Polish Perogi

The topic of this blogg is going to be the eastern european cuisine with special reagard of the polish cuisine. The recipe of Perogi, I goinig to write about, is one of the common dishes in poland together with Golabki (Stuffed Cabbage), Chłopski Posiłek (Peasants' Bacon and Cabbage), BIGOS (Hunter's Stew), Savoury Sausage and Sauerkraut, and Polish Wild Mushroom Soup (recipes and info here). The history of the perogi is not totally clear yet, but the origin of the perogi came probbably from the oriont across cntral Asia to Europe (more).

 (source)

 The recipe itsself is acctually pritty easy. The first step is just to mix the ingreadients for the dough and to cook the potatos. It's only important, that your dough is not too sticky, otherwise it would be difficuilt to form the perogis. when the potatos are ready then mash them and add some cheese and flavor the mixture with salt and pepper. For the forming of the perogis, there is a little trick,to make them look nicer and to make sure they keep their filling: After you cut out a little circle and please some of the mash potatos in the middle (not too much, otherwise you'll get potatosoup later) and fold it to an semicircle (make the edge of one inside of the semicircle a little bit wet, so that it better stick together) you can use a fork to get the typicall perogi structur.
When yor donne with allthese, you just have to put the perogis in boiling water and put them out when they are swimming. and ready are your porogis.



Things I learend from theDeVry presentation are, that I'm a realist, that I like managment of a buisness, that I'm not going to be a fashion designer and a security advicer, and which kinds of engeeniring exist.

Swiss Fondue

With this blogg, I start into sweidish cuisine.But before i start with my todays recipe about cheese fondue. I am going to write something general about cooking, something about working with onions.
Onions are an ver old ingreadiant and are spred through a lot of cultures, like ancient egyptian and rom. One reason for that is, that they are full of nutritions. When working with onions, you should know:
-that there are 2 basic types: the hotter storage onion and milder fresh onion
-ach onion taste is dependened on the soil it grews
- best way to slice onions is to cut them in halfs and leave them rest for some minuits with the cuttet side down
- if you store onions, kep them away from potatos and light and wrap sliced ones in foil
-more about onion and a good recipe here


but back to the fondue. Fondue was originated in swiss, during winters, where the main meals consists of cheese amd bread, since they are storeable (more).
The recipe, i used, is pretty easy, since you only have to molt the three diffrent kinds of cheese, cut bread and enjoy. If your result looks like this:

 you are on the right way. (source)
But you don't have to use always cheese for a fondue, you can variate and use chocolate, wine or even fat.

Apple Fritters and Bouletten

This blogg is totly dedicated to the German cuisine. The two recepies, I'm going to present you are very easy and hav got a tasty result. 
My first recipe is for Apple Fritters. They are a typicall German food, since Germans use a lot of apples in their cusine.

source

 As I already said, the recipe is very easy. The only difficuilt part is the right temperature of the pan, when frying the apple fritters. The rest of the instructions basiclly contains mixing ingreadients together, slice apples, dip apples and serve. As you see, nothing which you can't handle.



 The next recipe is about Bouletten or German meat balls. As the apple fritters recipe, this is an easy one too. You just have to mix the ingreadients in a bowl and add bread crumbs untill the mixture is easiliy workabble and don't sticks to much on your hands. After that you form balls (regarding the size, I reommand smaller ones, because they cook quicker, but acctually they can have any size) and flat them. Then turn the flat balls in brad crumbs, so they get a bread crumbs layer and fry them in a pen with fat. When the Bouletten become brown on th outside and aren't longer red in the inside, they are ready to serve.

Creme Brulee and German Potato pancakes

With this post I want to finish the French desserts and begin with German cuisine, that's also the reason, why this blog has such an unusually name. So, let's start with a very famous French dessert: creme brulee.

