Po-tay-toes, fried.

I went out to a work thing the other night. With drinks. Then I came home. There were lots of people in the house. Then I fell asleep in our alcove. Then I got woken up when everyone else was going to bed. Got into bed fully dressed. There are few things more gross than waking up at 10 in the morning in your jeans with the full lipstick-and-eyeliner things still happening on your face. Anyway, I woke up and I immediately wanted food. Something starchy. There's a surprise. Ideally I wanted noodles, but a) I always want noodles and b) our fridge and cupboards were woefully empty. No noodles for Sophie then.

There were three things in the fridge that were not condiments: onions, garlic, and potatoes. This meant I was going to have to bust out the pan and actually do some chopping. But I thought to myself: hey, I can work with these three ingredients. Because I'm German. Germans are good at potatoes. Especially at frying them in oil.

Granted, it's a pretty simple recipe, but the main reason I'm putting this up on das blog is that people often forget about the joys of fried potatoes. Also, you can pretty much make this for any meal. They're a stand-in for hash browns (breakfast), and obviously it's not difficult to imagine having them for lunch and dinner, maybe with a nice salad. Simon and I had them with veggie sausages the other night, because I was not allowed to make mashed potatoes for him.

The whiskey had nothing to do with this, I promise. Move along, people.

I had mine with cheapo supermarket coleslaw on that morning, which was alriiight but…. Okay I'll save the coleslaw rant for another day. Suffice to say it's high time I started making my own again.

You will need:

A pan. The bigger the better. It's not easy to achieve nice evenly browned potatoes in a tiny pan. You're constantly stirring to give all your little potato friends a chance to make direct contact with the pan, whilst at the same time trying not to turn them into a mushy mess from all that stirring.

Potatoes, halved lengthwise, then sliced thinly (see photo). The amount really is up to you. Who am I to tell you how many potatoes you want to eat? You gotta make your own choices once in awhile.

Onion. A really big one, halved, then sliced thinly. 

Garlic, minced. A whole bulb. No, just trust me on this. If you really are sceptical, then by all means just toss in 2-3 little segments worth. But you'll be depriving yourself of delicious garlicky potato goodness. Not my problem.

Olive oil. 

Pepper and salt, and some paprika to make it look pretty, and to make you feel better about eating yet another meal that is entirely brown. I'm only human.

How you do:

Pour a healthy glug of olive oil into the pan, whack in your sliced potatoes. Stir intermittently so that all the slices are coated and have a chance to fry. When the potatoes are just about starting to brown, throw in the onion and garlic. I recommend not doing it before then, otherwise the onions will start to go slightly black and charred… they just don't need to be in for as long as the taters. I learned this by doing it myself, as you may have noticed. Salt/pepper/paprika. Guten Appetit.

PS: We have food in the house now. All is well again.

Let's talk about blueberry pie.

Actually, let's start off by talking about blueberries. I present you with an amalgamation of my blueberry-related memories/knowledge.

1) Does anybody remember the children's book 'Blueberries for Sal'*? That's what I think of every time I eat blueberries. Despite being written in the late 1940s, it was seemingly still super popular in the early 90s. Because I went to an American school until I was 7, and hung out with mainly American kids, this book was read to me at practically every sleepover I went to. It was also heavily reenacted by us in pretend play. Nobody ever wanted to be the bears.

*Quick plot summary for all the non-North Americans out there who have no idea what I'm on about: little Sal goes blueberry picking with her mum. At the same time, a bear cub and his mum are out eating berries in preparation for the winter. Sal and cub wander off, and both accidentally end up following the wrong mum. The book is for kids, so it obviously ends on a happy note, i.e. not realistically at all (which would probably be Sal getting mauled, bear cub getting shot with mum's Marlin rifle).

2) It is now widely known that in addition to being delicious, blueberries are also super healthy. As a preteen, I found out via my dad's Men's Health magazine that they're good for prostates. Great! I was then informed that I do not have a prostate. Never mind. Apparently they're a superfood for both boys and girls.

3) Blueberries are expensive in the UK. Wahhhh.

4) Blueberries make a lot of things more delicious. We all know this. Think pancakes, muffins, yoghurt, granola. Also, salad. Believe it.

5) Pie is also a great excuse to eat blueberries. Or is it the other way around? 

Whatever. Anyway. PIE.

The award for the best pie maker ever goes to my mum's good friend Kathy, who writes a darn good food blog with her siblings. She is the goddess of pie. And a few years ago she passed her pie knowledge onto my mum. Obviously I begged mum to teach me, too.

Here is how you pie. The link leads to Kathy's recipe for the crust. The rest is jotted down below.

