Tzatziki! Gesundheit!

East becoming variable, 3 or 4.

Smooth or slight.

Fair.

Moderate or good.

I know: First I am quite for weeks and then I post two recipes in one day (I actually feel tempted to write up a third). But I just happen to have some time now, which is unusual.

And this is a request and my memory is not that good, so I might forget that request. And I helps that I am nibbling on yesterday`s leftover Tzatziki, so I can as well write it up now.

Tzatziki! More than a dip or a sauce. Its a starter or a stand- alone light dish. Not quite sauce, not quite cucumber salad.

And while the commercial ones tend to be really vile, the dish is dead easy to make. Of course there are rules, but rules are there to be broken.

However: Dont skip on the garlic. It is supposed to be gutsy and sharp. And benefits from resting.

And please serve it with bread, at least pita bread. Dont waste an excellent dish on mediocre crisps. If you want a dip for that, go to the supermarket and buy one. But feel free to use it as a sauce for grilled chicken breasts.

And don’t forget Retsina. While Retsina somehow fell out of fashion, it is still an excellent wine to go with it, since its strong herby taste balances the gutsy sauce.

Tzatziki (for one as a stand- alone dish or for two as a dip)

200gr Greek yoghurt (at least 10% fat)

Half a cucumber

3 cloves of garlic

A handful of Dill

Salt

Olive oil

optional- a squeeze of lemon juice

Strain the yoghurt as if you would want to do Labneh (see the technique here), but do it only for a few hours. You want thick yoghurt, not cheese. (If you are time pressed, do it for half an hour, the time you need for the cucumber).

Peel the cucumber and cut it lengthwise into 4 batons. Remove the seeds with a spoon and cut the cucumber very fine. Sprinkle salt over it and let it rest for 30 minutes.

Bash the garlic with a bit of salt in a mortar until you get a paste. Add a tbsp olive oil and incorporate well. Let rest.

Once the cucumber pieces have released some water, put them into a cheesecloth and try to extract as much water as possible. Come on, give it another twist, you will be surprised how much water you can squeeze out of it. If you get tired, strengthen yourself with a glass of Retsina.

Add the dry cucumber pieces to the garlic and pound a bit with the pestle. You just want to create more of the paste, but still keep a fair amount of pieces intact. Plus it incorporates the garlic nicely into the cucumber.

Add the strained yoghurt and mix very well with the pestle. Be careful with the salt now, remember you did put salt onto the cucumbers and the garlic.

This is it in its very basic. From then on it depends on the region. And personal taste. Some regions add fresh mint, but dill is actually more common. And gives a very nice taste. Just chop it very fine and add it with a squeeze of lemon juice to the yoghurt. Nothing stops you using both, mint AND dill, which is maybe an Athens` thing (at least I had it there). A Lady I know and who lives in Athens also recommended a glug of ouzo for a change, which I sometimes use as well. But then omit the dill, the ouzo has already a herby note.

Serve with bread and pour another glug of olive oil over it.

Καλή όρεξη!

Oh, and if you really just want a dip to go with your crisps and it is midnight and you are full of ouzo and don’t care if it is authentic or not: Mix 1/3 cream cheese and 2/3 plain yoghurt, chop up one whole dill pickle, add a good squeeze of garlic paste, salt and a hefty glug of ouzo and mix it. But please don’t call it tzatziki, call it [yourname]`s Greek inspired midnight dip. And please don’t tell anyone that the single gourmet at the sea told you to do it like this.

Sambal Oelek. Eggs and Green Beans in Chilli Sauce.

East becoming variable, 3 or 4.

Smooth or slight.

Fair.

Moderate or good.

I just love the variety of different chilli sauces. The other day I cooked with my oldest some some green beans in chilli sauce, following a recipe from Ken Hom. We both found it good, yet somehow wanting. It was not quite there yet and consequently we discussed the difference between ready- made Asian chilli sauces. My son was not convinced of the differences so I forced the poor chap to a blind tasting. Offering him 4 different Asian chilli sauces on tiny plates. And once he rejected one, he was forced to choose again between the rest. While we disagreed on the last two, it became very clear that not all chilli sauces are created equal.

