Tag Archives: easy

Steak, Green Beans and Hasselback Potatoes on Mother’s Day

Steak, Green Beans and Hasselback Potatoes on Mother’s Day
Steak, Green Beans and Hasselback Potatoes on Mother’s Day

Hello Everybody!!

I hope you all had a great weekend! I was at my parents house, spending a lot of time in the kitchen 🙂 My goal was to make a great mother’s day lunch for my parents and me, my two grandmas and grandpa. Of course I started preparing on saturday, but got really sabotaged as I found myself persuaded to do another cake for my mum to bring to a barbecue and to prepare lunch and dinner that day too. Oh my 😉 The end of it was that I didn’t start preparing the cake that I intended to make in the first place until late afternoon!!

But actually I didn’t mind much. My mom was so very happy this weekend, at least a bit because I made all this, that it was totally worth it 😉 The only thing I wished I did different was that I didn’t take much pictures!! Especially the dinner of  my Speedy Shrimp Pasta my father and me had on saturday was soooo awesome!! I thought it was already on the blog, so I wouldn’t need it, but this time I used frozen shrimps and homemade tagliatelle which made it sooo much better even!!

So what did we have for Mother’s Day lunch then? You might have guessed, as the title says it:

Beef steak, hasselback potatoes, green beans and wild garlic butter recipe for mother's day by ginger, lemon and spice

Beef steak prepared by my father, green beans the way I love to eat them, hasselback potatoes with lots of fresh herbs and a yummy wild garlic butter with all that! And for ‘dessert’ we had a Strawberry Oreo Cheese & Cream Cake (in Germany we say Torte for this type of cake!). It was sooo delicious!!

Beef steak, hasselback potatoes, green beans and wild garlic butter recipe for mother's day by ginger, lemon and spice

And you know what?! You will get the recipe for ALL of that!! And it even will be printable!! As you can see I installed a new feature on my blog which makes it possible for you to print the recipe only – and not all of the other things I am saying nor the big pictures. How do you like that?! 🙂

Steak, Green Beans and Hasselback Potatoes on Mother's Day
 
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Easy to prepare but soo yummy!! Perfect for any kind of holiday meal!
Author:
Recipe type: Meat Main Dish
Serves: 6
Ingredients
Wild Garlic Butter
  • 125g (1/2 cup) softened butter
  • 200g wild garlic
  • salt
Herby Hasselback Potatoes
  • 16-18 small potatoes
  • fresh herbs (I used rosemary and lemon thyme)
  • coarse sea salt
  • 5 tablespoons olive oil
Steaks
  • 6 beef steaks
  • olive oil
  • salt, pepper and a sprinkle of fresh thyme
Green Beans with Tomatoes
  • 750g frozen green beans
  • 4 big tomatoes
  • 55g (1/4 cup) butter
  • very herby salt (or normal herb salt with extra herbs)
Instructions
Wild Garlic Butter
  1. Chop wild garlic very finely. Mix with butter and salt to taste. Put on a piece of baking paper and form into a roll and put in the fridge to cool down. This is best prepared a day ahead.
Herby Hasselback Potatoes
  1. Preheat oven to 200°C (375° F). Brush and wash your potatoes thoroughly. Take a sharp knife and cut into the potato far but not through. It has to be attached a little! Make more of those incisions about 2-3 mm apart. To make sure not to cut through the potato you can hold your knife peak downwards like a landing airplane! Once you touch your cutting board with the peak just stop cutting.
  2. Chop your herbs very finely. Seperate the cuts of the potatoes a little bit with your fingers and sprinkle herbs in. Arrange all potatoes on a baking tray covered with baking paper and drizzle with olive oil. Sprinkle sea salt on top.
  3. Bake your potatoes in the middle rack for about 35-40 minutes. You have to have a look how crispy you want them!
Steaks
  1. About 2 hours before you want to cook them take the steaks out of the fridge and let them reach room temperature. Brush them with oil and sprinkle with salt and pepper. When your potatoes are ready turn the oven off and start cooking the meat.
  2. We used a griddle (electric grill with two griddle pans pressed together) to cook the steaks as I was occuping the pan with the beans. So preheat whatever you are using and once it is really hot put the steaks in. They only need like 3 minutes on each side! You want the insides to be rose. Put the steaks on a plate, sprinkle with just a little of finely chopped thyme and put them in the turned off oven (where your potatoes are - you are just using the left over heat) for a few minutes until you are finished with the beans.
Green Beans with Tomatoes
  1. Put green beans in a large pan on high heat and cover with a lid. Meanwhile chop your tomatoes in chunks. Once the beans are thawed remove the lid and continue heating the beans on high heat and stir. When the beans are warm and most of the water is evaporated add the tomatoes. At the time the tomatoes start to soften turn the heat off and add the seasoning and butter and stir until the butter is melted. You can add more salt or herbs if you feel the need to.
  2. Serve immediately and dig in!! 🙂

Beef steak, hasselback potatoes, green beans and wild garlic butter recipe for mother's day by ginger, lemon and spice

The recipe for the Strawberry Oreo Cheese & Cream Cake will be in the next post!

