Chocolate with salt

I have days, when I really struggle a lot to find something I could dish up. There are millions of recipes out there, but nothing seems to be right. And then I open the fridge and close it again, go through my cupboards and still don't know, what to do.
Wednesday was such a day and I hate them. It feels like I don't have two brain cells to rub together. And the more I open and close my fridge and cupboards, the less of an idea I have of what to cook.
That's the point, where I have to take a deep breath, decide on one component and work my way forward. Mostly I pick an ingredient we haven't had for a while, like tinned tuna this time.
So I searched the internet for quick and easy recipe, as after the indecisive search I was running out of time and found that great simply recipe (in German language).
I didn't change much, but I substituted the mayonnaise partially with Greek yogurt, as I don't like to use mayonnaise only. I also added juice of half a lemon to get a nice taste and add some more acidity.
The salad was quickly made, apart from waiting for the rice to cook through, and was fresh, satisfying and very tasty. So tasty, that I ate it the next day again... and it was even better.
I think it's a brilliant dish to have either for lunch or dinner. You can also prepare it the day prior and put it in a Tupperware and take it along to work.
I 'm pretty sure, this Tuna rice salad will be dished up in our house more often .

I wanted to publish that recipe for a long time already, not only because I love it, but also because it changed my attitude toward stuffed peppers. Not that long ago, you could have chased me by just mentioning that dish. Mostly burned pepper mush with a nasty skin, preferably stuck to my palate. It just wasn't mine, partially because I was convinced, that I only like raw peppers.
Now thank to that recipe, I started using peppers in my cooking more and more and in any preparation form.
So what makes the difference? To begin with, the peppers stay nice firm, as they are just steamed. In my opinion, the fresh taste is also very well preserved and you don't get that overcooked pepper taste. The skin is obviously still there, but as the pepper stays firm itself, it's not bothering at all.
During the winter time, I make that dish quite often, as the peppers are fresh and affordable, and it's quickly done, light and very tasty - and suitable for our whole family.
You can serve it with rice, noodles, potatoes or bread.
I should also mention, that I found the recipe in my favorite German recipe database chefkoch.de under
Illes gefüllte Paprikaschote „der anderen Art“ . Illepille, thank you. You will see, I didn't change much, as it wasn't necessary for our liking.

I was just waiting for the ridiculous price for snow peas to drop, so I can do that delicious dish, that I just love, not only because it's so easy and quickly done. The combination of flavours and textures is so beautiful. 
To be honest, I was sure, I wrote already about that dish and was surprised not to find it here. On the other hand, I also wasn't cooking it for quite a while, because of the already mentioned crazy price for snow peas.

I'm trying to grow snow peas in our garden for years already, but that's what you can call an epic fail. This year the plants grew indeed and were even carrying some fruits, but despite our new sprinkler system, the plants dried out eventually after having only one set of fruits. I won't give up thou and gladly take any advise that could help to finally cultivate them in our garden. 

But we're not talking about my garden... The idea for the following dish came from here (in German language), but I've made the recipe only once with pork and substituted with chicken instead. You will see, that I changed some other things too, but all in all left the recipe as is.

And here comes one of our all time favourites:
Chicken stew with snow peas and almonds.

Maybe you remember the quick and delicious spelt-curd-bread I presented in February, possibly one or the other even tried it out. As for me, it became my favourite bread and I'm baking it almost every week, alternating the seeds I'm putting in. 


So why revamping it? Well, I had the problem, that with the given quantity of ingredients, my bread either overflowed the baking dish 
or if I separated it in two baking tins, the breads turned out to flat, because there wasn't enough dough. At least with backing two loaf, I've been able to find out, that the bread is staying fresh and fluffy for a really long time. Even after 5 days in my cupboard, wrapped in a kitchen towel, the inside was almost as good as on the second day. Not that its very important to us, because normally we eat that bread within two days, but still good to know.
So last time I was baking with my original recipe, I've put the dough in only one baking tin again and my bread rose so much, that the thin crust broke and the still fluid dough flowed out all over the oven. I almost started to cry.
So that week I decided to reduce the amount of flour and adjust the other ingredients. But I didn't adjust consequently, because I wanted to experiment a bit. The idea of baking a smaller bread was initially grounded in getting hold of smaller packages of instant yeast; instead of 10 g they are only 7 g now. I wasn't sure, how the bread will come out, but as you can already guess, it turned up just better than the previous. Even my husband asked, if I changed something.

So here comes my revamped and improved Spelt-curd-bread with sunflower seeds

One of our all-time-favourites are wraps. They are not only done quickly, but are mostly light and always delicious. We eat them filled with either chicken and salad, or with mince, corn and beans for the richer version. Or as this time, with tuna.  I didn't have the ingredients for my usual tuna wrap (I will post about the next occasion), so I thought I will take a filling, that was initially a salad, inspired by that recipe (in German language). 
At this point I must confess, that I didn't do the wraps myself but used store bought wraps. I tried to do them once and it went horribly wrong. But it doesn't mean, I won't try it again, one day. For now the store bought must do it - and they are delicious too.

As I already mentioned, I'm trying to get rid of my pregnancy fat, but without dieting, because I'm not allowed to do so. And even if I'm one of these women, whom most other women hate, because I can eat as much as I want, as long as I work out just a bit, I'm not really getting fat. I'm also rather a stress non-eater than stress eater so that also helps a lot. But my second pregnancy is not that long ago and I gained with my first pregnancy a few kilos, kept them throughout the time in between and gained again with my second pregnancy, so I'm sitting now with few kilos I need to get rid of in order to have my comfort weight.

Best option is to change my eating habits, which never have been really bad, but lately I felt for stuff like chocolate, the already mentioned fantastic ice cream, croissants and cakes or combinations of all above. So yeah, it's time!

