Boris_A

Thank you for visiting my blog, for your encouragement, for your participation and for your patience to decypher my posts. I hope this blog was sometimes entertaining, sometimes infomative, sometimes inspiring and sometimes fun. The next blogger is tagged and waiting. Good night, co-bloggers and lurkers. Take care. The last one turns out the light.

I think "umido" is related to humidity. I make a marinade with some EVOO, smashed or pressed garlick and rosemary and let the rabbit pieces soak for some hours. I clean it (to avoid burnt garlick) and sear it (only hazelnut in colour) in home-clarified butter. Take it out, replace all fat with fresh butter. Usually I make a brunoise of very little celery, carrot and onion. I add a squashed garlick clove and some rosemary. Optionally, add some cloves en chemise ("in their skirt"), just to suck them after cooking. Others like to add a peeled/de-seeded tomato. I place the rabbit back, add some salt, wine and water (depends on the acid content of the wine). Now stew it covered for some 45 minutes with turning from time to time and add water if needed. After that, take the lid away and reduce slwoly. Try to get a nice, light brown colour. The balsamic- like juice can be heaven with pasta or white risotto.

It's not over yet! Tonight, the blog is more a private version of "Dinner, what did we cook?" This is could be the main course of a weekend dinner. For reasons I explained here, we shifted it: It's the "Coniglio in Umido" (rabbit stew) with some "Carots kind of Vichy", some string beans (there was a phone call in the completely wrong moment, so they're overdone) and some oven baked mini potatoes. White risotto (just wonderful with some deglazed rabbit "juice") would have been the the better choice, but we've been too lazy. The coniglio (pronounced "coneelyo") is a classic since my youth. It's a northern Italy/south of Switzerland dish. On sunday, when I was a boy, we used to visit my uncle for sunday lunch. He almost exclusively made that rabbit. My father owned several fashion shops and was an employer, my uncle worked as plasterer and was a communist ( a real one) . At the end of the meal, they used to start with a discussion about politics. Conflict and insultations were unavoidable (no eGullet-moderators around by then). We left always with the promise to return never again. After some weeks, they arranged a new lunch with both families. It was a ritual.

Ah, now it's my turn: Bündnerfleisch. Really great suggestion: Paella with Ipswich clams and Bündnerfleisch. Bon appétit bien sur! Technically, that's fusion, no? It's quite normal for us to have that level of internationality. When Alinghi won the "Americas Cup", only a handful of the crew members were Swiss. What else should a tiny high-alpine country without a single yard of coastline do in order to win the most famous sailing competition? Tyler will have a lot of support from here. Go, Tyler, go!

I visited once the gelato fair in Longarone, the place where many of the Italians who run Gelaterias in Germany and Austria are coming from. There have been recipe books, and many recipes included "wood sugar" (dextrose?) used in order to control the freezing point without the need to add too much real sugar (and sweetness therefore). Even the smallest pro machine (1 gallone) had a very powerful motor (1 hp) to knead the raw gelato until sufficient low temperature and creating very fine crystals, I suspect. There must be some freezing vs. heating by kneading equilibrium working as well to get that consistency.

Tyler Hamilton is from Marblehead, Massachusetts. They may not go over well with the French palate, but fried Ipswich clams and Boston baked beans would be appropriate.. "Taylor" Hamilton , Texan "Brisquet". Oh my! (blunders) Don't mind about the French palate. It's 1986, when Hinault was the last Frenchman winning the Tour. I know. He's racing for the only Swiss pro team I'd say chances are 40% Lance, 35% Jan and 25% Tyler. So brisket, sauerkraut and Ipswich clams are fix. Only flexibilty wrt. the serving sequence is required. BTW, a somewhat dégoutant menu would include blood sausage (blood exchange) and growth hormone beef.

At $10 or less, choice is somewhat, err - limited. In Vienna city, I'd recommend the "Reinthalers" in the "Gluckgasse" near the opera/Hotel Sacher. Menu between 5 and 10 Euros, so you could just get away. A must in summertime is a trip to the Prater (Riesenrad aka "Giant Wheel"?), and to the "Schweizerhaus". Draft Budweiser (of Budvar) and roasted knuckles. They are really big, so one can be enough for three people. They can accomodate about 3000 people. From students to billionaires, everyone goes there from time to time. Heurigen tends to be expensive, but a bit east of Airport "Schwechat", you'll find villages like "Fischamend", "Mariaelend", etc (It's a bit noisy though right under the landing jets, buf after visiting more than 100 Heurigen in my life, I'd say that's the place where the real Heurigen still exist. Every wine-grower of the village (it's a famous region for Austrian reds, called the "Carnuntum") has his Heurigen for a limited period during the year (usually two weeks, called "ausgsteckt") and it's so dirt cheap that on Saturday evening, the whole village is dining out there. Can't remember of having ever seen a tourist there except me. I learned that by Austrian "fressers" Sometimes, the have divine roasted baby pork for 5 Euros. After several visits, I'd never go back to Grinzing. Another very nice, even beautiful Heurigen ist the "Wieninger" (a famous wine grower) in "Stammersdorf". You can reach that place by streetcar. Cut down on food a bit. Normally, food is rather expensive at the Heurigens for what it is, but it's self service, so it' up to you. In earlier time, the Viennes took along their own food. I think it's still allowed (by Heurigen law), but it's very unusual nowadays, I believe. I wouldn't try it being a foreigner. Edited for wrong address (Reinthalers)

