Cooking Club

No photos today as I don't usually take a camera to cooking club. I did once make a movie, which you can see here if you're really interested. I may redo it with a voice-over and post it elsewhere.

One of the things my cooking club has to understand is that if you're serving a six-course meal, then each course needs to be just a couple of mouthfuls. I usually eat half or less when the courses grow too big, and take the rest of the plate home, so you may still get to see some photos during the week.

The menu was:
Trio of Amuses. Well, I always through trio meant three, not an entire platter. I guess because they made a lot they thought it best to serve it all. The trio comprised:
- choux pastry filled with a trout cream. I managed to snag one of the platters with just one of these, as I'm not supposed to be eating any flour at the moment. I did, of course, on the principle that one day should not make that much of a difference in the bigger scheme of things.
- courgette roll-ups filled with ricotta. These were very nice and low-carb friendly. I may well make them and then you will be able to see what they were.
- A quails egg on a bed of radish.

Salad with calf liver and black pudding
Those are heavy meats, and you would expect just a sliver of each. Nope. That was a main meal and most of it came home with me. It was a bit of lettuce topped with a generous slice each of liver, black pudding and fried apple. The black pudding is one specially made for Paul van Waarden, one of our Michelin chefs, and you can buy it at Slagerij Waayer , 275 Frederik Hendriklaan, The Hague. I've never eaten black pudding before and found it delicious!

Jerusalem Artichoke Soup with Jerusalem Artichoke Chips
A very nice soup made with equal parts poultry stock and milk and finished with cream. Some lemon and shallots, but just a touch. Some of the artichokes were sliced thin and deep fried for garnish. I don't know if Jerusalem Artichokes are on the allowed list, they aren't mentioned, but I guess they're not commonly eaten in this part of the world.

Smoked langoustines with ratatouille and Goat's Cheese sauce
This was the dish I cooked, with Martine. We peeled and cleaned the langoustines (2 per person) and then smoked them for about seven minutes in stove-top smoker. Those are cute and I may get one. Then me poured basil and garlic oil over them (15 basil leaves, a clove of garlic, 100ml oil blended together) and left them covered in the fridge.

Interesting ratatouille method: chop up one aubergine, one red pepper, one yellow pepper, one courgette, into tiny 1/4 inch squares. These are each fried separately, until soft and just cooked, without colouring. One onion+one shallot+one clove garlic are all chopped finely and softened and then combined with a bit of tomato paste. I think I'd leave the paste out, it dominated the dish somewhate. The vegetables are combined and warmed just before serving.

The sauce was dead easy: 100ml vegetable stock, 200 ml cream and 75 gram goat's cheese for 15 people. Warm through and melt the cheese, then beat until foamy.

Just before serving we warmed the langoustines in the oven for about two minutes.

I have leftover ratatouille, sauce, and uncooked langoustines. The smoked ones were very rich, by the way, and two was more than enough.

Rabbit tournedos with mustard sauce

I brought most of this home as well, so a picture will come later.

Mandarin sorbet, chocolate tarte and orange compote

Yes, I did, I'm afraid. They did give me the merest sliver of chocolate tarte, which was a buttery crust with nuts and a chocolate ganache topping. Something I will make I think, it was delicious - but it will wait till I'm at least the weight I was in England. The biggest culprit was certainly the sorbet, as this is made with sugar syrup.

However, I am no heavier this morning than I was yesterday. I may take an extra dose of metformin during the day to compensate for the sugars.

Lunch was leftover greek chicken with carrot salad and tomato. Breakfast was simply a bowl of all-bran with milk though I had a bit of yoghurt at around 11. I just did not wake up hungry like I normally do!

Danish Cabbage Soup and Leftover Lamb

Saturday again, and once again we have things to do other than eat. It's sad that, as eating can be such a pleasure.

Anyway, brunch was a trio of hams, one from Spain, one from Italy, and one normal everyday ham. There is not much to choose from between the two specialty hams and I would guess you can interchange them. The taste differences are subtle.

Dinner we started with a Danish Cabbage Soup. This is actually surprisingly delicious! Also very easy to make.


