Month: January 2013

bread · French recipe · travel

Petite Alsace and Petits Pains

georgiagilmourLeave a comment

Chocolat et saucisson

What does it mean to go to France and Italy for several days? Apart from seeing so many things you forget what / where / when (and especially with the photos – why?!), apart from meeting with your friends, talking in Greek in France and in fake Italian in Italy (at least I tried!), apart from doing the best sport ever which is walking around the city, well, apart from all these things, it means coming back with a kilo of both polenta flour and couscous, unpronounceable Italian cheeses you will never find here, tea from Trieste, and of course sausage and jambon Forêt Noire for my carnivorous Dad. I even took photos of some traditional recipes from the region my friends live (I would have liked to get even more local recipes, especially family ones, but had no time and no working brains already). We were about to take with us a church-bell-sized Pandoro but had just no free space / hands. Apart from all the photographic stuff weighing over 20 kilos, we were carrying back also two albums of photos purchased in Strasbourg. And a single post card remains after sending some to various destinations (see above – pictured with a weird hazelnut sausage from Strasbourg), but surely the best – the caption reads ‘Chocolate eliminates all my troubles’, so true! 😉

Robert Doisneau

{This is what I’m doing right now – waiting for the ideal job to arrive;) oh yes, I seem to be somewhat occasionally unemployed throughout the year!}

We visited my favourite second-hand book store in Strasbourg where we bought among other books this collection of black-and-white photos of schoolchildren of the post-war Paris taken by Robert Doisneau, Les Doigts pleins d’encre (Ink-stained Fingers, 1989, but the photos are from the mid-fifties, if you ever saw Les Quatre Cents Coups you know what I mean), with the text by François Cavanna (recollections of the childhood years – they also used to attach the ‘maple keys’ (scientific name for this thing called ‘nosik’ (little nose) in Russian is samara)) to their noses pretending they were rhinoceros!). The photos are truly amazing, taken as if the photographer was invisible – he should have spent days with the children not to be paid attention to at all! And you would tell no difference between the photos of the children in the USSR taken during the same period, I’m sure.

I decided to divide the posts on my travel and make a separate one on Strasbourg, the city I keep coming back to and will do so in the future for sure, moreover I have some food-related photos taken there (and yes, there’s a post about this city already, but I cannot get enough of my Petite Alsace…). I never feel completely sure I’m in France when I’m in Strasbourg or the Alsace region. There are these distinct German roots there and even with all the French people living there (Alsace became officially French in 1945) and the dying-out of the Alsatian language and culture… there still remains this ‘something special’. The region can serve as the background for the movies about the late 19th – early 20th centuries – it’s full of red brick factories and railway stations with impossible names. But there are also wonderful vineyards stretching to the horizon (Riesling is from this place), castles scattered all over the place, tiny villages (there’s one with just one street, well, a very long street!) with the sturdy maisons à colombage, storks building their nests everywhere from the plane-trees to the silage towers… and there’s enough to eat for sure 😉

Kouglehopf in rue d'Austerlitz

Kougelhopf (or Kouglof, reminds me of the Eastern yeast bread/cakes, see the top shelf in the photo above, ahhh those French pastries…), Flammekueche (Tarte Flambée, let’s call it a very thin pizza with traditionally onion, lard and fromage blanc on top but you can get it in all possible versions):

Tarte flambee, Place de la Cathedrale

{tarte flambée on display right in the Place de la Cathédrale}

…and of course the enormous Choucroute or Baeckeoffe for the meat eaters (the former is three kinds of meat + sauerkraut and the latter is, well, the three kinds of meat + onions and potatoes, baked)… there’s much more of course, the poor vegetarians included. What I particularly enjoyed in Europe were the farmers’ markets – you can just go there and LOOK. The colours are great even in the thin winter light.

