Showing posts with label tomato sauce. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tomato sauce. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Chicken soup

It has gotten cold here. And with the first fall of the temperatures comes inevitably... a cold. I have been sniffling for a week now and I am planning to get rid of this cold by making the ultimate cure: chicken soup.


Ingredients:

  • Chicken with bones and skin
  • Your greens: parsley, a thick slice of celery root, carrots, parsnip, some leek (you can buy this here already packaged, because people actually still make their own soups)
  • Garlic
  • 1 yellow onion with skin
  • peppercorns
  • 1 tomato
  • and my personal favourite herb Liebstöckl (I found these translations: Lovage, Love Parsley, Garden lovage, Bladder seed)

Bring the water to a boil with the chicken already in it (otherwise you don't get all the good stuff). Cut your onion in half and roast it on the stove. Keeping its skin will add color.

Wash all of your other ingredients (but keep a carrot and some parsley for later) and add them to the meanwhile boiling water. salt. basta. Sadly, you now have to wait for 2 hours, which I use to write up the recipe.

Once the soup is done, skim some of the fat from the chickenskin off the top. Drain your soup into another bowl and throw in some delicious noodles and the sliced carrot you saved earlier. Boil until tender. Add chicken meat, and finally before serving, add some finely chopped parsley. For an extra health kick you could grate some fresh ginger into your individual soup bowls. Eat it. Feel better.

n*

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Vegetarian Moussaka

We had a beautiful eggplant at home and as always some lingering potatoes, so tonight's dish had to be a vegetarian moussaka. the greek interpretation of a lasagne. or is lasagne the italian interpretation of moussaka? regardless.

1 eggplant
1 medium onion
2-4 garlic cloves
7-8 smaller potatoes
6 tomatoes on the vine
salt, oregano and nutmeg as you wish
butter, milk and flour for béchamel with no measurements


I salted the eggplant slices and left them for about half an hour before I patted them dry. I then roasted them in the oven for a bit. I can't say, if this actually did anything special to their flavor, but I felt fancy doing it. If nothing else, it did dry the eggplant for sure.





Meanwhile, I boiled the potatoes for a few minutes. Once I drained them, I prepared a simple yet delicious tomato sauce by sautéing one onion and a couple of garlic cloves, adding fresh tomatoes and some (greek) oregano and salt. After about ten minutes, I liked the consistency of it. After greasing the pan, I layered first potatoes, then eggplant, then the tomato sauce, repeated the layers of potatoes and eggplant and finished with a simple béchamel sauce (add flour to melted butter, whisk, add milk, don't forget to whisk, salt, whisk, nutmeg, still whisking, pour before it gets too thick!).








In the oven at 180 C for 40 minutes at least. At some point I added a little bit of water and covered the pan with some aluminum foil. Before serving I sprinkled some feta cheese on top which was probably my favorite part of the dish. K made a fabulous green salad with my
favorite shallot dressing.


voila! there it is! n*