I have decided to put this blog into hibernation for the time being. It will remain online, but I will not be adding new posts to it any time soon.
I sort of lost the inspiration for it :/ Maybe it’ll come back sometime and if it does I can always wake the blog up again.
Registrations and comments has been closed as well.
I know I have lacked in posting here, but I’ve sort of been out of inspiration in the kitchen. Feels as I do the same dishes over and over again. Nothing wrong with that, they are well tested and tasteful, just can’t blog about doing what I’ve already done…
Though I wanna share one small tip about making minced meat sauce. I suppose that most of you do as I were taught to do when I started cooking. That is start with browning the minced meat and then creating the sauce with that as base.
Recently I learnt that there’s an option, that works very well, even better in some ways. The result is a fuller body of the sauce, without adding thickeners. Well suited for large quantities as well.
Start with making the sauce, based on tomatoes or whatever you prefer. When that has been boiled together a few minutes, start adding the minced meat little by little. Remember to stir well while the minced meat gets cooked into the sauce.
When all is stirred in, let it cook for a little while and taste, adding more spices if needed.
The huge advantage of this comes forward when you try and make sauce on a couple kilograms of minced meat and does not have a huge frying pan, or doesn’t want to start frying in one pan and then adding it to a big casserole 🙂
I first tried it when I helped my sister cook for her birthday, we made three kinds of pies, one of them a minced meat pie.
Preparing todays dinner
Not really gonna give you a recipe on this, as it is just a matter of frying up the vegetables of choice and then adding a can of cherry tomatoes. Let it all simmer until it thickens by it self 🙂
I used oregano, fresh chili, one clove of garlic, couple tablespoons red wine, and roughly one tablespoon of honey, salt and pepper to flavour it.
My vegetables were: squash, red onion (half), mushrooms, celeriac and the above mentioned canned cherry tomatoes.
Todays dinner.
I served it together with fried chicken breast (just seasoned with salt and pepper) and couscous. I also added a small amount of crème fraîche to add some freshness.
Delicious yet simple.
I switched to a paid plan at my host recently. I hope everything was transferred smoothly and that all things still work as expected. Should you ever run into any problems, be sure to let me know. You can use the form under Contact Us or send an email to: webmaster[at]annas-playground[dot]info.
Within the next few days I hope that I will relaunch this blog with a new and updated theme, it’s long overdue already.
For New Years eve we had a couple friends over for some dinner. We’ve done this a couple years now with them, this year we decided to try some ostrich. It was a very good choice, turned out very nice. The ostrich was served with potatoes au gratin and a couple variants of salads: cucumber salad and tomato and onion salad with mozzarella cheese.
We also had dessert, in the form of a pannacotta (an Italian dessert) with orange salad. The orange salad was flavoured with cinnamon and star anise. The recipe for the pannacotta and orange salad will come soon The recipe for the pannacotta can be found here 🙂 Read the rest of this entry »
