Ep. 101 – PB&J

If I hadn’t been hit in the head by spring asthenia, I would have given you the recipe for Cosmopolitan. 🙂 That’s how you’ll have to settle for a high-calorie recipe that contains carbs, protein and fat, plus gluten and sugar. Yes, mother of all disasters in the kitchen, the American version of the classic sandwich with bread, butter and jam (or honey), PB&J. 😀

Don’t know what PB&J is? But what tv series are you watching? 😛 :)))) Peanut butter & jelly sandwich is the solution when your energy is below sea level. Preferably homemade jelly/ jam/ marmalade, because it will also have fruit, not just sugar, like the commercial products. 🙂 The same goes for peanut butter, especially if you are not a fan of palm oil (grind well, then soften with a little neutral oil to taste, eg sunflower oil, a soft or crunchy paste comes out, depending on your preferences).

Bread, plain or toasted, spread peanut butter, some jam, put the second slice of bread on top and eat.

Disaster, non-disaster, don’t exaggerate, because after that you will jump around the house and your neighbors will shout at you… 😀

PS: In the photo we have a fitness bun, homemade peanut butter and orange marmalade.

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Ep. 100 – Claudia cake :)

After exactly 10 years since I got the recipe and 99 episodes of #disasterinthekitchen, I set out to make the only cake that, for unexplained reasons, is called Claudia. 🙂 Although, originally, it is also known as Albina or Albinița cake, more than likely due to the bee honey sheets. 🙂 Hungarians have their own variant, which is called mézes krémes and which has chocolate icing on top instead of powdered sugar.

If you visit the confectionery regularly, it is one of the cakes with sheets and price per kilogram and that appears as a fasting cake. Why fasting, when the original recipe contains lard (!!!) no one knows. It’s good that it’s not passed on to vegan cakes, because honey is everything but vegan… 😀

It’s not a fancy cake, but it’s good baby, so sweet and sour… :))))

I probably wouldn’t have made it, because you have to wait a couple of days to be able to cut it, but what else can you use to celebrate the 100 episodes on the site, shaorma with everything? 😀 Noooo, with Claudia cake. <3

Sheets: 150g sugar, a pinch of salt, 2 tablespoons honey and 100g of 82% butter are put in a saucepan on the fire. Stir until smooth, melt the sugar and begin to boil (make small bubbles), then leave to cool. 600g flour, 1 tablespoon baking soda mix in a bowl, over add the cooled liquid ingredients and 1 egg mixed with a fork with 3 tablespoons of milk. Mix well and divide the dough into 4 pieces, from which you will spread the 4 sheets (dimensions: oven tray) on a plate greased with a little flour. Try to make your sheets look about the same, so you don’t lose a lot at the end. Bake the sheets on baking paper, in a preheated oven, at medium temperature, approx. 8 minutes (in my case), after being drilled with a fork, to come out evenly. They have a dark color from honey, they are fragile when you take them out of the oven, but they harden, like biscuits. Allow to cool well, then fill with cream.

Cream: 200g soft butter at room temperature and 150g caster sugar rubbed with the mixer, after melting the sugar add the semolina boiled in milk (80g semolina poured in the rain in 300ml boiled milk and 1 vanilla sugar and mixed well with a whisk, on the fire, until it binds, then cooled). A white cream comes out.

Assemble: in a tray put a sheet, half of the white cream, sheet 2, 1 jar of jam or marmalade (I put 400g of homemade apricot jam), sheet 3, the other half of the white cream and the sheet 4. Place a heavier wood chopper on top of the cake and leave it to cool for a day or two to soften the sheets. Then powder with powdered sugar and cut into pieces.

