Home grown for my mom's birthday!

a herbal bouquet from my garden

This tuesday was my mom's birthday. I usually cook something nice to make that day special, a wonderful cook as she was. I knew I was going to make something light this time as all our stomachs needed a break from eating too much as we had invited friends for a barbecue on the weekend and like always I had prepared too much and we were left with enough for the next day as well. But until her birthday I really didn't now what. Then, it so happened that I went with sunnyboy to have a look at our kitchen garden in the afternoon and realised that we could make something nice with the potatoes waiting to be digged out, as my mom would have been so proud of me - of my first potatoes.
Both of us got our gloves, sunny boy has got his from his aunt who keeps buying all kinds of fancy things for him everytime she comes. It was uttermost pleasure for both of us to take them out of the earth and collect them in our bowl. Every time sunnyboy found one, he would scream with excitement "here's one more!...". We just dug out one plant for this and we still have nine. Yipeeeeee!
I couldn't believe that planting them so spontaneously end of March (or was it April?!....don't remember, need to note it down next time) actually gave results. I had planted an early potato variety and they came through without any diseases. I think they will be the only ones in my garden without any diseases this year, as I found signs of tomato blight on a couple of my still green tomatoes today. I removed those I found. My zucchini, just like my Hokaido pumpkin, are suffering from mildew now. Luckily we have had enough Zucchinis and so far they don't seem to be minding the mildew on the leaves. But the pumpkins on the plant seem to have stopped growing and no new ones are comig either. I'll have maybe five pumpkins this year of which only three would be the normal good size. I think for a pumpkin it seems too little. But the mildew is getting stronger and stronger even though I have already sprayed a lot of baking powder on the leaves. Initially it seemd to help a lot but not anymore and I don't wish to use any chemicals.
But hubby says five is not bad from a plant, more than enough for us. Well, he's right that way!

So, coming back to the potatoes. I washed them and scrubbed them clean. I didn't need to peal them as the skin looked so fresh and thin. I prepared them along with the zucchini from our kitchen garden. And we ate them along with a simple daal, rice and an avocado guacamole made with cucumber instead of the onion in it usually.

Sukhi Aaloo ki sabzi (Potatoes sauteed with veggies)
Recipe by PG of My Kitchen Stories

Ingredients:
6 -8 small early potatoes, skin scrubbed clean and cubed
1/2 zucchini (or 1 small), cubed
3 spring onions, chopped
1/2 red bell pepper, cut into squares
1 tsp cumin
1 pinch asafoetida, crushed
1 pinch coarsely ground fenugreek seeds
1 tbsp ground coriander
1/2 tsp Pav Bhaji masala (Everest) or any other curry powder of choice
red chilli powder to taste
salt to taste
rapeseed oil

Method:

• heat oil in a saute pan and add cumin and asafoetida to splutter, stir and add the potatoes immediately.
• cook on medium heat covered, keep stirring in between
• after about 10 minutes add spring onion, ground coriander and red chili powder stir and cook further
• add salt in between and stir. Once done, take out and set aside covered to keep warm
• add little or no oil as per choice in the pan and stir fry zucchini and red pepper on medium high heat till they get a golden brown colour and cooked through but still firm to the bite
• add salt and put back the potatoes into the pan and cook further for no more than a minute (if using an electric or ceramic cooktop, switch of heat and leave on the cooktop)
  
• serve warm with rice, roti or any kind of bread. We ate it with daal, steamed basmati rice and guacamole made with cucumber instead of onion.
• Bon Appétit!
  

I've been away too long (and Myyyyyy zucchini plant)

It could get too long to explain to you why I had to take leave from blogging. It was unexpected but the reasons are gone now, unfortunately. That was another reason why I didn't feel like coming back as I was in no mood to do anything. Since last month I have been thinking of coming back, but somehow during my absence here a lot new happenend and I also realised that I had been neglecting a lot of other important things.
So, today I want to show you what all I have been up to in the last few months. I started working in my tiny kitchen garden a bit late this year but just about managed to plant some plantlets and just about managed to start the tomato seeds, but I don't know if it won't be too late by the time the tomatoes come. Though this time the sun had the mercy of showing up more often this summers than last year so, they almost seem to have made up for their small size. I hope i get atleast one round of tomatoes.
This time I even planted potatoes for the first time with hubbys help. They have been growing like wild. I have planted one zucchini plant and one Hokaido pumpkin which I bought from a local small groccery shop. They have come out very nicely. Now I have sown carrot seeds, a bit late, I feel, but lets see. And also seeds of radishes and a lettuce called 'pflucksalat' which are salads from which you can pluck just the leaves and new ones keep coming.
The Zucchini plant has been producing zucchini endlessly, but so far we haven't gotten bored of eating them.



