You’ll notice that my recipe calls for hare, and not rabbit.  In my opinion, rabbit isn’t really flavorful enough in a stew. In fact, most rabbit stews incorporate bacon or salt pork for flavor and, of course, if you’re concerned about calorie intake, that’s a deal-breaker.  The hare, however, combined with the mushrooms and some red wine, packs a lot of flavor.

In Switzerland and Germany you can often find hare in the freezer section, next to the deer and wild boar.  Fresh is best, but frozen will certainly do. What you’re looking for is a rich, red color to the raw meat, completely unlike the chicken-white of domestic rabbit.

The boxes have fussy little plastic snap-tops, though, and sometimes they break and don’t close properly.  This was the case for one of the cartons we had in the fridge, and when we noticed a day or so later the milk was spoiled. Or so I thought.  My husband heard me curse and stopped me before I poured it down the drain.

“Wait, wait! Let me taste it.”

I shuddered and handed it over and he poured (or, rather, plopped!) some into a glass.

“Wow, this is really good!”

I refused his offer of a spoon.  He shrugged and ate some more.  Then he said, “Can you pick up a couple of big glass jars when you’re at the market?”

I did, and that was the beginning of our yogurt odyssey.  He started the next batch with about a quarter cup of the cultured milk. It was summer and he left the two 2-liter glass jars on the counter. In 6 hours they’d solidified into yogurt and I finally tried it.  Delicious!  We weren’t sure where the culture had come from, but the milk was certainly not spoiled and the results tasted like the best fresh yogurt we’d ever had.  I’d never have been brave enough to try that kind of experiment, but my husband grew up in Russia where, he tells me, they culture milk all the time. (He also noted that in some areas of the world milk seems to spoil rather than culture.  In Berlin, he said, he only got a nasty inedible product that was definitely bad.)

We refilled the jars each time they almost emptied, and learned a couple of things:  the cultures get weaker as they get older, so you need to refresh them occasionally; and, eventually you need to wash the jars because they get gunky up at the top and start to smell nasty.  We have a nose for it now. When we get the faintest hint of mildew it’s time to swap jars.  To restart we’ve used various live culture yogurt, and recently we tried a yogurt starter powder from EuroCuisine which works really well.

When I did some research on the internet I found a lot of sites that insisted that the yogurt culture had to be kept at a warm temperature, and of course there are lots of yogurt makers to help you do that.  But we found that just putting the culture into the bottom of the jar, pouring in the boxed milk and stirring, covering the jar and leaving it alone for 7-12 hours always does the trick.  You do have to use boxed milk, though, if you don’t want to go through the hassle of heating fresh milk to 185 F before you mix it with the culture.  The purpose of heating is to get the whey proteins to coagulate, which makes for a nice thick, creamy yogurt.  But that’s already been done to the boxed milk, so it’s ready to go, as is.

I also read a ton of stuff about sterilizing jars. We don’t do it.  We put the glass jars through the dishwasher at a minimum of 65C/149F and every so often (when they start to get that mildew smell) I boil the rubber seals on the stove or super heat them in the microwave.  Then I let them dry and put them back on the jars.  We’ve been making and eating our yogurt this way for six months, without a bellyache, so it works for us.  Your mileage may vary.

Our yogurt keeps about a week before it starts to get “old” (tastes fine, but gets kind of grainy and separates in the jar), but it rarely lasts more than a couple of days.  We eat it too fast!  You can do the usual yogurt things with it, like stirring in vanilla extract and cinnamon.  I like to add some to my Blender Gazpacho when I’m in the mood for a creamier soup. I spoon it into my lentil curries.  I slather my chicken with yogurt and tandoori spices before roasting. I also love it mixed with a little cottage cheese, served over fresh pineapple. And sometimes we just drink it straight, with a bit of sugar or honey.  That’s the great thing about yogurt.  I can’t remember how I ever could have lived without my endless supply!

Controlling my weight is all about math. It’s a cold equation:  take in more calories than you use, and you gain weight.  Take in fewer, and you lose weight.  Very simple in concept but it’s damnably hard to practice.  Part of the reason it’s hard to practice is that preparing satisfying low-cal, low-glycemic index meals takes more creativity and effort than cooking tasty, high-calorie foods.  Since I’m currently on a reduction diet, I figured I’d share some of my tricks. One of those tricks is to make my low-cal meals particularly flavorful and to use ingredients that “plump up” the dish by adding thickness, silkiness and a sense of substance.

This particular recipe is for a low-cal rich-tasting soup with a Japanese flair, and it takes about 5 minutes to make. I use red miso, but you can also use yellow with great success.  The quality of the miso makes a difference because it provides most of the soup’s flavor, so don’t stint.  The nori should be as fresh as possible — old, stale nori tastes like cardboard.

*Yes, I know that shrimp farming as currently practiced degrades the environment. Fairtrade is putting in place a new certification program for shrimp, which is good news for those of us who love to eat the tasty critters, but don’t want to contribute to the depletion of oxygen-producing coastal mangrove forests.

We wanted to do something special for New Year’s Eve, so we decided to try the Newstyle Restaurant Tanaka after two of my Japanese clients told me that, in their opinion, it’s the best Japanese restaurant in Bern.  We made our reservations ten days before the event, and were glad we had done so, because when we arrived the host told us they were completely booked for the holiday.

