Egg and Cheese Salad

This surfaced up today in my memory as a solution to the frequent question what to eat for lunch. I like a yellow cheese with a bit more sharp flavor for this, though usually what ends up in it is that forgotten leftover piece you found at the back of the fridge shelf, deemed still edible after a careful inspection for the suspicious life forms.

I usually do not serve it in any special way, just eat it from a bowl (the amount bellow is for 2-3 people), but it has a potential to end up on a guest table, as a small bite something, on a toast, in the mini cups, etc.

Need:
100 g block of yellow cheese
3 hard boiled eggs
3 spoons of mayonnaise

The rest is simple, roughly grate the cheese on a vegetable grater, cut the eggs into small pieces. Mix, add mayonnaise, eat.

Christmas Eve Apple Pie, aka Fake Fish

From where I come from, Christmas Eve dinner is the most important feast in the whole winter festivities cycle. It is a somber family dinner on a Christmas Eve, while still upholding fasting tradition. Traditionally there have to be 12 dishes served (for 12 Apostles, 12 months of the year, you can take your pick) and at times it can be a rather challenging meal to put together, considering individual preferences of the family members. Last year we found this recipe in some article about Dutch Christmas food in the middle ages, and made it with some modifications. Even though it uses no dairy or animal based products, it turned out to be a really nice apple pie, definitely a keeper.

Need
... for pastry:
500 g flour
120 g sunflower oil (at least I used it, other oils probably will do fine too)
40 g grinded almonds
250 ml of water

... for filling:
3 large apples
90g sugar
1 table spoon ginger
1 table spoon cinnamon
60-80 g grinded almonds (depends on how much there was in a package)

... for decorating
a handful of nice whole almonds
1 raisin or prune

Rasp apples on a vegetable rasp (the rough part). Don't have to peel them, but if the skin looks crap, which often is the case with own apples at this point of the year, you can peel them. Obviously, seed pods go out, we do not want them in a pie. Mix apples with other filling ingredients.
Knead the pastry from pastry ingredients, divide it into 3 balls, 2 big ones (one slightly smaller than the other) and 1 tiny one, that one will be for decoration elements. Roll an oval shape from the bigger ball first, that will be a bottom of your pie. Put a baking paper in your oven plate and place the rolled out pastry sheet on it. Put a filling on it, so that it is about a good 2 cm from the edges. Note: It is important to first put a bottom pastry sheet on an oven plate and only then add the filling, because otherwise it can be rather annoying to lift the whole thing and transport it to the oven plate.
Roll the smaller big ball of the pastry, put it on top and fold the edges. Make a fish tail and fin from the tiny ball, also a rope thingie to separate the "head". Decorate it with whole almonds to make scales and use a prune/raisin to make an eye.
Prick the pie with a fork next to the "head" rope, and around the edges so the steam can get out when baking, otherwise the top layer can burst open in the places where you do not want it to do that; while it does nothing for taste, it can ruin a presentation. Bake in an oven on 200C for about 40 min.

Fruity Herring

Over the years my mother's contributions to Christmas and other celebrations' table were new herring salad recipes. Well, its not really a salad, more like appetizer, cocktail or whatever you want to call it; it is eaten cold, with a piece of a dark bread, quite traditional around those parts, especially in the winter season.
Here I usually get my herring filet mildly marinated from a local fish source, however if it is seriously salted or marinated, you might need to soak it first for about half an hour to get the saltines or overkill vinegar out. There are some taste gains in buying a big fat herring which hasn't been fileted for you, but it is quite a bit of work to get the bones out, and you might want to look first for some tips how to do it properly. Either way, ready filet normally works just fine.

