Experiencing Cooking Class and Discovering Tagine

I discovered that one of my work associates in the UK is a passionate cook and visited a cookery class during one of his holidays. I was very curious, since I have been playing with the idea of doing it myself. I thought his week in the class passed with lots of laughter and lots of great cooking and was surprised to hear that the action in the kitchen was done in a very pleasant atmosphere and since people took the cooking very seriously it was almost reverential. Wow!
Read David's story...

Experiencing Cooking Class and Discovering Tagine
by David Skinner

Based on my attendance at two cookery schools* in England – one in the south and one in the north – I would really recommend the experience. 

Whether you want to learn new kitchen skills, try out new recipe ideas – or even just take a mental break from work the format of the one day courses offered seemed very well designed.  I was really surprised by how much the Chef instructors can teach you in a day – but it is quite tiring and I noticed that some people who were on a week’s course started to want a break by the time Thursday evening came.

Although it might seem obvious to more experienced cooks, in terms of general technique the big aha for me was the need to protect flavour – even when cooking dinner party style menus.  Some of the key practical insights about this were:

-        use of very good quality sea salts added to the main ingredient of a dish right at the start

-       an ‘only chop once’ approach to preparing soft green herbs which are then added to the dish just at the last minute before serving

-       blanching of vegetables in boiling water for one minute only before cooling them in ice water and then re-heating them in a few drops of water with added rapeseed oil just before serving

-       using rapeseed oil rather than olive oil whenever a recipe calls for heating the oil (olive oil takes on a less pleasant taste when heated over 70C) 

With regard to recipes the biggest discovery for me was the delight of tagines and in fact many of the flavours and textures of Moroccan cuisine in general.

The conical shape of the tagine lid is designed to act as a condenser for the steam generated by the cooking.  This means you can slowly casserole meat, poultry or fish with vegetables, spices and sumptuous fruits like figs, dates, lemons and apricots using very little added water.  The result is a flavoursome and spicy - but not too ‘chilli hot’ - fruity dish with a pleasantly dry texture.

I tried out a chicken tagine based menu that I learned on a group of friends and they reacted really positively (they took second helpings  which is always good feedback I think!)

A very important Moroccan flavour component is the Chermoula paste used as a marinade before cooking the chicken in the tagine.

Chermoula paste is made from the following ingredients using an electric blender:

2          Spanish onions

5          (yes, five!) cloves of garlic

1          lemon, juiced

1          bunch of flat-leaved parsley

1          bunch fresh coriander

Sea-salt to season

Cumin powder, coriander powder, chilli powder and turmeric powder – all added to taste

Half a cup of rapeseed oil

Chicken pieces should be marinaded in this paste for at least one hour (in the fridge)

When ready, sauté the chicken pieces to colour in a large frying pan, allowing space between piece so each has chance to brown rather than steam.

Place the chicken pieces in a tagine and then add the following ingredients:

A dash of rapeseed oil

Another Spanish onion roughly chopped in six pieces

2          carrots, roughly chopped

1          small sweet potato, roughly chopped

1          tablespoon honey

handful of (pitted) black olives

half lemon, finely chopped

handful of dates, stones removed

Add a little chicken stock, but not enough to bubble over during the cooking.  Remember that the tagine is designed to condense the steam from the cooking liquid and so it should not boil dry.  Keep a watch on it just in case though, especially if you leave it cooking for a long time. 

Cooking time is a minimum of one hour, but the tagine could be left on a low heat after that so there is no rush if you are serving it at a dinner party.

The menu I learned recommended serving well-flavoured cous cous with the tagine – and there are many recipes available for this to suit a wide variety of tastes.

The internet has many tagine recipes and indeed Moroccan starters and accompanying dishes.  They all seem quite straightforward, but, it takes a little experimentation with the many spices involved to get the flavour you want - so the key seems to be to add a little of each at a time.

Overall, I feel that my first experiences at cookery school were very pleasant as a holiday which I would thoroughly recommend to anyone interested in cookery – and – I have learned a lot that I can continue to use in cooking for family and friends.

*The two schools were:  Ashburton in the Dartmoor National Park in the south of England and LucyCooks in Staveley which is in the English Lake District.  Both schools are in beautiful parts of England and so would form a convenient part of a touring holiday.

The tagine recipe described above was from LucyCooks.

Cool as a cucumber in 30C degrees in shade: Cucumber soup and salads

It´s been a hot weekend here with the thermometer showing 30+ degrees or more Celsius. Too hot to even eat. Drink, drink, drink, but eventually the stomach is asking for more. Cucumber with its 90% water content is a great source of hydration for a thirsty body. Often eaten cold the cucumber is the main ingredient for refreshing salads and cold soups.

