RSS
 

Archive for the ‘Food’ Category

Theory of Swiss Cooking: 6 Ingredients Is All You Need

25 Jan

This Christmas my family and I developed a new theory on Swiss cooking. All Swiss traditional dished are various permutations of 6 key ingredients.

  • Bread
  • Potatoes
  • Cheese
  • Onions
  • Bacon
  • Sausage

From this list you can make Roesti, Fondue, Raclette, Bouillon soup, bratwurst, geschwellte kartoffeln and the list could go on.   I think this will turn into my new barometer of Swiss restaurants.  If there menu consists of only items from my list it gets a top rating.  I can think of one restaurant in Baden that fits that bill.  All of a sudden I feel like I need to make a reservation at the Resturant Arcade.

 
No Comments

Posted in Food

 

Starbucks In Baden

29 Nov

Yes in fact hell has finally froze over and Baden now has a Starbucks.  The shop opened in the middle of November and is located in the train station building right on track one. There was some press for the opening, a small article in the local Baden newspaper, but besides that it has been quiet.

I was disappointed in the layout from what I say.  I guess I am used to these vast, expansive North American Starbucks shops where there are loads of comfy chairs where you can sit, enjoy a cup of joe, and maybe surf around on you mobile device thanks to free wifi.  What we have in Baden is yes indeed a Starbucks branded store, but the scale of the place is very European.

By that I mean I probably could have counted all the tables on my 10 fingers.  They do have some additional outdoor seating, but that is a bit useless at this time of year.  I just don’t image myself going to hang out for an hour or two in the Baden Starbucks, it’s just a bit small for my liking.

That said I did see a sign advertising some tasty looking holiday hot chocolate drinks.  Even if I don’t feel like hanging around the shop I think I’m still going to have to stop in for a hot chocolate to go and a little taste of home.

 

 
No Comments

Posted in Food

 

Roasting Chestnuts At Home

26 Nov

The Christmas season brings with it our local roasted chestnut vendor.  Every year there is an article in the paper about the elderly man, now in his 80s that sets up his stand on the main street in town for about 2 months starting in early November.  I do enjoy chestnuts and it is not uncommon for me to pick some up maybe once a week or so.

After watching him for so many years I decided it was time to give it a try at home.  We had made a charcoal fire for cooking dinner and I had purchased some chestnuts a few days before.  If seemed like a perfect chance.  I ended up using a metal basket for cooking vegetables on a grill for the roasting.  The basket turned out perfect, the chestnuts, well, they need some more work.

I have to admit they looked pretty, but I think I let them sit a bit too long in a sealed plastic bag.  The moisture from the nuts caused some strange stuff, probably mold to grow inside a few of the nuts.  Those were a very unpleasant surprise when I popped the first one in my mouth.  The nuts that were cooked well, and not gray inside were rather tasty.

The trick seems to be to ensure you have a good quality nut, and you keep it in a cool, dry place with lots of circulation.  Makes sense when the package the big bags of them in burlap, for air circulation I suppose.  I’ll have to give it one more shot before Christmas to see if I can improve my technique.

 
No Comments

Posted in Food

 

When American Baking Goes Wrong

04 Sep

We had some friends over last weekend for a small get together.  The majority of the group where American expats.  Many of our friends brought small dishes or desserts to share.  The most interesting dishes are always those that are modeled from American recipes.

I used the term modeled, because often times staples of American cooking and  baking are not available here in Europe.  Condensed Cream of Mushroom soup, condensed milk,  or canned pumpkin are some examples.  Yes you can get some of them at Jemoli for about 5 francs a can, but there are other substitute recipes on the web that are more cost effective.

This week the missing ingredient for a friend was corn syrup.  How on earth do you substitute that.  Well in short I don’t think you do.  Bless my friends heart for trying to make chocolate, peanut butter, rice crispy bars.  But without the corn syrup it just didn’t hold together.  The final result was a nice layer of rice crispies and peanut butter crumbs covered in a layer of hard chocolate.

The mixture tasted excellent, the problem was you couldn’t eat it without a spoon.  Then came my moment of genius.  I decided to re-purpose the mixture as an ice cream toping.  A little bit of the secret mix over the top of vanilla ice cream and I am in heaven.

 

 

 
No Comments

Posted in Food

 

Fireworks Over the Castle

03 Aug

 

We had a great party and a great show for the first of August this year.  All to celebrate the 720th birthday of Switzerland.

Our annual party turned out to be one of the better ones this year.  So a run down of the ‘cultural contributions’ for our pot-luck buffet.

  • Miller Genuine Draft Beer (US)
  • EKB Beer (DE)
  • Swedish Meatballs (SE)
  • Salsa (US)
  • Banana bread muffins ( US)
  • Tortillas ( ES)
  • Watermelon ( US)
  • Sierra Nevada Beer (US)
  • Root Beer Floats (US)
  • Bison Grass Vodka ( PL)
  • Brownies (US)
  • Bread Pudding (UK)
  • Pretzels (DE)
  • Pear Schnapps (DE)

I am sure I am missing a few things.  In the end we had plenty of beer , and plenty of food and lots of fun.