Disastrously good, but terribly sweet!!! 🙂

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Special [fromHongKong] ep. – mango pancakes (yum cha)

Yum cha (to go to dim sum) – this is the name of Cantonese brunch in the native language (includes Hong Kong and Macau). This late breakfast consists of Chinese tea with appetizers and cakes. Among which I found mango pancakes. 🙂

Well, these wonderful pancakes are made quite quickly and are eaten disastrously fast. 😀

The pancake dough is made of 3 medium eggs, 250 ml of milk (1 cup), 50g flour, 30g starch, 25g sugar, 10g melted butter, salt. Beaten eggs, add sugar, a pinch of salt, flour and starch, mix well, then pour the milk, mixed so as not to remain lumpy and finally melted butter. In a heated pan with a drizzle of oil, pour a little dough, fry the pancakes on one side, being careful not to burn. A thin, soft, elastic pancake should come out. 😀 About 12 pieces come out.

Whipped cream: 300 ml whipped cream with a tablespoon or two of powdered sugar and some vanilla essence (as for a cake).

When they are cold, place 1 tablespoon of cream and a rectangular piece of mango in the middle of the pancake, then wrap it in four, carefully. The unroasted part stays out.

Now, I used normal pancake batter – from Friday’s recipes – and toasted pancakes on both sides, and instead of whipped cream I put skimmed (very fine) cottage cheese mixed with 1 tablespoon vanilla sugar and 1 tablespoon of powdered sugar. If you don’t want to put sugar, it’s ok, if you have a baked mango, it will be super dietary. 🙂 I think you can also make them with Greek yogurt.

The girl from whom I took the recipe says that they can be made with other fruits, e.g. strawberries, kiwi, watermelon, banana or peach.

There’re a disaster!!!! And almost dietary, LOL. 😛 😀 🙂

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Ep. 99 – 3 variants of pancakes/ crepes batter

If you arrive in the area this weekend, you can join the famous pancake festival in Prejmer, the reason for the carnival before Mardi Gras. Fashing – how is called locally, which begins on 11:11 at 11:11 a.m., includes all sorts of parties and festivities, including a carnival with a parade of masks and street processions. In Ţara Bârsei, Prejmer village keeps this Saxon tradition alive. 🙂

Whether you arrive or not, today we have three recipes for pancakes/ crepes dough to try at home. Plus an infinity of filling ideas. 😀

1) Pancakes/ crepes with whatever it is, of the famous Radu Anton Roman.

Ingredients: 1 egg, 1 tablespoon flour, salt, 1 glass of milk (100 ml).

Egg whisked with flour, add a pinch of salt and milk. The dough is left to breathe for 15 minutes, after which the pancakes/ crepes are poured one by one into a 20-25 cm pan, greased with a thin film of sunflower oil, about half a ladle and fry for about half a minute on each side. I got 4 pieces in a medium frying pan, by Ikea.

If you make a larger quantity, I suggest you add a little oil directly to the dough, otherwise you have to grease the pan every time, so that the dough does not stick.

2) Crepes, by Julia Child.

Ingredients: 1 cup cold milk (250 ml), 1 cup cold water (250 ml), 4 eggs, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 11/2 cup flour, 4 tablespoons melted butter.

The same procedure, beaten eggs, added salt, flour, water, milk and finally melted butter. Mixed well so that there are no lumps of flour, left in the fridge for about 2 hours. Fried in a pan, initially greased with a thin film of oil, the dough is poured thinly, you will get approx. 20-30 pieces.

I put 4 tablespoons of oil instead of butter and kept the dough in the fridge for about half an hour, after which it seemed too thick, so I added some more milk. A really nice dough came out!!!

Radu Anton Roman said that the French pancake is more brittle and more porous than the mioritic one, but the French dough seemed impeccable to me.

3) Pancakes/ crepes like my father’s, the #familydisaster #pinkprincess recipe.

At my house, my father is responsible for pancakes, because a) he knows how to make the dough and b) he knows how to turn the pancakes in the pan with just one hand. 🙂

Ingredients: 2-3 eggs, 1 liter of milk, a pinch of salt, flour as much as it contains, some sunflower oil.

Well, as in the previous recipes, whisk the eggs and a little salt, alternately add flour and milk so that a dough comes out neither too thick nor too liquid – just like pancake/ crepes dough :P. At the end a little oil and possibly a little mineral water (they come out more porous). Leave it to stand for a while (you will see that the dough thickens, as a result you may add a little more milk), after which they are also fried in the pan initially greased with a drop of oil.

