thepassionatecook

I need a stiff drink! Deadline for WTSIM extended...

Just came home from a tough exam I presented at 4pm this afternoon and the last thing I want to do right now (interesting though it may be) is post my entry for "Waiter! There's something in my...". Please excuse the laziness, but a weekend of day-long lectures and the nerves of the exam have taken their toll... never mind that there are still three advent calendars to stuff before tomorrow morning, school bags to pack and a dramatic rescue operation to persue in an attempt bring the house back to its original state after a weekend of the boys wreaking havoc with Mummy far, far, away... I will be resuming my duties as host for this month's WTSIM tomorrow, with a post of our traditional Sunday roast and the round-up to follow in due course.

And seeing that I get an amnesty, if you have a roast simmering in the oven and yet to blog about it, don't worry about missing the deadline... I will be accepting your entries until mid week (at least), so get roasting ;-)

Roasted sweet potato & red onion

Ever heard of the blood group "diet"? I am not a diet girl, really, I have never been engaged to Atkins and the grapefruit and South Beach diets don't feature in my repertoire, despite the fact that I gained 25 kilos while living in Mexico, 9, 15 and 23 kg respectively in my pregnancies. The infamous cabbage soup once made an appearance on my stove only to be chucked out as soon as we finished our first bowl... inedible. Really. Fact is, I am way too undisciplined to follow any regime that doesn't advocate comfort food. (Whether I am naturally drawn to foods that are good for me or just have an above-average metabolism, I don't know. But I am far from being fat and any doctor's model student when it comes to measuring body fat, cholesterol levels and blood pressure. Do I think I am "practically perfect in every way?" - no way! There's always room for improvement, don't you think?)

The curriculum for the studies (a BSc in Complementary Medicine) that I embarked on last year also has a module on nutrition and the blood group "diet" was highly spoken of. I have the misfortune of having grown up in Austria and being a blood type O. What that means in a nutshell is that I am not supposed to have any potatoes or pasta, both of which are a staple in my diet. Sweet potato, on the other and, is beneficial for my metabolism and that's a vegetable that is all but  unknown where I grew up and therefore only a recent discovery. Paired with red onions and coriander or parsley, roasted in the oven for just over half an hour, those sweet potatos are a real treat, recently enjoyed with a steak straight from the BBQ, a chimichurri sauce (recipe to follow) and a new addiction: cavolo nero. Also extremely beneficial for me supposedly. Who said diets have to be painful???

And if you're in the mood for roasting now, why not participate in our much-revered foodblogging event "Waiter, there's something in my..." where the theme this month is roasts. You've got until Sunday, so that's your dinner for the weekend sorted! ;-)

Chicory "boats" with marinated chestnuts & parma ham

At the risk of boring you to death, I will have to state again that I am absolutely in love with Skye Gyngell (despite the fact that I have never really been introduced to her and the best I got to was to exchange a few glances through the kitchen counter from which she serves her spectacular fare a Petersham Nurseries, which happens to be my local). It's not just her, it's her cookbook which has been accompanying me for about a year, become a trusted inspirational source and the recipes in which have never, ever failed me.

About six months ago, we hosted a lunch for my parents and my host brother from Australia (he spent a year with my parents on an AFS inter-cultural exchange) and his girlfriend, who we hadn't met before. Now, I never make the mistake of not asking what somebody's food likes and dislikes are beforehand, especially if I don't know them - but even if you do, sometimes people are not being honest and you end up making something they eat, if only reluctantly. To make things even more challenging, his soon-to-become-wife was pregnant at the time as well, which ruled out quite a few options: seafood, unpasteurized cheese, raw/rare meat/fish, nuts, etc. What to choose, what to choose?

Again, I reverted to A Year in My Kitchen and found a perfect combination of flavours unlikely to offend even the pickiest of guests - and even if there was an ingredient they didn't like, I could always wing it by saying I had specifically chosen something created by a fellow Aussie... Everybody loved the salad and it's been featuring in many a dinner/lunch party since. Indeed, I found the flavour combination so perfect, yet uncommon, that I wrecked my brain as to how I could possibly convert this into a finger food and serve at my next catering gig.

The answer lay in the ingredients. The salad uses chicory, if I remember well (please excuse the vagueness, it's Saturday evening and I have had a glass too much, I think, but am too hyped to go to bed), so I tried to spoon it all onto chicory leaves and have them serve as my edible cutlery. They're time-comsuming to put together and you can only assemble them last-minute, but the flavour is so worth making them... I bet even Skye would approve!