Beef steak, hasselback potatoes, green beans and wild garlic butter recipe for mother's day by ginger, lemon and spice

Have a nice week!

~ Kathrin 

Ratz-Fatz-Streuselkuchen – Birthday Cake No. 3

Ratz-Fatz-Streuselkuchen – Birthday Cake No. 3
Ratz-Fatz-Streuselkuchen – Birthday Cake No. 3

Hello Everybody!

Ratz-Fatz Streuselkuchen. crumble/streusel cake from gingerlemonandspice

Finally you get to see the recipe for my 3rd birthday cake. It is kind of the signature cake of my godmother and I begged her for the recipe! 🙂 My other birthday cakes were Buttermilk Banana Bread and Cherry Chocolate Cake!

And now I am sharing it with you!! This cake really is a crowd pleaser! Everybody loves it – it is so simple and yet sooo delicious!!

Ratz-Fatz Streuselkuchen. crumble/streusel cake from gingerlemonandspice

You can get streusel cake at nearly every bakery in Germany and this one just looks like it. You will get asked if you are a professional baker a lot of times 😉

But here is the secret: The cake is not actually very difficult to make! You might even have all those ingredients in your pantry already. Just make it yourself!

 

Ratz-Fatz Streuselkuchen / Streusel Cake / Crumble Cake

Ratz-Fatz Streuselkuchen. crumble/streusel cake from gingerlemonandspiceRatz-Fatz Streuselkuchen. crumble/streusel cake from gingerlemonandspice

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

cake base:

4 eggs

200g (a little less than 1 cup) sugar

200g (1 3/4 cup) flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

 

streusel:

250g (1 1/8 cup) butter, softened

250g (1 1/8 cup) sugar

400g (3 1/3 cups) flour

1 package vanilla sugar or 1 teaspoon extract

 

for the finish:

200g (7 oz) cream

powdered sugar

 

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 180° C (350°F). Line one baking sheet with baking paper.

2. First prepar the cake base: Beat eggs and sugar with a hand mixer until foamy. Add flour and baking powder and mix until incorporated. Pour onto the baking sheet and smooth out with a pastry spatula.

3. Now prepare the streusel. You need dough hooks on your hand mixer now or you could use your hands! Put butter, sugar, flour and vanilla into a bowl and mix. This takes about 5 minutes until everything is evenly distributed. Put the mixer away and press the streusel to small lumps together and put on top of the cake base. Try to spread evenly.

4. Bake this cake for approx. 20-25 minutes! You can use a knife to lift up the cake at the corners to see if its done from the bottom. Take it out of the oven and immediately pour the cream evenly on top of the cake. Let the cake rest for at least half an hour. The cream will soak in!

5. Coat with powdered sugar with the help of a small sieve and a teaspoon. Dig in!! 🙂

Ratz-Fatz Streuselkuchen. crumble/streusel cake from gingerlemonandspice

~Kathrin

Simple Everyday Couscous Salad

Simple Everyday Couscous Salad
Simple Everyday Couscous Salad

Hello everybody!!

simple everyday couscous salad with tomatoes and cucumber recipe

I hope you are great, all of you? Well, I took some time off to have my second birthday party with my family and friends at home. Then I did a whole lot of nothing, resting my brain from all the work 😉 But now I am back again!! Ready to show you some more food and stories and finally being creative again! 🙂 Last night I had a great time with my godchild. She always wanted to do a sweet yeast bread with poppy seeds on her own, so we just made a date and did it!! It was very much fun and the two braided buns turned out beautifully, too!! Of course everyone had to make their own. I would love to show you a picture, but I was so very clever to bring only my camera and not my charger to my parents house and we already took too many pictures at the wild animal park we went as a family last sunday. Well, things happen 😉

With a little luck my godchild remembered to take a picture of hers when she got back to her house!! But I can’t promise. At least I can say it wasn’t very difficult at all, so maybe  I will make it again soon with proper pictures! To round up the evening we had a lot of fun eating pasta with pesto, watching Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix in English  and laughing about the silliest scens and of course – trying the first pieces of our sweet bread!! It tasted as good as it looked!

 

Today I have a recipe of a couscous salad for you. Well, it is not any couscous salad!! As I already told you, I live in a flat with two other girls – and this is what we eat a lot. And I really mean A LOT!!! We eat it on mondays or tuesdays, for lunch or for dinner, together or seperately – just all the time!! It is soooo very quick and definitly way too delicious to not been eaten at least twice a week!! I also take it to university if I don’t have time to eat at home which works perfectly too.

