Ah yes, sweet student life, whenever you think you have a little time to yourself something comes up and you end up spending your holidays busy with random stuff. Like we have this fabulous internship coming up for April. Normally universities, especially here in France, try to incorporate as many internships as possible in the study program for both bachelor and master degrees. Personally I don’t question the necessity of internships and they are absolutely crucial after several semesters of acquiring theoretical knowledge, which, in all honesty, is mostly useless for your future professional career. Yes, the intentions of universities are indeed honorable, but when reality strikes in, you often find yourself stuck in a small company that tries to replace full-time workers by chain hiring interns. Some of my friends at university have to work under abominable conditions, yet they still can deem themselves lucky to have found some sort of working experience to validate their semester. As a student, especially here in France at a public university, it’s difficult sometimes not to lose your motivation when all the support you get is “make it work” from your professors. But hey, all of this is just to make us a stronger, right? Right!
Anyway, enough ranting, let’s get back to business. This bento was quickly made with left-over gnocchi and a tomato relish (the recipe is from one of Jamie Oliver’s cook books). The sandwich and the snow-pea stir-fry are really nothing special. I really liked the taste of the tomato relish with the gnocchi but one must be very careful with packing the relish. It tends to be rather liquid so a leak-proof container with a compartment that can separate gnocchi from relish is needed. Overall I’m not quite happy with the presentation and I’d really like to get back to making more elaborate bentos but for now I’ve got almost no spare time
Recipe section
Tomato relish
Ingredients
100 ml vinegar (the lightest one you have)
2 Tbsp sugar
1 shallot, sliced
400g cherry tomatoes, chopped
salt, pepper
3 Tbsp olive oil
Preparation
In a small saucepan combine vinegar, sugar and the shallot. Bring to a boil and reduce to half at least. Then add the cherry tomatoes and let them get hot. Remove from heat immediately and season with salt, pepper and olive oil.
Serves 2-3. Can accompany various things like pasta or meat dishes.
Soon I’m going to be done with exams, then I’ll get to post much more. I really want to include a few recipes for things I posted during this busy period and I’d also like to make more general posts about quick filler dishes for bento that you can store in the fridge and use when needed. For now only the list of contents (recipes coming soon):
Tortellini with tricolor pepper relish
Colorful salad (lettuce, red beans, cherry tomatoes)
1 mini-doughnut (filled with apple sauce)
Miss-Kitty container with vinaigrette
This pepper relish is actually something that normally doesn’t go with pasta… it’s a great stand-alone dish that you can prepare ahead of time and use up over the week. Today I tried to mix it with pasta - surprisingly the taste was quite good! I think it mixes really well with rice too. The relish is made by cutting up 1 pepper of each color (green, red, yellow) and simmering them in a sugar/vinegar reduction with onions or shallots. More detailed recipe soon, if I’m still alive after the exams :p
—————–
En français:
La fin des examens approche et bientôt j’aurai plus de temps pour écrire sur mon petit blog! J’aimerais vraiment publier les recettes pour certains des plats que j’ai montrés ici pendant cette période stressante. De plus j’aimerais écrire des articles plus généraux sur des petits plats que vous pouvez cuisiner en avance pour les utiliser tout au long de la semaine dans des bentos. Voici donc la liste du contenu de cette bento (les recettes à suivre très bientôt!):
Tortellinis avec un mélange de poivrons à trois couleurs
Salade colorée (feuilles de laitue, haricots rouges, tomates cerise)
1 mini beignet (parfum: pomme)
Mini pot “Miss Kitty”, rempli de vinaigrette
Normalement le mélange de poivrons ne se mange pas avec des pâtes… c’est un magnifique petit plat appart que l’on peut cuisiner en avance pour ensuite l’utiliser tout au long de la semaine dans des bentos. Aujourd’hui j’ai tenté de combiner ces poivrons avec des tortellinis et en fait c’était plutôt bon! Je pense que les poivrons vont également très bien avec du riz. Pour le mélange il vous faut un poivron de chaque couleur (vert, rouge, jaune) que vous coupez en tranches et puis vous les faites revenir dans une réduction de sucre et de vinaigre avec des oignons ou des échalotes. Je posterai une recette plus détaillée bientôt, si je sors vivante des examens
I’m sorry for the lack of posts lately, I’m still very busy with exams. I did manage to make this bento today though, so I’m posting it quickly, without the usual wall of text! But fear not, I’m eager to start babbling again as soon as I get a bit more time Oh and I decided to add a french section to my posts as I seem to get a lot of visitors from France lately.
