In honour of the day I made two Swiss recipes: Schaffhausen onion quiche (bottom) and Lenzburger apple pie (top), yummy.Both recipes came from the wonderful little booklet "Baking with Swiss farm women" published by the LID agricultural information center of Switzerland. It features 27 savoury and sweet recipes, one from every Swiss canton, and I thoroughly intend to make them all one day. I got my copy free from the following url:
http://www.agriculture.ch/en/shop/
so if you're interested I recommend you head over there.
I must say that I was surprised at how well the two lots of pastry turned out! It was another 30ºC+ day and I was HOT, so needless to say that the butter and working area weren't nice and cool as is befitting for pastry making. The result was still lovely, flaky and crisp so I must have had a bit of luck there.
My only changes were to use thick yoghurt and smetana (сметана, like thick, creamy, almost clotted yoghurt), in place of cream as it's very difficult to find here and I added a bit of fresh dill to the onion quiche. I used ground almonds instead of ground hazelnuts for the apple pie and sprinkled some on top in place of slivered almonds too. These were divided into nine pieces and we then went visiting to our nearest neighbours so they could enjoy the day as well. So far the reactions seem to be good :O)
After our tour of the neighbours, there was just enough time to get my Bern (my grandma's canton) and Swiss flag lanterns up in the garden and enjoy looking at those with a cup of hot chocolate as the light faded, until the mossies forced us back indoors.
