latkes

I love potato pancakes. It turns out their preparation does not involve rocket science. Grate four potatoes and one onion (prepare to cry). Mix with two eggs, a few tbsp of flour, and a whole heck of a lot of salt and pepper. Fry large, flattened spoonfuls of the mixture in plenty of hot olive oil until very dark brown, turn, and make the other side dark brown too. Serve with sour cream and smoked fish, or apple sauce. These quantities make about twelve pancakes (serves about four).

As you proceed with the frying (with two pans doing two or three at a time), you can preserve the cooked pancakes on paper towels in a 170 F (80 C) oven.

An expert variation is to drain the shredded potato, let the starch settle out of the drained liquid, and mix it back in, but that may qualify as rocket science. One night we added shredded celery root, to good effect.

mirepoix

A mirepoix is a mix of chopped vegetables used to build the foundational flavours of many dishes. In classic French cooking, the mirepoix consists of two parts cooking or yellow onions to one part each of carrot and celery. If that sounds like rocket science, if I wanted for example one cup of mirepoix, I would use half a cup of onion, a quarter cup of carrot and a quarter of celery.

Other cuisines have their own take on mirepoix. The function is always the same: build a solid base or backdrop of flavour against which to highlight the goodness of the main ingredients.

• Indian: the highly aromatic "wet masala" of onions, garlic and ginger
• Cajun/Creole: the "holy trinity" of onions, celery and green pepper

lentil soup

This was great for lunch with a crusty baguette (we tried the new "La Tradi" from Eric Borderon's artisinal bakery in Quebec City).

• in a heavy-bottomed pan, sweat a cup of classic mirepoix in a bit of olive oil (covered at medium-low heat)
• add half a cup of small green lentils, a small handful each of red-skinned potato, rutabaga and zuccini and a sprig of thyme
• all the veg should be chopped or diced medium (the size of a green pea)
• add eight cups of water, bring to a boil and simmer for about half an hour
• season with salt (about two teaspoons) and pepper when the lentils are tender

water-based soups

Almost all of the soup-related entries here at F,NRS call for chicken stock. Sometimes, however, I don't have any stock on hand. This entry is meant to be an on-going record of soups that don't seem to suffer for lack of chicken stock and those that do or might.

Good with water:

• cauliflower soup using the pureed vegetable soup algorithm replacing stock with water
• lentil soup
• leek and potato, but I oversalted it (Dec. 2008)
• (Hogg say:) carrot-ginger: a bunch of carrots, a cubic inch of ginger (boil carrots and ginger with salt and blend), orange juice and cream

Bad with just water:

• chicken noodle (just kidding)
• Tuscan white bean soup, probably

pork rillettes

I've been wanting to make this ever since I bought Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles cookbook over a year ago. Finally got around to it last weekend. I served it with toasted baguette and sour cornichon pickles as a starter for Valerie and Roger. Of the five kids also eating, four loved it and the one who didn't doesn't like anything. It's ridiculously easy to make (as advertised) and insanely good. Even better than...get this... cretons.

Cut into 2 inch chunks and put into a heavy-bottomed pot (still lovin' that Creuset I got for my 30th birthday) the following:

• 1 lb. pork shoulder
• 2 lb. fresh pork belly (this cut is used to make both bacon and salt pork, but you want neither of those things; for me, getting this requires a trip to a good butcher, as it isn't the kind of thing supermarkets stock)
• 4 cups of water
• 1 bouquet garni (spigs of parsley and thyme and a bay leaf tied together)

Simmer for six hours, stirring from time to time. When it's done, there will be no water, an abundance of beautiful, golden brown liquid fat and chunks of meat that readily fall apart into shreds and some of which has browned a bit in the hot fat. You add a teaspoon of salt to this and pull the meat apart with forks. Pour everything into a terrine-like dish. Bourdain covers with thinly sliced pork fat, but I didn't have that so I just used plastic wrap. It's supposed to be better if you let it age for three days before you eat it, but I can't say I've noticed a difference between the taste the day after making it and today, which is three days after. So damn good!

sausage, squash, and apple

PMC came down to the fuzz compound for the weekend, and we threw sweet pork sausages, peeled and cubed butternut squash, and large apple chunks into the oven for 30 or 40 min at 400 F (200 C). The apple was over-cooked into a kind of thick apple sauce, but the squash caramelized on the cast-iron pan and the combination of the three ingredients was great! Everything had been tossed with olive oil, but to PMC's astonishment, it didn't need any salt or pepper.

macaroni and cheese

I took PMC's statement that it was impossible to make macaroni and cheese without pre-boiling the noodles as a challenge, and produced the following. I love it, but it won't satisfy those who identify the dish with creaminess. Cheesiness, more like it!