Vegetables in rue des Bouchers

Each Wednesday, for example, they have this fresh produce market in the middle of the Place Kleber in Strasbourg, where I used to buy Jambon sec for my Dad when I was going home or he was coming to France. This time we purchased some jambon too and I finally took the photo of this kit Choucroute for two people:

Kit Choucroute, Place Kleber market

The producer is called Marca (their permanent address is 15 Rue du Soelgel, 67390 Marckolsheim) and they sell all kinds of the traditional charcuterie as well as pies with meat (not my stand in the market for sure). We however opted for choucroute in a tin that you just warm up…

But we finally went to a restaurant and a good choice we made:

La Petite Alsace restaurant, Petite France

La Petite Alsace (23 Rue du Bain aux Plantes,  67000 Strasbourg; the title translates as Little Alsace) right in the Petite France district but somehow a not that touristy place where you can get a huge Tarte flambée au munster (a very good regional cheese) or a fixed menu with all the necessary regional specialties to make you sure you a). ate well and a lot and b). will certainly need to buy larger clothes if you continue comme ça! =) Although in this restaurant you won’t see the stammtisch – the tradition of sitting at a long table all together, all generations, still preserved even in the restaurants and bars, it’s darkish inside with tiny windows separating you from other guests – and very generous portions! (which also after the food in Italy made me think we certainly lack a lot in St Petersburg). The people there were a bit perplexed when I spoke Russian to my parents, Greek to Isabel (the best person in Strasbourg), occasionally English among all of us and then French to them. A truly Erasmus experience!

Other places to eat in Strasbourg that I would suggest (and yes, I’m advertising Stras and these restaurants just out of my sheer love for them! Have never done it but decided to share my favourite places with you in case you visit Stras one day, which you should!):

L’Épicerie (6 Rue du Vieux Seigle,  67000 Strasbourg; the title means grocery) where they serve warm tartines (like a wedge of artisan bread warmed in the oven) with all kinds of toppings (I enjoyed my goat cheese and honey tartine without even noticing it was goat cheese which I normally avoid!). The inside interior is stiled as an old grocery store + a French café and it’s always full, especially in warm weather with tables right in the narrow street of the city’s old centre.

La Corde à Linge (2 Place Benjamin Zix,  67000 Strasbourg; the name is funny, it means the string for the linen) also in the centre of the Petite France, used to be a small place serving the traditional pasta – spaetzle – and now enlarged and occupying almost the half of the square in warmer days. Kind of IKEA-like inside but very convivial as the French denominate such places. I’ve tried their spaetzles under tomato sauce, a huge plate and a spicy sauce!

a more touristy and more expensive place but very impressive and great inside – Au Pont Saint Martin (15 Rue des Moulins,  67000 Strasbourg), the same Petite France district, situated just next to a bridge and having several floors with sort of a balcony above the water. There you will pay for the interior, view and good traditional food – maybe just the portions will be a lil bit smaller =)

and for those who like game dishes here’s a place to go – le Renard Prêchant (34 Rue de Zurich  67000 Strasbourg; the title translates as the Preaching fox), off the centre, on the other side of the Ill river, in the Krutenau district. A very characteristic place inside of a traditional house, and if you happen to be vegetarian you can still get a huge plate of potatoes with fromage blanc. There’s my favourite Musée Alsacien close to the restaurant, where you walk through a traditional Alsatian house (actually houseS), and there’s this solid kitchen with copper kitchenware and porcelain and wooden molds for cookies… The Alsatian houses are all dark wooden inside with creaking staircases and embroidered curtains and stuff, and yes they’re mostly dark and have this distinct smell of the old wood exposed to the humidity, beer-brewing right in the house some ehm years ago and something else which I cannot tell exactly. Alsace is dark in its colours but once you go in the country on a fine day, it’s no darker than anywhere!

Ah yes, the jambon Forêt Noire!

Jambon, pain et olives

and look at the girl-sausage maker in a traditional attire with a black bonnet:

Jambon Foret Noire d'Alsace

But no, come on, staying in Alsace (a meaty place indeed) hasn’t converted me into a meat-addict! Actually I was taking photos of the French Rolls – or Petits Pains adapted from about.com.

A year ago – French Countryside Bread with Poolish (French again!) and Cottage Loaf, both made with poolish.

The recipe is supposed to make 12 rolls but I made my rolls larger and added whole wheat to the all-purpose flour. The recipe is very easy to follow and results in soft handy 🙂 breakfast bread:

French Rolls - Petits Pains

{here pictured with the pasta from Alsace which I actually found in a not very chic supermarket in my town!}

Finally a recipe in this post 😉 Not very much Alsatian or French probably but still a basic recipe you can use to fashion your own French rolls. If you want them to be as they should be, then the oh-so-Frenchy shape is an elongated roll with tapered ends (but I’ve seen perfectly round rolls too) and normally there’s just white flour in them.

