Waffle Breakfast

We copied what we learned in The Pig and made a waffle with egg and bacon, and some maple syrup.

Great Food

After these photo ops on the Mairspitze, we arrived at the Nürnberger Hütte. We enjoyed the sun, and their spectacularly good food!



There was home smoked bacon, Hauswurst, great cakes etc. Also beer.



Gröstl.



Goulash mit Knödel.



And a "Tris" of Schlutzkrapfen, Käseknödel and some other deliciousness. Many good reasons to stay overnight in huts!

Pasta Pasta

Carbonara for lunch...



... and bolognese for dinner.

 (Okay, so it was not the same day. Bite me.)

Quiche Lorraine

We tried to make the bacon rashers resemble a cross, to make this quiche more appropriate for Easter, but it is sadly not very visible.

Spaghetti Carbonara

A treat every single time.

Quiche

As you can tell, this quiche is one of our favorite recipes right now.

Incorrect Quiche Lorraine

"... the addition of cheese is optional and not correct as far as local custom is concerned."

Spaghetti Carbonara

Wishing we had a garden and a smoker again!

Quiche Lorraine

Quiche Lorraine, using Escoffier's recipe. Somehow these simple recipes of his have amazing results. I learned that I need to blanche and slightly fry my bacon (in thin rashers) for my quiche lorraine, and that the filling can be fluffy!

We Interrupt this Program

... for some wonderful wintry homemade foodz. Above, boudin blanc and boudin noir, the latter fried in a little duck fat, sprinkled with some butter, lemon juice and parsley --- awesome! Below, the well known and loved meatfest known to the locals as choucroute.

Pancakes

Spaghetti Carbonara

And even a little sun!

Choucroute Royale and Other News

Other news

Mr. Bojangles is mister no more. We took him to the vet, to have his junk removed. We are feeling pretty guilty now.

Special Guest Post: The Butchering of Emmanuel!

Thanks to Emmanuel we have an non-boring 900th post! Without further ado, here is his email:

Just returned from a vacation during which I worked at a butcher shop and learned to cut pork. Photos attached, feel free to use for a guest post on WTAW.
Take care of yourselves and keep on eating!

Here is the meat locker at the shop. Tasty meats waiting to be cut or dry-aging.


I took a half-pig over to my work table:


A few minutes later, it's cut up into more manageable pieces.


You can't really see it in the picture, but the ribs and tenderloin are separated and cleaned. I later made chops from the loin, a roast from the shoulder, cutlets and another roast from the ham, sausage-grind from the picnic, and saved the shanks for smoking and the belly for curing.

Here is the head.


The reason it looks a little strange around the eyes is because I had actually already removed the face, and just put it back on to take the picture. Here is what it looks like with its face ripped off:


Saved the jowls for guanciale, the cheeks for a fancy restaurant, the ears for dog treats, and the rest for sausage.

I also worked a bit with sucklings. Here is a 60-lb suckling, completely deboned with the bones placed back into the carcass:


And just the bones by themselves:


After removing the bones, I lined the inside with bacon:


And a layer of moroccan sausage:


Then sewed the little guy up and got him ready to roast.


Unfortunately I couldn't stick around for eating this one.

Inspired by the Alsace

On Monday we made a classic Flammkuchen with the bacon that we bought on the market in Saarbruecken and a fantasy Flammkuchen with apple and the boudin noir that we brought from France.

Foodz from the Roadz

Before we left Saarbruecken, we drove around town a little bit to see where we may live next year. We came across a slaughterhouse with a couple of meat wholesalers and restaurants.



We had boudin noir, that apparently is not served shaped like a sausage in Germany. It had a wonderfully clovey taste. Also, we had Weißwurst that was even better than Cafe Konstanz's Weißwurst. We did not take a picture, but we will make it up to you in a couple of months.

Instead of heading north, we decided to head south, to see what else what more or less in the neighborhood. We found simple French supermarkets, that already stocked all kinds of exciting foodz, and, a little further down, we even found wineries. We ended up in Lapoutroie which we visited one and a half year ago.

The hotel that we stayed in then was full, so we went to the other restaurant.





The farmer's salad was good, the onion tart was very delicious.



How can one visit the Alsace in winter without eating choucroute?



Or some civet de gibier?



Finally cheese cake. I think we can live here.

Dutch food that should be going places

This is part of F's proposal for developing some Dutch cuisine that people from other countries may not mind eating: Huitspot (name courtesy of HTLGZ)



Traditionally, Dutch food is rather on the parsimonious side. For example, we have the expression "dairy on top of dairy is work of the devil", warning us against putting both butter and cheese on one sandwich. There is no expression about meatz upon meatz because having more than one kind of meat is just unfathomable to the frugal Dutchman. This recipe aims to change that.

Recipe:

- peel 10 kilos each of potatoes, carrots and onions, and cut into roughly equal sized chunks.
- put in humongous pot, add salt and just enough water to cover and boil for approximately 20 minutes.
- drain off the liquid - preserve some of the liquid in case the mash becomes to dry (although if you live in a place where the supermarket stocks cream (lucky bastard), then we recommend adding cream instead)
- mash everything together, taking care not to overmash - you are making huitspot, not baby food!
- add butter, salt and pepper to taste (i.e. definitely a lot of butter)

- cut some slices of bacon into small pieces and fry till they are crisp
- fry four pork belly slices (approximately 1 cm thick) until they are crisp
- boil a nice part of a cow (god knows which part, just a nice part) in a vegetable broth with a bouquet garni on low heat for approximately one hour
- if you have the fortune of living in a place where they sell good smoked sausages, then by all means buy some and boil them for however long your butcher tells you.

Do this all in such a way that everything is ready at the same time (I am not a cook book writer, you figure this out for yourself).

When serving the mash, make sure it makes a disgusting splash sound when landing on the plate. Sprinkle the bacon bits on top. Then pile all the other meats on top in a pleasing pattern.

Voila, food fit for a tiny nation of 16 million people!

Very sorry for lating

Here is a picture of last weekend's brunch:



(Of course, this picture is just an excuse to show off my rapidly increasing knowledge of Chinglish.)

Guest blogger: team Wild explodes some bacon

Some time ago, we received a truly great guest post from Team Wild. Whence the delay in posting such a masterpiece? ...We can only give the very very lame excuse that we received it while we were still holidaying in Yunnan, and we subsequently forgot to add it to our blog once we arrived in Hong Kong. How could we forget, you ask? It is indeed a mystery. Judge for yourself:

On the 31st of January, Team Wild made the unforgettable BACON EXPLOSION... as publicized by the NYTIMES.








We are at a loss for words...