I don’t want to keep you in the loop any longer!! Here you go:

 

Simple Everyday Couscous Salad

simple everyday couscous salad with tomatoes and cucumber recipe

Ingredients:

2 cups couscous (the easy cooking type)

4 cups boiling water

2 tea-bags (about 6-8g, or as much as you want) of mint tea – fresh might be better, but that’s all we have on hand in winter

2 teaspoons of granulated vegetable broth

1/2 cucumber (Salatgurke in German)

3-4 big tomatoes (or the equivalent in small ones)

200g feta cheese (in Germany that is one package)

about 8 tablespoons white balsamic vinegar

6 tablespoons olive oil

Salt, Pepper

optional: 1 bell pepper

 

directions:

1. Put couscous, mint, vegetable broth and hot water into your salad bowl. Stir a little bit with a fork, then let sit for 10 minutes.

2. Cut cucumber, tomatoes, feta cheese and bell pepper into squares.

3. If the water is soaked up by the couscous already, loosen up with a fork. If not, just wait a little bit more and then go on. Put the vegetables and feta into your bowl and continue loosing up the mixture.

4. Season with salt and pepper, be careful with the salt as the feta already is salty. Pour olive oil and balsamic vinegar over the salad and mix well. Have a taste! We never measure olive oil or vinegar, we just go on taste. So if you feel you need more of anything, just add it. I like a little tingling from the vinegar on my tounge 😉

5. Enjoy lukewarm or cold!! We usually eat this as a whole meal, but it would be great as a side dish or at a barbecue too!!

simple everyday couscous salad with tomatoes and cucumber recipe

~Kathrin

Orange Ricotta Chocolate Chip Muffins

Orange Ricotta Chocolate Chip Muffins
Orange Ricotta Chocolate Chip Muffins

A very warm WELCOME to all my new readers!!

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I am sooo excited that you all joint me here and on facebook to follow my little blog! This blog is my heart’s desire and I love to bake and cook, tell my story, photograph and sew to make this blog a part of me and a nice place to be! And this is true, even if it rhymes 😉

For everybody that stumbles on this little site and especially the ones who decide to stay I am soooo very thankful!! It is so nice to see that other people like the same things I do and that encourages me very much!

I would like it best if I could get to know all of you personally, but as this is a very difficult task because you are living all over the globe, I encourage you to leave a quick comment! Don’t be shy! 🙂

 

Today I want to talk about muffins. Aren’t they great? You can bring them to any celebration and they are never out of place. People love them because they are already in single servings and can be transported easily! But most of all: They taste great!!!

If you have a muffin for yourself, it is just like you have a little cake baked just for you. They are cute, they are easy to make and simple to modify!

 

What I have here is a recipe which is loaded with a bright orange flavor, rich chocolate taste and is very moist thanks to the use of ricotta!

I used homemade ricotta which I made of the leftover whey I had from making my own camenbert and feta cheese. Also the only oranges I had were blood oranges! That is why the dough had a pretty rosa color and the baked muffins where a light green on the inside, because the color changed from rosa to green during baking.

I was very surprised when I had a bite of my first muffin! And they really tasted very delicious!!

 

So here it comes:

Orange Ricotta Chocolate Chip Muffins

from two peas & their pod

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Ingredientes:

115g unsalted butter, at room temperature

150g granulated sugar

Zest of 1 orange

15 g vanilla sugar (or use 1 teaspoon vanilla extract)

1 cup ricotta cheese

1 large egg

4 tablespoons fresh orange juice

240g white flour

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 cup chocolate chips (I used 125g chopped ‘Kouvertüre’ chocolate, but choc chips are fine)

Glaze:

1 cup powdered sugar

1-2 tablespoons orange or lemon juice

 

Directions:

1.Preheat oven to 180° C (about 350 degrees F). Line 12 muffin cups with paper liners, or use silicone cups. Set aside.

2. Beat the butter, sugars and zest with an electric mixer until light and fluffy. Add ricotta cheese and mix well. Then add the egg and orange juice.

3. Now it is time to put in the dry ingredients. Flour, baking powder and -soda and salt go in. Don’t overmix! Just stir it in on low speed of the electric mixer.

4. Add the chocolate and just mix it in with a big spoon.

5. Using two large spoons divide the dough between the 12 muffin moulds.

6. Bake muffins for approx. 25-30 minutes. Take a skewer and make the test! If it comes out clean, they are ready!

7. Now prepare the glaze.  In a small bowl whisk together the powdered sugar and the citrus juice (not all at once, check consistency!). Drizzle over the muffins. Let it sit until glaze hardens and muffins are cooled down.

Enjoy!!

 

~Kathrin

 

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