Good news for those of you who are the proud owners of an iPhone (and like to cook): Michael Ruhlman’s Ratio app was released today. This app helps you to calculate the exact ratio for doughs, batters, custards, sauces and many more kitchen staples. The good news is that its not all in cups or ounces, you can set the app to recalculate in grams, milliliters and kilos. Even eggs are recalculated to 85.05 grams for the muffin recipe! (I usually go by : use 1 or 2, but that’s not how ratios work). There’s also an option to save your own favorite recipes and share them with others. I think this app is indispensible for enthusiastic cooks. Like Ruhlman puts it: With a ration, it’s not like knowing a single recipe, it’s like knowing thousands!

Ever since fall has been in full swing I’ve been craving risotto. I usually make it once a month, but lately my consumption has increased to more than once a week. Combined with the pumpkin season I think I am in heaven. And if you try my pumpkin risotto combination I hope you feel the same way!

In the picture above I have combined the risotto with roasted pork shoulder (I marinated it in garlic, olive oil and mustard and it was delicious!) and I think that is really a winning combination. Other favorites include sausage and roasted chicken. But for all you veggies out there: this will work perfectly as a stand alone meal as well!

To serve three to  four people (depending on their appetites), you’ll need:

800 ml. vegetable or chicken stock, hot

1 glass of white wine (around 200 ml)

olive oil, for the pumpkin and the risotto

1 onion, diced

200 grams risotto rice (I use arborio)

400 grams  pumpkin, diced

100 grams mascarpone

grated parmesan cheese, to serve

salt & pepper

First, preheat the oven to 200 degrees C. Put the diced pumpkin in an oven tray and roast it for about 15-20 minutes until it is soft. Meanwhile, heat some more olive oil in a skillet and add the onion. After a minute or 2, add the risotto rice and coat it with the olive oil. After 30 seconds, add the glass of white wine and stir. When the white wine is almost evaporated, add some of the hot stock. Wait until this has almost evaporated, then stir in some more stock. Continue this until the rice is al dente (meaning it should still have a little bite when you taste is). This usually takes me around 15-20 minutes. Add the pumpkin to the rice, together with the mascarpone and some freshly ground pepper. Mix very well. Add salt and parmesan cheese to taste. I tend to err on the side of caution with salt, and I usually put the salt shaker on the table for my guests to help themselves: better to add some more than to add too much!

This dish will not win the pretty picture award, but the taste more than makes up for it!

I was going to write about my homemade ketchup, but I dropped the first bottle I made on my kitchen floor. If I had taken pictures then this would become more of a CSI fan blog. Of course I made a new batch, but I haven’t gotten around to taking pictures yet. Besides, it’s practically winter here, so I don’t think anybody has kilos of tomatoes just lying around waiting to be turned into delicious ketchup. Then I figured I would write about my favorite stew, but then I discovered I already did that. Is that Mr. Alzheimer calling? Anyway, you’ll have to make do with another cake recipe for now. But not any old cake, no, this is the one and only Mars cheesecake. I had never heard of such a concoction, but my little sister had a slice and couldn’t talk about anything else for days. So when her birthday arrived I didn’t have much of a choice: a Mars cheesecake had to be created. It actually was a breeze to make, and it gave me the chance to experiment with swirly chocolate and butterscotch decorations, which, as you can tell from the picture above, I still need to practice. Best thing about this recipe? No baking required! The original recipe can be found here.

You’ll need:

250 grams of chocolate chip cookes

125 grams butter, melted

2 tablespoons brown sugar

20 grams butter, extra

300 ml cream

50 grams milk chocolate

3 sheets of gelatine

60 ml. water

500 grams cream cheese

110 grams caster sugar

3 mars bars (around 60 grams each), chopped very finely. And I mean VERY finely.

To make the cake:

Blend the cookies in a food processor until they are very crumbly. Add the butter and mix until combined. Put the cookie and butter mixture in a springform tin and put in the refrigerator for about 30 minutes.

