Back and bringing a quick and easy home-made autumn meal

Wow - I've been in hiatus from blogging for almost half a year. Just didn't get round to updating - the less so the more there would have been to post about.

Life has been good and we got around a lot, enjoying good food in lots of different places. :)

To pick up the threads again, though, I'll make a start with a meal I cooked a couple of weeks ago for my sweetie and me.

I cook for myself very regularly, but am yet not used to cooking for others or, indeed, to cook more than one course. So I hardly knew what went into me to make plans for a three course meal - just so many different things that I wanted to make. And, best of all, finding a series of things that sounded easy to make, and really were a pleasant evening's work for my first ever three-course meal. And very yummy they all were, too. :D

For starters, we had potato soup. I love soups, and I'd made this one first a few days before (inspired by having just the kind of sausage that needs to go into it) and was surprised how easy it was.

Potato Soup (makes a starter for two or a small meal for one)

175 grams (approx. ;) ) potatoes - peel and dice
1 onion - peel and dice
1 knob of butter - melt in a pot and stew onions until glassy. Add potatoes, stew for five minutes, adding a little salt.
400 ml veggie broth
100 ml cream
- add, bring to a boil and let simmer with the lid on for 15 - 20 mins.
Puree with a hand-blender, spice to taste with salt, pepper and nutmeg.

The recipe suggested adding diced, fried bacon and oregano. I added a few chives and cut up Mettwurst - a traditional requirement for Rhenish potato soup.

As it was pumpkin and squash season, and I love pumpkins and squashes, we next had squash filled with minced meat, lambs lettuce and bread.

Filled squashes or pumpkins (serves 2)

Originally, the recipe asked for small pettipan squashes, one per person. I couldn't get any pettipans, but I happened to have the lower, conveniently bowl-shaped part of a butternut left and bought a small Hokkaido pumpkin in addition.

Here's how to make the dish:

Cut top off pumpkins and remove the seeds.

1 small Spanish onion (or two normal onions) - peel and dice

200 - 250 grams minced meat, half pork, half beef

2 tbl sp oil - heat and stew onions in it, add minced meat and fry until cooked while stirring, so that it becomes crumbly. Salt and pepper to taste. (Garlic is an option here, too, though I didn't use it.)

2 beef tomatoes - briefly dip into boiling water, then chill; peel and cut into stripes, removing the seeds. Add to the meat. (Leaving some for decoration later.)

1 teasp salt, a little Cayenne pepper - rub the inside of the pumpkins with the spices.

Fill meat into the pumpkins.

Place pumpkins in an oven dish, place leftover tomatoes on top.

2 teasp butter

4 tblspoon parmesan cheese

- sprinkle butter flakes and grated cheese on top

Fill dish with approx. 2 cm water

Bake for about 40 mins at 200°C (until pumpkin seems done).

Dress lambs lettuce with a fine vinegar (whichever you prefer) and olive oil, salt, pepper, dried herbs.

Serve with French or Italian bread.

Dessert was fun to make and surprised me with how good it was. I guess you have to be in Germany to be able to make this, though, but nevertheless, here goes:

Stracciatella-Quark (serves 2)

4 chocolate kisses - remove wafers, squash in a bowl

250 grams quark - mix with squashed kisses

(if available: 1 teasp grated peel of orange - mix with quark. If oranges with edible peel are not available - couldn't get any myself that day - just let the juice of the orange (see below) you fillet drip into the quark and stir again)

1 orange - peel and fillet and serve with the quark

Deeeelicious! :D

I guess this is a rather German meal all through. :D There's ingredients in each course that won't be easily available abroad.

Instead of the Mettwurst in the starter use the bacon the recipe suggests. A soft salami might work, too. Mettwurst is similar to that.

Instead of mixed (half pork, half beef) minced meat, I could imagine you could use any other kind of minced meat just as well.

For the dessert, however, I'm afraid I can't think of replacements. You'll have to visit Germany and try chocolate kisses and quark for yourself. :D

You can see, though, why this is fun and easy to make: you only need one pot per course, plus a couple of bowls, leaving you with hardly any dishes. The dessert can wait in the fridge, and the two first courses have fairly long cooking times during which they hardly need any supervision, giving you time to work on other dishes and clean up. A kitchen not in utter chaos after a three-course meal for two was a really pleasant surprise. :D

Adolph's Brauhaus, Cologne

This place - a humble Brauhaus and a bit out of the way (in Weidenpesch, just outside the Cologne city centre) - was a wonderful surprise find.

