Wandering Adventure Party

Love them. We made cherry preserve this week. Not jam, as it would need 50% sugar, but preserve with 75% fruit and only 25% sugar. Wonderful stuff, but needs to live in the fridge.

I once had pickled squash, ball pepper, and onion. Delicious!

My son was rather shocked when he followed me making his favourite pasta sauce:

• 500g large onions peeled and cut in eights,
• 1kg carrots, peeled and cut into thumb-sized pieces,
• 1 large celery bulb, peeled and cut in rough cubes,
• a few spoons of salt to start the spicing process.

Fry in a large pot with a helping of olive oil. When veg starts to brown, add

• 1 tin (4.5kg) of chopped tomatoes,
• 1kg of leek, halved, cleaned, and cut in thumb-sized pieces,
• one bulb of garlic,
• 200g of Italian herb mix.

Let this simmer on low heat for 3-4 hours at least. Take the large blender and go through the pot. It does not have to be completely ground down, if small chunks still exist, it is fine.

Then take

• 3-4kg of minced beef,

And fry it in chunks of about 300g each in a pan while stirring into crumbs. For the first one or two pans use some oil. When browned, take a ladle of the sauce and add it to the pan. Stir until both parts are well integrated, then add them back into the pot - on one side, do not yet stir them under. For later pans, take off the fat that collects on the surface to oil the pan.

When all meat has been done like that, stir it under and let it simmer for another hour.

We have a wonderful restaurant some 30 kilometers up the Rhine from here that specializes in blackberries. Waffles with vanilla ice cream and blackberry sauce. Blackberry spritzer. Blackberry wine and liquor. They also sell a wonderful blackberry syrup and blackberry jelly.

It’s close, but not that close. It definitely needs more heat than a supermarket pizza - I do my Flammkuchen at 250°C in convection mode. But still not in the burn-the-kitchen-down temperature range.

Instead of pure creme fraiche, I use creme fraiche and yoghurt half and half. And I add some nutmeg to it.

I had never heard of canola before. But I learned today that this is a Canadian brand name of rapeseed oil.

I would not heat up olive oil to that point.

The table is missing Rapeseed oil.

And: Fahrenheit! What the f…ck?