The Great Cookbook Challenge of '18: No, I haven't forgotten about it.
I just kept thinking "Oh, I'll just make an entry tomorrow" and hahahahahahahahaha, yeah. Which is why there will be four recipes in one entry (yes, okay, I haven't done much cooking from cookbooks since last year. I have done some cooking but most of that was with Kochhaus recipes, not from cookbooks) from four different books. Be prepared!
(no pictures because LJ is being an ass about Instagram tags and NO LJ THOSE ARE NOT TAGS I WANT TO ADD STOP DOING THAT)
Rainbow Kitchen - gesund ist, wer bunt isst!, Chantal Sandjon
I bought this because I'm kinda fascinated by all that rainbow eating stuff on Pinterest and because all of it is just so pretty (I'm shallow, I like it when my food likes good). Also, healthy! Healthy eating is always good. Hence, this book. The layout is very clean and light and of course very colorful. Food photography in the book is, against the current trend, clear-cut, clean and without anything to distract from the food.
It has a couple of the "classics" (summer rolls, smoothies, that kind of thing), bowls, salads, sauces, desserts etc. Lots of vegetable stuff (I think there are no meat recipes in it but I'm not sure). It's a very vegan friendly book so if you want some fresh new vegan recipes, this could be one for you. I think I found the recipes easy enough to follow. There are many recipes with lots of ingredients - usually not my thing - and, since it's basically all vegetables and fruit, lots of cutting work but if you like to do that (I do!), it won't be too bad.
When I looked through it, this was what I decided for:
Veggie Stir Fry
Ingredients:
(serves four)
200g brown rice (white works fine, though, if you can't get brown rice)
Salt
60ml soy sauce
2 table spoons vegetable broth
1 table spoon coconut blossom sugar
1 table spoon corn starch
1 piece of ginger (about 2cm)
1 chili
1 onion
1 garlic glove
1/2 red bell pepper
1 zucchino
200g pickled baby corn
300g broccoli
2 table spoons peanut oil
4 stalks of cilantro
2 table spoons black sesame
Wash the rice, and let it simmer 500ml lightly salted water for 30 to 40 minutes. In the meantime, mix soy sauce, vegetable broth, coconut blossom sugar, corn starch and 3 table spoons water in a bowl. Peel the ginger, chop it finely and put into the soy sauce mix. Half the chili, remove the seeds and chop finely and add to the mix.
Peel the onion and garlic, chop finely. Remove seeds from the bell pepper half and chop it up. Wash zucchino and dice it. Drain the baby corn and halve, wash the broccoli and part into florets.
Heat the oil in a pan or wok. Add onion and bell pepper and fry for about 3 minutes. Add the garlic and keep frying and stirring (gnehehehehehehe sorry) for 3 to 4 minutes. Add zucchini dices and fry 2 minutes. Add baby corn and broccoli and keep frying for 2 to 3 more minutes. Add the soy sauce mix and let simmer for about 2 minutes. Let everything simmer on mid-level heat until the vegetables are done but al dente. Wash and dry the cilantro, distribute the rice to bowls or deep dishes, add the stir fry and decorate with cilantro and sesame.
Like I said, it's a whole lotta work of chopping and stirring but I remember it tasting really good and feeling very healthy with all the vegetables. It also had a couple vegetables I don't normally eat, like the entire book does so I think I should pull it off the shelf more often in the future. I really like eating meat but once in a while, I really do wish we'd eat more vegetables in this family, and especially a bigger variety of vegetables. So, I guess this book really should get used more often!
Einfach schnell genießen: Außergewöhnliche Rezepte - Schritt für Schritt
Kochhaus cookbook! For those who don't know what Kochhaus is: they call themselves a "walkable cookbook" and that's pretty apt. They have a number of monthly recipes (starters, vegetarian and fish mains, meat mains, pasta mains and desserts) and provide the exact measure of ingredients you need. So basically, you go in there, choose a recipe you want to cook and get all the ingredients you need in the exact amount plus a very easy instruction sheet. It's extremely convinient, especially for someone like me who doesn't have much confidence in her cooking skills. It's not really expensive, either and honestly, from the two person servings, you can easily feed three or four persons usually.
They have also now produced a sizable number of cookbooks, and I liked this one especially because it has a number of my favorite recipes from the last couple years. They all share a nice, clean layout with every step in the recipe pictured and very precise and easy to follow instructions (like their recipe flyers). They break even very fancy looking recipes up into easy steps and sometimes, cooking Kochhaus recipes feels like cheating because they sound pretty fancy but aren't actually that hard. Best thing if you're a beginner or don't have much confidence in your cooking skills but want to show off a little now and then.