In Estonia typical hot summer food is boiled early potatoes with dill and butter and cucumber salad with dill and sour cream. If this is not enough, some BBQ from a huge choice of ready marinated meat or endless line of sausages on offer is made quickly.

Cucumber salad 1:

Cucumbers cut into thin slices, add salt, chopped dill and some sour cream. Mix and taste.

Cucumber salad 2 (my own favourite):

Cut one long salad cucumber into thin slices,

add 1-2 tablespoon of salad vinegar,

some salt to taste,

0.5 teaspoon of sugar,

1 -2 tablespoons olive or rapeseed oil,

some black pepper and thinly chopped dill.

Mix well and leave to marinate for min 30 minutes or overnight.

My alternative to gazpacho is 

Cucumber soup (2-3 portions):

3 long salad cucumbers, cold from the fridge

1 tablespoon salad vinegar

1 teaspoon salt

150ml unflavoured yoghurt

3 big leaves of peppermint, thinly chopped

or for a more northern taste instead of peppermint leaves add

a tablespoon of chopped fresh dill

Peel the cucumbers, cut out the seeds, cut into slices. Add the vinegar, salt, peppermint, yoghurt and purée with a mixer or blender. Taste for salt. Season more if necessary. Leave in the fridge to ensure the soup is refreshingly cold before serving.

Cool Cucumber Soup with Mint

A delicious cucumber soup was served at Neumarkt restaurant in Zurich, my current top favourite restaurant in the old town, with a great summer garden, very fast and professional service and most importantly very good local seasonal food.

Chicken and dumpling soup: Estonian “kana-klimbisupp”

Every now and then my friends in Estonia say they want some soup. The craving for some good healthy broth is strong, especially in colder days. On the other hand there are people who always prefer solid food to liquid. This one is a favourite of many Estonians. I like soups that have pieces of the ingredients in them. Puréed cream soups are great as well but every now and then I want to be able eat rather than just swallow my soup.

The dumpling soup is quite thick and serves as a full meal, especially at home with more than one helping. When I was growing up we never had to eat up what someone else put on your plate if we did not want to. Everyone took as much as they wanted and if on occasion what you had put on your plate was too much there was no obligation to eat up. Even if it meant that one mouthful was too many. I have always followed this principle. One’s stomach will tell when it is full, also a child’s. I guess for an adult the problem is not to want too much and recognise the moment of fullness. Soup is healthy, therefore two helpings are perfectly all right for a full meal. 

Chicken soup is well known for the healing properties against a cold. It certainly has helped me through some colds. Many cuisines make use of dumplings, German for example, being one of the closest influencers of the Estonian. The exact making varies, a mixture from old bread or flour, a combination with potato, gnocchis.

Ingredients for the chicken and dumpling soup:

Chicken Stock:

1 chicken

1 onion

Celery leaves or a good chunk of the root

1 carrot

1 teaspoon of salt

2 bay leaves

5 grains of black pepper

Soup vegetables:

2 bigger carrots

2 medium potatoes

Dumplings:

1 ladle full of stock or milk

1 egg

1.5 cups plain flour

Finely chopped dill or parsley

Put the chicken in one piece into the pot with cold water enough to cover the chicken. Bring to boil and wait till the foam starts to form. Cook for a few minutes and keep removing the foam. It is important to remove the foam to get a clear stock.

Throw away the water after the foam has been removed and start again with filling the pot with enough cold water to cover the chicken. Now add the cleaned onion, in one piece, as well as the carrot, celery leaves or root. Add 1 teaspoon of salt, the pepper and the bay leaves. Bring to boil at high temperature, then turn the heat down and simmer till the meat is totally soft and comes off the bones easily, 45-60 minutes. Turn the chicken once in a while and taste for salt. Some prefer to add the salt at the end, however I like the meat to take up some salt during cooking as later on it is difficult.

As the chicken is cooking prepare the carrots and potatoes. Peel and dice them into 1 cm cubes.

When the chicken is soft take it out on a plate and clean the meat off the bones discarding the skin. Remove the carrot, onion and celery from the stock.Put the shredded meat back into the pot.

Take a ladleful of broth into a bowl and let it cool a bit. Add half the flour into the lukewarm broth. Mix thoroughly. Beat an egg and add to the mixture. Add more flour till the dough is quite thick (feels heavy and drops from a spoon slowly). No need to add salt if your broth had enough already. If you make the dumpling dough with milk instead of the broth, add some salt to the dough.

Add the carrot and potato cubes into the stock and cook for 5-7 minutes.

Take two teaspoons and start dropping the dumplings into the soup by wetting the spoons in the broth, taking a small quantity of dough onto one spoon and turning it around on the other to push down into the boiling soup. When the dumplings have come up to the surface the soup is ready.

