Experimenting in the kitchen

This is usually not a food blog but last Friday's concoction was definitely something to share.

CherryTurkey

Sauté onions, mushrooms*, garlic, and ginger

Cut turkey breast in stripes or cubes and sear all around

Put it all together and add, according to taste:

- coconut cream

- good red wine (I used a fruity Merlot)

- salt, pepper, chili sauce (I used a chili&lime sauce)

Let it all simmer to cook the turkey through and get desired thickness of the sauce

Add sour cherries for the last 5-10 mins

Serve on rice or as is with a good bread, and some green leaves salad.

*The mushrooms didn't really add anything to the flavour, though it gave a nice texture to the sauce. I will probably skip them next time and add sliced bamboo shots instead.

Being busy

This is some of what I've been doing instead of updating the blog:

It was fun!

Sometimes it's just not right

My quilting teacher once said: "some days you sew and some days you un-sew".

I have just ripped out a 50 x 130 cm shawl that I've been knitting on. Deep breath and start from the beginning.

"Syjunta" - A Swedish fenomena?

Free translation from the Swedish Wikipedia:

A group, usually women, that meets to sew, crochet, knit, or embroider, and to socialize. 'Syjunta' is not a formal organisation but rather a group of friends that meet every now and then, usually at each other's homes.

In English it would probably be called a 'sewing bee'. I haven't found a lot of online information about the activity* so I assume that it's not so common. (Maybe I just don't know how to find it?)

In Hebrew, they don't even know what I'm talking about.

So, for all of us that have sweaters with just half an arm left to knit laying around for three years, or a pair of nice pants that only need to be shortened for the last few months - Welcome to my Syjunta! (for both sexes)

(While I was writing this, my head was busy trying to figure out how to write 'syjunta' in phonetic script. Still haven't figured that one out.)

* There are knitting circles but that's only part of the game ;-)

Stepping out...

...to the big world.

May I present my logo:

If you click it, you'll get to my future website.

"You Are Cordially Invited"

Final exams are over. We had to bake and prepare quite a bunch of things - About 10 different categories (including eatable table decorations) and three different variations within some of the categories. A day and a half at our disposal. Here are the results of my efforts:

The "theme" of my table was a fancy tea party.

The menu:

Bread - "50-50" Rolls

Yeast dough (folded) - Swedish Wienerbröd, Cinnamon-Coffee Danish Cluster, Cinnamon Danish

Puff pastry - Jam&Nut filled Combs, Voul-a-Vent with Compote, Fruit of the Season-length

Center Piece - Orange-Chocolate Cake

Choux dough - Paris Brest, Éclairs, Swedish Maria Balls

Petit Fours - Filled Chocolate Cups, Mini Tartlets, Ganash-Marmalade Sweets (Pineapple & Red Wine)

"Cut" cake - Pineapple Upside Down Cake

Desert - Wine Poched Pear Baked in Marzipan Shell

Signs - White Chocolate writing on Dark Chocolate signs

Decorations - Cookie lollipops

Now - Reality!

Final Exams

Today was the written exam. There were questions on how you check quality of flour, how you serve a Wiener Strudel, how much water you need for 1/2 kg flour when you make pastry dough, and so on. And then there was a question on what is regulating the temperature in the cake fridge. Are pastry chefs supposed to fix broken refrigerators by themselves?