For three people, slice a small onion, remove the core from about 400 gram of cabbage and slice the leaves very thinly. Melt a heaped tablespoon of butter and stir in about a teaspoon of soft brown sugar. Really, this is such a small amount of sugar it doesn't make any difference in anybody's life! Stir the sugar till it melts and caramelises a litte, which takes about two minutes. Stir the sliced onion and cabbage into the caramelised sugar and cook for about four minutes, till they're well-coated and starting to simmer, then pour in 400 ml of water or stock - I used chicken stock. Add a pinch of allspice, some salt and pepper to taste, cover it and let it simmer gently for about 35 or 40 minutes. Just before serving stir in about 75 ml of sour cream or decent yogurt, heat through and enjoy. It really was very nice!



Then we finished off the lamb from the other night, with some pumpkin and fennel. The vegetables were steamed very plainly, as the lamb fills your mouth with flavour. It was not as good as expected but perhaps we should have eaten the leftovers the very next day and not left them as long as I did.

Leftover salmon

Unless I vary from the usual egg and something, I guess there's no reason to write it down. I do need to make a better effort with lunch though.

Dinner today started with a simple salad of lettuce, tomato, onion and cashew. Probably a dressing of some kind, they're easy enough to make: one part vinegar, three parts oil, seasoning to taste. The trick comes in choosing nice vinegar and nice oil. Dressings are where extra virgin olive oils take pride of place: you ruin them when you cook them.

There was still leftover salmon, so I cooked some leeks until tender and combined the two, with a dash of cream to round out the flavour. Nothing exciting going on here at the moment.

Marinated pork

Breakfast and Lunch have long since been forgotten, but luckily photos remind me of dinner. It was a Thursday, so probably egg for breakfast, nuts and cheese for lunch. That nuts and cheese is very addictive.

Dinner was one of the sections from the gourmetten pack that we hadn't yet eaten: little morsels of marinated pork. I grilled them and served them with leftover sauerkraut and carrots. Sour cream just ... goes... with sauerkraut.

Steak, red cabbage and guacamole

Back to the usual breakfast. Egg. In this case and omelette with mushroom, cheese (recognise any leftovers?) and tomato.

Mid-morning I was hungry. I guess that's what comes from ditching the diet for a day. Rather than let my blood sugar plummet, I had slice of melon with yogurt and nuts.

Lunch was another slice of melon with 2 slices parma ham. Someone has to eat the stuff, it may as well be me. I also had some vegetable soup with slices of cheese instead of bread.

Dinner was a simple grilled steak with guacamole and a red cabbage and apple salad.



The salad was equal volumes of thinly sliced cabbage and peeled apples cut into julienne strips tossed in a dressing. Use any dressing you like. It doesn't keep well, so don't make too much.

Ditch the diet for a day

I need time off from this full time eating.

Breakfast. Well, seeing as I bought an entire melon to make two melon balls for the amuses, breakfast was leftover melon. A generous slice with yoghurt and two slices of Parma ham.

Then I gathered all the leftover bits of pieces from last night's Gourmetten. I softened the onion and fennel in a little oil, then added all the other vegetables plus the leftover chili in adobe, added water and let that simmer till I thought about it again. When I did, I tasted it, and it was a little hot with the chili. So I added the two turkey drumsticks and let it simmer some more until I thought about.

When we felt ready for lunch, I removed the drumsticks, took the meat off the bones, took off the soggy skin, chopped the meat and added it back into the soup. Everything looked a little thin, so I took half the soup, puréed it and added it back. Hey presto, instant body. For serving I stirred in the leftover sour cream and grated some cheese.

That was it I'm afraid. No salad. No 50 gram of something proteiny plus a side of veggies. Just soup.

Dinner was much the same. I took one complete set of meats, little marinated pork pieces, and grilled them. We had that with some sliced raw courgette (not carpaccioed, though I did add a little feta for the look) and a couple of cherry tomatoes. And we drank lots of wine.

I also took no metformin today, not at lunch nor before bedtime. (Too much wine!)

As I said, ditch the diet for a day.

Gourmetten

Breakfasts don't really change all that much here. Usually I settle for an egg until I can't face them anymore. And themes recur. Yesterday was ham and mushrooms. Today was scrambled egg, ham and mushrooms. Surprise.

Lunch? Who knows? Who cares? I was probably too busy thinking about dinner.