The challenge is to make a dough as thin as possible, from as few eggs as possible. 😀

If you destroy the dough, no problem, we’ll fix it. 🙂 If it is too thick, add some more milk or water. If it is too thin, add some more flour, but not directly, because it will be lumpy, but separately in another bowl, diluted in the dough. If you put too few eggs and do not tie the pancakes in the pan, then in a separate bowl mix some eggs with flour and dilute them with dough. If they stick, it means you haven’t put enough fat in, so add a little more oil (don’t overdo it, don’t make French fries :)))

Well, and if we finished the dough, what do we do now? 🙂 The classic pancake fillings, at least in my cultural area, are jam, urdă (local fresh white cheese similar with ricotta) and dill or cottage cheese and raisins (I ate the best ones at Rapid… go figure 🙂 ). Nutella is a relatively new invention and crepes Suzette is no longer in style. Ice cream can be a variation for the heat that will come. Otherwise, creativity is the basis (if you don’t want sweet fillings, you can try salty).

So this weekend, for Fashing and/ or Dragobete, love Romanian (or Saxon or French) roll up your sleeves and burn pancakes/ crepes! 😛 And, to give you from the house, on Tuesday, after Dragobete, we have a disastrous recipe for pancakes, straight from the Asian continent. 😀

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Special [cookingbookclub] ep. – spinach and sun-dried tomatoes quiche

… Welcome to the quiche made with spinach and sun-dried tomatoes. 🙂 Directly from Lidl Kitchen (which was the proposal of this month’s edition of #cookingbookclub) in Oana’s kitchen. You can find the recipe here.

I chose it because I had a bag of dried tomatoes that I didn’t really know what to do with, bought since it was Italian week… last year. I put frozen spinach, the chopped one, not the puree, because this is what I had. I put about 120 grams because I was thinking of the water that was going to evaporate. I just put an onion that was big enough and I thought it was enough, I don’t think I was wrong. Oh yeah, and I didn’t put Parmesan because I was convinced I had at home, so I didn’t buy any. I had thought about replacing it with white cheese, but I changed my mind, maybe next time. I didn’t add any salt, because the tomatoes are quite salty. Oregano, the tomatoes were soaked in it in the olive oil, I also added a bit more, but it wasn’t a problem.

45 minutes in the oven seemed like a lot, but I decided to at least follow the instructions in the recipe. I baked in a cake pan lined with baking paper and preheated the oven. It grew beautifully, it made a fancy crust. I like how it came out, I think it’s good cold and warm, and for breakfast and dinner, it’s colorful and good-looking, fluffy and smells nice (like… garlic?!!). Yes, because my dried tomatoes had been greased or rolled in something like that.

I hope you like it in the Shrek version as well (in their picture you can clearly see the green and red strips in the cake, my situation is more mixed.) It’s just that maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to have a little patience and not cut it as soon as you take it out of the oven…

PS: I forgot to say that I put more tomatoes, about 10, if I still didn’t put Parmesan. And only two eggs because… I read wrong :)))

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Cookingbookclub 7 | Lidl’s recipes

As you can remember, this year we are cooking from #321sourcesofinspiration, the first being Lidl Kitchen. Check below some of the recipes tried by our gang. 🙂

Focaccia with cherry tomatoes – the recipe here – I replaced a quarter of the amount of flour with wholemeal flour.

Banana and yogurt muffins – recipe here – Oana preferred the cake pan, used buttermilk instead of milk and didn’t put any sugar in it… 🙂

Walnut and cheese salad – the recipe here – with white cheese instead of blue cheese and simple dressing instead of cream. Edible. 🙂

If you have tried recipes, you can post the pictures directly on our Facebook page – here. If you haven’t taken pictures, no problem. 🙂 And if you haven’t had time to cook, don’t worry, there are still months in the bag… sorry, year. 😀

On Tuesday we will have a special with a recipe also from Lidl Kitchen, colorful and full of vitamins. Plus spinach. 😛 (Did you make it? No way Jose!!!) :))

Our club’s next virtual meeting will be in early March.

