How I turned into my mum and found sweet happiness in a jar

Lately, I've been feeling like my life is becoming more awesome and marvelous every single day - which is very unusual for me since I normally am the kind of person who starts every second sentence with the wonderful phrase "I am so pissed off right now because..." (Alternatively "I hate everything including myself, because..."). I still am afraid that this may just be a cruel prank God is trying to play to me and something awful is going to happen in a few seconds (like my boyfriend turning out to have cancer or BiFi Rolls not being produced anymore). But I think it's just for the fact that

1) It's Easter and I effing LOVE Easter (a week ago, I talked to a good friend of mine and since he's a Muslim, I couldn't stop hugging that poor guy because he has never experienced the magic of Easter on the countryside)

2) It's spring and I'm totally high on sunlight and all those hormones. Everything's just so great, dude.

3) Holidays!!

4) My mum gave her old kitchen machine to me, which has made my life a lot easier.

How could I celebrate this gorgeous life better than with food? Exactly, there IS no better way. So today I've decided to turn  myself into my own mum and make some strawberry jam and brioches - the traditional Easter breakfast in my family (no, we're not French, we're just totally addicted to food. Seriously, take a look at the female members of my family and this is a pretty obvious fact. And when you think about it, eating strawberries in March is a remarkably stupid tradition. I mean, that's like three months before you actually can harvest them in Austria. This jam sure tastes bitter with guilt because it makes you responsible for climate change). Okay, get the party started!

The recipe:

(I used this one from Chefkoch.de and translated it)

What you'll need for 12 brioches:

• 600g (or about 21.16 oz.) flour
• 200g (or about 7 oz.) butter
• 1 cube of yeast
• 4 eggs
• 3 (or a bit more if you like it sweeter) tbsp. sugar
• 1 pinch of salt
• 9 tbsp. of tepid milk
• liquid butter
• 1 egg yolk

First, dissolve the yeast in the warm milk.

Mix the flour, the sugar and the milk.

Let the butter melt on low heat, so it doesn't get very hot. Then add the eggs, the salt and the butter to the dough and knead it together so it's nice and fluffy. When it's nice and fluffy enough, put it into a warm place (you can just take your oven and put in on really low heat) until its volume has doubled.

Then part the dough into 12 balls and every ball into a big one and a much smaller one. Grease your muffin tray with butter, put your balls (haha) into the molds and put on the little balls, so it looks like your brioches are wearing cute little hats (of course it's better if you have traditional brioche molds, but I don't have one, so I tried it with a muffin tray. If you have proper molds, be proud of yourself and check your privilege.).

Your brioches will look even more adorable if you brush yolk on them. Just do it.

Now bake them for 15-20 minutes in your 180°C (or 356 F) hot oven. The original recipe says you should use top and upper heat. As if my oven even had something like this. HA!

They taste best when they're still warm (which is a bit creepy because then they feel a bit like actual living creatures in your mouth), but you can easily store them for a few days. Just put them in the microwave for like ten seconds and they get hot and fluffy again.

What you’ll need for the jam:

·        1.5 kilos (or like 3.3 pounds) strawberries

·        500g (or 1.1 oz. canning sugar) 3:1

·        Four or five jars

Seriously, this couldn’t be easier. Put the glasses into the 130°C (or 266F) hot oven for about fifteen minutes to make sure they are perfectly sterile. Cut the leaves of the strawberries and blend them, together with the sugar. Then put the mixture into a pot and let it simmer for 7-9 minutes - you now the jam is ready when you put a little bit on a cold plate and it already has this special consistence. Then fill it into your glasses, close them and turn them around so they stand on their lids. Let the jam cool off and it’s ready. Honestly, that’s all! Delicious, fruity and simply wonderful. (check out this pretty cool jelly-related Little Britain video:)

This is what I love so much about food: I just take a bite of these wonderful little brioches and taste the beautifully red jam – and I know that this is the language of food: fat, sweet childhood memories and incredible happiness.