Contents
Japanese rice with salt and toasted sesame seeds Tamagoyaki Miss Kitty container with vinaigrette Cherry tomatoes & mozzarella salad Tempura fried vegetables
————-
En français:
Contenu
Riz japonais avec du sel et des graines de sésame grillées Tamagoyaki (Omelette japonaise roulée) Mini-pot “Miss Kitty” rempli de vinaigrette Tomates cerises et mozzarella en salade Tempura de légumes
When I was little, my mum used to make a gratin with spätzle, cauliflower and broccoli. Even though she used a ready-mix to make the sauce for the gratin, I couldn’t get enough of it. But which kid can actually get enough of spätzle?
Unfortunately I couldn’t make any spätzle because I didn’t have eggs left, but I used pasta instead and it tasted (almost) just as good! To replace the ready-mix sauce I made a thin sauce béchamel and flavoured it with an onion and a little stock powder.
One reason why I love this gratin so much is that it’s a delicious way of eating broccoli, which is an incredibly healthy vegetable. Its health benefits beat the ones of most other vegetables. I generally think that it’s quite important to find an alternative to the 2-3 sad florets of cooked broccoli, which we typically serve with our roast dinner. Actually I think that the broccoli feels mistreated and sad, having to share the plate with a big mean piece of meat!
Bring water to a boil in a large saucepan and add salt. Turn the heat to medium. First add the cauliflower and let it cook for about 2 minutes, then add the carrots and let both cook for 2 more minutes. Then add the Broccoli and let everything cook for 4 more minutes.
Drain the vegetables from the water and put them in a gratin dish. Add the cooked pasta.
If the sauce béchamel isn’t seasoned yet, season it and add the stock powder. Keep whisking as you don’t want the sauce to develop a skin.
Heat your oven to approximately 180°C. Pour the sauce over the vegetables and the pasta and mix everything well. Sprinkle with cheese and bake in the oven until golden brown.
Oh boy the past few days have really been busy here in Aix en Provence. University was closed down because students throughout the whole country organise strikes against a law that would give full autonomy to universities (hence allowing selection of students by making them pass an entry exam). Many are fearing that this might lead to a full privatization of the university system (tuition fees etc). Anyway, all of this is quite new to me… I couldn’t imagine that a strike could block a whole university (or several actually) :p
So when you are in a stressful time you need to cook quick meals. Any form of pasta is handy but what kind of sauce can you make easily without fussy ingredients? Well of course, tomato sauce… But actually this is the first time since ages that I attempted to cook a tomato sauce. Usually the taste was always too bland or too acid and I preferred eating plain pasta. But I found an awesome recipe in a German cooking magazine, featuring one of my favorite German cooks, Tim Mälzer. I loved the sauce because it had a slightly sweet taste, didn’t include annoying onion or garlic pieces but was still very flavourful. Ricotta cheese goes incredibly well with this because it softens the taste of the sauce and rounds it up nicely.
Ingredients (Adapted from Essen & Trinken, Für jeden Tag - Nr.10)
1 onion, halved
1 clove of garlic, halved
400g of tomato dice (can) or tomato purée
1 Tbsp butter
50 ml water
salt, pepper
1 generous pinch of sugar
4 Tbsp olive oil
1 tsp dried basil or 2 Tbsp chopped fresh basil
100g of ricotta cheese, drained
Preparation
Put the onion, garlic and tomato dice/purée in a pan. Add the butter and the water and season with salt, pepper and sugar. Let it cook for about 30 minutes at medium heat. (Stir once in a while)
Remove the onion and the garlic pieces. Add the olive oil and the basil. Adjust seasoning if needed.
