eller | Entries tagged with food

The last time I posted easter eggs here, I had no idea this stuff would ever become political - yet here we are. Anyway. I don't celebrate, except I really enjoy painting eggs. (I do not think I would enjoy painting potatoes. I mean, I'd have to try before I judge, but...) Happy Easter if you celebrate. :3

...or, sexist subtitle, "Why Men* Never Cut Bread Properly", because that's what it seems to amount to in real life. ;) Ahem. So, a few nights ago, I met up with some other ladies for drinks. Somehow, this turned into one of us complaining bitterly about how her husband keeps producing Catastrophic!Bread!Spirals when cutting bread. Two others also agreed that, yes, their respective men also produce spirals rather than proper bread slices and how annoying that is. Well. I'm into technology and into knives, so, of course, I immediately took out pen and paper and produced some shitty construction drawings to show why the issue really comes down to hand size...

*I hope it's obvious this is not really a gender issue. Just that, statistically, any technical problem that exclusively hits people with very large hands is going to affect significantly more men than women.

shitty construction drawing

In (1), you can see what cutting bread with an entirely straight bread knife should look like: In order to produce a clean cut, the knife is held completely horizontally, with all the teeth arriving down on the cutting board at the same time. At this point, if your hand is small enough and nothing else went catastrophically wrong, you should have produced a nice, regular slice of bread. (Because I was drunk while drawing, I'll provide translations. Tisch: table. Schneidbrett: cutting board. Brot: bread. Messer: knife. Kleine Hand: small hand. Also, no, this is not supposed to be an illustration of how to hold a bread knife... LOL)

But, oh noes, if the user's hand is too large, suddenly there's a problem! In (2), you can see that the fact that the fingers can't sink into the table surface causes the knife to be held at an angle! Under those circumstances, of course, there's an area of bread (marked orange) that's not going to be cut! And that's where the problem starts: the two main approaches to solve this are to either rip the underside of the bread (which results in really ugly slices for obvious reasons) or to rotate the bread. If you rotate the bread and your second cut does not perfectly align with the first (which it never does, not just because aligning two cuts perfectly always requires unusual levels of precision, but mainly because, hey, bread deforms when you suddenly exert pressure from a different direction, and while it's theoretically possible to correct for that, not everyone wants to fuck around with tensors during an otherwise uncomplicated kitchen task)? Catastrophic!Bread!Spirals are the logical result. Ladies, your men are neither malicious nor stupid, it's just that handing a completely straight bread knife without any kind of offset to a person with large hands is a shitty idea! (The same, of course, applies to any blade that's designed to arrive on the board surface completely horizontally. Like, also, absolutely anything with a sheepfoot blade...)

A possible solution is shown in (3): there are some bread knives with a bit of an offset that lowers the blade in relation to the handle, which means there's extra space for thicker fingers under the handle. (If you now immediately think "but this costs stability!, congratulations, you've been following my knife nerdery closely! Displacing the blade does cost stability. A knife like this will not withstand any hard impact. However, a bread knife is intended for cutting bread. If you are experiencing any kind of potentially blade-shattering impact on bread, there's most likely a bread malfunction... That is, unless you're the world's worst baker, or you intend to go into a knife fight with a bread knife - which I'd strongly advise against, even under the best of circumstances - this should never become an issue.) This extra space means that a person with large hands is now also able to hold the knife horizontally while cutting. YAY!

Other possible solutions to the problem, of course, include...
- using a thicker cutting board (which would also provide extra finger space, albeit in an impractical way... Generally, there's the recommendation your cutting board should be exactly as thick as your fingers* - not just for being able to place cuts in completely horizontal position at all, but also to provide a measure of when you've arrived on the board, with your fingers as the spacer, so you'll stop exerting pressure then, which protects your knives so you have to sharpen them less often - but at some point this becomes impractical as it results in very unwieldy cutting boards...)
- cutting at the edge of the table (which is going to be uncomfortable because you'll have to stand at an awkward angle or strain your shoulder, but, sure, this also provides extra finger space)
- cutting with reeeeaaally long arm motions (which is unergonomic as fuck, and you lose most of the advantage of that lovely serrated edge - as in, unless your knife is excellent, you're likely to shred the bread - so it only "works" in a very theoretical way but comes with other issues in practice)

*Yes, "a finger thick" as a measuring unit is not merely a historical relic; there are use cases when using your finger as a measuring unit actually fulfills an important practical purpose! Generally, when talking about tools, ergonomy, and so on, so much depends on an individual's hand that units like "a palm width" also have to be taken literally, and followed precisely, not as a guesstimate.

