what better time to start a blog about cooking, eating and drinking than around Christmas?
right. none. I had so many nice dishes in the last one and a half week that i have no idea where to start.
let’s try anyway:
Christmas eve started with…ehm yes, lots of Glühwein, Möwenschiss (don’t ask) before starting to cook officially, a little tipsy: red cabbage, bambi legs on veggies and serviettenknödel. (i am going to have to think over the language of this blog. I am Dutch, live in Germany, and do a lot of my work in English. hmm gonna be confusing)
First day of Christmas: this deserves an extra blog, cause here, we did something really cool, we bought 5 different cheeses, still had some chorizo, sausage and ham left and tried these with three different wines to taste the effect of the combination. Exciting, very cool, but also very exhausting (i got the idea from the book Nudeldicke Deern from Anke Gröner, who also pointed me to a very nice recipe of Baba Ghanoush an eggplant dip, for which in this recipe the eggplant does not have to be burnt, as the israelis like to do. but i don’t like the taste of burned eggplant very much, so this recipe was a welcome alternative. Very nice!). as said, more later, cause i made notes on the cheeses and the wine.
Second day of Christmas: our ‘traditional’ Christmas family dinner, which means: everyone (or rather every couple) makes one course of the dinner. Lots of fun and usually very nice. Little sister started with an amuse of coquilles, after that first brother made a tuna carpaccio from Rick Stein, which i recommended to him (i love his cookbook, everything i make from it works and tastes great). Very very nice dish, lots of fun with cutting the tuna (next time i actually would deep freeze it first). Then we were on: pumpkin ravioli from delicious days. This is normally a very nice dish. but, one should not try to make it with butternut pumkin (to wet) and not for 10 persons. other than that, the gnocchi were great, but they didn’t look orange anymore, and well, a waste of pumpkin. pity. second brother then made wild campy chicken, also known as pheasants. very nice indeed. For desert my parents made semifreddo with macadamia nuts, which turned out to be rather freddo, but tasted great nonetheless. Ah i forgot the in-between spoom of my little sister: prosecco with pear sorbet and mint. lekker!
Coming home after so much food we opted for pasta with tomato sauce (and just a little bit of butter 🙂 ), pasta carbonara on wednesday and home made pizza on thursday.
Oh and then of course: thursday lunch: pancakes on the pannekoekschip in Groningen with a dear old friend i hadn’t seen in, well 6 years? We looked for something child-friendly, and the first thing coming to mind was pancakes. It worked out well, the kids had clown pancakes (yes), and we pancakes with speck and syrup, which may sound disgusting to anyone not Dutch, but we love it. The pancakes were nice, the restaurant is indeed child friendly and that’s the most you can say of it. we were there for the company and conversation anyway, and the kids could run around, so all in all a good choice.
more later. as said, i ate a lot the last one and a half week, and i need to get used to this blog thing anyway.
i’ll keep you posted
esthercooks 