Kitchen experiments

I love cooking, but I don't really follow any recipe. So most of my dishes are improvised.

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Red curry with chickpeas, tofu, spinache and flat bread.

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Spelt-kidneybean-burger with oven baked fries

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Wholemeal noodles with eggplant, zucchini, tomatoes and olives

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Miso soup with tofu, onions, cabbage buckwheat noodles and an egg.

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Spelt pancakes with homemade applesauce.

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Breakfast: banana, blood orange, chia, rice milk and cereal

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[kitchen-experiments]

Easter Dinner.

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“...I say tomato!“

I got these lovely colourfull tomatoes from the market. They are much too pretty to hide them in a sauce, so I thouth of something else: Tomato puff pastry with homemade pesto. To get started I thawed out four squares of frozen puff pastry. I bouth the kinde with butter, because the indication of ingredients is much shorter then the one on the vegan type. Then I roasted a large handfull of a nut mix (pumkin, sunfower and pine seeds) with two garlic cloves in the pan until they turned brown. In the meantime I sliced up the tomatoes and one large red onion.

When the seeds were done roasting I puréed them with the garlic, salt, pepper, a litte chilli, some frozen Italian seasoning, dried tomatoes and organic oliveoil. The finished pesto I spread out on the puff pastry and topped it with the sliced tomates and the onion.

I put the pastry into the oven for aproxepately 20 minutes at 180°C until the edeges turned brown.

They turned out absolutely delicious ;)

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Pumpkin Schupfnudeln with sauerkraut

Schupfnudeln is the german pendant to the italian gnocchi.

I have cooked gnocchi several times before. I make the same mistake every time again: I end up using to many potatoes and have to add almost three times as much flower as intended. Your dough can't be sticky anymore befor rolling out the gnocchi. Otherwise you'll have a hard time even producing one single gnocchi.

So what I did this weekend was steaming potatoes and Hockaido pumplin until they were really soft. Then I mashed them up and added flower, semolina, eggs, salt and nutmeg. Again I had to add more and more flower until the dough had the right consistency. In the end I shaped the Schupfnudeln an cooked them in boiling saltwater and then roasted them with melted butter and sauerkraut in the oven.

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Macarons

So I have been trying to bake Macarons almost all day long...quite a chalenge. Batch no. 3 is in the oven right now. Wish me luck that they turn out like they should this time!

Update: Well they didn't turn out. One more batch before bedtime!

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Oven-baked vegetables with homemade Ranchdip

A feew weeks ago I made one of my favorite dinners: oven-baked vegetables! Super easy and super delicious! Just cut up some of your favorite vegetables ( I like to use onions, potatoes, sweet paprika and carrots) coat them with good olive-oil and season them with salt, pepper, fresh garlic and dried rosemary. Sepread overything out on a cookingsheet, but make shure not to crowd it! Otherwise everything turns out to soggy. Let the vegetables bake in the oven for aproxemately 20-30 min. at 180°C.

Now to the Ranchdip. I started just mixing up ingredients and was surprised how much it tasted like the Ranchdip my father used to bring from America.

You will need some yoghurt or sour cream. Then add: 1-2 teaspoons of mustard, Mrs. Dash original, salt, 2 teaspoons olive-oil, ground paprika and a squirt of lemon juice. This sould do it. Taste it and just add whatever you thing is missing :)

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Autumn Salad

This is a absolutely delicious sald a made a few days ago.

one mini-Romana-Sald

a hand full of cherry-tomatoes

one zucchini

half a goatmilk cream cheese roll

sweet mustard

italian seasoning

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Not vegan, but I thawed out some Pie dough I had left over. I first rolled out the dough an cut out round peaces. I placed them in i muffin-tin. Then I filled them with marzipan and chopped apples. For seasioning I used cinnamon, nutmeg and some sugar.

They only took 15 minutes in the oven to get done. For the topping I made some caramellized walnuts.

[kitchen-experiments]

[kitchen-experiments]

[kitchen-experiments]

ayurvedic lunch

The motto of my lunch was ayurvedic. I had spinach soup with flatbread and Jasmin Tee.

Soup:

1 onion

2-3 garlic cloves

200 g of fresh or frozen spinach

1 L of water

half a cup of coconut milk

salt, pepper, Chilli

Sauté one onion and add 2-3 chopped garlic cloves when the onion starts turning brown. Then add the spinach. Add the water and potatoes.  Cover an cook for 10 min. When the potatoes are done, purée all the ingredients. Pour in the coconut milk and stir.

Flat bread:

125g spelt flour

125g chickpea flower

100-150 ml of warm water

Mix the flour together with a little salt. Sowly add the water until the dough doesn't stick to your fingers anymore. Wrap the dough in a clean dishcloth an let it reast in the refrigerator for 30 min. Devide the dough into 10 balls. Use a rolling pin to thinly roll out the flat bread. Heat up a pan and roast the flat bread. You don't necessarily need any oil. The flat bread ist ready to turn when it starts to rise.