I was tempted do make one of my favorites but yeah, that would have been cheating. So this is what I choose:
Turkey breasts with bell peppers, curry orange bulgur and yoghurt sauce
Ingredients
(serves 2)
330g turkes breasts
150g yoghurt
200g bulgur
1 clove of garlic
1 red onion
1 orange (organic)
1 green bell pepper
1 red bell paper
6g Madras curry
15g parsley
Quarter peppers, remove seeds and cut into strips. Peel onion and garlic, halve onion and cut into strips, chop garlic finely. Rub off orange peel (that's why it has to be organic) and squeeze juice. Wash and dry turkey breasts, cut into strips.
Bring 1 tea spoon orange peel, orange juice, 400ml water, 2 table spoons oil and Madras curry to boil, ad a tea spoon of salt. Add bulgur to the boiling water, let boil again while stirring, take the pot off the oven and let it sit for seven minutes.
Heat 4 table spoons of oil in a pan and fry the meat for three minutes until goldenbrown. Reduce heat to mid-level and add the peppers, keep frying for eight minutes. Then add onion and garlic and keep frying for two more minutes. Season with salt and pepper to personal taste.
Pluck parsley from its stems and chop up, mix in the bulgur. Put yoghurt in a bowl and season with 1/2 tea spoon of salt. Arrange bulgur, meat and peppers on a table. Drizzle with the yoghurt sauce.
This one was fun to make. I usually shy away from cooking meat because I'm afraid of getting it wrong - either not done enough or too done - and I still haven't gotten up the courage to try beef but I'm finally getting more confident with poultry. This was really easy and clear-cut, not too many steps but savory and spicy and fresh. Definitely will cook from that book again.
Endlich Freitag! Schnell & einfach: Die besten Rezepte für den perfekten Start ins Wochenende, Liselotte Forslin
I am so very much in love with Forslin's books. I own all she has published and I keep wishing she'd publish a new one. Forslin has a kind of "quick and dirty" approach to cooking I appreciate very much and I just love the aesthetics of her books. A little messy, a little homey, and down to Earth, as if you're sitting right in her kitchen and watching her cook and then eating her food right off the oven.
Her recipes often include quite a lot of ingredients but most of them don't actually require much work and are put together quickly. The ones in this book are really good for Friday nights spent at home, lots of them comfort food-y, if you want to let the week end on a comfy, warm note. Or even if you have friends over and want to go out later or spent a long evening with alcohol and friends and food.
The one I tried is more of the party variety than of the staying in variety but it worked just fine for us, anyway. It was this one:
Chicken tacos with mango salsa
Ingredients:
(serves four)
700 - 800g chicken breast
2 tea spoons ground cumin
2 tea spoons ground cilantro
olive oil for frying
juice from 1 lime
1 table spoon soy sauce
1 tea spoon brown sugar
salt and pepper
1 ripe mango
1 big ripe avocado
2 spring onions
1 big chili
2 table spoons freshly chopped cilantro
juice from 1 lime
tortilla wraps
sour cream
Cut the chicken breasts up into strips and put in a bowl. Mix with cumin, ground cilantro, salt and pepper and let it marinate for a short time.
Heat some oil in a pan and fry the marinated chicken strips until goldenbrown, Lower heat to mid-level and keep frying for five more minutes. Add lime juice and soy sauce, season with a bit of sugar.
Dice mango and avocado. Cut spring onions in rings, halve the chili, remove the seeds and chop finely. Mix everything with the fresh cilantro in a bowl and add the lime juice, season with salt and pepper.
For serving, fill the tortilla wraps with chicken and salsa, add some sour cream and drizzle with left over lime juice.
I remember that I messed up the meat in this one. I let it fry for too long and it came out too dry. Other than that, it really was quick and dirty and aside from the dry meat, my family liked it (my sister found the salsa a leeeettlee too hot, though) and I liked it, too. I just still have to work on my meat cooking skills...
Süßkartoffeln: Rezepte für gesunden Genuss
I love sweet potatoes. I really, really do. I love their color and their texture and their taste and fries being made of sweet potato make them even a thousand times better than they already are. If it has written "sweet potato" on it, I will probably eat it, and I will most probably like it. Want to make me happy, give me sweet potatos. Fried, baked, mashed, I take them in all forms. Just give 'em to me.
