Goat Cheese with Pumpkin Seed Brittle on Beetroot Carpaccio & Mango Salsa

Last week we had our annual office team dinner, and as is typical when you book for larger groups at a German restaurant we agreed to have three starters and three main courses to choose from to make it easier for the restaurant.

The starter I chose was Goat Cheese with Pumpkin Seed Brittle on Beetroot Carpaccio. Even as I read that I was thinking about making this at home. On our night out this tasted fantastic, and I went shopping the next day to buy all the ingredients.

Making this dish is really easy, although it took two attempts to get the consistency of the pumpkin seed brittle right. It looks a little too dark and burnt in the pictures, but it tasted almost exactly as it did at the restaurant.

What I really like about this starter – apart from the fact that it only takes about 20 minutes to prep and cook this* – is that the down to earth taste of the beetroot, mixed with the mild but slightly tangy goat cheese, the sweet brittle and the spicy mango salsa were like a little joyride for my taste buds.

*That doesn’t include cooking the beetroot – but you can do that in advance, e.g. the day/night before.

If there’s anything I feel needs improving the next time I make this, it’s the method of making the pumpkin seed brittle. My first attempt was to set the goat cheese on a baking sheet, sprinkle it with light cane sugar and pumpkin seeds, and put it in the oven to grill. The result was that the cheese was done in 5 minutes, but the sugar hadn’t melted yet. On the second try, the result of which you can see in the pics, I grilled the goat cheese for about 7 minutes while caramelising the sugar with the pumpkin seeds in a pan. It was a little difficult to transfer it onto the cheese when it was done, and it doesn’t look very sophisticated. The instructions in the recipe below will tell you how I intend to do it next time.

Goat Cheese with Pumpkin Seed Brittle
on Beetroot Carpaccio & Mango Salsa

1 piece of goat cheese, with rind
1 small beetroot
3 tbsp brown sugar
handful pumpkin seeds
¼ sweet onion
½ small mango
½ red chili
a few mint leaves

1 serving

Cook beetroot for 45 minutes. In the meantime, make the salsa by finely dicing the onion, dicing the mango, and chopping the mint leaves. Mix everything together in a small bowl. When the beetroot is done, let it cool down in cold water for about 15 minutes.

Spread the pumpkin seeds out in a circle on a piece of baking paper, making the circle about as big as your piece of goat cheese. In a non-stick pan, heat the sugar. When it’s all melted but before it gets too dark, pour it over the pumpkin seeds, then let cool.

Peel the beetroot (wearing rubber gloves!), finely slice it, and arrange slices on a plate by making a circle with the slices overlapping.

Grill the goat cheese at 220°C /425°F for 5 – 7 minutes until it just shows signs of melting. Remove from oven and place in the middle of the beetroot carpaccio. Place pumpkin seed brittle on top of the goat cheese. With a very small ice cream scoop or a spoon, arrange the mango salsa around next to it.

Spiced Winter Porridge

Shortly before Christmas I read this post on Speculaaskruiden by London Eats, a really lovely spice mix that I made but unfortunately didn’t get to use because I didn’t have enough time to make more than the two kinds of cookies I’d already made.

However, I already had this vision of using it with either thick, creamy yogurt and some winter fruit, or porridge with some citrus fruit. This morning I decided on the latter, and I mixed up a new mini batch because I didn’t want the pepper, coriander and anise seeds in it for this wintery porridge version.

I only made one serving, and I used a 1 ml measuring spoon as it was the smallest measuring device I own. There are measuring spoons for a “pinch” out there, so if you own one of those you could use that (replace the “ml” in this recipe with “pinch”).

Making this for breakfast was a great start to my day. The bland porridge, tangy fruit, caramelised sugar and the spices made for an awesome combination. I normally use a little milk in my porridge but I left that out with this version as it was already perfect.

