Anyway – I needed some meat yesterday, and thought about a different salad with meat. Simply by taking salad and putting some meat on top. And I ended up with this:

It started with some rucola, I then fried two sliced carrots in a pan and added two or three chopped up tomatoes to the mix later on. Those bacame all mushy and warm. This was salted, peppered and Cayenne peppered (a fresh chili might have been nice but wasn’t around) and then put to the side of the pan to create a free area for the steak. I only seared the steak briefly, leaving it raw in the middle.

Finally the steak was thinly sliced, chopped coriander was added to the tomato-carrot mix which was then mixed with the salad (giving an IMO nice hot-cold contrast when eating), this was put on a plate with a few steak slices on top and coarsly grated parmesan yet on top of that.

Eat with a buttered toast and grunt.

Cooking the dish was nice and simple. As I wanted rice to go with it, I first put some rice in the rice cooker. Then I halved the seedless grapes and put them in a medium-hot pot with plenty of melted butter (quantity: a knob – whatever that may be). It takes a moment for the grapes to become soft, so I started with that. While they are cooking you spice them with salt and pepper – where the pepper plus grapes combination turns out to be brilliant. At the end you’ll have soft-ish grapes which lost a bit of their colour and which are in a slightly spicy buttery sauce. Just before finishing to cook them add some lemon juice and half of the chopped chervil (OK I used rough parsley instead because I couldn’t figure out that chervil is Kerbel in German while at the supermarket) you bought.

While the grapes are simmering, fry the fish after salting and peppering it. First the side with the skin in an olive oiled pan for a few minutes and to finish it off turn the pieces and fry the other side while adding some extra butter for bonus goldenness and butteriness. While doing that I found that the thin slices of fish are rather fragile and like to fall apart when you turn them over.

And once you did all that, dinner is ready. Serve as rice + fish+ grapes + leftover chervil and you’ll be fine.

Cheers to The Guardian and Mr Rhodes for the idea.

[Wondering whether I should put an amazon link or not… I quite like the recipe but seeing the guy’s picture on the book titles reminded me that he’s the TV cook I really don’t like, so I wouldn’t buy his book… Hmhmhm.]

• 125g butter or margarine
• 125g sugar
• 3 eggs
• lemon zest
• baking powder
• 200g flour
• a little milk
• 500-750g of apples or other fruit

Preparation

You will need a medium sized bowl and a hand mixer for this. Pre-heating the oven to 200°C is a good step to start.

Make sure the butter isn’t too cold and hard and mix it for a short while so it becomes a bit creamy. Then add the sugar and mix for a little, then add the eggs (3 small ones, 2 will do if you get XL eggs) as well as the lemon zest (or a little lemon flavour powder/essence) and continue mixing for a while. You should have thinnish creamy mass after this. Keep mixing and add the baking powder and flower as well as a bit of milk. Dose the milk such that the dough remains quite soft (like muffin dough, say). Then put the dough into a well-greased spring form of 26-28cm diameter.

Now peel the apples, remove the pips and core and cut it into four to six wedges. Make about four length-wise cuts in the outer side of the wedges. These will open up a little during baking and give the cake a great look. Then put the wedges on the batter and press them in slightly.

That’s it. All that remains to do is baking the cake for around 45 minutes at 200°C and to enjoy it. I recommend serving the cake with a bit of icing sugar on top, slightly cooled with freshly whipped cream.

The cake can also be made with virtually any other fruit. Cherries work well, particularly those from a glass. And fresh rhubarb is definitely worth a try. For an extra twist you can add almond slivers on top before baking. The photo below shows the cake with apples and rhubarb:

add some celery, onion and garlic:

after a while add tomatoes, chickpeas and spinach (unfortunately of the frozen kind at this time of the year, but that worked surprsingly well):

then stew that with some broth for three quarters of an hour and finally add some ham oil and – fun extra hint! - grated hard boiled egg on the top. Tastes great.

But my omnivorous self wasn’t content with that so there was also a salad before – where I used what I scraped out of the tomatoes that went into the soup plus some balsamic vinegar for a tomato dressing – and some Waldmeister jelly with custard. Both of which come in little bags an need stirring but I paid enough attention to the custard that it didn’t get a yucky skin for a change. Yummy and mostly green, all that.

Did I mention there’s also a cake?

The cake has a thin shortcrust dough at the bottom and red currants in a kind of almond meringue on top. Its blend between sweet and sour is just perfect and I’m pretty sure I could eat it every day.