...but, really, it comes down to technology. I understand how painful it can be to watch Catastrophic!Bread!Spirals, but really, there's no need for a relationship conflict over this issue! (I simply got my boyfriend a bread knife he can actually use. It's now one of his favorite knives because, hey, if you like bread, the difference between being able to cut bread and not being able to cut bread really matters. Also, I guess it was a relief to learn that, nope, he's not that clumsy, he just had the wrong tool for the task.)

I'm also tagging this entry with Germany, because - obviously - this conversation scored very high on the VFGI (Very Fucking German Indeed) scale: People getting extremely emotional over bread - check. People getting extremely emotional over knives - check. Overly technical approach to, well, absolutely everything - check. Alcohol, alcohol, and more alcohol involved - check. The only reason this doesn't get a perfect score is that one of us arrived at the bar three minutes late.

Boyfriend and I are not really "celebrating" New Year's Eve with fireworks or anything, but we were making Raclette. That's a Swiss tradition and not a German one, technically speaking, but it's common enough in Germany that all the supermarkets have the special cheese as a seasonal product. (Also, it's popular as a party food because you can vary the ingredients so you can accomodate different dietary requirements at least to some extent.) Because I think some of you guys here are interested in food culture, I decided to document it this year with some pictures. :) So, uh, what is Raclette? Okay, so, first and foremost, Raclette is a type of cheese. The word, however, does not only refer to that cheese but also to... Okay, kind of difficult to explain, but I guess we'll need to look at this specific table grill thingy...

Raclette-Grill-kl

Obviously, on top of it, you grill stuff. This part is easy. We are simply talking about a thin metal sheet with a heating spiral below it. It gets hot when you switch the electricity on. You throw food on it.

The interesting part, however, which makes it a Raclette grill rather than a "normal" table grill is that you put these small triangular pans below the heating spiral, so anything in those pans is grilled from above. Look at this, I pulled one of the pans out:

Raclette-Pf-nnchen-kl

Basically, you put the stuff you want to eat in there, put cheese on it (Raclette cheese, obviously - hence the name of the whole dish. Yes, other cheese will work fine, it will just taste" wrong", that is, like a perfectly normal gratin. LOL) and push it under that lovely heating spiral.

The other ingredients are... extremely flexible. Basically, you can put in there whatever you want. It usually involves various vegetables. This is what we had today:

Raclette-Zutaten-kl

Those are...
- Red bell pepper. (Only I ate that.)
- Potatoes. (This is Germany, after all. Potatoes need to be added to absolutely every dish. It's a law. Or something.)
- Zucchini. (Because, if you bother to bring out that table grill, not having grilled zucchini is a fucking crime. Seriously. It's just soooo good.)
- Eggplant. (Ditto, though grilled eggplant only really works if you pre-treat the stuff with salt and lemon juice. Also, it always takes more oil than you think.)
- Champignons. (Yes, eating mushrooms while being North German is a cultural crime, but whatever. Sue me. Also, no worries, they are from a supermarket and should be safe to eat.)
- Red onions. (Boyfriend prefers those to the white and yellow ones; I'm entirely indifferent. That is, I like onions just fine, I just don't notice that much of a difference.)
- Beef. (We even put the raw meat on a separate plate and not on the board with the vegetables. Damaged by civilization...)
- Raclette cheese. (Because.)

Technically, the dish also involves bread, and we had bread, but I don't eat much cereal-based food (unless it's cake), so, Boyfriend ate most of that. (Cultural differences.)