The history of this dish is partly in the dark. It is not sure, how actually invented this dessert, but the Trinity College in Cambridge claimed, to be the originator (more about history). But what actually is creme brulee? Creme brulee is French for burned cream and describes pretty good the dish. the definition is a custard with a sugar crust/glaze.
 I did such a creme brulee (recipe) and it tastes pretty good, but you want to make sure to use ceramic bowls, otherwise the heat wont spread out constantly over the surface and you’re result will look like the ones I did in a muffin form. Furthermore you want to make sure, when you mix the hot cream with the eggs, that you do that carefully and add only little amounts of the hot cream to the eggs under constant whisking to avoid scrambled eggs. This procedure is called tempering and very important for a good result of this recipe.

 my creme brulee in a muffin form

So, let’s start with the German cuisine, famous for their meat, sausages, cabbage and potatoes. My first recipe is a variation from the German “Kartoffelpuffer” (potato pancake), shallow fried cakes of grated potatoes, that are usually mixed with eggs and grated onions, and in my opinion an improvement. The original “Kartoffelpuffer” comes probably from Poland, where they are part of the favorite dish placki wegierskie (potatoe pancake and gulash). However in Germany they are typically served with mashed apples. Very often they are served during the “Oktoberfest”, a big festival, initial celebrated of the marriage of Ludwig of Bayern and princess Therese of Sachsen-Hildburghausen (more), together with other typical German and especially Bavarian food, e.g sausage salad, Radisalat, meat loaf, Allgäu cheese spaetzle, dumpling and apple strudel. 
But back to our recipe. If you do everything right you should get some flat brown cakes with a crust, which look like them in the picture.

sources:

http://allrecipes.com/recipe/german-potato-pancakes/detail.aspx 

French Cuisine and Desserts

This chapter is totally dedicated to the French cuisine. Even if I am going to focus more on desserts I am starting briefly describing French cuisine. French food and beverages stand worldwide as delicacies. Most of the recipes France is famous for today, were developed during the Absolutism (more about history). But what makes French cuisine so special? Well, the answer is their sauces. None of the other European countries has developed that much different sauce.  Following is a little list with the most important ones plus a little description:

·         hollandaise Sauce (recipe) is an egg based sauce, mostly with butter, lemon and cayenne pepper.

·         roux sauce (recipe) is a mixture of fat and flour (1:1), which exists in tree different variants: light, medium, dark.

·         bechamel sauce (recipe) is white and creamy sauce made out of butter, flour, milk and salt and is one of the basic sauces from which many others could be produced.

·         demi-glaze sauce (recipe) is a brown sauce made out of Espagnole and a beef or veal stock.

·         vinaigrette sauce (recipe) is basically an oil and vinegar dressing.

Before I start with the French dessert, I want shortly write about the probably most famous French food next to French wine, cheese and baguette. I want to explain how to make a perfect croissant. Actually it’s easier than I thought, so don’t panic if you try cook some. The only two disadvantages of this dish are, you need a long time to make it and it’s not that healthy. You only have to keep in mind three tricks (recipe):

1.      If you have the dough ball roll it out to a cross with a thicker middle.

2.      Make sure that your butter is soft, so that you can easily form it.

3.      Give all the butter in the middle of the cross and fold the ends over the middle. Stretch the dough a little bit, if needed. Make sure that there are no holes, where you can see the butter.

4.      After that you have to let the dough rest for aprox. 2h, before you fold it the same way again except that you don’t add again butter.

5.      A god croissant has got over 1500 layers and with each folding you take the amount of layers by the power of three. That means you should fold it 5-6 times (but you can also eat it after the second fold)

6.      When you done with the folding roll the dough into a rectangle and cut out triangle. Then you just take the shortest side and roll it to a croissant.

this was my result. Your croissants should be bigger then my, to not burn that quick as my one in the middle.

So lets start with the desserts. One very famous French one is the Tarte Tatin (an upside-down French apple tart) originated by the by the elder of  two unmarried sisters who took over the running of their deceased father's hotel in the rural town of Lamotte-Beuvron (more about tarte tartin, more about tarts ). I didn’t make a Tarte tatin, but therefore I did a easy and very tasty one:

Recipe dough     recipe pestry cream

The only two thing you have to be careful with by making this tart, are firtstly that you use rubbed dough method, which basically means that you want some butter crumbs in your dough. And secondly that you have to be pretty careful, when you let your pastry cream become thicker, because you don’t want it burn on the ground and too thick. Everything else is actually very easy and god described in the recipe.
 By the way, talking about dessert pestry, one French one is Choux paste. if you like to try something diffrent with it click here.