My New Friend the Crock Pot
Jul22

My New Friend the Crock Pot

Aside from me not really being a cook, there are other reasons I had never heard of a crock pot until 3 years ago. The Germans, and I am one of them, don’t get that much use out of it. Their main meal is served at lunch time. Given 6-8 hours of cooking time, it means you’d have to start your preparations long before breakfast.

But I’ve adapted to living in the US and my eating habits have as well. Which has given me the wonderful opportunity to make a new friend: My crock pot. It’s a great tool for somebody cooking “guy” style. Most crock pot dishes start with some chopping and filling up the pot. Switch it on, add some spices and stir once an hour or so. Go, mow the lawn, start writing a novel or do some scrap booking. Or facebooking.

The main purpose of many cooking recipes is to get tough meat soft and tender. The crock pot is a master in that endeavor. When I saw and tasted what the miraculous device did to my first goulash, I was overjoyed. What was even more interesting was seeing how the Pulled Sauerkraut Pork was developing over time. After two hours of cooking, it looked like the meat that was typically served during a German Schlachtfest or for the Americans, a pig pickin’. Continuing, after four hours, it came pretty close to North Carolina pulled pork.

I’ve used the crock pot often for goulash, pea and bean soups. All three of them are classic meals prepared in large quantities at gatherings or in the military – cooked in a field kitchen called the “Goulash Cannon”. All of them required a similar process: get the meal started early, cook for a long time and don’t lose much taste when kept warm for a long time.

There are plenty of crock pot recipes out there, waiting to be discovered. I might get around to reading them some day.

Read More

German Potato Salad

Yes, potato salad. Nothing special about it. Plenty of dishes called for this potato salad and it was just a given. You only start missing it when you can’t have it. Like when you move to California. They do have decent potato salad there as well. Mayo based. You start wondering why mayo based potato salad is different and can’t tell at first. Until you call your mother and ask how she makes potato salad and she mentions vinegar. Of course, it took me five more years to write down the recipe, since I had to make potato salad on request.

The only problem is the potato selection. Back home an entire vocabulary is build around it: Boils firm, good for potato salad and other secret words. None of them have been translated for me and I have to find out through experimenting. I know the standard red potatoes are just fine for potato salad and Yukon Gold are okay. I’ll conquer the secrets some day.

Recipe: German Potato Salad
Author: 
Recipe type: Side
Prep time: 
Cook time: 
Total time: 
Serves: 4
 
Ingredients
  • 2 pounds potatoes
  • ½ cup diced onions
  • 8 oz bacon
  • 1 cup vegetable broth
  • 3 tablespoons vinegar
  • 2 tablespoons cooking oil
  • 1 tablespoon yellow mustard
  • 1 teaspoon sugar
  • ¼ teaspoon pepper
Instructions
  1. Boil the potatoes and dice or slice them afterwards.
  2. Saute the onions until just a bit glassy, don't let them get brown.
  3. Fry the bacon and cut or break it into small pieces.
  4. Mix the dressing: broth, vinegar, oil, mustard, sugar, pepper.
  5. In a small pot, heat the mixture until boiling and stir it through for a minute.
  6. Add the onions to the potatoes and poor the dressing on top.
  7. If vegetarians are around, keep the bacon pieces on the side, otherwise add them.
  8. Mix everything through.
  9. Can be served warm or cold.

Read More

Facing the Rice

It’s already a good while back since I got to visit my first Indian restaurant and got to smell Basmati rice for the very first time. It was incredible. Until then I had mostly eaten boil-in-bag rice, and some rice a Korean guest student had made a couple of times in the dorm. Of course I wanted to make Basmati rice all by myself. (Note to self: need to rant about Basmati(tm) )

So I got the instructions kind of right, 1 1/2 cups of water for every cup of rice, get it boiling and turn it on low for 20 minutes or so. That worked well a couple of times. Sometimes I added some more water. Sometimes I ended up with a more or less solid layer of rice on the bottom of the pot. Which I had to soak over night and to scratch out from the pot next day. But it did produce a decent amount of rice.

