Kerry, or the silence of the lambs

Look at this lovely little lambs, little babies, which work the mountains in Country Kerry, giving this landscape its shape, and preventing the meadows from getting to wild.

Who would think in a moment like that, about lamb soup, a tajine made of a leg of lamb, etc. fore sure not a vegetarian.

I have to say, I considered it too, but (please don't take it wrong if you are a Veggie) I think it is against nature not to eat everything the nature provides us with. We are made that way, so why changing it. For a religious believe OK, but just because its a life style thing, i wouldn't.

I have seen however pictures of mass animal transporters, of "meat factories", etc. thats why I want to see where my food comes from.

Today its easy, with the labeling, or best with a butcher of your trust,
you have a choice, what to eat, and what not.

I enjoyed my lamb chop last weekend, fresh from the grill, surrounded by lambs, on a table build from stone. OK, it sounds maybe a bit awkward or macabre for somebody living in a big city never seen a animal in nature, buts thats just the way it is on the Country Side in Ireland. 

I hope that doesn't change.

 

Summer Refreshment / Clonlins Cocolate indulgence

Food, Food, Food,
seems like all I can think about is Food these days.
Since I did smoke 15 years, and finally quit some months back, i can just taste better, so i cant stop rediscovering old tastes or create new ones.

Mixing different kinds of chocolate 75% cocoa ones with milk chocolate is one of this experiments I do.

Together with strawberries, fresh from the garden,
whats better than that ?

Recipe: Irish Stew with an Austrian-German Approach

Living in Ireland 6 years now, it took me quiet a while until i tried the first time myself to make a Irish Stew.

Coming from a Country (Austria) which traditionally prepares the Goulash it took me some time to overcome the prejudice that Irish Stew isn't tasty.

So the best way to overcome that was to give it a try myself, and I had two good friends to help, So let me tell you about the Irish Stew with an Austrian-German Approach;

Ingredients:
800 gram neck of lamb, cubed
800 gram of potatoes, peeled and sliced
400 gram of carrots
400 gram of onions
3 pieces of garlic
dash of redwine
fresh thyme and cumin
1 liter lamb stock ( i used the stock i had left from cooking the bones from the Tajine i made the other day)
freshly ground pepper, salt to taste

Cut the garlic and onion, and fry it until golden brown,
add the diced lamb and fry until nice brown. Add spices and top up with the lamb stock.
add the carrots first, after the potato. Cook for one hour. Take one potato and grind it into the stew, giving the stew a nice consistency.

Enjoy

Heidi High performing

Do you remember my post when I reported the first eggs laid by my chicken ? They have been so small, I actually couldn't store them proper in my egg container, they had been smaller than the hole to hold them.

I said back than more motivation is needed. Look at that huge egg now on the left, compared to the first one before !  Say hello to the top motivation trainer !




 Now                                                                                                                           before

                                  

Recipe: Noodle (Fussili) Salad

In a previous post I described how you can easily make your own mayonnaise.
At the end of a month you might run out of ideas or money what to cook, so why not chopping up some veg's, cooks some fussili pasta, take a few  spoons of your self made mayonnaise add some salt and pepper, oil and vinegar, and there you go, your Pasta Salad is finished !
Enjoy !

Brotzeit

In German they say: "Da ist keine bessere Zeit als Brotzeit !"
Meaning, there is no better time than snack time.

So what is a Brotzeit ?
Its a plate with cold or warm snacks on it. Traditionally it includes bread (Brot), sausage,cheese,radish,butter,mustard...
You can even put a Schnitzel on it once its nice cut into pieces.




There is really now limitation on how you create your very own Brotzeit,

So enjoy, its a perfect snack in the summer !

Recipe: Coffee Cookies

Do you know the problem, you have recipes in which you need only to use the egg yolks, but the egg white is not used, and you wouldn't like to waste it ?

I had the issue the other day, and was looking all over the web for a ripe in which i can use the egg white only.

What i found, is the lovely recipe for coffee cookies / sweet cookies you can eat with coffee.


Ingredients:
4 Egg whites
125 grams sugar
125 grams icing sugar

Beat egg whites with granulated sugar until you have a nice mass, mix also the icing sugar into the mass.
Bring the mass into desired form on baking paper and put it into the oven on  50 degrees Celsius ideally overnight or for a few hours until its hard.
Enjoy !

Best bottles for beerbrewing

Its time again soon and I kick off with some beer brewing again.
The best bottles for that hobby are the Grolsch ones, since they got the easy snap on system to close the bottles.

Only issue, you cant really disinfect them in the oven, since the topic isn't ceramic anymore, its plastic and it would melt.

So what i do, i give it a good clean in the dishwasher, disinfect it again afterwards, and give it a good rinse before bottling the beer.

Also make sure not to fill up glass bottles to much, or to add too much sugar since the bottle might just explode and the liquid gold is gone :-(

How to make the perfect Sushi ? Help !

