The Susanne

I made schnitzel again! Yey me! I LOVE schnitzel!!! To mix it up a little I tried some dif­fer­ent fla­vours tonight: I went for a ginger and garlic rub for the schnitzels, and couscous on the side. I also had to change the filling for the schnitzels as I was out of both cured ham and expens­ive cheese. So The Boyfriend’s schintzel had a Jarls­berg and bacon filling whilst mine had bacon and asparagus. Scrump­tious! As before, I used a mix of bread­crumbs and sesame seeds for the crust. I love how the sesame seeds give it a nutty fla­vour and also some extra crunch!

It was my first time making couscous and I must say I was pleased with the result in that depart­ment also! I made it with veget­able stock instead of water and I seasoned it with some grated ginger. I sauteed some veget­ables in my biggest skil­let, seasoned with some hoisin-​based sauce and mixed in the couscous just a few minutes before serving.

I’m not really one for writ­ing out recipes. I feel like this one deserves to be shared, but I just don’t have the patience to write out lists of ingredi­ents and instruc­tions on how to make it. I am aware that that prob­ably makes me selfish and lazy and not a good food-​blogger. But I’m will­ing to live with that. And who knows, maybe some day I’ll change my mind and post all my recipes. Or maybe I’ll write them down in a beau­ti­ful leather-​bound book and give to my daugh­ter, when I’m old and wrinkly and have loads of time on my hands… Who knows.

I’d like to end with a few choice words from Lewis Carroll:

‘Twas bril­lig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

Do you ever wake up feel­ing so awful you think the day can only go uphill from here…and then it goes down­hill instead? Yeah, you guessed it, that’s today for me. Woke up with a split­ting head­ache, prob­ably due to the weather as I react badly to rain, then got up and my left hand is swollen and hurt­ing for no good reason at all. Got in the shower and as soon as I star­ted sham­poo­ing I could tell this is not just a bad day, it’s a bad hair day as well. To cheer me up I decided to try my hand at making Rösti for break­fast. Rösti is a Swiss potato based dish not that unlike hash browns I guess. It’s made from shred­ded potato by itself or mixed with veget­ables, cheese, or fruit, basic­ally whatever you like. I made mine with leeks, onion and car­rots. Deli­cious! It was a bit of work and they took much longer to cook than I’d anti­cip­ated, but the end result was def­in­itely worth it:

I served them up with some crispy bacon and a fried egg, and I believe that in addi­tion to dis­cov­er­ing an unques­tion­ably yummy way to serve bacon and eggs, I have pos­sibly found a hangover favour­ite. The only prob­lem is that I’m the cook in this house­hold and I’m also the only one who suf­fers from hangovers. The Boy­friend is curi­ously exempt from this pain­ful after-​effect of drink­ing. I sup­pose I will just have to avoid the ‘over-the-top, blind-and-stumbling’ drunken nights and go for the ’slightly intoxicated’ ver­sion instead. Much easier on the liver, too. And I’ll be able to cook my own breakfast ;)

I’ve spent the last few days study­ing or trying to study. dis­tract­ing situ­ations keep pop­ping up and as The Boy­friend and I live in a studio flat there’s nowhere for me to go in order to get some peace and quiet. There are simply no doors to close. Unless I want to study in the bath­room, that is. Uni is out of the ques­tion as I have a tend­ency to fall asleep and whenever I’m in a lib­rary I just end up either star­ing at all the other people or read­ing random books that beckon to me from their shelves.

Des­pite my efforts to study, how­ever, I have had time to cook. I bought a huge pack of pork chops the other day and wanted to do some­thing dif­fer­ent with them to what I usu­ally do. (Which is just cook­ing them up with Worcester­shire sauce and serving with pota­toes and veg­gies. Incred­ibly deli­cious but it gets boring, like everything else.) So I flipped through the Boyfriend’s cook­book that I have a feel­ing his mum might have sup­plied, and what did I see? The Schnitzel!

I knew imme­di­ately that I would have to make it. Although there are those who will call it sac­ri­lege, I don’t have a prob­lem with sub­sti­tut­ing pork for veal. Veal is very expens­ive and I had all this pork and all… So I set to work. I didn’t have the ‘meat hammer’ thing used for pound­ing the meat flat, so I tried a few things I had lying around. I tried using our reg­u­lar hammer with a wooden spat­ula. It split in half. Then I tried it with my plastic spat­ula, it was crushed. I had to send The Boy­friend out for a new spat­ula and almost gave up the entire attempt, when I thought of my little sauce­pan, just sit­ting there on its shelf, look­ing smug. I picked it up, and poun­ded the four bone­less pork chops until my arm hurt!  after­wards, I seasoned them with salt and pepper before pla­cing some cured ham and a little grated parmesan on each, and then spin­ach on two and The Boyfriend’s cheese of the week (he gets one expens­ive cheese at a time. When he’s fin­ished that one he gets to pick another) on the other two. Then I folded them up and sent them through the schnitzel-​dips:

Firstly, flour mixed with salt, pepper and grated parmesan

Secondly, two lightly beaten eggs, and-

Thirdly, bread­crumbs mixed with yet more parmesan, salt, pepper and sesame seeds.

Then the schintzels were ready for the pan, where I fried them in a mix­ture of mar­gar­ine and canola oil until they were golden brown and scrump­tiously crispy. I served them with mashed pota­toes, asparagus and green beans. Unfor­tu­nal­tely I was in such a hurry to dig into my huge plate of deli­cious­ness that I forgot to take a pic­ture: I will there­fore make some again tonight and I’ll try to remem­ber the photo session.