Food time

Cooking!

Some DS days, there will be a dinner/cooking thing for DS participants. The hotel where it'll happen is Meininger hotel Berlin Mitte, which has a kitchen I estimate to be big enough for about 25 people.

Please spread the word a bit, I didn't really manage to reach many people and others seem to think it's not open to anyone or something - it is, just see who signed up already :D

What to do & costs

• You might need to help with either cooking, cleaning up, carrying stuff etc!
• Price will be 5 euro. BRING DRINKS!!!!

When/where

• cooking starts around 18:00
• Those who want to help carry stuff (and consequently be led to the hotel) can gather in front of our building around 17:30
• There will most likely still be food until around 21:00 if not later, so don't worry if you can't make it exactly at 18:00!
• The place where we'll cook is the kitchen of Meininger Hotel Berlin Mitte, about 800 meters from the venue and at Oranienburger strasse 67-69. Careful, enter 67-69 on eg google maps 'cuz there is another Oranienburger strasse in the middle of nowhere :D
• Directions: go left in front of the conf building, left again to follow the track. Go right to cross the track as soon as you can and go straight on. Cross the bridge, keep going straight. It's the second street on your left, Oranienburger Strasse. Just 15 meters to find the entrance of Hotel Meininger Berlin Mitte. Follow signs for the kitchen!

The promised recipe

I promised to put the recipe's here so here you go. It's based on memory so you'll have to experiment a bit to get it perfect :D The amount of food should be for about 4 people.

Surinaamse Roti (Wednesday)

• The meat(replacement) curry: Heat 2 spoons of curry masala with enough oil, garlic, a sliced hot pepper (with seeds if you want it very hot, without if not) and a stock block and stir-fry it a bit. You can add cashew nuts at this point too. After it's been frying a bit, add onion, mushrooms and either chicken(legs), tofu (see tips) and/or eggplant (cubes). Add oil where needed to keep it from sticking to the pan. After the meat or tofu is getting brown and fried a bit, add water, half a spoon of sugar, lower the fire and close the pan if you can to let it shimmer for about 30 min to an hour. Stir occasionally. At the end, add whatever thickener you prefer (eg flour) to make the sauce as thick as you like!
• The potatoes: Cook the potatoes in water with 1 spoon of curry masala, some garlic, half a spoon of sugar and a stock block.
• The beans: Stir-fry the beans with whole peppercorns, onion, a stock block and some sugar.
• This dish is supposed to be served with Roti, a surinaams/indian pancake. It's quite some work to make them and you can't really buy them outside of NL or Suriname, sorry... Roughly, the recipe is: make a thick, strong dough with water, salt and flour. Cook Lentils with garlic and onion. Make a ball of the dough, make a hole, fill it with lentils and flatten it to a pancake (with lentils on the inside). fry in a flat cooking pan with enough oil. You should get a thin pancake which consists of two layers (the lentils in the middle keep the dough from both sides from merging). Use the pancake to pick pieces from the food...

Curry a la random

So on Thursday and Friday I made a semi-random curry. Here's the recipe:

• mix spices. This is black magic, I know. Be creative. I use: ve-tsin, sugar, salt, coriander (seeds, powder and/or fresh cilantro), cinnamon, serreh (citron grass), cumin (whole and/or powder), musterd seed, fenugreek, nutmeg and lots of other stuff. But if something is missing it's not a big deal :D Read the average curry ingredients and pick what you like. Usually I pick a few of the ingredients and have a lot of those to make a typical taste but it's certainly always fun to make it all random :D
• add 2-3 spoons of the mix to a lot of oil, garlic, hot pepper slices & nuts (if you want to use any. Peanuts & cashew nuts are both very nice).
• Stir-fry it a bit, make sure it doesn't attach to the bottom! Add enough oil!
• add the Tofu blocks* and stir-fry until some of them start getting a bit brownish.
• add the mushrooms and 'strong vegetables': thin-cut carrot, green beans, the kind of stuff that has to fry a while to become soft. Stir-fry a bit longer :D
• add the 'medium vegetables': eggplant, peppers, pre-cooked potatoes and chinese/normal cabbage and stir-fry a bit more!
• and then the soft veggies like cucumber sticks, bamboo-from-a-pot, small pieces of babycorn-from-a-pot etc
• don't wait long, now, just add the coconut milk, turn the fire low, let it shimmer for a few minutes and it's done.
• I surely have forgotten some steps or minor things but the big picture is above - it's not complicated but you have to try it a few times to learn where you can skip stuff and what you have to do properly (yes, I'm a lazy cook).