Then we move on to butterscotch sauce: combine the brown sugar with the 20 grams of extra butter and 2 tablespoons of the cream in a saucepan. Stir over low heat and make sure the mixture doesn’t boil! When the sugar is dissolved you are done. Just let it stand while you make the chocolate sauce and the cake mixture.

Now make the chocolate sauce by melting the milk chocolate with another two tablespoons of cream in a small saucepan.

Heat the 60 ml of water and add the gelatine: stir until the gelatine dissolves completely. Let it cool a bit.

Beat the cream cheese together with the caster sugar into a smooth mixture. Beat the remaining cream until soft peaks form. Add the gelatine to the cream cheese mixture, together with the chopped Mars bars. Finally fold in the cream.

Now we come to the decorating part. First, pour about half of the cream cheese and Mars bar mixture in the springform tin. Get a spoon and drizzle the butterscotch in lines over this mixture. Repeat with the chocolate. Now get a skewer (or use the handle of the spoon) and pull it backward and forward through this mixture to create lines. Sounds difficult? Take a look here to see how a real pattisier does it. Add the rest of the cream cheese mixture and decorate the top the same way. Now you can just put the cake in the refrigerator and let it set for at least three hours.

Ta-daa! Your Mars cheesecake is done. I didn’t get to taste it, because I don’t eat chocolate, but I have it on good authority this cake is quite delectable!

Carrot cake seems to have an uncanny ability to divide a room full of people within seconds. In the one corner you have its very vocal advocates who can’t stop praising the delectable combination of carrots, nuts and cream cheese, while in the other corner people are pulling very strange faces at the very notion of putting vegetables in dessert. I haven’t told them yet about zucchini-chocolate cupcakes, for I fear that it would lead to anxiety attacks. I just don’t have enough paper bags to deal with that.

Anyway, I’m very much in favour of carrot cake. Don’t knock it ’till you’ve tried it, that’s all I can say. And with the following very easy recipe, trying it shouldn’t pose too much of a problem!

You’ll need:

For the cake

175 gr. of carrot, grated

75 gr. almonds, coarsely ground

75 gr. walnuts, coarsely ground

175 gr. butter

250 gr. sugar

2 tablespoons of cinnamon

3 eggs

225 gr. self-raising flour

For the frosting

50 gr. butter (soft)

100 gr. cream cheese

125 gr. powdered sugar

1 sachet of vanilla sugar.

To prepare:

Preheat your oven to around 200 degrees C. Mix the ground walnuts, almonds, sugar and carrot together. Add eggs and butter and mix until it resembles a homogenous mass. Slowly add the self-raising flour and cinnamon, make sure to prevent lumps! Sieving the flour helps, but I’m usually too lazy for this and it seems to work out fine most of the time.

Pour the resulting mixture in a springform cake tin with a diameter of about 20 cm (a bit smaller or bigger won’t make much of a difference). Put the cake in the preheated oven for about 30 minutes. Turn down the oven to about 175 degrees after 30 minutes, and check every 5-10 minutes if the cake is done. It really depends on the kind of oven you use how long the cake has to bake: it has taken me everything from 35 to 60 minutes. You can tell if the cake is ready if a knitting needle or fork comes out clean when you poke it in the middle of the cake. If it is finished baking, take it out of the oven and let it cool.

Meanwhile, mix the butter and cream cheese together in a bowl, and add the powdered and vanilla sugar. Make sure the cake isn’t warm anymore when you spread the mixture on top, otherwise you get a fairly runny frosting.

Put the cake in the refrigerator until you are ready to serve.

It is also a great idea to decorate the carrot cake with tiny marzipan carrots and such, but a few walnuts also make it look very sophisticated if you aren’t patient enough for that kind of thing. As you can tell from the picture I don’t even have enough patience to put walnuts on top, but the cake was a smash hit anyway!

Just one more tip for serving: small pieces are usually quite enough for most people, this cake tends to be on the heavy side…

soon, with, among others, a recipe for fried green tomatoes, vegetarian lasagna and homemade ketchup. Until then, here’s a fantastic video of hand-pulled noodles being made. It is really mesmerizing… And I wish I had those wicked skills!