Oh, and to be complete, those were the (somewhat nonclassical) spices we used:

Raclette-Gew-rze-kl

Those are:
- Pommessalz. (As required by law! XD Uhh. No. I mean, we're talking about a convenience mix of mostly salt and paprika that's typically put on fries but will work in any food with potatoes... Which is almost every German food... Which is why you'll find this type of mix in almost every German kitchen. It's the quintessential spice that screams "lower-class German" - of course, people will never admit in polite company that they use the stuff. You know the deal. It's the kind of class disqualifier like... uh... I guess the American equivalent of being "very classy" would be the bottle of ketchup to complete that nice, upscale meal?!? Of course, we totally didn't eat that, we only put it on the table for, uhhh, decorative purposes! Also, of course, it tastes really fucking awesome.)
- Black (fermented) garlic. (Totally nonclassical in this context, and this is the first time we had the stuff. It tastes really good, but adding it to a Raclette was maybe not the best idea because it seems to lose some flavor when heated. Oh well, live and learn.)
- Granulated pepper. (This is classical.)
- Hibiscus salt. (That is, a mix of salt and powdered hibiscus flower. Again, something we had for the first time. That is, I had it in my Advent calendar. It turned out to be really tasty, though! Boyfriend and I both really loved the stuff! It's very intense and kind of fruity, which worked really well with the meat.)
- Plum-Chili-Sauce. (Okay, this one is weird. Theoretically speaking, plum-based sauces for meat dishes are classical - in the sense of "archaic", really - in many parts of Germany. Chili is... NOT. XD So, this is a modern variation on something very, very traditional. I found it because a lady in the supermarket was filling her basket with, like, seven or eight jars (!) of the stuff and told me it's "the best thing ever for Raclette". I'm glad to confirm it's really very, very good. I suspect it's even going to work in a traditional roast dish. Will definitely buy again.)
- "Raclette spice mix". (Again, super weird, because afaik there is no classical "Raclette spice mix", so it absolutely has to be a modern invention. I bought that mainly because I saw it in the supermarket and went "WTF???", and obviously, I tend to buy anything that looks weird enough. The ingredients say it's composed specifically for cheese-based dishes and it consists mainly of pepper, nutmeg, onion powder, garlic powder, smoked paprika, parsley, salt and sugar. Somewhat surprisingly, turns out this really works well with grilled vegetables and cheese, so, its existence can be justified.)

At midnight, we'll have some sparkly wine. Until then, we are having a nice, relaxed evening. :)

If you guys follow the latest social media crazes at all, you may have heard of "Dubai chocolate", a relatively new chocolate flavor invention involving pistachio and crunchy bits, (in)famous not only for its high price but also, unfortunately, for tasting really reeeaaaallly good. Well. Anyway, Boyfriend got me a bar as a gift, and I really loved the stuff, but it's (obviously) too expensive to buy on a regular basis. So, we decided to make our own instead!

Dubai-Schokolade-kl

( Ingredients and recipe behind the cut. )

I'm glad to inform you that the experiment was successful: while our result doesn't quite look all that professional (we will need to practice more, ahahaha), it tastes exactly like the original.

Have a watermelon! It's summer (where I live, anyway), after all! XD

Skizze-03-kl

Completely with acrylic pens this time, partially diluted with water and paintbrush. The suuuper wide black acrylic pen was a gift from Emily Adams who sent me a very generous art supply care package (with some awesome things I still need to post!) a while ago. I like pens with wide tips, but drawing with this one (look at the picture...) turned out to be kind of extreme. XD Nothing wrong with it, though - it's a very nice pen, I just have to get used to it.

From a technical standpoint, the drawing was a failure: initially, I wanted to make this without any red paint, just the paper background color with white and black (and, obviously, green for the green parts), but it simply did not look right, so I had to use a red and a pink pen on the melon slice. Oh, and I learned the hard way that the paper doesn't like water - it buckled quite a bit. (So, no watercolor sketches in this book, I'm afraid...) I kind of like the end result, though: it's every bit as cliché-summery as intended.

