This one is slightly thai-influenced in its taste, and extremely quick and simple to do.

You need:

• 2 cans asparagus
• 1 paprika
• 1 yellow onion
• 200-300 g frozen prawns
• vegetable broth (1 bouillon cube)
• 5 dl water
• 2 dl cream
• salt, pepper, chili powder, sumac
• fresh coriander

Rinse the canned asparagus in a strainer until no foam appears. Wait until the water drizzles out, then dump into a pot.

De-seed the paprika. Slice it into big chunks. Then dump into the pot.

Peel and roughly hack the onion, throw it into the pot.

Put bouillon cube and 5 dl water into the pot. Heat it up and boil for some time, until paprika has softened and the cube has completely dissolved.

Take the pot off the stove and use a wand blender aka. immersion blender to puree the vegetables to make a fluid paste.

Pour in the cream and mix well. Put the pot back to the stove and use medium-high temperature.

Let heat up for a while, add pepper and salt. TASTE before adding the salt as the bouillon cube can be salty! Also mix in chili powder and sumac to taste.

Next, dump in the frozen prawns. Mix well, bring to boil.

Soup must be hot but do not overcook the prawns.

Take about 3 palm-fulls of coriander leaves, and hack them into small pieces. Dump the hacked coriander into the soup. Mix well.

Done!

Enjoy with some fresh white bread and (cold) butter over the bread.

For drinks, if you want to be fancy for this ad-hoc soup, try white wine or lager beer. Maybe a nice Riesling for the wine, and Red Stripe for the beer.

Yet again, it is a soup that is perfect for the cold winter days (speaking of which, today it’s -15 C here).

The recipe makes for 6, and like the onion soup, is suitable for vegetarians too. Be sure to have big pot to avoid overflow errors (a 4 liter pot will be all right). Here’s what you need:

50 g butter
olive oil
1 large (yellow) onion, chopped
4 stalks celery, sliced
1 kg white potatoes, peeled and diced
1 small head of cauliflower, cut
400 g carrots, peeled and chopped
2 l vegetable stock
salt and pepper
400 g Gouda cheese, grated
6 slices country-style bread, baguette, or other white bread
2 tbsp chopped parsley

Like with the onion soup, the big idea is to make a soup, then place a toasted cheese-crusted piece of bread over the soup and serve. Unlike the onion soup, the soup itself does not need to go to the oven – however, you will need the oven to first roast the bread, and second to cover the bread in delicious molten cheese. Yum yum yum… Half of the cheese will be used for the soup, the other half for the bread pieces.

That said, let’s start. It’s good to prepare everything before starting to fry things.

You can start by preparing the stock first: add 2 l of water into a big pot, add appropriate amount of bouillon and heat the whole thing up with medium heat. Don’t boil it, and be sure to mix the thing every now and then. When there’s first big bubbles, turn off the heat and let the stock just sit there waiting for its turn. This is the same procedure as with the onion soup.

While the stock is heating up, peel and hack the onion. Place the hacked onion into a bowl.

Next, wash and slice up the celery. Place the sliced celery to the same bowl with the onion.

Next, peel and chop the carrots. Discard the ends of the carrots, they’re not good. Place the chopped carrots into a new bowl.

Trim the cauliflower by cutting out the green parts. Wash the whole thing. Next, cut out tiny trees from the vegetable. If you want them soft, then make them very very tiny; if you want them a bit crunchy, leave the pieces bigger. Put the chopped cauliflower to the same bowl as the carrots.

Peel the potatoes and place them into a new bowl. Note, the bowl is filled with water, otherwise the potatoes will turn dark after a while. You could also cut the potatoes now, but if you do, place them under water anyway.

Next, we have the most important ingredient, the cheese! Take out the Gouda, admire it for a while, remove the plastic wrapping (if any) and cut a 400 g chunk out of it.

Unless you like eating wax, it should be “obvious” to remove the yellow wax before grating the cheese… Just cut the wax away and discard.

Next, introduce the cheese to the cheese grater and turn the chunk of Gouda into a bowl of grated cheese.

If you didn’t already do so, cut the potatoes into small cubes and place it into the same bowl as the carrots and cauliflower.

