2 minute spiders for Halloween

Tonight is Halloween and probably there are many more of you busy parents out there scrambling to find quick decorations. So I'm sharing the spiders I just made. Of course if you can make them in 2 minutes they are not going to be very detailed, however the effect is there.

For a basic spider all you need is 4 black, long pipe cleaners.

Bend the pipe cleaners in half to identify the middle

and then twist in the middle twice to secure the cleaners together.

Next take a "leg" from the right hand side and bend it diagonally over to the left hand side. Do this with all legs moving them from left to right and right to left. This will form the body of the spider.

Next bend the legs down in the middle to a 90 degree angle and then bend the bottom to 90 degrees in the opposite direction (up). Viola... you have a spider.

If you have googly eyes stick a couple on each leg and if you like tie a thread to the middle so that the spider can be suspended from her web.

Mushroom Soup

I was away for a couple of days and discovered a kilo of mushrooms in the fridge when I arrived home. Apparently they were on sale! This fact, combined with the sudden cold, wet and dark weather, called out SOUP. So I made a huge pot of mushroom soup. I'm halving the recipe here because it's not usual to buy a whole kilo of mushrooms unless you are cooking for a large number of people. Since you are making half of what I made it is also likely that you can make it in less than 1 hour.

Preparation time: 1 hour; makes 1.5 l  

Ingredients:

50 g	Butter
75 g	Onions, diced
1 tsp.	Garlic, finely diced
50 g	Flour
600 ml	Water
1	Vegetable cube
600 ml	Milk
500 g	Mushrooms
	Salt & Pepper, to taste
2 tbsp.	Lemon juice
4 tbsp.	Cream

Method:

The thing that took me forever was washing the mushrooms. I learned recently that you are not supposed to wash mushrooms because they absorb the water that you wash them in and don't taste as good. I'm still going to wash my mushrooms because they are always dirty, but apparently you could buy a special mushroom brush to brush away the dirt. Just another gadget to have in an already overstuffed kitchen! I think not.

Well once they are washed I trim off the ends of my now "soggy" mushrooms and then slice them roughly. If you want to have a chunky soup and don't want to run it through a liquidizer then you will have to dice them, or slice them, finely. I personally don't like chunky soups.

Then dice the onions and the garlic.

Heat the butter in a large, heavy bottomed saucepan on medium heat. If you burn the butter tip it out and  start again, else the soup will not taste good. Once the butter has melted add the onions and the garlic and stir (to prevent burning) for around 3 minutes, or until the onions are cooked. The next step is to add the flour to the mixture and continue to stir so that the flour does not burn or stick to the bottom of the pan. Cook it for about 1 minute. Next you have to slowly add the water. Add about 1/2 cup of water, stirring it in until you have a lumpless paste. If your Sri Lankan then the instructions would be... it should look like pappa (which is a glue made out of flour and water that we are all too familiar with)! Then continue adding water 1/2 cup at a time until all the water is used up. By this time your soup should be quite liquid. Now add the milk. If the soup is already liquid enough then just add the whole thing in there and stir it around. Also put in the vegetable cubes. 

If you are going to liquidize your soup then you don't need to be too worried if there are lumps of flour in the soup. 

Bring the whole thing to a boil (you can increase the heat to get it to boil quicker) and add the mushrooms and salt and pepper to taste. 

Be careful, the vegetable cube is quite salty so make sure you taste it before adding more salt. Allow your soup to simmer over low heat for another 10 minutes or so. Then it is almost done. All you have to do is liquidize it. I am a fan of the stick mixer with a metal stick. This can be inserted directly into the boiling soup and the soup can be pulverized. However, you must be very, very careful and know how your gadget works. Else you will end up with hot soup splashed all over you and some pretty nasty burns. If you are not sure allow your soup to cool first (this cooling is not accounted for in the preparation time. One way to decrease the time would be to add the mushrooms to the mixture once the water has been added, then remove the pan from the heat and then add cold milk to the mixture. This should bring it to a decent temperature to experiment with.) If you use a liquidizer then you have to cool the liquid all the way down before liquidizing. Again, the preparation time does not take this into account. Once you have the required smoothness, bring the soup back to the boil. 

Remove it from the heat and add the lemon juice and cream. You can also add the cream later into the individual bowls to make it look fancy. No time for that over here. Soup has to be served piping hot. That means that it cannot be served in the kitchen and then left to sit on the dinning table!

NOTE: This soup freezes pretty well. So if you happen to return to a fridge full of mushrooms you know what to do.