Spiced Winter Porridge

rolled oats for 1 (however much you like, I used a lot because I was hungry…)
filleted grapefruit
6 – 10 tbsp cane sugar
handful pecan nuts
2 ml ground cinnamon
½ ml ground cloves
½ ground mace
¼ ml ground ginger
¼ ml ground nutmeg
¼ ml ground cardamom

Cook the oats with water and a pinch of salt. Break the grapefruit fillets into pieces. Mix the cane sugar with all the spices.

Heat a non-stick pan and melt the spiced sugar. As soon as it’s melted – before it gets too dark! – add the pecans and grapefruit, stir quickly and well to make sure as much of the nuts and fruit are covered in the molten sugar.

Pour the porridge into a bowl and arrange the caramelised grapefruit & nut mix on top.

Oven Bag Cooked Pork Tenderloin

Before I start – I guess we all go into a new year with some resolutions. One of mine was to (try to) keep my posts a little shorter and more to the point. As this is only the first week of the new year, I won’t mark this down as a failure yet, even if at first glance it looks like the longest post ever. It can only get better from here on…

Last week, between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, I had a friend from Munich visiting. It was her first visit in 2011, whereas normally we meet about two or three times a year. So we had quite a lot to catch up on – in between a visit to IKEA (I know, total madness during school holidays and just after Christmas, but we survived) and some serious clothes shopping in Stuttgart (same madness).

A tradition developed over an 18-year friendship is that we go to our favourite Indian restaurant whenever she visits. Four of us went, had a fantastic time and gorgeous food, buffet style. We all agreed that we couldn’t possibly eat any more, then went to the buffet to get second helpings of the main course. And dessert afterwards. The next day one of us (hint: it wasn’t me) was still feeling so sick due to those second helpings that she skipped food completely that day and could hardly eat anything the day after that.

However, shortly before my friend left, we did some food talking, and that’s how I came by this recipe, slightly adapted from her own adaptation. So – sorry S you had to suffer, and thank you for this recipe!

My friend got the idea for this recipe when she found a sauce mix to use with pork tenderloin, had a look at the ingredients, then didn’t buy the sauce mix but made up her own. Then I substituted some spices for others, and here we have a winner.

Oven Bag Cooked Pork Tenderloin

500 g pork tenderloin
½ onion, thinly sliced
6 mushrooms, halved and thinly sliced
1 tbsp olive oil
250 ml / 1 cup cream
125 ml / ½ cup water
2 bay leaves
1 tbsp pink peppercorns, crushed
1 tsp white peppercorns, crushed
2 tsp Herbes de Provence
salt
1 oven bag

feeds  2 – 3

Mix together the cream, water and spices and put aside.

Heat olive oil in a non-stick pan. Cut the tenderloin in 2 pieces and fry until browned, about 5 minutes, together with the onions and the mushrooms.

Prepare oven bag and place it inside a small ovenproof dish. Transfer meat, onions, mushrooms and any juices to oven bag, placing the two pieces of meat side by side.

With a ladle, add the cream-water-spice mixture to the oven bag, seal it and make sure the meat is almost completely covered by the liquid.

Heat oven to 180°C / 350°F and bake for 40 – 45 minutes on middle shelf. Open oven bag, remove meat, arrange on individual  plates or a platter and serve with the sauce.

Notes:
The dish you place the oven bag in has to be a small one because the meat needs to be covered by the liquid, so the sides of the oven bag need to be held in by the side walls of the dish.
To get a thicker sauce, after removing meat from oven bag, pour liquid into a pot, bring to boil and stir in some cornstarch.
The original recipe on the sauce mix said to cook the meat for 60 minutes, but my friend found that too long, so I went with 45. The meat wasn’t dry due to the liquid but I’d still opt for a little less cooking time next time, approx. 40 minutes.  The thing is you can’t open the oven bag during cooking so you won’t know how well it’s done until you finally cut it open.
I decided to use the fan setting to cook it at 180°C / 350°F but I think my friend hadn’t used the fan, so next time I might reduce the heat to 160°C / 325°F when using the fan.
I served the tenderloin with potato balls, a recipe from a German food magazine. If you don’t speak German, you could make these Crispy Ridged Rosemary Mashed Potato Mounds by Joanne of Fifteen Spatulas, which are quite similar.