Turn on the oven, 200 C.

Take out at least a 4 l pot and turn on the heat. Melt the butter with some olive oil in the pot until the mixture starts foaming. Add the onion and celery and fry it there for 5 minutes. The onions will turn a bit yellowish (depending on which onions you used).

Add the diced potatoes, cauliflower and carrots, and some more olive oil and mix well. Continue to fry for another 5 minutes.

Pour in the vegetable soup stock, mix well and bring it to boil. Let the whole thing boil for around 25 to 30 minutes until all vegetables have softened and the potatoes have boiled enough. Just have a taste every now and then, starting after 20 minutes or so.

If you’re drinking wine, now is a good time to open the bottle.

Also, while the soup is boiling, slice up some bread and put it into the oven to toast. It’ll take a few minutes, depending on the bread. When the bread is toasted, take it out but leave the oven on, you’ll need it soon again.

Once the vegetables are soft enough, add salt and pepper to taste.

Next, slowly start adding 200 g of the Gouda to the soup, mixing well all the time. Eventually the soup will look something like this:

Next, take the toasted bread and divide the rest of the Gouda (approximately 200 g) over the bread, and place back into the oven, until the cheese has melted.

Scoop the soup into bowls, place a toasted piece of bread with molten cheese on top of the soup bowl, and decorate with some parsley.

Well done! Now, serve the soup immediately while it’s very hot. Enjoy your meal!

“Whatever amount of space you have in your backyard, it is possible to create a fantastic little garden that will allow you to reconnect with the real value of gardening, which is knowing how to grow food.

And once you know how to grow food, it would be very nice to be able to cook it. If you are growing food, then it only makes sense that you know how to cook it as well.

And cooking food will introduce you to the basic knowledge of nutrition. So you can see how this can slowly reintroduce food back into our culture.”

(Mr. Blanc knows his way with food – he’s a chef who owns a restaurant with two Michelin stars.)

After reading that quote in the BBC News article, I said to myself: “A-ha, that’s exactly what it should be!”. There’s really very little point in hauling frozen vegetables from half way around the planet – cheaper though they might be, for whatever reason – as locally grown ones (given those are available) would be so much better, both nutrient-wise and taste-wise.

If you’re impatient and looking for a taster right now, visiting the local farmer’s market is surely worth a shot. You’ll be amazed at the number of offerings, and the quality is quite good. It’ll be fun to concentrate on this whole fundamental food rethink issue and the layout of your soon-to-be-garden over some fresh cold-smoked fish, a bit of mustard sauce and potatoes boiled with a few fresh twigs of dill.

Of course, not everything grows everywhere, so some things which cannot be grown locally must be imported. Exotic fruit like pineapple or mango, for example. Or, more importantly, wine – just try some nice chilled white wine with the aforementioned fish dish.

Even if you don’t have your own little piece of land to farm, it is not too difficult to grow some herbs and spices indoors. Things like parsley, basil, coriander, mint, and chili peppers can be grown with little effort. It’s both fun and tasty.

The recipe makes for 4 people and suits vegetarians too. Here’s what you need:

6-8 yellow onions
ca. 100 g butter
2 teaspoons sugar
2 dl dry white wine
1 l vegetable stock (use bouillon cubes unless you make your own)
2 dried bay leaves
ca. 1 teaspoon dried thyme
ca. 1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1 teaspoon salt
4-5 dl grated cheese (something semi-soft/firm and aromatic: Gruyère, Emmenthal, Edam, Gouda, etc.)
fresh white bread

The big idea is to make the basic soup, then scoop it to deep plates, put white bread slices over the plates and cover the whole thing with cheese. Then put the plates to oven for the cheese to melt. Consume with good red wine. It’s that simple!

If you know your way around the kitchen, you should be able to create some onion soup with these instructions.

For the rest, I’ve got more details and some pictures. Let’s start; first you need to peel and hack the onions.

Onion, meet knife. Knife, meet onion.

If you have some handy kitchen tools, now is the time to use them. I often use a mechanical vegetable chopper as my numero uno hacking tool while in the kitchen. It’s some kitchen apparatus from Tupperware.

In no time, you will have a lot of hacked onion.