I have made very many different things with it. Here are a few examples:
You see I wanted to post about it last month but I'm getting the time now. Sunny boy actually ate Zucchini. Yes! the biggest wonder of this year happpened on the day I served this dish , Zucchini with chickpeas. These were his words: "this is the best zucchini of the world". He was as happy and proud of the zucchini from his own garden as me.
But, don't worry, his enthusiasm went as soon as it came! :(




My zucchini plant, still going strong....
Although hubby loved all the things I prepared so far, but this was his favorite, Gobi manchurian a la PG, with zucchini and a lot of other veggies. The basic recipe came from the awesome blog of Sailu's Kitchen.

So that you know I will be writing but it will only be every now and then. Time has made me change priorities. I loved each and every moment of food blogging and I have been wanting to post so often but to no avail. I still keep taking pictures hoping to post about it. :D Maybe one day I will have more time for this hobby of mine.
I'm sorry for not replying to your emails and querries immediately. And thank you so much for your concern! I hope to post a couple of more posts soon.

Home grown tomatoes and my first ever Tomato sauce!

It was a very spontaneous decision to buy three tomato plantlets whe I saw them in the market. I was amazed at how well they grew in my kitchen garden. I also learnt for the first time a few basic things about tomatoes, like, for example, that one needs to pinch off the side shoots just when they start to show up. If they have grown a bit longer then just cut them up and throw them down on the ground where the tomato is growing, apparently they like it. And for the first time I got many tomatoes, but usualy one or two at a time and also with long waitings in between. But then, my happiness knew no bounds when I for the first time, after waiting for so long, got enough tomatoes to be able to make something like a chutney or a sauce.
So, I started searching for some recipes and came across a number of good ones. But then I settled for this one at Aayi's recipes as this seemed to me to be the closest to how I imagined my chutney with a number of ingredients I also wished to have in my preparation.

Tomato sauce

Based on the recipe of Tomato pickle at Shilpa's Aayis Recipes

Ingredients:

1 kg tomatoes, washed and chopped finely (all from my kitchen garden!)
1 tsp Fenugreek seeds
1 tsp Sesame seeds
1 tsp mustard seeds
1 tbsp rapeseed oil
2 large garlic cloves, grated or crushed
1 inch piece of ginger, grated
1 tsp tamarind paste (also works as an acidifier)
1/2 tsp turmeric powder (I left it out)
5 g citiric acid (1packet of Dr. Oetker)-neccessary to make the sauce acidic enough
1 tsp whole cane sugar (jaggery)
3 1/2 tbsp gelly sugar (contains pectin in addition)
1 tsp salt or to taste
1 pinch red chilli powder (or to taste)


Method:

• Roast the 3 seeds in rapeseed oil in a deep saucepan till they smell good on medium heat
• add the tomatoes, stir and cook for further 5 minutes
  
• add the remaining ingredients, mix and cook for another 5 minutes covered
  
• Remove the saucepan from heat and puree with a hand blender
• Cook further for another 10 minutes covered*
  
• store in boiled jars with twist off lids (check the link)
  
• And let them cool down before placing them in the fridge

I used the leftover gelly sugar I had from my previous experiments I'll be talking about soon to make the sauce a bit thicker, as my tomatoes were very watery. Maybe had I used a larege flat frypan or sauté pan it would have thickened faster, but I think if you want to preserve something for long it is better to use a deeper saucepan and the lid should be kept covered , keeping the spoon with a long handle in the pan all th time, so there is some space for the steam to escape as wll.

*NOTE: Cook for atleast 10 minutes or longer, till you feel that it can be preserved for long in that state.
Do read the guide lines of canning in my link before trying to preserve yorself, if you are a beginner.

And now coming to the results. I made a sauce , at least a tomato sauce like this for the first time. And all i can think of is, "why did I wait sooooo long to try it?!". It is such a wonderful taste I have never tasted before in a tomato sauce. I love this sauce and it will surely go into my tried and tasted and passed recipes which are then preserved in my precious folder with such special recipes. Thank you Shilpa for this wonderful experience which I could have with my home grown tomatoes!

This post goes to this month's MBP event started by Coffee and being hosted this month by Rachel of Tangerine's Kitchen.

And of course I will send this one to Grow your own at Andrea's Recipes, being hosted this time by Andrea herself, the initiator of this wonderful event.

