Panko Fried Brie with Lavender Mushrooms

While the weather is not as it’s best these days, we already had some quite pleasant days.

It’s best not to expect perfection all the time, because you are only going to be disappointed. For sure, you don’t want that. Rather concentrate on the small things of beauty always around you, appreciate that.

Then you can find enjoyment more often …

… like in a quick and simple meal with not much fuss about it. Among the simple things I enjoy is cheese. I wouldn’t want to imagine a life without cheese. If I would have to choose between cheese and meat – which one to go without, I would select the meat to go without rather than the cheese.

But, I don’t have to choose. However, for the following meal I have chosen to go without meat and with cheese … with Brie to be more precise. So we are having Panko Fried Brie with Lavender Mushrooms …

Somehow I like lavender, so I try to look for new ways to carefully introduce it into cooking. See, whether it works today.

Ingredients:
Olive oil
200 g mushrooms
2 cloves of garlic
Salt, chilli
Juice of half a lemon
1 tsp. lavender buds
Knob of butter
1 Brie (200 g)
1 egg
Panko (or other breadcrumbs)
Rosemary

Method:
Use two pans to get both elements ready at the same time. I used a griddle pan for the Brie.

Well then, how do we go about?

Heat up some olive oil for the mushrooms.

Prepare the brie by tossing it around in the whisked up egg. Next you have the panko ready together with some salt and finely chopped rosemary. Try as best as you can to coat the Brie with it.

The mushrooms start rolling in the pan. Season them with salt and a bit of chilli if you like.

The Brie is in the other pan. You turn it, when you think the time is right after a few minutes. If it starts oozing away in your pan, you’ve lost and evidently waited too long.

Add the lemon juice and the lavender to the mushrooms and let them continue in the heat. Finish it off with a knob of butter.

When you have done everything right, both the Brie and the mushrooms are finished at about the same time. So, serve it up …

Have some bread on the side and … whatever makes you happy. Fine, here we have another use of lavender in cooking. As I felt, the taste was good and I enjoyed it.

Do you enjoy going for a walk. I hope to walk … eh … well, a lot this year. 

Anyway, have a lovely day! Keep smiling!

Going French with Rillettes and Fougasse

Some weeks ago I was very much in the mood for cooking some French food and improve my knowledge in that cuisine. Well, apart from the option to look things up on the net, I have a few books on French cooking. One of it is The Little Paris Kitchen by Rachel Khoo. It's a lovely book and the recipes work excellently. I selected some of them and worked myself through them during a week.
I like to share some of the results with you today as France is also playing Switzerland in the World Cup today. However, I will not share all of them, I need to reserve a bit for later.
Therefore today I like to concentrate on two things: Rillettes au porc and Fougasse aux romarin, avande et from age du chèvre.

 First to the rilletes with pork. If you find the right shop you most probably can by it ready in a jar. However, it's so simple and worth a try. You need pork belly, some bay leaves, rosemary, thyme, salt and pepper and some time. It goes into the oven for 3 hours at 130 °C. Afterwards you can easily shred the pork (rind cut off) and jar it up and eat it with some lovely homemade bread and a glass of red wine.
If you care to make a mess in your oven you can throw the cut off rind under the grill and let them get crispy. Great, you get a crispy, fatty snack, hear some crackling sounds from your oven and get the chance to clean your oven.
Guess what I did ...

I just wanted to test some pork cracklings, too.
Anyway, I enjoyed the rillettes most of it together with the fougasse and the red wine.

Sure, you need some time as well to make the fougasse, but hey, it's all so lovely. What I liked about this fougasse version was, that it included lavender and goat's cheese.
You make a yeasty dough with 10 g dried yeast, 400 g flour, salt, dried rosemary, dried lavender and olive oil.
Then, you know, there is some kneading involved, rising, proving and all that lot, yes shaping. Apart from that we need to fit in the goat's cheese. Push pieces of 80 g of firm goat's cheese into the bread before you let it rise for the last time after the shaping.
The bread needs about 20 minutes at 210 °C in the oven. 
The end result is lovely. So, if you want to try it, you either have to try it as it is or have a look at the book or ask for further details.

Now you get also a closer look at the bread. I enjoyed it very much. So, do you like to have a bite?

