Grilled marinated tiger shrimp

Ingredients:

1 pound tigershrimp
4 cloves of garlic chopped
1 orange
1 small bunch of chives
1 tsp lemon peel
black pepper
sea salt

Heat the chopped garlic with the olive oil until the aroma starts coming of.
Add a bit of lemon peel, and orange peel. Add juice of the orange. Add chives and seasoning.
Peel and clean the shrimp but leave the tails on.
Mix the shrimp and marinade, and let it marinade for several hours.

Heat grill pan. Grill the shrimp untill done.

bloody mary sorbet

The recipe for this sorbet was created by James Shepherd for Britain's Best Dish.
We served it as an amuse during xmas diner 2009, and it was very nice!
To each sorbet glass we added a grilled marinated tiger shrimp, and decorated with piece of celerystalk with leaves on.
Nect to this glass we served an icecold shot of limoncello with a parmesan cheese crisp, and bruschetta with olive/dried tomato tapenade.

Ingredients:

100g caster sugar
2 celery stalks
bunch of basil leaves, roughly chopped
500ml tomato juice
80ml vodka
20ml Fino sherry
Juice of 1 lemon
1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
Splash of Tabasco sauce
Sea salt and freshly ground pepper

Dissolve the sugar in 300ml water over a low heat. Once the solution is clear add the celery and bring to the boil. Boil for 5 minutes then strain the mixture into a bowl and discard the celery. Add the basil to the hot liquid and leave to infuse until cool.

Mix the tomato juice, vodka, sherry, lemon juice, seasoning, Worcestershire and Tabasco sauces. Strain the basil from the syrup then pour the syrup into the tomato mixture.

Season then churn and freeze.

Kruidkoek

This is a typical Dutch recipe. It's somewhere between bread and cake, and people usually eat it with their breakfast, or with their tea or coffee.
It always seems to me that the Dutch cuisine had very little influence on the eating habits of the countries the dutch colonized, especially in comparison to countries like Spain and France... Except when it comes to cookies! Ofcourse this genuine Dutch recipe is embedded with Indonesian spices, so it's really a great example of some strong fusion cooking ;-)

Ingredients:
1 orange
250 gr raisins
4 ts cinnamon powder
2 ts coriander powder (a.k.a ketoembar)
2 ts ginger powder
1 ts nutmegg powder
1/2 ts clove powder
300 gr wholemeal flour
1 bag baking powder
250 gr dark brown castor sugar
1 egg
2 tbs kitchen syrup
200 ml milk
6 balls stem ginger, chopped

• Preheat the oven at 175 °C. Grease a cake mould (2 litres content). Wash the orange, grate the zest and squeeze out the juice. Heat the raisins and orange zest and juice and let cool a little bit.
• Mix the herbs in a bowl. Mix in the flour, baking powder and sugar. Break the egg over it, add syrup and milk, and stir everything to a smooth batter.
• Stir the ginger, raisins and juice through the batter. Pour the batter in the mould. Put the mould in the oven, a little bit under the middle. Bake the kruidkoek for about 1 hour and 15 minutes.
• Let the kruidkoek cool off for 10 minutes, and take it out of the mould. Let it cool off some more on a cake grill. Pack the kruidkoek in tinfoil and let it rest for a day.

To eat it you cut it in slices on which you put dairy butter.

Fig Bread

This recipe (for breadmachine) is coming from "Allerhande", a magazine from a supermarket chain in the Netherlands. It bakes one normal size bread.

Ingredients:
1 orange
250 gr dried figs
25 gr butter
500 gr wholemeal flour
10 gr salt
10 gr sugar
6 gr dry yeast
200 ml water

• Wash the orange, grate zest, and squeeze out the juice
• Cut the figs in fourths, bring to a boil with the orange juice, and let cool
• Put everything in the breadmachine in the way that is appropriate for your machine, and use the program for sweet bread to bake it

This is especially good with a blue cheese like gorgonzola!

