Thursday, April 5, 2012
Quick and healthy food for kiddies
At the Easter party last Sunday at the kindergarten I talked to a friend about cooking for kids, as we have to prepare for our children breakfast and lunch for the kindergarten every day. I'm cooking for my daughter every morning something fresh. You can imagine the looks and the obvious questions; what time am I waking up, how do I do it and what am I cooking. A lot of the mothers don't realise, how quick cooking for children can be.
It was always very important to me, making food for my child that is diversified and balanced, as it is for my husband and me. From the beginning, when I introduced solids to her, I gave her everything to eat that was of course suitable for her development. Till she turned one, or even a bit longer, I completely cut out sugar and strong spices, as I did with honey and nuts. Till today I try to reduce or even leave out the sugar, but I'm not to quibble about it. I was rewarded with a child, who eats almost everything, who is always keen on trying everything new I give her and who is eating by herself since she is 11 month old. And I'm still able to give her oats sweetened only by a banana and the natural sugar from the milk and oats. You would be surprised, how curious children can be about food and ready to try almost everything, if you are convinced of what you are giving them. All without pressure of course. But I also appreciate, that I'm very blessed with such a good eater.
Preparing food for my daughter takes me normally not more than 15 minutes. The key is good preparation. Stuff I always have in the deep freeze are ice cube size portions of chicken or veggie stock, finely diced onion and garlic, chopped fresh herbs (parsley, dill and basil), 3 sorts of early harvest vegetable mix and mostly a pancake or two, left from last Sunday. I'm also lucky to have an own veggie garden, that's why I have additionally fresh courgettes, tomatoes, spinach, cucumbers, paprika and different herbs handy.
Don't be afraid of frozen vegetables, they contain normally more vitamins, than the "fresh" stuff you're buying at the supermarket. The onion and garlic I prepare in order to have a bit for the small portions. And it makes such a difference in terms of taste, if you either use or leave out the onion and garlic. At the end it's your choice, especially, because every child is different. But don't be afraid of offering your child something new, you'll never know, if he or she will like it.
It was always very important to me, making food for my child that is diversified and balanced, as it is for my husband and me. From the beginning, when I introduced solids to her, I gave her everything to eat that was of course suitable for her development. Till she turned one, or even a bit longer, I completely cut out sugar and strong spices, as I did with honey and nuts. Till today I try to reduce or even leave out the sugar, but I'm not to quibble about it. I was rewarded with a child, who eats almost everything, who is always keen on trying everything new I give her and who is eating by herself since she is 11 month old. And I'm still able to give her oats sweetened only by a banana and the natural sugar from the milk and oats. You would be surprised, how curious children can be about food and ready to try almost everything, if you are convinced of what you are giving them. All without pressure of course. But I also appreciate, that I'm very blessed with such a good eater.
Preparing food for my daughter takes me normally not more than 15 minutes. The key is good preparation. Stuff I always have in the deep freeze are ice cube size portions of chicken or veggie stock, finely diced onion and garlic, chopped fresh herbs (parsley, dill and basil), 3 sorts of early harvest vegetable mix and mostly a pancake or two, left from last Sunday. I'm also lucky to have an own veggie garden, that's why I have additionally fresh courgettes, tomatoes, spinach, cucumbers, paprika and different herbs handy.
Don't be afraid of frozen vegetables, they contain normally more vitamins, than the "fresh" stuff you're buying at the supermarket. The onion and garlic I prepare in order to have a bit for the small portions. And it makes such a difference in terms of taste, if you either use or leave out the onion and garlic. At the end it's your choice, especially, because every child is different. But don't be afraid of offering your child something new, you'll never know, if he or she will like it.
Sunday, April 1, 2012
Sour-dough, a sponge and its starter
As promised in my last post, I want to show you, how to do a starter for a sour dough and the sour dough itself. It's very time intensive, but worth the work. I love my sour dough breads, they are so fluffy and stay fresh way longer, then breads without the sour dough or sponge. I sourced the classic way of preparing der-Sauerteig. The idea for the regular sponge came up by reading that article and I adjusted it to my needs.
Saturday, March 31, 2012
Baking bread - Linseed-sesame bread
One of the first things I started doing myself in Namibia, was bread. And not, because you don't get good bread in Namibia, you do. With the German past and still present influence, you will hardly miss the German culinary world. There are not only plenty German restaurants in Namibia, but also the typical occupations like baker and butcher, the Germans are famous for, are either influenced by or in hand of Germans. Beside Namibia importing wast of German products for the "feel at home" sensation.