Plum & cinnamon streusel cake

It's been a long time since I last made a traditional Austrian cake. If you want to know what's been keeping me all those years, I'll be very honest with you. I used to hate baking, primarily because I never was much of a sweet tooth, so I had never felt the urge to bake until quite recently. It's only since we moved to London that I discovered that end of the culinary spectrum - possibly because good pastries are hard to come by in this country. Sure, supermarkets and cafés offer muffins, cookies and deep-fried stuff galore, but proper home-made cakes are not all that easy to find. And although I love a good opera cake (bought, not home-made) as much as the next person, you can't beat a cake that really makes you feel at home. Like coming in after a long autumn walk in the woods, fingers and toes slowly thawing by the fireside, a pot of tea at arm's length... surely this calls for something like your Mum used to make much more than poncey patisserie. Right?
The other obstacle to baking Austrian things more frequently is that in a country that (deservedly) enjoys world fame for its patisserie and (inexplicably) coffee culture, most cakes are just impossible to recreate at home. Our way of baking is very far removed from the American (and I guess British) approach where you throw all ingredients into one bowl, mix them up with a fork, pour into a tin and hope for the best. No, that would be far too simple! To make a proper Austrian torte (think Dobos  Torte), you'll be killing your back standing in the kitchen for hours non-stop just to prepare fourteen pivotal ingredients to a cake, not to mention the fact that you'll run out of mixing bowls and whisks half-way through it!

On the other hand, we obviously have simpler fare as well, but I never even attempted to make any of that, because back home, they're so well known all around that a) they don't impress anybody and b) everybody has their own favourite version of a particular cake and instead of reaping compliments, the best you'll possibly get is a half-hearted "this is nice, but you know, my auntie soandso makes the best EVER (insert name of the cake that you just pain-stakingly made) and we've been trying to coax the recipe out of her for ages, but she took it to her gave". How can you possibly compete with that!

So it was only this week that I undertook my first attempt to make one of the most popular cakes known to the Austrian: the Zwetschkenfleck. It's a tray bake with plums, topped with cinnamon & almond streusel and the name sort of suggests already that this isn't considered haute cuisine... "Fleck" literally translates as "blotch" or "stain", although in Austrian dialect, it is commonly used to designate a scrap of cloth. A Zwetschkenfleck is an afterthought, something you make on the side when you've got too much fruit at home at harvest time and you can use all sorts of fruit, of course, the plums just being the most common.

I did not have a recipe for it, nor did I remember exactly how my Mum makes it. I think the traditional would be a sponge or shortcrust base, a generous spread of jam, topped with the fruit and then the streusel. I wanted to make the deluxe version of it, which is probably what you would find in most patisseries and coffee houses (including Paul's in Paris and London), with a base of pâte briochée, a layer of crème pâtissière, a layer of plums and a topping of cinnamon-laden streusel with almond slivers, half of which I naughtily gobbled up while I was assembling the cake. What can I say, since I brought the cake to a coffee morning where I could be sure not to encounter any Austrians or Germans, I felt quite confident with my first attempt at baking Zwetschkenfleck. And although it wasn't all that difficult to make, it was a sure hit with the ladies... whether they're easy to please or just glad someone could be bothered to actually bake something, I don't know. What I DO know is that I feel like I've done a big step towards my own reconciliation with Austrian baking ;-)

WTSIM... theme for November!

With a brilliant and very autumnal round hosted by Cook Sister! in October, I have chosen another comforting theme for this month's instalment of "Waiter! There's something in my..."

Granted, not every possible partcipant is experiencing cold, rainy days like us, with some sunny intervals that feel even chillier, or has to scrape the ice off their car as they run out in the morning... but we're all in need of comfort food, no matter what the weather.

So the theme I am proposing for this round is ROAST. You can make this a traditional Sunday roast as is custom in the UK or give us a 101 to your Thanksgiving turkey, you can try your luck at making Beef Wellington or Beer Can Chicken or put a whole hog on the BBQ... you can even propose a vegetarian alternative - roast, stuffed butternut squash, anyone?

So the only rules are that you have a sizeable chunk of something or other that will be the protagonist of your dish, roasted whole (although BBQ'd is accepted) and present it with all the trimmings/sides you suggest. In that vein, no casseroles, stews or stir-frys or individually cooked dishes.

Please send your entries () by 30th November and I will  have the round-up ready the following weekend!

Happy WTSIM everyone!

Marsala-roast onions with camembert

When I first learnt in High School at the tender age of ten that Europe's main diet in the Middle Ages was onion, I couldn't believe it. Of course, potato, rice and many other staple foods weren't known around here until a certain Cristoforo Colombo set sail for India and discovered something entirely different (I will be entirely grateful for the fact that he brought us, among other things, avocados, exotic fruit and CHOCOLATE!) Much as I love onions, I couldn't bear to think of the stench everywhere as people were tucking into onions as if they were apples... but then again, Dove wasn't selling on market stalls either, nor did they have the convenience of a bathroom or WC. So I guess onion breath was the least of their worries.

Making a meal of onions is exactly what I did a few weeks ago - what was originally planned as a side ended up being our dinner... and deservedly so. There's nothing better than to indulge in something roasted on a wet autumn day and even more so when there's cheese involved - and mopping up the juices with a fresh slice of French sourdough makes you forget it's only onions you're eating - a luxury they wouldn't have had in the Middle ages, of course!