An address to everyday cooks as dilettantic and limited like me. Let me say a word here about my view on ingredients and the search for them. I'v just marinated the rabbit with some garlick and rosemary. Rosemary seems to be a simple thing, but it's not. There are differences. Some are very perfumed and can be too itense for certain dishes. Other are more on the herbacious side and are more elegant. If one like to cook technically simple things, than apart from cooking time you need to play on these parameters to achieve better results. Sometimes, suppliers do a disservice here. My haircutter, an old Italian born in San Remo on the Ligurian cost of Italy, told me once about his difficulties with pesto sauce, a signature dish from his region . Why? Because the basilic he could buy here in Sitzerland (a herb which was rather rare here some decades ago) was simply ... too aromatic. It was just too strong, too dominating. I'm sure this was a result by breeding and cultivation. For sure well intended, but more of the same doesnt' need to be a better thing. He said the basilic of his youth was more elegant, more "vegetable". He couldn't use the quantities of his traditional recipe. He compensated with adding spinach to get the colour and taste of his "real" pesto, because a pesto dish needs a certain amount of sauce to look good. The "dilution" helped to preserve taste and appearance of the original dish. (Wine lovers know about the dilemma of elegance vs. concentration) It's all a matter of taste, and I'd never claim there's a right way to make, for instance, pesto. But even if we talk about an unspecific ingredient like basilic, there are nuances and differences. The simpler a dish, the more imortant to play with such minor differences to achieve a result which expresses you own taste and your own way of cooking. For people with severly limited technical capabilties like me, it can be very rewarding to play on such nuances. Sometimes, you can surprise people with an absolutely simple, well known dish, composed by maybe 5 different ingredients and no technical level at all. Just by very carefully choosing and composing "trivial" ingredients like pepper, salt, garlick, cook wine and a herb like rosemary or basilic and so on. Suddenly, the sum can be quite more than the addition of the parts.

As a suggestion by someone who never has eaten them: They could make an excellent base for a pasta dish originating in the Campania region around Naples: Pasta with crude tomato sauce. The tomatos need to be absolutely ripe, of course. After peeling and deseeding (but keep all liquidity) and cuttting in small cubes or thin sticks, marinate the tomatos with som basilic leafs, a bit EVOO and two squashed garlick cloves for some 10 minutes. Take out the garlick. Add salt and pepper. Mix with still very hot, boiled pasta (fetuccine, linguine, ziti, penne, etc.) . Serve wihtout parmigiano. Irresitible. Edited for 8 typos

Try something like "Que-shwe-lty", rather quickly spoken. But please, be careful when trying abroad. I have a friend from abroad who once ordered a "Wähe" (Swiss fruit pie) and got "Wädli" (nuckle of pork) instead with his cup of coffee. Whit the globalization of e Gullet, we are going to need a SoundByteGullet aside of ImageGullet to upload some .wav's. I find "Gschwellti" interesting, because it shows there are traditional dishes, where the left-over recipe is already built in, somehow.

I hope that the "fair-use "portion might impress an English publisher in food area. Or that the French publishing house "Robert Laffond" might see a translation of the comlete preface (as a .pdf document maybe) as a pusher for the book. As for Karl-Heinz Goetze: Les Chefs, this would require a full blown licence edition, of course.