Need
3 average size herring filets (cleaned, mildly marinaded or salted)
2 normal size carrots
2 normal size onions
1 handful of dried plums
1 handful of dried apples
1 handful of raisins
1 table spoon of ketchup
4 spoons of sunflower oil
a pinch of salt and black peppers

Put plums, apples and raisins into a bowl and pour boiling water over them. Leave them to soak for about 15 min.
Cut the herring into bite size pieces.
Grate the carrots on a vegetable rasp.
Cut the onions into small pieces.
Add oil to the frying pan and start frying carrots. Add salt and pepper, and when carrots start softening up, add onion. Fry until ready (aka onion is golden, carrot soft), then add ketchup and put in a mixing bowl to cool off.
Dry the soaking fruits and cut the plums and the apples into the small pieces. Add to the carrot mix, together with the raisins.
If the carrot mix is cooled off (only warm to the touch), add herring. It is important not to do it too soon, because if herring is mixed with the hot oil and veggies, it will start cooking and can taste a bit weird. Mix it and serve cold.

Black Forest Cherry Cake (Schwarzwälder Kirsch)

Black Forest cake, also known as Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte is a well known German dessert, with tons of different recipes how to make it. The one I use is a bit adapted recipe from the 70-ties cook book. While some of this can seem like a bit of an advanced magic, it is really not that difficult to puzzle out once you are busy with it. A note though, it is not a cake that is well suitable for a star shape cake, like the one I made in the picture, as it is rather soft and soggy cake, which does not keep sharp edges that well. Normal round shape is no problem at all, I suppose classic look, with black chocolate sprinkle on sides or top and cherries is a thing to go for.
Since you normally bake a cake part and then cut it into 3 layers, this recipe is for 24 cm cake form, if you want bigger or smaller diameter, adjust proportions accordingly.

Need:
Cake biscuit part:
150 g of black chocolate (70% cacao)
150 g of butter
150 g sugar powder
2 satchels of vanilla sugar (10 g each, can do with one)
6 eggs
150 g flour
1 satchel of baking powder

Filling part:
1 liter of cherry compote (aka full jar of sour cherries, without pits, swimming in syrup/juice)
2 table spoons of starch
5 spoons of sugar
5 spoons of kirsch (or any other cherry liqueur). If you are not familiar with kirschwasser, it is a form of cherry vodka, 40% strong and clear. It can be substituted with sweeter cherry liqueur or fruit brandy, or, just pouring vodka on cherry leaves and leaving it for 1-2 days.

Cream part:
1 liter of cream for whipping
50 g sugar
1 satchel of vanilla sugar

Decoration part
Chocolate sprinkles, a few nice fresh or candied cherries to put on top.

Start with making the cake part. 150g chocolate has to be broken into smaller pieces and melted in a hot water bath. For that, you take a smaller pot or bowl, put the chocolate in it, so that most of it touches the pot surface on the bottom, and then place it into a larger pot, with hot water. Chocolate will slowly melt.
Room temperature butter has to be beaten with 150 g of sugar powder. If you never have done that, you do it with the same mixer whisk as what you use for the whipped cream, in the beginning it tends to cling to it and look a bit scary and wrong, but further it softens and fluffs up. It takes about 5 to 10 min to beat it well, until it doubles in size more or less, and turns white(ish).

Separate your egg yolks from whites. Add yolks one by one to the butter mix, beating with the same whisk. Add chocolate to the mix at the end.

Beat the egg whites separately, till they are stiff.

Add sifted flour to the chocolate mix. You have to sift it, because it ensures the fluffiness of the cake and can make really really significant difference to the end result. DO NOT SKIP that step, ever, when making cakes.
Slowly add egg whites to the chocolate mix, stir it slowly, with a hand or a spoon. Do not use mixer by all means, it will mess things up.

Take your cake form, add baking paper on the bottom (or use the form that does not leak). Bake for about 1 hour in 160C oven (always put cake into already pre-warmed oven). When it is ready, cool it off and cut into 3 layers with a bread knife (the tricky part, but even if it is not a perfect cut, it still can work just fine inside the cake).

When cake part is ready and cooled off, start with the filling. Separate the cherries from the syrup. Ideally there would be about 2 cups of syrup, but if there is less, add water to it.

