Kitchen Gadgets

You would think I have everything my little heart desires in the way of kitchen paraphernalia but I have found room for 2 new acquisitions that I have sort of been wanting—a mandolin and a small slow cooker.

I think the mandolin is my favourite of the two. Instead of being a full-fledged job with multiple blades and a box, and something to protect your fingers, and that costs almost a hundred euros (like the OXO deluxe mandolin), and which claims more space that I don't have in a kitchen cupboard, this is a simple hand-held plastic number with a ceramic blade that cost under 10 euros. And it just hangs on a rack when not in use. Since its acquisition I have been making thinly shaved salads almost everyday. My favourite is a fennel-cucumber salad.

As for the slow cooker, I have been sort of wanting one because they are great for cooking beans and stews unattended overnight or during the day while I am at work. The disadvantage seems to be that most of them are enormous. So when I recently saw a small one, I snapped it up. It was quite inexpensive, probably because it is missing the more sophisticated controls that you let set how many hours it should go for before going into keep-warm mode. Of course I only realized this when I got home. Nevertheless, I am finding it useful. In the photo, it has just finished cooking chickpeas (without soaking), which is pretty well my favourite legume.

Back to the fennel-cucumber salad, it's my own invention, inspired by Japanese sunomono salad. It is light and fresh, sweet and sour, and I eat for lunch several days a week. Anyone coming to dinner in the next couple of months is likely to be eating it. It may even win over people who don't like fennel!

Fennel-Cucumber Salad

• 1 small fennel
• 1/2 English (seedless) cucumber
• 2 teaspoons fresh dill, finely chopped
• 1-2 tablespoons fresh coriander, chopped
• 1-2 teaspoons sugar
• 1/4 cup apple vinegar

Thinly slice the fennel and cucumber. (I think having the vegetables thinly shaved, which is easiest to do with a mandolin, is really important in this salad.)
Toss together, add the herbs, sugar, and apple vinegar. (I am using a light apple vinegar, but apple cider vinegar or rice wine vinegar would also be suitable)

Busy Sunday

Yesterday morning, a glorious sunny day, the first true spring day (20 degrees!), I found myself sauntering along the Albert Cuyp Markt—3 or 4 blocks of vegie/fruit, cheese, charcuterie, cheese, poultry, fish, and clothing vendors. Part of the pleasure of the market is the people watching, and the snatches of overheard conversations in that awful Amsterdam working class accent, lunch a sandwich from Tjin's Exotic Broodjes, poking into the Pittenkoning (one of my favourite kitchenware stores), and just reveling in the sun.

Needless to say, I came home with some goodies and today I spent the day cooking. I've cooked for the week and that has included:

• Fish Pie, based on several recipes and trying to scale it down to a two-serving version. Not entirely successful, but there's a lot of promise and I want to work it out into something that really works.
• Apple-Cranberry-Custard pudding. What would I get if I topped apple and cranberries, plus brown sugar, lemon, orange peel, cinnamon and black pepper (!), poured a sauce of egg, milk and some Birds Eye custard powder over it, and baked for half an hour? This was an attempt to cut some fat by using a custard instead of a crisp topping. It proved to be quite tasty, but may need even more custard. 
• Osso Bucco, from Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking. Similar to one in our family cookbook, but without the porcini. 
• Hummus, based on Jane Brody's version in Good Food Book. Unfortunately, I didn't have enough lemon juice, so I used apple vinegar, lemon peel, and sumac to get the balance right. I'm really liking what sumac does to it.
• Red Pepper and Bean Spread, based on one from Smitten Kitchen, but with more garlic, quark instead of cream cheese, and red pepper flakes and sumac (instead of lemon juice) to punch it up a bit.
• Moroccan Roasted Vegetables from Moosewood New Classics for a couple of lunches this week.

It was a lovely day!

Local Food

The local food movement has reached the Netherlands! Today, as I came home from shopping (clothes, not food), I noticed a mini-market on the square in front of Studio K, the café associated with the cinema of the same name next to my apartment building. There was stew from the Veluwe (the mildy hilly area in the center of the country, home to woods, drift sand, and heather where deer and wild pigs still roam), local honey, artisanal bread, dry sausages, and flyers about a new online supermarket that will deliver mostly-local, mostly organic produce, meat and fish to your door. It's the initiative of a local couple from a distribution point in East Amsterdam (Watergraafsmeer).

My first order is already placed!   www.ruudmaaz.nl

Pork Cooked in Milk, with Bay and Cinnamon

Normally I stay clear of combining meat with milk. It's a combination that doesn't appeal to me (I will never choose Beef Stroganoff in a restaurant, for example). I'm not kosher about it--pepperoni pizza, here I come--but in general, I avoid it.