Home grown radishes

Rishab was being quite wild when it came to plucking flowers and leaves all the time. I thought that I might help him develop a little bit more sensitivity towards plants, if I let him sow the radish seeds I wanted to sow himself. Though I know he is quite young (3 years) and I keep hearing from mothers that it is normal, but I thought it was worth trying. Both Rishab and I sowed the seeds in the soil as per the instructions on the package. And now that I think of it, it seemed to have worked, at least to a certain extent.
Although we got quite a lot of radishes - about 2/3rd of all that we planted, I realised that they had not been planted deep enough. In the package they just said, 1 cm deep and I think many a times (luckily!) we sowed the seeds 2 cm deep. So, in many cases, though they grew (the leaves), the radish tuber didn't get thick and were protruding out of the soil and were thin like any other root, to our disappointment.
This was the first summers where I actually planted or sowed seeds for vegetables and I also got something at the end. Also the first time for radishes, but I think that is the easiest thing to do. Last year the slugs ate aways everything one by one, even before they could grow. This year I had sworn not to plant a single plant! :D "Why waste my energies with the bad weather here - cloudy and wet, cold and no sun, which in any case doesn't allow plants to grow", I thought.
But, come summer and the warmer days with it, and I again became optimistic about it. The last year was also a bad summer - wet, cold and little direct sunlight. These summers were again nothing so special, but good enough that I at least had some small successes, enough to motivate me to do some more gardening next year. Yipeeeeeeeeeeeeee! Yes, this is no big deal I know, when I see so many blogger gardeners doing it in a big way, but this is my very first time ever!
So, what all did I plant this year in my garden. I planted some new herbs. I already had mint, oregano and a small plant of thyme from last year, but since I chose a wrong spot to plant them, where they were always in too much of shade, they didn't like it. So, last Fall I changed their position to another well lighted spot. It helped a lot this year. I planted some more herbs -sage, another variety of mint, and a wilting pot of organic chives which I had used up (it came so well) and two different strawberries. One of them I had mentioned in my earlier post. Tomatoes, this time they grew much better than I had expected, unlike last time. And bore fruit heavily, but, now that it has become cold, they don't like it any more. And i am forced to pluck the remaining ones which are not compeletely ripe. I think I waited too long to buy and plant them. It was a very spontaneous decision when i saw them and couldn't resist buying them. Don't know if it makes sense to buy a small glass house for it next year, if it will keep the tomatoes warmer. I realise that they don't like it wet and cold at all. well, time will tell. I am learning so much with such small experiments. And the best thing is the only fertiliser I used was this organic horn and hoof chippings /meal (German: Hornspäne) which help enrich the nitrogen content of the soil and is allowed for organic farming under the EU law.
But, I also have to mention that I actually had also bought zucchini seeds (or was it cucumber, I had cucumber seeds too) and wanted to plant them too. I had sown them in small pots in the house in Spring time. It was almost summers and after two weeks and already about 18-20 °C outside, I thought that I might as well transfer the seedlings outside. But, as it looks like, they got a climate shock and all wilted one after the other, to my big disappointment. That I didn't even bother to plant the other set of seeds (either cucumber of zucchini). Will have to check that in the packets I still have.
But, whatever, next year I will surely do some more sowing and planting and see what I get.
So, here is my humble recipe for a simple salad which we ate as a side with Italian dressing (oliveoil, white wine vinegar or lemon juice, salt and pepper, ad i also added some dijon mustard) which everyone added to his own salad bowl at lunch. I think key to a good sald is the dressing, which again depends on a good vinegar, which makes a world of difference in the taste. So, it is worht it to use natural vinegar, any kinds one likes. Some of my favorites are white wine vinegar - a lot of times flavoured with different herbs, sherry viengar, balsamico - white and dark, apple cidre vinegar. Right now I bought one flavoured with elderberry (Sambacus) must, a sweet and mild one - tastes good.
For the salad, I just cut up some cucmber and organic Iceberg from the local market, and radishes and chives from my own garden. The radishes were especially tasty. Spicy and pungent that my son found it hard to eat them! It was a totally new taste for him. I have noticed that here in the market you also get spicy radishes, but only during summers. I'm sending this to Grow Your Own event initiated by Andrea and taking place this fortnight (1st to 15th Oct.) at Maria's A Scientist in the Kitchen.

Arugula Tomato Raita (stirred yoghurt with arugula and tomatoes)

...with home grown tomatoes!

