Tamarind and Thyme

From Zürich, we took a train through the Alps to Innsbruck. It was a most relaxing 3.5 hours of this:

Innsbruck is an adorable city with its cozy old town centre and its location next to the unexpectedly fast flowing Inn River and surrounded by gorgeous mountains. I had a grand time in Innsbruck, as did our friend Victor who came along for the holiday, but I think Blai had a few stressful moments as this was a working holiday for him. We were mainly there for a music festival and with rehearsals and concerts every evening, I had to rejigger our eating schedule. Every day in Innsbruck, we started with a decent enough continental breakfast at our hotel, a large late lunch, a snack if required and finally, a late night visit to a wurst stand in the centre of town. Gotta keep us fed. As you’ll see below, we did pretty well!

No photos of the breakfast as I’m barely functioning in the morning but of particular note was the fresh crusty buns served up by our hotel. Actually, all the bread we tried in Innsbruck was very good, even those served by the ubiquitous Tyrolean chain, Der Bäcker Ruetz. This was a Snackbreze, a delicious pretzel topped with ham and cheese.

We had two nice lunches in Innsbruck and one average one in nearby Schwaz (I’ll leave that last one out) – prices were certainly more affordable than in Zürich, with our lunches costing about €20 a head. Our first lunch after exploring the city was at Weisses Rössl, a hotel restaurant with a good selection of Tyrolean specialties.

We started with their hauspfandl (the dish of the house), which was pork fillet cooked with garlic, caraway and brandy served with green beans with bacon and spätzle. This was some kind of trick plate or something – there was a lot more food in that dish than I expected.

A traditional Alpine dish of Tiroler Gröstl was as you’d expect of an Alpine dish: a chopped beef and potato hash topped with a fried egg. Seriously filling grub for a serious day out in the mountains.

A cabbage and bacon salad came on the side. Gosh and golly, this was possibly the tastiest cabbage salad I’ve ever had (step aside, coleslaw) – love that combo of fried bacon and caraway seeds.

The next day, after a visit to Schloss Ambras, we descended back down into Innsbruck and had lunch at Cafe Central, one of the city’s Viennese style coffee houses. Having missed Wiener schnitzel, we proceeded to order their butter fried version; it was delicious and well fried but just a little too thick.

For everyone who exclaimed about our lack of vegetables on our Vienna trip, look! Salads!

We also shared a rindergulasch with polenta. While I enjoyed the combination of polenta with the stew, the gulasch was too salty to eat by itself.

And we couldn’t leave a Viennese-style kaffeehaus without having cakes. They perhaps didn’t live up to the heady heights of those we tried in Vienna (especially the whipped cream) but were still delicious; my favourite was the strawberry cake with its layers of strawberries in jelly, custard, cream and sponge cake.

At night, our Würstelstand of choice was the one underneath the Golden Roof (see the third photo in this post) – this makes it seem like we were discerning but really, there were only two to choose from and this one was on the way back to our hotel. On average, it was about €3 per sausage or pair of sausages and one each was plenty to fill or empty tummies. Our default order was the Kasekrainer hot dog, a long cheesy sausage tucked into a baguette (it tastes better than it sounds) – not sure why I didn’t end up with a photo of it.

I did end up with a photo of our chilli currywurst – a sliced wurst slathered in ketchup and dusted with copious amounts of curry powder and dried chilli flakes. And with this currywurst, I fall utterly in love with it (my previous experience was with a nasty version involving a curry sauce in Munich)…and the chilli flakes! Inspired.

Also, these St. Johanner würste, long smoked pork sausages, are typical of the Tirol region and apparently one is supposed to eat them with mustard and horseradish…. so I failed. Delicious even without horseradish though!

I’ve got to mention Handl Tyrol too, a Tyrolean chain of smoked and airdried meat products. We’d snacked on quite a few of their salami products and I bought a few things to take home too. They’re very conveniently located in the Old Town as well as in the train station.

I’m still in the middle of uploading our photos but all my photos from Zurich and Innsbruck are being placed in this Flickr photoset. I’m also trying to convince Blai that he’d like to return to the Alps in the winter… (ack, just remembered how our first Vienna trip was cancelled!)

