Dangerous dieting, but soup is good for you - Winter Minestrone

I reckon, life can be quite dangerous as a food blogger ... when you are at least as crazy as I am ... at least. Otherwise, how would you call baking a Sachertorte just for your 2nd Blogiversary? As I don't throw away food, I will inevitably end up with having problems putting my trousers on. Yes, no help arrived in helping me eat that cake. 
Anyway, repeated incidents like this will turn you into being overweight. That can make life quite hard, especially when you want to go swimming at the Sea and at the same time activists of Greenpeace are nearby. For sure they will aid you in getting back into the Sea, where you obviously belong.
Now, you could also choose the way of dieting as some have the custom to do at the beginning of every year or ... no wonder ... close to the beach season. From the latter we are still far off.
In case you have found a diet that is working well for you beware that it isn't working too well. In order to help you with that I have some clues for you when to stop dieting ...

Fully Fed - Pulled Pork with Herb and Beer Cheese Buns

I know, there are quite a lot of things I haven't tried before. There is still a lot of food on my list to feed on ... eh to try, cook and eat. Sometimes I think, I should be cooking all day. Eh, well, for some thing you nearly have to do this literally, like for example pulled pork. An acquaintance talked about it, that he wanted to try it and then I saw something lovely on the net somewhere that encouraged me to try it, finally.
So I had a bit of a look on how to do it and then I had a go ...

Together with the pulled pork I wanted to have some Herb and Beer Cheesebuns.

Underground Cooking and Hawaiian Luau time

Let me get one thing straight right away, this is not just a fooling around blog, but Cooking Around the World. Due to that fact, at times it's necessary to work hard for this.
So I got myself a shovel and went to the garden ...

A grave? Does this mean someone has to die or has died already?

Confused? Green White Cabbage Risotto

There is something lurking in the freezer part of the fridge, a few bags of frozen white cabbage. I couldn't possibly use the whole head of cabbage in one go for coleslaw or kimchi or for whatever. I needed a cabbage break. Into the freezer it went and stayed and stayed there. What to do with it?
Then I read something about cooking the cabbage with garlic and I thought by myself, why not have a risotto, a Green White Cabbage Risotto.

Isn't that a bit confusing? I don't know really, because I am kind of confused most of the time and simply try to go on. In this case here, however, I am just referring to this "Green" and "White" thingy. Well, not really. You already see, how we get the white cabbage green. Lets go for it then ...

Ingredients:
A quarter of a head of white cabbage
4 cloves of garlic (the more the merrier)
Vegetable stock
A bunch of basil leaves
A splash of olive oil
One small onion, finely chopped
200 g  of risotto rice
A splash of dry white wine (might be a bigger splash)
A knob of butter
50 g of freshly grated Parmesan
Salt and pepper

Method:
The recipe unfolds with the leaves of cabbage cooked together with the peeled and halved cloves of garlic. Just cook them a few minutes together. Then remove the cabbage and the garlic together with a bit of the liquid and transfer it to a blender. Add the basil to the blender, too and ... blend it.
As for the remaining cooking water, you can mix it with the vegetable stock and keep it warm.
Now have the pot for the risotto ready and start softening the onions in some olive oil. Once you have achieved that, give the rice into the pot and go through it with a spoon to bring things together. Pour in some white wine and cook until most of it has been absorbed.
Then we can go on with the risotto fun part by adding one ladle of stock to the rice at a time and cooking until most of the liquid is assimilated. 
Keep going for about 18 minutes. Then toss in the knob of butter and the grated Parmesan. Cover the pot for two to three minutes. Remove the lid again, spoon the risotto through and season it with salt and pepper. Then it's time to plate up.
Enjoy your Green White Cabbage Risotto.

Maybe you do. At the beginning of the month I thought, maybe I get the chance to take part in Herbs on Saturday (Cooking with Herbs) from Lavender & Lovage this month. I just made it ...

La Soupe Aux Choux - Herby cabbage Soup

Space! The final frontier ... cut, cut ... stop this! We already had it.
What though about receiving visitors from outer space - having some aliens for dinner?
No, the aliens are not going to have you for dinner.
Well, let me get to it in a slightly different way. Just slightly. Do you connect some kinds of foods with movies? Or vice versa? What about cooking something you saw in a movie?
Let us come back to our aliens and move right away over to France. 
Sorry, if you got this wrong! It was not my intention, just put the words a bit of ... don't know. Anyway, you might know the famous French actor Louis de Funès. Right away, different movies come to my mind, that deal with food. One of it has the French title La Soupe Aux Choux.
That brings us straight away to France, as I said, and to the aliens, as I said as well. The main character receives a visitor from outer space, because of food, that is, a cabbage soup. Well, the movie contains also some ... well, eh ... just concentrate on the soup for now.