Serve on the pasta of your choice (goes really well with Gnocchi too). Sprinkle with ricotta cheese.
A few days ago I received one of Gordon Ramsay’s cookbooks I had ordered. Gordon Ramsay Makes It Easy is a collection of recipes for everyday life, which you can prepare without spending a lot of money or standing in the kitchen for hours (it says so on the book-cover). As I’ve said before already: I don’t like celebrity cookbooks. Often you open them with high expectations and once you try out a few recipes you get disappointed not only by the result but by the time and money you invested.
I watch a lot of cooking shows with Gordon Ramsay and I’ve always been impressed by the simplicity of his dishes. This is actually the reason why I decided to buy his book and to give it a try, despite my prejudices. I randomly selected 3 recipes and will be trying them out over the next days, always posting about my experiences here.
When I went shopping today for ingredients, the list of items I needed to make those three dishes was 9 items long. Of course it always depends on how well your pantry is stocked but 9 items for 3 dishes is really nice, especially given the fact that I’m a student and that I must be careful with my budget.
The first dish I decided to try out was a Broccoli soup. Gordon Ramsay’s famous broccoli soup with 3 ingredients: Broccoli, Water and Salt! After preparing the dish I can say: it was quick, it was cheap and it tasted good. I wasn’t blown away but that’s mostly due to the additions beside the broccoli. Ramsay suggests in his book/dvd that for a “Posh occasion” you can add a strong goat cheese along with a few walnuts to the soup. Given the fact that I loath goat cheese I added some “Tomme Blanche” (which doesn’t have a strong taste) and a few walnuts. I loved the soup itself but the cheese bothered me more than anything and made the dish really heavy. The walnuts were ok but not a must either in my opinion. The soup itself though is a great way to eat broccoli which has a bombastic nutritional value.
Ingredients
1 broccoli head (nice green color, no brown spots)
water
salt
olive oil to drizzle (optional)
——————–
Preparation
Bring water to a boil in a large saucepan.
Take the broccoli in your hand, by the stem, and hold down the florets. Cut them off by cutting around the stem, turning it slowly as needed.
Wash the florets and salt the water.
Once the water is rapidly cooking, add the florets and cover with a lid.
After 4-5 minutes, once you can cut through the broccoli with a knife, remove the pan from the heat and drain the broccoli through a sieve into a bowl. It is important to keep that water, do not throw it away.
Put the broccoli in a blender and add some of the cooking water to it until the water is about at half height of the broccoli. Now blend thoroughly (starting slowly and interrupting a few times at first) until you have a soup with a very smooth texture. Remove the lid from the blender and add seasoning if needed.
Fill a plate with the soup and drizzle a little olive oil on top.
Croutons should go well with the soup, try it out!
It’s autumn which means it’s pumpkin season! Normally every market should be filled with a great variety of pumpkin/squash/acorn. Yeah well that’s normally :p Unfortunately here in the south of France pumpkin is not really a staple food. When Halloween approaches the big supermarkets import a few pumpkins but whatever they don’t manage to sell is sometimes being offered for weeks after as prepacked pumpkin slices. I’ve had a lot of bad experiences so whenever I buy pimpkin I’m extremely careful. Luckily at the moment the markets here do have a few pumpkins lying around and they still appear to be fresh.
When I decided to make this soup I thought about adding a little fresh ginger to give it a spicy kick. Although I’m not a big fan of ginger the outcome was surprisingly good, however if you don’t like ginger don’t add any.
Ingredients
500g of pumpkin
2-3 carrots
1 onion
250 ml vegetable stock
1 tsp of grated ginger
2 Tbsp vegetable oil
2 slices of bread (white bread works nicely but you can use any sort of bread, I for one used black bread here)
2 tsp of paprika powder
1 Tbsp olive oil
crème fraîche (optional)
finely chopped parsley (optional)
——————–
Peel and clean the pumpkin. Cut into small pieces.
Chop the onion finely.
Heat the vegetable oil in a large saucepan.
Peel, clean and cut the carrots into small pieces.
Put the carrot into the saucepan with the hot oil and cook them at medium heat for about 5 minutes.