Gasthof Weisses Rössl
Kiebachgasse 8
Innsbruck, Austria

Cafe Central
Gilmstrasse 5
Innsbruck, Austria

Absolutely nothing prepared me for how expensive Zürich is. 7.50 CHF for a bratwurst from a street stand. 40 CHF for an average sounding risotto from a nice restaurant. And at a cheap Chinese restaurant (I say cheap because the place certainly looked like a budget eatery), 16 CHF for a one dish meal of sweet and sour chicken and rice. And on our last day of holiday, while waiting at Zürich airport, I saw that a Japanese stand at a food court was selling a small miso soup for 5.50 CHF. Oof.

I cannot deny though that Zürich is a beautiful city with its winding old streets, giant clocks and gorgeous location on Lake Zürich.

Our holiday in the Inn Valley in the Alps started with us flying into Zürich and staying the night before taking a train the next morning to Innsbruck. That meant we had a dinner there and with no real plans, we went to visit what is possibly the most touristy restaurant in Zürich: Zeughauskeller. The Swiss guy who sat next to us told his business colleagues that yes it was touristy but even the Swiss bring their visiting friends here as it had a very good variety of Swiss dishes. Well, that makes it ok then…

Kalbsgeschnetzeltes nach Zürcher Art was panfried sliced veal and mushrooms in a creamy white wine sauce and was served with rösti. It was certainly a generous portion of this delicious stew and we mopped up as much of the sauce as we could. There doesn’t look like much on the plate but the rest of the portion was kept hot in a small chafing dish in the middle of the table.

The Engadiner Hauswurst geräuchert was a beef and pork smoked sausage seasoned with red wine and herbs and spices and served with potato salad. This was a boiled sausage but its flavour didn’t suffer for it.

The Zeughauskeller Wurstspiess was served with more potato salad and also came with an onion gravy. There were at least three different varieties of grilled wurst on that skewer and the variety is great for a single diner.

Three main meals and three soft drinks came to a total of about 100 CHF. It was all delicious but yeah, expensive. If, like us, you don’t visit with a reservation, it’s likely that you might have to share a table with others.

The next day, we had a 3.5 hour train ride to Innsbruck and like any Asian going on a long trip, I stocked up on nice things to eat at the train station. Sprüngli was my bakery of choice that day and all their sandwiches were delicious and made with excellent bread. I’ve only got a photo of the delicious quiche mit speck I bought. That was a gorgeous buttery little quiche.

And a week later, back at Zurich airport on our way back to London, we encountered more Sprünglis than I could shake a stick at – and it was here that I bought a few of their Luxemburgerli to use up some Swiss Francs. Some of the flavours of these bite-sized macarons were a bit better then others and the texture if the biscuit could have been a bit lighter. Still, it was a tasty little treat.

So, Zurich – delicious but hard on the wallet.

Zeughauskeller
Bahnhofstrasse 28a, near Paradeplatz
8001 Zürich
Switzerland

Sprüngli
lots of branches throughout Zürich

Here are some more great posts that I’ve come across in my RSS reader. I’m trying to catch up with my travel posts and the number of photos I’ve got to sort through are insane!

A very green courgette gratin at I made that! looks like another great way to use up that ubiquitous vegetable!

A great rundown on what constitutes a Thai breakfast at SugarHead. I wish this was available near me… I certainly could have used one this morning.

I like the use of the dried chillies in the stir fried cabbage at Beijing Haochi.

The London Foodie reviews Rodízio Preto, a Brazilian churrascaria that I’m now keen to try!

There’s a post on how to cook pasta to make it come out like ramen over on Umamimart. It boggles the mind!

Shu Han’s sambal tumis, over at her blog Mummy, I can cook!, looks like a kitchen staple! I’ve been looking for a good general sambal recipe.

This curried pineapple over at le sauce looks incredible. I can already imagine the spices with the sweet fruit.

The lemon raspberry breakfast rolls over at Joy the Baker look so much more refreshing than cinnamon rolls!

And finally, not a blog post but a Flickr photo – look at this fried spam musubi from Da Kitchen in Maui!