But to prove how goy I really am, this Spanish recipe for pork cooked in milk (from Moro) intrigued me and proved to be delicious. There is a plainer version in Essentials of Italian Cooking, and the Moro recipe also mentions using lemon zest and sage leaves instead of bay and cinnamon, so you could make lots of variations.

Basically, it involves browning a pork roast in a pot, adding milk and flavourings, and then simmering with the lid half off until the pork is cooked and still juicy, and the milk has evaporated leaving the remaining solids to caramelize into an almost cheesy sauce. It sounds simple, and it IS simple, but ...
I only had a small roast (about 500 grams) and, even though I tried to scale the recipe down, it took only 50 minutes to cook the pork and over 2 hours to evaporate the milk. This may have been a result of cooking the roast in a smaller pan, although I figured this was just part of scaling down the recipe. Fortunately, I had no guests and was not pressed for time. The result was tender and flavourful pork. The caramelized sauce is slightly sweet and subtly flavoured with bay and cinnamon. If you didn't know what it was, it would be hard to describe.

Lomo con Leche

Although this recipe reduced the meat and milk, I left the seasoning, bay leaves and cinnamon at the same amounts.
500 grams pork loin roast
1/2 teaspoon dried thyme
salt and pepper
2 tablespoons olive oil
3 cups milk
3 bay leaves
1/2 stick of cinnamon

1. Season the outside of the pork with salt, pepper, and thyme.
2. In a large heavy pot, heat the olive oil. When it is hot, add the pork and brown it on all sides.
3. Add the milk, bay leaves, and cinnamon and bring to a simmer. 
4. Turn the heat down and put the lid on the pot so that it is only half covered. 
5. Simmer for 45 minutes to an hour, turning the pork from time to time.
6. When the pork is cooked, remove it to a plate and cover with with tin foil.
7. Keep the lid off the milk, raise the heat slightly, and continue simmering until the milk has reduced to a thick brown sauce.
8. At this point, you can add the pork again to reheat it, before taking it out to serve with the sauce on the side. (Or you can just reheat the pork in the microwave.)

Garlic-Saffron Roast Chicken

Several weeks ago I put a gift certificate towards a new cookbook: Moro: The Cookbook. Moro is a restaurant the focuses on flavours from Spain, North Africa, and the Middle East. I'm not that keen on Spanish cooking as experienced in restaurants, at least the ones I've been to in my one trip to Spain. It's very meat-heavy and they don't understand that ham should not be part of a salad for vegetarians. (In contrast, the home cooking at Villa Matilde , where we stayed, was fabulous.) But I love North African food and would like to discover Spanish food that I like, hence the new cookbook.

All this is leading up to a recipe that was not in the cookbook! I started out seasoning a chicken a day in advance to make Zuni roast chicken, but on the day decided I wanted to do something new. Moro had a recipe for Chicken Stuffed with Garlic and Coriander. I didn't have coriander, but the rest of the recipe sounded intriguing so I made it without and served it to my guests that evening, followed by Casablanca Oranges (Jane Brody's Good Food Gourmet) for dessert, made with blood oranges and clementines.

Garlic-Saffron Roast Chicken

Besides omitting the coriander, I also left out the olive oil from the garlic paste. I reserved the milk to make a gravy, and followed the Zuni method of cooking the chicken in a preheated cast iron skillet. The dish was tasty and looks lovely, but I actually found the saffron flavour too strong and the garlic not intense enough. Worth trying again with coriander though.

1 medium chicken
1 tablespoon salt
3 garlic bulbs
1 cup milk
1 generous pinch saffron
1 1/2 teaspoons ground cumin

1. A day or two before you serve, thoroughly dry the chicken. Gently slide your fingers under the skin and loosen it. Rub the salt in all over the chicken, then put in a plastic bag and let it baste itself in the fridge until several hours before you plan to cook. This is a dry brine that lets the chicken marinate in its own moisture and gets the meat well seasoned throughout.
2. Several hours before cooking, take the chicken out of its bag and let it air dry. 
3. Preheat the oven to 220 C/425 F.
4. Meanwhile, break the garlic bulbs into their cloves and put them in a small saucepan with enough milk to cover by about an inch. Cook gently for about 25 minutes until the cloves are soft. 
5. Soak the saffron in 2-3 tablespoons of the warm garlic milk.
6. Meanwhile, remove the garlic, and squeeze out the cloves from the skins. Mash the cloves into a purée, along with the ground cumin and saffron milk. (I used the small blender of my immersion blender.)
7. Using a teaspoon and your fingers, put the garlic-saffron paste under the skin. Try to get it around the thighs as well as the chicken breast.
8. Heat a cast-iron skillet that is large enough to fit the chicken. Put the chicken in, breast-side up, then put it into the oven.
9. Cook for 20 minutes, then turn the chicken over, breast-side down.
10. Cook for another 30 minutes and flip the chicken breast-side up again.
11. Cook for another 15 minutes or until the juices run clear or the thigh join is very loose. (I like chicken well done.)
12. Remove the chicken to a platter and cover with foil to rest for 10 minutes.
13. Drain all but a tablespoon of the fat from the skillet. Over medium heat, add a tablespoon of flour, stirring and scraping up the brown bits. When the flour is browned, slowly add the garlic-milk until the sauce reaches the desired consistency. You can add water if it is still too thick.
14. Cut the chicken into pieces and serve with the gravy on the side. I served it with a rice pilaf and roasted broccoli and tomatoes.