Add the onions, the pumpkin and the ginger and cook everything for approximately 15 minutes on medium-low heat. (Or until the carrots and the pumpkin are nicely soft)
Add the vegetable stock and bring to a boil.
Put the soup aside.
Cut the bread in cubes and drizzle them with olive oil. Powder them with a little paprika and put them in the oven at approximately 180 °C.
Either use a food processor or an immersion blender to blend the soup until the texture is nicely smooth.
Run the soup through a sieve and remove the croutons from the oven.
Add salt and pepper to the soup if needed.
Serve with a little crème fraîche and chopped parsley. (optional)
Gnocchi is one of my favorite Italian dishes. Usually I eat them with just a little grated cheese and I don’t think that any type of sauce is necessary for them to taste good. It’s actually not easy to find a good sauce for Gnnochi and I’ve been searching for a long time :p For me usual pasta sauces (bolognese, basil pesto, carbonara etc.) were simply to heavy for a Gnocchi dish. Sometimes I ate them with a simple tomato sauce but my stomach isn’t always happy about that, so I continued the search and finally today I decided to try and make a Pesto Rosso.
I’m actually not quite sure if Pesto Rosso is a traditional Italian sauce. I didn’t find anything about it on Wikipedia. If you happen to know where Pesto Rosso comes from and if it’s used in traditional Italian cuisine, please leave a comment The only thing I know is that I found two different types of recipes on the internet. One type involved a lot of olives and fresh thyme. The other type leaves out olives entirely and uses basil as herb. The latter is the type of pesto rosso I tried here in France before and that’s the one I tried to reproduce with this recipe. However I don’t know if this is the “original” recipe (should there be one).
Unfortunately I didn’t make the Gnocchi myself as the process is quite time consuming and requires some practice. But if you’d like to give it a shot check out this video.
50g walnuts, chopped (you can also use 100g almonds)
3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil (the best you have)
salt and pepper
Other than that:
500g of uncooked Gnocchi
grated parmesan or mozarella cheese (optional)
—————————
Preparation
If you are using almonds, cook them in some water for approximately 5-10 minutes. Drain the nuts, cool off with cold water and peel away their skin. If you are using walnuts you can omit this step.
Put the fresh tomatoes in a bowl and pour some hot water over them. Let them in the hot water for about 2 minutes, drain and remove their skin (should be easy now because of the hot water). Cut in cubes and put aside.
Roughly chop the dried tomatoes. Put aside.
If you are using garlic, chop finely.
Bring water to a boil in a large saucepan and add 3 teaspoons of salt.
Put the fresh and the dried tomatoes in a food processor. Add the nuts, the garlic and the basil. Turn on the processor on high speed while slowly adding the olive oil. Once all the olive oil is incorporated continue to process everything until you are happy with the texture. Personally I like it as smooth as possible, but that’s up to you.
At last add salt and pepper to taste.
Turn of the food processor and put the pesto rosso aside.
Cook the Gnocchi according to manufacturer’s instructions.
Drain them well and serve with 1-2 spoons of pesto rosso. Sprinkle with some grated cheese if you like.
Serves 3-4. If you have some pesto rosso left you can conserve it in the fridge for a couple of days. Some even say that it conserves for up to a month if covered with a film of olive oil but I’m a little sceptical about that. Enjoy
“Les soupes, c’est pour les vieux” (Soups are for old people)
“Errm… mais moi j’aime la soupe :p” (Uhm… but I like soup :p)
“Pas possible!” (Can’t be!)
I remember having a similar conversation with my husband’s adorable aunt. Well I’m not quite sure if young people really have come to hate soup nowadays, but I can’t imagine autumn without colorful vegetable soups. I must admit that the above soup looks more like a purée but that’s exactly the consistency I like
Ingredients
For the soup:
If you live in France, you can buy a bunch of vegetables together (”Pot au feu” - vegetables). One of those boxes is what I used here (minus one onion). If you do not have anything similar where you live use 4 carrots, 1 onion, 2 turnips, 1 leek. You may, of course substitute the vegetables in any way you like (with what you got at home), you can even use 1-2 potatoes.
water
salt
For the Zucchini Pancakes:
200g of flour
1 cup half milk half water
2 eggs
100g yoghurt
1 big Zucchini, finely shredded
salt
pepper
optional: grated emmental cheese
oil (olive oil for example)
____________
Cut the vegetables roughly and put them in a pot. Add water to the pot to cover the vegetables. Cover with a lid and bring everything to a boil, then reduce heat to low and let simmer for about 45 minutes. If the water level gets low, don’t hesitate to add more.
