I tried to shape the burgers with as little pressure as possible and overcooked the first batch a little. The second batch ended up perfect though, with the meat being lovely red and juicy in the middle.

This is addictive. I’m already wondering when I’ll get to make the next batch.

And there is something to using a big pot of nicely boiling and bubbling water to cook your pasta it. It just has a good feel to it.

Strangely it turns out that – at least for reasonably small pasta – it’s not wrong but still unnecessary to work with a huge amount of boiling water. Just stirring enough at the beginning of the boiling process suffices to prevent sticking. And you don’t need to boil the water strongly either, the pasta comes out fine anyway.

This bit of knowledge comes out of The food lab column at the serious eats site. I really enjoy reading it as it puts a bit of scientific method on our cooking habits and tries figuring out what is reasonable to do and what’s just superstition – along with an attempt to explain things a little [and not going totally chemical and unpractical like the ‘molecular’ cooking people do]. Their burger lab posts are very cool as well, in fact I’m enjoying their slight obsession with burgers.

As I wanted to eat some green asparagus anyway, I went along and cooked the paste recipe given on the page. Nice and creamy because of the ricotta and with an interesting touch given by the lemon zest. Mine didn’t look as pretty as theirs, though:

While it takes a bit more patience to make them than other variants of eggs, it turned out that the process isn’t overly complicated as Dan demonstrated to me in January. So, there: hot, but not boiling, water with a dash of vinegar, add the egg and let it boil…

… for three and a half minutes or so. Giving the water a little spin before adding the egg apparently helps keeping the egg in shape. And soon you have…

… a lovely smooth egg whose yolk is still liquid. Yum.

Bonus: Instructions for poached eggs along with a photo slideshow.

Only the daikon relish mentioned in my recipe was missing. That stuff is hard to get. And trying to even explain an ingredient from a Japanese recipe in an English language cookbook to an Indonesian working in an Asian food store in small town Germany may just be too Babylonian a task to succeed at. After some further consultation I settled for buying an ordinary German radish, chopping it finely and trying to marinade it a bit in rice vinegar with a bit of mirin. That wasn’t bad but not quite as sour and tasty as I would have liked it to be.

For dessert there were blueberry daiquiris. Not the worst thing to have either…

Of course Knödel go naturally well with Rouladen. But I never even considered making them myself in the past. Both because many Knödel variants are made of potatoes and I am a total potato refusenik (heck, if other people can refuse whole ranges of food like fish or meat, I’ll be allowed to refuse potatoes… particularly as, unlike many other people, I even have a very good reason for not eating potatoes: I dislike the taste). And because it’s supposed to be a lot of work. But after chatting with Antonio (random Italian guy I ‘know’ from the internets) who just moved to England and is living there with people from Germany who made Knödel, I thought Well, I can do that as well. Add to that that I recently flipped through my cookbooks to check how they are bound and how that affects their usablity - a bit of pointless geekery our French bookbinder friend Benjamin pointed me to - and found a recipe for Serviettenknödel there (heh, I always have to be punny when seeing that name and think if Kartoffelknödel are made of potatoes, and Semmelknödel are made from bread rolls then Serviettenknödel need to be made from napkins; but somehow it always turns out they are made in napkins instead; while generally being quite a clever language, German has its flaws as well…).

Now it turns out that you can make Serviettenknödel from loads of breadrolls and even more eggs. Plus butter, of course! I can say now that mixing egg-yolk with butter is a splendidly creamy and quite probably seriously unhealthy affair. But totally worth it after you wasted loads of energy to boil the damn thing for an hour. Enough time for a chat with Ronald over in Canada and with Konni in Bavaria, who could help out with advice on cooking the (green) beans: not a long time but possibly longer than you expect as the beans themselves may cool down the water you throw them into.

And after all those excursions around the world, the mind, and the kitchen, I eventually had dinner. In fact, I used the final time of the cooking to make another Biskuitrolle - upping my egg-count for the day to 10. I promise I won’t consume all the resultant goodness in one go.

It’s easy to get bad food. We have a bunch of tolerable university restaurants around here. Plus a few rather bad canteens. In addition to that you can get all the cheap kebaps, falafels or noodles your stomach can tolerate. It’s also not too hard to find fancy food. Once you spend enough, it may not be worth the price you’re paying but it’s probably a bit exciting anyway.

But what about a good but not fancy meal for a medium price? That genre seems to have died out or it’s hiding fairly well.

Sometimes you just want a well cooked dish made from good ingredients rather than going for a multi-course meal where each plate contains several exciting little tidbits, summing up to more than you can recall afterwards because there are so many details.

Back to the stove, Mr Porst…

The food was excellent. With fancy bits like lobster or scallop, more old-school ingredients like liver or sweetbread finding their way onto our plates and things being eaten whose existence we weren’t even aware about before: yellow beetroot or black rice.

In fact the one dish was truly outstanding. From bottom to top the plate came with a bit of saffron foam, black rice risotto, algae and a scallop. That was just excellent. Particularly the risotto was interesting. A bit of Googling afterwards suggests that the black rice comes from China where it was reserved for the emperor but it has been cultivated in Italy for a decade now, making it ‘known’ in Europe as well (it seems to be known as Venere rice around here). Its grains are round and apparently it takes quite a long cooking before it’s turned into a risotto with a slightly nutty taste.

Even the chocolate soufflé, served with Quark ice cream was good (fluffy and light but still substantial; chocolaty but not the sweet greasy mess you may fear to get) to end things on a high note…

Yumyumyum.

Its tuna mayonnaise may look a little yucky on the first sight but once you eat it, as well as the thinly sliced veal beneath it, it’s whoa!-amazing. Then something with even more tuna:

And, on a whim, some doubly deep fried plantains for dessert:

File as: food porn.

It’s even delicious before baking. I may have coined the Term ‘Scarlett Johansson der Backvorstufe’ when trying to describe the whipped egg-whites with sugar and almonds. Yummy! And after baking the meringue on top is fantastic as are the berries inside. Can’t wait for tomorrow when I’ll eat it.

And just for the sake of the argument. Would LOLCATS use umlauts (I CAN HAS FUNNY DOTS) or would they refuse (MEOW - LETTRZ LOOK WRONG)? Discuss.

This one came out extremely crisp which I enjoyed. And the next day I learned that a fully home-made chicken mayonnaise sandwich can be quite a joy as well.