But it was a new challenge. I asked myself, is it possible to bake bread at home as good as you can buy at the bakery or even better? Well, I don't know, if it's better, but at least as good as and I know, what ingredients I'm using. The main motive for me cooking, was being aware of the ingredients I'm using. After the birth of our daughter even more than ever.
I remember I baked my first breads without a yeast sponge or sour dough. They are tasty, the day you bake them and if you're lucky even the day after. But we need mostly a bit longer, to finish a bread. I remember reading millions of recipes and various websites about baking bread, one of them very helpful from a German baker (Bäcker Süpke's Welt).
The preparation of bread spread to two days or more kind of scared me off. And to be honest, when I was baking bread, then I needed it now or never, always somehow last minute. But after throwing away, I don't remember how many halves of breads, me, who is very aware of being poor and having nothing to eat and of the poverty in our country, I realised, that I have to change my bread baking behaviour. And I did and was rewarded with fantastic bread, sometimes even ready in only one day.
My first sour dough I made from a ready to buy sachet. It was a German product, I don't know if you can buy ready sour dough all over the world. You can always do your starter yourself.
The linseed-sesame bread was again part of my birthday gift for my mum in law. I know, I'm late with my publishing, but I was sick and not really in the mood of writing. No excuse.
So let's start, we don't want to waste any more time. One more thing, I only bake small breads, as I like eating them as fresh as possible. Please join me!
Saturday, March 17, 2012
Let's make some jam today
I wasn't in the mood for making either of the dishes, so I bought the rhubarb without any recipe in mind.
Back home, I not only had an idea what to make, I also solved my problem, what to give my mother in law for her birthday. She loves rhubarb, but doesn't really like cake and while I looked at my freshly baked bread I decided to make some jam.
I don't really have a sweet tooth and till today I've only made jam once or twice, so I had to look up some recipes. To my disappointment all of them were either mixed with strawberries that I can't buy at the moment, or bananas. As I don't like the combination of bananas with rhubarb I was pretty clueless. Thinking about making a pure rhubarb jam, I had the fear of rhubarb not having enough pectin to set.
A glimpse to the limes gave me the inspiration for this recipe. I saw in all the recipes, that some kind of a citrus fruit was always used, but I was unsure, if the jam would come out very sour. But I decided to give it a try. As I had vanilla beans left from our stay at Mauritius I put one of those in as well. Out came a delicious jam, although not as firm as I expected. Still worth writing about it. And at the end, half of the jam became part of the birthday gift for my mom in law.
Sunday, March 11, 2012
Sunday is pancake day
By the time, our daughter started to eat solids, we introduced "Pancake Sunday". Pancakes are simple, easy to make and you can diversify them with different fillings. But most of all, our little one loves them and so do we. And now it became a tradition. I try to alternate every Sunday between the crêpe style pancakes, I know from my childhood, and American pancakes, or Flapjacks, as they are also called.
That Sunday I decided for crêpe style pancakes, we call them naleśniki in Poland, on the net you find them as polish crêpe . They are not as thin as french crêpe, but used the same way.
Please don't think, because I'm doing them every Sunday, they turn out perfect. If it comes to taste and texture, I found the perfect recipe for us, but I still don't manage to do them perfectly round and evenly thin. Every Sunday I try to perfect my technique, try to pour the batter differently, and still... somehow I'm not capable of getting them right. But I'll never give up. One day...
The recipe I show you today is a basic recipe. The secret of the moist and elastic texture, is the balance between the ingredients. Please don't do the mistake replacing the water with milk. That would make the pancakes very hard. But on the other hand you can leave the milk out and replace it with water, that's up to you. Then you must watch the batter not becoming to fluid. You can use the pancakes for sweet or savoury dishes either way. My mom mostly filled them with jam, Nutella (or any other chocolate spread) or vanilla cottage cheese with raisins and almonds. She fried them rather blank in the first place, filled and browned them again with butter, so they became golden and crispy on the outside, but stayed nicely soft on the inside. You can imagine, I do it the same way till today. However, be pretty careful with the jam; it starts getting runny as soon as heated, so does Nutella.
