Wednesday 2 September 2009

The most labour intensive salad...ever

I'm lucky enough to have a few wonderful friends scattered around the world, and this past weekend I went to visit two of my favourites who reside in Gernany - Fraulein Caroline and Bman. It was a lovely and relaxing weekend, definitely what I needed after a hectic few weeks in London.

Caroline and Bman love to cook and so every night was a chance to try out new recipes or bring out old favourites. On my second day there, they decided to prepare a traditional Germany dish - schnitzel paired with potato salad. Very typical Germany dish, but with a twist, the potato salad would have an asian flair to it (perhaps in honour of their visiting Chinese friend?)

Anyway, when Bman told me that we would need about 2 hours alone to prep the salad, I thought he was kidding.

He wasn't.

I won't even try and recount all of the steps to this recipe, but it involved peeling a lot of potatoes by hand using fancy German engineered potato peelers, chopping then blanching carrots, de-seeding cucumber then slicing and salting it, de-stemming cilantro and chopping the leaves, and making your own mayonnaise and fancy chili sauce

We started at around 5 and sat down to eat around 7:30. Was it worth it? Definitely. I'm actually not a huge fan of potato salad, but this one I couldn't stop eating. How can I describe this salad? It had a perfect combination of textures, from the crunchy carrots and cucumber, to the still-warm mealy potatoes. The flavour was a mixture of sweet, sour and spicy, with a dash of cilantro to finish. And to top it off, we had veal schnitzel that was perfectly tender thanks to Bman's efforts with a frying pan and a little muscle.

Thanks Fraulein and Bman again for a really wonderful weekend. I can't wait to visit you both (and tru luv) again!



Bman using his manly power and strength to crush the poor veal for our schnitzel



Attempting to use the fancy German engineered potato peeler - they have devices for everything, I should have taken a photo of the egg cutter!



Step #17 Caroline chops the carrots...



Step #52 Adding the bean sprouts



Finally we eat!

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