Katrin's Summer Beans

No, I haven't disappeared. I've not been cooking much, since I've been on this diet. Roast chicken, grilled steak, fish with leeks and tomatoes. You've either seen these recipes or you don't need them. So I haven't been posting. MISTAKE! Because we've been travelling....

The Reckoning (recipe: Fish Terrine)

In restaurants in Germany, when you finish your meal you don't ask for the bill. You ask for 'die rechnung'. It's what tells you how much you have to pay for your excesses at the table. As you may have guessed, this word is the root of our English word 'reckoning'. Which also has to do with paying for your excesses.

Apocalypse

So. The world ended yesterday sometime when I wasn't looking. I guess we're now in paradise—a place where we have everything we need to be happy. To me the world looks the same as it did before. Maybe we always lived here? Maybe we've always had everything we needed to be happy?

Occupational Hazards

I've been a little bit under the weather lately. No, that's not really true—I've been on the injured reserve list. I have a kitchen injury.

We're all familiar with the normal kitchen injuries: burns and cuts. When we work with fire and knives we expect a little blister or cut from time to time. Sometimes we even have something more dramatic, like the time I sliced the tip off my little finger while preparing dinner for some friends. It bled significantly for a couple of hours. When I say 'significantly' I mean that I had blood dripping off my elbow as I held my tightly wrapped hand above my head (why hold it above my head? I don't really know—it seemed like a good idea at the time).

CARDAMOM LIME TEA CAKE

I have been trying to figure out how to bake with gluten-free flours. I have quite a collection: brown rice, white rice, corn (fine and coarse), buckwheat, almond, oat. But wait, there's more! Teff, millet, quinoa, chestnut, chickpea, coconut. I keep thinking that I have to 'know' each one before I know how to combine them. I've been a little discouraged, to be honest.

As I read more and more about gluten- and wheat- free baking, I see similar recipes with different flours and I don't understand why they used one as opposed to another. I don't like it when I don't understand...

Simple Gifts

Many years ago, when I had my first kitchen, I began to do what my grandmother called “setting up housekeeping”. I had to figure out what I needed: plates, glasses and silverware of course, but also towels, mixing bowls, cutting boards and canisters. Canisters. What to keep my staples in? I searched and searched and couldn't find anything that I wanted to look at on my countertop every day.

Part of the problem was that I've always resisted buying things that tell me what their function is: Sugar, Coffee, Flour, Salt. What if I want to put rice in the one that says 'flour'? I can guarantee that if it tells me to put flour in it I'll have an almost irresistible need to put rice in it. Or popcorn. I don't have bowls that say “pasta” in my house. If I did, they'd surely have salad or fruit in them. Some might call this perverse - I like to think of it as being creative.

Rabbit and Merguez Tagine

I have two tagines, those lovely Moroccan cooking dishes. The big one is a traditional cone-shaped one, made from glazed terra cotta. I bought it from a Moroccan shop in our town not long after we moved here. I fell in love with it when I first saw it--it’s old, a little wonky, a little chipped. It wasn’t new when I bought it. The shop owner tried to talk me out of that particular one, pointing out that there were new, colorful ones available. I can only use it for serving, not for cooking. It’s too big for my oven, and I can’t use it on the stovetop because the bottom’s not exactly flat. But I love it.