Beef Rollade Braised in Tomato-Onion Sauce

I'm gradually making my way through the free-range beef in the freezer, and it is forcing me to explore new territory.  I love stews of all kinds, things that require long slow cooking and imprecise timing, and ground meat is flexible and easy to handle, but steaks and roasts are terra incognita for me. My experience with steak several weeks ago was not that positive, so it was with some trepidation that I turned my hand to the cuts of braadstuk (literally, roasting piece).  Of course, I ratcheted up the tension by inviting someone for dinner too.

I found the basic recipe on the internet (Braadstuk in tomatensaus), but adapted it in several ways:

• Reduced the tomato sauce quantities by a third
• Reduced the butter and oil that went into it by two thirds.
• I had only two smallish pieces of beef totaling 300 grams instead of a single cut of 800 grams. Rather than cook them individually, I decided to roll them together in a rollade with a stuffing between them.
• Added a fennel bulb that I happened to have on hand 
• Added bay leaves and herbs to the sauce, trying to balance the sweetness

There are things that I would do differently next time, though:

• Adjust the balance between the tomatoes and the onions. I found that caramelizing the onions made the sauce overly sweet. Reducing the onions and/or increasing the tomatoes would help. Or perhaps letting only half of the onions caramelize and adding the rest with the tomatoes.
• Prepare the beef rollade the day before and season it with salt and pepper. By letting it marinade with the salt in its own moisture, the meat would have been better seasoned. I found the end result rather bland.

Beef Rollade

Serves 3-4


300 grams beef, in two pieces
2 tablespoons dried porcini mushrooms
1 sun-dried tomato
3 tablespoons fresh parsely
2 cloves garlic
1/2 teaspoon salt
pepper to taste

1. Soak the mushrooms and sun-dried tomato in hot water for 15 minutes.
2. Drain them, reserving the soaking liquid, and chop finely with the garlic and parsley.
3. Season with salt and pepper.
4. Place the mixture over one piece of meat, then put the other on top of it.
5. Using kitchen string or twine, tie the pieces together. (You can do this by cutting individual lengths of string and laying the beef on top of it and tying the individual pieces, or you can use one long length, wrapping as you go. For instructions see this video. There's a bit of spoken Dutch (or Flemish, judging by the accent), but the visual says it all.

Tomato-Onion Sauce

This yields about 6 cups of sauce—too much for this meal, but it makes a great pasta sauce that can be used in subsequent meals.


50 gram butter
2 tablepoons oil
4 large onions, chopped
1 fennel bulb, chopped (optional)
2 chili peppers
1 small bulb garlic
1 teaspoon salt
1.5 kilos tomatoes
500 ml red wine
2 bay leaves
1 teaspoon dried basil
parsley to garnish

1. In a large heavy pot, heat the butter and oil over medium high heat. When the foam from the butter subsides, add the beef rollade. Turn it every few minutes until it is nicely browned on all sides (aproximately 10-15 minutes).
2. Remove the beef to a plate, let cool, then cover and refrigerate while the sauce cooks (3-4 hours).
3. Add the chopped onions to the fat, stir thoroughly, turn down the heat to low, and let the onions cook uncovered for one half to three-quarters of an hour. Stir every 10 minutes or so, scraping up any browned bits.
4. Meanwhile, mince the chili peppers: chop one complete chili pepper, including the seeds, but scrape out the seeds of the other and mince only the flesh (unless you like your sauce very hot).
5. Separate the cloves in the garlic bulb, smash them and remove the outer peel, then mince the garlic with the salt.
6. When the onions are thoroughly browned and carmelized, add the minced chili peppers, Stir and cook for 2 minutes or so.
7. Add the chopped fennel, then stir in the minced garlic.
8. Add the red wine and the reserved mushroom soaking liquid.
9. Add the whole tomatoes, then cook the sauce, uncovered, for two hours. By this time, the tomatoes will be soft and have mostly subsided into the sauce. Use a potato masher to break up and smash the tomatoes into the sauce.
10. Add the bay leaf and herbs and cook over low heat for another hour. 
11. While the sauce finishes cooking, take the meat out of the fridge to bring it to room temperature. About 40-50 minutes before you want to serve, add the beef to the sauce, cover and cook over low heat. For medium rare, cook for 30 minutes (or use a meat thermometer to determine how when ti's done to your taste).
12. Remove the meat, cover loosely with tin foil, and let rest for 10 minutes before slicing and serving it with the tomato-onion sauce. Serve with pasta and a steamed green vegetable, such as broccoli.