Mexican Herb Mix

Because I have a lot of herbs, but usually no mixed herbs in the house, it's sometimes good to know what is in a mix when recipes refer to it.

Ingredients:
cumin seeds
coriander seeds (a.k.a cilantro)
black pepper
ginger powder
cayenne pepper
red bell pepper powder (a.k.a. paprika powder)
cinnamon powder (or cinnamon stick)

This is put together 'from the wrist'...
If you use everything from powders, just combine everything in a bowl and mix together.
In case you only have non-powder ingredients (or want an even tastier mix), dry roast everything that's not a powder, grind it, think of sunny things like drinking margheritas in a hammock on the beach, and mix everything together.

Twice Cooked Pork - 回锅肉 - Hui Guo Rou

This is one of the dishes Wu Lei prepared when Mao Xiaoyu invited me over for some serious chinese cooking at his place. The dish is Wu Lei's speciality and they eat it almost every weekend. (During the week they make only 1 dish, or the typical fast low budget student cooking like noodles and spaghetti... I already wondering if every Chinese man has a secret life as a master chef when I noticed the home made steamed bread from their other roommate... Just when do actually have time to play Starcraft ;-) ??).

Ingredients:
400 gr pork (in slices of about 1.5 cm)
bunch of spring onions (cut diagonally so that the pieces are 4 x 1 cm)
2 tbs secret sauce
2 tbs corn starch
1 tbs sunflower oil

The secret sauce is in the top left

• Boil the slices of pork for about 10 minutes. Drain and cut in small pieces of about 2.5 cm. Mix the corn starch with the meat so it gets a coating.
• Heat the oil in a wok, and stir fry the the pork for about 3 minutes. Add the secret sauce and stir fry for another minute or so.
• Add the spring onions, and let them heat along for another minute

some of the ingredients	The finished dish is in the middle top

To be honoust I got a bit scared when I saw the meat. I hardly ever eat pork, and I never eat the pieces with the fat on it.. I just don't like the way the fat feels in my mouth, and how heavy it is on the stomach, if I even manage to chew and swallow it. "Courage evo", I told myself, "you should at least give it a try, and it will be very rude to refuse to eat it". When we sat down to eat I first took some safe dofu, and after that took some pieces of pork with a lot of spring onions to make it look more ;-). As I took a bite I felt a bit pressured as Wu Lei was seriously studying my face to see how I would like it. Wow!!! It was good++!! What a relief, and what a surprise!! I actually took a lot more after that initial hesitation! Wu Lei explained that cooking the meat first makes the oil go out of it. When it's fried after the cooking the sauce takes the place of the fat, so it becomes super tasty, and because of the starch and stirfrying it has a nice crisp to it!
So this twice cooking method must be the secret to how Chinese people stay so slender despite of the fatty meat!

Fish With Sour Pak Choi - 酸菜鱼 - Suan Cai Yu

This is one of the dishes Xiaoyu prepared when he invited me over for some serious chinese cooking. Though Xiaoyu wasn't entirely happy with it, because he didn't have the right fish, I though it was delicious! But yes, he now used a rather small fish that comes from the freezer of our beloved Chinese supermarket, that was cut in pieces, but had the bones still in there so we had to be a bit cautious eating it, and it didn't have so much taste. The vegetables tasted absolutely great, and the dish combined wonderfully with the other dishes.

Ingredients:
400 gr fish cut in pieces of about 5 cm (best take the filets of a river fish)
1 package of preserved sour pak choy
2 tbs corn starch or tapioca starch
1/2 tbs shaohsing rice wine
1 tbs sunflower oil

the sour pak choi is the bottom left package

• Mix the rice wine and corn starch with the fish and marinate for 15 to 30 minutes.
• Heat the oil in the wok, and carefully fry the fish for a minute or 3.
• Add the package of preserved pak choi and let everything cook for another 8 minutes or till the fish is ready

Suan Cai Yu happily coming along