To be fair to Ken Hom, our beans were a supporting act to an exquisite star of a (Japanese) main dish. My oh my, was that good. And it was also clear that you cant just mix different “Asian” foods and expect them to work together. It takes a true knowledge to be able to combine a, let`s say, a clean tasting Japanese dish with a robust Korean recipe. A knowledge we both don’t have, but thrive to achieve. So it is, for the moment, best to stick to one variety of East Asian cooking and learn from there.
Faced with the challenge of providing a typical Dutch recipe for summer (see previous posts), I was tempted to go for the easy option and go for an Indonesian meal. Indonesia is for the Dutch what India is for the Brits. And as much as a “curry” became part of the British food identity, Indonesian food found its way into everyday Dutch cuisine. And of course the ingredients. If you go into a British supermarket and walk towards the “World Food” section you find a different choice than in the Dutch “World Food” section. For example you find all the ingredients for a Rijstafel,  a dish as Indonesian as a Chicken Tikka Masala is Indian. And you cant escape Sambal Oelek, yet another variety of a South Asian chilli sauce. But different.

Robust, earthy, not as elegant as some Thai sauces. Think of Worcester sauce for the UK, Maggi for Germany, Aromat for Switzerland. Each country has a beloved ingredient which hardly finds its way into fine cuisine (have you ever encountered a restaurant which uses Milo in its desserts?

There is no escape of Milo in Asia, yet most Western countries have no knowledge of its existence).

So, as a Brit, you might not have encountered Sambal Oelek while generations of Dutch children grew up with it. But do try it out. It is a different chilli experience and I think you might start to like it.

Sambal Telur with Green Beans

1 birds eye chilli

1 clove of garlic

1 tsp of shrimp paste

2 tbsp of Sambal Oelek

1 tsp of unflavoured oil (ground nut or rapeseed)

1 tbsp of dried onions (or a fresh shallot browned to crispiness in oil)

6 cherry tomatoes cut in half

200ml of water or vegetable stock

2 eggs

1 handful of green French beans

Plain cooked rice to serve.

Top and tail the green beans and cook for 4 minutes in salted boiling water. Drain and put immediately into ice water. Hard boil the eggs. Refresh and shell. Cut in half.

Chop and deseed the chilli, cut the garlic in small pieces. Fry both in the oil, add the shrimp paste, the Sambal and the water/stock.

Shrimp paste smells weird and is certainly an acquired taste. If you don’t feel you are ready yet, leave it out. It will taste different but it will be fine. If you feel half brave add a few drops of Thai fish sauce. Reduce to a “grainy” sauce. Add hard boiled eggs and green beans, turn the heat down and let the flavours infuse.

Serve with simple rice.

Serendipity. A Moroccan-Indian Vegetarian Feast

Variable, mainly southwesterly backing southeasterly, 3 or 4, occasionally 5 in north.

Slight.

Fair.

Good.

 

Serendipity. What a wonderful untranslatable (as in one) word. It is an unintended (accidental) discovery which turns out well. Columbus had serendipity when he discovered the Americas (although the Natives might question the part which says “It turned out well”). Fleming had serendipity when he grew a sample in a contaminated Petri dish and thus discovered penicillin. Serendipity is well known for cooks and usually starts with a slight panicky exclamation: “What the f*** did I do now” and ends with “Not bad at all”. I think most wonderful new dishes start with a perceived disaster. The cook who threw calf sausages into hot water (instead of cold water to keep them fresh) created the Bavarian “Weisswurst”. The Chinese chef, who forgot about the pickled eggs in the larder, created the “Century Eggs”.

I doubt my serendipity dish will go down in history as iconic, but you miss out if you don’t try it.

It started with an Ottolenghi recipe. A Moroccan kebab. I also wanted to add some of my Ras el hanout which is lurking in my cupboard. Then the telephone rang and I absentmindedly grabbed the nearest spice mix while chatting. A taste, after the conversation, raised some eyebrows and I realised that I added Garam masala. Okay, forget Moroccan and giant couscous, make it fusion.

Next, the vegetables. Since the main ingredient in my feast is mellow and yoghurty and has some heat, I needed something with a punch. Acidic and fresh. Some kind of salad.

I might be wrong but I don’t know any Indian salad, which is puzzling. All around its borders you get pickled vegetables and salads, but the closest the Indians get are chutneys or sweetish pickles. No salad in sight. The Moroccans however have a neat carrot salad. Acidity, freshness, sweetness and spice. Exchange some spices and you create another fusion. And last but not least, the carbohydrates. Couscous or rice felt wrong, flat bread is it then.