And then I burned my $50 1 gallon pot. Blackened, inside and out. No way to wash it off the ionized surface. Kaputt. Damn. I admit, I had forgotten to set a timer. But there were no obvious signs I was in trouble. No smell. No smoke detector went off. Nothing. The rice was burned, too. I tried to revive the pot a couple of times, but nothing helped and all that was left to do was to give it a proper burial. I salvaged the lid, though. And I face that lid at least once a week.

I haven’t managed to make rice since. Not that I didn’t attempt it. No, I failed multiple times: burned, under cooked, soggy beyond believe, not enough rice. And worst of all, I think I infected my wife, too. I think next time she attempts to make rice, I’ll just leave the house for a while.

And then there were a couple of attempts to cook rice in the crock pot. I am being told it is possible, but you need to have the right rice and good timing. Me? Impatient and struck by ADD as I am?. The crock pot recipe did produce a soggy hard to describe mix of halfway dissolved rice, overcooked chicken and various vegetables. Tasty, actually, but it felt more like eating grits.

All that’s left now is boil-in-bag. The bag of Basmati rice is half empty, sitting right next to a bag of Jasmin rice, also half empty. Don’t start a discussion if they are half full or half empty, I don’t know which one the pessimists view is. All I am saying is, I want to eat some good rice. Without trouble. In my despair I looked up an article about making risotto. It made me cry. Somewhere two paragraphs in they said, this cook was able to make such great risotto only because he knew his rice so well. Oh, the horror!

Read More

Double Date and Mousse au Chocolat

By now it’s a good while back that my friend Lutz and I had meet those two great women we anted to impress. Nothing easier for Lutz to invite them for dinner, since he’s a great cook. And careless as I am, I am offering to make the dessert. I had just come back from a trip through France and had tasted mousse-au-chocolat for the first time. That’s what’s it going to be.

Yeah, right. I really don’t recall the details of the recipe, but there were three core ingredients: chocolate, coffee and eggs. Which presented a few challenges. Working with chocolate is tough, so I hear nowadays. Back then I had no clue and I skipped the part that says it is complicated. I got it molten and I kept it that way for a while. Part two required half a cup of coffee. Great. The recipe I found stated it clearly. What it didn’t say was: brewed coffee or coffee powder. It’s french food after all, they do weird things to their food. There was no internet to look things up quickly. I had found the recipe I was working with….somewhere. And still no idea about the coffee.

So I mixed the coffee powder with the molten chocolate. And I needed to fold the chocolate mix into the egg yolks. Grumble. WTF. Folding A into B. No clue what they want me to do. Somehow I just mixed it. Might have been the right thing to do. Who knows. Who cares.

And then there was the egg foam. I did ask my mother how to make it: Separate the egg whites, add sugar and beat it into submission with a mixer. Well, there is no mixer in this bachelor household. There’s no need for it. Up until now, all mixing could be done easily with a whisk. Doing heavy whisking by an impatient bachelor without any talent to cook? Beating egg whites until there’s stiff foam? Exactly. I produced a layer of foamy egg whites, about 1/4″ thick, but not very stiff. And there was still plenty of egg white. That got soaked up by the chocolate/coffee/egg yolk mix and somehow stiffened to feel like a pudding. Good enough.

I didn’t taste it, since it was supposed to cool in the refrigerator first. And once it was cooled down, tasting it, would have left marks on the perfect surface. Off to Lutz’ house. He’s almost done with his part of the food. I tell him my mousse story and he raises his eyebrow. Coffee powder?? Funny. The rest of the story is short. Each of us tasted 1 spoon full of it and tried to get the coffee grinds out of our teeth for the rest of the night. I was branded as a clueless cook, but willing to take a risk… with the life of my friends.

Good thing we had Lutz’s food and plenty of red wine.

Read More