I haven’t been updating because I have been really really busy, but I have another guest post to keep my loyal reader(s) occupied until I return in full force. Joyce has been lucky enough to go the Ivy, the new restaurant of Francois Geurds, who is a loyal disciple of Heston Blumenthal. I made her promise she would do a guest post for me, and here it is:

I’ve always enjoyed going out to new restaurants and letting the experience wash over me, but I absolutely adore it when my boss pays and it is called “work”. Yesterday’s meal at Ivy was an absolute delight, if only for watching my bosses and the two chefs (who’ve dined in the finest restaurants all over the world) be deliciously bitchy about every little detail. Which would usually annoy me, but these guys know their stuff. As do the people at Ivy, who bombard you with delightful impressions from the moment you walk in the door.

They sat us down on a lush, fluffy couch in a beautifully styled segment of the restaurant, and immediately presented us with a very modern take on the bread basket, as well as a lovely glas of champagne. The first amuse swiftly followed, and let´s just say it made me happy. Not just because I hadn´t eaten anything all day and would´ve happily wrestled a grizzly for some leftover camp food at that point, but also because I like my food simple, packed with flavour, and beautifully presented, and that´s exactly what the toasted cherry tomato with black olive ice cream was. Next up was a barbecued cucumber and green apple skewer, which were served from a real hand held barbecue, with a garlic mayonaise (aïoli) that we had to squeeze from tiny plastic bags. Tasty, but nothing special.

We were then treated to a swig from a hookah filled with hints of menthol and eucalyptus, which was very refreshing, but a little gimmicky. If they had done it later in the meal, or just left it on the table so we could enjoy it all through dinner it would have made slightly more sense. The best amuse was of course the famous piccalilly icecream, with the tomato and liqourish cone and exploding sugar. A feast in your mouth, although I do think the exploding sugar is very close to cheating (we use it at our restaurant all the time, and it’s more about the element of surprise than actual flavour). We opted for the 7 course menu, with the 5 course wines (which was plenty, believe me!) and we started things off with a beautiful looking shrimp and ginger beer dish, which was served in a miniature fish bowl. Inside was shrimp tartar, fried shrimp and crispy shrimp skin, served on a ginger beer gel and topped with a ginger beer and lime mousse. A little bit too much gel for our taste, but very nice indeed, although the heavily acidic white (almost green) wine wasn’t the best match. Next up was the dish that almost made Holland’s premier culinary reviewer jizz his pants, white asparagus with (duck) foie gras on toast, so expectations were very high indeed. The creamy asparagus and green peas were packed with flavour, but the toast was very salty (and I usually love salty foods) so the thinly spread foie gras couldn’t quite deliver. And the dry croutons used to keep the toast above the cream were just bland. A beautiful dish in principle, but not quite there yet in execution. The next course was amazing though. Panfried seabass with pumpkin toffee. The wow factor was delivered by the pumpkin toffee, created by slowly cooking the pumpkin multiple times, so it’s own natural sugars caramelise to a golden brown, sticky substance, that compliments the seabass beautifully. A tiny piece of toast with salty cured ham to finish it off. Simple, elegant, delicious! And the high continued with the lovely sweatbread in a crispy skin, with vongole and parsnip cream.

The wines got better as the meal progressed, but my memories of them fade as I drank more. I didn’t take notes, or pictures, because A: I didn’t want to look like an amateur (read: tool), and B: I didn’t want to interrupt the carefully constructed flow of the dining experience. Next up was the nitrococktail which was prepared at the table. Fun to watch, and our melon cocktail with mango chunks was quite refreshing, but it wasn’t the mindblowing experience I had hoped for. The lamb that followed was cooked to perfection, but unfortunately the seven courses ended on a low. The blood orange ice cream was good, but dessert was the first dish of the evening that didn’t look fantastic, and the rest of it I can’t even remember. Just meh. However we managed to turn things around by asking for the cheese cart (if you want an extra cheese course you have to ask apparantly, they won’t offer you it) which I had seen rolling around and had my lusty eye on all evening. I literally wanted to climb in and live there. There were too many to choose from, and they were all incredible. Deep and complex in taste, complimented by a lovely ruby port from 2002. The cappuchino was moronically served in a whiskey glass, so it was impossible to drink. But my boss was very impressed with their tea selection. A tiny bit of dark chocolate would’ve been the perfect ending, but no such luck.

