Chocolate with salt

I'm so late this week and apologizing for the delay. We have winter holidays and the kindergarten is closed; after almost 2 weeks at home, my three year old is missing her friends and is noticeably bored. I just hear her calling me all day and she wants to be carried around all day long. I'm so thankful for my husband being home and helping out, but both our patience is spent.
That's the best time for takeaways, but if it comes to takeaways here in Windhoek, the choice is very poor, beside the unsatisfying taste.
We have lots of different chicken and burger takeaways, Italian and Chinese and that's mostly it. There is a new place, that just opened a few weeks ago and is actually selling Döner Kebabs, but the last time we were there to try it out, the whole shop was full of smoke. I'm sure, we will give it an other try, but for now we decided on homemade.
This are moments, I really miss Berlin or Cape Town and the fabulous takeaway places, where you can get Döner, Shawarma and Co.
Berlin of course, as the hometown of the famous Döner Kebab, had the most amazing places you can imagine. Additionally I was living in Tiergarten Moabit, a suburb with mainly Turkish and Arabic population, so needless to say I was sitting at the source. From greengrocer, baker to the butcher, I had the best culinary experience from the Middle-east world right on my doorstep.

But that's far away now and I decided to try it myself. I'm not sure I can call them Shawarmas though, but let say it's my take.


We had them actually twice that week, once with lamb and once with beef.
Lamb was definitely the big winner. Even though I took lamb chops, not the best cut for that purpose, but it was more than delicious. And the dogs were happy about the leftovers hanging on the bones.
The beef was o k a y, but somehow it wasn't as satisfying as the lamb. I don't know, if the meat seasoning didn't work that well, or maybe I've cut the meat to thick, somehow we were missing something.

The pita bread was the second time head and shoulders better, for one thing because I managed to overbake them the first time by not sticking to the recommended backing time, for another thing the dough was resting for four days in the fridge and the flour had enough time to develop.

We'll definitely have that dish more often and next time, I will try to stick more to the original ingredients like tabbouleh and hummus (chickpeas are already bought).
But for now, we were more than happy about the outcome of my first homemade Shawarmas.

Here I was talking about old habits and fish on Fridays and just on Good Friday I decided to make Massaman curry. But let me start at the beginning.

We love to watch MasterChef, especially MasterChef Australia and while we were in South Africa on holiday, we missed quite a few episodes and were now feverish catching up. One episode was a challenge to improve a bad Massaman Curry. To be honest, I've never heard of that kind of curry before, but then I never was a big fan of curries anyway, mostly because they were way too spicy for me. They described the curry as rather mild compared to other curries, so I had immediately to look up the recipe, as it sounded delicious.

I found one here, but I wanted to do make the curry paste from scratch, so I also orientated me on that recipe and I was really happy, that I had almost all ingredients at home, although I had to substitute galangal (never heard about it before) with ginger, the cinnamon sticks with grounded cinnamon,  the shrimp paste with fish sauce and I had to leave out Mace (outside tissue of a nutmeg - never heard about it until MasterChef, so I had no clue where to get it) and unfortunately lemon grass, because mine was mouldy. Also I had to substitute tamarind pods with lime juice.

I have to admit, I missed quite a few ingredients, but even without them we had a very delicious curry I was really proud of.

But it was a long road - somehow I misread the cooking time. My husband remembered, that it has to cook for at least two hours, I on the other hand read somewhere it takes about 50 minutes. Well, as it turned out, that was for a Chicken Massaman Curry.

Anyway, I started late morning with the paste; and here the tip of the day: don't do a curry from scratch, if you have a baby and a toddler to look after at the same time. I burned my first set of spices and my first grilled garlic and onions and it took me till late afternoon to make that paste only . That evening we had instead of curry chicken piccata, as my curry was only ready the next day. My husband wasn't a happy camper, smelling curry all day and having chicken piccata to eat, but I can recommend now to prepare the curry the previous day. 

The last three weeks we've spent in South Africa with my parents joining from Germany. What a great holiday! I wish I could now report, that it was a culinary journey through the country, but unfortunately with a baby and a toddler, dinning out was kind of out of question. We enjoyed every lunch eating out though and had here and there really good food. Our last day in Knysna for example we found that little cafe / restaurant directly by the heads with a stunning view and even a kids corner. We were impressed by the menu and the philosophy - I actually posted the introduction out of the menu on Facebook. So after a fantastic coffee, we decided to stay longer and try out the food and we haven't been disappointed a bit, if anything we were more than thrilled. So thrilled, that coming home, I had to make that fantastic burger for lunch again and share it with you.