My intention is not to conjure up some extra terrestrial life. No! I simply like to reproduce such a soup and ... use up my leftover cabbage in the kitchen. 
By the way, this is not going to be fast food. We are taking some time to do this herby cabbage soup.

After slaughtering the cabbage we can get into things (Hey, who said, we could do this without hurting something ... ah, no worries. Things will be fine!). Good! I used cabbage already in my last post. I got a comment, that 'cabbage is hugely underrated as a vegetable'. We don't want this to be, do we? Besides that, if you take a closer look, you find more cabbage recipes out here on my blog. Hm, well, at least one more.
Let's work then: Herby cabbage soup. Plan about two hours, to be generous. Remember? No fast food! On top of it, it's all made from scratch.

Ingredients (as they go in):
A large knob of butter
One onion, chopped in rings (that's also a reason, why I cry so much lately)
One small white (to be specific) cabbage, roughly cut (use your imagination)
One large carrot, cut into cuby pieces
1,5 l water
Bouquet of herbs (rosemary, oregano, thyme, lavender)
600 g potatoes, cut roughly into cubelike shapes (don't be too fussy, unless ...)
4 cloves of garlic, roughly chopped (yes, this is all going to be very rough)
Fleur de sel (or use other salt, if you must)
Pepper

Method (as time goes by):
Well, a lot of the above mentioned things (cutting) you can do as we go. At least this is the way I prefer to do it.
Therefore, whilst heating the butter in a large pot, you concentrate on the crying (onion) and then add them to the pot to let them start to soften a bit.
Now you devote your attention to the cabbage and then to the carrot. Obviously, the result of that leads to more vegetable in the pot.
It would be quite helpful to put the kettle on to get the water boiling. Why not take some more water. That way you can treat yourself to a nice cuppa of tea. We are in no hurry (you can do this at other times, if you insist). The water you are not using for your tea goes into the pot. The cabbage should be covered. If not, you used too much water for your tea.

The bouquet of herbs, to which I also like to refer to as a bouquet garni, goes into the pot as well just before you put the lid on and bring all to the boil.
After that is done, we have plenty of time for tea and for the potatoes and garlic. Should it be in boiling mode, we reduce the temperature and let it simmer for an hour.
Depending on your skills, though, you could also manage to do some other things during that time ... you think of something for yourself.
I'm not going to tell you, what I did.
No!
Forget it!
Back in the kitchen, right in front of our soup, yes, after one hour has passed, we throw in the potatoes and garlic. Season the soup with fleur de sel and pepper. I like to use fleur de sel (hand-harvested sea salt), because traditional fleur de sel is collected off the coast of Brittany - just to give a bit more of a French touch to it.
Having come that far, we are nearly through. Just another half an hour to simmer and then we are ready. What to do again?
Maybe set the table? I'm planning on having a candlelight dinner. Oh, well, yes ... I put a candle on the table and light it.

If it is according to your desire, you might open the meal with a small glass of pastis - as also seen in La Soupe Aux Choux. As you see on the picture as well, you have a nice baguette ready to go with the herby cabbage soup, too.
Before I forget, the bowl for the soup is also from France. What you can't see here is, that it has a picture in it with a famous place in Normandy, which has also something to do with a place in Cornwall. I just mention it, so you get a rough (yes, again) idea.
Should you have anything of the baguette left, you could finish your meal with some cheese. Yep! I did it!
Let us now come to the side effects of the soup. If you remember the movie La Soupe Aux Choux, you know what I mean. Up to this point, where I am writing this done, nothing happened ... and no, I didn't get any visitors from outer space. I might get a few visitors, though, reading this post or even trying this recipe.
Is everything said now? No, not yet, not yet!
Since we used our lovely bouquet garni, I decided to enter this post into Lavender and Lovage's Herbs on Saturday challenge, even though, it's Wednesday.

Finally, after everything has been said, I'm not keeping my mouth shut, although that will be the case very soon.
Think again! What comes to your mind, when pondering food and movies? What movies pop up in your head and/or what foods? Let me know!