Overall it was a great evening. Ivy displays amazing attention to detail, the staff is friendly and knowledgeable, and let’s not forget they’ve only been open for four months.You will have to save your pennies if you want to go there though, the five of us rang up nearly 800 Euros. It wasn’t the best meal I’ve ever had, but there were some excellent dishes, and they will have earned the Michelin star they will no doubt be awarded next year.

(editor’s note: Can you tell how jaded she has become since her return to the restaurant world? Exploding sugar? *yawn* Nitrococktail? Been there, done that. Never mind that I would happily donate my kidneys (I still need the liver) to eat there. But thanks for the great review anyway Joyce! You know I’m just kidding, right?)

This recipe actually combines two things I like to write about: food and wine. A classic example of two birds with one stone! I used Vin Santo (literally: holy wine), a traditional Tuscan dessert wine made from Trebbiano and Malvasia grapes. It is usually eaten with biscotti (also called cantucci), Italian cookies made with almonds and anise. I found this recipe on the BBC Good Food Website, a site I often turn to for inspiration.

I have to warn you in advance: it is a killer dessert, containing both mascarpone and whipped cream, so I would advice you to eat this after a fairly light meal. Hopefully you’ll avoid the food-coma this way!

 You’ll need:

• 250 grams of biscotti/cantucci biscuits
• 100 ml of Vin Santo
• 400 grams of strawberries (make sure they are ripe)
• 50 grams golden caster sugar
• 250 gram tub of mascarpone
• 250 ml of cream, lightly whipped (I added a little bit of sugar to the whipped cream, about 10-15 grams)

First of all, put the biscotti in a plastic bag and crush them slightly with a rolling pin or something heavy. Put the broken biscuits in a bowl and add the Vin Santo. Stir it in and let the biscuits soak. Meanwhile, hull the strawberries (this means you have to remove the crown and slice out the little hard top) and halve them. Take about half of the strawberries, put them in a bowl with the caster sugar and mash them with a fork.

Fold the mascarpone in with the whipped cream. I added a bit of sugar, otherwise it just tastes like cream. If you think the mixture is too thick, add a little bit of milk. In a one-litre bowl, put half of the biscotti on the bottom. Add half of the strawberry mixture and spread half of the mascarpone mixture on top. Repeat until you have used everything up. Scatter the remaining halved strawberries on top. 

After you have finished, put the bowl in the refrigerator. Serve the dessert chilled, accompanied by a glass of Vin Santo.

This post is going to be mean. Mean because I’m using an ingredient that’s very hard to come by fresh: morels. Morels are a type of mushroom usually sold dried or canned, and when sold fresh they are ridiculously expensive (kinda like the elusive truffle). Luckily my mother found a patch of morels near her allotment, decided to tell absolutely nobody about it and brought the stash home. It was then up to me to come up with a recipe which would put the morels to good use. After a little googling I decided to make fresh pasta with a morel-parsley cream sauce, and it turned out pretty great, if I say so myself. (I had to check a couple of times with my mother to find out if there where absoloutely no identical mushrooms which would turn out to be poisonous so we would die a horrible death, but nope. No evil twins!)

I don’t really want to call this a recipe because it is so easy and I didn’t really use measurements, but this is what I used (for 4 persons):

-  about 200 grams of morels, fresh & cleaned (check for insects hiding under the hoods, you don’t want that much extra protein)

- 400 grams of fresh pasta

- 1 onion, diced

- 2 cloves of garlic, chopped

- parsley (I think I used about a quarter of a cup here)

- cream (I’m guessing about 100-150 ml.)

