Das ist ein Schokoladenbrötchen. Schokoladen = chocolate, brötchen = little bread roll. It's an odd idea, but no less good for that. In fact, I think they're GREAT! I developed a taste for these whilst in Germany - my host father would eat these often, for dessert or a little snack.

To make a Schokoladenbrötchen, you start with a Brötchen. In Australia the equivalent would be a white dinner roll. I got mine for 50c from Baker's Delight. You want something white and soft.


Then, you need the Schokoladen. In Germany I found they had a larger range of thin, brötchen-sized chocolates, but my local Coles had these funky little Furry Friends chocolates, which were just the right size. And, if you head over to the Furry Friends' website, you can learn about Australian animals! Learning and deliciousness.



If Cadbury's too frightfully common for you, I guess you could use a few pieces of Lindt Excellence, which are the right thickness, but then I think you'd be missing out on the point of this snack. So, chocolate-snobbery thrown to the wind, slice your Brötchen lengthwise, place your chocolate inside, and eat. I had the above Schokoladenbrötchen this afternoon with a cup of tea.

At first, I thought it was odd my host father never heated his Schokoladenbrötchen. Melting chocolate in crispy bread sounds like a winner, no? Below we have a toasted Schokoladenbrötchen that I made in Germany. Check out the oozing chocolate...

... which, upon being eaten, proceeded to ooze over my face, my hands, my arms... it was not a good look! And in fact, I realised that I rather like the contrast of soft bread against solid chocolate.

Another variation:

We ran out of Brötchen one night, but still had heaps of regular old Brot leftover from a cold-cut based dinner... and I thought it might be a good idea...
Brot mit Milka Schokoladen. A chocolate sandwich on brown bread. Not the same as the original, but surprisingly still lecker! (Delicious).

I feel that I should just add here that Schokoladenbrötchens - with their high-GI white bread and fattening, sugary chocolate centre - are almost totally bereft of any nutrition. In the interest of health they should not be consumed every day.

According to its article on Wikipedia, Kappabashi Kitchen Town is an "offbeat" tourist destination. Bollocks! It's one of the coolest places in all of Tokyo. Kappabashi is a stretch of road that is dedicated to kitchen supply and wholesale shops. They sell everything that your kitchen could desire - deep fryers, takoyaki grillers, knives, muffin papers, bentoh boxes, take-away food containers, crockery, pots and pans, trays, silpats, flexipans, giant whisks, industrial piping bags, electronic cookware and those funky plastic food models that you see in Japanese restaurants. (A custom-made one starts from around sixty dollars). If you want to open a restaurant or cafe in Tokyo, start practising your "irasshaimase", and get yourself down to Kappabashi!

I can't believe it's not mentioned in the Lonely Planet, when Osaka's much smaller, less exciting Doguya-Suji Arcade rates a mention. Hmf. Kappabashi is near Tawaramachi station, on the Ginza line. It happened to be a 5 minute walk from my hostel, and near a Mister Donut, a post office, and the Asakusa temple district. Perfect tourist destination, in my opinion. I spent the majority of my second last day in Japan walking up and down the street here, visiting the various stores, spending too much money, and adding to my already bulging and dangerously overweight suitcase.

At the entrance to Kappabashi, you are greeted by a giant model of a chef and these massive cups at the Niimi building.

Plastic food!!!!! How cool is that??


As awesome as I thought a plastic plate of fried eggs would look in my home, I resisted temptation and just bought a keychain for a friend. It was shaped like a pink macaron!

Some other goodies I purchased...

"Silicon Rubber Pan" for madeleines. As yet unused, but I will get around to it soon.

My pride and joy - a santoku knife. It was individually forged by hand, with 37 layers of Damascus steel, titanium pins, and a micarta handle. It only cost me $154, and it is the sharpest knife I have ever, ever used.

Here is my knife after obliterating a pile of onions. Check out the funky-looking waves on the blade.

At the same knife store, I picked up this Wüsthof Grand Prix I 16cm cook's knife.