French Rolls - Petits Pain

Soft but crusty, they will be devoured in just about no time, believe me. Bon appetit!

French Rolls - Petits Pains

And if you happen to be in Strasbourg after all, get your pain from this bakery – Au Pain de mon Grand–Père (58 Rue de la Krutenau, Strasbourg), very close to that game restaurant, this place is just amazing and very popular with the locals. After inhaling the freshly baked bread aromas and getting yourself a non-supermarket baguette, try their Tarte aux myrtilles (blackberry tart), mmmmm!

The Italian post will surely come, though a bit later. Even if I’m currently unemployed, there seem to be so many things to do… And also my friend brought me the enormous two books (the third will come to me later) of the Lord of the Rings and yes, I’m re-reading the first part! It will definitely take more than two days per book as it was ten years ago now that I’m reading it in the original but it’s worth it.

G.

bread · sourdough · sweet · sweet bread

Post in Which We Swap Sourdough Bread for Camera Lens and Finish with Apples!

georgiagilmour4 Comments

Apple Cinnamon Coffee Cake

I’m just out of traveling and already in the next job-seeking period (welcome back!). It explains my absence for some time here. Each time I come back from a journey, it seems I return to the same very point I left ‘this life here’ when I set out for traveling (and definitely needing some rest ;). It’s around -20 ‘C here and full of snow. Cannot believe I’m still baking with apples from our garden (?!?!?)! Thanks god, only several of them are left now and I can finally turn to some other sweets rather than apple-something!

While I’m preparing my post on traveling (and mostly on the tasty Italy, I guess), I think it’s high time I published these two recipes. I’ve been recently asked why everything in my blog is about USSR and again USSR and I struggled to explain that this is part of our history and without it there’s no present Russia. Well, here’s a post without any nostalgic photos or reminiscences at last, haha, for those who didn’t get the idea (and I thought I was writing too little on my topic!). But I’m kidding, of course, I’m not going to change whatever, cause I am the author (hoho ;).

Ok, bread first, then apples. Here’s a very fine Swedish recipe for sourdough rye bread from actually an Italian living in Sweden:

SÖDER LIGHT RYE

Soder Light Rye adapted from www.myitaliansmorgasbord.com will make three large loaves one of which you can give as a present (my Dad actually ‘paid’ with it for the use of an enormous camera lens).

SÖDER LIGHT RYE

For this recipe you can use Swedish white rye flour if you’re that lucky or you can substitute it with white rye flour and all-purpose wheat flour which I did (the author gives all the necessary measurements and instructions in the original recipe). I found some Finnish extra-whole-wheat flour in a supermarket and used it for my bread, also adding less water and less salt, but as for the rest I followed the recipe. Here is the crumb:

SÖDER LIGHT RYE

The proofing time amounted to about 3 hours; I slashed the loaves and dusted them with flour. They started to spread out too much and continued so in the oven but in the end they turned out just fine, puffing nicely. The bread took extra 15 minutes during the second baking stage (at 200 ‘C). Just be careful and on the watch – its top can start burning.

The result: although containing enough rye as well as rye sourdough, this bread is really light and let’s say all-purpose. We used it to make our sandwiches for the road 😉

And now – oh yessss – back to apples! When I pass those huge glossy apples in the supermarkets, I just want to snatch some but then I remember we have stiiil those never-ending and forever-keeping tiny tight apples from our dacha. Just before the departure, I made this leavened apple roll:

Apple Cinnamon Coffee Cake

Apple Cinnamon Coffee Cake adapted from www.joythebaker.com will make two loaves if you follow the original recipe or you might as well cut it in half and still get a fairly big cake!