Thank you Kathy!

Just an excuse to show off pretty nail polish from OPI's new Spiderman collection. 

For the filling:

- 4 cups blueberries ( Or any kind of fruit for that matter, if blueberry pie really isn't your thing. Frozen fruit works as well, by the way. Baking times will change though.)

- 1 cup sugar

- 1/4 cup cornflour

Assembly:

While the dough chills, prepare your filling by mixing the 3 ingredients together in a big bowl. Super easy, right?

Divide the dough into 2/3 for the bottom crust, and 1/3 for the top crust. Roll out the bottom crust on a well-floured surface, and ease it into a 9 or 10 inch pan. Trim the edges.

Next, pour the filling into the pan, distributing it evenly. Roll out the top crust and cover the pie with it, crimping the ends. Press together the edges further using fork tines. Sprinkle the top with water, then dust with some extra sugar.

My berries were frozen, which is why this looks somewhat odd.

Make a concentrical pattern in the top crust with a knife before sprinkling the sugar.

Bake at 220 degrees for the first 10 minutes, then at 190 degrees for 50 more minutes, or until the crust is golden.

The piece on the right is mine.

Mega props to my mum for helping with the photos ("MOOOOOOMCANYOUTAKEAPICTURE?").

Everybody must get sconed!

Hello from Northern Michigan! I'm making the most of these 10 days of freedom before heading back to London to start New Job. This involves being somewhat outdoorsy during the day, watching the Boardwalk Empire box set all night every night, and spending some time in the kitchen again. And assaulting you all with terrible Bob Dylan song lyric puns, apparently. Forgive me. It comes a bit too naturally when I'm around my dad. 

I've been coming Up North since I was tiny. It has everything a kid could possibly want - woods, wide open spaces, lakes, lots of other kids, and a place to play mini golf. Oh the memories. Not much here has changed over the past 22 years. Coming back is like travelling back in time, only now I'm a slightly taller kid who can drink, and drive a automatic car badly.* I still enjoy the mini golf (it's pirate themed, can you blame me?), and I still wander around in the woods. Only now I no longer pretend I'm Pocahontas.

What can I say, it's a special place. Aww. Anyway. Moving on.

Let's make cheddar and spring onion scones! 

I wrote down this recipe ages ago from somewhere, but I altered it by making these savoury instead of sweet. An excellent idea, if I do say so myself. I reckon substituting cracked black pepper for the spring onions would also be yum. Just do yourself a favour and use mature cheddar. None of that "mild" crap. Gross.

Oh yeah, also, the camera broke. I took this as an excuse to use my dad's iPhone. Hello Instagram!

Hi.

You will need:

- 270 g all-purpose flour

- 1 1/4 tsp baking powder

- 3/4 tsp baking powder

- 1 tsp salt

- 2 tsp sugar

- 90 g cold unsalted butter, cut up

- 90 g mature cheddar cheese, grated

- 2 large spring onions, finely sliced

- 350 ml heavy cream

Preheat oven to 190 degrees celcius. Line a baking tray with wax paper, or grease it.

Combine the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt and sugar together. Cut the cold butter into the mixture with a pastry blender (or your fingers) until it resembles coarse crumbs. Stir the cheese in. Add the cream and stir until the dough just comes together. Add the spring onion last, incorporate but don't overstir. 

With your hands, drop palm-sized mounds of dough onto the tray, leaving enough room in between the scones. Bake until golden brown, for approximately 20 minutes. Let the scones cool on a wire rack until the are warm before eating.

*(Disclaimer: I obviously don't do these things at the same time. Don't drink and drive. Or whatever the message is that I'm supposed to put here.)

The one where I show you how to make peanut butter cups.

Hello! Still not hugely big on cooking right now, but this weekend I was having an all-encompassing craving for something peanut butter-and-chocolate-esque, and I thought that I should probably take that and run with it. 

This is basically one big excuse to make something that looks and tastes vaguely like a peanut butter cup. When I was 10, I ate five of those things in one go (that's two and a half packs, kids). And then I got on my bike, rode home and had dinner. And them I probably ate the leftover pb cup for dessert, while watching Nickelodeon. Ahh, to be a bottomless pit again…… Anyway, my point is that I really really like peanut butter cups, and they were all I wanted to eat after getting home at 1am on Saturday morning. 

At around 3pm, they became a reality. I don't think you guys fully comprehend that this is the most effort I have put into making something edible since LATE JUNE (that totally deserved caps lock). Still, I wanted something that didn't need baking, where measuring was optional, and where no separating of eggs, endless mixing and shaving of chocolate into tiny microscopic pieces was required. My bullshit tolerance for the summer has been saturated. I wasn't about to fanny around with 2-page recipes.

