All posts tagged: classics

Bitter and sweet – my favourite way of eating sweet potato fries – a quick recipe

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With sweet potato fries, it is usually love on the first bite. Preparing them is a bit of an art though. Don’t get me wrong, in fact, it is pretty simple, you just cook or bake the potatoes for a short time, fry them in oil, and put some chillie powder above them. However, every now and then, you will encounter some restaurant or food vendor who figured the ultimate trick how to prepare sweet potato fries. The result is just genuine, heavenly sticks! Although your home-made version is pretty awesome, those are by some dimensions better than yours – a galactic phenomenon. At least this was my thought when I tried the Sweet Potato French Fries from a vendor in the spectacular ‘Arminushalle‘ in Berlin Moabit (always worth a visit!! – see pic). My ambition is sparked – at some point I will figure out their recipe (eventhough the chef who sold me the fries said I should just enjoy – not all secrets are ment to be known). What I liked about their fries …

‘Lost Eggs in Burgundy Sauce’

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I found an old cooking book from 1938 from South Chile (even back then Germans lived in Chile – not like all the Nazi-associations everybody immediately gets). The little black, hand-written cooking book survived all this years. See picture! In this book, there is one recipe, I have never seen before. And, I wonder where it comes from. Knowing the author, I can see that maybe she read it SOMEWHERE and found it extraordinary chiqué! Quite a thing. The chef in question was a Master in cutting veggies for a soup particularly small because it is elegant (and her soups tasted soooo good!!). She was a lady through and through – so, I guess this recipe is a kind of window in her origins. (I hope she doesn’t read this from heaven…). Let me be clear – I haven’t tried the recipe so far. There is a simple reason: it is a recipe how to prepare eggs in a red wine sauce. Being modern German, I find red wine too luxurious to be wasted to …

Bed your Sweet Potato!

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Simple truth – sweet potato is a very, very delicious food! And, it is so easily tranformed into a delicious meal – the perfect ingredient for a lazy cook! For example – assuming you want dinner ready in 20 minutes (portions for three people) – take 300g of sweet potato (around 2) and 300g of cèpe (a French name for a very special boletus – yellow boletus). Also you need 3 shallots and as much fresh parsley as you want. First peel and cut the sweet potato into thin pieces – around 0.5 to 1cm thin. Put the peeled and cut potato into boiling water and leave it for 3 minutes. Afterwards discard the water and keep the potatoes at the site. Clean the cèpe and cut it. Peel the shallots and cut them as well. In a pan first heat olive oil to maximum until it starts frizzling. Then add the shallots. Reduce the heat to medium and fry the shallots untill they become glazzed. Heat them a little bit more until they start …

Hemp your Couscous!

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Couscous is an all-arounder. It can be served both as a main and a side dish. Either you prepare it fresh or store it forever. It‘s a perfect social food but you can also eat it as a lonely singleton. A very healthy dish – it has one drawback: couscous is rather rich in carbohydrates (~70%) than it is in protein (~10%). My favourite strategy to increase it’s protein content is to just mix it with peeled hemp seeds. The reasons for this are obvious: hemp seeds are look-wise pretty similar to couscous and do not change the overall appearance of the couscous too much. Hemp seeds contain less carbohydrates (~36%) but more protein (~23%). And, last but not least, hemp seeds are very easy to prepare – just mix peeled seeds (buy peeled seeds in the shop, don’t peel them yourself!) into the cooled couscous. As hemp seeds are very rich in oil (containing omega-3 fatty acid) it’s advisable to add less olive oil (if at all) to your couscous. Last but not least, …

On the spotlight: “Manneken Pis” – the Dutch fast food chain that dares to be different

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So, a big part of traditional Dutch “cuisine” is fast food. Dutch love their french fries greasy and salty. You can find little shops offering fried stuff everywhere in Dutch urban areas. The density of fast food vendors is unmatched by any other food type shops  (e.g. bakeries, fish shops, green groceries etc). Among the many vendors, one very special chain of french fries shops stands out: Manneken Pies. Despite offering very greasy and supposedly unhealthy stuff, they take pride in only using the best organic ingredients for their fast food (http://www.mannekenpis.nl/). In fact, they were awarded in 2013 as best french fries shops in the Netherlands. Very special is their large focus on sauces, e.g. their infamous (yet delicious) hemp mayonaise. Hemp is a very healthy food ingredients – thus, the mayonaise most likely adds value to the french fries. The idea to develop such a mayonaise came natural to the vendor owners. Their Amsterdam shop is very close to coffee shop, thus, they were smelling hemp all day long. Why not make a …