Eat your way around the world: Switzerland

I almost want to joke about creating my very own cooking show called: Cooking with Ticia ™, where you watch the mad-cap adventures of Ticia as she manages to mangle beloved cultural cuisine with her inept cooking.  Except I do occasionally do well with the recipes I share, and no one has ever gotten sick from eating my food.  And yet, here I am again about to tell you how my Switzerland meal did not go as planned.

I mean the Swiss Mac and Cheese was a HUGE hit.  Everyone else loved it.  But the other recipes……..  Let’s just start with what worked.

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Swiss Mac and Cheese

All right this Swiss Mac and Cheese was easy.  Well, relatively easy, especially since I’d made a homemade Mac and Cheese before.

Swiss Mac and Cheese ingredients

• 1 large potato peeled and cubed into 1 inch cubes
• 1 box (1 pound) of macaroni pasta
• 2 large onions diced
• 4 tablespoons butter
• 1 pound of Gruyere cheese (this can be expensive, but it was soooo good), grated
• 1/2 cup milk or cream
• salt and pepper to taste
• aluminum foil* (is it just me, but does Amazon pricing seem high?)

 

Let’s put together this yummy swiss mac and cheese

As per usual, I have no pictures, because I didn’t remember, and I was running around like a chicken with my head cut off.

1. Get a pot of water boiling and your oven heating to 375 (in the Switzerland Adventure Pack* they’ve also got European measurements)
2. Heat the butter and cook the onions until soft
3. Cook the noodles and potatoes together (about 10-15 minutes) until tender
4. While that is happening combine the milk and salt/pepper
5. Once you’ve drained the noodles put half in a greased casserole dish* (I think I’ve had this dish for my entire 15 years of marriage, that is a miracle), and add half of the grated cheese.  Put in the rest of the noodle/potato mixture and sprinkle the rest of the cheese over it.
6. Cover with aluminum foil and cook for 10-15 minutes.
7. Serve to your children who will eat monstrous large amounts of food.

 

Zopf, swiss style bread

I have no clue why this bread did not turn out the way it’s supposed to.  I swear I followed the directions.

• 2.2 pounds of white flour* (this might be where I went wrong, I don’t have a kitchen scale, so I googled and guesstimated)
• 1 tablespoon salt
• 1 package dry yeast* (good to know Amazon will not be driving HEB out of business anytime soon, the prices are definitely higher)
• 1 teaspoon sugar
• 4.4 ounces butter, softened
• .7 quarts milk
• 1 yolk of egg diluted with water

Looking at the ingredient list I see where this went wrong.  I don’t have a kitchen scale, and so I’m pretty sure I was off on my measurements.

So, here we go….

1. Mix together flour, salt, yeast, butter, and milk.  Knead for 10 minutes, then let rise for an hour.
2. Come back an hour later, and see how the dough hasn’t really risen at all.
3. AT ALL.  Have a vague memory that yeast is heat activated, so try putting the entire thing into the somewhat warm oven for 20 minutes.
4. Nothing happens.  Sigh.
5. Split dough into two pieces and weave together just like the directions say.  Then let it rise for an hour.
6. Yeah, it so didn’t rise.  It was just a big mass of flour.
7. Brush with the egg yolk and stick that baby in the over at 400 for an hour.
8. Pull it out and it looks good.
9. But man was that a thick bread.  It was not in the least bit light and fluffy.

Swiss cookies

I’m not sure what these were supposed to taste like.  The problem is they said they were “brownies,” and so in my head I was thinking brownies.  But these are a bit more cracker like than brownie like, so I don’t know what I was supposed to get.  Sigh.

• 5 ounces sugar (again, I’m beginning to think I should get that kitchen scale)
• 9 ounces ground almond (last time I saw this listed I threw up my hands right there, since then we’ve had a few new health stores move in, and the whole gluten-free thing has become a bigger deal, so weird flours are more common)
• 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1 pinch of cloves and 1 pinch of salt
• 2 tablesppons cocoa powder (side note, did anyone else learn capital T means tablespoon and lower case t means teaspoon?)
• 2 T flour (see, isn’t that easier to type?)
• 2 fresh egg whites (I used the eggs from my grocery store, no clue if they were “fresh” enough)
• 3.5 ounces bitter chocolate (I used unsweetened baker’s chocolate* (this price is finally about what I paid for it), and bought a whole new bar, because I’d just thrown out the old bar I’d had under the “I’m never going to use this”)

1. Mix the sugar, almond flour, spices, cocoa powder, and flour together
2. Add egg whites
3. Melt the chocolate, and mix it into the mixture while wearing COW PAJAMAS!
4. Roll it out and cut into shapes, at this point I was feeling rather tired and I just cut rectangles.  I know lazy Mom, this is why you’ll never see me featured on one of those Bento lunch blogs.
5. Let rest 5-6 hours!
6. Totally missed that, so it rested for an hour or so, and then we baked it for 5 minutes at 480 degrees.

I’m so doomed to never cook anything fancy right.  Ever. It sure looked amazing though, and tasted good, just never really rose.

I totally cheated for the cheese fondue, while the  Switzerland Adventure pack* had a cheese fondue I thought I could probably make at this point I was feeling all cooked out, and I bought a tub of cheddar beer soup, or maybe it was a dip.  All I know is the kids refused to touch it, and it did not taste as good as I’d hoped, so it ended up going to waste and we just ate the apple slices.

 

See my other amazing attempts to not butcher cultural cuisine and our original Switzerland unit study