We're trying now to eat more lean meat and more fish, leave the pork out and cut short on fat and sugar. We will see, how it'll work out.

On that note I want to introduce you to another of my favourite chicken recipes:

Chicken Piccata

I know it sounds strange, but I actually don't mind, if I have to get rid of groceries in my pantry or fridge, because then I tend to get my best ideas for a dish. This time we had plenty of peppers left, one of it even started to get wrinkly, so it was really time to do something about it. I also had fresh pasta left, that I had to use within the next days, so I already had two ingredients. Otherwise our fridge was pretty empty, as we planned on going shopping that day, but had to change our plans last minute and postpone to the next day. So I checked my deep freezer and the fridge and found eventually some frozen bacon. All the other ingredients I kind of always have at home, so here we go, my

Tagliatelle with a spicy pepper - bacon sauce

How about a nice smoothie?


Your children don't like eating fruits? Do they refuse to eat breakfast? You don't have the time to have breakfast before you go to work? You need a healthy boost for the day? Here is your answer: have a smoothie! It take's me about 10 minutes and it's ready. My husband and my daughter are always looking forward to their smoothie in the morning. We drink it in the car on our way to kindergarten and work.

Today morning we had a

Banana - Kefir smoothie with toasted muesli

Ingredients (for 2)

4 small bananas ( or 2 big)
2 handfuls toasted muesli
250 ml Kefir
200 ml apple juice
1 tbsp honey

Blend all together in a food processor till smooth. If you don't have Kefir, you can always substitute with yoghurt.

Have a great start to the day!

As you can see, I was raised catholic, at least the first 10 years of my life or maybe even longer. That was mostly the time when I lived in Poland. Poland is very convinced catholically and you didn't have much of a choice back then, in great part because my grandparents were devout. I remember my grandparents house with all the crucifixes and pictures of the pope and saints. It was very impressing. The time we moved to Germany, my parents felt more liberated and turned their back on the church. But some habits die hard and so here we are, we had fish for lunch. 

The rain just doesn't want to come and we are over a month late this year. Every day we have cloud covered skies, yesterday we even had thunder, but still no rain. The days are so hot by now, that even me, who normally doesn't mind, just wishes the rain to fall. The Namibians are praying and wishing for nothing else then rain at the moment.

Wouldn't we have such nice organic ice cream, I would say, the weather is perfect for loosing some weight (I'm trying to get rid of my pregnancy fat), but yeah, we have extremely good ice cream , so no, no weight loss here.

Still, I love salads, no matter what weather we have and when it's as hot as it is at the moment, I don't want to eat anything else. But Namibia has a tradition of eating primarily meat. I got to know people, who said, they don't eat anything green or others, who said, they don't eat meat, the cow has had already enough grass. So you can imagine it's kind of difficult to introduce salads as a main course.

Therefore I thought, why not combine meat with a nice salad to start with. Normally I would have taken a rump steak, but we've got the opportunity to buy veal, that's why the following salad is with veal stripes.

I was unfortunately forced to make a longer break from writing again, as my husband and I suffered from food poisoning end of last week. We had sushi from our supermarket, as usual,  but that time we seemed to have bad luck. I must admit, it tasted different and was more sticky than usual. And I remember I was gulping the last pieces and was wondering why, since sushi is one of my favourite meals. Luckily our daughter decided not to eat with us, what she normally does, so we just had to cope with our own sickness and the daily madness of having two little children. I guess we won't have sushi for a while now.

So after a few days of dieting it was time to cook again and what better meat to start with than chicken.
With that said, I'm always waiting for the grape season, so I can cook one of my favourite chicken dishes. It's again an easy and quick dish, with lovely flavours. I don't remember where exactly I found the recipe, but I know, that I cooked this dish over and over. When I look back, my daughter was even enjoying that dish with one and a half already.

I hope you'll like it as much as we do.

I'm always looking for nice fish recipes, preferable quick and easy to make, as I usually need them for lunch. I rarely get hold of fresh fish, if so, it's mostly salmon, which is ridiculously expensive in Namibia. The most popular fish species you can buy in the supermarket is hake, kingklip, smoked haddock, salmon and salmon trout, less often and then rather fresh, is kabeljou and sole, but to be honest you can get hold of it almost exclusively at the cost. So every time we are at the cost, we obviously buy our fish at a fish deli, enjoy it fresh there and can't resist to bring some back home, of course frozen. 

But today I was up to something simple and quick. I had hake in my deep freezer anyway, so the choice was obvious. 

We ran out of bread yesterday and our shopping day is still a few days away. I haven't baked bread for months, so I didn't have any starter/motherdough  to bake my usual bread. I baked already bread without a starter, but they aren't as tasty, additionaly they also don't stay fresh longer then one or two days. I've set my starter immediately, but was still sitting with the problem of not having any bread at home. I decided to give it a try and find a new recipe for a quick bread.

I intended to find a recipe for a spelt or full corn bread, considering us trying to eat as healthy as possible since new year. Christmas time was a killer, we haven't watched our figure at all and since it was as hot as I mentioned already, we had lots and lots of ice cream. Now we are back on track and trying to avoid white flour, too much fat and of course ice cream. I know, my apple - kefir pancakes haven't been really diet food, but one day a week we are allowed to sin - it makes it definitely easer to stick to our plan.

By the way, for our Namibian followers, you get spelt flour only under the German name Dinkelmehl, at least I haven't found it otherwise yet. Please contact me, if you could buy it differently.

Anyway, I discovered this very interesting bread recipe I couldn't wait to try out. I should mention at the beginning, it's not meant to be kneaded by hands, because the dough is too runny.

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.