Kohlrouladen - cabbage roulade for #BloggersAroundTheWorld

This month I set out with you on a journey around the world in a challenge kind of way. We start our trip in Germany. Therefore it's time to cook something German. I have eaten German food more often than I have cooked it myself (ah, that should not be too difficlut - well, yes, but I mean more more often). So I was thinking hard on what to cook. After all I didn't want to do something Bavarian kind to just repeat the more known things.
After some days of thinking and talking and watching, I got an idea: Kohlrouladen. It's time for cabbage and so I want to work with it a little bit.

What we will need:
3 leaves of cabbage per roulade
500 g minced meat (pork and beef)
1 small onion, finely chopped
2 tbs of bread crumbs
1 egg
A splash of Worcester sauce
Salt and pepper
A knob of butter
1 tbs of corn starch
Water and white wine

How we do it:
First of all blanch the cabbage.
Then you can go for the filling, mixing together the meat with the egg, onion, Worcester sauce and bread crumbs. Season with salt and pepper (I fought the temptation to add chilli this time).

Take three cabbage leaves for each roll (then you can afford to loose one layer later) and fill it with a handful of the meat mixture. Try to roll it together as good as possible.
Heat up a large pan at medium high heat and melt a knob of butter in it. Done? Good! Place the cabbage rolls in the pan and fry from both sides.

After that, put on a lid and let it sit there for about 20 minutes at a lower temperature, checking occasionally whether things don't get seriously burned.
Should you manage without greater loss, you can then remove them from the pan. I decided to get rid of the outer layer, because it wouldn't look so nice on the picture.
With the remains in the pan, you can whip up the gravy with some water, white wine, maybe more salt and pepper and some corn starch.

Serve it all together on a bed of salted potatoes and enjoy it. So far my entry for this September's Bloggers Around the World blog challenge.

Why not have a go yourself?

Japan: o-konomi yaki

Some days ago I found my old notebook - the kind with paper, where you need a pen to make entries. In this very book, the last entry was from August 1995. Some things (I'm not going to reveal the whole content of that book) written in it were recipes I liked back then and wanted to keep. One of this was a Japanese recipe: お好み焼き (o-konomi yaki). This is a savoury pancake with cabbage. The name is derived from a Japanese word meaning "what you like". So, whatever you like goes on it (although there are certain things I would never dare to recommend).
Here we are then, about to cook something Japanese. To get myself in the mood I put a CD on with some Japanese music.

That was all I had: A CD from Vivian Hsu.

Together with the pancake I want to prepare a miso soup.

A bit of cutting to start with. Then ... OK ... here is the pancake recipe ...

O-konomi yaki


Ingredients:
100 g flour
1 egg (preferably from a happy chicken - at least until someone stole her egg)
1 handful of cut cabbage
50 g prawns
1 spring onion (cut lengthwise)
1 clove of garlic (peeled)
1 thumb sized piece of ginger
Salt
1 stock cube (chicken, vegetable, or whatever)
water
vegetable oil for frying
seaweed, Worcestershire sauce (optional)


Method:
First of all mix the flour, a pinch of salt, the (happy) egg and a bit of water to a "gooey"
batter.
Heat up the oil in a medium sized pan.
Then add the cabbage and incorporate well. If the batter is too gooey, just add a bit more water to get the desired texture.
When the oil is hot enough you can add half of the batter to the pan and tilt the pan so that the batter covers the bottom of the pan.
Get your prawns, spring onion, garlic, and ginger ready. Put the prawns and the spring onion on the already frying batter. Then grate the garlic and ginger on top, but don't grate too vigorously ... or otherwise you grate your fingers as well.
Cover it all up with the remaining batter and fry nicely and golden from both sides.

Once the pancake is done, you can serve it with seaweed (Reminds me of a stupid joke: Why did the lobster blush? Because the sea weed.) and Worcestershire sauce.

Then "dig in"! Maybe together with a miso soup. Well, how can you it this with chopsticks? Try, and find out ...
To finish this whole meal of, a small cup of green tea.

But don't add milk to the tea. At least that is what it said on the package.
I hope you like o-konomi yaki ... I do. Instead of using prawns - as I already mentioned at the outset - you can use many different other things, like beef, pork or go for a vegetarian version with some nice vegetables like carrots or use cheese or ... what you like (However, I don't take any responsibility if it isn't edible anymore!).

Some day I will try a traditional Japanese breakfast ...