So it's not really surprising that I had to have this book when I saw it. And well, it doesn't disappoint (then again, books published by Thorbecke rarely do). It's a little slim, but the recipe variety is surprising. Casserols, balls, stir fries, meatless, with meat... it's really amazing what you can do with one root vegetable. Which was exactly why I wanted this book: I like sweet potatoes but I wanted more variety than oven baked vegetables, fries and sweet potato dices for salads, and I got it. Layout of the book is nice and well-put together, but nothing innovative. However, the instructions are easy to follow, even for cooking novices.
Deciding for a recipe to try was a little hard but this is what I settled with in the end:
Pan-fried broccoli with sweet potatoes, raisins, pine nuts and yoghurt sauce
Ingredients:
(serves four)
400g sweet potatoes
salt
1 red onion
600g broccoli
4 table spoons of pine nuts
4 table spoons of olive oil
4 - 5 table spoons of raisins
250g yoghurt
juice from 1 lemon
ground pepper
Peel the sweet potatoes, dice in small pieces, and throw into boiling water to let boil for five minutes. Take them out and let them drip off.
Peel the onion and cut into rings. Wash broccoli and pull into florets. Roast the pine nuts in a pan without fat until goldenbrown, take off the oven and put aside for now. Put oil in a pan and roast the broccoli on mid-level heat for about 5 minutes. Add the onion rings and fry for 3 more minutes. Add the sweet potatoes and raisins and let fry for 3 more minutes with a lid on.
Mix the yoghurt with 1 - 2 table spoons of water, 2 table spoons lemon juice and salt. Season to taste with pepper.
Season the stir fry to taste with salt, pepper and lemon juice, sprinkle on pine nuts and arrange on plates, provide yoghurt sauce separately.
This one was pretty good, actually. Not exactly a summer time recipe but really, really good as autumn comfort food (and how I long for autumn to come around, OMFG). And yes, it has raisins, blahblahblah. I have to be honest, I never got the hate people shower on raisins and trust me, this recipe doesn't work without them. It needs them. Don't leave them out. You will regret it. Because it'll be boring without the raisins. Yes.
Alright then, that's it. Four more books, and I just remembered that I have another recipe in the challenge to share but I just decided to keep that for the next batch. I'll just blame it on the fact that it's summer and summer always makes me cranky and lazy. So, fuck summer.
How are you? Everyone okay? Have you been trying any new recipes? Any favorites you would like to share? Tell meeeeee!
(no pictures because LJ is being an ass about Instagram tags and NO LJ THOSE ARE NOT TAGS I WANT TO ADD STOP DOING THAT)
Rainbow Kitchen - gesund ist, wer bunt isst!, Chantal Sandjon
I bought this because I'm kinda fascinated by all that rainbow eating stuff on Pinterest and because all of it is just so pretty (I'm shallow, I like it when my food likes good). Also, healthy! Healthy eating is always good. Hence, this book. The layout is very clean and light and of course very colorful. Food photography in the book is, against the current trend, clear-cut, clean and without anything to distract from the food.
It has a couple of the "classics" (summer rolls, smoothies, that kind of thing), bowls, salads, sauces, desserts etc. Lots of vegetable stuff (I think there are no meat recipes in it but I'm not sure). It's a very vegan friendly book so if you want some fresh new vegan recipes, this could be one for you. I think I found the recipes easy enough to follow. There are many recipes with lots of ingredients - usually not my thing - and, since it's basically all vegetables and fruit, lots of cutting work but if you like to do that (I do!), it won't be too bad.
When I looked through it, this was what I decided for:
Veggie Stir Fry
Ingredients:
(serves four)
200g brown rice (white works fine, though, if you can't get brown rice)
Salt
60ml soy sauce
2 table spoons vegetable broth
1 table spoon coconut blossom sugar
1 table spoon corn starch
1 piece of ginger (about 2cm)
1 chili
1 onion
1 garlic glove
1/2 red bell pepper
1 zucchino
200g pickled baby corn
300g broccoli
2 table spoons peanut oil
4 stalks of cilantro
2 table spoons black sesame
Wash the rice, and let it simmer 500ml lightly salted water for 30 to 40 minutes. In the meantime, mix soy sauce, vegetable broth, coconut blossom sugar, corn starch and 3 table spoons water in a bowl. Peel the ginger, chop it finely and put into the soy sauce mix. Half the chili, remove the seeds and chop finely and add to the mix.