So without further ado, I give you the peanut butter cup recipe in a few easy steps.

First, stuff you will need. Roughly.

- 140 g peanut butter (Skippy isn't allowed. Use real peanut butter.)

- 50 g of some sort of granulated sweetener (the obvious answer here is sugar, but some people might prefer to use artificial granulated sweetener, or there's this cool stuff called maple sugar and it's apparently better for you but probably only available at Wholefoods where they'll charge you £20 and claim to your firstborn.)

- 110 g butter, or some sort of spread

- 8-10 digestive biscuits, smooshed into crumbs (I recommend the freezer-bag-and-blunt-object method)

- 150 g chocolate (I've only ever used dark chocolate, but since Reese's pb cups are traditionally milk chocolate coated, who the hell am I to argue if you want to do that?)

- 60 mL milk/soy milk

- a muffin tin

- muffin cups

Ignore the agave syrup. I decided granulated sweetener would be better since I didn't want to make it runny. But by all means, try it and tell me how it turns out.

Step 1: Melt the butter in a saucepan over medium heat. 

Step 2: Stir in the peanut butter, biscuit crumbs and sugar and mix well.

Step 3: Remove the mix from heat and evenly divide amongst the muffin cups.

Step 4: In a pan over medium heat, melt the chocolate, stirring in the milk bit by bit. The mixture shouldn't be too runny, so adding the liquid slowly should prevent that. And if you screw up, you can always add more chocolate to thicken it.

Step 5: Spoon the chocolate evenly over the peanut butter mixture.

Step 6: Stick your little babies in the fridge for at least an hour.

Step 7: While you wait, stick on the Forrest Gump soundtrack and have a little sing and dance-along. Entirely optional, but highly recommended.

Step 8: Insert into face.

*I feel I should mention that these have been given the thumbs up by two people who do not actually like peanut butter (HI MELIE AND TOM). For this reason alone you should go and make them. If people who hate peanut butter enjoy eating these, well then I must have created food that everyone loves and nobody can refuse. Right? You're welcome.

I'm still here.

Soooo. It's been awhile since I last posted anything. Bad Sophie. A couple of people have been asking me about my next post, and whether I was still doing the blog thing. The answer to the latter question is yes, I guess so. As for my next post, well, here it is… but it won't involve anything recipe or food related. Not this time. 

I've been somewhat busy this past month and just haven't been able to do any cooking. I'd make myself a bowl of instant ramen noodles in between coming home and planning for the next day's lessons, sometimes I'd chop some spring onions into it if I was feeling fancy… that's pretty much all I've been willing to stretch to. This meant that my housemates had to resort to freezer food and pasta. Sorry guys.

I'm off now until September, which means that I theoretically have plenty of time to get back in that tiny kitchen. But truth be told, I currently have lost all interest in food. Even the instant noodles seem like too much effort now. It happens to the best of us, right? Losing my appetite always makes me anxious given my somewhat shaky history with food and hunger in general, but I have gotten better at reading the signs, and being sensible rather than allowing myself to regress back to old habits. At the same time, I can't really force things, so I'm currently just doing the best I can. What one resists, does persist and all that.

I'll be taking a little trip to Michigan in August. I hope to be back to my old self by then. I might just bake you guys a blueberry pie if you stick around. Or something involving maple syrup. Who knows, by that point I might just go for a little jaunt to the Upper Peninsula and tap the damn maple trees myself. Then I'll wrestle a bear. That totally happens every year.

Thank you for your patience. I'll try and end this on a high note, so here's a track from an obnoxious and perhaps overly prolific band that I happen to love. Electric Six. Michigan's finest. Well, they certainly aren't the worst - that title belongs to Insane Clown Posse. Enjoy.

A change of scenery

Once again, I have left it way too long. Ah well, better late than never, eh?! Let's get started.

Chilli. VEGETARIAN chilli. Those two words strike fear into the hearts of many. I know this to be true, because many have told me that they get a bit panicky when they find themselves in a situation where they have to eat it. Say, for example, my house. I honestly don't know what the big deal is. What makes veggie chilli so terrifying? The abundance of legumes and (god forbid) healthy things it contains? "It's something that you would make when you're low on ingredients and want to get rid of everything in your fridge. Boring." Someone actually said this to me. Hey, everyone has a right to their own opinions. In this particular case, the person in question happens to be wrong. And (excuse my bluntness) if you share this opinion, then you are also wrong. So there. Nya.

Allow me to set you straight. Allow me to bombard you with some facts.

