Who wants some cake?

When you own a pasta machine you should also use it, shouldn't you?

Self made pasta with herb-tomato sauce (and herbs are of course from my garden) So good!

Cake for juhannus / Midsommer. I brought this to my Hubby's work...only two persons eating would have ment a cream overdoses ;D

Looks nice...even when I say it myself :D But there is of course always something that one can do better.

Summer dessert and yes I admit: the tartlet bases I bought ready.

Steps to Swissness: Sunday Zopf

Zopf

Ohhh, so nice...it's so warm in Switzerland at the moment that even after 10 pm I can sit outside on the terrace. Makes me really happy...and the best thing is that the weather is supposed to go on like this for the next days.

I'm really astonished of my new work: I'm always off in the evening!! It's wonderful and I still don't really get it. My new work has also inspired me to "swissness". We have to bake every weekend Zopf for our people and I though that hey, why not to bake it also home for my Hubby who really likes it. When I first came to Switzerland I found Zopf a bit strange because something like that would pretty much always be sweet in Finland but here it's not really salty or sweet. I guess most of the people eat it with Nutella or some short of a jam. It's a Sunday breakfast thing. In the beginning when I went to Coop on Saturdays I always wondered about the amount of Zopf there. My Hubby told me back then that it's a part of Swiss Sunday breakfast and if I looked at the people's shopping trolleys I would find Zopf in each one of them and sure enough he was right.

Well, I have learn to eat Zopf as I have learned to eat croissants with Nutella (In Finland I always ate them without adding anything or maybe with something salty.) since I'm here in Switzerland. Baking Zopf is super easy I just somehow never came to it until now. I followed more or less the recipe from the package:

Zopf:

 500 g wheat/zopf flour (needed some more)

1 pack dry yeast

3 dl milk

1 tsp sugar

1 tsp salt

 80 g butter

1 egg 

I found a nice video of baking a Zopf. Take a look if you interested: Zopf

Here is also a photo of our summer dessert: Raspberry tiramisu

Hotel tip for Graubünden

The main building of the hotel

I want to share with you our very recent hotel experience which was super great. This week we had a reason to celebrate so we booked for us two nights at In Lain Hotel in Graubünden. We had actually planned to go further away but due to my new work our holiday was moved to May and thus we were able to get away only for a couple of days...despite the short stay we loved our days in Graubünden.

This hotel is perfect place for you if you love great food, fantastic service and the mountains. The hotel is about 30 km from St. Moriz, in a mini village of Brail so it's perfect relaxing and enjoying the nature. The food will get from us an extra praise. Very much is selfmade (e.g. they have a small cheese factory!) and tastes great. Our eight course menu in the gourmet restaurant was great and presented by the kitchen chef. I didn't want to use our time for taking food fotos during dinner so you just have to take my word that everything looked very beautiful. All this fun wasn't cheap, of course, but is was worth every penny. We have nothing negative to say about the place.

The main building from the other side

Our room

The bar

Sunrise seen from our terrace

The pool area

Herbgarden

The hotel seen from the pool

Seen on our hiking tour.: Korvasieni/False morel is a poisonous mushroom which is considered a delicasy in Finland but is not allowed to be sold in Switzerland.

Seen on our hike: Morchel/true morel which I wanted to pick up and bring to the kitchen chef so that he could prepare one of those eight courses with morels...

Who would not want to hike when the view is like this

On the way

I believe that the cows living in the mountains must be mega happy...they can roam around so freely.

Lillet Vive is the in-drink of this summer

Thurgauer Zeitung on the 7th of June

Well, well, well...I didn't advertise the Lillet Vive for nothing earlier in this blog. According to Thurgauer Zeitung it's the new in-drink for the summer. A quote from the newspaper: "Eine Reihe neuer Cocktails mischt diesen Sommer die Barkarte auf. Als neuer In-Drink der heissen Tage wird etwa Lillet Vive gehandelt. Mit Lillet erobert ein neuer Apéritiftrend diesen Sommer die Bars."

