Duvel

Well... the dessert certainly was 😉

After spending the last couple of weeks in New Zealand I am back in HK. And today is the first day since last winter I actually feel a bit chilly. Ok, might be because in my free time I run around in shorts and T-shirt and today we were at merely 17oC, with high humidity and a light drizzle now and then ... Regardless, I felt really like warming, comforting food. As Grünkohl und Bregenwurst is pretty much out of the question (due to lack of raw material), I opted for the food of my second home: Oden. My wife does not share my love for the simplistic, neither for molded fish cakes with spicy mustard - so we had a chicken/pork based bone broth with jujube and goji berries (courtesy of Haidilao, a big Chinese hotpot chain) in parallel, with all ingredients shared between both broths and dipping sauces or karashi (hot Japanese mustard), respectively. And some seasonal Japanese beer followed by hot sake (from my former hometown Kyoto) to go with it. Needless to say I am a veeeeery happy camper tonight 🤗

Fantastic. Just the thing I was looking for...

Grilled lemongrass chicken thighs with thai-ish Aubergine puree (walnuts filling in for the more appropriate peanuts) ...

The latest treat at our local Pizza Hut ... Salted duck/chicken (?) egg yolk pizza. To quote Sepultura: Refuse/Resist !

Really ? So quickly after Christmas ..?

Yes, please !

Fideua with clams, prawns and sausage for yesterday’s Three King’s Day. Served with allioli ...

Christmas Dinner in a rental cabin in Taupo, NZ: Rosemary-crusted lamb rump with Kūmara purée and gravy* ... Not bad for being made on this equipment, if I may say so myself 😉 — *Gravy being improvised from onions, garlic, tomato, Sauvignon blanc, rosemary, sweet ham, instant coffee, a dash of BBQ sauce, roasted and finely ground toast bread and a bit of blue cheese. Strained it made a rich, balanced and very umami sauce.

I have that one, actually already my second one, after buying it first while living in JP in 2003. It is excellent - foolproof & perfect (and I mean perfect) rice every time. And makes pretty good soups, too ...

Every Sunday night ... about 100 g carbs. Better make it count 😉

Got some nice veal shin yesterday and decided to do a SV braise. I prepared a sauce with the usual suspects: onions, carrots, garlic, tomato purée, white wine, bay leave - and augmented with fish sauce, oyster sauce, powdered porcini and two tablespoons of ‘Nduja. The sauce was probably the most umami thing I have made in a long time; I had difficulties not to eat it on the spot, but 90% survived. As my vacuum sealer is a very basic model that can’t handle liquids, I froze the sauce on a tray. Veal shin got a quick salt, pepper and sear treatment and was bagged with the frozen sauce sheet. 24h @ 176F. Crostinis with the buttery bone marrow and Maldon flakes as a starter, followed by the tender shanks in just the strained bag juices (solids were discarded) on top of mashed oven potatoes with copious amounts of butter and nutmeg. Very, very satisfying ...

Spaghetti Vongole ... for the family. I had two eggs, boiled in soy sauce 😉 (not pictured)

Already did

Noooooo ... Kale is my favourite veggie by far. What I can’t wrap my head around, however, is how you can eat Kale that is still green with distinct leaves and has not been harvested half-frozen and boiled for hours with cured meat products. Maybe if you give the German version a go, you’ll fall in love with it as well. Especially in it’s ritualised version ...

More gelatinous in terms of the meat ? This is very interesting ... Would your assessment then be that the browning “facilitates” the leakage of gelatine into the sauce ?

New one here in Hong Kong: CoCo House curry - this one is FANTASTIC !!!

More cabbage pizza ... today I shredded the cabbage more coarse, resulting in a rougher texture, more like a veggie pancake. Taste again was neutral, but the mouthfeel was better than the “riced” cabbage version . It simply had more “bite”. Toppings were mushrooms and smoked lardons ...

Yessss ! That looks so good, @Anna N...

Sunday night is pizza night. And while preparing the pies for my family I decided that after two weeks of ketogenic diet I might just have one or two slices ... Tomorrow back to meat and veggies, but tonight I enjoyed the mushroom & salami one (that disappeared so fast that I couldn’t make a picture) as much as the flammkuchen with chicken and rosemary ...

“Chicketta” - chicken legs, scored and rubbed with salt, garlic, fennel, rosemary, chili and black pepper. Rolled in the skin to form a roulade and SV’d for 150 min @ 70oC. Checked for consistency & taste, very pleasant. Will think about deep frying or finishing from cold in the convection oven. Or maybe removing skin layer and then breading and deep frying - so many options 🧐 ...

That’s basically tiny shreds of shirataki, right ? How satisfied are you with those ... can you compare it to cauliflower rice ?

Nothing more romantic than enjoying a fancy dinner with your love interest wearing a pair of Mickey Mouse ears ...

Yup. One has to prioritice ...

As if you could tell ...