Sooooo many options, so little time. When Foodgoat announced this months theme for IMBB #14, my first thought was “Wow, what an extraordinary theme!” (my second thought was “Thanks for not choosing blue…”) We had great fun last weekend roaming around Viktualienmarkt on the hunt for orange food without a carved in stone plan. Since we couldn’t decide on just one dish, we went for a quick, manageable 3 course orange menu.

We started off with a Roasted Orange Pepper Tomato Soup with Basil Oil and Bread Chips. Roasted pepper soups are always a treat with either some good quality Balsamico sprinkled on top or like we did here with basil infused olive oil. The crisp slices of rye bread we saw on a TV cooking show, “Koch doch!” (it loosely translates to “Just cook!”) with the German cook Alexander Herrmann. He baked very thin slices in the oven between two baking trays to avoid the bread get all curly. We took a shortcut, our panini grill did a good job here and it saved time, too… Those bread chips are really a great substitute for any soup side-dish!

Roast peppers in a very hot oven under the grill, until the skin throws bubbles and turns black. Put the peppers in a plastic bag and seal it. While the peppers are cooling down, the enclosed humidity makes it easier to strip off the skin afterwards. Peel them after about 15 minutes and cut the peppers in small pieces.

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Change in plans. The original idea for Sugar High Friday (hosted by Derrick at “An Obsession with Food“) was to create a compelling and off-your-feet sweeping dessert based on elderflower syrup. For whatever reason we couldn’t get/find a proper base recipe to start with – not that we couldn’t find any, just not what we wanted. So I thought of a three berry lime sorbet, as a variation of our still unbeaten basil/lime sorbet (well, the basil/lime sorbet is not really our recipe, but one we did for several dinners and everybody seemed to be blown away by it :). The recipe itself is pretty straight forward and easy to make – no rocket science here :) And don’t search the ingredients for molasses. You’ll have to make the syrup yourself… (the easiest part!)

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Can anyone ever have enough cookbooks? I’m sure O. would be ready for lively discussion on that topic (ok I do have a few…), but after all he almost enjoys them as much as I do.

Whilst following my daily blog reading routine I came across a post (Mango Crème brûlée) on Petra’s blog, which sounded delicious and referenced The Cinnamon Club Cookbook from Iqbal Wahhab & Vivek Singh. I remembered that I put this book on my amazon-wishlist sometime ago, so I went back there. Click-happy as I am, I saw, read and bought it :) Since I purchased it via marketplace, it took a little longer than usual orders – almost two weeks until the sight of a big brown parcel in our real mailbox saved my day… Is there anything better, than coming home after a stressful day of work, finding new evening literature in your mailbox? It has already become one of my favorite Indian cookbooks. Beautiful layout and photography. The recipes seem easy to follow and it has neat writing/little stories besides the recipes.

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