The "Salz & The City – Kochen für Freunde" cookbook is out. "Coeur de sel" is featured with a recipe.
The book is in german.

«Salz & The City – Kochen für Freunde» ist das brandneue Kochbuch von waskochen.ch – mit den besten Rezepten, mit Küchengeschichten und Tricks; mit vielen Bildern und Videostills.

Seit 2002 sammelt waskochen.ch Rezepte bei Freunden und Mitgliedern der Community. Die Rezepte sind alltagserprobt, einfach und doch frisch und speziell. «Salz & The City» serviert die besten Rezepte von waskochen.ch. Das Buch ist genauso knackig, urban und mittendrin wie die fast gleichnamige TV-Serie. Es gibt Einblick in Küchen der Rezeptautoren aus Schweizer Städten, mit Bildern aus Web-Videos, mit Alltags-Tricks, persönlichen Geschichten. Kurz: genau die richtige Inspiration für eine Tafelrunde mit Freunden.
 
Das ideale Geschenk für Leute, die gerne Freunde bekochen, jedoch nicht immer Zeit haben, stundenlang in der Küche zu stehen. Mit vielen Bildern und praktischen Tricks.
Das Buch kann online bei waskochen.ch gekauft werden.

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After a brief discussion with the lady down the cheese shop, I made my first cheese pies - they turned out absolutely delicious!

~ Serves 3 when accompanied by salad ~

Ingredients:

• 250g Fondue cheese mixture
• 80ml Light Sour Cream
• 1 small egg
• 1dl White wine
• 1 Garlic clove (chopped & crushed)
• 350g puff pastry (ready made...)
• 1 Teaspoon white flour
• Black Pepper, Caraway Seeds, Nutmeg (freshly ground)

Recipe:

1. Mix up cheese with all the ingredients except the pastry ;) in a bowl and let settle for half hour.
2. Preheat oven at 220 degrees
3. Butter a cup cake tray generously, press thinly rolled puff pastry into the shapes
4. Fill them two thirds with the cheese mixture
5. Bake for 25 - 30 minutes, bottom heat only for the last 5 minutes.

I was yearning for this for so long -  a kitchen aid. You probably all know the discussions, how many kitchenware does one need? Do you have a juicer? I have. It uses a lot of shelf space and takes way to long to clean. I even have a cutter and a raclette oven oh and of course a toaster, everybody does no? Almost forgot the steamer I hardly ever use for the same reason as the juicer. And I had a mixer which broke down recently and brought up the whole kitchen aid issue again. Because actually I decided to restrain the kitchen aid.
So what happened? Since the day the mixer broke down I was looking for a new one with the same power as my old turmix one. My turmix was a two in one, you cold use it as a mixer but it also had a very good puree stick.
Of course I was (again) tempted but decided that it's to expensive and that we don't really have space for a kitchen aid. So I went to town on a grey saturday to buy a new mixer only to meet a very nice saleslady who explained, very plausible, why I actually need a kitchen aid and a puree stick. That was more than I could take, gone were all the good resolutions .... so here I am,  a proud and happy kitchen aid ( and a puree stick) owner.
If you now think I 'm a boring person because I choose the white one,I have to tell you that this color was on sale so at least  there I saved a bit of money.

How is it? I did not really have time to experiment so far, but my Friday bread is peanuts with a little help by our kitchen aid.

Today finally I found time to bake something different than zopf. Fanny gave me the inspiration with her last blog post :

Be kind, rewind - cake weekend au citron et confit de clémentines à la vanille.

Here's the making off, oh and strongly I recommend you take your time to make this lovely cake too. It's delicious, especially the confit de clémentines, I could eat the whole pot right away.

I've never seen a batter like this before so light and fluffy after only 3 minutes in kitchen aid :-) I'm looking forward to my next pavlova thats gonna be a totally new experience.The next step and actual goal is MACARONS.
I only have to buy an oven thermometer and good food coloring.

Thanks to a recipe by Christophe Champagnac of the Restaurant Les Arums I realized how beautifully anise goes with chestnuts. The original recipe was ' cappucino of chestnuts with star aniseed, pan fired foie gras, balsamic caramel ' (...). Now I don't eat meat and I had no star aniseed in the house, so I went about the recipe as follows:

• Sweat finely chopped onions in butter, quench with Pernod/Pastis
• Throw in 300g cooked chestnuts
• Add 2dl of vegetable stock, - preferably yesterdays home made vegetable soup, simmer for 25 minutes
• Add 100ml fresh cream, salt (if needed) and freshly ground black pepper

Heat 50g sugar in a pan until it turns brown, add 100ml balsamico vinegar, add this to your ready dish (drizzle on top or stir in lightly).

Serve with potato mash, some bitter veg like warm treviso (with pernot, garlic, lemon juice) or whatever suits you.

This is probably the most beautiful veggie of all. Sorry sorry I don't want to be mean to all you beautiful carrots, potatoes and such. You know it's the intrinsic values that count, and this radish certainly is not the best veggie of all. Though, served with a pinch of salt, fresh lemon juice and olive oil it makes a nice apéro. Of course it also a nice addition to any salad. I probably should try to roll it into sushi once.

