Couscous sweet potato salad with halloumi

Let me just say: I adore, I love, I worship halloumi cheese. It doesn't melt when you fry or grill it, it has that wonderful squeaky feel when you chew it and an indescribable salty taste. It's just heaven.
Pair it with some couscous and sweet potato and enjoy your perfect arabian-style supper. 

Cooking in summer. An utterly philosophical essay on the idea behind this blog

Sorry for the lack of updates during the past month. It's not like I've been particularily busy, I just haven't really felt like blogging in a while. Beats me why.

Also, I haven't made anything special for a while now. Summer (or something that, apart from the temperature, very closely resembles summer) has officially arrived and neither the weather nor the stuff in the grocery store makes me particularily desirous of spending hours in the kitchen preparing a meal. And I don't mean this in a bad way: All the spring/summer veggies and fruits look and smell so amazing that all I'd like to do with them is tossing them together in a bowl and eating them right away. No frying or glazing or pureeing (is that even spelled correctly?) or drowning them in fancy cream sauces. Just steamed asparagus with an egg, a simple, fresh radish salad or nectarine with a splash of yogurt. 

Long story short: All I eat at the moment are simple, effortless, basic dishes with no cooking magic involved, and I just didn't feel like any of them was worth a blog post because they're so, well, simple. But, on second thoughts, why does simplicity make them unworthy of a blog post? Because a food blog should only consist of surprising, new stuff? Well, it got me thinking about what kind of cooking I actually want to promote with this blog. I mean, there's a hell of a lot of food blogs out on the internet and most of them have a very decided philosophy. They're about fancy cooking or unusual, creative cooking, traditional cooking, healthy, vegetarian, vegan, protein-rich, low-carb, sugary, child-friendly cooking. Whatever kind of cooking you can think of, I'm pretty damn sure there's a food blog for it.

But me? I don't know. I like fancy food, I like creative cooking, I like unusual ingredients but that doesn't mean I need or even want to use them every time I cook. In fact I don't. And the longer I thought about it, the more I became aware of the fact that the simplicity of cooking is the message I want to get across. Eating right and good and healthy doesn't mean that you have to spend all your money on groceries, fancy spices and expensive kitchen equipment. Neither does it mean that you have to spend hours in the kitchen to prepare a good meal nor that only non-standard combinations of ingredients can make a good meal.
I could write another essay about the importance of food for our bodies but I'm guessing that most of you know the gist anyway, so basically: You are what you eat. And if you are what you eat, then I only wanna eat the good stuff. (To quote Remmy from Ratatouille). With "good stuff" not referring to sugar, pizza, chocolate and beer but healthy stuff. Fruits. Veggies. Whole grains.
So, back to my basic message: I want to make this blog about healthy eating that isn't expensive, doesn't take hours of preparation and includes the occasionally sweet treat that my humble self wouldn't be able to live without.

Here's to simple cooking! (And now good night.)

What feels amazing

• running for several minutes to catch a connecting train and getting neither sweaty nor out of breath nor having trouble to keep running but instead overtaking most of the other passengers running to catch the same train
• not being winded after climbing the 6 flights of stairs to the flat
• running 5 k in one go for the first time
• cheekbones
• realising that my resting heart rate has dropped 12 beats in 2 months
• reaching a new level on Nike+

Though it may not sound like much to some people, it's a huge deal for me. Looks like 2.5 months of running are starting to pay off. Am very happy about that and just wanted to share.

Easy as Cherry Pie

A bit later than promised but here it is:
Two weeks ago on Saturday, it was the world's best flatmate's birthday. A quarter of a century old and, may I assure you, she (also affectionately known as Puschel, though only by me) doesn't look a day over 21.
And what better present to give to her than a cookbook. This one to be precise. It's the bakery-related volume of a (I think) two volume cookbook of healthy fast food recipes all wrapped up in pretty pictures and graphics and a very hipster-y layout. A few weeks ago, Puschel came home with the first volume and when she continued raving about how great it was and how great the second volume was, too, the issue of her birthday present was resolved before it had even really come up. Maybe that was her plan all the way. She must've known that I wouldn't be able to resist giving her a cookbook, especially if it was one she specifically wanted. She knows me so well. Sometimes even too well. It's spooky. And not a topic of relevance here.