Since Becca and Stevie would be eating with The Dulcinea and me, I whipped us some appetizers. I bought a small jar of pickled herring, boiled some shrimp & made cocktail sauce, and made some Kase "mit Musik" (Cheese "with Music").
To make the Kase "mit Musik", I started by marinating some Swiss cheese in olive oil, vinegar, and pepper. The slices sat in the frig for a few hours before being patted down a bit and put on a plate. Technically you should use big slices of cheese that fit on a slice of bread and eat with a knife & fork but I had smaller pieces of cheese and a mini-loaf of cocktail pumpernickel bread suitable for fingers.
Here's how to eat it:
1) Butter a slice of pumpernickel.
2) Lay a slice of cheese atop the bread.
3) Sprinkle some minced onion on the cheese.
4) Eat.
As I prepped the Graupeneintopf, I found that we were out of salt so I had to grind up some really coarse sea salt that I had in my mortar & pestle. Graupeneintopf is a very simple dish. First you saute some finely diced onion and celery in butter. I deviated a little bit and used half butter and half lard. Then you add your meat of choice. In this case, it was ground beef.
Let the beef cooking a few minutes and throw in your barley, a few cups of stock, and some tomato puree. Season. Then throw in the oven. It'll dry up on ya so I added more stock after about 45 mintues. This is what I got in the end:
It's not a fancy dish, by any means, but it was a good hearty meal on a chilly fall day. Oh, and I fried up some spuds.
Then there was the Apfelbettelmann for dessert. It's akin to apple crisp but, instead of oats, there's pumpernickel bread crumbs. Since these were unavailable at Woodman's, I made them myself. They formed the crust along with sugar, and booze. So you layer things in the pan: crust, apple slices, rum-soaked raisins, and then grapes. Once all the strata are in place, I threw a generous number of bits of butter on top and threw it into the oven.
And here's the final product, two-thirds eaten.
With the weather turning, I look forward to huddling 'round the hearth more often.
No comments:
Post a Comment