Quick, delicious & warming chicken tagine with exciting spices
This dish has it all: tender chicken (aka protein), subtle sweetness, a hint of lemon, a nice crunch and lots of vegetables. It’s delicious, warming and just a great & light supper for cold evenings. Personally, I love the complexity of this dish, because it has so many different components that come together and form one great dish.
Light & healthy chicken breasts with tons of fresh flavors
Winter vegetables. Savoy cabbage. This is my first time trying to cook with it, but when I looked at its strong, green leaves it was clear to me that I had to wrap something in it. Chicken was my meat of choice and this is how we got here.
Delicious & warming beef soup to warm you up from the inside
November is here, it has cooled off in Vienna, it’s cold and grey and you see lots of people coughing and sneezing in the streets (always makes me feel slightly uncomfortable). So I thought what would be better for this kind of season and weather and health than a warming, strengthening beef soup?!
Warming comfort food happiness for grey Sundays
I was standing in the supermarket in the meat section last Saturday and started to wonder what ever happened to the good old Sunday roast. “Time to give it a go”, I figured, and took a nice piece of pork neck home with me. Pork roast is an Austrian classic, traditionally served with sauerkraut and bread dumplings and not usually placed in the “healthy” section of a menu. But since I need my beloved vegetables, I decided to go in a different direction and to serve the roast with sage, roast apples, (sweet) potatoes and a bunch of root vegetables. Continue reading
Easy & healthy dish with tons of fresh spring flavors
Spring is super awesome, because of all these fresh vegetables that are now in season… asparagus, green beans, spring onions and friends – here we come!
As it gets warmer it’s time for some light lunch recipes. 🙂
This recipe is really nice, because it’s very light, easy to prepare and comes with a refreshing white wine sauce – you’ll love it!
Crispy creamy deliciousness
I came up with this recipe when I came home after a workout and was just looking for something nice, balanced and easy, and had some tortillas left to use. I ended up liking the quesadilla so much that I made another one the day after and finally decided to also share it with you 🙂
In this case, the bacon really adds a little something to the whole dish and works perfectly with cheese, green peppers and chicken. Top it with sour cream and you’re close to food heaven. I really think you can never go wrong with creamy guacamole and the tomato salsa just adds lightness to the whole dish.
As I said, this is quite balanced, you have lots of proteins from chicken and cheese, good fatty acids from guacamole and the plenty of veggies in the quesadilla, salsa and guacamole. Also, I used a whole wheat tortilla to make the whole dish even more wholesome. If you want to step it up further, serve with salad on the side.
Sweet mango chicken, crunchy veggies, creamy avocado and a hint of spice
I’ve been thinking a bit more about light & healthy summer dinner options, and this is one more dish I came up with. It’s brilliant, because you have fresh, zingy avocado cream, sweet and spicy mango, crispy chicken and crunchy veggies. Also, it’s a really healthy and delicious thing to make and will surly jazz up your day. I really love mixing sweet and savory flavors so this is a total win on my books. Just make sure to use ripe and soft mangoes. This is really important, because underripe mangoes are not sweet and juicy enough and therefore won’t give you this amazing thick sauce when frying.
Once again this is a healthy and pretty straight forward dish to make, so let’s do it!
Incredibly fragrant, fresh and healthy
This is another really quick, easy and healthy recipe that will make your taste buds and tummy happy 🙂 I really love this dish (and I’m saying this after eating it around 5 times in the past 2 weeks because it’s just so great!), because the soy, ginger and garlic marinade adds so much flavor and frangrance to the whole dish – you gotta love it!
Basically, you can adapt which kind of veg you use depending on your own preferences, what you have in the fridge and what’s currently in season, but I really liked a combo of red bell peppers, carrots, broccoli, green asparagus, mushrooms, spring onion and zucchini. As you can imagine, this is also a great dish to use up left-over veggies.
I know that most of the time I’m not that serious about leaving everything to marinate, but in this case there is no fast track as marinating the meat for a few hours makes all the difference. If you work all day just do it the night before. You’ll see, the work will pay off 🙂
One more important thing: you really want your veggies to stay crisp so make sure you don’t fry them to long. For this to work you have to take into consideration how long each of the difference kinds of veggies will take and sort them from hardest to softest and add them one by one (i.e. the broccoli florrets first and the mushrooms last). Having said that – let’s get started: Continue reading
A delicious Easter treat
Easter is right around the corner so I thought it would be nice to have a dish perfekt for a big family lunch on Easter Sunday, so these (Easter) lamb filets just popped to my mind. I realize that if you look at the ingredient list it looks like this is an incredibly elaborate dish to make, but it’s really clean and straight forward, also taste-wise. In the end, this recipe gives you fragrant and tender lamb filets and polenta with an incredibly creamy texture – I couldn’t stop eating, but then I seem to have this problem frequently 😉 I also love the carrot and zucchini mix: I feel that most of the time you don’t taste the zucchini, because it’s covered up by other flavors. In this case, the zucchini flavor and sweet earthiness from the carrots come out in such a clean way, it’s great!
Ideally, you should marinate the lamb filets the day before or allow at least a few hours for the meat to absorb the flavors from the marinade.
Since we currently have real April weather with a mix of snow, hail, rain storms and a bit of sunshine in Austria I decided to hop on a plane to enjoy the (hopefully warmer) Spanish weather in Madrid and some awesome mojitos. Have fun trying this recipe and happy Easter to all of you, hope you find lots of Easter eggs! 🙂 Continue reading
Traditional Austrian meets racy Spanish
Gröstl, or typically Tyrolian gröstl, is a traditional Austrian dish, often served in a skiing hut in the Alps. Usually, gröstl is a go-to dish for left-over potatoes fried with bacon and onions. As most Austrian food, it is absolutely delicious. Healthy? Well, maybe not, but everybody deserves a treat once in a while 😉
To jazz things up a bit and since I still had spicy chorizo from my last Barcelona visit I decided it was the right time for Spanish gröstl, for which I replaced bacon by chorizo. Now, chorizo has this fantastic smokey paprika flavor which works incredibly with lemon, so the gröstl is topped off with a fragrant mix of fresh parsley, lemon zest and finely chopped garlic just to give it a nice kick. Just keep in mind that due to onions and fresh garlic this is not a dish you want to eat before going on a date or meeting your significant other 😉 However, they say that the way to the heart is through the stomach, so you could also share a plate of gröstl.
This Spanish gröstl is a very down-to earth, quick and easy dish to prepare and tastes awesome. If you want to go full on Austrian (or you’re very hungry or have an untamable desire for additional protein), top the gröstl with a fried egg, it’s what I typically do. Trust me, it’s good! So try it out and bring Austro-Spanish feeling to your dinner table! 🙂
