What have you been eating?

[medievalfantasyqueen]

Today was relatively mild, a vegetarian South Indian meal with lentil soup, and a variety of cooked vegetables, all to go down with a type of pepper-herb soup (which is called rasam in Tamil).

[Jubal]

Pepper-herb as in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peperomia_pellucida ? It's not something I'm as familiar with I guess.


Also, a dump of Caucasus food pictures, as I've been eating out a lot in Georgia & Armenia so there's plenty of interesting food to share from there...

A tamtaki - a fusion "traditional Georgian dish on a soft taco" thing. Here with Skhmeruil, garlic chicken. Was extremely good.	A meal at Veriko, which is an excellent Georgian restaurant. The bread item is a kubdari, a meat-filled bread, and the cheese is gebzhalia, a cheese, mint and matsoni dish.
Khinkali, some meat some cheese, at the restaurant Shemomechama. The name of the restaurant is a verb roughly meaning "I ate it by accident".	Trout is quite a thing in Armenia. This smoked trout & orange bruschetta were at Cafe Ilik, which is now my favourite Yerevan Cafe.
I occasionally managed some familiar tea. This with a fairly Armenian-style layered honey cake in the back.	And a less familiar tea in Yerevan, this one made out of sweetened sea buckthorn, a notably sour fruit raw.
Georgian has no letter f in the alphabet. As such, when I saw a Tbilisi waffle shop I had to get one to be amused at it being a wapple. It was also nice.	In general I think Tbilisi has better restaurants than Yerevan, but Yerevan does better snacks and street food. This kiln bread (baked on the side of an open kiln) is absolutely the food of the gods.
Good tolma is good, I've had a lot of bad tolma in the past but I really enjoyed the stuff I could get in Yerevan.	Chicken harissa. I enjoyed this one!
Back in Tbilisi, a vegetarian kharcho, fried aubergine in walnut sauce, at the vegetarian cafe Leila which is nice & pretty.	Chicken in berry sauce from the Corner at Tabidze restaurant. It was excellent.

[Pentagathus]

I am very hungry now, congrats everyone

[Jubal]

A food update of Things I Have Been Eating in the first part of 2024!

Pasta with sour cream, chives, lemon juice, and smoked salmon as a sauce. The sprinkling on top is sumac. This was excellent.	Canapes from my in-person birthday celebrations. Sadly wasn't able to serve these at the online event.
One of my classic fried khachapuris (is this my signature recipe? Is that a thing I have now?)	Cheese polenta with tomatoes and berberis berries: looks like very much A Lump but was actually very good.
Pancake day, the savoury side: melting cheese with old doverhouse chutney onto a crepe as it finishes frying.	Pancake day, the sweet side: melting nutella with bananas onto a crepe.
I made some little pastries to use up some frozen apricots I'd had for ages!	Sadly I wildly overcooked them, but they were quite tasty anyway despite the looks.
From my Italy travels, a squacquerone (almondy crumble-cake base) cheesecake. This was very good.	A sandwich from Bologna which was especially good: an Italian blue cheese with I think pork shoulder and a few other things.

[Spritelady]

I have set myself a food-related challenge for this year! I am attempting to make at least one dish in a style/cuisine that I haven't attempted before!

January went well, with Jubal providing me with the inspiration to choose Georgian cuisine for my first attempt. I made a nice cheese bread boat and a chicken stew that went well!




February was interesting: I chose Lebanese, on the recommendation of my future mother-in-law, whose family is Lebanese, and made a chickpea and spinach pie with lentils:



Sadly it's now halfway through March and I can't settle on something I want to make this month. Any suggestions for me? I've made a lot of Italian/Spanish dishes before, and a few Asian ones, but otherwise haven't branched out much (hence the challenge!)

[Jubal]

Sadly it's now halfway through March and I can't settle on something I want to make this month. Any suggestions for me? I've made a lot of Italian/Spanish dishes before, and a few Asian ones, but otherwise haven't branched out much (hence the challenge!)

What about something South American? Trying to do empanadas or ceviche or something? I've never got round to making those but they seem fun.

[Spritelady]

Ooh that's a great idea! Thank you!

[Jubal]

Well, let us know how it goes

[Spritelady]

So I decided I had better get on with making empanadas, given that March was half over, and made some beef and chorizo ones last night:



They turned out pretty well! If anyone has any suggestions for April, let me know!

[Spritelady]

For April, I decided to make something sweet (and just in the nick of time...): Svarlotka! This Polish apple cake is made using a dough, rather than a cake batter, to sandwich a delicious layer of sugary apple filling.

[Jubal]

Ooh that's pretty! Is it a leavened dough, or more sweet-flatbread-y?

[Spritelady]

It's more biscuit-y than anything really, it was a very soft dough

[Jubal]

Right, an update from me!

I bought some tempeh, partly because I had little idea what temph was and thus to challenge myself to work out what one does with tempeh. I got some mediterranean-herb version of it so it didn't need marinading: the two things I came up with were a fried bread/red pepper/tempeh mix with salad and a sour cream/salt/sumac dip, which worked well, and an olive/red onion/orange/tempeh hot salady thing with garlic bread, which was possibly a more out there idea but also worked.


Whilst I'll have more full things to say on Liechtenstein later, I'm going to share with you the overpriced food here. I perhaps cheekily saved a bit by making my lunches out of the hotel breakfasts (which had the amusing designations of "lactose free milk" and "milk milk" among offered drinks), but the evening meals were about forty euros each which is a lot for what they were. They were nice, and the little Italian restaurant in Vaduz where the owner just walked out and gave me the menu verbally was quite fun, but everything was definitely pricey.

The bottom right meal is not from Liechtenstein, but Konstanz, and besides therefore being better value it's also a more interesting local dish, maultaschen, basically large dumpling-like constructions made of sheets of pasta dough with minced meat inside. Definitely an interesting take on how to combine meat and dough and worth looking out for if one is in Swabia.


And finally, it's been asparagus (Spargel) season here in Austria so as usual I've made some asparagus dishes. I have to say probably the most successful of these was the top right: steaming asparagus above some pasta as it cooked, and then using a mix of sour cream and lemon juice as a sauce, with tomatoes added in and sumac sprinkled on top at the end. Top left is asparagus with speck (tiny bacon bits), and at the bottom is a non-pasta option which can work quite well, wrapping the spears first in some kind of meat (parma ham or similar) and then in pastry and cooking them. It's easy to overcook them doing this, the asparagus may want more brushing in oil or similar than I gave it, but it's a nice meal or good finger-food if there are guests around.