 
No Comments

Posted in Festivals, Food

 

Gearing Up For The First Of August

30 Jul

Baden is getting ready for the upcoming first of August holiday.  The flags went up on the tower across the street early Saturday morning.

I’m getting ready as well.  Stocking up on chips and beer for our annual party.  This year will be the first year I’ll be trying one of the self-cooling beer kegs.  No ice needed. Thank God for that because it is just too difficult and costly to get ice here.

From the guest list and the number of RSVP’s we’ve gotten this year I expect a good turn out.  I’ll of course pull out the Alphorn for a a couple of songs as well.

Every year we always tell our guests that if they would like to bring something, they should bring something that represents their cultural background.  In the past we have had cup cakes, nusstollen, German Beer, taco dip, Capriana’s.  Lets see what comes this year.  It is always a great surprise.

 

 
No Comments

Posted in Festivals, Food

 

Old Food

19 Jul

Sometimes you just need to do some cleaning.  This Sunday was one of those days.  With a gray cloud hanging over Baden and what looked like rain that would never end we decided it was time to clean out some closets and the pantry.

We found some great stuff.  Meaning junk that just needed to be thrown away.  But the winner has to be a box of pasta salad mix that had an expiration date of 2003.  Wow, 8 years past it’s prime.

Thinking about it, I moved to Switzerland in 2006, so we must have shipped this across the ocean.  Even more scary is that kind of stuff usually has a long shelf life so I wouldn’t be surprised if I bought it in 2001 or 2002.

With time tastes change, so I was not disappointed to be chucking the pasta mix in the garbage.  There are still a few more cabinets to clean out.  I wonder what I’ll find in there.

 
No Comments

Posted in Food, Moving

 

I’d Like an Order of Beef Balls Please

11 May

Cafeteria Sign

Sometimes I see extremely poor translations.  Our Cafeteria at the office tends to provide some good laughs.  We had a very nice menu selection this past week including a personal favorite of mine, beef balls.

This translation was used once before, then at some point it changed to something like ground meat balls.  I’m pleased it has resurfaced as beef balls again.

 
No Comments

Posted in Food

 

6 Hour Hike and Ice Cream For Dinner

24 Apr

Banana Split For Dinner

We went for a hike yesterday with the intent of grilling a few sausages in the woods at one of the local fire pits.  We packed a couple of cervela sausages some potato chips, grapes, strawberries and a bottle of water.  We started our hike and about an hour in found the first of many grill locations along the way.  Unfortunately there was a disappointing sign waiting their to greet us.

Due to the fact that it hasn’t rained in a couple of week the local Kanton had banned open fires.  Darn.  While you can technically eat an uncooked cervela, I would say it is about as appetizing as eating a cold U.S. hotdog.  Yeah, if your in a tough spot of course you eat it, but me, I prefer mine cooked.

So plan B.  We decided to stop at a grill spot and wolf down all the other stuff, and agreed that we would head to the local berg resturant, which shouldn’t be do much farther along the trail.

Well, fast forward from our potato chip lunch about 4 hours and we finally reached the berg restaurant.  Tired hot and hunger, something to eat sounded.  While I could have easily had a nice schnitzel and pommes ice cream sounded better.  My wife and I both opted to have huge dishes of ice cream for dinner.  In my mind after 6 hours of hiking I felt like I deserved to have a 3 scoop banana split and not feel the least bit of shame.

It was darn good, at the price it should have been.  Where else in the world would you pay about 28 Francs (28 USD) for 2 large ice creams and a half liter of bottled water.  Sometimes the prices in this country still scare me.

 
2 Comments

Posted in Daily Life, Food

 

Cleaning House At Manor

12 Feb

This week one day after work I ran over to the Manor Supermarket on my way home to grab something to eat.  I had about a hour before the store closed and thought that should be plenty of time to get a few items for a meal.  On the top of my list were a few items from the diary section.

Much to my surprise when I entered the store the entire dairy section was not there.  The shelves were completely empty.  There were employees scurrying everywhere throwing butter in one shopping cart and yogurt in the next.  There were others cleaning the shelves, and even others readjusting other shelves.

After about 30 seconds of observing the situation I realized first, I would not be getting my yogurt that day, second there were obviously in the process of restocking and arranging things, and finally the Swiss still have no concept of customer service.

Why in the world would you basically shut down about 20 percent of you entire shopping store at a prime shopping hour to clean shelves?  Not only does it surely impact sales, but it pisses customers off.  I saw more than one person including myself with a look of total disgust because of an apparent wasted trip since we weren’t going to get what we had come for.

I talked to a Swiss friend later in the week and explained the situation and she mentioned that stores like that can’t do such work outside of work because they can’t pay overtime.  To me, that is just another sign that the Swiss labor system including the unions are extremely powerful.  These stores are closing at 7:00 in the evening and are opening at 8:30 in the morning and they can’t find a way to work with the unions to do such work as major store layout changes outside of opening hours.

I however don’t think that is really the root of the problem.  The easiest explanation is that the store managers just don’t care. Customer service doesn’t matter here.

Unfortunately I went back to the store today.  I had no choice, it is the closest.  Wow, what a difference the new layout makes.  The frozen pizzas are now closer to the fruits & vegetables, which really has improved my life.

 
No Comments

Posted in Food, Shopping

 
« Older Entries