Apple Cinnamon Coffee Cake

As it always happens after and during the holidays, there seem to be so many odd bits of various foodstuffs in your fridge which all need to be consumed as soon as possible. That’s why I enhanced the apple filling of this cake with such ‘whatever’ things as a bunch of grapes, some pineapple + some leftover streusel topping from the apple crumble I did before (as I though the filling might get too wet). I didn’t use any lemon juice, brown sugar, cornstarch or cinnamon  as they were all already in that leftover streusel. I also forgot about the nutmeg and the salt, but that’s fine C: I made the streusel topping required for the recipe exactly as suggested but instead of brushing the top of the cake with some egg, I used ryazhenka.

baked apples

{baked apples – a fast way to cook them and then eat as they are or use to make something else}

The result: this cake has a well-balanced filling-dough proportion, it is not over sweet (and makes it thus even more useful in terms of finishing with everything apple, as my parents were eating it with apple puree) and keeping its softness for several days.

Well, this was a brief post, the next one will certainly take much more time. Will come back with some observations, considerations, photos and just things inspired by traveling. With food, for sure.

G.

Family recipe · no-dough

Join the Soviet New Year Table

georgiagilmour2 Comments

Hello everybody and welcome to the New Year,

it’s Olivie time here in Russia and here is the inevitable post on this inevitable salad and other more or less inevitable things for this season. In my – already last year! – post on the new year staples, Let Me Invite You into the New Year, I’ve talked a liiiil bit about the citrus flavour and the nuts – also being used as decorations for the New Year tree. Ah, yes, here they are, the tangeriiiines!

tangerines

They say tangerines bring you joy and this automatic (and very aromatic! 🙂 feeling of holidays. Of course there’s a very down-to-earth explanation of their appearing on our tables right before Christmas and New Year, simply because this is the time when they ripen in those warm countries… But we’d rather stick to an inexplicable childish / childhood feeling of a holiday they bring, right?

And now let’s move straight to the table. My father who grew up in a family with two boys in the Caucasus (as his father moved there to work in the mines) remembers lots of dishes on their festive table although the food (choice) was especially poor in their region (he says it was even easier to get clothes there than food). It’s just that his mother was a very inventive and practical cook, making all those savoury pies and sweet cakes when the ingredients were scarce and hard-to-come-by… Mom lived in the North-West of the country, in a town near St Petersburg, in a region definitely better supplied and less rigid in all aspects, although perhaps lacking in truly traditional food culture. She says they had more choice in St. Petersburg, for sure, and that all depended on the cook in the family. But they both recalled some of the staples which still appear on the New Year table year after year after year… It seems that we welcome the NEW year into our homes with something very OLD and stubbornly repeated. Can it be a part of a ritual? Like a symbol of all those things we care for and carry into the new year with us? These dishes might as well have disappeared if not for the New Year. We still have Olivie occasionally throughout the year for some – usually – family occasions, but we tend to remember about all those mayonnaise-loaded dishes only around the New Year’s eve. Each family has been making the same things over and over again, (new) year into (new) year…

I will not tell you about the main dishes this time as they are normally all about meat or fish and that’s not my cup of tea. Let’s delve into (or better take a snack of) the zakuski (or appetizers) part of the table, the things that are supposed to trigger your appetite and also be the accompaniment of the first toasts (this is when vodka enters the stage, of course!). Zakuski are there on the table along with such ‘must’ things as Olivie and Seledka pod shuboj loaded in heavy glass bowls, a bread basket etc.

SÖDER LIGHT RYE + pickled cucumbers

{this very nice sourdough rye bread will surely appear in one of my next posts}

Now that I have at least some photos from our family reunion, I can even show you some of the stages these dishes go through. All the cooking usually starts in the morning with the first Soviet comedies shown on the TV. When the first part of Ironia Sudby begins, the time is up, you’d better be frantically chopping your boiled vegetables for Olivie! Which we decided to omit for the new year’s eve this year and opted for a scrumptious (and a bit too rye-ish as I overloaded the crust with rye flour…) khachapuri po-mengrelski instead (it’s a double crust cheese pie which also has cheese on top, see other versions of khachapuri here, here and an Ossetian version here; I said we’re addicted to everything khachapuri in my family – puri meaning bread and khacho cottage cheese or tvorog in Georgian).

Back to Olivie – Mom eventually made it for our family reunion, but lacking any sausage she put some tuna in it… making it even less edible to me as there was already mayonnaise in it too:

boiled vegetables for Olivie

The early stage of a long Olivie making process – the vegetables which have been boiled in their skins + eggs are ready to be pealed and chopped up. Chop-chop-chop!

ingredients for Olivie

{the old-school device on the right is an egg-chopper, used exclusively for Olivie in my family}

Then there are the chopped pickled cucumbers, green peas / sweet corn, meat / in this case fish added and finally comes the time of mayonnaise (which kills the whole thing, to my mind) mixed with some sour cream. Season the salad and voilà!