Happy New Year!

Just a quick post to wish you all a Happy New Year and all the best for 2012!

Although I’m not very good with using my old digital camera at night, last night I decided to use the fireworks settings and just see what happens, not really expecting very much.

Funnily enough, a few came out quite interesting, looking like some nebula in some far away universe. Or maybe I’ve just seen too many Stargate and Farscape episodes…

Back soon with a food post. Until then, hope you enjoy the first day of the new year without wincing when you hear the song “Hangover” on the radio…

Christmas Jelly

A few months ago I had to buy a whole bottle of Crème de Cassis, which I resented a little because I only needed 2 tablespoons for a recipe, and you only get the stuff in large bottles. So this bottle has been sitting in my kitchen ever since, until the other day when I was thinking hard what else I could make with it. I didn’t have to think too long before two other seasonal C words popped into my mind – cranberry and cinnamon. The combination sounded quite christmassy to me, so I decided to make Christmas jelly.

I put it off for almost two weeks because I was so busy, and whenever I went shopping I forgot to buy cranberry juice. The good thing, though, is that this jelly is made in 15 minutes, so you could actually make it today and enjoy it with your Christmas breakfast.

I made jelly for the first time this year, Grape Jelly in October and then Clementine & Chilli Jelly in November, and both turned out delicious. This one turned out exactly as I had envisioned it, a nice deep red colour, and it totally tastes like Christmas. However, it has more than a hint of alcohol, so better not let the children have a taste of this…

Christmas Jelly

1 l / 4 cups cranberry juice
250 ml / 1 cup Crème de Cassis
4 cinnamon sticks
500 g / 2 cups 3:1 gelling sugar

Combine all ingredients in a large pot, stirring well so the sugar is covered by the liquid. Bring to a roiling boil. As soon as the boiling starts, keep on cooking for 5 minutes, then remove from heat.

Have your clean preserving jars ready – boiled and dried (or fresh from the dishwasher, hottest setting, and dried).  Remove the cinnamon sticks and break them in half (best to use rubber gloves for this). Divide the halved sticks between your jars. Fill jelly into jars, close them tightly and let them sit overnight.

On that seasonal note I want to thank you all for stopping by, reading and subscribing this last year – I had a lot of fun doing this and hope that so have you. I wish all of you a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Chocolate Covered Marshmallows

When I started my German Blog in February this year, I said I wouldn’t be posting the same things I post on this one. Except if something turns out really spectacular. Well, this is not something spectacular, but I still decided to post the same recipe to both blogs today, because I have been out socialising so much this last week that I’m not up to speed with the housework, let alone cooking and baking. I admit to even using the same pictures, because I was in such a hurry I didn’t take that many.

On Friday we had our annual end-of-year party at work, on Saturday I was invited to a Brandy Punch Party (wanted to post the brandy punch recipe but it was made out in the garden in the late afternoon and it was already dark, so absolutely no acceptable pics, unfortunately), and from that party it was on to Christmas Brunch this morning.

I made the chocolate covered marshmallows on Saturday morning to take them to the Brandy Punch Party – they go quite well with that, or with mulled wine. I found the recipe in a little IKEA brochure that was lying around at a friend’s house, so I decided to make them as this is so quick and easy. I just added the chopped nuts and flaked coconut. Fun thing to bring to a party.

Chocolate Covered Marshmallows

½ pack (= 140 g) Marshmallows
150 g chocolate for coating
chopped nuts
flaked coconuts
wooden skewers

Skewer the marshmallows. Thinly spread the chopped nuts and flaked coconut onto some baking paper (separately). Melt the chocolate over a bain-marie.

Dip the skewered marshmallows into the molten chocolate, then roll them over the nut or coconut surface immediately. For drying, place the skewers in drinking glasses, or stick them into a flowerpot filled with decorating sand.