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Ep. 98 – Black Forest gâteau

Out of love for you (and especially for me: P), Chef made us the Black Forest cake today, the famous German cake also known as the Black Forest gâteau or Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte.

The cake, in its original version, contains four main ingredients: a chocolate top, cherries, whipped cream and cherry liqueur (sour cherry).

In our slightly modified version, the cream is mixed with mascarpone (to be eaten by family members who are not fans of cream) and the sugar is reduced to the maximum.

Top: 8 eggs, (240g) 8 tablespoons sugar (6 brown, 2 vanilla sugar), (200g) 8 tablespoons flour, 70g black cocoa, 6 tablespoons oil, 4 tablespoons warm water, a sachet of baking powder, a pinch of salt.

Beat the egg yolks with 1/2 of the sugar + oil + water with the mixer until the sugar melts, the egg whites + the other half of the sugar and salt are beaten with a hard foam (as in meringues), the flour is mixed with cocoa + baking powder and incorporated with the yolks beaten in egg whites. Bake at 180 C, 30-40 minutes or until fully cooked (if you put a toothpick in the middle it should come out clean). Allow to cool completely in the baking tray, cut into 3 layers, one layer of which is crushed in a bowl and used for decoration.

Cream: 500g mascarpone, 600 ml cream, 75g powdered sugar, 1 sachet of food gelatin.

Mix the mascarpone cheese with the sugar, add the cream and continue beating until the cream hardens. The cream can be stabilized with gelatin (7g gelatin + 30 ml of cold water, let the gelatin hydrate then melt in a water bath and add to the cream, stirring constantly until all the gelatin is incorporated).

Fruits: pitted sour cherries/ cherries, fresh or from compote, 50g sugar, 50ml water, 100ml sour cherry or cherry liqueur.

In a saucepan, bring the sugar, water and alcohol to the boil, add the fruit and simmer until the amount of liquid is halved. Cool completely before use.

For the top syrup: 75g brown sugar + 75ml water boil until the sugar melts and cools completely before use.

Extra: 100g bitter chocolate min. 60%.

Assembly: one layer of top is syruped, one layer of cream and 1/2 of the amount of fruit is added, then the other layer of top is syruped + cream. Cover the edges with cream, line with the pieces of crushed top, decorate the edges with cream decorations and dark chocolate and put the rest of the cherries in the middle.

If you prefer the option of buying a cocoa countertop ready from the store, over which you put cream, cherries and sour cherries brandy, don’t get behind the wheel!!! 😀

It’s disastrously good. It’s just that you can’t get on the scales for a couple of days. :))))

Happy Valentine’s! And don’t forget that the cake is eaten with friends. 😛

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Special [ipsebrexit] ep. – winter slaw

I wanted to make this salad last year, for the December bookclub, I even bought radishes, but in vain, I didn’t have time. 🙂 Oana, on the other hand, did not give up, so today we have the remaining recipe. A fancy one. 😀

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Good thing I read Jamie Oliver’s book of Christmas recipes in November that I made this salad on the New Year’s Eve… of Chinese year! I think I took the “Let’s be Xmas every day” phrase seriously, I still have to start kneading Chistmas cakes…

But let’s get back to our sheep. From the quantities in the original recipe, 12 servings come out, I have nothing to do with 12 servings, so I cut it by ear until two came out. One I ate immediately, with potato stew, the other I ate withered the next day, but it was ok. It’s good, it’s crunchy, it’s sweet, it’s colorful and a bit different so if you’re bored of the cabbage salad, is interesting that handful of almonds and blueberries thrown at the end.

You need:

1 red onion

2 large carrots (and hard, otherwise the julienne doesn’t come out…)

2 apples

500 g of red cabbage

500 g of white cabbage

1 tablespoon of mustard (the wholemeal says, what’s that?)

