As we were recommended to make our experience for the food blog as fun as possible, we decided to do this work as a group of four and have an international cuisine dinner. Each course we had came from another country which turned out to be an interesting idea. Why is there so much garlic in the Greek Tzatziki? Who would ever make handmade puff pastry except for Alma’s mum? All in all, we sure had a lot of fun and full bellies afterwards.
Starter: Tzatziki (Marlene)
Tzatziki is fairly easy to make. All you need is (no, not love…) yoghurt, cucumber, garlic, lemon, salt and pepper. You can add a dash of olive oil or some herbs like chives or dill for extra flavour, if you like, but those are the most important ingredients. How much of each ingredient you need depends on your personal taste and on how much Tzatziki you want to make. For mine I used…
...and then I seasoned it with salt and pepper until I deemed it tasty enough.
First, I poured the yoghurt into a bowl. I then added salt, pepper, and a splash of lemon juice to refine its taste.
My next step was to add the garlic to the mixture. I recommend you use a garlic crusher for that, but since I don't have one, I just used a knife to cut two cloves of garlic into tiny little pieces. I tried to make them as fine as possible, so there wouldn't be any garlic chunks. The thing with garlic is that the intensity of its taste can vary a lot. I was originally told to add 5 cloves to the Tzatziki by a reliable source (aka my mum). I added two and it was already verging on too much. So I suggest you just taste the yoghurt-mixture after every clove you add to make sure you don't end up having made Tzatziki that's either tasteless or far too garlic-y.
After I'd added the garlic, I chopped half a cucumber up into small squares, whisked them together with the rest, and just like that my Tzatziki was finished. Took me a grand total of about 15 minutes max. So if you ever need a quick and simple side dish or starter, Tzatziki is the way to go! Just... Be careful with the garlic... Less really is more sometimes, I learned that the hard way...
Main Course: Cheese Pita (Alma)
Pita is a traditional Bosnian dish, best served fresh from the oven. Pita is light, healthy and easy to make. Depending on what type of pita you prefer, it can be a gateway drug to moreish and healthy eating. If you don’t insist on making the pastry yourself, it can be referred to fast food as well.
What you need:
flaky/puff pastry
natural yoghurt
eggs, yolk
salt
pepper
feta cheese
Mostly, there are no measurements needed when cooking this, because it is a rather long lasting dish and therefore you can make as much as you want to.
At first you have to take the yoghurt, eggs, yolk, spices and the crumbled feta and mix everything together until you have a thick mixture. After that you roll the flaky pastry into a long and thin dough. Then you place the mixture alongside two opposing edges of the pastry. When this is done, you have to roll it over so the filling is fully surrounded by the pastry. Then you have to grease the baking plate and put the pita in the oven for about 45 minutes at 200°C. The last step before taking it out of the oven is to pour melted butter over it to intensify its taste. This amazingly tasty dish is best served with yoghurt and tomato salad. While eating with cutlery is considered as boring, Bosnians declare it as finger food. You may or may not wash your hands afterwards.
Pita can also contain other fillings such as: potatoes, zucchini, spinach and meat.
I would, of course, add the original names of them, but they are unspeakable for those who don’t speak any of the slavic languages.
Dessert No. 1: Mousse au chocolat (Ines)
There is no dessert more typically French than mousse au chocolat: It’s a bit too much of everything and still manages to stay classy. Every look at it seems to gain you a tiny piece of fat on your hips while every spoon of it makes you crave for more. That’s probably the kind of food they invented the adjective ‘moreish’ for.
Many people do not seem to realise how fast you can make such a mouth-watering dessert. Of course I’m not French, but I tried my best to create the impression that I know how mousse au chocolat is supposed to taste. All you need is three eggs, about 250 grams of cream, 200 grams of chocolate and some sugar. I usually add between 20 and 40 grams. Depending on your personal preferences, you can either use milk chocolate, which makes the mousse more sweet and tender, or dark chocolate to make it taste more interesting. For at least half of the chocolate mass, I would just use plain chocolate as it’s much cheaper and tastes superb as well.
Basically you just have to whisk the egg whites until it becomes a solid but fluffy white mass. Whisk the egg yolks with the sugar. Do the same with the cream while you heat the chocolate. If you do it in the microwave make sure you don’t burn the chocolate. That has happened to me so many times before. Now slowly and carefully mix the liquid chocolate with the egg yolks. Then let the whipped cream and the egg-yolk-chocolate-mixture unite. As a very last step gently fold in the whisked egg whites. Then put the whole thing into the fridge for at least three hours. If you want it to look really nice when you serve it, I’d recommend at least five hours. Well, I didn’t have that time, so this is why it was still a bit too creamy when we ate it. We enjoyed our mousse with a strawberry on top so that we could convince ourselves that there were vitamins in the dessert.
Dessert No. 2: Mor Monsen’s Kaker (Norwegian) = Mother Monsen’s Cake (Tabitha)
I decided on baking something for our dinner, because my cooking skills are very poor and I am better at baking cakes and cookies than cooking. My baking skills are not that good either, though, so I had to not only look for a cake from a foreign country, but also a cake that wouldn’t be too hard to bake.
After some research in my mother’s cookbooks, I finally stumbled across a Norwegian cake, which is typically made there during Christmas time. The Mother Monsen’s Cake. In Norwegian: Mor Monsen’s Kaker.
As the instructions did not seem to be very hard to follow, I decided to take up the challenge and just give it a try. No risk, no fun.
So, I got together all the ingredients:
400 grams of butter (O.O seriously? Yep, I double checked it)
200 grams of sugar (This cake is a real calorie bomb)
1 package of vanilla sugar
4 eggs
250 grams of flour
1 teaspoon of baking powder
100 grams of almond flakes
100 grams of raisins
The first step is to stir the butter till creamy. This took a little while and my fingers got pretty greasy, while struggling with the blender. (I really am a beginner ;))
Then, with the butter being nice and creamy, slowly add the sugar, vanilla sugar and the eggs and blend everything together.
After, more or less, successfully doing that, stir in the baking powder and the flour.
And that’s the whole batter. Pretty easy, right?
The only thing left to do now is to spread the dough evenly on the baking tray and sprinkle it with the almond flakes and raisins.
Now a piece of advice: There are people who don’t like raisins, so it might be a good idea to leave a part without raisins. I did not do it and regretted that later.
Then bake it in the oven at about 150 – 170 degrees for 35- 40 minutes until it has a golden yellow color. Aaaaaaand done!
As I had never baked this cake before, I was really curious about how it would taste. It felt like a little experiment when I took my first bite, but luckily it tasted really good. Well, it has to. There are 400 grams of butter in there!!!!
So, if you ever need or want to bake an easy cake and brag about it, that is the right cake. But beware… it surely is a calorie bomb!
OUR RESUMÉ
After we'd eaten all that the general consensus was to never move again. Ever. All four of us had our stomachs filled to the brim. Turns out four courses are a lot of food... Still, we had a good time preparing and eating said four courses, and agreed that we’d really like to stuff ourselves with randomly chosen and haphazardly made international dishes again sometime soon!