Skizze-03-Material-kl

Materials:
- suuuper awesome sketchbook; a red page again
- Acrylic pens: Marabu Art Painter in black, Uni Posca PC-5M in white, Amsterdam Acrylic Markers in Yellowish Green, Permanent Green Light, Pyrrole Red and Permanent Red Violet Light

Walnut bread with honeycomb.

brot-mit-honigwabe

One of my favorite small pleasures in life. (But then, I'm a serious honey addict, and processing honey and filling it in jars doesn't improve the taste...)

I used the holidays for baking...

Kekse-1-kl

...and it was fun.

Everyone, look at this,

yhlee made me a sketch book! (To fully admire the craft that went into binding the book, look at his journal entry with more pictures and descriptions how it was made.)

Skizzenbuch-0-kl

The chess position on the cover isn't random - rather, it's the end position of my favorite chess grandmaster game ever, Tal - Hjartason, 1987. I squeaked when I unpacked the mystery package and saw this diagram! (It's the kind of super-weird position that, uh, has a lot of recognition value.)

Skizzenbuch-1-kl

The back cover is chess-themed, too. :)

Skizzenbuch-2-kl

And the book holds a selection of different papers in different colors! YAY! I knew some of them, but others were new to me, so I couldn't wait to test them all! The book is suuuuper fun to use, and for dmonstration purposes, I decided to show the first page of each paper section, with the picture I painted on it. Recently, I've mostly sketched with black and white acrylic pens and my watercolors, so that's what I've used here as well.

( Behind a cut, because hey, these are a lot of pictures. )

As you can see, I'm enjoying the book a lot already! :D It's not full yet, but... Only a matter of time. ^^°

Guys, if you're thinking that by 'Easter fire' I'm talking about the lovely Pagan tradition, you're wrong. We did not go to the Easter fires last night though I'm sure there were plenty along the riverbanks. Rather, there is a fire in some warehouses, and the city is under a dome of toxic smoke. When we woke up this morning, we were surprised there were no church bell sounds whatsoever, which was a huge surprise - usually, on Easter, all the bells are ringing, and I mean, Hamburg has many old churches with bell towers. We wondered what was going on. Oh, yeah, there's a disaster warning. Citizens are supposed to stay at home keep their doors and windows closed and switch off any ventilation systems, and if even the Christians (who were all for keeping church events open during the pandemic because the lockdowns "interfered with their religious freedom"; I still wonder how many elderly people they killed with that) collectively support that message and cancel their Easter services, I guess shit is serious.

Meanwhile, I was displaying the most important virtue of the good German lady: simulate normalcy while the world is burning. I was planning to bake today, so, I baked!

Osterkranz-kl

That's a traditional Easter wreath, in case you were wondering - it consists of a slightly sweetened yeast dough with milk. I used this recipe with some slight alterations. First, I halved the amount of all ingredients, because this thing needs to be eaten today (not just because of tradition but also because tomorrow it will be dry) and also, a larger one would likely not have fit in the oven. Then, the ratio of ingredients (250g flour, 125ml milk, 40g sugar, 40g butter) resulted in something that was too wet to shape properly, so I had to add a bit more flour. Oh, and I used dry yeast. By the way, the recipe's suggestion to use lemon peel in the dough is decidedly nonclassical but I went with it, and I mean, it works! (I deviated further and used a frosting made of powdered sugar and limoncello; might as well amplify the theme...) I'm kind of appalled by the idea to use extra eggs as 'placeholder' for the easter eggs while baking, as they did in that recipe, though. Wouldn't have done that even before eggs began to cost their weight in gold. It's a waste of food (I mean, you can't eat them after more than half an hour in the oven), so I simply left more space between the strands. The easter eggs I painted last night are held in place by the frosting anyway! That being said, the result tastes good, so, the recipe isn't bad, it just needed some adjustments.