The Dutch have a custom called Gourmetten. I've never really understood how this works, but I bought myself a Gourmetten Set, which is basically a Raclette Grill. Mine is kinda nice because it has a stone grill and a little ridged teflon thing.

While I was wandering around the shop looking for ideas for a nice New Year's Even dinner I spotted a tray of Gourmetten meats which had no sausages or crumbed things on it. It was in a box, so I picked it up and was trying to figure out what was in it, when a man came up, rattled off the contents, and stuck a 35% off sticker on it. Well, that decided that, then.



As you can see, it's a selection of mostly pork with various marinades, little hamburgers cut into quarters, and some plain beef.

Being new to all of this, I wasn't entirely sure what to do, but I also prepared a plate of vegetables to cook on my toy.



In separate bowls I also had little servings of sauerkraut and broccoli.


I had an idea one needed sauces, so I made my simple cream sauce. (Yes, I know the diet says AVOID cream due to cholesterol, but it doesn't say NO cream, and in any case I'll worry about cream once my body starts producing less cholesterol than my food provides. Body fat is the biggest source of cholesterol!)

Anyway, to make the sauce, pour plain whipping cream into a pot and cook it over a low heat until it reduces to half. I guess you could add salt and pepper, or any flavouring you like, but believe me, there's nothing wrong with a simple cream sauce.

I grated some mature Gouda, and crumbled some roquefort into a small bowl.I chopped up some chillis in adobo (thanks MK for bringing them all the way from the States!), some garlic and some olives.

The way we handled this was we cooked the veg on the stone grill, and the meat on the teflon grill, then we combined them in the little raclette dishes, covered them in toppings and put them under the grill to brown.




Well, there were just two of us and the set is for eight, so we had four raclette pans each at any time. I think we're supposed to get by with one. So having done this now, I think a better way would be to have a salad or two ready, a tray of vegetables and toppings, the meat/fish/chicken, and bread for those not on a starch-free diet. Cook the meat on the grill while you whip up a delicious little vegetable accompaniment in your (single) raclette dish at the same time. I'll try it sometime and let you know.

The diet says to eat only three meals a day, but we have a New Year tradition that needs to be observed. We see the Old Year out with a little dessert (an ender) just before midnight. In this case, it was a simple baked apple with cream, but very delicious. We open the champagne, and then just after midnight we have a little starter. In this case it was a trio of amuses that I made myself.

We have an amuse spoon with salmon and sour cream; a lollipop with a cherry tomato cut in half and sandwiched around a filling of brie and a little glass with serrano ham and a ball of melon.

Happy new year!

Moroccan lamb

You may have noticed that I've got as bored with my photos as I get with my food and have tried new ways of cropping them. They look so nice when they're large and full screen on my computer, and sort of ... sad... when they're shrunk to a manageable size.
So here's an exciting crop of today's breakfast, ham and mushrooms.

Lunch was the main meal of the day. Paul was starving because the smell of the stew cooking all morning and had been titivating his taste buds.
We finished off the broccoli soup. There was enough to fill the amuse glasses. More like 50 ml each than 500 gram, but it's still a soup course.


Salad. Umm, how about a tomato, feta and olive salad. It's a shared tomato, but it's still a salad!


Then we had the Moroccan Lamb Stew from the Epicurious website. I left out the honey, mainly because I was too lazy to fetch it from the pantry. I don't think 1 tablespoon of honey across a kilogram of meat is going to affect anybody's diet too adversely. I served it with chinese cabbage stir-fried with finely-chopped fresh ginger and garlic. A poor substitute for couscous I know, but needs must...

The lamb was nice. I really like the flavour of the orange coming through. I think it will be stunning tomorrow, after an overnight infusion. I made a full recipe, so there will be plenty of opportunity to test the theory.


Supper was leftovers, in the form of a salmon mousse. This is really easy to make! i took the leftover roast salmon and leftover smoked salmon, and mashed them to a creamy paste in the food processor. You can use just roast salmon, or just smoked salmon, or if you don't have any leftovers, open a can of salmon. What the heck! Then add salt and pepper to taste, and a spoon or so of sour cream, yoghurt or ordinary cream. Voila! Delicious.