The big problem with the cake are its ingredients. Not only can red currants be quite pricey – more relevantly their season seems to be very short and easy to miss. Thus, on seeing them in the supermarket two weeks ago I immediately bought a pack… just to have my flatmates eat half of them before I could get hold of the recipe. Another week, another shopping spree and a quick digital photo sent from my mum’s cook book (digital cameras + e-mail seem to be the 21st century fax) and I was in business. So for my future memory and your enjoyment, here comes the recipe. You’ll need the following ingredients:

For the crust:

• 200g of flour
• a tiny bit of baking powder
• 1 egg
• 50g of sugar
• lemon zest
• 100g of soft butter or margarine

• 500g of red currants
• 5 egg whites
• 200g of sugar
• 100g of ground almonds (or more)

First prepare the crust: Mix the ingredients in the order given above, and knead a dough of them which shouldn’t be sticky but shouldn’t be crumbly either. I’d rather have the dough a bit on the greasy side to make sure it doesn’t stick to the pan. Roll out about half of the dough on the bottom of a well greased round (26cm diameter) baking tin [we typically use a Springform in Germany, a word and device which at least according to Google could be known in the rest of the world as well]. Then make a thinnish roll from the rest of the dough, place it along the edge of the tin and press the dough upwards, giving you a nice and thin outer crust for the cake.

Next for the filling: First you need to wash the red currants and remove the little wooden bits. That can take a moment, so it might be good to do it in advance. Next whip up the egg whites so they’re really firm and whip the sugar in as well, giving you a stiff-ish shiny mass. Then drag the almonds into the mass and split it in two. Put one half aside for a moment and carefully add the red currants to the mass. Then put that mixture onto the crust in the tin. Finally put the other half on top – which will give you a nice and slightly crisp-meringuey top.

Bake at about 180°C for 55 minutes.

In my opinion it’s best to let the cake cool off, then put it into the fridge and remove it about half an hour before eating, which will give you a lovely room-temperature crust but refreshingly cool berries. Having some whipped cream of top doesn’t hurt either…

Ugh, this photo just doesn’t do the cake justice…

As there were a couple of bananas in the kitchen that were starting to go brown, I went for a banana bread. Not only does this mean you don’t have to eat the squishy and possibly too tasty bananas – I’m not a big fan – having those ‘bad’ bananas is actually better for banana bread as they are more squishy and thus distribute better in the batter and they are their taste is stronger, which is just perfect for banana bread.

And making it was simple. First get some fat (around 200g of margarine I’d guess), whip it up a bit then add some sugar (150g?), vanilla sugar, baking powder (I used around half a German pack, which I’d guess are two to three teaspoons), eggs (I used three). I also found some ground almonds which needed to be used up so those went in as well. Then the bananas and finally flour and a dash of milk balanced to have a texture that still easily tears but isn’t liquid.

Finally I put it in a baking tin and into the oven (200°C) until it looked finished. It’s not extremely pretty but it has a firm crust now and is still of moist banana goodness on the inside. Just the way I like it (although I assume that some people can’t stand this).

half a litre of cream, a few spoons of sugar, vanilla and a three leaves of gelatine. I was quite keen on trying that out as I’ve never used gelatine for cooking myself. The process is rather simple. You add the sugar and vanilla to the cream and boil it. While that’s happening, you put the gelatine in a bowl of water, so it can soak a bit. After the gelatine is soft and the cream has boiled a bit, you take the cream off the stove, add the gelatine and stir it under.

Then you put the resulting liquid in a large glass dish, or in serving size glasses. As what you’ll be eating is essentially pure cream, remember to keep the servings small. Let them cool for an hour or two and then put them into the fridge, so they can become properly solid. That’s it.

Using proper vanilla to do this is probably the preferred method, but it’s rather pricey. So we settled for a compromise between ordinary vanilla sugar and the real stuff: A sort of poncy vanilla sugar that’s made with Bourbon vanilla and has those black dots in it. While I’m not 100% sure how natural the whole thing was, its vanilla taste and colour was much more intense than that of ordinary vanilla sugar, giving you a strong vanilla taste in your Panna Cotta. As the Panna Cotta only solidfies slowly, you’ll find all the black bits of the vanilla sugar at the bottom of the glass, which is a bit of a shame and actually looks rather weird.

The vanilla taste may be all nice and dandy but it’s not too exciting, so you can add further things to the dessert. We used ‘Rote Grütze’ for that, a German berry dessert which is quite nice. But I guess that fresh strawberries or blueberries might have been even better.

What still irritates me, though, is that the recipe is so simple. Perhaps it was just a simple student version that I got hold of. I’m also interested to try some variations. Making it with slight less fat – perhaps just a quarter litre of cream with a quarter litre of milk. Not that I’m into dieting now but with the current recipe, you basically end up feeling very stuffed after only eating a little. That way, you might be able to eat more. I’d also be curious to see how using coconut milk would work out. That wouldn’t be properly Italian, but sounds quite good.

Somehow, my previous post on Tiramisu seems to attract many people interested in making tiramisu – despite not having a recipe on them. So in an attempt to make the actual relevance of these pages match with what the search engines see in them, I'll post the recipe now.

