My Berlin Kitchen by Luisa Weiss

Luisa Weiss had an American dad, an Italian mother, and grew up in Germany and the United States. As she reached adulthood, she began to wonder where in the world she belonged. She explored her heritages through travel and food. Her memoir, My Berlin Kitchen, is an attempt at catharsis through writing and eating. It was our Kitchen Reader pick for January.

Much of Luisa Weiss' story resonated with me. It is hard to be a person who doesn't know where home is. I am not sure my homeless feelings are as consuming as hers, though. I count Canada, the UK, Europe, and Hong Kong among my choices for a place of belonging. And for the most part, I feel happy in all of them. For Weiss, she was overwhelmed not by rootlessness, but the feeling that she had roots in too many places. And these places were impossible to be in all at once.

Lobster Dinner

While in my parents' home city, I want to eat all the seafood I can. One highlight has been indulging in Grammie's seafood chowder. It's a chunky, milky soup filled with haddock, lobster, and scallops with a few potatoes thrown in for good measure. Our main Christmas meal was turkey, obviously, but our small family meal on Christmas Eve was maple-glazed salmon that Ant and I made. But a visit to Nova Scotia is not complete without a lobster dinner.

for freezing: fish with cheesy topping

I am trying a few recipes from the book I borrowed from the library: The Kitchen Revolution. I expect to review this cookbook for you in a while, after I have tried out a few more of the 400+ recipes. The title of the first recipe I tried is Fish Rarebit. It's based on Welsh Rarebit, a fancy cheese-on-toast. Here, the toast is replaced with white fish. The idea of this "Two for One" meal is to make double proportions and then freeze half for a later meal.


Sweated leeks are added to lots of cheddar cheese, breadcrumbs, some ale (or water), mustard, and Worcestershire sauce. Then this is layered on the fish and grilled for a few minutes, then baked to finish. The recipe in the book makes two meals for four people, so I made half this, serving Ant and I one fresh meal and one frozen for a later date when things get hectic and we are both thinking of take-away. The original recipe is below.

Fish Rarebit
two meals for four people


3 leeks, approximately 500 g, finely sliced
2 T butter
2 eggs
1 1/2 T mustard powder
1/2 t ground cayenne pepper
350 g cheddar cheese, grated
2 t Worcestershire sauce
75 ml bitter or ale (or water)
100 g breadcrumbs (made from 4 slices of bread)
8 portion sized white fish pieces (haddock, pollock, cod, or coley, for example)

Melt the butter in a pan and add the leeks. Cover and sweat gently for 5-7 minutes.
In a bowl, combine eggs, mustard powder, cayenne pepper, cheese, Worcestershire sauce, beer or water, and breadcrumbs. Season with salt and pepper.
Remove the lid from the leeks and cook until the liquid evaporates. Season the leeks, remove from heat and allow them to cool.
Preheat the oven to 180 C/350 F and heat the grill to its highest temperature.
Oil an ovenproof dish large enough to hold four fish pieces. Place four fish pieces in the pan and use half the topping to cover the fish. Place under the grill for 3-5 minutes, or until topping is brown and set. Then bake in the oven for a further 7-10 minutes.
Meanwhile, top the remaining four fish pieces with the remaining topping. Place them in a suitable container (plastic, foil, or ovenproof dish). Cover and freeze well.
To cook the frozen meal at a later time, defrost the fish completely. Cook as above.
Serve with new potatoes, watercress salad, or veggies of your choosing.

small growing success

My garden was not a great triumph this year, but! But it was better than ever before. Helen and I went out last Sunday to tidy it up and pull weeds and I discovered that my potatoes did grow. I am so proud. There were lots of leaves at first, but recently they had all been eaten. But when I started to dig, I saw that I actually had a decent number of new potatoes. Here is the whole crop: 51 potatoes in all, including 24 reasonable sized ones. Look at the little babies! I dug them up and cooked them with the others; I was determined to waste nothing that I had successfully grown.


On Sunday evening I made Ant and I herbed salmon (Nigel Slater’s recipe from the last Observer Food Monthly) with bacon fried spinach and boiled new potatoes. The potatoes were small balls of delicious success.

recipes to try

While surfing today I saw a few nice sounding recipes that I think I will try. It's soup season--nice warming soups brighten up winter nights. How about this zucchini garlic soup? I am always on the lookout for ways to cook courgettes/zucchini since it is my new favourite vegetable ever. And look at this roasted garlic soup with parmesan cheese. Who could believe a recipe that starts out with, "take 26 garlic cloves" and the second step is "add 18 more garlic cloves"?! Here's a recipe for a goat's cheese tart, which is the kind of thing I love to order at restaurants. Learning to make it would be brilliant. I would serve it with a crispy rocket salad. Another delicious sounding main dish is the lemon fish with basil cream sauce. And finally, Ant is in love with rice and requests it at every meal, and so I am thinking of trying rice pudding for dessert at some point. Here's a really tasty sounding lemon rice pudding.

So that's my food for thought for the evening (ha ha!). What new things would you like to try out? These are just dreams, mind. I am not always as ambitious away from the internet and in my kitchen! I'll let you know if I get around to making any of them. (Would anyone care to come over on the night I make the garlic soup? If not, we will be very stinky on our own!)

you are what you eat

There's a TV show I like to watch called You Are What You Eat. Dr Gillian McKeith is a tough love nutritionist who exposes bad eating habits that make people sick and unhealthy. She shocks the participant by lining up all their week's food to see; then she puts them on a strict diet to get their bodies functioning again.

Her recipes are mostly vegetarian. On the Channel Four website you can find the recipe for tofu and bean burgers. Sweet potato shepherd's pie sounds lovely. Often she makes her participants go vegetarian at first. Ant would never go for this. He always jokes that he is a meatetarian. He says he doesn't feel full without meat. I hope that I will find some good vegetarian meals that he likes. At the moment I am trying to incorporate more fish into our weekly menus. We've discovered that we really like eating tuna steaks, and they are delicious marinated for about 20 minutes in soy sauce, ginger, garlic, and a bit of hot sauce. I'm going to try Dr McKeith's marinated salmon on spinach and leeks, I think.