Of course, this is fabulous with thinly sliced bread, currently verboten. I used thinly sliced fennel, which is kinda tasteless but crunchy. I guess you could use any firm leaf as well, such as raw Belgian Endive or Little Gem lettuce.

Er, leftover turkey and sauerkraut, take 2

Paul was having a long doze in, so I had half a mango and yoghurt while he slept. Not much of a breakfast, but still a breakfast.

Lunchtime, the sun was shining. It was icy cold out, but the sun was shining. Celebration! I made a salad platter with whatever looked salady in the fridge and some leftover roast salmon.


Dinner was scratchy. No soup, no salad. The same ingredients as last night, except that I had broccoli instead of carrots. And I changed the presentation slightly.

I sliced the leftover turkey breast thinly. I grated some cheese. Then I put a small cylinder (two actually) on some aluminium foil on a baking sheet. (The cylinders are actually bean tins with both ends removed.)

First I put in a layer of thinly sliced turkey. Then a layer of sauerkraut. Then a very thin layer of sour cream and grated cheese. Then another layer of turkey. Another layer of sauerkraut. You have to press everything down firmly so it holds its shape. Very firmly. Then I mixed the grated cheese with some mayonnaise (bought, but not low fat, this won't work with low fat mayo) and topped the creation with that.

I put it in a 180C oven for about 12 minutes until the cheese mayo mixture had melted and looked yummy and bubbly. Took everything out of the oven, transferred the cylinders to plates and sprinkled some steam-fried broccoli florets (yes, the same ones I didn't use for the soup!) around the plate. These were flavoured with salt, black pepper and nutmeg but you could use anything that turns you on. Then it's time to carefully remove the tins and serve the leftovers and everyone thinks you're a brilliant cook.


You could call them Turkey Reuben Stacks if you wanted to be really fancy.

Leftover Turkey and Sauerkraut

A bit of fun with breakfast. I scooped the insides out of two tomatoes and filled them with scrambled egg. They don't take a lot of egg though, I need bigger tomatoes, so i served the rest on the side with some bacon.

I was still hungry so I finished off the half orange left over from last night's butternut salad with some yoghurt and nuts.

Lunchtime, I mixed the scooped out tomato with the last of the vegetable soup and warmed that through, and ate it with some yoghurt as garnish. I had another courgette carpaccio. Then I had two handfuls of nuts and some cheese. I couldn't face anything heavier.

I was unmotivated for dinner. The vegetable pack was full of cabbage: red cabbage, chinese cabbage, sauerkraut. Oh wow.

I had it mind to do a nice turkey sauerkraut thing, but didn't have the energy nor the appetite to be honest. So we had the turkey thighs, some sauerkraut and some sliced carrot for a bit of colour. There were beetroots in the bag, which would have been better for colour and would have suited the sauerkraut better, but they are verboten. I might give them to my neighbour.

Roast Salmon

Breakfast was virtually the same as Christmas day, without the new dish.


Lunchtime I took a single metformin, I think I need to work myself into the lunchtime dose slowly. I had with a mug of leftover soup from last night. I made a courgette carpaccio to follow, that was my salad.

Then I had a sliver of turkey with gravy, a handful of nuts and 2 nartjies. How much is a handful? Well, I weighed it. 10 grams.
A nartjie is a South African generic term for all things mandarin, clementine and the like. Here's what I had, and the size.


The shops were open and I needed some basic stuff like catfood. I trawled through the post-Christmas markdowns and found a side of salmon for roasting. OK it's Scottish salmon, which I normally avoid because the stuff is so full of hormones. But I guess once in a while it can't be too bad.

We started with a broccoli soup, which I made with the thick stalky parts of the broccoli that aren't great to eat as a vegetable. Just cut the stalks off your broccoli and save the florets. Easy. I steamed those until tender. While they steamed I just softened up some onion and celery over a slow heat. I threw the whole lot into the blender with some of the water from steaming and a couple of cubes of frozen reduced stock from the deep freeze, and then reheated it. I served it in glasses with a little cream poured over the top.



Then I made a butternut salad. I peeled a piece of butternut and grated it, then mixed it with some orange zest, orange pieces and the resultant orange juice. Normally I like to do this with passion fruit, but it's winter here and my choices are limited. Raw butternut is fine! Try it!