Put 8 oz macaroni in a lot of hot tap water for 30 min while the oven pre-heats to 400 F (200 C). Cut cubes of swiss and cheddar cheese until you have two or three cups. Drain the macaroni and mix with the cubes of cheese. Butter a cast-iron pan with as much butter as you can stand to use, pour in the macaroni and cheese, fill with milk until more-than-covered, and generously salt and pepper. Bake for 45 min.

Serves four. Double the recipe, make it in a big oven dish, and serve eight.

Spätzle

Hans-Walter Rix (Director of the MPIA) made this German classic for me, in preparation for an attempt on Käsespätzle I plan to make later this week.

Get some water boiling on the stove and salt it. Mix 200 g flour (about 1.5 cups) and plenty of salt with 2 eggs until smooth. Add water (the word is that soda water works better than flat water, but we did not perform any comparison) a bit at a time and stir until you get a dough that is slightly foamy and flows, but which is not fully liquid.

Pour the dough onto a small cutting board and fling small bits of it into the boiling water with a flexible knife. Boil for a few minutes until the noodles are solid. Drain and then either serve with butter, or else sauté with butter and serve with salt, pepper, and cheese.

If you make the dough too liquid, the noodles become too small and water-logged. Interestingly, the liquid can be replaced with broth or puréed spinach to vary the taste. Top Spätzle makers have a large ricer that looks like an enormous garlic press to make consistent noodles from the dough. I think PMC may have one of these?

ch-ch-cherry pie

Or rather "ch-ch-cherry soup" as Ben likes to say. After losing any fruit our Evans sour cherry tree had set to plum curculio two years running, I resolved last year to treat the tree systematically with insecticide in the spring rather than just hoping that nature would sort things out in my favour. As a result, we were able to harvest about 10 pints of cherries (a little more than half a peck, as in "a peck of pickled peppers") from our tree during this weekend's visit from the Fabulous Nerissa. Marie-Lou, Ness, Ben and I pitted those babies in record time and I set out to make the sour cherry pie filling described in Steingarten's piece "Pies From Paradise" in The Man Who Ate Everything.

Both Steingarten and the editors of Cook's Illustrated recommend tapioca for thickening cherry pie. The fruit flavour is reported to be "brighter" and the filling clearer. Corn starch, they say, produces a muddier taste. Steingarten instructs us to blend instant tapioca into a powder before using it, but no matter how long I let it whir around in there it wouldn't get much smaller than large grains of sand. I used it in that form and since the tapioca only dissolves partially when cooked, there were a multitude of little jelly specks in my filling, which was nonetheless absolutely delicious. I let it cool on the counter and then for several hours in the 'fridge before making my pies, as recommended. When the filling remained quite runny even when well chilled, I should have been more concerned than I was. I figured it might thicken more when I baked the pie.

It didn't. Two pies were made. We cut into the first only an hour after taking it from the oven, which I knew was going to be a mistake but it was too compelling. It was still very warm and the filling was like soup (sound familiar). The crust was also underbaked, a consequence of the cold filling throwing off my usual timing. The second pie spent the night in the refridgerator and cut much more nicely the following day; the above picture is of this pie. So that was that for this year's cherries, but I have found a nearby source of good frozen pie cherries and will press on. I have to find tapioca flour and increase the amount and see if that helps. I'll also bake it until the pastry is well and truly brown on top next time. Stay tuned for further developments.

tomato sauce with anchovy

No rocket science for this quick and tasty treat: Soften up 1 or 2 thinly sliced or chopped onions and 4 to 8 anchovies in a substantial amount of butter. Add canned crushed tomatoes (or whole). Salt generously. Simmer for 10 to 30 min or until thick. Adjust salt.

We ate this tonight with supermarket tortellini.

chicken pot pie

I don't know for sure, but a "pot pie" might be a pie in which the pot forms the bottom, but there is a top crust of pastry. For my fourth pie of the summer I tested this assumption by making a chicken stew, adding a pie crust pastry top, and then baking it until the top was crispy. It came out like chicken and dumplings but with crispy, flaky dumpling-like servings of pie crust!