Now this is such a simple dish that you might wonder why I'm posting it here.
Well, for two reasons. First of all it contains my very first ever home grown pesticide-free organically manured garden tomatoes. Secondly, because I just love this creation of mine, however simple it may be.
Now, if you have eaten arugula, then you know what I'm talking about. If not, these are a wonderful variety of salad leaves with a wonderfully pleasant pungent and spicy flavour, similar, but only similar, to that of radish beans (beans of the radish plants), if you have eaten them.
Although since my visit to Italy last year I know arugola is not always arugola. I knew about the difference between the varieties available in the US, which were much milder in taste than those available here in Germany, but after having eaten those wildly growing spicy and pungent arugola leaves and flowers in a village near Bari, I was so overwhelmed by its rich flavours that I needed time to get adjusted to these varieties available in the markets back here which almost tasted bland in comparison to those I ate in Italy last September.
And that brings me back to the second reason of my writing this post. These arugola leaves I bought this time tasted the nearest to those from Italy and since I love this green salad I had just chopped some leaves into the yoghurt and added one tomato from my garden into my Raita and I had a delicious side to the paranthas in no time.

Preparation time: 10 minutes
serves 2-4 people

Ingredients:

300 -450 g probiotic Yoghurt
1/2 tsp ground roasted cumin seeds
1/4 tsp black salt (available in Indian and Asian shops)
1/4 tsp table salt (regular salt), or to taste
1 pinch chilli powder (or even more; optional)
1 nice bunch of Arugola leaves, chopped coarsely into large pieces
1 large tomato, chopped


Method:

• Stir yoghurt throughly along with the salt and roasted cumin
  
• just before serving, add the chopped leaves and tomatoes and stir gently
• eat it plain, as it is, or served with other Indian savourys like paranthas or rotis or even rice (check previous post for it too!)
  

Polish Apple cake....

.....with apples from HOME!

I had a huge batch of apples (James Grieve) from my own garden.












These are a lovely variety of apples for baking or in any form as a dessert, but as good for eating fresh or in a salad, for example. They are quite rich in flavour and have a nice tartness which I feel is a must for an apple to taste good. I don't like those sweet varieties of apples which just taste sweet and don't seem to have any other flavour.
So, to my happiness this is a wonderful variety of an apple tree I have at home, which was there before we moved into this house. It is still a young plant, maybe 10 years or so, but had been strongly cut really short as it was growing against a wall and we moved the poor plant to a place where it got enough room to grow properly. And it is growing really fast now. I am learning to take care of these garden plants, which I don't find as easy always and this time I learned a few basic things about taking care of apple trees. I always find pruning a difficult task. You need not only some experience , but also some good guidelines to do it. Let's see How I manage this time.
So, two small buckets full of nice looking apples was more than I had expected. It was a weekend and hubby took out his ladder and did this job for me. We ate a couple of them just like that and enjoyed it a lot. It was still a bit early for them, but that is how I like them, whe they are still crispy and juicy!













And the next day I baked the cake with the recipe I have made a couple of times of a Polish apple cake from my cookbook I own almost since I came to Germany and which not only taught me how to bake, but also learn German! I have have gone through many baking adventures with it, mostly successfully!
I made some changes to the last time. I didn't use any rum for the raisins 'cause of my son, and neither milk - just some hot water to soak them. I didn't use any currents either. This time I also used ground almonds instead of slivered or chopped ones. And made the cake on a baking try this time.
I also didn't add any cinnamon or cardamom to the cake this time on my hubbys request. And for the same reason added raisins to only half of the cake and the remaining without them. He prefers the cake without them. And since my 3 year old son wasn't sure if he wanted them or not - "yes, I want them..uhhh....no, no, I don't....Ok I want...."... "OK, Rishab, you'll get whatever you want, once the cake is done". I like them in the cake, by the way. :)

And the cake was a dream! I love this thin layer of "Baiser" (Meringue, in English) as the call it here on top of the cake. Nothing can beat this flavour. And with it you also don't require any whipped cream, as the Baiser takes care of that. It is a complete dessert, as it is. It rounded up our weekend meal very nicely. One cake I can only highly recommend.















This one goes to the Andrea's Grow Your Own event being hosted by Denise of Chez Us this time.

Woodland Strawberries

Wild strawberries in my garden

Just for the memories....
Frageria vesca, called woodland- or wild strawberry, is a variety of small strawberries, which are very aromatic and strongly flavoured, but are not very fleshy, partly because of their small size. They don't always turn completely red or only partly red when ripe, but still have a very pleasant and a mildly sweet taste.
A friend of mine gave me this "Wald-Erdbeere", as it is called in German, when she came to visit me about two years ago in autumn. Initially I thought it to be the same as some other variety, whose berries looked a bit different than the typical strawberries and although they were very aromatic, didn't taste as good.
But, the next year, when the strawberries grew, I enjoyed eating these and this time Rishab too!

want to eat some too?!