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.