I did the roast salmon with some steamed and glazed belgian endive. You know, I think I don't like this endive stuff much. It really is a bitter vegetable. I ate the inside bits, and only about half the salmon. It was too much food.

Roast Pork leftovers

Breakfast was not leftovers, Breakfast was a BLT omelette. It was delicious!


Also, I'm getting worried about not eating enough food. So today we definitely aimed for three meals. I we used up the leftover duck in a fresh salad. You don't need a recipe, you can see all the ingredients! A nice vinaigrette is fine as a dressing.


For dinner I tried to follow the diet suggestions, though in greatly reduced quantities.

A tomato and mozzarella to start.


I revisited yesterday's soup by adding the tomato offcuts from breakfast, plus the pumpkin I didn't use before, and whizzed it up to get a totally different colour! I did warm it, but the tomato kept its fresh taste and gave a nice tang.


And then it was the leftover pork roast from the other night. I cooked a little plain broccoli to go with it. There was also leftover gravy with onion and green beans in it.


Three whole meals on a public holiday!

Christmas!

Despite my best intentions we ended up with a two-meal day.
A late brunch, almost lunch, of scrambled egg, smoked salmon and a little tomato on the side. I served them in the new dishes I got for Christmas.

Besides the turkey, I hadn't really thought about Christmas dinner at all. But there was plenty of stuff in the house, so it was easy to busk it. I made a brine for the turkey (300 mls salt, 6 litres of water, a handful each of peppercorns, juniper berries and star anise, plus about 100 ml of brown sugar. Bring this to the boil, add another 6 litres of cold water and let it cool. Then put the turkey in a LARGE tub, cover with the brine, cover the tub and leave it in a cool place for 2 hours per kilogram).

I put my turkey tub outside for four hours, rinsed it off and then roasted it breast side down for 45 minutes. At that stage I turned it, added the parnsips to the same dish and put the mushrooms in alongside and left it in the oven for another 30 minutes. It cooked at 180C.

Let's begin with a photo of the festive table.


You can see the now-familiar amuses from Albert Heijn. That's the last of them. One was paté and cranberry sauce with cream cheese, and the other was melon and ham. The cranberry sauce was probably a no no but at less than a tablespoon, and plenty of protein in the meal to balance it out, I decided it would be fine.


We can buy carpaccio packs here, and I bought one rather than make my own. So all I had to do was put the beef slices on the plates, sprinkle them with dressing, pine nuts, and parmesan, and leave them to stand to come up to room temperature and infuse with flavour.


Soup was easy. I puréed a selection of the leftover roast vegetables (trying to leave the pumpkin out so I would get a nice green colour) with a bit of stock and heated it slowly. The garnish is fresh chopped peeled tomato.


Then came the mushrooms, which by now had cooked. I took them out of the oven along with the turkey and left everything to stand, the turkey especially needs to rest before being carved. I took the centre stem out of the mushrooms, seasoned the mushroom cup and then tossed on some sliced cooked bacon and sliced red pepper. I covered that with slices of goat cheese and left it to bake for 30 minutes. 20 minutes may have been better, but I was eating the earlier courses while it baked so I didn't check them.


The mushrooms were very rich, so a little palate-cleansing salad was very welcome. This was just lettuce, radish, olives and little of the now almost finished wasabi ginger dressing, that tastes neither of wasabi nor ginger.


At last, the highlight of the meal, the turkey, with roast parsnips and nuked green beans. The parsnips were woody and unappetising so we didn't eat them. Clearly they need to cooked and served when very, very fresh.


And yes, we did squash in dessert. Mango and yoghurt, layered in a glass, and topped with a hint of whipped cream.


That was a lot of food! I felt quite replete at the end of the meal and had to sit relaxing on the couch for it all to settle, drinking lovely Christmas tea from Simon Levelt. It's a tea laced with dried fruit and spices, and is like gluhwein, except non-alcholic. Wonderful!

We had Wolf Blass champers with the first couple of courses, which was disappointing. It had very little mousse, although the flavour was nice. The main wine was the Wolf Blass President's Selection, which was rich and full-bodied and very satisfying.

Duck a l'orange

What better way to start the festive week? Simple scrambled egg, a couple of rashers of bacon, fried mushrooms, a little salad.