We were walking in search of dinner from my partner's flat and happy to try anything that looked comparatively smoke-free and half-ways appetising. This place exceded all my expectations.

A 'Brauhaus' is a brewery pub, and normally that means beer and plain (though mostly decent) food. Here, however, they also offered a very decent choice of wines and other drinks, and food that even on the menu looked unusually ambitious for a pub.

The one thing that immediately caught my eye was "Viennese Schnitzel (veal)". Now, in order for you to allow calling it "Viennese Schnitzel" it has to be veal, but they did well to make a special note of it, because otherwise you'd have assumed they were misnaming it - because real Viennese Schnitzel is really, really uncommon here. What you get in virtually all pubs is "Schnitzel, Viennese style", which then means a chunk of pork with a bread-crumb batter. I do like bread-crumb batters, but what makes Viennese Schnitzel so adorable is the fact that it's ultra-thin veal and a very fluffy (from proper frying, I think) batter. I had to try this one.

And wasn't disappointed. It was utterly delicious. My partner had steak with fried potato chunks, which was very good, too. The salad was the only thing that was less than great - typical pub-style, that is - and the fries (which I had with my schnitzel instead of the recommended potato salad) weren't perfect either, but very edible.

Now, a plate-sized schnitzel with fries is normally enough even for my appetite, but I had spied something on the dessert menu that had tickled my interest - Palatschinken.

This is an Austrian specialty (which, together with the proper Viennese Schnitzel made me suspect the chef was Austrian, which the waiter confirmed), one of their many egg-based delicacies, this time in form of a pancake or crêpe. (Palatschinken)
I'd heard much of them, but never tried any.

They came with an apricot or cherry filling - or both, and I opted for both.

At first I was a little shocked when I saw two large-ish pancakes on my plate. I'm not normally a great fan of pancakes. I eat them mostly because I like the idea of pancakes. I tend to find the texture unpleasant and the taste not sufficiently interesting to outweigh the unpleasantness of the texture - and that goes for any pancakes I occasionally make myself, too.
I never thought I'd be able to eat more than half of one of them.

However, I soon found that these were a different matter entirely! They were airy and fluffy and the more I ate, the more I wanted. I finished both of them easily and thought I shouldn't have minded some more.

The interior of the restaurant itself is simple but tasteful, with a bar area (with a TV, to show football games) and a generous dining area behind, TV-free, plus seating outdoors in a quiet street parallel to the main street on which the building is situated. Smoking, thankfully, is outdoors only.

Prices were nice, too - typically Brauhaus/pub, really.

The restaurant doesn't have a website of its own, so here's an entry for it in a pub-listing: http://www.gaffel.de/index.php?nc=82&firmaid=905

Manala, Helsinki

On a recent weekend visit to Helsinki, Finland, we went to the "Manala" for dinner. We were in search of local food and weren't disappointed.

Apparently, "Manala" means "Underworld" in Finnish, and the restaurant greets you with a merry devil painted on the door. But neither is the restaurant underground nor is the food in any way hellish.

On the contrary, it's a big, airy place with a comfortable dining room that is a pleasant mix of the rustic and the stylish. There is also a bar, probably for when you are waiting for a table or just want drinks. Both are, according with sensible Finnish law, non-smoking.

Food and drink were good, and some dishes on the menu sounded decidedly local.

I had sautéed reindeer, cut up in tiny bits with (somewhat too watery) mashed potatoes and the seemingly omnipresent but very tasty lingonberries as a sauce. They also served excellent salmon chowder and an interesting pudding with buckwheat sauce for dessert.

Though alcoholic drinks were, typically for Finland, extremely pricey, the food prices were decent enough.

The only iffy thing about the place is the fact that you are first faced with a cloak room to which it is obligatory to give up your coat or jacket - for a fee. That's the first time I've seen a restaurant make money of its customers' clothing. They also sold a bunch of 'fandom'-items with the name of the place on it there - also not something you'd exactly associate with stylishness. Odd that they should resort to such measures to make an extra bit of money, when the place seemed fairly popular with customers.

http://www.botta.fi/MANALA.3.0.html?&L=1

Ouzeria, Cologne

This Cologne restaurant is a jolly little mix of cuisines from all around the Mediterranean (with a bit of the rest of the world thrown in for good measure), mostly Greek and Spanish, situated fairly centrally in the fashionable 'Belgian quarter'.

Good wines, both by the glass and by the bottle, Ouzos (of course) and other interesting spirits accompany a wide selection of tapas, some of which come as a full meal, too.

(Distinguishable only by the price, which might lead to some confusion as some tapas are a bit pricey and look like they might be a meal.)