I work way to much at the moment, it's buying season and instead of trying new recipes from my lovely new cookbooks I run from one fair to the other.  Hotel breakfast and the junk food one usually eats  during the day don't make me feel too good either. In the evening we usually eat out but tis time I was to late with reserving tables so all the new restaurants I wanted to try were already fully booked.
Anyway I have a weekend at home and was full of ideas of things to do and to cook. Sadly I realized very quickly ( friday evening this means) that I am way to exhausted. And that instead of cooking great dinners, sewing this new pants I intended and blog a lot I should go for a walk in the wintery landscape and sleep a lot.
At this state I wish I would know more fast but yummy dinner recipe. Usually I do THIS but this involved too much different pans and plates, means to much cleaning up afterwards ...

This is probably the simplest  dinner I know and while it's baking one can take a hot bath, read a book or watch some telly.

Recipe:

you need:

6-7 pears
puff pastry
roquefort cheese

Roll out the dough, wash the pears cut into quarters and lay out on the dough.
Bake on 200° for 20- 30 minutes. Take the pie out sprinkle over the the roquefort cheese and put back into the oven and bake for another 10 minutes on 150°.
Serve with green salad or maybe a light soup.
Bon app!

I don't like to admit it, but our boy is very picky when it comes to food. He always was like this, he hated the first ever mash ( it was carrot ) we made him. Today he could live from pasta and parmesan cheese. Vegetables he likes as long as we don't cook them. Risotto is fine but please no rice! Strangely enough he loves salad, asparagus  and artichokes ( the later ones cooked ). But fruits are basically a no go. Apples sometimes and tangerines.
For christmas we wanted to make some kitchen gifts for friend and family, jams are easy and nice but apple jam? So we were left with tangerine. In my cookbooks I couldn't find a single tangerine jam recipe and on the internet I found several, all totally different. So I decided to do a bit of a freestyle. Tangerine juice cooked with a bit of cinnamon and some tangerine zest...et voila.  Let me tell you the result is just delicious! We've already eaten 3 pots and made a second load.

Recipe:

2- 3 Kg Tangerines  should give you 1l of tangerine juice
1 Cinnamon stick
800 - 1000 gr sugar
1 Lemon
Pectin
1/2 tangerin zested

Peel the tangerines and juice them in a juicer. Bring to boil ( together with the cinnamon ) in a pan with a heavy bottom. Let it cook for several minutes. Add the sugar and the pectin according to the package instructions. Every gelling agent  need a different procedure it seems. Add the juice of the lemon and the zest and fill into the warm glasses.

I love to brunch. Saturday and sunday noon we sit down for a extended brunch. Nice food and good music.
The table is right next to the turntables so during our meals music and food always sort of mixes.
This was a pretty extensive one, but it's christmas so we are excused ;-) Not on the pictures but a must are fried pasta with soy sauce and onion rings. Always good but essential after the good bottle of red wine we had the evening before. I wasn't fast enough to take the picture, our boy was already eating them.

Another cook book I recently bought is Fish by Tom Aikens. I can only recommend it, especially to people who like fish but are concerned by the state of our oceans and fish stock.

"We are constantly being told about the benefits of eating fish and seafood - high in protein, low in fat and rich in nutrients. Yet we also know that species like cod and tuna are in danger of extinction while unscrupulous trawlers are over-fishing waters around the world. In this stunning new collection of fish recipes, Tom Aikens takes readers with him on a voyage of discovery. Having travelled to fish markets and spoken to fishermen worldwide, his recipes include new takes on ever-popular fish, such as sea bass, scallops and oysters, as well as ideas for lesser known but underfished, species like megrim sole, ling and gurnard. While urging us to ensure that we eat only sustainably sourced, line and net-caught fish." randomhouse books

Read this interwiew with tom on seafood choices an organisation mobilizing and connecting world leaders who support action for a sustainable supply of seafood and healthy oceans through responsible business, management, policy, and regulation.

I just bought the new cookbook from Nigel Slater and adore it. All about vegetables in the kitchen and in the garden. The perfect book for a cook with his own vegetable patch like myself.
It's the first cookbook I read like a book. I like the way he writes, the stories on his garden and his experiences as a gardener.  His cooking I always loved, healthy, down to earth food made with lot's of passion.
The book is full of beautiful pictures by Jonathan Lovekin. No doubt this is my cook book of the year.

"Tender is the story of my vegetable patch, how it came to be and what I grow in it. The book is published in two volumes, vegetables and fruit. Nearly a thousand pages in length and taking five years to write, Tender is a memoir, a study of fifty of our favourite vegetables, fruits and nuts and a collection of over five hundred recipes. Photographed, as all of my books, by Jonathan Lovekin in my own kitchen a metre away from the vegetable patch. Volume One is out now, Volume Two is to be published in 2010. For more details, click below."

more on nigel slater