The 17th recipe in this cooking challenge was Leipziger Allerlei. I think this is one of those tradition recipes where every family makes it different and everyone claims that their recipe is the proper recipe. It calls for the freshest vegetables you can get, I managed to find everything needed fairly easily: white asparagus, carrots, peas, green beans, cauliflower, and kohlrabi.
I also bought some fresh morels. When we saw them, we asked how much they cost and the shop keeper had to call someone and came back to us with 30 Euro for 100 grams, but seeing our faces, he dropped it to 20 Euro. Rainer was balking, but after missing out on the morels last week, I wanted to put some in, so I asked for 4, one for each of us. It ends up that morels weigh nothing, so we got the 12 the recipe called for and the grand total was 44 cents.
The Astroyogas joined us for this week’s challenge. It took forever to get all the vegetables separately boiled, blanched, then cooked in butter. I was starting to feel bad that everyone was waiting so long for lunch! The recipe said 8-10 minutes per veggie, but I found that some things took longer, like the Spargel, which took about 20 minutes. I cooked the peas for 10 minutes and in the finished dish found that they maybe could have used another minute or two.
We didn’t use fresh crawfish or crawfish butter in the dish. I had no idea where to get either one in Regensburg (I’m sure both are available in every supermarket in France, darn my luck at living on the Czech border instead of the French, but hey, at least I can get 5 foot garden gnomes for a good price!). Rainer didn’t want to leave out the crawfish entirely, so we used a pack of Louisana crawfish meat from China that we got at our regular supermarket.
I found the dish really delicious. The morels were awesome and I think they would have been so good in last week’s Berliner Frikasee. I’m undecided if the 50 grams of dried morels in that recipe is a typo. 50 grams of fresh morels would be A LOT of morels, but that 5 gram bag of dried morels I’d found in the Köwe Center Edeka didn’t contain all that many and given the picture in the cookbook showing the stems being cut off of the morels, it looked like 10 of those bags may be right, or at least 5 of them.
In the end, another really delicious dish. My sauce wasn’t as thick as what the picture in the cookbook shows, but I found out I accidently put an extra 50 ml of cream in. The recipe says 200 ml and the cream containers I usually get are 200 ml ones, but this week those were sold out and I took another brand and didn’t pay attention to the volume.
I think this dish would go really well over pasta too. If I made it again, I probably wouldn’t cook everything seperately. Maybe the cooking of each vegetable one at a time makes the vegetable broth tastier? Next time I’ll boil all the veggies together (except the stuff that took a little longer, like the Spargel, so maybe I’ll boil in two batches), and I’d just stir fry it all together in the butter at the end. It probably doesn’t end up as pretty that way, but if I’m not cooking for guests, I don’t need pretty.
Other participants (will be updated throughout the day):
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Next challenge!
- Blankenhainer Kirschkuchen (Blankenhainer Cherry Cake) – The cherries on the trees in our garden are almost ripe, that means the birds are descending en masse and we’ll probably have to buy the cherries to make this cake, but anyways, it’s cherry season! (This is a Thüringen recipe and was supposedly Friedrich von Schiller’s favorite cake, by the way).
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it looks so good! too bad i wasn’t ome this weekend, otherwise i would have joint in.
This does look delicious! Unfortunately, this is the first recipe that I wasn’t able to make – I was sick most of the week and just couldn’t muster up the energy to go across town to the “good” grocery store to get fresh, young vegetables.
I will try the cherry cake though! Sounds great!
Glad you liked the morels – they are the best mushrooms!
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I love those raised-in-China Louisiana crayfish, or, rather, I love the idea. I saw them in Texas — right next door to Louisiana! I’ve been told that frozen tails taste like pencil erasers, though. In Berlin, I found live crawfish from time to time, and had contact with a guy in Prieros named Böhnke who had a secret connection for them. One 4th of July, we got 18 kg from him and had a real down-home crawfish boil.
But you probably did the right thing, since the taste of Scandinavian crayfish, which are the most common ones in German markets, is way milder than the Louisiana variety.
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This looks so delicious, and I would love to make it when I am over there. Thanks for the laugh with the 5 foot gnome comment haha
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@rita: We’ll have to save some other Saxony dishes for you!
@stephanie: I hope you’re feeling better. I’m not feeling well this week, but I hope to be better by the weekend and up to making the cake.
@ed: That sounds like a great 4th of July party, wish I had a connection like that!
@christina: You’re welcome! It’s a delicious dish and I encourage everyone to try it.
You always make the yummiest things that make me want to crawl into your blog. Soooo delicious
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