Peel the onion and garlic, chop finely. Remove seeds from the bell pepper half and chop it up. Wash zucchino and dice it. Drain the baby corn and halve, wash the broccoli and part into florets.
Heat the oil in a pan or wok. Add onion and bell pepper and fry for about 3 minutes. Add the garlic and keep frying and stirring (gnehehehehehehe sorry) for 3 to 4 minutes. Add zucchini dices and fry 2 minutes. Add baby corn and broccoli and keep frying for 2 to 3 more minutes. Add the soy sauce mix and let simmer for about 2 minutes. Let everything simmer on mid-level heat until the vegetables are done but al dente. Wash and dry the cilantro, distribute the rice to bowls or deep dishes, add the stir fry and decorate with cilantro and sesame.
Like I said, it's a whole lotta work of chopping and stirring but I remember it tasting really good and feeling very healthy with all the vegetables. It also had a couple vegetables I don't normally eat, like the entire book does so I think I should pull it off the shelf more often in the future. I really like eating meat but once in a while, I really do wish we'd eat more vegetables in this family, and especially a bigger variety of vegetables. So, I guess this book really should get used more often!
Einfach schnell genießen: Außergewöhnliche Rezepte - Schritt für Schritt
Kochhaus cookbook! For those who don't know what Kochhaus is: they call themselves a "walkable cookbook" and that's pretty apt. They have a number of monthly recipes (starters, vegetarian and fish mains, meat mains, pasta mains and desserts) and provide the exact measure of ingredients you need. So basically, you go in there, choose a recipe you want to cook and get all the ingredients you need in the exact amount plus a very easy instruction sheet. It's extremely convinient, especially for someone like me who doesn't have much confidence in her cooking skills. It's not really expensive, either and honestly, from the two person servings, you can easily feed three or four persons usually.
They have also now produced a sizable number of cookbooks, and I liked this one especially because it has a number of my favorite recipes from the last couple years. They all share a nice, clean layout with every step in the recipe pictured and very precise and easy to follow instructions (like their recipe flyers). They break even very fancy looking recipes up into easy steps and sometimes, cooking Kochhaus recipes feels like cheating because they sound pretty fancy but aren't actually that hard. Best thing if you're a beginner or don't have much confidence in your cooking skills but want to show off a little now and then.
I was tempted do make one of my favorites but yeah, that would have been cheating. So this is what I choose:
Turkey breasts with bell peppers, curry orange bulgur and yoghurt sauce
Ingredients
(serves 2)
330g turkes breasts
150g yoghurt
200g bulgur
1 clove of garlic
1 red onion
1 orange (organic)
1 green bell pepper
1 red bell paper
6g Madras curry
15g parsley
Quarter peppers, remove seeds and cut into strips. Peel onion and garlic, halve onion and cut into strips, chop garlic finely. Rub off orange peel (that's why it has to be organic) and squeeze juice. Wash and dry turkey breasts, cut into strips.
Bring 1 tea spoon orange peel, orange juice, 400ml water, 2 table spoons oil and Madras curry to boil, ad a tea spoon of salt. Add bulgur to the boiling water, let boil again while stirring, take the pot off the oven and let it sit for seven minutes.
Heat 4 table spoons of oil in a pan and fry the meat for three minutes until goldenbrown. Reduce heat to mid-level and add the peppers, keep frying for eight minutes. Then add onion and garlic and keep frying for two more minutes. Season with salt and pepper to personal taste.
Pluck parsley from its stems and chop up, mix in the bulgur. Put yoghurt in a bowl and season with 1/2 tea spoon of salt. Arrange bulgur, meat and peppers on a table. Drizzle with the yoghurt sauce.
This one was fun to make. I usually shy away from cooking meat because I'm afraid of getting it wrong - either not done enough or too done - and I still haven't gotten up the courage to try beef but I'm finally getting more confident with poultry. This was really easy and clear-cut, not too many steps but savory and spicy and fresh. Definitely will cook from that book again.
Endlich Freitag! Schnell & einfach: Die besten Rezepte für den perfekten Start ins Wochenende, Liselotte Forslin
I am so very much in love with Forslin's books. I own all she has published and I keep wishing she'd publish a new one. Forslin has a kind of "quick and dirty" approach to cooking I appreciate very much and I just love the aesthetics of her books. A little messy, a little homey, and down to Earth, as if you're sitting right in her kitchen and watching her cook and then eating her food right off the oven.
