dates stuffed with orange scented almond paste, dipped in dark chocolate and sprinkled with sea salt

Date delicious! Datemania! Date away! Date divine!

The making of:

To prepare them in your own kitchen you need:

dates

marzipan

the peel of an orange, zested

dark chocolate, melted

Maldon Sea Salt

a bain-marie to melt the chocolate

2 forks to dip the dates

gingered beans with hijiki

My international family of favourite green bean recipes (German with tomatoes, onions and vinaigrette, Spanish with fried garlic and almonds) welcomes a new brother in their midst: Asian gingered beans with hijiki.

This recipe is full of flavour and makes use of the beautiful hijiki algae, and fancy yet very easy to prepare.

dry and soaked hijiki

gingered beans  with hijiki (inspired by Alicia Silverstone)

1/2 cup dried hijiki
1 tablespoon tamari
2 tablespoons olive oil
1/2 cup onions, chopped
1 tablespoon finely chopped garlic
pinch of sea salt
2 cups fresh geen beans
2 tablespoons grated ginger

Place the hijiki in a small bowl with hot water. Let it soak for about 30 minutes, then drain and rinse.

Combine the hijiki with the tamari, add waterto almost cover in a saucepan.Cook, uncovered over medium heat until the water has nearly evaporated.

While the hijiki cooks, heat the oil, add onion, garlicand salt and sauté for about 4 minutes, or until translucent. Add the green beans. Cover and cook until the beans are tender-crisp, about 5 minutes.
Add the hijiki and ginger.
Mix well and cook for 1 to 2 minutes longer to marry the flavours.

Enjoy!

Michael's meadows and a lunch al fresco

Michael Simonsen, of Simonsen Freianlagen, the landscape designer and family friend, has a beautiful garden, that we were very eager to visit. Whenever we asked, "can we come see your garden this weekend?" He said "No no noooo, it needs a little more time to show the whole variety of flowers! Half of them didn't blossom yet!" or "Just a little more patience, I am still waiting for the sunflowers!"

Finally, on a sunny day towards the end of August, we decided "now or never" and called Michael to tell him the day of our visit had come, and that we didn't want to wait for the sunflowers any longer.

The walk through the meadows was delightful; we saw a real-life deer and some of the flowers smelled like honey.

For lunch Michael sent us off to the vegetable patch in the beautiful kitchen garden equipped with a washing basket to pick our ingredients. Warty cucumbers, the most differently shaped and coloured tomatoes and little leafy greens and herbs made a wonderful salad.

weekend links

Royal Saxonian Shallop, Großteich

31 amazing things to cook in August.  Only August 4th, we're still in time to keep up!

How to transform your inspiration into a colour scheme

My photographer self loves this kind of video: On Assignment with Penny De Los Santos

On my to-try list: Ecstatic Raw Chocolate. Look at the list of additions! Must be so much fun not only to make chocolate but to experiment with lemon, ginger, mint, roses, lavender, sea salt

 From Rookie Mag: All by my selfie.

strawberry crumble

strawberry crumble

strawberries ( blueberries, peaches, apricots.....)


3 cups oatmeal
2 cups flour (I used coconut flour)
a pinch of fine sea salt
3/4 cup coconut or safflower oil
3/4 cup rice syrup
1/4 cup maple syrup
1 cup chopped almonds, pecans or walnuts

I got the idea and ingredients for this recipe from Alicia Silverstone's book The Kind Diet, but my motivation to make the crumble was so urgent, that I did not read the instructions and created an entirely different "crumble", actually much closer to the German "Streusel". Therefore I want to encourage you, just as I did, to be very liberal with Alicia's instructions (to find here), and of course the suggested quantities and measurements may be adjusted to your pleasing.


Combine the fruit and the crumble in a baking pan. Bake it in the oven  at 180° until the fruit bubbles and the crumble turns golden. Enjoy!

sunset by the lake

 

Dippelsdorfer Teich

semi-dried tomatoes overnight

Every now and then the overnight tomatoes make their appearance on various food blogs I follow. They have many fancy names like night blushed tomatoes or moon dried tomatoes, but I think the flavour speaks for itself.  When I talked with my local vegetable shopkeeper about the many possibilities to enjoy the little heirloom tomatoes I remembered the overnight method and promised to share it with him.

It's super easy and the result is irresistible. While you heat your oven up to the maximum (250°C), you cut the tomatoes in halves, put them on a baking tray and season them to your liking.
I love to sprinkle them with salt, brown sugar (or maple syrup) and a bit of ground caraway. That's it.

The moment you put the tomatoes in the oven you turn off the heat and go to bed.

When you open the oven the next morning, you'll find the most sweet, tasty, semi-dried, wonderful, delicious tomatoes you hardly can contain yourself from eating them right from the tray.

The tiny tomatoes of the middle row didn't survive until we had prepared the rest of the lunch (the smaller the tomatoes the better for the overnight method!)