Rice Salad

Rice Salad

As this meal is not really known in Austria, I thought I could share with you a recipe I love to use in the summer months. The rice salad is a quite refreshing, healthy and tasty meal you can prepare in 15 minutes. This salad is excellent on its own and also perfectly fits for a barbecue side-dish! ;)

Ingredients

•           Rice (as much as you want), knowing that 1 cup + 2 cup water ≈ 2 people
• -         Tomatoes (idem)
•           Corn (idem)
•           Lettuce (idem)
• -         Olives (idem)
•           1 or 2 tuna can(s) (optional: my mother uses this but I don’t)
•        In fact, everything you like to put in it like maybe prawn, ham, cheese, carrots, peppers, onions, garlic, nuts, etc.

My personal salad-dressing

•           1/2 teaspoon(s) of hot Dijon mustard
•           Wine vinegar
•           Olive oil
• -         Pepper, salt
•           Herbs (I use the Provence herbs but you can use what ever you want)

Preparation

1.           Cook the rice as if you were cooking pasta (that’s important because your cooked rice shouldn’t be sticky).
2.           While the rice is cooking cut the tomatoes in cubes, cut the lettuce and put it and the other ingredients into a big bowl.
3.           Once the rice is done, drain it using a colander. Cool the rice off using cold water and when the rice has become cool, add it to the other ingredients.
4.           In order to prepare you dressing, just put all the ingredients together and stir your preparation until it becomes a unified color.
5.           Pour your dressing into the salad and mix everything together and…

... your rice salad is ready to eat! J

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French Pizza (or “Tarte flambée“) – An Alsatian cooking experience by Shishi

When I fly to Paris, I usually make a stop in Vienna, crash by an old friend of mine called Leni and enjoy the city for a couple of days. We always cook together but this time, as she had to work on her bachelor thesis, I decided to kill two birds with one stone preparing a little motivating something for her and her flatmate and improving my English food vocabulary. I chose to make a “Tarte flambée” (only takes a few minutes ^^) and I tried to translate a recipe my grandmother once told me about.   

Ingredients (for 1 very hungry person or 2 people)

Dough:

~    250 g Flour

-          1 packet dry yeast

-          1 pinch of sugar

-          1 teaspoon of salt

-          Water

Topping:

~    2 cups of crème fraîche 

-          Salt

-          Pepper

-          Nutmeg (optional)

-          Grated cheese (optional)

-          Spinach (or bear's garlic)

-          Feta

-          Cherry tomatoes (or red and green pepper)

-     Actually everything you're in the mood for ;)

Preparation

-       Mix all the dough’s ingredients in a bowl and knead until obtaining a uniform ball. Let the ball rise at a hot spot approx. 20 - 30 min.

-          After this time, roll it very thin and place it on a backing sheet lined with parchment paper.

-          Season the crème fraîche with salt, pepper and nutmeg and coat the dough with the mixture.

-          Spread the grated cheese, the sliced tomatoes, the feta and the spinach on the dough.

-          Bake for around 10/12 minutes in the preheated oven 220-250°C at hot air.

And..... That's the result!! :)

It's quite easy to prepare it, so I hope you'll try it once. Enjoy!!!

Who I am?

  

   My Name is Guillaume and I'm a 22-years-old student who was born in the French Caribbean Island, Martinique. However, my father came from the Normandy and my mother, even if she was born and grew up in Paris, comes from Guadeloupe, another French colony. I grew up in a small fishing town, in a big house located only 50 meters from the Caribbean Sea: when I was a child, I used to go for a swim every single day before and after school! ;-) 

   When I was 10 and my parents just had separated, my mother decided to go back to her family and we moved to a small city named Ecouen in the North of Paris where I lived till I was 18.

  I was always interested in learning German. So I chose it as first foreign language at school. When I was fifteen, I really wanted to improve my language skills and decided to do an exchange year in Austria and came the first time to Klagenfurt. I worked alongside the school so that I could “survive” and when I came back, I managed to pass the entrance exam of an international school in Paris. The school was very hard but I had the motivation of leaving again for Austria. The month after I graduated from High school (yes in France, you get your 1st academic degree after school because the Baccalauréat is organised by Universities and is a kind of entrance exam for further academic education), I moved back to Klagenfurt and worked as waiter so that I could manage to finance the beginning of my studies.

   A few months later, it was so far: I had accomplished my dream of moving to Graz and started to study sociology. Three years later, it brings us to now. I am currently finishing writing my bachelor thesis and have begun to study Global Studies and Transcultural Communication with the languages English and German. 

   Apart from university I try surviving as a freelance translator. I'm also a speaker in an synthetic voices society and give French private lessons. In my free time, I love playing chess (even if I forgot a lot, I used to be the number one of my region! :-) ), doing theatre, dancing Caribbean and South American dances, travelling, rambling, swimming, listening to very different kinds of music (Reggae 4 EVER!!) and, of course, going for (a) drink(s) in the city and coming far too late (early?) home swearing I'll never drink again...

So, that's who I am! I hope you enjoyed reading it! ;-)