4 tablespoons white wine vinegar (well, yes, that apple vinegar coughs… I had that one, I put that one)

extra virgin olive oil

1 bunch of radishes (I didn’t have)

1/2 lemon

100 g of almond flakes (I had no flakes, I shredded almonds on the robot and was ok)

100 g of dried fruit (I put blueberries)

30 g of parsley (I didn’t have this either)

I had and put, that Jamie said we can put something else, important to be fresh and crunchy, beetroot and quince.

The important thing is to cut everything, everything, everything as finely as possible. We start with the onion, which is immediately mixed with the mustard, vinegar, 4 tablespoons of oil, a pinch of salt and pepper to make them more soft.

Next are the cabbages that are placed over the treated onion, the carrots, the radishes, the apples (which are immediately sprinkled with lemon juice so that they do not fade), etc. At the end, add the fried almonds (a little, not until smoke comes out like I did!) And the dried fruit. At the end, chop the parsley and place it on top.

In other words, you can put the salad in layers, in the fridge, take it out and mix it only when it’s time to serve it. Have fun!

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Ep. 97 – maneesh

Manakish, manaeesh, man’ousheh comes from the Middle East (originally from Lebanon) and is a flat bread similar to pizza. The dough can be covered with thyme, cheese or minced meat. Thyme topping and other spices are called Za’atar.

I used Paul Hollywood’s recipe, which says that for one serving (3 large pieces) you need 500g flour, 360g lukewarm water, 10g salt, 25g caster sugar, 10g dry yeast, 20ml olive oil. Mix well and knead for about 10 minutes. The soft and elastic dough is left to rise for about an hour – until it doubles in volume. Divided into 3 pieces, given the shape of flat circles, placed on top with Za’atar, left for about 20 minutes until the oven heats up well, put in the oven for 15 minutes at 230 degrees.

Za’atar is made from 3 tablespoons of sesame seeds, 2 tablespoons of dried thyme, 1 tablespoon of dried marjoram and 2 tablespoons of half an olive oil. Mixed well.

I made half of the quantity, the flour was 2/3 wholemeal flour (from Kaufland) and 1/3 flour of 650 and I baked for almost half an hour. Yes, in my disaster oven. Which is why they burned lightly on the bottom, but I ate everything. :)))

Paul recommends eating it at breakfast with baba ganoush (the classic eggplant salad); wiki says it goes well with feta cheese and mint or mezze tea (combined plate of olives, hummus, vegetables, meat, etc.).

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Special [German] ep. – Kräuterspätzlepfanne mit Specksauerkraut or pasta, speck and sour cabbage

Well, this recipe, which sounds awful, is in free translation a homemade pan of pasta with bacon and greens and German sour cabbage (from the pickled one with vinegar).

In practice, it is done quite quickly, if you are smart and buy the ingredients from a Lidl or Kaufland, respectively spaetzle noodles (egg pasta), which you boil and a can of sauerkraut.

As I am more of a disaster, I wanted to rebuild the recipe from scratch. 😀 So I started making homemade noodles, as the recipe says, from 2 eggs, 150g flour, salt, a bunch of green parsley, which I replaced with half a grated parsnip and some chopped celery leaves, that was in the fridge and 2-3 tablespoons of mineral water. 🙂 A dubious dough should come out, more flowing, but which can be grated. 😛 :))))) Which, after mixing well, is left to stand for an hour (logically I skipped this stage…). The point is that you also need a special grater, not one with four walls, otherwise you will end up like me, ending up pouring the noodles with the teaspoon into the pot of boiling water. 😀

It is certain that in the end they came out, but I had to put them in the pan, with a little oil and salt, pepper, cumin and coriander, because they were tasteless. 🙂

A box of bacon (found at Lidl), chopped red onions, sauerkraut and oil are put on the fire to brown for half an hour. Then combine with pasta. Extra spices. Green leaves on top for decoration.

The food for the weather outside. 🙂

The recipe is from lecker.de. If you want to learn how to make Spaetzle, here is a video clip.

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