Olivie with tuna salad

What else is on the table? Instead of a British or French-style cheese board there is usually a kolbasa (sausage) plate with some herbs to decorate it=) There were not so many cheese varieties in the USSR and good cheese was hard to come by. Sausage, on the contrary, was a part of the Prazdnichny Nabor (Festive Set) and there was a possibility of getting some un-cheeeeewable sausage for the holiday. And, wait, the best buterbrod (sandwich, we use the German word in Russia) is with caviar, of course! (but not to me, sorry! I will make a very frugal kind of wife, haha):

caviar on rye bread

The classic version is caviar on a well buttered slice of white bread of course, but we had only this (BTW very good!) 80/20 Rye Sourdough bread from thirteenvegetables.wordpress.com. You might guess how fast these sandwiches disappear… I guess such staples united not only the two different family tables in different corners of the USSR, because it was an almost number one goal each year to get some caviar for your table. Ok, so the family sits together around the table (usually enlarged with the extra board and covered with a heavy white table cloth, see the next picture), gobbles down all the buterbrody s ikroy… And what are these?

deviled eggs

Farshirovannye yaytsa or Deviled eggs (stuffed eggs), made from hard-boiled eggs. So the process is the following:

Boil the eggs, peel, cut them in half, take the yolk out…

ready to be stuffed

… and mix it with fried (they should be really crunchy) minced mushrooms (might be champignons from a tin) and onion, season and place back in the halves! Garnish with mayonnaise (yuk!). You will have some yolk leftovers, so grate some over the eggs and scatter some chopped herbs to finish. Some stuffing versions contain fish but we prefer the mushroom one. Just as Olivie and Seledka pod Shuboj, the leftover farshirovannye yaytsa are consumed on the morning after the celebrations, cold, just out of the fridge, along with the remaining vodka if your hangover is especially strong (not recommended ;).

IMG_0011 (2)

And if we talk about vodka, here’s the most famous zakuska for it – because you actually zakusivayete (oooh, Russian, I love you for your untranslatability! The word literally means ‘bite after’) your shot of vodka – marinovannye ogurtsy (pickled cucumbers)! You take a jar or two of them from your attic and finally put them to use. And for those who are going through an excruciating hangover, it’s thought to be helpful to sagaciously save the ogurechny rassol (the brine from the cucumbers) and ddddddrink it the next morning! (this is hardly recommended, as you can imagine!).

Other non-represented here zakuski include studen’ or kholodets (=jellied meat, whatever you call it, well, for me it’s disgusting!), various pickled things such as mushrooms (accompanied by the long stories of how you picked them yourself oooh already last summer in that forest near your dacha), sauerkraut with a couple of cranberries on top, sprats right in a tin, herring in oil, cod liver…  Well, as you can see, mostly the things that keep well and were actually meant to survive for the festive table (all those tins appear in the pantry several months in advance but there’s always a good chance of sending your tired hubby for a packet of this and a kilo of that right before the midnight of the year!).

And of course as for the drinks… If you’re not much into vodka or have already had enough of it, there’s a possibility of getting some kompot or home-made juice – we always have our apple juice on the table (tea will come later). There are so many Soviet movies shown on the TV during these days (that even our old TV couldn’t stand it anymore and decided to die temporarily over the course of The Twelfth Night 🙂 and they all seem to have some references to vodka. Consider this (in these episode a real criminal talks to a pseudo-criminal, actually a kindergarten director in disguise):

– So, budem (an invitation to drink). Sour stuff. It’s boring without vodka.

– But is it really necessary to get hog-drunk?

– But what else’s there to do?

– Just sit, have a heart to heart talk [this is what happens when you drink vodka…].

– I’m not a prosecutor to have a heart to heart with you.

(from the 1972 Soviet comedy Dzhentlmeny Udachi, Gentlemen of Fortune).

The most appropriate topic to finish my first post this New Year 😉
P.S. Will soon be off traaaaaavelling! I adore planning trips but then… what can be better the travelling itself?

See you!
G.