Cherries: First take 1 cup of syrup and mix it with starch and 3 spoons of sugar, so that there are no lumps. We do this when it is cold, as it is much easier to evenly add starch that way. This cup we put to boiling, so starch can thicken it up, cook it for about 1 min after it boils, stirring vigorously so it does not burn on the bottom. Then we wait for it to cool off a bit, mix in 3 spoons of kirsch and add cherries, so they get coated with the mix.

Syrup: Then take 2nd cup with syrup, put it to boil with 2 spoons of sugar, when it is a bit cooled, add 2 spoons of kirsch to it.

Last is the cream part, when everything else is ready. Before you whip the cream, cool it off well in the fridge or even throw it in a freezer for 10-ish minutes. If cream is warm, you will get a butter, not a whipped cream. So, whip the cool cream with added sugar and vanilla sugar and then the cake is ready to be assembled.

First sprinkle all 3 cake layers with a syrup we made from the 2nd cup of cherry syrup. It is nice to use some tool to spray it, but in an absence of it, just pour it on a cake layer with a table spoon, so it gets soaked evenly.

Put a layer of cake on the plate you are going to serve it on, or on a circle of a baking paper if you plan to transfer it to a proper plate later. Add a layer of cherries filling (the one we made from 1st syrup cup), a layer of whipped cream, second layer of cake, a layer of cherry filling, a layer of whipped cream, a last layer of cake (the prettiest one) and a layer of whipped cream. Basically you need to split cherry filling in 2 parts and whipped cream into 3 parts. Fix the sides of the cake with the whipped cream as well.

Put it in a fridge for half an hour at least and then decorate it. I usually leave decoration for the day I plan to serve it (usually the next day, everything has to soak through overnight), because sometimes the moisture in the fridge can ruin the decoration. If I want to decorate the top with whipped cream, I make some extra, using a fixer for it to be more stiff and hold form better. Big black fresh cherries look awesome on top, but sky is a limit for how to make it pretty.

Mom's favorite cookies

My mother got this recipe from her long time friend and colleague, Grazinele. The recipe is easily 30 years old if not more, as I can remember my mother making these when I was really small. She usually formed the cookies by using a special add for the meat mincing machine, while her friend just rolled them out normally and cut out moon shapes. Either way, they are really easy to make, but that's a point really, sometimes simple things are the best. Kids and hubby definitely share that opinion about these, they hardly last til the next morning. For some variety there is a more chocolaty off-spin, when you add a spoon of cacao powder into the flour, or you can make them normally and then dip into molten chocolate.


Need
200 g of butter,
120 g of sour cream
3 cups of flour
1 egg,
0.5 cup of sugar

Knead everything together (butter can be either soft room temperature, or melted), cool of in a fridge for 15 min, roll out, cut the shapes.
Bake on 180C, for about 15 min (or untill the top is nice and brown.

Oat Cookies

These are great for digestion, reasonably healthy and taste awesome with milk. You can make it with kids, and there is no chance that they will eat too many of these, because they are quite filling. Simple old good oat cookies.

Need:
200 g of butter
1 cup of brown sugar
2 large eggs
2 cups of flour
3 cups of rolled oats
1-2 cups of raisins
2 tea spoons of baking powder

Mix soft butter with sugar and eggs.
Mix flour with baking powder and then with oats.
Combine both mixes, knead well, add raisins, knead some more.
Form cookies, put them on oven tray line with baking paper. Bake at 180C for about half a hour.

Flat Apple Pie

Ever since our apple trees started yielding more than one apple a year, it became a rather common subject for contemplations about what else we could possibly make from them. Last weekend I remembered that when I was growing up we hardly ever had a traditional apple pie, with crumbly pastry and apples on top. Instead, in all shops you could buy this flat apple pie, which generally gave an impression that something was pressing on it while it was baking, so it never had a chance to rise. I did not particularly like that one when I was a kid, because it often was too sour and too moist, but now, when I did not have it for a decade, I got an urge to try and make it at home.
Finding a recipe, however, proved not so easy. Eventually I found a few that looked plausible, compared them and put together something in between. The result was not exactly what I was looking for, because a texture of the pastry was different from the pie I remember, but non the less it is a really good apple pie.

