We are back in the U.S. and were craving barbecue so we made our favorite barbecued brisket (Alex started it on Friday night in the slow cooker so it cooked all night and then we drained the extra fat off and warmed it up for Saturday’s dinner.)  We have made brisket several times before but we were really craving it after eating lots of Swiss food so we made it again.

We also made corn-on-the-cob, arugula-goat cheese-tomato salad and blueberry crisp.   For the blueberry crisp we added extra sugar for extra sweet blueberries and an extra sweet topping (the blueberries were pretty tart).  For our salad, we tried using a different type of tomato – one large local tomato instead of our usual cherry tomatoes. Our friend Niki helped out. Although we had made these dishes before, it was more fun with a friend. Thanks, Nicolas.

Brisket:

Salad:

Blueberry Crisp:

Full meal:

We just spent the last four days in Lugano, Switzerland, exploring the city, visiting Lake Como in Italy, doing some hiking and eating a lot of great Swiss food that was really what we think of as Italian food.

It’s so amazing that you can drive three hours from Zurich in Switzerland (where everyone speaks German and the food is more robust, Germanic) to Lugano (where everyone speaks Italian and you can get great pizza, pasta, risotto and polenta) AND still be in the same country.

We loved Lugano. It’s a beautiful city with amazing food. Our two favorite restaurants were Cafe Argentina and La Tinera. Cafe Argentina is in the main square and is more casual with great pizza, pasta and salads. (We went there three of the four nights). Our favorites were the Estate pizza and the Cafe Argentina salad. Other great options were pasta bolognese and breaded chicken cutlet with fries:

Estate pizza: fresh tomatoes, arugula, fresh mozarella, parmesano cheese

Salad Argentina

The other restaurant, La Tinera, is a little more special. It specializes in cuisine from Ticino, which is also very much what we think of as Italian, but more on the Northern Italian side: polenta, risotto…. It is also a cool space, downstairs from the main square. It is not only downstairs but surrounded by huge wine barrels and racks of wine. It also serves as a more traditional type of restaurant instead of just pizza and pasta. The place seemed VERY authentic, a true hidden gem. It seemed as if most of the crowd was local, a good sign at any restaurant. We ordered polenta with fried eggs, risotto with mushrooms, pork cutlet with spaghetti and fresh raviolis. Everything was delicious but really the polenta with fried eggs was the best.

Polenta with fried eggs

Risotto with mushrooms

Mom and Dad also said the wine was really good (Alex had a sip or two:) and reasonable and they served it in traditional ceramic jars.

Today our parents picked us up from two weeks of Swiss Camp. (We were with about 40 other kids who, like us, are Swiss citizens who live outside of the US.) After an afternoon of hiking outside of Zurich, we were ready for a hearty Swiss meal. And we found it at Restaurant Swiss Chuchi! Here you can find all the traditional Swiss food…what you think about when you are skiing in the Alps — like fondue and raclette and rosti. And even though its August, that’s what we wanted. We ordered a moiete-moiete fondue (half gruyere and half vacheron), raclette (with all the fixings, including our favorite…small boiled potatoes) and the best raclette rosti (potato pancake) we have ever eaten. Mom and Dad ordered fendant, the traditional white wine that you drink with fondue.

Fondue

Rosti

Raclette machine

We are actually in Switzerland and not able to do much cooking but mom sent us a picture of  some amazing pork that our friend Ed Kiel sent us.  Thank you so much Ed!!! We can’t wait to come home and cook it and we will be sure to write all about it.  We love pork–especially bacon (and this bacon looks amazing).  We’ll be back September 1: in the meantime stay cool and keep cooking.

Mom always warns us that if we over whip cream, it will turn into butter…and we never believed her.

So for an experiment, I (Max) tried to whip butter into cream. I poured about a cup of heavy cream in a bowl and started whipping. After about a minute it started getting chunky; at about two minutes a new thin white liquid (buttermilk) appeared along with chunks of yellow solids and by three minutes there was a soft but solid lump of butter in a pool of buttermilk. I rinsed the butter with cold water a couple of times and then did the taste test.

Yep it was butter…but VERY unsalted!  Mom was right…I guess moms do know best! (Mom made me write that:)

Watch the video here!

For Dad’s birthday, it wasn’t enough to just spend one day on the meal. So we cooked Friday and Saturday to truly make his birthday special. We started out the weekend with the baking of Oatmeal Raisin Cookies, and then moved on to the spice rub of our Brisket, which we cooked in a slow-cooker. On Saturday, we started out the day by placing the brisket in the slow-cooker after letting it sit in its rub for the night. We then made our favorite summer salad – Spinach Orzo . We also made corn-on-the cob.

Day 1:

Oatmeal Raisin Cookies

First I mixed the butter in with the sugar,

using the back of my spoon

Then I added in the flour mixture into the

bowl and…

…Stirred it into the mixture along with

oats and…

…RAISINS!

Then I molded the dough into small balls

ready for the oven

Then I baked the cookies

The final result!

Brisket Rub

These were all the ingredients of the Brisket.

The Spices/Rubs we used included Onion Powder,

Garlic powder, Salt & Pepper, cumin, paprika, and

red pepper flakes.

After mixing the spices together, I rubbed

them all over the brisket. I let it sit for the night

for the brisket to be more flavorful.

The brisket in the slow-cooker with our home-made,

secret BBQ sauce. Hint: there’s molasses in it.

The delicious end result.

Day 2: Orzo Salad

The Ingredients

The Ingredients right before being put in the

salad – the onion and the spinach finely

chopped and the Orzo cooked.

After making the balsamic vinaigrette with

pepper and basil and adding it to the the salad,

I tossed it, then refrigerated the salad until use.

Note: We did not initially add the pine nuts to the salad, but when we were preparing to serve, we roasted them and then tossed them in. (This is because the pine nuts will get too soggy.)

Corn on the Cob

We just boiled 12 ears of corn in salted water

and served with my homemade butter (Vlog to come)

And here’s a photo of part of the barbecue (friends brought some stuff too):

Tonight in Upstate New York it was just too hot to cook, with temperatures reaching the 90s+! How to make dinner without cooking, you say? Just Grill It! The two main dishes were steak and veggies (including green zuccini, yellow squash, red onion and kale) so I decided to grill everything (originally I was going to stir fry it because I have never heard of grilled kale). I also made a goat cheese, walnut and cranberry salad and mom allowed me to turn on the oven to boil water for sweet corn (it was so fresh it only took a couple of minutes to cook, so didn’t make the kitchen too hot).

(Before…all the raw ingredients)            (After…everything ready to eat!)

The steak was easy to prepare, just salt and pepper on each side.  For the veggies, I mixed olive oil, minced garlic and soy sauce and let them marinate in that for 20 minutes or so.  And the salad was one of my favorites: butter lettuce, goat cheese, cranberries and walnuts (with a sherry viniagrette).  Super easy and super delicious.

The Steak:

The Veggies:

Note: the kale cooked faster than the other veggies so I took it out earlier.  Sorry we don’t have too many photos of the grilling process…it started raining so we were trying to keep everything dry. Also, mom said her favorite part of the meal was the grilled kale, but she is a little weird.

Final Grilled Veggie plate

The Corn and the Salad were very straightforward (and yet delish):

And one more time, here is the final meal. So happy to be home!

Since I am leaving for camp tomorrow, I wanted to make one of my favorite dishes: rosti (since I know I won’t be able to eat it for a while).  Rosti is a traditional Swiss food and is essentially a potato pancake.  However you can add lots of different things: cheese, chopped sausage, chopped chicken.  My favorite is to add lots of raclette cheese. I’m half Swiss so I LOVE cheese.

I’ve also experimented with the ingredients and come up with a great secret substitution.  Hint: watch the video to find out what gives my rosti a little more crunch and a little more taste.  I’ve also got a great suggestion on how to flip rosti easier.

Watch the video and learn my secrets 🙂

This is the last dinner I will make for a while because I leave for camp on Saturday (I will be away at camp for 5 weeks and then away for another 2 weeks travelling with my family in Switzerland…but I will try to at least review some Swiss restaurants for the website.)

Anyway because Max is still away at camp, I made a dish that I love but he dislikes: Pearl Couscous with Chicken and Peas. It reminds me of making paella because even though there are a lot of steps, it’s pretty simple.  Because there are so many steps, its important to get all the ingredients chopped and ready to go before you start cooking.  This is called mise en place (that means “putting everything in its place”).  The ingredients are chopped garlic, chopped onions, quartered plum tomatoes, saffron, chicken, peas, chicken broth, white wine (optional), couscous and lemon zest.  So I chopped everything that needed to be chopped and measured everything out.

Then I sauteeed the pearl couscous in a pan with olive oil until it was light brown. (The olive oil I used is really good: its home made from Greece! A patient of my dad gave it to him and I love cooking with it.) So after I removed the couscous, I browned the chicken.  Then I had to take the chicken out and add onions, garlic, tomatoes and saffron.   That all had to cook until the tomatoes were soft — I added a little white wine so the onions wouldn’t burn.  Then the chicken, chicken broth and couscous went back in and simmered on low till the couscous had soaked up all the chicken broth.  At the very end I stirred in frozen peas.  Delish!

For dessert we just had chocolate chip cookies.  I had made them the day before but saved some cookie dough so we could have warm ones today.  There is nothing better than a warm chocolate chip cookie!

Today I decided to think outside of the box in terms of cooking and cook something I had never cooked before.  So my mom and I went to Best Market to buy lobsters that were alive. They looked like huge bugs!!!  Koko (our dog) was really scared of them.  Since it was hot we decided to make lobster salad.  First we put them in salted water and boiled them for 15 minutes. Mom said to keep the rubber bands on the big claws while I was putting them in the water.  Once they were cool, my mom and I dissected them to get the meat out.  EWWWWW!!!! There was a lot green guts that mom cleaned for me (and threw out).  Whew.  She said it was “edible” but I don’t believe her.  Then we cut the lobster into bite-size pieces and let cool some more. We also boiled some new potatoes (separately from the lobster).

For the salad, we combined boiled new potatoes, tomatoes, cucumbers, avocado, papitas and of course…the lobster. I made a lemon – olive oil dressing for it and served the salad with some extra cooked potatoes.

For the peach crisp, I sauteed several sliced peaches with butter and brown sugar and then made a simple stove-top granola topping (just oats, butter, honey and brown sugar browned together.)  I put the peach mix in the bottom of a ramekin and then put the oat mix on top.  I saved a few cooked peaches to put on top as a garnish.