For the stew, I put two chicken legs and some chopped green onions in a covered pot, cooked them hot for about 15 min, added water to half-cover and a lot of salt, simmered it for about 30 min, pulled the chicken off the bones, chopped the chicken, tossed the bones, added peas and carrots, stirred in flour to thicken it (yes, cheating, I should have made a roux and it would have been better), and simmered it for about 30 min more.

I put on the pastry top and threw it in a 375 F (200 C) oven for another 30 min.

herring and potato salad

For lunch today, the 'fuzz made a salad of boiled new potatoes, smoked herring, and fresh arugula. She dressed it with lemon juice, olive oil, shallot, salt, and pepper. That was a beautiful use of our Heidelberg farmers' market fare.

tarte au citron

After a long phonecall with PMC, I decided that my third pie-baking attempt this summer would be tarte au citron. For the shell I used a sweetened version of PMC's pie crust (with butter as the fat), and pre-baked it (in two small pie plates) for 15 minutes at 375 F (200 C) with pie weights (euro pennies on a sheet of baking parchment in this case).

For the filling, I mixed two whole eggs, six egg yolks, one cup sugar, a few tbsp butter and about a tsp of salt with the grated rind and juice of three lemons. I heated it up on the stove until it was starting to emit steam (nowhere near boiling), then strained it into a few tbsp of milk (I was out of cream).

I poured the filling into the shells and baked it at 375 F (200 C) for about 10 minutes. I let the tartes cool, and then served them with blueberries, raspberries, and creme fraiche. Awesome!

The above story leaves out numerous mistakes and failures, like using a not-properly-preheated oven, baking at the wrong temperature (so I had to bake longer). But it worked well nonetheless. A mark of food that ain't rocket science: You can mess up and recover.

sour cherry pie

I made this for a party today, the same way as my rhubarb pie, but (a) I made the crust with German-supermarket margarine instead of butter, (b) I used sour cherries instead of rhubarb, (c) I cut the sugar a bit, and (d) I baked it for one hour only.

It looks great. I will report on how it tastes (in the comments) after the party.

rhubarb pie

I vowed to make ten pies during my summer in Germany. I made the first yesterday. It would have come out better if I had baked it normally and not in "broil" mode, but I couldn't understand the icons on my damned European oven!

I put into PMC's pie crust (made with butter so it tasted good but was not super flaky) three cups of cut-up rhubarb and one cup of sugar. I put on the top crust, put it in a 200 C (400 F) oven for 20 min and then turned it down to 175 C (350 F) for another hour.

The pie was delicious but as I implied I was a bit disappointed with the crust. PMC, can you make a flaky crust with butter? If so, how? I have an intuition that you might be able to if you rolled it with flour, folded it, rolled it, and repeated many times?

lasagne

I was very pleased to discover this month that lasange does not require pre-cooking of the noodles (which, if you count water-boiling time, almost doubles the preparation time). I just soaked the lasagne noodles in tap water while I heated up some pasta sauce (which I made earlier in the week by frying onions and cut-up sausage in a whole lot of butter and then simmering with a large can of crushed tomatoes and a lot of salt). I layered the noodles and sauce with soft and hard cheese and raw spinach. I reserved a lot of cheese for the top. I put it in a 350 F oven for an hour, let stand for 20 min, and then ate it! Warning: A big pan requires a double order of sauce.

It is clear that if you are in a real hurry, you could just layer unsoaked, uncooked noodles with raw spinach, unheated crushed tomatoes, cheese, salt, and pepper, and cook it for a bit longer and it would work just fine; I have yet to try this, though.

It is also clear that it will be possible to make macaroni and cheese with no pre-oven preparation: That's tonight's experiment!

"The Most Delicious Fruit Sorbet in the World"

Today we have a guest, my son Ben, who you know, dear Readers, as the star of Ants on a Log. I am acting as his scribe: "First I weighed 400 g of frozen strawberries, raspberries and blueberries. Then I put them into a food processor and blended them for a little bit. Then I added two handfuls of sugar and blended a little bit longer. Then I realized that it was just dark so I added a spoonful of vanilla yoghurt and then blended it again until it was all mixed together. Then I put it into a container, tasted it and put it into the freezer."

two pies

Emboldened by the simplicity of PMC's pie crust, I made two pies this week. One was filled with sautéed mushrooms and leftover boeuf bourguignon. The other was filled with huge apple chunks and a 1/2 c sugar. Both were assembled (quickly) in a pre-heated (ouch, ouch) cast-iron pan (yes, my old faithful). Both were baked for about an hour at about 400 F. Both came out great! Who knew? Pie baking is not rocket science.