Today I cut some branches of my walnut tree. I felt bad for the bucketful of green walnuts that should go to waste, so I began a small search for a simple way to make use of the semi-ripe nuts. David Lebovitz in his blog “Sweet life in Paris” made the convincing suggestion: Liqueur de noix!
In 2 months I will know whether this spontaneous experiment was a success.
A clafouti is a great summer cake. It has no crumbly, greasy “floor”, but is juicy and moist and fruity and still doesn’t fall apart. Julie, originally from France, to be precise la Bretagne, makes the best clafouti I have ever tried. Of course I had to get the recipe and her permission to pass it on to my dear readers!
Julie’s clafouti
150g flour
4 eggs
80-100g sugar
80g melted butter
1/2l lukewarm milk
300g fruit (cherries, plums, blueberries….)
Butter your baking dish.
Preheat the oven to 200°C.
Blend eggs and sugar.
Add melted butter, flour, milk in that order.
Spread out fruit on the baking dish.
Pour the batter over the fruit.
Bake for approx. 35mins.
Dust with powdered sugar.
Serve cold or warm.
| … quick photo, before the last bit of delicious gazpacho disappeared in my mouth. |
Not only the southern part of the Península cools itself down with chilled gazpacho during the summer months, I loved to savour it under the hot sun of the Alta Meseta, in Salamanca, where I spent my student days. It’s easy to prepare if you’ve got a mortar, a blender and plenty of field grown, sun riped vegetables: tomato + cucumber + bell pepper + onion +garlic + white bread + chilled water, salt, olive oil and vinegar = traditional Spanish gazpacho.
There is a big variety of gazpachos, the green one, the white one, the Ajo Blanco, the Salmorejo – even the traditional red gazpacho is prepared differently depending on the region and personal taste. (Hmmm, I’ll never forget the mouth-watering Ajo Blanco my friend’s grandmother used to bring along in a small plastic milk can.)
For a basic recipe I recommend you always take tomatoes, cucumber and bell pepper, salt, vinegar and olive oil. For the rest you may play around with garlic, onions, white bread or celery sticks…. Anyway, gazpacho is always hearty and satisfying and, in addition, it provides you with salt and vitamins when it’s sweating hot!
My quick gazpacho comes out of the blender and is prepared in a minute ( well, 5minutes..)
2 ripe, uncooked tomatoes
1/2 cucumber, unpeeled
1 spring onion
2 celery sticks
1 red bell pepper
1 glass of chilled water
2 tbs olive oil
2 tbs vinegar
salt and pepper to taste
Chop the vegetables and blend in a blender. Chill.
If you want to add bread and garlic, mash salt, garlic and bread in a mortar before blending with the vegetables. It’s worth the effort. Enjoy!
design and photo by Vik
The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.
— Chuck Close
(Source : nirvikalpa)
In her vegan cookbook “The kind diet” Alicia Silverstone shares a great pizza recipe we often prepare in our own kitchen: Radicchio Pizza with Truffle Oil. Actually I don’t like either of the components (radicchio is just so bitter and truffle oil so strong and predominant), but in this very composition it’s genious.
For the original recipe you need:
1 large head radicchio
olive oil
salt, pepper
white truffle infused oil, to taste
1 pizza crust, fresh or frozen
For the spinach and bell pepper variety you need:
2 big handfuls of spinach
1 red bell pepper
salt, pepper
olive oil
1 pizza crust fresh or frozen.
Lately I tried a variety of Alicia’s original recipe. Instead of heaping sliced radicchio on the pizza crust I took fresh spinach leaves and finely sliced red bell pepper.
I dressed the spinach and the bell pepper with salt, pepper and olive oil, scattered it on the pizza crust and then put it into the preheated oven at 200°C.
After about 15 to 20 minutes, when the crust has turned golden and the spinach is smooth with crispy tips, the pizza is ready. It is best when served immediately!
In case you like to prepare the original radicchio pizza, it is essential that you first toast the pizza crust, then you add the dressed radicchio only for the remaining 3 to 5 minutes until it is warm and just starting to wilt.
On sunny days I try to do it like the plants and soak up all the light. I hope the green has the same uplifting effect on you as on me. Have a lovely weekend of Pentecost!
I totally love to pass by Sylke John’s flowershop “Blumenschnecke”. I met Sylke a long time ago when she still worked in another flower shop. Now she has not only a loving husband but also a sweet little daughter, two super cute kittens and her own flowershop at the family’s B&B. And happily she brought along all her creativity and sense for colours and surprises.
The little snailshells inspired her for the flowershop’s name.
I initially dropped by just to get some peonies (my own ones in the garden are still a bit lazy- no surprise with the cold temperatures) and I left the shop with an armful of white and cream gillyflowers, some historical roses emanating a dazzling scent and all the deep red peonies there were.
Blumenschnecke at Landpension John, Altwahnsdorf 28, 01445 Radebeul,
Tel. 0351-830 33 43.
using the days to work in my personal paradise..