Chef friendly version

Breadfruit Curry - Sri Lankan Style

On the weekend I had to drop off my eldest at a lazer tag establishment. We were surprised to find that it was right down town! Since we were the first there and had a few minutes to spare I dropped into an Asian store that was a few doors down. I was happily surprised to find that they had breadfruit in their vegetable section, and one good one too! As I picked it up one of the people working in the store, who was of South Asian decent, asked me what I would do with it. It always surprises me that the people selling these things don't know what they are! Sometimes in the Sri Lankan store in Dortmund I have people ask me what I do with the vegetables I buy. They are usually rather embarrassed by the question since I look German and they look Sri Lankan!! Maybe I should have a little card with my blog address on it and tell them to check up in a few days to see what was done with it :)

Breadfruit is one of my favourite vegetables. Unfortunately it is never in season when I visit Sri Lanka so I have not had it for years. I also love kiri kos (jak fruit in a milky curry) and have no recollection when I last ate it. A very sad state indeed. I have hope though. Maybe eventually I will be able to get unripe jak fruit here in Germany. I can already get ripe jak fruit, although it does not taste as good as the stuff in SL.

If you happen to find a breadfruit, buy it and cook it. It is really easy to prepare and delicious to eat.

Preparation time: 1 hour; serves 4 if served alone with rice 

Ingredients:

600g	Breadfruit
1 sprig	Curry leaves
3	Green chilies, roughly chopped
1 tsp.	Salt
1/2 tsp.	Tumeric
1 cup	Water
1	Onion, diced
12	Black pepper seeds
4 tbsp. (heaped)	Coconut milk powder
2 tsp.	Roasted curry powder

Method:

The hardest part about making breadfruit is the cutting and cleaning of it. As you can see above I cut mine into quarters and then cut the middle piece out (kind of like I would take the core out of an apple). It is possible that white milk will leak out of your fruit. This did not happen to me but I think it is because the fruit was probably not very fresh (as it had not been picked just yesterday!). The best way to deal with this white milk is to wipe it off with newspaper. If you get it on your hands or knife clean with oil and newspaper. If you try to wash it off everything will just get stickier.

Peel the fruit with a potato peeler and then cut it into cubes. You don't want small cubes else it will disintegrate. So nice big cubes about 1.5 inches wide. Then I sprinkled mine with tumeric and salt and rubbed it well. It's kind of like using a scrub on your vegetable. This 'scrub' will take off anymore milky stuff that is on your fruit.

Wash the fruit and put it in a saucepan. Now add all the ingredients except the 1/2 the water, the coconut milk powder and roasted curry powder.

Cover the pan and bring to the boil. Then reduce the heat and cook until the water has been absorbed (about 15 minutes). Mix the remaining water with the coconut milk powder. It helps if the water is luke warm. You can also use thick fresh coconut milk or coconut milk from a can. The canned milk tends to be quite  thick so you may have to dilute it a bit. Add this to the pan and bring back to the boil. Allow to simmer for another 15 minutes.

Once the fruit is cooked it will be soft, like over boiled potatoes. Remove it from the heat and add the roasted coconut powder. It is now ready to serve.

The method is relatively simple and I'm guessing if you are not being neat and pretty and taking photographs that you can probably put this together in less than an hour. The big time consumer is letting it simmer at the end for 30 minutes, but this gives you time to make other delicious things (and if nothing else at least your rice).

NOTE: I have found that breadfruit curry tends to turn very quickly. It's best to eat it within 24 hours.

Bratkartoffeln - Fried potatoes

This is a simple recipe that my children love. The only problem with it is that it cannot be really eaten alone, except maybe as a snack. When I make it we have burgers, sausages, or schnitzel together with a vegetable (last night it was carrots).

Preparation time: 45 minutes; serves 4

Ingredients:

1kg	Potatoes
1 tsp.	Salt
	Oil

Method:

Peel and wash the potatoes and then cut them into small pieces about 0.5 cm thick. For smaller spuds I cut them in two first and larger ones into four.

To fry these potatoes it is important that you have a heavy bottomed frying pan, preferably a cast iron one that is well seasoned (i.e. nothing sticks to it). If you use a non-stick pan the potatoes will not get as crunchy and brown. Heat the pan on medium heat and add enough oil so that the bottom of the pan is covered (I need about 1/4 cup). Don't put so much oil in that the potatoes are swimming. You need just enough so that they all get coated with the oil. Once the oil is hot you put in the potatoes, sprinkle them with the salt and toss them in the oil so that they are all coated with oil. If there is not enough oil to coat them just add some more.

Continue frying them, stirring every now and then until all the potatoes are cooked and are as brown as you like them. This takes me 20-30 minutes. If you feel like your potatoes are sticking you can pour in a bit more oil. Scrape the bottom of the pan while you are frying to ensure that nothing sticks to the pan and burns.

You can sprinkle a variety of other things on top of your potatoes once they are cooked through. Roasted onions, garlic powder, cheeses, chilies, herbs are a few that come to mind.

Serve hot.