Cooking Sundays

Sundays tend to be the day I cook for the rest of the week. Saturdays are spent in errands, or lazing around recovering from the work week, or browsing through recipes planning things I'd like to try. But Sundays I get up, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, ready to cook. Today the agenda called for polpettini, eggplant curry, a lamb stew or curry, and deviled eggs (for the apartment potluck reception  this afternoon).

Polpettini

This is a recipe slightly adapted from a contribution my sister and brother-in-law made to our family cookbook. The amount made here will make about 18 meatballs (3-4 servings), but you can easily double the recipe.

• 1 tablespoon porcini mushrooms
• 1/3 cup warm water
• 260 grams ground beef
• 1 cloves garlic, minced
• 2 tablespoons fresh parsley chopped
• 1/4 teaspoon dried basil
• 1/2 beaten egg
• 3 tablespoons bread crumbs
• 1 tablespoons Parmesan cheese freshly grated
• salt and pepper
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 onion very finely chopped (divided)
• 1/3 cup dry white wine
• 1 tomato, chopped
• fresh parsley, to garnish

1. Soak the dried mushrooms in the warm water for 15 minutes. Lift them out of the water and chop finely. Reserve the soaking water.
2. In a mixing bowl, combine the meat with the chopped mushrooms, half the chopped onion, garlic, and herbs. Stir in the egg. Add the breadcrumbs and Parmesan, and season with salt and pepper. Form the mixture into small balls containing about 1 tablespoon each.
3. In a large heavy frying pan or skillet, heat the oil. Add the onion and cook over low heat until soft. Raise the heat and add the meatballs, rolling them often to brown evenly on all sides. After about 5 minutes add the reserved mushroom water. Cook for another 5-8 minutes, or until the meatballs are cooked through.
4. Remove the meatballs to a heated plate with a slotted spoon. Add the wine to the pan and cook for a minute or two,  stirring to scrape up any residue on the bottom of the pan. then add the chopped tomato and reduce the sauce by about half.
5. Pour the sauce over the meatballs , garnish with parsley, and serve with pasta or potatoes.

Bharta (Curried Eggplant)

One of my staple vegetables is eggplant. I love it in almost every imaginable guise—in baba ganough, in lamb stew, roasted, grilled, you name it, I love it. Yesterday I bought a package of three smallish ones, so I was on the hunt for some new recipes to use it up. The recipe I ended up using comes from an old cookbook that I was considering getting rid of. But this looks like it might be a bit premature, given how good this curried eggplant was!

Adapted from The Cooking of India

• 500 grams eggplant
• 2 tomatoes, chopped
• 2 tablespoons fresh coriander, chopped
• 1 teaspoon coriander seed
• 1 teaspoon cumin seed
• 1/2 teaspoon turmeric
• 1/4 teaspoon chili flakes or small dried chili
• 1 tablespoon oil
• 1 teaspoon butter
• 1 clove garlic, minced
• 1 teaspoon fresh ginger, minced
• 1 onion, chopped
• salt
• 1 teaspoon garam masala
• fresh coriander for garnish

1. Preheat the oven to 210 C/450 F.
2. Score the eggplants with evenly-spaced, 3 cm gashes, about 1 cm deep, on opposite sides of the eggplant. Place in a baking dish and bake in the oven for about 1 hour, turning them after 30 minutes.
3. Meanwhile, grind the coriander seed, cumin seed, turmeric, and chili flakes into a powder. (I use a coffee grinder).
4. When the eggplants are very tender, take them out of the oven, cut them in half and scoop out the flesh. Chop coarsely and put in a bowl with the tomatoes, half the onion, half the garlic, and the spice mixture.

5. In a large frying pan, heat the oil and butter over moderate heat until the butter foam subsides. Add the garlic and stir for 15 seconds. Add the ginger and stir for another 15 seconds.
6. Add the onion and cook for 2 minutes, stirring constantly, until they are soft but not brown.
7. Add the eggplant mixture and continue to cook and stir until most of the moisture is evaporated (about 10-12 minutes).
8. When the mixture masses together, drawing away from the sides and bottom of the pan, transfer it to a serving dish, sprinkle the garam masala over it, and garnish with chopped fresh coriander.
9. Serve with rice, chapati, or naan and some dal.