What’s for dinner?

I’ve recently had more trouble to come up with ideas for dinner. We do have a few dishes that we like to make on a regular basis, but lately it feels like I am running out of new ideas to fill the days in between.

I would love to cook more with potatoes, but since the potatoes here are all pretty flavorless, there are only so many potato dishes that I can make. Simply boiling the potatoes as a side dish, as we so often do in Germany, is not really an option. You need lots of spices to make those potatoes taste like anything.

Then there is pasta! I am a big pasta fan, but every second night it gets kind of old pretty quickly as well.

Rice! – you’re going to say. Of course. We also have rice pretty regularly. What I need are new ideas of what to make with all those great side dishes.

So I am calling for new, simple recipes that you, my dear readers, have tested and approved.
Easy dinners that won’t leave me standing in the kitchen for half the night when I come home after a long day at work.

Thank you in advance!

And of course, I won’t let you go empty-handed. You can find some of my recipes on the recipe page.

  1. Thanks for sharing your recipes with us! I tried your potatoes and the Marble cake. I don’t know I must have done something wrong with the calculation, I think I used too much flour in the cake. But the taste was good and especially the rum was a great twist to the flavour. Anyway, I think we have about 12 or so pretty fast every day dishes i.g. chili con carne (with ground beef) with rice, Chow mein noodels with spring onions, carrots and chicken, flavoured with soy sauce, sesame oil and ginger, parmesan chicken with canned tomatoe sauce, fried potatoes with eggs and so on! And we just discovered mashed sweet potatoe with creme fraiche and pecan nuts as a great side dish for beef! Goes well with grean beans! Maybe we should all set up a little recipe page so that we all can share.

  2. Oh, have you ever tried Potatoes with Quark or sour cream? You simply boil the potatoes with the skin (eat it with or peel it off on the plate). The Quark goes (one full fat, one low fat) mixed with milk, salt, chopped fresh onions and a bit of oil (usually “Lausitzer Leinoel” as it is a very traditionell meal from my home, the Lausitz)
    If you prefer sour cream: fry some chopped onions, and mix in the cream with salt and pepper, maybe a bit of milk.
    Very simple, very nice.

    We recently made quite a lot of jacked potatoe, with Chili con carne, cheese or simply butter and salt.

    Anyway, I will think of some other dishes and let you know.

  3. Some more recipes to offer:

    Gefuellte Paprikaschoten
    Rouladen
    Potatoe, Lentil or Bean soup (Eintopf)
    French Onion soup
    and my personal favorite: Mashed potaoes with fried egg and cucumber salad

    Just let me know if you are interested.

    Altogether I use my favorite dishes and recipes of my mum and try out new things from one of my JO books.

  4. I don’t know how you guys are with tofu, but something I’ve been making lately (AND LOVING!) is peanut tofu over soba noodles. Sure it’s still pasta, but different pasta (buckwheat)!

    For two:

    Crumble half a package of firm or extra firm tofu into a bowl. Drizzle about 1-2Tbsp of soysauce over it.

    Make a peanut sauce with peanut butter, water, garlic, ginger, soy sauce and sesame oil. I always wing this part. If it’s too thick or salty, add more water. Not tasty enough, add a bit of everything else. Pretty self explanatory.

    Thickly slice up some red onion and red pepper (as much as you think two people would like) and fry in a bit of oil until just starting to get soft. Add tofu and fry up for a bit.

    Boil water and cook soba noodles. They only need about 4 minutes, so make sure not to over cook them.

    While noodles are cooking, add sauce to tofu mixture.

    Serve noodles with peanut tofu over top.

    Usually I’m not the hugest fan of tofu, but I love this dish.

    Let me know if you try it.

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