Fiist of all, potatoes There are two camps of Röst lovers: the larger (classic) one likes the potatoes pree-boiled, preferably the day before, the small one prefers raw potatoes. The ideal potato type are "semi-firmly boiled" (itleral translation) for the first variant, and rather "firmly-boiled" for the raw varaiant. (There's a traditional basic dinner called "Gwschwellti", which is essentialy composed by a an assortment of cheese and boiled potatoes. One uses to prepare a lot of boiled potatoes to be on the safe side with quantity. Rösti on the next used to be almost mandatory) You grate your potatoes with a coarse grater. Salt is mandatory now, but you can add a finely chopped, slightly roasted onion or some roasted bacon cubes. Mix all. Form kind of a pie. For frying, you can use a lot of butter, clairfiied butter, lard or a mix of it. The use of a non-stick fry pan is strongly advised here, but connoisseurs prefer a iron cast pan with all the hassles of sticking. Now you fry your pie for 20-30 minutes on rather mild heat, just to get them golden and brown and with some crisp areas. If you prepare the variant with the raw potatoes as ingredient, then when frying the first side, cover with a lid to assure it's really done.

I think it's what we call "Felche" in the German part. Very widespread and also known in Germany and Austrial. I had it three days ago. If you ever buy it, be careful with cooking time. They tend to become dry really quick. Overdoneness is the problem here. I prefer to make a very reduced (vitually back to pure fat) butter/wine or butter/lemon reduction and then to butterpoach its filets, maybe for 5 minutes only, toghether with some parsley or basilic leafs. Stay definitely on the "rare" side. It's a salmonide, but flavour is very subtle.

Ok, this was a bad day. A hangover and even swimming in the lake didn't help. We cancelled the "Coniglio in umido" (braised rabbit) and went for pasta ("Papardelle al pomodoro") instead: Sometimes, I love the tomato sauce very "short" (little cooking time, about 10 minutes. But the finely chopped onions shoud be still sufficiently done.) Canned tomato sugo is an absolutely essential thing to have in your food stock, yet quality can difer horribly. For us, it's another trivial product well worth the search for better stuff. We once bought samples of many different brands and made all of them simoultanously and exactly the same way, just to compare all of them. Such an effort pays immensly. I cook the pasta just a bit under the al dente doneness, so I can mix them with the sauce, wait another two minutes over light fire and they suck a bit of the sauce. Add Parmigiano or Sbrinz. The rabbit is for tomorrow then. The first evening in three weeks wihtout a soccer game, BTW. We all need it.

We quitted later than late yesterday and had more than a few bottles. I hope you understand that I can't gear up to verbous mode. Here's my main course of yesterday evening. Steak and Rösti. I asked my friends about their habits with cooking Rösti. They asked "Cooking Rösti? But that's something you eat in a restaurant." What we did.

Some years ago, we travelled in the Piedmont with friends from Washington state. The journey happened to overlap with my anniversary, and we went ot for a typical Piedmontese multi-course dinner (in Cossano Belbo, for those who care to know). They were a bit nervous about their two kids of age 3 and 5 and thought a dinner longer than 1-2 hours would be impossible. We entered the restaurant at 8. They couldn't believe it when we left at 12:30. They had so much fun watching their kids running around, playing with other kids, walking outside on the balcony where caring of the kids was shared with other parents and eventually visiting the kitchen just to provoke smiling faces there.

Now you said it: "Fermented" This is a key word in matters of delicious flavours. Fermentation is something like controlled rot. Our readiness to accept such "prima vista" stinky, rotten stuff as delicacies must have to do with very old parts of our limbic system, I guess. But I've never heard of such theories. I know that the Asian taste for fermented food is completely different from the European one, which in contrast has a more to do with the fermentation of animalic aminoacids (cheese, meat). Beatrix lived in China from 1980-1985 and has many private and business contacts until today. So we know that cheese and similar, fermented animalic produces are completely unacceptable for Asian palates. This family is running that lovely basic restaurant for some 100 years. ...no hurry, no hurry .... Thank you for remembering my suggestion for the first Swiss-Japanese eGullet get-together. And this is our schedule this evening. Meeting some 20 friends I know since schooldays, playing a Mini-Golf game (winning is a shame!), then sitting in the restaurant garden there and eating grilled sausages and lots of "Rösti". And cool beer. Until late, late night. Life is sad, but tonight we are going to be happy.

Be prepared for alternatives to Brisquet. Sauerkraut (Jan Ulrich), Basque tapas (Iban Mayo), ossobuco (Ivan Basso). What region is Taylor Hamilton coming from? I supect this on is going to be the toughest "Grand Boucle" for Lance of all six. Last year already, without the terrible tactical blunders by Ulrich ... The peloton is pretty equilibrated these days. I suggest a menu all in yellow. Risotto milanese, yellow zuchinis, ananas, yellow peppers, pommes frites, omelette, cordon bleu ( ), curry and so on. I'm inspired here by visits to the Giro d'Italia, where whole Italian towns are drowning in pink, the colour of the leader jersey in that race. BTW I'm closely following this race for more than 30 years now. As for the great winners, I liked all of them: Eddy "le cannibale" Merckx, Bernard "le blaireau" Hinault, Miguel "Miguelon" Indurain, Lance "le Texan" Armstrong, but equally the van Impes, the Thevenets, the Zoetemelks, the Roches, the LeMonds, the Delgados, the Rijs, the Ulrichs, whoever. I used to climb some of the "Giants" of the Alps with my bycicle, you know. Ahhhh, c'est dur, ça. Vive le Tour!