Need:
250 g of butter
200 g of sour cream
400 g flour
1 satchel of vanilla sugar
2 eggs
1 kg of apples (more or less, sour kind)
1 table spoon of brown sugar (not flattened heap, a big one)
1 tea spoon of ginger powder
1 tea spoon of cinnamon powder

Soften the butter and knead it well with the sour cream, flour and vanilla sugar. Note, essentially this apple pie is not very sweet, so if you want something a bit more sweet-toothish, you can add a good spoon or two of a regular sugar into the pastry mix. Divide pastry into 2 balls and put it into a fridge.
While the pastry is cooling, prepare the apple filling. Peel the apples, take the seed pods and cut them in small pieces or grind them on a vegetable rasp. I prefer cutting, because then there is less juice coming out, but you get the point, small pieces.
Beat both eggs, then separate 1/3 of the mix to a separate bowl - that one would be for the top of the pie.
The remaining 2/3 of egg mass mix with brown sugar, ginger and cinnamon and then with apples.
Take out the pastry and roll it into two sheets, roughly a size of your pie form. The sheets have to be about 0,5-1 cm thick, not more, so a form has to be not a very tiny one. Put one sheet on the bottom, put the apples in, put the other one on top, and brush the remaining egg on top.
Bake at 200C about 30-40 min (until the top is nice and brown).

Sweet and Sour Chicken with a Pineapple

An idea of this dish is that of an Asian kitchen, but as usually, there is an European twist to it, to make it easier and faster to make from what is widely available in a local supermarket. We all are familiar with a typical Chicken-tonight or Chicken Sweet&Sour sauce jars. Those usually are great if you want to stock pile the jars themselves, but at some point I really got fed up that usually it is only a few scraps of vegetables swimming in it. Figuring it can't be that hard to make it, I decided to try and do my own. Result actually does not take longer than making it from a jar, and definitely is more filling.

Need:
200g of chicken filet
1 large carrot (it can be small as well, just more annoying to cut)
1 red sweet paprika
1 normal size onion
1 can of pineapples (300 ml one or smaller. As long as you get them swimming in half a cup of juice, it is fine.)
1 mug of basmati rice (aka about 300 mil, roughly)

3 spoons of plain tomato ketchup
2 spoons of soya sauce (ketjap manis or any other darker kind)
1 spoon of corn starch (here in NL it is Maizena)

Spicing: a pinch of pepper, salt, ginger powder. Though, to be honest, there is enough flavor in this to skip on spices entirely.

So, first put a pot with water (about 2 liters) for rice on fire, it will take a while for it to start boiling.

Start with the veggies, clean the carrot and shop it into pieces, more or less what you normally see swimming in pre-made sauce. Put a bit of oil in the pan (bigger and deeper is better), throw a carrot in, put it on medium fire so it does not burn too quickly, etc. Chop paprika into similar size pieces, throw in. Cut the chicken into more or less half bite pieces, add to the pan. Cut the onions into blocks, add to the pan. Open your pineapple can, fish out pineapples (save the liquid you will need that later!), cut the pineapples if they are not in the blocks already, add to the pan. Fry it for 3-5 minutes, while you are making the sauce.

Somewhere in between this process a water for rice started boiling - add rice, stir it with a fork and cook for 8 minutes, occasionally stirring so it does not stick to the bottom. Try to not overcook it.

Now action moves to the pineapple tin can (or a cup if you poured the juice out). To the pineapple juice add 3 spoons of ketchup, 2 spoons of soya sauce and 1 spoon of corn starch. Whisk it, so the starch is not in the lumps (children toy whisk is lovely for that, but simple spoon/fork can do too). Add this liquid to the frying pan and stir, stir, STIR, so everything gets coated well in sauce.

Get the excess water off the cooked rice (aka sift) and serve with the chicken.