If you like to have this ready for the football match today, I have to inform you, that you better have to hurry. Otherwise ... you need to have something else.

I add this to our ever increasing collection of posts for the World Cup 2014 and Bloggers Around the World.

You have been hacked - Lavender & Chocolate Semifreddo

Have you been hacked? No, I'm not talking about your Twitter or Facebook account, nor about your blog in the way that they have been hacked and strange posts appear. By that standard, my blog must have been hacked quite some time ago.
However, you might be hacked in another way. If you believe, you can only be happy when you buy certain brands, you have been hacked. If you believe, you need a lot of money on your bank account in order to be secure, you have been hacked. If you believe, that people need to be able to contact you anytime and anyplace, you have been hacked. 
We just could go on while talking about things that the system wants to make you believe you need to have it or do it in order to find real happiness. That is not going to happen that way.

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!

Lavender and Honey Pancakes

Around this time it should be the season for the lavender to turn Provence purple. So far I didn't have the chance to witness it myself. I was around at the wrong time of the year. Nevertheless it's very pretty around Provence. Mainly we did hiking and exploring villages and ruins.

Nature is always working at winning territory back. Somewhere around the neighbourhood here I saw even a house with a car next to it, where plants started to crawl up on the car (obviously not used recently).
However before looking around at the above shown ruin, there was a warning sign: "Dangereux ..." something. Rocks could fall on your head and snakes could bite you. None of these happened, though. Luckily! Although, my friend, I sometimes call him "Nougat" (you might know him already from one of my older posts: Chocolate Marzipan Cake), somehow attracts danger and things happen to him. But not this time.

I also very much like those villages resting gently at the slopes of the hill. Whatsoever, I have no photo with lavender for you - at least not from France.
The one in my garden, doesn't look to good either.

The lavender of the neighbours looks much much better at the moment. However, I am glad that it survived winter (-15°C), although it didn't look like that. I would never dare to give up on my plants. It's over when it's over!
Back to lavender! To a large extent, lavender in Provence is used to make perfume and soap. Apart from that, lavender is also part of the well known herbs of the Provence, together with hyssop, oregano, basil, rosemary, sage, fennel, thyme, and savory. There are many more ways to use lavender. According to my herbs encyclopaedia, it can calm you down or help against cramps when you use it in your bath. Furthermore it helps against nervousness, stomach problems, sleeping problems, headache, stress symptoms, moths (doesn't quite fit at this point, but ... whatever), and when you have problems concentrating.
For that (concentrating) briefly cook one tablespoon of lavender buds with half a litre wine and let cool down. Have a small glass of it before and after your meal. I said a small one. It's medicine, not for getting you drunk.
Well, then, you can use lavender buds also directly for cooking. That is what I wanted to do today for breakfast. The Internet planted the idea in my brain some days ago. So when I fell out of bed this morning, my first thought was: LAVENDER!
Fine!
Let's do some Lavender and Honey Pancakes.

I don't want to give you a list of ingredients, but we do it again as we go, because it is quite simple.
Have a small bowl ready (this will do for 1-2 persons). Crack one egg to it and add a pinch of salt. Fill a mug (or large cup) with flour and try to remember how much you took after you added it to your bowl.
Use the same cup and fill it to the same level with milk. Give the milk a splash of lemon juice (a good thing to do when you have no buttermilk in the house).
Add a half to a whole teaspoon of dried lavender buds (depending on taste) to your bowl, but beware, the taste can get quite strong. So if you are not sure, take less. You can add more later or next time.
After you had the milk working a bit, pour it into the bowl (including those bits that started to form). Now to complete the batter use 2-4 teaspoons of runny honey. Whisk things through well.
Then you can bake your pancakes with a drop of oil at high heat in your pan. When things dry nearly completely up at the top, you can turn your pancake. For the other side you have to guess when it's ready, but it will not be too long.

Serve it with some yogurt and extra honey and lavender buds. If you are greedy, you will eat them all alone. After all, breakfast is the most important meal of the day. At least this is what some say.
However, that would be a different subject.
Enjoy your Lavender and Honey pancakes and maybe one day you will have the chance to see the lavender flowering in Provence.