Flat bread is eaten all over the world and has, as its most basic, 2 ingredients: X amount of flour added to approximately x/2 amount of water. From then on it gets fancy. X amount of flour (mixed or whatever you have in your cupboard) x/2 amount of liquid (water and oil, water and lard, milk and butter= you get the hint) plus a pinch of salt and/or baking soda/cream of tartar/baking powder/yeast. Or a pinch of salt and sugar. Or added garlic and/ or herbs. The more saturated fat you add, the more pliable it becomes (a soft tortilla is either made with butter and milk or palm oil or pork lard; a hard pita is made with water and a few drops of olive oil). I opted for a mixture of yoghurt, olive oil and water to follow the Moroccan idea, but added coriander leaves to the plain flour and salt to get the best of both worlds. I made it all into a round smooth ball and let it rest for a few hours in a plastic bag. Then I rolled it out to my pan size, let it relax for a another half hour to give it time to shrink, rolled it out again to fit again the pan, heated coconut oil in a pan and grilled it for 3 minutes each side. But feel free to make the flat bread of your choice.

Dont be intimidated by the amount of ingredients. The cooking itself is very simple and takes a few minutes, but the marinating and preparing can be done several days in advance.

Not Ottolenghi`s paneer with an Indian twist

150g plain Greek yoghurt

1 tbsp harissa

1/4 tsp ground cumin

1/4 tsp ground coriander

1/4 tsp Garam Masala

1/4 tsp fenugrek leaves (crumbled)

1 tsp honey

A good pinch of salt and black pepper

200g paneer (half packet), cut into 3 horizontal slices.

Mix the yoghurt in a medium bowl with the other marinating ingredients. Add the paneer, stir to coat, then cover the bowl and refrigerate for at least overnight.

When you are ready to cook, turn your oven to grill settings, take the paneer out with either a fork or tongs and place on a rack which is suspended over a baking sheet covered with foil (I advise to close the kitchen door and open the window, your smoke alarm will probably go off quickly). Grill for about 4 minutes each side, brushing frequently with the rest of the yoghurt mixture.

Moroccan carrot salad with an Indian twist.

2 carrots (more than you need, but it taste so nice that you can munch on it the next day)

Water (weigh the carrots and add the same amount of water in grs, but dont be too anal about it)

1 clove of garlic, peeled but left whole

1 piece of ginger (about finger thick), peeled but left whole

1 tbsp olive oil

A pinch of sweet paprika

A pinch of either cayenne pepper or Aleppo flakes

A pinch of salt and a sprinkle of white pepper

The stalks of a fistful of fresh coriander

A total of 1 tsp of a variety of cumin, whole and ground (I used cumin seeds and a few caraway seeds, toasted them and ground them up and added some ground cumin to make a tsp full), but feel free to just use ground cumin

½ tsp of nigella seeds

1 tbsp of white wine vinegar

1 tsp of honey

Peel and cut carrots into rounds, about the thickness of 1+1/2 of a pound coin. Add to the pan with all the other ingredients ending with the coriander stalk. Bring to the boil, reduce temperature and let simmer until carrots are soft and there is maybe one tbsp of liquid left (you might have to add a tad bit more water, depending how thick you cut them; or you might have to increase the heat if they are cooked with too much water left). Take of the heat. Remove garlic, ginger and the coriander stalks.

In the meantime either toast (in a pan without oil) your cumin/caraway seeds and pound them, once fragrant, in a pestle and mortar, or just add the ground cumin or a mixture of both to the vinegar, add the nigella seeds and the honey and shake away.

Once you took the carrots off the heat, add the vinegar mixture to it and let cool. Once it is cool enough to go in the fridge, put it there and let the flavours infuse as long as you wish.

Make a flatbread of your choice

See above in regards to flatbread.

Assemble

Take the carrots and marinating paneer out of the fridge.  Heat oven to grill and follow the paneer recipe.

Fry your flatbread while the paneer gets nice and crusty. Put your flatbread on a plate, add (half of) the carrot salad and top with the grilled paneer. Cover with chopped coriander leaves (remember the stalks you used for the carrots?) and give a cut up lime a good squeeze over it.

Enjoy