Making a selection about the most preferred dish (or food) is a torment for me. And after 5 minute of thinking about a plausible answer, I will refrain from making a single choice and I'm offering three instead: - "Poulette de Bresse sautée à l'ail" (it's still ok for me if the chicken is not from the Bresse, but occasionally ...it has to be. ) - Whole beef shank, slowly braised for 9 hours - Roasted baby goat All these dishes are most simple, yet all of them can be found (or have been once) on the menu lists of three star luxury restaurants. I've never eaten one of them in such an etablissement, though. They are an incarnation of my cooking philosophy.

Hello Helen! Incindentally, this very evening we are going to dine at that restaurant I recommended back then. And I wasn't there since I posted it then! There is a tradtitional glas. It's intended for white wine and clearly shows that there was a time when coming together and having a good time was much more important than sniffing, tasting and talking about some liquidity. You used to get your glas, you sipped, you had to say "Ahh, that's a nice wine" and that was it. I can't really recommend it for wine, of course, except you want to express: "Please no wine talk this evenening". (Hmmmm, OTOH maybe it could be useful to silence some of those non-stop wine talkers): Here's a picture showing that particual glas shape, and same time, now everybody should know what's the meaning of "planed cheese": It's bad, but it's not as catastrophic as we suspected before we bought it.

This evening, two pizzas in front of the tv: one marinara, one a "white" pizza with minuscule quantities of EVOO, rosemary and garlick. No wine. Yesterday, the Portuguese kicked out England. There are two Portuguese here in the neighbourship. They showed up after the match. We had a very strenuous third half time until "early" in the night. No wine please.

Why I like so much artisanal produces. Those who followed a bit my eGullet posts should have noticed that much of my food interest surrounds cheese, wine and cured meat. For me, these things have something in common: their best representants are artisanal produces and many are fixed to a certain expression and thus remain recognizable. A parmigiano cheese should taste like a parmigiano cheese, a cabernet sauvignon should taste like a cabernet sauvignon, a felino salami taste like a felino salami. Within the scope of such produces, creativity and innovation of a producer aims not so much at more variety (horizontal enlarging) , but rather at higher refinement of the same process (vertical enlarging). He has to innovate his processes, yet regard the characteristics. It's a kind of innovation which has more to do with a Kai-Zen approach: stepwise, constant refinement over extended time. And one should not forget that a producer has not only to try to achieve improvement in order to reach his goal of excellence, but has to regard the constant shift in the underlying parameters over time. (pantha rei). As a consumer, I'm fascinated by the search for superiour or simply different produces within the same species. I feel challenged by the task of compairing such produces. I feel overwhelmed by the depth of the variants, the different techniques, the different terroirs, the subtle change within the range of the same producer over time. And how sometimes the character of a person can be detected in a seemingly same produce. Or to use a metapher: it's more like watching the work of calligraphs than that of painters. In the end, small, hard to notice differences are overweighing the obvious similarities.

As for chocolate, I bought some pralinés and made the pictures at home: Impressed, eh? But - if there was a worldwide praliné competition, this walnut-size balls would be a strong contender. These are Sprünglis "Truffe du jour", and the decisive words here are "du jour". Daily made and intended for immediate consumation. 2-3 days in the fridge is possible. But you need a strong will or you bought several pounds. ($40/lb)

Made a walk through the shopping area of Zurich City and tried to make some pictures of choclatiers and other shops. Digi-cams and their operators seem to be out of favour these days, not only with the Pentagon. "Why?, "For whom?", "We have to ask the boss", "Sure it's possible, but you should contact the office first" and so on. Modern times. But it's not always that way: Ok, it's not exactly fine dining, but for sure it's good food. THE classics of grill sausage here. The brown ones are called "Cervelat", the white ones "Sankt-Galler Kalbsbratwurst". It's a really cool place called Vorderer Sternen Grill. I f you like sausages, visiting this stand is a must. BTW, there was a thread here about Zurich, and a noble Englishman called the place "simply heaven". I scanned all "Elsewhere" threads, but I couldn't find that threat anymore. Are we loosing threads?

There's a speciality bookshop for English books in Zurich claiming to offer 30'000 titles. I'm there from time to time to check for English wine books. They might have what you are looking for. I'll ask next time.