It was the last in the store, and being thrown away at the bargainous price of $60. SIXTY!!! That's incredible value! A fully-forged Wüsthof Grand Prix knife! I would have expected to pay three times that amount in Australia. (Interested in purchasing one yourself? Click here.) It was the bargain of the century. According to the wonderfully eccentric salesman, it was on sale because the Grand Prix I range had been discontinued to make way for the Grand Prix II range. Which is exactly the same blade, with a slightly improved handle.

The salesman was awesome - a well-travelled Japanese man with an American-ish accent, a tweed jacket, and a salt and pepper scruffy haircut.

Salesman: Oh young lady, you're going to Germany tomorrow? Do you like to gamble? You have to go to Baden-Baden.. there's a wonderful casino, and many beautiful hot springs.
Me: Er... well, I don't really gamble...
Him: Oh it's great! You will love it! Here, let me write it down for you. B-A-D-E-N-B-A-D-E-N

I never made it out to Baden Baden, but I do love the knives I bought from him. The Wüsthof isn't quite as sharp as the santoku, but it's still much sharper than any of the old knives rattling about in my kitchen drawers. And I find the handle incredibly comfortable.

Kappabashi rocks! I enjoyed the shopping there more than I did in the far trendier Harajuku, Shibuya 109 or Omote-sando. I feel better getting that off my chest.

Salmon Fishcakes with Ketchup and Peas (or is it Catsup..? Ketchup..? Castup..?)

Friday nights usually find me slumped on the couch in front of the computer or TV, with no desire to move. Take-away would be the obvious choice for dinner, but it gets expensive, and besides, my freezer is full to bursting point. During my How to Eat project in 2005-06, I got into the habit of stashing all leftovers away in my freezer, to cope with the incredible quantities of food I was cooking. However, I soon realised that unless I stored the leftovers correctly - double wrapped, labelled and dated - they would just be wasted, lost in the icy depths of the freezer, unrecognisable and most likely inedible.

Nowadays I have (almost) everything in my freezer labelled, and carefully stored in Glad bags and Decor Tellfresh containers. It's still a mess in there, but at least now I can identify everything when I do start searching through there. I've got egg whites, frozen cubed watermelon, stews, soups, stock, ice-creams, brownies, muffins and fishcakes!

I made these months ago when we had heaps of mashed potatoes leftover from a dinner. They're loosely based on Nigella's salmon fishcakes from How to Eat, but I didn't refer to the exact recipe. To the mashed potatoes, I added a tin of salmon, lemon zest, a beaten egg and some grated parmesan cheese, mixed it up and formed it into patties. (Wearing plastic gloves, of course - same aisle as the Glad bags and the Decor containers). To freeze them, you have to lay them out on a tray, and put them in the freezer. Once they're rock-hard, you can stash them in a freezer bag, then in the freezer, and forget about them!

Until tonight. According to Nigella, you can dip them in egg and crumbs (panko, please) and fry them straight from frozen. Then you just put them in a low oven (120C) for 30 minutes to heat them through. However, they'll sit happily in the oven for up to 2 hours, if that helps with your timing. Whilst the fishcakes were nearly done, I microwaved some peas to go with. I served them with lashings of ketchup, then parked myself on the couch for some Simpsons, Futurama, and Family Guy on Fox 8. The fishcakes were great, unhurt from their extended stay in the freezer. They were soft and warm on the inside, delightfully crispy and crunchy on the outside. Perfect comfort food and perfect comfort viewing.

Goodnight everybody!

It's not all steak and cakes, all the time at Sarah's house, you know. Or at least it shouldn't be! I often find it a challenge deciding what to cook for dinner, with time, budgetary and health concerns all playing an important role. Below I have a selection of simple and quick(-ish) meals I've made recently. I hope that fellow time-poor food lovers can find some ideas for your weeknight meals!