Two of my favourite savoury dishes are pancakes with spinach and chicken in a nice béchamel sauce (white sauce) and pancakes with ham, asparagus and sauce hollandaise.
But I will come to that anytime soon. For today let's just start at the beginning, with the pancakes.
Saturday, March 10, 2012
About flour
I never paid a lot attention to the flour, since I refused to bake for many years. I suppose that was one of the causes for my continued failure in my baking projects. If you want to bake well, you must start to understand the difference between flours. I got that, when I eventually gave baking another try and with lot's of experimenting I started to love it. I still fail now and then, mostly because I don't stick exactly to the recipes, which seems to be very important, but more and more the outcomes are really tasty. The most important thing about the use of flour is the content of gluten and its effect. Gluten is the main protein in wheat and its content is influenced by the milling, the husk and the removing of the wheat germ. Gluten gives the dough its elasticity, as it absorbs water very well, that again makes the dough light and spongy.
Most of the facts below refer to an article in the South African "Food and Home", Issue June 2011. I'm not talking about all flours discussed in the article, only about flours I mostly use.
Wednesday, March 7, 2012
Burger brioche buns and an accidental bread
In my mind, the best burger buns ever. I never made the effort of baking burger buns myself, as I could always get them in the shops. That changed when I moved to Namibia, where one can't get them at all. You only get burgers made with ordinary white flour buns, even in the (fast food) restaurants. After a while, I started missing those soft buns I knew. So I decided to give it a try and bake the buns myself. After trying a few recipes, which were mostly terribly disappointing, I already gave up and settled for enjoying my burgers during my visits in Europe or on holidays.
Said so, on our honeymoon in January, we went to Mauritius and had the best burgers in a long time and the buns were made from brioche dough. Back home, I started again browsing, this time for burger brioche buns and luckily I found them here. It wouldn't be me, if I wouldn't make a mistake. While mixing the ingredients, I became suspicious, when the dough wasn't as runny as described in the recipe. The problem was I converted the milliliter measurement one-on-one to gram, without even thinking. So now I had to research how to modify the measurement right. As it turned out, I used way too much flour. The recipe you find is with the converted measurements and according to my liking and also to the ingredients I can get here. As you can see on the picture, they turned out perfect; and they not only look lekker, as you say in Namibia, they are delicious.
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
And here I am
I've been planning to start my own blog for almost a year now however as a full time mother of a 1.5 year old daughter, it is not easy to implement all ideas immediately. When I moved from Germany to Namibia my culinary career ended abruptly and I was wondering how I could fulfil my passion again. An idea of a deli has been raised but unfortunately is linked to a lot of time and money. But what is not, can still well be!
So one day I had a thought, why not start a blog? I usually cook two meals per day and gladly something new every day, so this is a nice way to capture everything.
I try to keep my cooking diversified and therefore am always trying something new. But we also have our evergreens and they are not as exciting as one might think: a delicious pizza, crumbed pork chops or homemade hamburgers are always a winner. Nevertheless a little break from time to time is always appreciated, that’s when my husband cooks his fantastic stew or we just have some takeaways.
The Namibian food culture revolves mostly around the braai, which is the local term for BBQ, as well as potjieskos which is a stew in a cast iron pot prepared on coals and ideally simmering the whole day. Our favourite potjie is with oxtail, mmmmmmm.
I will try to post from time to time also some recipes for braais, but they are mostly prepared by men whereas woman are then responsible for the sides and salads. But it’s part of my life and if I spot something special I will gladly share it with you.
Aside from that, many of my dishes are influenced by my Polish roots, always a fond memory of my grandmothers cooking, who not only inspired me but always let me be part of it. Among our family, we used to cook together a lot, generally for special events like Christmas and Easter.
I will try to post from time to time also some recipes for braais, but they are mostly prepared by men whereas woman are then responsible for the sides and salads. But it’s part of my life and if I spot something special I will gladly share it with you.
Aside from that, many of my dishes are influenced by my Polish roots, always a fond memory of my grandmothers cooking, who not only inspired me but always let me be part of it. Among our family, we used to cook together a lot, generally for special events like Christmas and Easter.
My other inspirations are from friends, restaurants I worked at and places I visited. Bit by bit I’ll post my recipe collection to share with you and it might even inspire you. The collection also includes, in my opinion, perfect burger buns and my favorite pizza dough.
So please join me and support me on my journey.
So please join me and support me on my journey.
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