I’m sorry; it’s just those hormones again. Dude.

God, this is so great.

PS: Here's your ultimative jam-and-brioches-soundtrack:

1. Strawberry Fields forever by The Beatles
2. Jamming by Bob Marley
3. and, for the French touch, Foux du Fafa by Flight of the Conchords

Coq au vin, gallo en vino or cooking with wine. :)

We, Magda and Katy, decided to try a new recipe together and invited 2 friends. When we were doing our introduction interviews in class, Guillaume (the French guy from our group) stated that he missed the French coq au vin. Then when we were browsing the site BBC FOOD (worth checking out!) we came across a recipe for coq au vin, and since neither of us had ever eaten that dish, we decided to give it a try. We both tend to improvise when it comes to cooking, so it was a new challenge for us to stick to the recipe. Sounded like a huge ambition at first, but turns out it's really easy to cook! And we love cooking with wine anyway (sometimes we even put it in the Food). :)

And we assure you, we spoke English the entire time AND the recipe was in English too. Here is an input from me, Magda on the new vocab I learnt while cooking. Luckily we were able to find all the ingredients in the supermarket: a sprig of fresh thyme (the first word I was struggling with, but I found out that a sprig is a small stem with leaves on it), a small knob of butter (a small amount of butter), shallots, garlic cloves, bacon, mushrooms, wine, chicken, rosemary sprig, dried chilli flakes, olive oil and chopped fresh parsley. For the mashed potatoes we needed potatoes, milk, butter, sour cream and salt.

Link to the BBC Website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/coq_au_vin_87115

Ingredients

For the coq au vin

1.5kg/3¼lb chicken, jointed

150g/5oz diced bacon or lardons

10 French shallots, peeled

a few thyme sprigs

1 rosemary sprig

1 tsp dried chilli flakes

3 tbsp olive oil

250ml/9fl oz white wine (we used red)

small knob of butter

350g/13oz mixed mushrooms (such as oyster and chestnut), sliced

3 garlic cloves, crushed

small handful chopped fresh flat leaf parsley

For the crème fraîche mash

800g/1¾Ib potatoes, peeled and chopped

150ml/5fl oz milk

25g/1oz butter

110g/4¼oz crème fraîche (or 110ml/4¼fl oz single cream)

sea salt, to taste

To use and practise the new vocabulary we got to know in the last few classes at university we tried to reproduce the recipe in our own words:

First we had to place the chicken pieces and the shallots in a large roasting tin (we didn’t have a roasting tin available, so we just used a baking tray, which worked as well). Then we seasoned the chicken and the shallots with salt, pepper, rosemary, chilli flakes and thyme, sprinkled the chopped bacon on everything and poured oil over it. Now the whole thing had to roast for about 20 minutes in the preheated oven. Meanwhile we fried the button mushrooms with garlic and butter in a frying pan and sprinkled chopped fresh parsley over them. After 20 minutes we added the mushrooms with the garlic to the chicken in the oven, pulled wine over it and let it roast for another 25 to 30 minutes. After cooking the potatoes we peeled them and mashed them with forks, because we didn’t have a stick blender (by the way: another new word). Milk and butter have to be heated in a pan and added to the potatoes afterwards. Then we added sour cream to the mixture (instead of créme fraiche) and seasoned it – the mashed potatoes were ready.

It was absolutely delicious, tender chicken, perfectly spiced, a créme-fraiche potato mash on the side, HEAVEN!! :)

We have highlighted the words or phrases that were new to us and put them in an explanatory list for you:

to joint a chicken -  to cut the meat at the joints (the junction between two or more bones) so as to separate into pieces

diced - cut into small cubes

lardons - a strip or cube of fat or bacon used in larding meat

shallots - small round vegetables that are the roots of a crop and are similar to onions

sprigs - small stems with leaves on it which has been picked from a bush or plant, especially so that it can be used in cooking or as a decoration.

flat leaf - a variety of parsley having flat leaves