Blackberry Jam

I go swimming twice a week, and on my way to the pool, I walk across a large common bisected by a railway line. The other day, when crossing the bridge over the railway, I noticed that the bushes to either side of the line were brambles heavy with ripe blackberries.

So on Monday night, I met Rachel on the way back from work and we went picking blackberries. It turns out that the most important tool in the blackberry-picker's arsenal is a hook made from a wire coathanger, which we used to great effect to draw in branches too far away to reach otherwise. One of us would hold the hook while the other would pick the berries.

When the box I'd brought was full, we headed home via the supermarket, where we picked up sugar and pectin. It was time to make jam.

When we got in, we were ravenous, so we quickly prepared and ate dinner. Then we took out the stock pot and set to work. Conveniently enough, the bottle of pectin had instructions for making blackberry jam on it, so we followed them (or tried to - I added the pectin too early). We ended up filling a big jar with jam, and putting a bit of overflow into another one. Finally, we got out some bits of white bread and polished off the jam sticking to the inside of the pot.

We left the jars to cool off overnight. To our satisfaction, when we checked in the morning, the full jar had pressure-sealed. Rachel made a sandwich using jam from the overflow jar, and it was delicious.

Since we still have lots of pectin left, we plan to return to the common. There may be more blackberries, and the elderberries are ripe too...

Welcome to Zum Znacht!

This is the food blog of one vegan-by-association Swiss man (David) and one Swiss-by-association vegan (Rachel). We write about the meals we make together that are interesting or tasty.

The posts below are imported from my (Rachel's) personal blog, where the series was called En Guete! -- Swiss German for "bon appetit". With the move comes a new name: Zum Znacht, or "For Dinner".

We'll be writing fairly frequently but irregularly, as we find things worth posting about. We hope you will enjoy it!

En Guete! Green and black

A guest post by Dave about our dinner the other night.

Having made pasta salad with lots of olives in, I got to theorising that you could make a pasta sauce based on olives. Since basic olives in brine aren't very expensive, I decided to give it a try the next night. This is what I came up with:

• A tin of pitted black olives in brine
• A jar of pitted green olives in brine
• Juice of a lemon
• Two cloves of garlic
• A bundle of mint leaves
• Olive oil
• Salt
• Pepper

Drain and rinse the olives, peel the garlic. Chop the olives, garlic and mint finely and put them in a bowl. Add the lemon juice, enough olive oil to coat everything, some salt and a lot of pepper.

We had it with some wholemeal spaghetti and the result was intense and delicious. The biggest problem was that the "sauce" didn't adhere to the spaghetti, so next time I make this I want to try running it through a food processor.

En Guete! Salads

I was never much of a salad person before I started going out with Dave. I would put some lettuce and a tomato on the side of the plate if I was making something otherwise unhealthy, but that was getting fancy. It took his continental approach to make me a true believer. This is (a) ironic, since I'm the vegan one and (b) why I'm writing an En Guete! entry about two meals I didn't actually cook. I wanted to praise his salad-making skills.

The first (shown in the terrible picture) is a potato salad created to play with a tahini-based salad dressing. The salad itself contained steamed potato chunks, black olives, cherry tomatoes, radishes and red kidney beans. The dressing was made up of:

• tahini
• lemon juice
• garlic paste
• salt and pepper
• a small amount of olive oil and balsamic vinegar
• water to thin it

It was delicious, filling but not stodgy, thanks to the hidden protein from the tahini and the freshness of the radishes and tomatoes.

The second salad (in the nicer picture) was based on wholemeal pasta shells, cucumber and tomato. It also contained black olives, spring onions, cornichons and mint leaves from a pot in the kitchen. The dressing was made from:

• vegan mayonnaise
• turmeric
• salt and pepper
• olive oil and balsamic vinegar

I love this salad and we've had a version of it several times this summer. The only problem with it is that, with so many different flavours, I'm constantly compelled to have just one more forkful...

En Guete! Return of the return of the beetroot

Here is another En Guete! post by Dave. He also took the photo, which I think is rather good.

Having made two beetroot-based meals, we found ourselves with yet more beetroot to use up the following day. So we looked into the cupboard and determined that the other thing we had far too much of was risotto rice.

Consulting Google for a recipe yielded this one. We made it vegan by the simple method of leaving out all the cream and cheese and using margarine instead of butter. We also substituted brandy for the vermouth, since we had no vermouth in.

Despite the recipe's dubious origins, the result was delicious, and probably a lot less taxing on the stomach than the cheese-laden original.

En Guete! Return of the beetroot

After the great success of our borscht, Dave and I were a little surprised to see quite how many beetroots we had left. We decided to make purple mashed potatoes with them. This was made easier by the rice cooker/steamer we got for Christmas (expect many of these posts to mention it. It is a marvel). We steamed potatoes, carrots and beetroot together, then I mashed them with some salt, pepper, and margarine. The different types of vegetables hadn't softened to the same degree, which gave a nice mix of creaminess and chunkiness. Dave made onion gravy and we had the mash with Linda McCartney vegetarian sausages.

The next day we had both fresh beetroot and beetroot mash left over and I started to despair a little. Neither of us had actually made bubble and squeak before (although I love my stepdad's version) but we steamed some cabbage and improvised. From subsequent looking at websites, it seems that my choice to make the mash into patties before frying it was quite a fancy one. Despite looking worryingly meatlike in the pan, they were good and had just enough of the crunchy outside.

Dave will be happy, because now I've written about these rather traditional meals he can write about what we did with the last of the beets...

Oh yes, and that white thing the plates are arranged on is our washing machine, which stood around for a while because the kitchen fittings were brand-new and strange. We eventually plumbed it in ourselves, with help from Ask MetaFilter, and felt mighty.

En Guete! Borscht(sch)

As promised, here is episode one of En Guete!, written by Dave.

The day after we moved into our new flat, Rachel went to investigate the market in town and returned with a profusion of vegetables, amongst them a large bundle of beetroots.

"We schould make borscht!", she said. Neither of us had had this infamously red stew before, so we went onto Google and used pretty much the first recipe we came across.

In German, borscht is spelled "Borschtsch" and pronounced a bit like the sound a parent makes when their meal of borscht is interrupted by their beloved daughter's declaration that she is unexpectedly pregnant with the stable-boy's child, causing a near-eruption of stew. This pronunciation made us refer to our dinner in an increasingly elaborate way, ending up at "Would you like some more borschtschtschtschchshchshhhhh, darling?"

Anyway, the recipe we were using included optional pork sausages, which we left out, and cream, for which we substituted vegan cream. We can't know if the result was authentic, but it was certainly delicious.