Food Porn. (9)

For our "Before Christmas"-Dinner we chose the Motto "An Experiment of Maximizing Hedonisitc Extravaganza".
And we did create a six-course-dinner of truly epicurean proportions!

We started with two snacks served in a spoon.

Snack: Salmon Crépe with Caviar and Horseradish Foam

Snack: Quail's Eggs in Beef Coating

Salad: Lobster on Green Salad with Orange Sauce

Soup: Warm Lemon Soup with Salmon Tartar

Main Course: Roasted Lamb with Brussel Sprouts, Orange Potato and Pomegranate Jus

Dessert: Cream of Avocado and Lime with Coconut.Chili-Macaroons

Especially the dessert is worth mentioning, since to all of us it was something entirely new - trying to turn a vegetable into a dessert.
It really worked and out came this fantastic dish. Damn, that was good :)

Food Porn. (8)

Yesterday's motto was "Cook fast, die young".
The reason we picked this motto was that Sylvia had to go to work really early today, so we had to really hurry since usually, to cook and eat our four to six courses takes about 8 or 9 hours.
So the challenge yesterday was to get done in 5 hours!
 Fortunately, Frank brought an already prepared, fantastic chicken soup:

So we only had to heat that up, and we had our quick first course.
While heating up the soup, we prepared the beef roulades for the main course:

We fried the roulades sharply on all sides, put them in a roasting dish with a lot of mirepoix, fried it some more, deglazed them with a generous amount of Port and put it all in the oven.

After the soup, with the roulades in the oven, I wanted a quick salad, so I took some leftover beef from the roulades, a little honey, some Port and some balsamic vinegar and made it into a jus which we used as dressing for a small salad with steak stripes and oranges:

Here's a picture of Frank revisiting the jus:

After we had the salad, the roulades were almost done, so we had to get started with the red cabbge and the potato dumplings.
We added some apples and cloves to the cabbage, glazed it in butter, added some red wine and then let it simmer for a couple of minutes.
We took the roulades out of the sauce, filtered the liquid, seasoned the sauce and thickened it with a little cornstarch. Cooked the roulades in the sauce for about 10 more minutes and then served them with the cabbage and a dumpling:

While eating the roulades, we were already cooking out the next dish in the oven:
Hazelnut-Marzipan Roast Apple:

We served the apples with a ball of vanilla ice and - believe it or not - we were done in under 5 hours.

Chocolate.

Monster Magnet performing 'Spine of God"

In 1991, Monster Magnet released their first full-length album, 'Spine of God'.
The phrase "Stoner Rock" hadn't even been invented yet, and what Monster Magnet recorded back in the day was so new and different that a term had to be made up for it.
Admittedly, Kyuss were really the first who used it. But still, the 'Spine of God' kept Metal upright and alive at the beginning of the 90s and still is until today the original blueprint for the genres of Desert or Stoner Rock.
And only one year after Dave Wyndorf and his band graced the audience with a live performance of their other groundbreaking album, 'Dopes to Infinity', they've come back to celebrate the sheer sonic intensity that makes this album so mind-warping stuff, even without chemical additives.

I have seen Monster Magnet live a couple of times, but this time was better.
The venue was small, so the atmosphere was really personal, and Dave Wyndorf had such a great night, running around the stage, fooling around with the audience, and taking photos.
It was the best Monster Magnet show yet for me, and I am looking forward to the next.

Here's my video of the first encore, the rarely-heard 'Lord 13' from their 1991 EP '25......Tab':

Food Porn. (7)

I saw this on the cover of a gourmet magazine at the checkout of my local supermarket and I thought, this looks good, let's try it.

So I got a good thick piece of filet, red onions and an apple.
I cut the steak in half to get two thin slices of steak and I fried them in butter sharply for about a minute on each side. I put the steaks in the oven to keep warm and let it stand. I used the excess fat in the pan to lightly fry a couple of thin apple slices and caramelized them in honey.
I added some butter to the remaining fat and honey and I put a bunch of thinly cut slices of red onions in the pan. I waited for the onions to become a little translucent and deglazed it with a rather liberal amount of port. I let that cook for a couple of minutes, seasoned it with salt, pepper and a small spritz of Worcerstershire sauce, arranged it on the plate in the order beef-onions apples-beef-onions-apple, put some copped chives on top and Voilá:

The whole thing didn't take much longer than about ten minutes and the best part is that you don't even have a big mess in your kitchen because you only use one pan and one plate :)

Food Porn. (6)

Unfortunately, the two-week-frequency of our cook-offs had been disturbed a little, so after four weeks without a feast, we decided to go for a six-course dinner.

And it totally worked out. Everything was perfect. No really, everything. Check it out:

The Snack: Bacon-Wrapped Pinapple with Chives Dip

The Soup: Cream of Rocket Salad

The Salad: Black Salsify with Louisiana Crawfish

The Entreé: Fried Scallops with Black Salsify and Ginger-Blood-Orange-Jelly

The Main Course: Breast of Duck with Balasmic-Vinegar-Port-Sauce, Red Cabbage and Mashed Potatoes with Pumpkin

And just so you see how wonderful the duck looked in the oven:

The Dessert: Cream of Mascarpone with Apples and Cinnamon

Here's a photo of the pile of groceries wie bought...it was funny to see how it kept shrinking over the course of the evening:

And this is how we cook:

I can tell you, I'm so looking forward to our next dinner evening!

The Ruins of Prora

I had been to Prora once, I think it was in 1999, but unfortunately, I had no camera with me then, so for the past 13 years or so, I have planned to go back there and take pictures.
The best thing this time was that we found a hole in the fence around the ruins of the former Coffee House of the Sea Resort.
Apparently, the building was never finished and what was built was left for decay and vandalism.

Anyway, I made a short movie of the walkthrough in the coffee house.

The photos below are outside shots as well as inside the Coffee House and some pictures of the docks at the beach and the living quarteers.

The Coffee House - outside:

The Coffee House - inside:

The Docks:

The Living Quarters:

Various Bunkers: