Living the Life

A long time ago I had banoffee ice cream, I think it was from Häagen-Dazs but it could have been Ben and Jerry's also. Later I found out it was based on a pie and I made one yesterday. It was a big hit and not as filling as we'd expected, even my brother loved it and he's kind of picky with new things. Here's how I did it: Banoffee Pie Ingredients: 1 tin of condensed milk (400 gr) 150 grams of digestive biscuits 75 grams of butter 3 large bananas 250 ml whipping cream some dark chocolate to grate over the pie Instructions: Put the can in a pan filled with water and boil it for 4 hours, make sure that the can stays submerged all the time, otherwise the can may explode! Let it cool down. The milk has turned in to toffee. Put the biscuits in a ziploc bag and hit them with a rolling pin until you have only crumbs left. Melt the butter in a pan, add the crumbs and spread this mixture evenly in a pie tin. Let this cool down in the fridge for at least 30 minutes. Spread the...

The first flower on my chile plants opened today, it's on one of the jalapenos, I hope I'll have chiles soon, but with the warm weather we have at the moment I'm pretty sure they will do very well :-)

Everybody in my family loves Mexican dishes and some of the family (including myself) love mega spicy food. Here we have only a limited variety of chiles available so I started three years ago to grow my own. That year I grew "Spanish peppers" (the local cayenne variety), jalapenos and orange habanero peppers. The Spanish ones ended up in my regular cooking, the jalapenos while green in Mexican dishes and the red ones I smoked in the barbecue for about 7 hours over mesquite wood than dried them further in my dehydrator to make chipotles. Most of the Mexican peppers have different names the moment you dry them. The orange habaneros I dried and ground into chile powder, except for the first one which I cut in half and my nephew and I both ate it raw. It took a lot of milk to cool things down :-) Last year I grew other varieties but my neighbor over watered them when I was on vacation so that was pretty much the end of them. This year I have Jalapenos, Rocotos, Chocolate Habaner...

While surfing the net I found this recipe on Vicious Ange's blog, I'm crazy about chocolate and decided to give it a try. Our local supermarket discontinued Oreo cookies and I couldn't find any reasonable alternative so I made the pie crust from scratch. I don't have 8 cm tart pans so I used 4 12 cm ones. You can only eat half :-) As Ange states on her blog the filling is way too much for the tarts, we used it the next day over pineapple slices and topped with some whipped cream! Here's my version of the recipe: crust: 225 grams flour 2 tablespoons cocoa powder 150 grams unsalted butter 2 tablespoons sugar 2 tablespoons cold water filling: 300 ml whipping cream 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 250 grams dark (over 70%) chocolate, roughly chopped 300 grams raspberries 1 tablespoon icing sugar cocoa powder to dust the tarts Making the crust: Preheat your oven at 190 C. First sift the flour and cocoa, cut in the butter and add enough water to make a smooth dough. Let the do...

I love barbecue , I love to barbecue and until now I used my trusty weber kettle for that. But it's hard to maintain a low steady temperature for a long time on a regular barbecue . So I ordered a WSM (Weber Smokey Mountain Cooker) today. I wanted one for quite a while but the reason I waited for a long time was mainly a financial one. In the US these babies go for $199 and if you are lucky a lot cheaper on sale. Here the regular price is €449, at the current rate $610!! But yesterday when I checked the local online barbecue store they had them on sale for €299, which is still $406 but I thought what the heck let's get one! So now it's waiting for it to arrive, put it together and start with all the great recipes I have laying around. A great place to find info on this smoker is the Virtual Weber Bulletin Board , They have lots of info on modifications, recipes etc.

Just a little test to see if this is working.