Ginger beer is also present although mixed with vodka instead of rum. Star of the summer will apparently be the mint: "Wer immer das Rennen machen wird, eins ist klar: Der Star des Sommers ist das Pfefferminz-Zweiglein. Das Grünzeug kann nämlich sämtliche erwähnte Drinks zieren:"...the recipes in the picture all include mint. I'm luckily secured on that front: my garden has three different sort of mints in huge pots. I don't know what I should do with that all.

Our dinner on Tuesday

And these were the dessert. Thurgau strawberries are finally here! So I will be paying our village farm everyday a visit :))

Thirsty in summer?

Anna Blume in Berlin...that's where I took my first sip of rhabarber schorle and loved it! If I had to choose, that would be my favourite schorle. By wikipedia: "Schorle is a German beverage made from diluting juice or wine with carbonated water."  And by the way, if you are ever in Berlin you should definitely pay Cafe Anna Blume a visit.

Sadly, I can't buy a good rhubarber juice here in Switzerland so I or my friends have been buying it for me in Germany where it's available at the bio store. Unfortunately I drive very seldom to Germany and now my best importer doesn't live in Switzerland anymore ;D Well, it's a rhubarber time now so why not to make the juice myself, specially because I can by the rhubarber from the village farmer. So here's what I needed:

Rhubarber juice

1 kg rhubarber cut into small pieces

1 l water

juice of 1 lemon

2 tbs dried hibiscus flower (for better colour)

...

400 g sugar (can be adjusted according to one's taste)

Place the rhubarber pieces with water, hibiscus and lemon juice into a pot. Bring to boil and let simmer for about 20 min. When ready pass the liquid through a cheesecloth. Add the desired amount of sugar and bring the juice to boil once more. When hot, bottle it into a very well washed and desinfected (I place the bottles to oven for about 15 min/85 celsius) bottles. Fill the bottles to the top and close the cap. With a right kind of cap you will create a vacuum inside the bottle. My bottles were filled to the top but as you can see in the photo they don't look full anymore. That's due to the right bottling technique which I learned from my mom. 

We are actually planning to by an extra freezer and fridge for the cellar. Then I could make more different kind of juices and have a place to store them. When I was a kid my mom always made so much juice (mainly red and black currant) that we had enough almost for the whole winter. She also froze blueberries, strawberries and raspberries and I can't remember that we had ever bought frozen berries from the shop during winter because we always had so much in the freezer.

Rhubarber juice and rhubarber schorle

The next drink, ginger beer, I learned to know in South Africa. It's a super summer drink. The Paupered chef blog has a nice text about a ginger beer. I didn't follow the recipe exactly, but the text gave me some ideas. I, as well as my hubby, love our ginger beer fiery so I need a good amount of ginger to make my ginger beer.

Ginger beer

2 l water

500 g ginger

juice of two lemons

300 g sugar

5 g yeast (or some old ginger beer as a starter)

I peeled the ginger partly but I didn't chop it by hand. Instead I used the lowest level of a blender and it worked out just fine that way. I placed the ginger, water, sugar and lemon juice into a pot and brought it to boil. When it startted to boil I took the pot from the stove and let it cool down on the table to about 40 celsius. Then I added the yeast (starter), covered the top with a lid and let it stand in the room temperature over night. All in all it stood about 15 hours until I bottled it and placed it to a fridge. Enjoy when cold, unless you want it to be lighly sparkly in which case you should wait for couple of days.

When I had my nice, selfmade ginger beer I could also give the drink Dark 'N' Stormy a try. In the recipe there stands sugar sirup. We made it ourself with 1 kg raw cane sugar to 1 litre of water.

Dark 'N' Stormy

6 cl dark rhum (didn't have the official one so used Negrita)

12 cl ginger beer

lime juice and a wedge

sugar sirup to taste

ice cubes

Dark 'N' Stormy

Woah, this became a long blog text. Well, don't get too used to it because tomorrow I'll start in the new job and then I probably won't have so much time to post. Hopefully Friedrich Peter's kitchen will be ready at some point and then we might hear more from him as well :D Now, I shall maybe enjoy one Dark 'N' Stormy to calm my nerves...new job! Apua!