Recipe | Put some cilantro on it!

(Yellow) Curry fried rice

Since I’ve been unfortunately bereft of cash, I’ve moved much of my diet over to the produce that’s on sale for the week and brown rice. Brown jasmine rice, to be exact. The other part of my diet is using up whatever I have in the refrigerator. Recently it has been small dill pickles.

Eating so much rice quickly (soon I will move on the quinoa and the bulgur wheat I have stored) means I have to mix up what I’m doing with the rice. Early in the month, I made a conglomeration of black beans (I had cooked in the slower cooker,) chorizo and brown rice with ample amounts of onions, (home-made) salsa and Taptio (not home made.)

Curry rice with a wee bit of cilantro on top.

I then moved on to the stir-fry route with a failed General Tso’s chicken, made with broccoli. The sauce (made with apricot preserves) did not come out at all. (The point of the dish, to me, is the sauce, not the meat.) I considered it a failure. That left me with extra rice and no eggs. I didn’t want to just fry the rice — no eggs. Instead, I dug through the quickly-emptying refrigerator for my big container of yellow curry paste. Two pounds, to be exact, of spicy goodness. I poured some oil into the cast-iron skillet, put the curry in, let it disintegrate some and then threw in the rice.

Curry paste!

Had I other vegetables, or had I remembered the just-bought sack of onions sitting with the potatoes, I would have thrown them in. Good contenders range from potatoes to eggplant to broccoli and sprouts, peppers and tomatoes and squash. I then made a hole in the center of the rice, cracked for eggs, cooked and mixed them into the rice. I cut up cilantro I had bought for the purpose and threw it in, leaving a little extra to be used as a un-cooked garnish.

It serves its purpose. Now only, if I had vegetables left.

If you’re looking for a little extra somethin’-somethin’, then consider making some dill-heavy tzatziki to go with the curried rice.

Recipe: Wine-Fruit Brownie Sauce

Note: This post originally ran on my blog from many years ago, wheeleringermany.blogspot.com. I posted to and updated it during some of my tenure as an au pair in Dresden, Germany.

Wine-Fruit sauce for Brownies

Adapted from: Rebekah in Germany

Note: This recipe is a work in progress

I invited my former Volkshochschule classmates to the house for dinner on Saturday night. The family was out for the weekend; I had the entire place to myself. Only Ingrid, a classmate from Columbia, replied. She brought her husband and son along.

We started out with a beef stew made with a ¾ to ¼ red wine to water base. As a side I’d roasted Kohlrabi. However, in trying to keep them warm I managed to burn most of them to a crisp. Note to self: don’t leave Kohlrabi in the oven while baking anything else. Also, I learned NOT to use sea salt on roasted kohlrabi. The sea salt adds too much saltiness in too little space. Ingrid’s husband seemed to like them though; we had an entire conversation revolving around Kohlrabi. It’s a cousin of the turnip. I’ll write its recipe later.

I also picked up .40 Euro cents garlic bread baguettes. Quite delicious by themselves and go great with the beef stew.

After the stew we moved on to a “Bavarian Apple Torte,” which did not turn out as planned, and brownies coupled with the subject of this recipe: a syrupy wine-fruit sauce. As I wrote, brownies. Gotta love ‘em.

The definition of a perfect brownie changes from person to person. To me, perfect is on the just-cooked, fudgy side; the cake side is reserved for cake. However, this recipe is not for brownies. It’s for a sour, sucker-slapping syrupy fruit-wine sauce that goes with, on or next to a brownie.

The wine to use changes with the fruit. Peaches and nectarines go well with a white wine, possibly with a splash of red. Strawberries and raspberries go better with a red wine, possibly with a splash of white. But, ultimately, the cook should make the decision on wine-and-fruit paring. I’m no wine authority. It doesn’t hurt to remember that red wine usually goes great with chocolate. However, a glass accompanying dessert is probably better than putting peaches in a red wine sauce.

Wine, wine, wine. Wine is a beautiful thing. And wine is an inexpensive thing here in Germany. I find myself using it all the time when I cook now. The not-very-good tasting wines are downright cheap. They’re close to the price of organic milk, if not cheaper in some cases.

I used terrible-for-drinking (and downright cheap) boxed wine for the sauce. Not space-bag boxed wine but honest-to-god, wine in a box. Much like milk comes in a 1-liter container, so does crappy wine. It cost under a euro. 9.5% alcohol content.

The sugary taste of the sauce gets both chopped down and spiked with the lime. I’m very much a chocolate and fruit person, so this recipe is love to me. The sour, with the wine, really brings a new taste to the brownie.

My personal favorite matching is raspberries with anything chocolate. When I made this with nectarines and juice of about ½ a lemon it contrasted beautifully with the sweetness of the brownie. Ingrid’s husband and I were in love with the combination. Ingrid and her son didn’t like the sauce because of the sour. I loved the sour. The recipe and pairing are, alas, not for everyone.

The recipe calls for boiling or cooking/reducing the wine to about half of where it was. One can reduce it more, or less. The alcohol taste was gone from the sauce when I called it quits on reducing.

I’ve yet to work on presentation. You’re on your own for that.

This recipe/concept came (to me) from a fellow expat who’s living on an Army base here. In a previous life she cooked professionally. We’re in good hands.

Ingredients:

2 cups chopped fruit, separated into 1 cup each

2 cups red, white or rose wine

1-2 tablespoons white granulated sugar, to taste

Juice from ½ a lime or lemon

Directions:

In either a deep sauce pan or a small pot add 2 cups of chosen wine. Bring to a boil, mix in the desired amount of sugar until its dissolved and half the fruit. Boil or cook/reduce the sauce until it’s about half the amount it was before boiling. The previously strong (warm/hot) alcohol taste should be gone. Add the rest of the fruit and serve with the brownies or other dessert.