Golden Root Vegetable Quinoa


This recipe comes from How to Eat, my most cooked-from recipe source (need proof?). The stew itself takes over an hour to prepare, but most of that time it's just simmering away by itself, and it's easy enough to increase quantities so that you have leftovers for the rest of the week. Nigella serves the vegetable stew with couscous and a chorizo sausage, but in the interest of health, I omitted the chorizo and replaced the couscous with quinoa.

Quinoa, in case you're not yet familiar with it, is a nutritionally excellent grain - full of protein, lysine and iron, and a good source of calcium, zinc, potassium, magnesium, phosphorus, and copper. Woah! (Click here for a nutritional breakdown). Lucky for me, it tastes pretty good too. It is often described as generally "nutty" (not specific or helpful!), but I found that it tasted rather like sesame, with a similar texture to couscous. Delicious.

With the stew, I had to have harissa. Nigella's harissa (also from How to Eat), is my favourite version. It's garlicky, strong, punchy, and fucking hot. You have to deseed a lot of dried chillies, chop them up, soak them in hot water and then pound them with garlic and roasted spices. Please folks, if you're making this, use gloves, wash your hands thoroughly, and don't touch your eyes or any other delicate parts of your body for a good few hours afterwards! Trust me.

Check out the chillis....
That's right folks, I'm the pope of chilli-town.


Salmon with Shiitake Mushrooms and Greens

This is from the Templefood chapter of Nigella Bites. I can't say this is the most dazzling of dinner recipes, but it is reliably good, easy and healthy. I do love the sauce Nigella suggests to go with though - soy sauce, sesame oil and mustard powder.


Broccoli Risotto

This one's a Sarah special, made without a recipe. Can you believe it? I just made a simple risotto base, and added some cooked and processor-blitzed broccoli. Topped it off with a sprinkling of chopped parsley and a dollop of pesto. Yum yum. I have to say, it wasn't the world's greatest pesto. I bought a gourmet-looking tub at the supermarket, only to discover that it was disappointingly bland. When I had a closer look at the ingredients, it had canola oil and cashews instead of olive oil and pine-nuts. Why would you bother? Blergh.


Mirin-Glazed Salmon with Steamed Broccoli with Garlic and Ginger

The salmon comes by way of Nigella, the vegetables from Jamie Oliver. The salmon is quickly marinaded, then pan-fried. You make a sauce by letting the marinade bubble away in the hot pan, then adding some rice vinegar. For the broccoli, you make a dressing by frying finely sliced garlic in oil until crisp, then mixing it with soy sauce, sesame oil, ginger and toasted sesame seeds. The flavours of the vegetables complemented the salmon and became a simply stunning dinner.


Chicken Salad

I made this one a while ago (and you can see a sliver of it in my header!) using a bottle of delicious Yumm Dressing that I picked up at a farmers' market not too long ago. With the dressing, they gave me a flyer with a bunch of serving suggestions on it, which is where I got the idea for the salad. Baby spinach, cooked chicken pieces, red onion, avocado, pine nuts and sun-dried tomatoes. It sounds a bit 90's, but it tasted great!


Spaghetti with Spinach

From Everyday by Bill Granger. As you'd expect any of Bill's recipe to be, it's extremely easy. Bill suggests wholewheat pasta, I used wholemeal spelt spaghetti. You toss the pasta through garlic sautéed in olive oil, baby spinach leaves and parmesan cheese. It's not bad, but be warned it's very bland. I needed a lot of salt, pepper and extra virgin olive oil to make it tasty.


Risotto with Roasted Pumpkin, Rocket and Goat's Cheese

This risotto was the cover recipe from the Italian Issue of Delicious, May 2006, and I had to make it as it contains 3 of my mum's favourite ingredients - pumpkins, rocket and goat's cheese. You roast the pumpkin separately and fold it through the risotto at the end. I found it gave the pumpkin a wonderful caramelised flavour. My whole family loved the risotto, especially my mum, and we demolished it in record time.


