An International Cuisine Dinner

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…

• 1 cup (500 g) of plain yoghurt
• half a cucumber
• 2 cloves of garlic
• roughly 1 teaspoon of fresh lemon juice

...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!

I speak food in different languages.

Hey guys :)

I love food. 

And wine.

And food.

I'm still trying to figure out whether my personality or my cultural background made me a foodie. I'll probably never know. But then again what's the big deal about the reason behind that anyway? ;)

I'm Italian and Italians love food. They enjoy the whole act of this get-together with friends or family, consuming delicious and delicate dishes. The very thought of it makes my mouth watering. And let's be honest, every food tastes at least three times better when eaten in good company. And this time I don't intend the wine with company but the people. 

I almost never take pictures of my food. Quite unusual nowadays, huh? I think it's more important to eat the food, with that perfect consistence and taste at the moment it is served. Don't just think of meals as ingestion but as something independent. Take your time to eat. Be receptive for new things, at least most of the time, but more about that later.

I speak food in different languages.

I love the Italian cuisine as much as I love the (South)Tyrolean cuisine. But I also really enjoy Indian, Japanese, Spanish, etc. dishes. I may not know all the different languages and actually never will, but in terms of food my language is international. I fancy trying out new things, new recipes and new tastes. Cooking is definitely a passion of mine. Whilst reading new recipes I mostly just skim the text and almost never stick to the recipe or at least not to the measurements. I often experiment with different foods, sometimes already having a final result on my mind and sometimes trying something without even having an idea of the outcome. You always should be open to new things, textures or tastes but there are also some things that just shouldn't be changed. This reminds me of the Easter break. I was at home and my mum and me made some delicious spinach dumplings (the best I ever had). Typically you serve them with some melted, brown butter and some Parmesan cheese. And here was the problem. We didn't have any butter at home and my mum tried to convince me to eat them with olive oil instead. It actually didn't sound that bad, (and actually also didn't taste that bad, I tried some of my mums plate), Still it just sounded horrible in my ears. It's just such a classical dish, also connected with quite a few memories and being on holidays at home it just had to be the classical combination, everything else would have been wrong. This is probably one of these moments I was talking about earlier, where you don't have to be too open for new things. Same goes for all these so-called pizzas in America. I don't doubt that they are good with all that cheese overload and stuff but do me a favour and stop calling it pizza. Call it I don't know what, but something else. It may be delicious but it isn’t pizza. But that's a whole other topic.

So I had a lot of dishes on my mind that I wanted to present you, but none of them came in line for posting them here, because I haven't got exact recipes for them. Except for one: Pizza. It's not a classical thin Italian pizza but it's still an Italian recipe. The dough is a bit fluffier then you may know it from a pizzeria but it tastes really delicious and it's a good alternative to the classical pizza. And if you are feeling fancy, you could also add some Buffalo Mozzarella or just substitute the normal one with it.

So here's the recipe:

Ingredients:

Base

·      250g flour

·      1/4 litre water (lukewarm)

·      1 yeast cube

·      1 tbsp. salt

·      a few drops olive oil

Topping

·      Tomato sauce

·      Mozzarella

·      Toppings you like

1.   Crumble the yeast and add it to the water. Then mix all the ingredients together in a bowl. The dough is supposed to be sticky. If needed you can add some additional water or flour.

2.    Put a dish towel or the like over the bowl

3.    Let it rest in a warm(!!) place for at least 30 minutes

4.    Preheat the oven at about 180°C

5.    Now the dough will have risen. First put some olive oil on the oven tray then the dough. Pour a little bit more of the oil on the dough this will prevent the dough from sticking to you fingers and the tray.

6.    Spread the dough on the oven tray. This may take a few minutes, as the dough is a bit elastic. Try to avoid making holes.

7.    Add the tomato sauce and sprinkle some salt and herbs on it. Add the toppings you like. You can put the Mozzarella cheese either before or after the toppings on the pizza.

8.    Put it in the oven. It takes about 15-25 minutes depending on your oven, so keep an eye on it from times to times.

Enjoy :)

The time is now - Let's get creative

The time is now - Let's get creative

Finding a food related topic that is interesting for people to read could be a real challenge. My first idea was trying a new recipe, taking some adequate pictures and commenting on the process, which would have probably been sort of banal. I realized I had to play with my creativity. So I thought „Why not combine these two ideas in order to get unique and impressive results?“ As I have always been crazy about trying out various creative ways of preparing and decorating food, I decided to share it with those who are eagerly interested in reading this blogpost. Each idea is linked to a short story of my life, so you may also get an even better picture of who I am.

The first idea is called „sliced baked potatoes“ which I first tried for mothers day, as my sister and i were preparing dinner for our family. It’s important to take bigger potatoes, because it makes the whole process a lot easier. Before cutting them, you peel (which is optional) and cook them as you would normally do when making for example mashed potatoes. Let them cool for a couple of minutes while you prepare the cheese slices. You can choose whatever kind of cheese you like, it is completely up to you. Remember that you do NOT want to slice them the whole way through, just approximately half way through. Try to insert the cheese carefully, as cooked potatoes are very soft. The only thing you can do wrong is that your slicing technique is not so good at the beginning, which is why my first attempt failed. But it’s not that hard to get the hang out of it. Put them in the oven for a few minutes and voilà - your perfect side dish is ready. Additionally you can put sour cream and some herbs on it to give it even more flavor. It’s really easy to make and it tastes absolutely delicious!

When thinking back to your 18th birthday, I’m pretty sure, most of us wanted a big party with lots of guests and, of course, a lot of alcohol. I remember being very excited about my birthday and wanting to have some special drinks for my guests. It was important to me that the drink (I decided to make a cocktail) not only looks gorgeous but also tastes delicious. The „Blue Hawaii Cocktail“ was exactly what I was looking for. I’m not going to explain how to prepare such mouth-watering cocktails, as everyone has his own special taste. All you need is white vodka, rum, pineapple juice along with some pineapple chunks and the secret ingredient blue curaçao. The reason I chose this cocktail is because it’s not bitter at all and you don’t taste the alcohol as intense as you do the pineapple juice. Additionally you could also put some whipped cream on top, which is another delicate way of preparing it.

Last summer my little brother celebrated his fifth birthday. What would you have prepared as a special sweet treat? I came across a really nice idea for children which could be done in 10 minutes - Chocolate cups. Basically I just melted some dark and white chocolate and blew up a couple of small balloons. The next step is to just take one of these balloons and dip it into the melted chocolate and then let it dry. After the chocolate sets, take a tooth pick and pop the balloon, so you can peel it of and have a perfectly small chocolate cup. To make it even more interesting, each cup was filled with either some ice-cream or various kinds of sweets for the children. As you can imagine, the kids were crazy about it.

How cute are these? My last idea would be perfect for those of you, who are still thinking about little treats for Easter. They are so easy to make and I guarantee you that people are going to love them. I just used small balls of dough for dinner rolls and snipped them to make the ears and I used a toothpick to poke into the dough in order to make the little eyes. Just put them into the oven and let them bake. I think I'll try them again this year on Easter Sunday. 

I have to admit, these are not my pictures - But I did try all of these and yes, I did photograph them, but all my photos were on my laptop, which broke down about two months ago. I lost every computer file, every picture and every song I had on my laptop, because the disk was defective. At least I learned to save every file on an external hard disk drive.