confit de canard

confit de canard
Originally uploaded by kattebelletje.

This was the meal I had on Christmas: confit de canard (duck, cooked in its own fat on a very low temperature) with roast potatoes and string beans, wrapped with prosciutto - and a salad to go with everything. The duck, by the way, comes in a tin, so all you have to do is plonk it in a pan and heat it, and then put it under the grill briefly, so it gets a nice crispy skin. I love it! To go with it, I had roast potatoes from the oven, cooked in the duck fat from the tin with confit de canard. Alas, I made a fatal mistake there. I remembered the last time I made this, it took at least one hour for the potatoes to roast, so I decided to precook the potatoes this time. Wrong, wrong, wrong, don't do this at home! The result, after 10 minutes of precooking, and then immersing them in the duck fat and roasting the potatoes? The potatoes sucked up the fat and didn't let it go, so the end result were greasy potatoes which didn't go down well at all. As a matter of fact I felt sick for two days with an uneasy stomach, so I won't go for confit de canard as eagerly in the future... By the way, all the others eating this dish were just fine, but they didn't like the taste of duck so much as I do. Did your Christmas meal turn out as well as you wished?

shrimp cocktail

shrimp cocktail
Originally uploaded by kattebelletje.

The holidays haven't even started yet, but I felt like eating this classic Christmas dish: shrimp cocktail. You will need: 100 grams of peeled shrimp (small and tasty ones will do); 1 apple, cut into small dice; 5 or 6 tablespoons of mayonaise, either from a jar of home made; 1 tablespoon of ketchup; a few sprigs of lemon juice; 1 teaspoon of Worcestershire sauce (or use soy sauce); some salt and pepper. First mix the mayonaise, ketchup, a tablespoon of cognac or whisky and the lemon juice, salt and pepper. Taste for seasonings. After cutting the apple into small dice, mix it with the shrimp and then stir everything together. Try it out and add more lemon juice or mayonaise to your liking, it should not be too dry! Shred some lettuce and put in a cocktail glass. Add the shrimp mixture on top and sprinkle with paprika and extra pepper. Use a slice of lemon for garnish. This dish is really tasty, very simple to make, and goes well with a glass of white wine or cava!

gnocchi

gnocci
Originally uploaded by kattebelletje.

I've started reading lots of food blogs lately, and came across Nicoletta's La Cucina del Sole, a blog on italian cooking. She shows in a video how to make potato gnocchi with a butter and salvia sauce. Still inspired by this (and feeling jealous of her beautiful wooden gadget to make the small lines in the gnocchi dough with), a couple of days later I boiled some potatoes and waited for them to cool. Then, without checking her website, I added some flour, an egg, and did some kneading, but with my hands all sticky and gooey I couldn't quite watch the instructional video again. So I used the old fork and tried some lines there in a couple of gnocchi, cooked one portion and gave them to my daughter to eat, who really liked them. Then, today, I took the potato and flour dough out of the refrigerator, only to discover that the gluten had started to work and made the whole dough rather sticky. I added more flour and rolled them and did the old fork routine, again without watching the video, so this is how they turned out. The taste was quite nice, with some melted butter and leftover home made pesto - although I think they lost something in the waiting process! [who knows, perhaps I made a fatal mistake!] Only just now I found out I should have made them more cylinder-shaped, and press them on the inside of the fork instead of on the outside.... Never mind, I'll make gnocchi again soon and post new pictures to show my progress.

Oil blasted shrimp

[youbao daxia
I just love watching Chinese cooking videos. I brought lots of them home from China, but to my surprise I found there are many clips uploaded on YouTube, ripped from Chinese dvds or vcds. The videos are very unlike the trendy chef-lifestyle videos you have in the West, where the focus is on close-ups of the chef's face and cooking gear instead of on his or her cooking basics. Chinese chefs take their time, sometimes even real time, to show their knife techniques and cooking skills.

Everything is shown step by step, the cutting preparations and the final assembling and stir frying moves. You sure can learn a lot about Chinese cooking by watching these videos! As not everyone understands Chinese, I have translated the directions they give in the video, so you can watch the techniques, and read the directions for assistance. Try for yourself! View more of my Chinese cooking playlist at YouTube...


This is a rather easy recipe, with great flavours enhancing the tastyness of shrimp. You will need: 350 grams raw shrimp, with heads on, but cleaned; 25 grams soy sauce; 5 grams spring onions; 15 grams Chinese rice wine (Shaoxing wine); lots of [vegetable] oil; 25 grams of sugar and 15 grams of Chinese vinegar.

First: dry the shrimp and fry them briefly in medium hot oil (the Chinese call this 60% hot), take out; then turn up the heat and fry them again in hotter oil (70% hot). There surely is a lot of oil in the wok. You can see the really big ladle with holes in it, like a strainer, with which the Chinese chef scoops out all the ingredients in one go, he also has a large container at hand for pouring in the excess oil when necessary. OK, pour off all the oil and add just one or two tablespoons of oil in the pan, then add the shrimp, rice wine, sugar, vinegar, soy, spring onions and stir to combine. Don't fry too long, take out and arrange prettily on a plate. Chef of this video: Chen Yongqing from Hangzhou.

romesco sauce

romesco
Originally uploaded by kattebelletje.

Sometimes I really feel like cooking, but am not sure what. I grab some cooking books on the shelf and start turning pages, flipping from one recipe to the other, trying to imagine the taste as you do so. Then you start combining things, and flipping even more pages, and getting very excited, up to the stage that you want to cook EVERYTHING you just read, mixing dishes in your mind until you become kind of dizzy and have to stop. Then I put the books away and suddenly feel like just making one very simple dish. And.. yes. I found this one in Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian, which I like, but I never really cooked anything out of. That happens. Quite a lot with my cookbooks actually. Which doesn't mean I bought the wrong ones, but some cookbooks are just for reading, and the others make you cook. So... Madhur said she couldn't live without this Spanish sauce, called romesco. I was intrigued. So.. I toiled in the kitchen for quite some time, roasting 4 onions, 8 garlic cloves, 6 tomatoes in a hot oven for about 30 minutes (take out tomatoes and garlic after 10 mins or so), and simmering a dried chile de ancho in red wine vinegar for 10 minutes, too. The tomatoes and skinned chile were passed through a sieve, and the onions and garlic had to have their black bits removed, and everthing was whizzed in a food processor with about 60 grams of roasted almonds and about 6 tablespoons of olive oil. The mixture smelled delicious, deep, wooden, a whiff of the dark vinegar, the nutty taste of the roast garlic... very special! I turned the oven on again, this time to roast some vegetables - I should have read better, because I could have made it in one go, but ... well. That happens, too. I have a huge bowl of sauce with I froze immediately and which I will take out for a dinner party or other festive occasion! This would be great with no knead bread, too...