Yogurt-Coriander curry

A really nice curry I wanted to make on Friday was yogurt-coriander(the leaves, sometimes called cilantro) but I couldn't find fresh cilantro/coriander. You make this stuff by adding yogurt and lots of fresh coriander instead of coconut milk to the curry above...

general tip

• TOFU: to make sure the tofu is not too wet and crumbly, put it between two plates and put a weight on the top plate for a few hours. Remove the water every now and then. The tofu will be much more sturdy that way.
• add lots of oil. Much of the veggies suck it up like they eat it but the bottom of the wok needs to be a tad oily or it all burns... Oil isn't that unhealthy, esp if you have no meat it's all fresh veggies, nothing artificial in this dish so a bit of oil won't hurt :D we used at least a bottle of oil (1 litre) for 20 people during the cooking at the DS. That was about a third of a bottle in a big wok with the veggies.
• instead of coconut milk (or yogurt-coriander) you can also simply add some water as is done with the curry masala. At the end, add whatever thickener you prefer (eg flour) to make the sauce as thick as you like!
• You can also add some peanut butter with the water (just half a spoon, you quickly add too much) and get a nice peanut sauce with your curry!
• Yes, sugar. Sugar is really needed for a very good curry. Not that much, but some is required. Try for yourself! Esp with the peanut sauce you'll notice it tastes worse without some sugar. Even if it's just half a spoon...
• ve-tsin is monosodium glutamate and is used extensively in the asian kitchen. It occurs naturally in a variety of veggies and gives the curry a savoury, meat-like taste. Some people seem to have trouble with it but frankly, it's a protein-building-block, and the fear for it is very much overrated imho.

The food

For every day:

• It's all going to be curry/asian food related but don't count on authentic, it's pretty much made-up.
• If you love HOT, don't worry, you'll get it. If you don't, don't worry - I'll get you that too.
• There's either no meat involved or vegetarians can skip it. Vegans will also be able to easily skip the eggs and/or cheese.

Wednesday Wednesday night we'll be eating vegetarian roti (without the actual roti, which is a kind of pancake I very much doubt I can buy here). If you don't know what it is, keywords: Curry Massala, potatoes, egg, green beans, eggplant, mushrooms. It's a surprisingly simple yet surprisingly good dish from Suriname. I'd be happy to share the recipe after the dinner :D

Thursday We'll have a self-made curry out of some spices and herbs, of course combined with peppers. We'll use the curry to cook a bunch of vegetables with tofu and/or tempeh. Think carrot, mushrooms, baby corn, beans and more. There'll be rice and possibly noodles to go with it, naan if we can find it.

Friday Not clear yet what we'll eat, I still have to digg around in the spices I brought but there's a good chance we'll make a yogurt-coriander curry with some tandoori-spiced stuff ;-)

Wednesday

name
1 Alex Merry (willing to help, arriving some time after 19:00)
2 Alexandra Boehm (willing to help)
3 Mirko Boehm (willing to eat and drink)
4 Stu Jarvis (willing to help)
5 Carl Symons (willing to help)
6 Paul Adams (always helpfully crazy)
7 Chris Kuehl (me too.)
8 Kenny Duffus (can't say no anyway)
9 Christian Hartmann (loves to cook)
10 Ines Kahl (willing to help)
11 Daniel Laidig (willing to help)
12 Bradley M. Kuhn (will stop by to say hello, unsure if I can stay for dinner)
13 Karen Sandler (willing to help but not sure about the timing)
14 Dave Neary (Can help cook)
15 Philip Muskovac (willing to help)
16 Georg Greve (loves cooking)
17 Karl Beecher
18 Jennifer Altgen
19 Izabel Valverde (will help)
20 Stella Rouzi (will help)
21 Theo Chatzimichos (will help!)
22 George Kiagiadakis (helps out)
23 Efstathios Iosifidis (helps out)
24 Behdad Esfahbod (can cook, not sure about timing)
25 Inu Kim (willing to help and help eating as well;) )
26 Jonas Müller (willing to help if I can stay awake)
27 Chani

Tonight we'll be eating vegetarian roti (without the actual roti, which is a kind of pancake I very much doubt I can buy here). If you don't know what it is, keywords: Curry Massala, potatoes, egg, green beans, eggplant. It's a surprisingly simple yet surprisingly good dish from Suriname. I'd be happy to share the recipe after the dinner :D

If you love HOT, don't worry, you'll get it. If you don't, don't worry - I'll get you that too ;-)

There's no meat involved and vegans can skip the eggs.

Thursday

name
1. Alex Merry (willing to help)
2 Ian Monroe
3 Sherry Lochhaas
4 Philip Muskovac (willing to help)
5 Jonas Müller (willing to help)
6 Asheesh Laroia (willing to help)
7 Jonathan Kolberg (willing to help)
8 Harald Sitter (willing to help eating and stuff :P)
9 Izabel Valverde (willing to drink :-P )
10 - Henri Bergius (willing to eat and drink :-P )
11 Karen Sandler (willing to eat and drink)
12 Thomas Thym (willing to eat)
13 Laszlo Papp (willing to eat)	...
25

Friday

name
1 Frank Karlitschek (will help and eat!)
2 Jonas Müller (will again run for missing kitchen items)
3 Alex Spehr (gluten free, lactose free, butter free, pineapple free (she's complicated...))
4 Marijn Kruisselbrink (vegetarian)
5 Daniel Glassey (signing up this time and hoping to help)
6 Arjen Hiemstra (Vegetarian, willing to help)
7 Dan Leinir Tuthra Jensen
8 Mirko Boehm
9 Tomeu Vizoso
12 Arno Rehn (will help and eat!)
13 Daniel Laidig (willing to help)
14 Guillaume Emont (hates to peel veggies, loves to cut them)	...
25