Has anyone out there a idea how to make the perfect Sushi ? I definitely don't.

It Cant be that difficult i thought, but it actually is. Well cooking the rice its the easy part, but how to roll that bloody damn thing ?
I used matt's i got from China, maybe thats the issue, Sushi is a Japanese dish, so what to heck i do with Chinese wooden matt's ? Well i thought its easier to roll the sushi than, but it isn't.

Having a bowl of water with vinegar nearby was a great tip I got from a cooking website, that way the rice isn't sticking too much on your fingers.

The rest sort of came naturally to me, get fresh fish, since I didn't catch anything I went to the shop.
A lovely sea drought was in and on my sushi.

It actually doesn't look as bad here, and didn't taste as bad at all than i wrote this blog entry, but serious, i need more practice and some good advises.

Anybody, HELP !

Recipe: lye pretzels

I always thought to make pretzels its rocket since, and i payed gladly 1 Euro at the market for a pretzel from a German baker.
Just recently i discovered how easy it is to make your own ones, and its so simple, you can do that while you cook something else, f.e. your dinner or Sunday roast.

So here my story, thats the way you get started:

Ingredients
500 gram flour
1 pack yeast (20 gramms)
¼ Teaspoon sugar
350 ml     milk (lukewarm)
a bit of salt
2 spoons Natron, (baking soda)
Sea salt for toping it




Preparation: make a dough with the flour, yeast, sugar,salt and milk. Mix it well and than let it rest for 45 Minutes.
After, form a huge sausage of which you cut 12 even smaller pieces out of it.
form out of that pieces one pretzel each, thats the tricky part but after a few exercises you get there.
Boil a pot with water and add 2 spoons of the Natron (baking soda), it must be boiling, than throw in the pretzel for 30 seconds.

After that arrange them on a baking tray, leave space between them since they will get larger, add the salt on top and bake them in the oven with 180 C for 25 Minutes. as an alternative you also can make sticks (with cheese on top as well) or little breads.


Best served is a pretzel with Bavarian beer and butter,how to make the beer, I will teach you shortly !

Prost and Mahlzeit !

Smoking fish part 2

I like his approach to, especially step 1

How to smoke a Mackerel ?

Here we go, the important part about smoking fish is to catch it first, or in my case, I was lucky and my neighbor did that part for me last weekend.

First you need to clean your fish, than you need to built a smoker. There are different methods how to build one, i describe the recycling method i used. I had 2 old BBQ grills, both broken, but together they make a good team now, as you can see here on the picture:

I just hanged the fish with some old hooks on top of the construction. I recommend to use a iron chain ore something, not just normal fishing line, since the line could melt and your fish ends up in the fire.

Speaking of fire, thats the last thing you want, you need a bit of heat, but what you want is smoke. Best results you get from wood of the beech tree.


20 minutes with low heat, under the wet towel in the smoke,
and you will see how good the Mackerel will taste.
Just yummy !

I will blog soon how to make a nice Salad out of a smoked Mackerel, my friend got a great recipe there. Smoked fish can be stored at least a week in the fridge, if it is vacuumed even longer.

Recipe: Clonlins perfect Gulasch Soup

I guess nothing is really perfect in life, but it can get close. Like in this case, my self made Goulash.
Coming from Austria, I should know how to make the perfect one, like my cousins the Hungarian do.

Diced beef is the basic material, it should be to nobodies surprise that also paprika is added.
I used a bit of tomato sauce and mark, pepper, salt and a bit of a soup stock, to make the sauce for the Goulash.

In my perfect one, there must be potato, so I boiled some potato from the own garden separately until they have been softer, and added them in the end to the meat. 

In the end I also added some more boiling water, to have kind of a soup, you can eat it than with a bit of bread if you like than its more filling.

Overall the cooking time is about 15 Minutes, and most important is to have some left over for the next day, since on the next day the goulash always tastes better !

Enjoy !

Building a decorative flower pot out of a pallet

To be honest, it was an accident, I just needed some planks to finish of the garden shed, so i did cut along a pallet. Suddenly after making they first few cuts, it looked kind of nice, and than i remembered i had this small flower pots from the herbs left, and they fitted perfectly into it.

 

So here it is, the result, a perfectly looking flower pot, I just need to put some flowers or herbs in it, in this picture some basil.

Fresh Milk ?

Looking out the window Sunday morning I am happy to know I got a roof over my head.

Taking a closer look with the zoom of my camera out of the window, i wonder would it be worth it to have my own cow, to wake up early in the morning to get a few liters of milk ?

No, not yet, I better leave that job to the Irish dairy farmers, they do a pretty good job, and they deserve a decent Milk price.

If there is any farmer around the area I would like to buy the milk directly from you, and I would pay you more than the supermarket price !
At least I would know than exactly where my milk comes from, maybe its than from one of the cows, out of my kitchen window?