Breakfast Burrito


This burrito recipe comes from Jill Dupleix's Lighten Up. She suggests it as a breakfast, but I had it as a light lunch. Lightly toast a tortilla, top with smoked salmon and diced avocado, top with and a sharp and limey-dressed salad and wrap up. I loved it! It was so fresh and vibrant, but still rich enough to be satisfying.

Nigel Slater is a culinary genius. His very fast nectarine and blackberry cake was one of the easiest, most delicious cakes I have ever made. The base is a simple butter cake, topped with chopped up fruit. Nigel suggests pears and blackberries - I used blackberries and some rapidly-ripening nectarines from my fruit bowl.

It comes from the May chapter of his wonderful book, The Kitchen Diaries. I received the book as a gift many, many months ago, but never got around to reading it, let alone cooking from it. Which is a shame, because it is as fantastic as you would expect any book from Nigel to be! When I finally did open it, I couldn't put it down. I love Nigel's writing. I daresay I prefer his writing style to Nigella's, although I do find her recipes a lot more approachable.

Nigel writes that he made the cake as an "emergency cake": a cake made quickly, without a recipe, for unexpected visitors dropping in. It is 'the classic 'equal butter to sugar to flour' base". Before this recipe, I wasn't familiar with this base, but it's quite easy to remember. Basically (hah!) you cream together equal weights of butter and caster sugar, add beaten egg (1 egg per 65g of butter), then fold in sifted flour and baking powder (1/2 teaspoon per 65g of butter). Easy peasy.

Nigel's recipe calls for 2 pears and a handful of blackberries. So, I chopped up 2 nectarines and got out a handful of blackberries (Frozen, of course). I found that half this amount totally covered the batter, and I didn't want the cake to be soggy, I didn't use all the fruit at first. After 10 minutes of baking, however, I noticed that the batter swelled a lot, whilst the fruit on top had shrunk. So I went the whole hog and threw the rest of the fruit on. (And I decided to add another nectarine for good measure). This base is great! It can take a lot of fruit, so don't be timid. It's a great way to use up fruit that is past its best.

As for the cake, it was absolutely brilliant! I took it, still in its tin, when we went afternoon-tea visiting, and it was a total hit. It was so simple, yet so incredibly good. Tender, buttery cake, topped with sweet and tart juicy fruit. Fabulous. I am totally, utterly convinced by this recipe, and know that I will make it time and time again.

Sometimes the best meals happen on the spur of the moment. I came home today with no plans for dinner, but with a lovely loaf of ciabatta bread. I was inspired to buy this bread after seeing Ina Garten make garlic bread with ciabatta on her Barefoot Contessa program not too long ago. When I told my dad that I wanted to make garlic bread, he suggested spaghetti marinara. Sounded good to me! Dad went out to buy some marinara mix, and I started working on dinner.

For the pasta sauce, I sautéed finely chopped onion and garlic in olive oil, then added a tin of chopped tomatoes and let them simmer slowly until thickened. I let it sit on the stove, and when Dad came home I stirred in the marinara mix until it cooked - about 4 minutes. Whilst it simmered, I cooked the pasta (fettucine was all we had in the pantry) and prepared the garlic bread. Ina's exact recipe is here, but here is a rough set of instructions:

Take one loaf of ciabatta and slice it in half lengthways...

Sautée finely chopped garlic and parsley in good olive oil... (you can imagine how good this smells!)

Spread the mixture on one of the slices.

Spread butter on the other side. Reassemble the loaf, cover in foil, and bake in a moderate oven for 5 minutes. Remove the foil and bake for a further 5 minutes to crisp it up. Slice into chunky fingers.

Then it was simply a case of tossing the cooked pasta with the sauce, and scattering some chopped parsley over. Ta-dah! Dinner was done. Easy and delicious! It only took about 30 minutes all up. Even without a recipe, the pasta turned out really well (and I almost never cook without a recipe). Lucky. I loved Ina's garlic bread, and highly recommend it as a tasty accompaniment that's a little bit different from the usual.