Lunch I thought I'd have the leftover garlic prawns and some avocado, but the prawns looked so unappetising as a leftover even the cat wouldn't eat them. So I threw them out and just ate the avocado.

Dinner was quite late as we put up the Christmas tree and made the lounge look festive. It was a duck breast a l'orange from the Albert Heijn festive range. I roasted some vegetables alongside (hint: I use a melon baller to scoop out pumpkin once I'd sliced it in half; much easier than trying to peel the bloody thing, and much prettier than my uneven cubes.)

Roasted veggies are easy and delicious. Take any selection you like, get them into bite-size pieces, put them in a casserole with a cover or a cooking bag, add s&p and drizzle with olive oil. Shake well to coat all the veggies with the olive oil then put in a 180C oven for about half an hour.

I tried some fresh orange slices with the duck. If the oranges had been sweeter (yikes, they were sour!) it would probably have been magnificent rather than OK.

Lamb chops with aubergine

Does this look familiar? It's the chopped beef for the moussaka, except I added a whole two tomatoes to it to make it juicier. Paul had his over a slice of bread. I made do with getting carbs from 3 nartjies. Just not the same as having the gravy over bread, though. There's something about bread and gravy...

So that was breakfast. Paul was going to sing in the Messiah and had to be at the Anton Philipzaal by 11am for rehearsals. I joined him there at about 13h30 and we had lunch at Havana. We had to wait a long time and barely had time to eat. I ordered a tomato soup and a chicken and cashew nut salad. I didn't eat much of the soup; I don't think it had too much real tomato in it anyway and given the time constraints the salad looked the safer bet.

We got home well after 6, so my intended lamb stew was once again postponed. For dinner we clocked up another two of the amuses from Albert Heijn, I'm building up a collection of those little glasses. I need 8.

Instead of stew we had lamb chops. I had originally thought these would make a nice Christmas Day course, but that was before I bought the turkey. These I doused with Robertson Barbecue Spice (bless all my friends and family who keep me supplied with this wonderful, unbeateable South African spice mix.)

I FRIED (yes, in lots of oil) some aubergine slices. What the heck, it's low carb, and aubergine is really nice fried. It absorbs so much liquid that normally I par-steamfry it, and then finish it in a little oil. (In fact, if you ever really have to drink half a cup of olive oil for any reason, just put it in a pan, and fry aubergine slices in it. A much tastier way of ingesting neat oil.)

I finished that off with a sprinkling of feta. What better combination?

Instant Moussaka

The neighbour came around just as I was serving brunch, which was the last pieces of fish from the Gourmet platter, scrambled egg and tomato. I have no idea what kind of fish it was, it tasted a bit like tilapia, but it had some orange marinade stuff on it.
It was fine, not great.

She wanted to borrow cutlery, crockery and glassware for Christmas day, as she is having 12 guests and has nothing. But she knows well that I am well-stocked! I suggested she may want to serve her soup in shot glasses, but she said it was a plain vegetable soup and not fancy enough for glasses. Ha ha ha. I told her it was the glasses that made the soup fancy, and not the other way round.

Perhaps she should have popped around at dinnertime. I had planned to make a lamb stew, but left it a bit late. So instead we started with a melon and ham amuse from the Albert Heijn Festive range.

Aren't those glasses cute? That's why I bought them.

Then tomato carpaccio. I have an electric slicer, not a mandolin, and I cut the tomato about 2mm thick. I used bottled dressing (wasabi and ginger, which tastes neither of wasabi nor ginger, but makes a reasonable vinaigrette), s&p, parsley and feta as a sprinkle over the top. It's always nice to let these stand for a while so the tomatoes can absorb the flavours.


Main course was leftovers. There was about 250 gram of leftover roast beef in the cold drawer and I wanted to use it up before it went off. I chopped it finely in the food processor, and cooked it up with some chopped shallot, a peeled tomato, and a dash of red wine. That mix went into individual ramekins (there was too much for just 2) and I topped it with peeled aubergine slices. Very thin slices. Then I made a sauce with one egg, half a cup of milk and about 4 tablespoons of freshly grated parmesan cheese, which I poured on top of the aubergine. All that went into the oven for 20 minutes, and hey presto, instant moussaka.

I served it with cooked beans tossed in walnut oil, with walnuts added for show.