In addition to a rich standard menu, there is an interesting list of the day's specials, too.

The atmosphere is relaxed and friendly, the interior a bit noisy, on account of being kept in a Mediterranean mix of bare stone, wood and plaster.

I've been there twice now: once coming in late for a dessert and drink only, we found the place very lively at about 11pm. The desserts on offer then were certainly very imaginative, if not entirely convincing (I had an asparagus zabaione).

The second time I visited with a large group, which could barely be seated (I don't think the place could take groups of over 20 people), but the waiters worked hard and patiently to get everyone pleasantly seated.

This second time, I had three tapas, which were all very good, even though, oddly, the first one was served as a starter. The two for 'mains' were potato-chips with cheese (nice price option, if you just wanted a snack with your drink) and some rabbit, very pleasantly spiced with cinnamon and coriander. I had a traditional Greek yoghurt for dessert and a white wine from Crete, which was very pleasant drinking, plus a good Samos and a sweet herbal liqueur.

A place to come back to and try the many interesting things on the menu - it is also commendably non-smoking.

http://www.ouzeria-koeln.de/

La Barra - Cava Y Mas, Cologne

Dedicated to Spanish Cava (the Spanish variety of sparkling wine), this is a fair-sized, comfortable and relaxed restaurant right in the middle of the newer part of Cologne's city centre. Seen from outside, it looks inconspicuous, but inside it is quite roomy. It is entirely non-smoking and the typical clientele seems to be fairly young, twenties and thirties, I'd say.

Apart from Cava, which you can have in all varietes of dryness and by the glass as well as by the bottle, they also serve really good tapas.

Prices are very decent, for both food and drink (tapas average at € 3.50, a 0.1 l glass of Cava at 2.50, a bottle at 13 Euros), and the place is open till midnight during the week and till late at the weekend. You can also buy bottles of Cava to take home.

Definitely a place to come back to. :)

http://www.la-barra.de/de/home.htm

Weinhaus Brungs, Cologne

A place I really like to go to in Cologne is the "Weinhaus Brungs".

In a city that prides itself on its beer and where, accordingly, there's no shortage of brewery pubs, finding a place that offers good wine is worthwhile to a wine-drinker like myself. It's also bung in the middle of the old city centre. Plus, the food there is really good, too.

When I went there last winter, I had some very nice liver pâté with berries, which I didn't find on the menu when I went there again last week. However, last week I had a fairly good Flammkuchen (flame cake - a sort of pizza, an Alsatian traditional that goes very well with white wine) with some exotic toppings (olive and sheep cheese), and my partner had an excellent beef in aspic, which we followed with a shared dessert of cinnamon ice cream with grappa plums.

And, meeting up with some friends by the river the other day, we ended up there again, and as we had had dinner before, shared a cheese dish of Tête de Moine among us:

Tête de Moine, for under 7 Euros, a nice accompaniment for a glass of wine (on average 4 Euros per 200ml glass).

The wine selection by the glass is more than sufficient, and you can get even greater choice by the bottle. German wines are predominant, which is exactly how I like it.

The waiters are friendly and informal in a good way.

You can get full meals as well as just a drink or a drink and a snack, and they are happy to let you share dishes.

Apart from wine, you can get any other drink, too, and they have some nice sparkleys and a wide range of spirits.

The building itself incorporates the remains of a medieval city gate. In summer, you can sit outside, the main guest room isn't too big, but very pretty, involving lots of old architecture, and there's a cellar of ancient vaults to host larger group bookings. Last time I was in the cellar, though, it had smoking allowed there. Not sure if that's still the case - the unfortunate failure of Germany to provide non-smoking laws for pubs and restaurants leaves you always unsure of whether you'll be pestered with smoke or not anywhere. Their website, otherwise very informative, doesn't provide any information on this.

http://www.weinhaus-brungs.de/

A new blog - and it's all about food and drink :D

Being a hobbit, I'm somewhat partial to good food and drink. And by 'good food and drink' I simply mean food and drink that I like. And as I've been getting rather a lot of it lately, I thought I'd start keeping a diary on nice things I've had, places I've been to etc.

I'm in Cologne, Germany, so most of the restaurants visited will be in or near Cologne, but I get to travel occasionally, so I hope that I'll be able to add places from elsewhere, too.

And I'm not excluding home-cooking either. :D

At the moment, there's a lot I'd like to catch up on, but as with a number of other online-projects, I wouldn't be surprised if nothing much was added to this one after all. Well, we'll see... :)