First, make sure you boil the water for the pasta. I used shop-bought fresh pasta, but if you want to go whole hog you can make your own. (And now I find out I haven’t put my own recipe for fresh pasta on this site. Great. I’ll make sure to add it later!) Chop the morels, make sure you get quite chucky bits. That sounds rather dirty, but still. Gently fry the onion and garlic for about 5 minutes, then add the morels. After 2 more minutes, add the parsley and cream. Season with salt and pepper, and heat the cream through. Meanwhile, put the pasta in the boiling water. Drain the pasta when it is al dente, and add the morel-cream sauce. Tadaa! Easy-peasy!

I don’t think this is a great picture of the resulting sauce, but it still makes me hungry:

Update:

This is why you shouldn’t trust me on poisonous mushrooms: (from Wikipedia)

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Early Morels

Verpa Bohemica are also called wrinkled thimble cap, or early morel, and Ptychoverpa Bohemica. Although the early false morels are sometimes eaten without ill effect, they can cause severe gastrointestinal upset and loss of muscular coordination (including cardiac muscle) if eaten in large quantities or over several days in a row. They should be parboiled and dried before use in cooking to break down a gyromitrin-like toxin (an organic, carcinogenic poison) that is produced by the mushroom.

The early false morels can be told apart from the true morels by careful study of how the cap is attached to the stalk. The edge of true morels’ (morchella) caps are intergrown with the stalk, but early morels’ (verpas) caps hang over like a thimble, for which they are sometimes referred to as “thimble morel”. Early false morels are the first morels to fruit in the spring, shortly after leaves begin to form on deciduous trees. Narrow-head morels (morchella angusticeps) fruit next, around May. The last morels to fruit are the yellow or white morels (Morchella esculenta), then crassipes.

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Ok, so the bottom line is that I would probably be dead if I was left to fend for my own in nature, and that you shouldn’t eat morels raw. Other than that, you should probably be fine, but you might want to check if your morels are really morels with someone who knows their mushrooms. Like my mother, for instance…

In my family, we take Easter seriously. This means that no less than 40 eggs are boiled and painted each year, while usually only 5 or 6 people take part in our Easter breakfast. The week after Easter the leftover eggs will seem to glare at you accusingly, daring you to eat them. However, after the egg-extravaganza of Easter Sunday, you’d rather…ehm…not.

In the past, it was my task to hide the eggs in the garden for my siblings to find. It took us a few years before we realised it was smarter to count the eggs before hiding them, because we never knew exactly when we were done with the hunt. Therefore, it was entirely possible to move a wheelbarrow in, say, November, and hear the telltale *splat* of an Easter egg falling down from its hiding place. This was followed by a manic scramble to get away from the offending object as soon as possible, because that egg would resemble a stink bomb very closely. Of course, the first year we did count the eggs beforehand, we ended up with one extra egg anyway, meaning we had to screen each one to see which one looked like it had spent a year in the garden, opposed to half an hour or so. Good times.

This year I decided to try my hand at a traditional crème brulée for dessert on Easter Sunday, to use eggs in a different incarnation. And it was a very good excuse to whip out my fancy crème brulée-torch. Seeing as I like to play with fire, it was a good day all around.

For 4 crème brulées, you’ll need:

• 1 vanilla pod, sliced open
• 200 ml. cream
• 200 ml full fat milk
• 4 egg yolks
• 80 grams of sugar
• white caster sugar, to sprinkle on top
• 4 ramekins

Preheat the oven to 125 degrees Celcius. 

Heat the cream and milk, together with the vanilla pod. When it is boiling, turn the heat low and simmer for 5 minutes. Meanwhile, beat the eggs with the sugar until it resembles a thick pale cream. Remove the vanilla pod from the milk and cream, and add the mixture together with the eggs and sugar. Beat until it thickens a little. Pour the resulting mixture in the ramekins. Place the ramekins in the oven and cook for about 45-50 minutes, until the mixture is fully set. Remove from oven and let them cool. Sprinkle the crème brulée with a generous layer of sugar, and turn on your torch. Burn the top layer until the sugar caramelizes (be careful not to scorch the layer) and turns brown. The sugar will form a hard crust on top, and it is very satisfying to tap that crust with your spoon! Serve immediately. If you don’t have a fancy torch, you can also place the ramekins under a very hot grill in the oven for a few minutes.