Very good! At this point you can multi-task and start making the vegetable stock. The big idea is to crumble the bouillon to a suitable amount of water and heat it up. Read the package for more instructions. When the bouillon is ready, simply turn the heat off.

While the vegetable stock is heating up, you’ll start frying the onions with medium heat (for oven with knobs with 1..6, use 4; for oven with knobs with 1..12, use 8). Heat up the frying pan and melt the butter a bit. Pour in some hacked onion, add some sugar and fry it. Don’t let the onion burn! This means move it around every now and then.

It will take around 8 to 10 minutes until the onion is yellowish to golden brown.

Eventually the onion will look like yellowish, is a bit soft and tastes sort of sweet. When one batch is fried, pour it into a big pot. Do this until there’s no onion left.

At this point your vegetable stock is ready. Pour it into the big pot and mix well. Pour in the white wine also and mix well.

Next, add the spices: ground black pepper, thyme and bay leaves. Do not add salt yet.

Heat up the soup and let boil slowly for 15 minutes. Season with salt – taste it first.

Next, take some deep plates – these are the plates you will eat the onion soup out of. Make sure the plates can withstand heating in the oven!

Deal some onion soup into the plate. Place two slices of the white bread over the soup. Sprinkle with a lot of grated cheese until you don’t see the bread nor the soup.

Open up the red wine.

Place the plates into oven (275 degrees C) for about 5 to 8 minutes, until the cheese looks golden brown.

Make sure to have something under the plates when you place them to the table, as the plates are VERY hot. Don’t burn your finger, like I did…

That’s it, enjoy!

My Spanish is quite basic, so I have to rely on the built-in translation tool of the Konqueror web browser. It turns out that the translation of wine tasting descriptions from Spanish to English can provide a few Engrish-like moments.

The weight of the mouth is in the full protagonism of a retronasal apabullante with aromas of pasificada fruit emphasizing but also of hazelnut, coffee and chocolate with milk.

Can one argue with a full protagonism of a retronasal apabullante? I wager not.

The recipe of a Jägerbomb is simple: one needs only Jägermeister and Red Bull, both as cold as possible. However, to achieve the best efficiency and taste I recommend NOT to use the Red Bull as we know it, but instead to use the “original Red Bull”, i.e. the Thai energy drink called Krating Daeng, which oddly enough supposedly means “red bull” in Thai. The easiest way to find small bottles of Krating Daeng is to visit your local Asian food store.

The story goes so that an Austrian businessman Dietrich Mateschitz bought rights to Krating Daeng, (carbonated) watered it down and slightly altered the recipe to be able to sell it in Europe, packaged it into a nice can, then marketed it like crazy. Thus was born the Red Bull as we know it.

The Thai version has the same logo and slightly the same taste, but that’s where the similarities end, in my opinion. The taste is very different: whereas Red Bull tastes like “spiky” and soda-like, Krating Daeng is sweeter and more cough syrup-like. When combined with Jägermeister liqueur, the resulting taste resembles a fruity-sweet licourice with many, many nyances. Not to mention the effect which kind of blows your head off.

With these words I wish everyone a very happy and warm Midsummer and a very cold Jägerbomb!

So, how does one boil an egg? First, treat the egg as a spherical homogeneous object of mass M and initial temperature T_egg…

Okay, so what is hummus? Hummus is a delicious food from the Middle East. Ever since I first had a taste of it, I’ve become somewhat addicted to the stuff, enjoying a bowl every now and then, with and without extras. Hummus is both healthy and tastes good, and you can combine it with quite many things.

Before you rush out to buy a can of ready-made hummus, you might consider that since hummus is very easy to make, you can easily achieve better taste and fresher hummus with very little effort. To make hummus, one needs

• chickpeas (also known as garbanzo peas),
• tahini (sesame seed paste),
• some garlic,
• some lemon juice,
• some salt, and
• perhaps some spices, such as cumin and paprika powder.

A dash of olive oil won’t hurt.

Even after numerous times I have yet to perfect my own recipe in great detail, so in the meanwhile you can check out the Hummus Blog, read what Wikipedia has to say about hummus, or peek at Wikibooks’ hummus recipes.