Recipe: Marocan lamb soup a la Clonlin.

Cooking Lamb dishes on which some meat stays on the bone can have its benefits. Its so easy to make a lamb fond and make out of that a soup.
I have seen so many different approaches on the web, so finally i came up with my own, since most of the recipes i found looked rather complicated to me.

So here it is, the Marocan lamb soup a la Clonlin:
Take the bone of a lamb shank/leg or in my case fillet,make sure a bit of meat is left on the bone, and cook that with about 1 liter of water for several hours on low head, but bubbling.

After cook some potatoes, i took 4 separate in a pot until they are soft.Remove now the bones from the lamb soup, add a bit pepper, salt, potatoes, bit of cream and start the blender.

You should get a nice creamy soup, great tasting the lamb.For a extra sensation add a drop of Sherry. (for a none alcohol free version)

Enjoy

Our perfect Lamb Tajine.

Some people might have guessed it from my previous post, yes the next weeks will be a lot about Lamb on this blog. Beeing a beef person the past few years, I recently rediscovered on a visit to Rolfs Guesthouse in Bantry how lovely Lamb can taste.

Since i love to recook what I eat in restaurants and also like to make my own variations i bought plenty of lamb which i cook of now.

Lamb Fillet is something you wouldn't like to freeze. First its really the good part of the lamb, secondly it would take ages to defrost and all the phasers of the lamb meat would be broken. 

So off I went to get the Tajine I bought in Marrakesh and used that to cook the lamb slowly. Before putting the lamb into it, I took the fillet and fried it very hot on all sites very quickly, this way the juice is locked in.

After that I did add a spice mix which did contain Saffron, Curry, Pepper, Salt, Rosemary, and Honey. With a bit of olive Oil on the bottom and also water, i did roast the lamb in the tajine for 4 hours at 100degrees celius.

To go with the lamb i just chopped up a tomato and paprika to be mixed into couscous. I used some of the braising juices to prepare the couscous, this way i had it nice spicy.


Have a sharp knife ready to chop the lamb up,
its gorgeous with a glass of red wine.

Enjoy !

Funny Friday: Coffee time :-)

This accent reminds me so much about my friends from Finland, Hello There !

How does half a Irish Spring Lamb look like ?

People might think a Irish spring lamb is huge, but once chopped up it fits easily in a small freezer.

Well in my case i got half a spring lamb at Scully's, the local butcher here in West Cork. Buying half a lamb makes in many ways sense, but the main reason is the price.

Compared to buy all the parts one by one you save about 40 Euro by buying the half of an actual lamb and the butcher chops it up for you, the way you like it.

So you might see the next few weeks a lot of lamb recipes in this blog. The most important about most lamb parts is, cook it slowly, very slowly !

Articles about this topic soon to come:

• Lamb fillet the Moroccan way
• Moroccan Lamb soup a la Clonlin
• a Lamb BBQ
• and "HELP, I cant eat any Lamb anymore...". :-)

Hunting in Ireland

This post is not really about hunting, since I do not have a gun, and will never have one I guess. I am rather the fish guy than the hunter. But being married to a French lady of course I like a good rabbit roast.

So I would rather catch one than shoot one.

Anyway, that doesn't mean i can not shoot a rabbit with my camera, so here some pictures i took Sunday morning behind the house, can you spot all the rabbits ?

Building a Garden Shed for less than 10 Euro

To be used to live in a house with got a garden shed can be frustrating after moving to a new home, with perfect interior, location, price and garden, but not just having a shed.

To go to the DIY store and get a kit, is just not my style, and also Budged wise i didn't want to spend hundreds of Euros. After having build a compost and hen house out off pallets i though it would be just the best option to construct the shed in the same way.

So first task for building the shed is:

• get pallets

Where to get them if not steal them ? I had a technical approach to that and asked on Twitter where one of my followers @Trevor_Kingston was so kind and replied that he had some of which he is happy to get rid of them. Dropped of Friday evening, the Sunday after already put to a new use.

My neighbor across the road was so kind and gave me some old nails and wood.



So that was the equipment I used:

• 8 wooden planks
• 8 pallets
• a bucket of rusty nails
• a hammer
• a house wall
• 2 friends (optional, but easier to erect the whole thing)

I always say pictures say more than thousand words,
so as you can see we build a basic frame work, cut a door into it and also already got one kind of shelf in place.


A bit of manpower is necessary, thats why i wrote in the Title of this post: "Building a Garden Shed for less than 10 Euro" since each of my helpers, and suppliers of the materials will get a bottle of the "Clonlin Redwine 2011" which is bubbling away in the utility room.

Thanks to Trevor and Vincent the material suppliers, and to Jens and Michael for the hands on.

In Part2 i will report about the interior design for my "Holiday Inn" so stay tunned.



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