I often promise myself I will cut back on eating meat, and that I will start preparing vegetarian meals more often. But apart from some hummus-and-falafel-bingeing, my promises never get me far. After a while I can’t resist the delicious pork sausages, the perfect steak, and the superb lambchops I see at the butcher’s shop. Sigh. I do buy organic meat though, so at least I can feel as if I bought off my guilt, does that count for anything?

But I’m currently on a new vegetarian-streak, and this time I’m using The Cranks Bible by Nadine Abensur. This cookbook is just perfect: the recipes are delicious, she doesn’t just insert tofu everywhere in the hope people won’t notice the meat is missing (a lot of vegetarian cookbooks do that, why?), and she uses a lot of seasonal vegetables. One of the recipes which caught my eye a long time ago was the recipe for a mushroom Wellington, a play on the recipe for beef wrapped in pastry. But since the recipe begins with the ominous words: “There’s no way around this. Mushroom Wellington takes time and you need a good food processor, the blade of which still has some zip to it.”, I put it off for a long time. However, three weeks back I finally conquered my fear, I geared up my trusted Magimix, and I turned out two beautiful loaves!

So, without further ado, the recipe for mushroom Wellington:

(the recipe serves 12 to 16 people, so you can halve it to get less sizeable portions, but the loaves also freeze pretty well)

• 500 g. of puff pastry, defrosted
• 60 ml. sunflower oil
• 675 g. onions, chopped
• 4 garlic cloves, crushed
• 450 g. chestnut mushrooms, whole
• 2 tbsp. fresh tarragon
• 4 tbsp soy sauce
• 1 tbsp. Marsala wine (optional)
• 320 g. cashew nuts
• 175 g. fresh breadcrumbs (I used white, but wholemeal can also be used)
• 320 g. almonds
• salt and pepper
• 1 egg, beaten, for glazing

Preheat the oven to 220 degrees Celcius.

First of all, you’ll need to roll out the puff pastry into two rectangles of about 30×23 cm. I put the rectangles on some baking parchment to prevent it from sticking, and it makes it easier to transfer the final loaves onto a baking sheet. In the meantime, heat the sunflower oil in a large pan and fry the onion with the garlic for about 20-30 minutes, until they are a deep golden-brown colour. Don’t turn the heat too high or they will stick to the pan! Take the mixture out of the pan, and add the mushrooms to the pan with half of the tarragon. Now you’ll have to turn up the heat and cook the hell out of those mushrooms! After about 5-7 minutes, add the soy sauce and the Marsala (if you’re using it), and continue cooking. When the mushrooms are fully cooked, season them with salt and pepper. Use your food processor to crunch the cashew nuts and almonds, and then add the mushrooms (plus the liquid from the pan) to blend it to a very smooth purée. If it is not smooth enough, add a little water. Take this mixture from the bowl and then blend the onion mixture. Add everything together in a large bowl, and add the breadcrumbs and the remaining tarragon. Now comes the fun part: you can use your hand to mix everything together. The mixture should hold its shape when you form it with you hands.

Put the mixture on the pastry rectangles, shaping it with your hands to make a long rectangular shap about 28 cm long, 6 cm wide and 5 cm high. With a sharp knife, make diagonal cuts at a 45 degreea ngle, starting from the left-hand corner of the pastry to the mushroom mixture. Repeat on the other side. You’ll end up with a flap of pastry on the front and back of the loaf: fold this upward, and then fold in the strips on the left and right side one at a time, crossing them over. Do this for both loaves.  If you’ve made two, you can choose to freeze one at this stage, and glaze the other one with the beaten egg. Otherwise, glaze both of them. Put the loaves in the oven for about 35-45 minutes, and check them quite often, because they can cook faster than you expect.

As you can see here, I had some mixture left over and I turned it into some mini-loaves, which would be excellent for a dinner party! I took all the pictures with my iPhone (oooooh, fancy me), so that explains the quality….

Finally, I have to thank my partner in crime Anne, whose hands you see in the pictures. She’s truly excellent in shaping Mushroom Wellington!