Mussels jelly-dome à la nage Asiatique

Here we go with the second installment of the seaweed saga.

In the past episode , I introduced you to the seaweed tasting experience I did for a recipe competition I entered; the theme of the competition was indeed seaweeds.
They provided us with quite a few samples, mostly dried and just a couple fresh.
I do prefer when seaweeds come in their dry form, since the whitish coating on them is actually a natural concentrate of many of their savory compounds. It is easier this way to get the seaweed flavors into things without the need of cooking them longly.

Cooking classes and my Tomato sauce

March is starting to look like a pretty busy month. Long time has passed since I had so many deadlines and possibilities to earn some money.
Those of you who follow me on Twitter will know that I have started giving cooking classes in my town, Bonn. It took some time for the city (represented by the Volkshochschule) to realize the need of offering public classes in English but once they started I was right there to offer my contribution.
Nothing better than some tasty Sicilian food, right? So I decided to offer two classes delving on Sicilian cuisine (one of them for vegetarians) and so far the answer has been excellent!

Crispy pork belly gyros of many traditions

I guess somebody was in a street food mood lately, yeah I think so.


This round of Velveteers has been brought us by the eclectic mind of Asha from Fork Spoon Knife. Amidst her blog birthday and the plethora of guest posts she managed to put together for the occasion, she came up with the idea of challenging us in making Gyros ourselves....
What is Gyros? Come on, you know that! Oh wait, you might know it as Doner Kebab perhaps. In effect they are essentially the same thing and that is a huge conical pillar of meat roasted vertically on a skewer.
If you didn't know that Germany is famous for its sausages and sauerkraut, you would call Doner (contraction from Doener Kebab) the national dish. You find a "Doener Haus" almost every second corner around here and I would bet that 1/3 of the middle-aged to young part of the population almost entirely survives on it. If well done this fast-food item can be in effect quite a balanced meal.

Clafoutis and the wondrous world of baked custard

Few weeks ago Rebecca from Chow and Chatter asked me to contribute a guest post to her blog.
Discussing with her about what to write about, we convened that a light and yummy dessert would fit the occasion. It is a very easy, light, sweat fix that showcases mostly a very useful dessert category: the clafoutis. I decided than to share with you all my Clafoutis of peaches and apricots with caramelized fennel and blackberry-lavender sauce.
Hope you will enjoy!