Summer time is salad time! and this italian salad with zucchini, carrots and lots of fresh basil is one of my favourites. because of its ingredients i call it zucaba salad, if you come from great britain feel free to change the name to coucaba. whatever you call it, it is delicious and goes with everything. for other salad ideas check out the lets

This green couscous salad keeps its promises, you get different shades of green and as a bonus different textures, soft broad beans, crunchy green beans and bursting capers. every bite is a surprise. i got the idea from the new-zealand cook annabel langbein. the green couscous salad makes friends easily, you can serve it with lamb chops, grilled be

Our daring cooks’ september 2012 hostess was inma of la galletika. inma brought us a taste of spain and challenged us to make our very own delicious paella! i made a paella with squid ink, squids and shrimps. i found the recipe in the amazing cookbook "a platter of figs" from david tanis. it doesn't look very tempting but it is delicious and the

Whenever i travelled abroad i ended up buying some local specialty only to discover that at home the great espresso doesn't taste as good as in rome. but to every rule there is thank god an exception. last summer i spend with my husband a week in the valley du lot in france. it is famous for its red wine but also for its saffron. the guy who sold s

Rachael of pizzarossa was our august 2012 daring cook hostess and she challenged us to broaden our knowledge of cornmeal! rachael provided us with some amazing recipes and encouraged us to hunt down other cornmeal recipes that we’d never tried before – opening our eyes to literally 100s of cuisines and 1000s of new-to-us recipes! i chose to mak

June was cold and rainy and i begged for summer, so now that i am sweating because of a heat wave, i cannot really complain. you can imagine how difficult that is. so i decided to make the best of it and to put my ice cream machine that was starting to collect some dust to good use and i made some pineapple rosemary sorbet. now i know it does sound

Our july 2012 daring cooks’ host was sarah from all our fingers in the pie! sarah challenges us to learn a new cooking technique called “cooking en papillote” which is french and translates to “cooking in parchment”. i like this technique a lot but sometimes while being very healthy papillotes can turn out to be a little bit on the bland

My relationship with pasta salad had a rough start. the first time a pasta salad crossed my path was at a student party, the pasta was way beyond all-dente and drenched in store bought mayonnaise, the few defrosted peas that were added to this mix couldn't save it. well, i drank a lot of beer that night. for a long time i didn't want to have anythi

Une amie nous a invité à une soirée "noël international", l'idée étant que chacun amène un plat de l'avent traditionel de son pays. en tant qu'allemande j'avais l'embarras du choix, il existe des centaines de recettes de petits gâteaux sucrés, sans parler du glühwein, le fameux vin chaud. finalement j'ai décidé de faire des "lebkuchen"

J'ai eu une très longue journée au travail aujourd'hui et en rentrant ma tête était vide, mon moral à zéro et je ne me sentais pas de faire des petits gâteaux pour noël et d'écrire des cartes de voeux. heureusement que je me suis souvenue d'un smoothie sésame-oranges du blog the green kitchen. n'ayant pas le temps de faire tremper des gra