fabulous food

We haven't posted much of our cooking lately, but that's not because we haven't been eating well! This past week was Japanese-themed (some pictures of this follow), and the week before was a Mexican extravaganza. We only took one picture of these dishes unfortunately, but it really was the best of the whole week - bean enchiladas with salsa verde.

Now when people cook things from scratch that can mean many different things - for some it's only that it didn't come out of the freezer, or maybe they didn't use a powdered mix for the sauce (as is rampant in Germany). However this dish was really from scratch. Okay, not the salsa verde, but only because tomatillos are even harder to come by here than the sauce itself (which we picked up when we were in Switzerland, and still haven't found here in Jena).

While we are able to buy some tortillas here, I've only done it once, and they were sufficiently nasty to discourage me from ever doing it again. They cost something like three euros for a pack of 10 small ones, and they had a best before date that was four months in the future. And they weren't even refridgerated, let alone frozen. I'm not even sure they were real food.

And so we looked in the Joy of Cooking, and Jeremi decided that he could make flour tortillas from scratch. (Corn tortillas are out of the question, as I don't think there's any masa harina in our Bundesland at least.) And the refried beans he also cooked from dried, and seasoned himself. This was based roughly on a recipe from Brandy, which used sweet potatoes as well, but since they cost 4 euros a kilo here, he adapted it with onions and peppers.

And not only that, but it was completely prepared and already in the oven the moment I walked in the door. I'm a very lucky girl. And here you can view a bit of the deliciousness, with apple pie filling being prepared in the background, as we wanted to bring a North American-style "pie" to our English Stammtisch to illustrate the difference between pies and cakes. (This distinction isn't really made in German.)
Now jumping ahead to Japanese week, here you see (at right) a pan full of beef roll-ups around green onions (negi maki), a pot full of miso soup (at the left), and pot of mixed vegetable seasoned with mirin and rice vinegar. Delicious!
And then our really indulgent meal from last week, vegetable tempura. Much easier than I'd expected, and it really tasted divine. Okay, so anything deep-fried is delicious, but it was really good. We dipped them in leftover sauce from our cold soba noodle night (which didn't get photographed, unfortunately.)
Here's a close-up of the greasiness. Right there in the middle is a piece of breaded, deep-fried broccoli. We'd never even tasted deep-fried broccoli before - it was great. (We also had onions, carrots, sweet potatoes, and cauliflower.)
And finally, Jeremi made a great Japanese-style vegetable curry. I'd never made one from scratch before, but I'd made it using those blocks of curry mix you can get at asian stores. From scratch it's not so hard either, but did involve browning a whole lot of onions and thickening it with a roux. We got the recipe here, which is a great site for Japanese recipes, especially as it's written by someone living in Switzerland, who understands the trouble finding ingredients sometimes.

Here Jeremi is singing an ode to curry with the salt-shaker microphone. (Not true! I'm eating the salt shaker - Jeremi.)