I walked by Princess Garden of Mayfair for the first time about two years ago and while I immediately recognised that it was a popular place for dim sum, I assumed that it was quite expensive – this Chinese restaurant being located in the not exactly budget neighbourhood of Mayfair! Mr Noodles organised a recent dim sum lunch there and I joined in, keen to try the food as I’d heard good things.

Seven of us gathered one Saturday afternoon there, all hungry for dim sum. Quite the spread was ordered and these were the particular highlights/most interesting dishes to me. First to arrive were the baked char siu buns with their glossy tops and heavily sauced filling. Mr Noodles has said that this is the first place in London he’s found these that are more commonly found in Hong Kong.

Their wu kok, a fluffy fried taro pastry with a meat filling, a firm favourite of mine, was very good and especially fluffy.

Mr Noodles was raving about the golden cuttlefish cheung fun and so of course, we had to try it! I had no idea what to expect (I think images of golden tentacles waving out from the cheung fun filled my mind) and so was pleasantly surprised to find a tube of cuttlefish paste wrapped first with a fried tofu skin wrapper and then encased in the cheung fun. What a great variety of textures – bouncy, crispy and slippery smooth – and yes, it was tasty too.

I was also quite taken by this pan fried sticky rice; again, I had no idea what to expect and what turned up was large sticky rice patties fried with egg on one side. I quite liked them though I missed the ritual unwrapping required when having sticky rice wrapped in lotus leaves.

Of all the steamed and boiled dumplings we tried, my favourite was this prawn and chive dumpling. I didn’t think the siu mai or the har gow were the best I’ve had but they were passable.

Oh dear, we did order a lot of food (the photo below is only halfway through the meal)! That pan fried turnip cake on the lower left was also excellent.

We couldn’t leave without sampling some of their desserts. Clockwise from the left, we have little pumpkin pastries, egg custard tarts (dan tat) and pineapple custard buns. (There’s no actual pineapple in a pineapple bun – the name comes from the look of the biscuit topping.) My favourite was the pumpkin pastries which weren’t too sweet but had a nice chewy texture but the pineapple bun seemed to be the most popular with the rest of the table.

With all the food we ordered (bloated stomachs go!) plus the location of the restaurant, I certainly didn’t expect my part of the bill to be under £20 but it was! ‘Twas a fun lunch and I rolled out of there vowing to return again for more of their novel dim sum. Bookings are probably essential.

Princess Garden of Mayfair
8-10 North Audley Street
London W1K 6ZD

I came across another Filipino dish that I wanted to try recently, tortang talong, aubergine omelette. Ingredient-wise, it’s very simple but the method means it’s not something you can knock together in 5 minutes. Well, you could probably cook it in about 20 minutes!

I made the most basic of tortang talongs, with just aubergine and egg, and it was lovely in all its simplicity. Onions, tomatoes and other vegetables, all finely chopped, are also common additions. Minced pork is also commonly added, making it something you could just eat by itself with rice. If adding any of these, I would fry them separately and mix them with the egg, patting the filling onto the aubergine when frying.

What other Filipino dishes would you recommend?

Tortang Talong
serves 2 as a dish in an Asian meal.

2 medium-sized long aubergines
1 large egg
salt
oil

Grill the aubergines over an open flame until soft but not mushy. If you have not got a gas stove, you can put them under a grill in they oven too. The skin should be black. Let cool and peel off the skins, keeping the flesh and the stem intact. With a fork, flatten the flesh so you’ve formed aubergine fans, still keeping the stems on.

In a shallow bowl, beat the egg with a little salt.

Heat a frying pan oven medium heat and when hot, add about 1 tbsp of oil. Using the stem of the aubergine as a handle, dip the flesh of the aubergine into the egg, turning to coat both sides. Lay the eggy aubergine fan into the frying pan. Repeat with the other aubergine, laying it next to the first in the pan. Pour over the rest of the egg onto the aubergines in the pan, taking care to keep them separate. Cook on each side for a few minutes, until both sides are golden brown.

Serve with rice, possibly with other Asian dishes too. I read that ketchup is commonly eaten with tortang talong but I had mine with chilli sauce.