Garnish with chopped dill and/or parsley.

Serve with dark rye bread, white bread or without any bread.

Chicken -Dumpling Soup / Kana-klimbisupp

Food from the forest – 1: Wild blueberry-ricotta cake and blueberry-banana smoothie

50% of Estonia is covered by forest. For many Estonians going to the forest is as natural part of their life as surfing would be for people living close to the ocean like my Brazilian friends or skiing and mountain biking for the Swiss. A walk in the snowy forest on a sunny day is a bright relaxation, but a walk in summer or in autumn will fill your stomach in addition to having a good walk and an abundant breath of totally fresh air.



July-August is the time for blueberries (Ger.: Heidelbeeren, Est.: mustikad), August-September for lingonberries (Ger.: Preiselbeeren, Est.: pohlad), and September for wild mushrooms. The only thing to do before disappearing to fill your basket is to establish where is the exit. The position of the sun in relation to the point of entry (=exit or the place where the car is) is my best orienteering aid. Going with my Mom, the exit rules need to be established early on before reaching the forest as she has a habit to delve among the trees the moment the car stops and her foot touches the moss. It’s sweet but caution is better. Every year there is news about people getting lost in the forest. In my many years of being friends with the forest I have just about panicked once and thought I was lost for 10 minutes on a cloudy day as I could not detect the position of the Sun.



Wild blueberries in the forest







During my holidays in July I went to pick blueberries 5 times and got my oxygen dosis. I would add that the trip to the forest in our case is driven by the excitement and undertaken with a lot of enthusiasm, more so than the material benefit that may come with it. My Dad has so to say prohibited my Mom to make any more jam as there is enough already. In some years the crop is poor, but as long as you can eat some then and there the trip has paid off. That´s as fresh and natural a mouthful as it can get.In the past the berries were made into jams or other preserves. Blueberry jam is a must in the home medicine store – helps with any kind of indigestion, besides being just delicious. Nowadays there is an inversely proportional change from preserves to freezing the berries in the freezer. The shelves in the cellar become emptier while the freezers get bigger. I have friends who have found a new fashionable hobby in making all sorts of fruit and berry smoothies, cocktails and iced juices.Yummie! Well, three freezers of my close families were filled with the season’s blueberries from these trips to the forest. Ready for the winter.



Wild blueberries / mustikad

The forest blueberries make your tongue blue, the industrial blueberries don’t. In my town in Switzerland it is difficult to find forest blueberries in the supermarket frozen food department.  I was recently in Munich and saw the wild blueberries, lingonberries and the chanterelles mushrooms on the market – it felt so much like home, only at  about twice the price.



Blueberry-Ricotta Cake



Blueberry-ricotta cake recipe

24-26cm diameter cake form fitted with baking paper

120g butter

100g sugar

1 egg

250g wheat flour or a little more if sticky (for a healthier option use 50% whole grain wheat flour and 50% plain white wheat flour)

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 pinch of salt

400g of ricotta
4 tablespoons sour cream (20% fat)

3-4 tablespoons of sugar

2 eggs

0.4l or 4 big one-palm fulls of (wild) blueberries (If you use frozen ones - totally fine too - mix the berries with 1 tablespoon of potato or corn starch to keep them separate)

50-100g of almond flakes

Pre-heat the oven to 200 degrees C.

Mix the butter with sugar using a mixer, add the egg and mix again. Add the flour and before mixing with the butter-egg slightly mix the dry flour with salt and baking powder. Mix all into a dough. Form it into a ball with your hands. If the dough is too sticky pat some flour on the dough. Cover the dough with the plastic foil and leave to settle in the fridge for ca 30 min.

The dough is quite soft and lets itself to be spread on the bottom of the form. Pre-cook the dough for 10 minutes until the dough seems cooked and not raw soft sticky any more.

Mix the ricotta with sour cream and sugar. Taste before adding the egg (salmonella risk!) and then mix in the eggs.

Set the oven to 190 degrees C.

Put 2/3 of your blueberries on the pre-cooked dough, then the ricotta mix, more blueberries on the ricotta mix and the almond flakes on the blueberries.

Bake in oven for 35-45 minutes. The almond flakes should take a slight brown colour and check the cake with a match (ricotta should not stick to the match).

Let the cake cool down before serving.

Cool blueberry and banana smoothie, even better with icecream

Blueberry-banana smoothie

In a blender mix per person

a handful of blueberries,

1/2  banana,

some apple juice,

ice cubes into a smoothie.

If you want to give yourself or your friends a special treat add some ice cream as well. (Thanks for treating me=))

Mix well until the ice cubes have been crushed and the drink takes a nice thick consistency.