) and asked my friend Allison of First Prize Pies for a couple of recipes. I made S'mores Pie and Apple Cheddar Pie and discovered that it is bloody hard to make a good pie!

The S'mores Pie was particularly difficult - it took forever to make the Graham Crackers for the crust and my chocolate filling was a strange consistency - maybe 'heavy cream' isn't quite the same thing in English and in German.

Making the Graham Crackers 

Runny, bubbly chocolate filling...

After trying and failing to make the marshmallows twice - maybe because it was impossible to find corn sirup in any shop in Zurich and none of the replacements I came up with worked - I began improvising: The chocolate filling didn't taste very chocolatey so I added chocolate chunks for cakes, which I found in my cupboard:

 

Instead of marshmallow I decided to make meringue. I spread it onto the pie, torched it with my new blow torch (hours of fun - wow, I'm such a geek!) and baked it briefly:

 

I really had little luck with the S'mores Pie. I decided to add some toasted Marshmallows on top of the pie (I admit, I was looking for an excuse to use my blow torch again), only to discover that they are highly flammable.

 

It took me fifteen minutes to put seven toasted but unburnt marshmallows on the pie. When I was finally done I walked out of the kitchen holding the pie proudly only to trip and send the whole thing flying down the corridor and splat onto the floor!

I'm happy to say that despite all hurdles and floor dirt the pie was gobbled up with great gusto in no time!

Check out First Prize Pies! http://firstprizepies.com/

Food and memories

Few things bring back memories the way food can.

In September I was in New York for a few days to visit family and friends. I spent a morning at the Neue Galerie enjoying the Klimts and Schieles (I've been obsessed with the art, design and architecture of the Wiener Secession lately and I love Schiele!). While I was waiting for my sister-in-law to join me I felt a pang of hunger and so I went to the Café Sabarsky for breakfast. Just reading the menu made me feel homesick and made me think about and miss so many places I love: Vienna, the childhood holidays spent in the Austrian countryside, breakfasts in Berlin (the capital of breakfasts - at least it was until not too long ago...) At first I couldn't decide what to order there were so many amazing breakfasts on offer: Kaiserschmarrn, Weisswurst, Eier im Glas... I had to go for the latter, one of my all time favorites! It seems it's not a frequently ordered dish - all the wonderful Upper East Side Ladies oohed and aahed when it arrived and looked very surprised to see peeled eggs in a Martini glass:

http://www.neuegalerie.org/cafes/sabarsky

I had a food and memory experience this summer. I was roadtripping around Central and Eastern Europe with two friends of mine, who also thoroughly enjoy food... Everywhere we went we bought a few things at local supermarkets to take home with us. Austria was paradise for this - we bought amazing Kürbiskernöl (pumpkin seed oil), Powidl (plum jam) and Schokobananen. As a kid my family spent every summer holiday in the Austrian countryside with friends in their countryside house. The house is right next to a forest and mountain a few kilometers away form the next village. Lunches and dinners consisted of fish freshly caught by my dad and his friend KTh and rarely a deer they hunted and of the herbs and veggies Gigi (KTh's wife) grew in her vegetable garden. A couple of times a week we would drive into town to buy everything else we needed including Schokobananen - the most horrible, artificial, yellow, gooey stuff covered in chocolate. Us kids loooooved them and luckily KTh did too. Every evening after dinner he would get out one and cut it in slices - one per person. Which meant that every person got an approximately 0.8 cm slice of chocolate banana...

Best buffet ever!

This summer I was invited to the wedding of two friends of mine. It was their church wedding - the civil one took place ten years before. It was a spectacular weekend with wonderful people, fantastic music and lots of champagne! For me there were two highlights: firstly the Appenzeller Trio, which played most amazing local and international folk music and yodelled its heart out. And secondly the buffet after the church service. It was a cheese fest!!!

Eating and drinking in Turin

Despite the constant rain the week in Turin was a joy! Mainly because of the great food we ate.
One restaurant I highly recommend is Il Gatto Nero. We went there twice and not only because the restaurant was next to our hotel, but because it was fantastic. Service was slow (and approx. 80 years old), but when one of the waiters asked us whether his father had already taken our order our hearts were warmed and we didn't mind waiting. Maybe it was also the most amazing wine we drank!

 Il Gatto Nero

Corso Filippo Turati 14

 Torino

+39 011 5900414

One thing we were looking forward to all week was Pasta con Tartufo - truffle pasta. Unfortunately the weather has been very dry the past months so there have been very little truffles so far these season, which means they are small, expensive and maybe not as tasty as they could be. Hopefully the current down pours will change the situation.
For one of our last dinners we went to Da Michele and finally found what we were hoping for:

 Da Michele

 Piazza Vittorio Veneto 4

Torino

 +39 011 888836

Eataly in Italy

I just spent a week in Turin working at Artissima Art Fair. Next to the fair ground is Eatly, an Italian food supermarket chain that focuses on slow food, local found and organic products. Throughout the market are little restaurants where you can eat all the products on sale. The place is huge and you can get anything your foodie heart desires: fresh vegetables, fish, all kinds of meats, sausages and prosciuttos, lots of cheeses, dozens of olive oils, pastas, jars of pestos, sauces and ragus etc
Need I say that I went totally wild and filled my car to the top with wonderful things. It's Schlaraffenland!!!

 Truffle season!

www.eataly.it