BIRTHDAY::BRUNCH

STRAWBERRY MEETS WHITE CHOCOLATE

I wake up, tickled by the bright rays of the sun which start to make me feel like being somewhere far away in the south. Indeed it is much too bright for my sleepy eyes, because its allready 3:00 pm. Nightshift. Besides working and sleeping, which makes up nearly the hole time, during nightshift week I do only things I like to do and indulge myself in everything I can imagine..expensive weeks by times, luckily besides amazon there is no possibility to go shopping.

So I wake up and think of all the things I would mostly love to gobble now. Sweet strawberries....
freshly pressed orange juice, some pieces of white aerated chocolate. To give my gluttony a bit more civilized form I go buy me some now already kind of unsoft breakfast rolls (why don't they have another fresh rolls time for until-the-afternoon-sleeper??) and create the best jam this way to crisp roll has ever seen in his short life.

wash 300 g sweet strawberrys, 
cut them and remove the stalk

peel an orange, take 4-5 slices

add some bourbon vanilla

add 250 g of non-cook-marmelade-sugar

mix it till it's puree

add plenty of small pieces 
of white chocolate

DONE

I think I did not only imagine that even the roll got a bit softer and nealy melted away..

RED PEARLS

Autumn, and crepes for dinner....

Once upon a time there was a big fat pancake, golden as the sun and soft as snow, that didn't want to be eaten by the rich fat widows and jumped out of the pan to see the world. After a realy thrilling, nearly never ending journey, escaping the pig and the old dog and the stinky wolf he jumps in the wooden basket of the little lonesome girl and the little boy, giving them the best dinner they ever had.

Childhood is this story, told over and over again each time we savoured this delicious mass of pastry.

To make it more fancy, let's call it "Kräppe", to make it less grossy and make us feel better let's scale the height to some undefined percentage...and voilá, we have a nice looking, nearly healthy little "take back" to times before steuererklärung.

When it comes to cooking in my opinion it has to be special, but easy. I admire every way of preparation, that allows you to use valuable fresh ingredients, but on the other hand does not take to long. One of my best founds respectively, is Diamant Gelierzauber (and even better: Diamant Eiszauber), a great invention for fast and very healthy preparation of marmelade. You don't boil the fruits, so the vitamins remain...and: it takes less than 5 Min.

Back to the crepes...
For 2 Persons I take

250 g milk
100 g wheat flour type 405
25 g wheat flour type 1050
2 eggs
butter
salt

Melt a tablespoon of butter in the crepepan, do not allow it to sizzle. Mix the melt butter with the other ingedients and pour small ladleful after ladleful in the hot pan.

To add something fresh I thought of marmelade....and bought what the fruit market had to offer.

1 Pck Diamant Gelierzauber 
250 gr. red currents (wash and cut)

bourbon vanilla

pinch of salt and pepper

mix it...

add some cut needles of rosmary

DONE

Other variations are

::  Mango Coconut milk Cardamom Ginger Lime

::  Cherry Pink Pepper mix it...

    Add Basilikum

::  Strawberry Orange Bourbon Vanille mix it...

    Add White Chocolate

DEDICATION TO ARGENTINIA

There is nothing better on a cold midwinter evening than a good glass of dry red wine, a catching conversation and a white plate with nothing more than a juicy, medium rare argentinian steak resting on it, waiting for you to slowly cut its roasted crust and deliberate the bloody juice....

It has been a daylong  investigation  full of foodblogs, youtube experts videos until we performed our little project to perfection. There were some quite big issues to deal with: when do you season the meat? before putting it into the pan, in the pan, or on the plate? When and where to put the oil?
After hours of investigation on the sofa we thought to slowly make out some principles. The first one was less is more. Salt and Pepper, thats all. Anything else would be indignity. Another cornerstone of a damn good steak seemed to be damn hot oil in a damn hot pan to close the pores of the meat and let the inner part stay juicy...

...BUT then there was Jamie O. He just marinates the meat in oil and never puts oil in the pan. And he seasons the meat in rosemary and garlic...Jamie.
With a bunch of  ultimate ways to prepare "the perfect steak" we started cooking to find our perfect way. We seasoned one steak before, one after roasting. One with, one without garlic. One thick, one thin...thank god we had the tiny amount of 700 g of best filet steak for the two of us!

Finally we found the ultimate way to prepare

"The Perfect Steak":

Take slices of around 2 cm thickness, so the pan will do and you do not have to use complicated things like tinfoil or the oven.
Season the meat shortly before putting into the pan, so the taste will be more intense. Just use salt and pepper.
Put the meat in a damn hot pan with damn hot oil.
Rub the meat in the pan with slices of garlic.
Roast the meat for about 3 min., till its texture feels like the base of the thumb, when the tip of the thumb meets the ring finger (thumb law!).

Never...
add sauce.
hurt the steaks "skin" with a fork or a knife before eating it. The juice will escape.

Only the cone with dulce de leche ice cream for dessert was missing.