Enter Annabel. She is one of the best humans in the world. This is a fact. She was the one who suggested this chilli. Proof of her awesomeness, clearly. 

This cooking session took place in Annabel's shiny new kitchen. My kitchen is not new, nor is it shiny. It's fine, I'm okay with this. I like my kitchen. But sometimes you need a bit of a change of scenery. We were joined by our friends James (who has featured on this blog before!) and Ross.

We may have been drinking rather a lot of Lambrini throughout the evening. Lambrini is cheap. That's a fact. And really not so bad. Once you start drinking it, it's hard to stop. (Okay, that might be an opinion. Unlike veggie chilli, I can see how Lambrini would scare people).

Chilli ingredients. All of them cheap, all of them healthy. FACT. 

The deliciousness of a chilli increases one hundredfold if you leave it to simmer and thicken for awhile. That is definitely a well-known culinary fact.

As we are probably all very aware, chilli can be eaten with rice, or wrapped up in a burrito. We did both, because we know how to live. This called for condiments. Avocado and tomato salsa. I got to cut the avocado. Avocados are my favourite thing ever.

Chilli always tastes that little bit better the day after it's made. Fact. Although we didn't get to taste this one the next day. We ate it all. Every last bit. Not gonna lie, I polished off two burritos with everything in them. I regret nothing. Besides, I don't think we could have handled the deliciousness of this chilli a day later. 

I know it's not a fancy-ass recipe, but sometimes it's just good to be reminded (or informed) of the deliciousness of veggie chilli. You need veggie chilli in your life. FACT.

YOU WILL NEED:

- one red onion, roughly chopped

- 1-2 chillis (we used 1, but it's all a matter of taste really)

- 2 tins chopped tomatoes

- 2 tins kidney beans (I'm sure you could use dried one's as well, but obviously that's a plan-ahead kind of thing, because of the soaking time)

- 250 ml veggie stock

- a good handful (that's an official measurement) of sun dried tomatoes in oil

- 1 1/2 tsp cumin

- 1/2 tsp dried oregano

- a nice big bunch of coriander. chopped up

*you might also want to add peppers, sweetcorn, maybe mushrooms, or different kinds of beans... anything goes.

It's really quite simple. Throw the onions into a pot with olive oil, toss in the chilis and wait until the onions are slightly translucent. Toss in the beans, tomatoes, and stock. Bring to boil, then turn down to a simmer. Add the cumin, oregano, coriander and dried tomatoes, plus a pinch of salt. Let simmer for about 20 minutes, or until the chilli has thickened.

(For the salsa):

- 2 tomatoes, finely chopped with the seeds removed

- 1 avocado, finely chopped

- olive oil for drizzling

- chili sauce (we used Sriracha... not exactly mexican but I firmly believe that Sriracha has a place in everything)

- juice of one lime

Combine tomatoes and avocado in a bowl. Drizzle with olive oil. Add lime juice and chilli sauce. Mix. Voila!

Eat it ALL with tortillas, or rice. Or both. Don't forget the sour cream, and/or cheese.

A week at home.

I went to Berlin for a week. I visited my mum and dad. I let others cook for me, and I took lots of photos.

Although she probably didn't realise she was doing so at the time, my mum taught me how to cook when I was a kid. I always enjoyed watching her make meals, and for better or for worse, I probably got my slightly ad hoc style of cooking from her. She would often work with whatever we happened to have in the fridge and get creative. We ate lots of vegetables, lots of fish. Soups featured heavily in our household,  every time I go back I get treated to at least two soups. This visit was no exception.

On the first evening back, mum made a cheese heart. Coeur de fromage. With strawberry sauce. The last time I had this I was about 10 years old! It's a good dessert for people who don't have a sweet tooth. Despite it being heavy on the soft cheeses, with a splash of cream, it's far from being rich. It has an almost cottage cheese-like texture, but let me tell you, it is so much more satisfying than that! The sweet strawberry sauce offsets it nicely, although mum reduced the amount of sugar and decided to forgo heating and straining the strawberries as the recipe suggests. She simply whazzed them up with a bit of sugar, and I actually prefer the sauce a bit tangier. Now that I've gotten older, dumping a load of sugar onto a bunch of strawberries seems pointless.

Her state-of-the-art kitchen puts mine to shame. She even has a hand mixer.

Guys! This bowl is older than I am!

Mum has a lot of nice China. And she even uses it occasionally. When her second favourite daughter comes over. Fwohohoho.

And then we dipped eggs in dye! I wish everyone a very belated happy Zombie Jesus day!

 

This blog may have been a bit heavy on the photos, and a bit light on everything else. But I don't feel like waffling on and on today. Services will resume as normal soon, don't you worry.