You'll need the following things:

• a tub of mascarpone
• 3-5 tablespoons of sugar (to taste)
• 4 eggs
• 2-3 espressos
• 1 pack of sponge fingers
• Amaretto
• dark/bitter cocoa powder

Let me add a few explanations for those who never made tiramisu and may not be familiar with the ingredients: mascarpone is an Italian cream cheese. It is very rich and a bit sweet. It is essential for the creamy taste of tiramisu, so replacing it by other cheeses like Quark (too sour, too watery) or crème fraîche (too sour) Philadelphia (not smooth enough) or even custard won't cut it. Use mascarpone or go for another dessert. Once you've got the hang of mascarpone, it's easy to get addicted. It's nice with jam on fresh bread or with strawberries. But I digress. The tub of mascarpone I have in mind contains 200-250g.

By tablespoons I mean what is referred to as tablespoons in Germany. That's the stuff you would eat müesli with, not those larger spoons used for serving vegetables which some people seem to call tablespoons as well. Anyway. just use sugar to suit your own taste.

Eggs – you know the stuff coming out of hens. While I have never had problems with that, keep in mind that these eggs won't be cooked. So better use really good and fresh eggs. And consume the tiramisu within two days or so (easy!).

A pack of sponge fingers containing two layers of fingers, or about 200g should be the right size. There seem to be different kinds of sponge fingers. Lighter and thicker ones and denser but smaller ones. The lighter ones will yield a slightly more fluffy result but can make the tiramisu look weird because they'll float to the top of it if you don't have enough of the other ingredients.

Amaretto is an Italian almond liqueur. It's indispensable for making tiramisu as it is responsible for the characteristic taste. Personally I think it's too sweet to be drunk on its own, so a bottle bought for making tiramisu will last ages.

Now for the preparation, in my personal optimised order to do things: First, make the espresso. Once it is ready, pour it into a small flat dish, so it cools a little. You need to dip the sponge fingers in this later on, so have that in mind when choosing the dish. While the espresso is cooking, separate the egg whites from the yolks. Then beat the egg whites. They need to be extra stiff. That's crucial. They will become liquid again after a while, so you can't have any breaks after this. You may want to put them into the fridge. I think this slows things down.

Next beat the egg-yolks. [Lazy note: Doing things in this order means you can use the same tool to beat both without needing to wash it in between. That wouldn't work the other way roud.] They'll become creamy and withe-ish. Then add the sugar and a dash of Amaretto and continue beating. After a while, add the mascarpone and beat until everything is nice and homogeneous. Taste and add more Amaretto if necessary. I quite like to also add a little bit of brandy at this stage.

Now gently drag the stiff egg whites under the creamy substance. This is best done with a large flat scraper or so. Treating the egg whites too roughly will make them break down, so you need to be a bit more careful here than when just stirring. You shouldn't see any more lumps of the beaten egg-white after this.

Now comes the fun part: Get a small (17cmx27cm or so) , preferably square, pie/lasagne dish out. Dip a sponge finger's bottom side quickly into the espresso (which could also contain some extra brandy if you are so inclined) and place it into the dish. Some sponge fingers soak really quickly, so you may have to be equally quick in removing them. This is how you control the strength of the coffee taste in your tiramisu. If you like a strong coffee taste, you may want to make a few more espressos to begin with.

Fill the whole bottom of the dish with sponge fingers lying side by side. Then use the bottle of Amaretto and sprinkle some on top of the sponge fingers. As you added the egg whites to your creamy mixture after adding the Amaretto, its Amaretto taste is lighter now. This compensates for it and helps making the sponge fingers nice and soggy. Your fingers and Amaretto bottle will likely be sticky after this.

Now add about half the creamy mass on top of the sponge fingers. Then dip, sprinkle, repeat to create a second layer. Depending on the shape and size of your dish the second layer may need more sponge fingers and creamy stuff. Keep this in mind when making the first layer. If in doubt, put more of it on the second layer. You have to do this because there's a lot of air in the sponge fingers and they have a tendency to start floating in the semi-liquid creme after a while if there's not enough of it above them to bury them reliably.

If you're reading this and your meal starts in an hour you're having a problem: The next step is to put the tiramisu into the fridge so there is time for the sponge fingers to be completely soaked and softened. I usually prepare it the day before serving it, but if you like getting up early, it may work as well to prepare it in the morning. Finally you should sprinkle a thin layer of the dark cocoa powder on top of the finished dish. Depending on whether you want the cocoa to be slightly shiny and wet or dry you do this either before putting it into the fridge or just before serving.

That's it, enjoy. It serves 5-8 people, I'd say. If you need more, I recommend doing two separate servings as it doesn't seem possible to whip larger amounts of egg whites satisfactorily.