Now, I'm watching the chess world championship (GM Ding Liren vs. GM Ian Nepomniachtchi) livestream. Today's the first game, and while I missed the beginning and joined in the middle of the game, it's very interesting! They're both players with very entertaining styles, so I'm very happy it turned out to be these two playing a world championship match! Also, the commenters on chess24 (GM Daniel Naroditsky and GM Anish Giri) are doing a great job. (It's a fascinating pawn endgame with knights and bishops, and without commentary by these top players I'd have no idea what's going on!)

EDIT: Ah, it's a draw now.
EDIT2: The fire seems to be under control now. I think I'll wait with opening the window, though.

It's after midnight, so, it's technically Easter Sunday now where I live... Happy Easter to everyone who celebrates, and a wonderful time to absolutely everyone! I actually don't celebrate, but I participate in the fun local traditions anyway - and clearly, the best of those is getting to paint eggs! (I'm just treating it as a generic celebration of spring.) Any excuse for some creative activity! :D

chess-easter-eggs-kl

This year's easter egg theme was actually a bit of an emergency solution - I usually prefer having a variety of colors, but the only eggs available in all the local supermarkets were brown (and, let's face it, with the food situation being what it is, we were lucky there were eggs), which means I was somewhat limited. (Green and blue dyes only look good on white eggs, and yellow on brown? Forget it!) I mixed red and orange food colorant to get the background color, because I figured pure red would be too dark for proper contrast with the drawings, and pure orange wouldn't really show up on brown eggs. I drew the chess pieces with a brand new food pen (you know, the kind you also use for drawing on fondant and the like) that will be getting a 1-star review from me because it ran out of ink and I wasn't able to fill the dark areas properly, which if you ask me is wholly unreasonable after only six tiny drawings. Anyway, as improvised as they are, I'm happy I have chess easter eggs now. Silhouette style always works for me! And they were so much fun to paint! Maybe I'll eat them while playing online chess? Then again, I wanted to do some old-fashioned baking tomorrow, so, we'll see. :)

It's that time of the year again. The (unofficial) traditional German calendar has a season called 'asparagus time'. (Did you know asparagus is the vegetable with the largest agricultural area in Germany?) And also, it happens to be one of my favorite vegetables. So, I cooked some green asparagus!

spargel-kl

Actually, I already wanted to eat that asparagus yesterday but could not because of Ice Cream Incident. The ice cream place has a new employee who happens to be male. Those of you who are female probably know this tends to result systematically in slightly larger portions. Well, this employee exaggerated a bit - instead of the three scoops of ice cream (a large but still somewhat reasonable portion), this guy decided the scoop was not large enough and gave me factually six. Yeah. Needless to say, I did not eat anything for the rest of the day... The asparagus had to wait.

Cooking it was straightforward: 10 minutes in boiling water with salt, sugar, and butter. (The sugar is necessary - not to sweeten the asparagus but to make it less woody.) Even I can manage that! The meat is turkey in a homemade marinade. I actually wanted to eat it with potatoes, but they had sprouted and I had to throw them out... So, the carbs had to come from pasta instead. (It had a spinach-and-cheese filling, which actually complemented the asparagus quite well.) In case you are wondering about the portion size: asparagus has a near-zero caloric value, so basically, it tastes good but will not keep you alive. (It has some nutritional value anyway, because of vitamins and trace elements, but you really need to add fat and carbs.) Speaking of fat... How much Hollandaise can you drown your asparagus in? YES. I love Hollandaise. Always did. (This used to be a recurring point of contention between me and my parents: somehow, they did not think a 50:50 Hollandaise:asparagus ratio was reasonable. These days, no one can stop me!)

Anyway... This was GOOD! SOOOOO GOOOOOD!

By way of

yhlee:

Comment below and I'll ask you five questions. Answer them in your own journal, offer to give the first five commenters their own sets of questions, and let the cycle continue!

1. If you could play chess against any chess player, present or past (or even fictional), who would it be and why?

Mikhail Tal, who else? :D I mean, I'm told often enough that my style is as weird as his - unfortunately, that's not the case, because he was brilliant and my chess is just weird but not nearly as good... But, oh, the result would be fun!