Her recipes often include quite a lot of ingredients but most of them don't actually require much work and are put together quickly. The ones in this book are really good for Friday nights spent at home, lots of them comfort food-y, if you want to let the week end on a comfy, warm note. Or even if you have friends over and want to go out later or spent a long evening with alcohol and friends and food.
The one I tried is more of the party variety than of the staying in variety but it worked just fine for us, anyway. It was this one:
Chicken tacos with mango salsa
Ingredients:
(serves four)
700 - 800g chicken breast
2 tea spoons ground cumin
2 tea spoons ground cilantro
olive oil for frying
juice from 1 lime
1 table spoon soy sauce
1 tea spoon brown sugar
salt and pepper
1 ripe mango
1 big ripe avocado
2 spring onions
1 big chili
2 table spoons freshly chopped cilantro
juice from 1 lime
tortilla wraps
sour cream
Cut the chicken breasts up into strips and put in a bowl. Mix with cumin, ground cilantro, salt and pepper and let it marinate for a short time.
Heat some oil in a pan and fry the marinated chicken strips until goldenbrown, Lower heat to mid-level and keep frying for five more minutes. Add lime juice and soy sauce, season with a bit of sugar.
Dice mango and avocado. Cut spring onions in rings, halve the chili, remove the seeds and chop finely. Mix everything with the fresh cilantro in a bowl and add the lime juice, season with salt and pepper.
For serving, fill the tortilla wraps with chicken and salsa, add some sour cream and drizzle with left over lime juice.
I remember that I messed up the meat in this one. I let it fry for too long and it came out too dry. Other than that, it really was quick and dirty and aside from the dry meat, my family liked it (my sister found the salsa a leeeettlee too hot, though) and I liked it, too. I just still have to work on my meat cooking skills...
Süßkartoffeln: Rezepte für gesunden Genuss
I love sweet potatoes. I really, really do. I love their color and their texture and their taste and fries being made of sweet potato make them even a thousand times better than they already are. If it has written "sweet potato" on it, I will probably eat it, and I will most probably like it. Want to make me happy, give me sweet potatos. Fried, baked, mashed, I take them in all forms. Just give 'em to me.
So it's not really surprising that I had to have this book when I saw it. And well, it doesn't disappoint (then again, books published by Thorbecke rarely do). It's a little slim, but the recipe variety is surprising. Casserols, balls, stir fries, meatless, with meat... it's really amazing what you can do with one root vegetable. Which was exactly why I wanted this book: I like sweet potatoes but I wanted more variety than oven baked vegetables, fries and sweet potato dices for salads, and I got it. Layout of the book is nice and well-put together, but nothing innovative. However, the instructions are easy to follow, even for cooking novices.
Deciding for a recipe to try was a little hard but this is what I settled with in the end:
Pan-fried broccoli with sweet potatoes, raisins, pine nuts and yoghurt sauce
Ingredients:
(serves four)
400g sweet potatoes
salt
1 red onion
600g broccoli
4 table spoons of pine nuts
4 table spoons of olive oil
4 - 5 table spoons of raisins
250g yoghurt
juice from 1 lemon
ground pepper
Peel the sweet potatoes, dice in small pieces, and throw into boiling water to let boil for five minutes. Take them out and let them drip off.
Peel the onion and cut into rings. Wash broccoli and pull into florets. Roast the pine nuts in a pan without fat until goldenbrown, take off the oven and put aside for now. Put oil in a pan and roast the broccoli on mid-level heat for about 5 minutes. Add the onion rings and fry for 3 more minutes. Add the sweet potatoes and raisins and let fry for 3 more minutes with a lid on.
Mix the yoghurt with 1 - 2 table spoons of water, 2 table spoons lemon juice and salt. Season to taste with pepper.
Season the stir fry to taste with salt, pepper and lemon juice, sprinkle on pine nuts and arrange on plates, provide yoghurt sauce separately.
This one was pretty good, actually. Not exactly a summer time recipe but really, really good as autumn comfort food (and how I long for autumn to come around, OMFG). And yes, it has raisins, blahblahblah. I have to be honest, I never got the hate people shower on raisins and trust me, this recipe doesn't work without them. It needs them. Don't leave them out. You will regret it. Because it'll be boring without the raisins. Yes.
Alright then, that's it. Four more books, and I just remembered that I have another recipe in the challenge to share but I just decided to keep that for the next batch. I'll just blame it on the fact that it's summer and summer always makes me cranky and lazy. So, fuck summer.
How are you? Everyone okay? Have you been trying any new recipes? Any favorites you would like to share? Tell meeeeee!