15 minutes before your soup has finished simmering, start preparing the pancake batter. Pour the flour into a mixing bowl then slowly add the milk/water while mixing well. Adding the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients while mixing prevents lumps. Then add the eggs, the yoghurt and the spices. Mix everything well, then fold in in the shredded Zucchini (if you leave the skin on, it gives the pancakes a nice color).
Put some oil in a frying pan and heat it up well at medium heat.
With a laddle pour some of the batter into the pan until the whole surface of the pan is covered. Let it cook until the pancake is golden brown on the down-side then flip it. Sprinkle some shredded cheese on it and let the pancake cook until it reaches the same golden brown color from the other side. Once that is done you can fold the pancake in a half or you can fold it the way I did in the above picture (the cheese must be inside though).
Once the soup is done, remove it from the stove and let it cool off a little while finishing the rest of your pancakes.
Once that is done, pour the soup into a blender and blend it really well until there are no bits of vegetables left. You can then pass the soup through a sieve if you’d like a really smooth texture. It is not necessary though.
Season the soup and add a little crème fraîche or some chopped parsley as garnish.
[image to come soon] “Ok, what would you like for dinner tonight?”
“Pasta, Pasta!”
“Again? :p”
“Yes :)”
I’m sure you know this type of conversation just too well. What can you do if your family likes Pasta a lot but if you’d still like to cook something healthy?
While strolling over the vegetable section of a local shop here in Aix en Provence, I found a bunch of different vegetables which all looked very appealing but I simply didn’t know how to put them together. So while browsing the wonderful foodblog of Elise I stumbled on a recipe that I’ve always wanted to try out: Pasta Primavera.
Pasta primavera is an Italian dish that consists of pasta and fresh vegetables. A meat such as chicken, sausage or shrimp can be added if desired, but the focus of primavera is the vegetables themselves.
This recipe is so interesting because it is a healthy, low-fat alternative to all those pasta dishes with heavy sauces. Refreshing, light, a taste of autumn and italy on a plate. A great recipe to use up vegetable leftovers you might have in the fridge.
Ingredients
(You can substitute/adjust the following vegetables in any way you like)
2 carrots
1/2 zucchini
1 red pepper
1 yellow pepper
1 green pepper
1 onion
7 cherry tomatoes, cut in a half
garlic (if you do not like garlic, don’t put any)
olive oil
200 ml tomato purée
200 ml water
thyme or herbes de provence
salt and pepper
1 vegetable stock cube
200g pasta (penne for example, you can also use whole-wheat pasta)
grated parmesan cheese (optional)
_______
Chop the onions finely. Wash and cut the vegetables in bite sized pieces, stripes for example. Put a large pan on the stove and heat the olive oil in it. (medium heat)
At the same time bring a large pot of water to a boil. Add some salt and a bit of olive oil.
First put the onions along with the garlic in the hot pan, stir them once and cook them for 30 seconds. Then add the rest of the vegetables and stir to cover with the olive oil. Let the vegetables cook like that for approximately 10 minutes (while stirring once in a while), until they are almost soft.
Once the water is boiling, add the pasta and cook them according to manufacturer’s instructions.
After the vegetables are soft enough for your taste, add the tomato purée, the water and the vegetable stock cube. Stir well and let everything cook for a minute while adding some thyme (or herbes de provence) and salt/pepper.
Drain the pasta and add it to the vegeatables. Mix everything well and adjust seasoning if needed. Add the cherry tomatoes and remove from heat.
Serves 4. You can add some parmesan cheese but personally I left it away. Enjoy
a collection of recipes for everyday life, which you can prepare without spending a lot of money or standing in the kitchen for hours (it says so on the book-cover).