2. What is your favorite dulcimer song?

Eh. Are there songs specifically for dulcimer? I'm clueless. XD If it's "song that can be played on a dulcimer", that would be German folk songs like "Es geht ein dunkle Wolk herein" or "Ich hab die Nacht geträumet". They'll work on any type of zither, really.

3. What is your favorite meat dish?

Steak. XD
...okay, that's a primitive answer, but really, I love a good steak. I also like any and all casserole dishes involving ground meat, like moussaka. I love roast wild boar in plum sauce. And I like pizza with salami and bacon. And... I like most meat dishes, really!

4. If you had to use a limited palette of six colors/pigments, which would they be? (Sorry not sorry, my obsession with limited palettes is a DISEASE.)

Oh, that's easy.
PY154, PG7, PB15:3, PV19, PV23, PR254. These are the ones I keep buying and keep running out of. Where does all that PG7 disappear to, I wonder? XDD

5. What is one algorithm that you find aesthetically really pleasing?

This could become a very long list. :D One of my all-time favorites is one I learned as a little kid: the Monte Carlo approximation of Pi by throwing darts at a circle drawn in a square. Soooo much fun, and I remember being very impressed by the beauty of that approach! (It's also one of the first algorithms that nerdy kids learn; every single programming book and course has it as one of the first examples. Guess what? That's BECAUSE it is so neat.)

For your amusement: a very fast, very messy sketch made during lunch break at work. I was showing someone how to draw geometric shapes.

chocolates-kl

No, I realize what this looks like, but we are not hopelessly lazy. XD (I was actually quite productive today, entirely non-artistically speaking.) We are dealing with crystals, so this was quite work-related for a lunch break activity. These are very obviously not crystals, but when it comes to "how to draw a cube" and stuff, well, these were the simplest geometric objects available.

Drawn (okay, okay, scribbled) with fineliners (two sizes) and markers (light brown, dark brown, warm grey and white) in a sketchbook with grey paper.

Also: the chocolates were excellent.

Mini rose cakes!

rose-cakes-kl

These are basically just modified quark balls. The ingredients are wheat flour, sugar, salt, quark (raspberry quark, because there was no other in the fridge - but the color fits, so, whatever), milk, oil, egg, yeast, and a few candied rose petals - not weighed, so once again stochastic baking. The frosting consists of powdered sugar, rum (the alcohol is important, both for preservation and so that the lovely rose aroma dissolves and spreads well) and much more candied rose petals. Not whole petals because this was just-for-fun baking during my lunch break. We don't have guests or anything, so I stuck to the "cheap" stuff (candied rose fragments; whatever), though of course cheap is very relative when referring to candied rose petals. (I love the stuff, so, worth it.) I'm very happy with how these turned out!

No worries, this is not going to become a food blog. (I'd have to learn how to cook first!) Just an indicator of my mood: when I'm happy and relaxed, apparently, I enjoy making fancy desserts. :)

Yesterday's Dessert: Mango-Vanilla-Pudding

pudding-mango-kl

The thing in the middle is pudding - very basic pudding recipe (milk, cream, egg yolk, sugar and starch) to which I added ground vanilla and mango syrup. This is, of course, barbaric. It's just that I'm far too lazy to cook fruit until it's dry enough to flavor pudding! LOL Around that, I decorated with mango pieces (YAY fresh mango! I was lucky to get that!), and covered the whole thing in whipped cream. The photo was taken before the rest of the cream was added, because afterwards it looked a lot less interesting. XDD Tasted good, though!

Today's Dessert: Yogurt Pudding With Grapes

pudding-joghurt-traube-kl

This one was a bit more difficult: first, I had to cook a "normal" pudding, just with twice the amount of starch, and then I had to add the yogurt and heat everything without letting it boil. For my standards, that's complicated. (Yes, you may laugh.) I didn't add any flavor stuff, just decorated the whole thing with grapes. It tasted niiiiiiice, too! (No cream for this one, of course: that would ruin the mild yogurt-y taste!)