It is less than a 20 minute ride from the Bern Hauptbahnhof to Kehrsatz Nord, and Tanaka is less than a five minute walk from the station, so it was an easy trip. Tanaka is an understated, roomy restaurant with open tables, set far enough apart so that even when the restaurant was full we had privacy.  In the summer, the terrace must be lovely.  Our hosts were quick to seat us and to explain the menu and the open sushi bar, which were were allowed to visit between each of the five courses.  We were told that we could sit at the sushi bar for only 15 minutes between each course, but that turned out to be more time than we actually needed, and we skipped a visit or two anyway because the dinner itself was ample.

Soon after we were seated, we were brought a tuna tatar appetizer — just a mouthful beautifully arranged on a white ceramic soup spoon.  The fresh fish and the light sesame flavoring was an excellent start to the meal. The menu offered a choice between French Onion and miso-salmon soup for the first course, and both of us took the miso soup.  It was tasty but not remarkable, and we happily moved to the sushi bar for our first visit.  Sushi choices were limited to the expected:  tuna (maguro), salmon (sake), mackeral (saba), scallops (hotate), freshwater eel (unagi), salmon roe (ikura), egg-pancake (tamago), and yellowtail (hamachi, also known as King Mackeral) nigiri.  They also served a corn salad nigiri which was odd, but pleasant.  The chefs were quite quick, so we ate all we wanted without feeling any time pressure. All the fish was very fresh and tasty, but I was disappointed by the shari (sushi rice).  Instead of being glossy and sticky, it fell apart quickly as soon as the nigiri was dipped (properly, fish side down) into the soy sauce & wasabi mixture.  (My husband tells me I’m too picky about my rice.)  At any rate, the second batch of rice was a slight improvement over the first, but I wouldn’t go back to Tanaka if I only wanted sushi. (Instead I’d go to Restaurant Kabuki at the Markthalle in Bern, which is actually owned by the same people.)

The menu, on the other hand, was terrific, and they can count on me as a customer any time I’m in the mood for Japanese salads, seafood or beef. Our second course was a leafy green salad with the house dressing, a tart lemon-miso mixture that was superb.  I ordered my salad with scallops, and my husband ordered his with beef.  Both were lightly cooked and extraordinarily fresh. Sadly, I don’t have a copy of the entire menu and it was a long evening, but I can certainly recommend the shrimp tempura, and the sauteed Monkfish with teriyaki foam over fresh vegetables.  (There teriyaki foam was made from whipped eggwhites.)  The highlight of the evening, for me, though was the duck liver over mixed sashimi — the liver seemed to be carmelized on the outside, but was so tender and flavorful that it almost made me weep.  Desert was a lovely mix of treats including a tiny egg custard, a spoon of unbelievably rich chocolate mousse, and a fragrant Earl Grey ice cream.

The ambiance throughout the evening was pleasant.  There was a band with a competent female vocalist, and the music was suitably low-key while the food was being served.  They played for about twenty minutes at a time and then took a break, which worked well.

The meal was 135 CHF per person and the green tea was extra. (In my opinion, it should have been included at the table, as it was while we were at the sushi bar.)  For the quality of the food, the atmosphere, and the hospitality, I’d say it was well worth it.

The following menu was offered:

• Green salad with lime vinaigrette
• Curry-lemon grass soup
• Pork duet with Bernaise sauce Potato-celery puree
• Leaf spinach Chocolate mousse, banana/chili chutney sorbet

for vegetarians, they substituted these for the “Pork duet”:

• Spinach-ricotta ravioli
• Potato-mushroom basket with white wine sauce Belperknolle (Swiss cheese made with truffle)
• Belperknolle (Swiss cheese made with truffle)

Vegetarians forked over 84 CHF, and meat eaters paid 90 CHF. Even in Switzerland, at that price I’d expect something special for my money.

The room was lovely and the wait staff were excellent. Plenty of bread & butter was made available at the tables, and the two different varieties of bread were truly excellent. The salad was fresh and not overdressed. The trouble started with the soup.

Curry lemon-grass soup is usually either coconut milk-based, or simply broth-based — one just doesn’t expect a cream soup. In this case, innovation was not met with success: the lemon grass clashed unpleasantly with the cream which had formed distinct, slimy curdles in the bowl. The initial burst of lemon grass flavor was followed by a flat undertaste of consommé, which, given the viscosity of the preparation, was somewhat distressing.

I had ordered the vegetarian main course and instead of being three served separate preparations decently separated on the plate, as seemed to be indicated in the menu, the potato mushroom basket (about the size of a large chestnut) perched sloppily on top of a small plate of ravioli that was sprinkled with some of the most miserly, transparently thin shavings of cheese one could imagine. The potato basket (thimble!), which was crisp, contained two tiny button mushrooms that tasted canned. The ravioli was so gummy it was impossible to discern the ingredients it claimed to maintain — imagine ravioli reheated for an airplane meal and you’ll get my drift.  The one faint taste of the cheese I had was pleasant, but it might have been more in my imagination than in fact. When I looked around, I saw that both my neighbors had declined to eat one half of the 2-bite-size “pork duet.”  They’d pushed it aside because the amount of fat visible in the cube on the skewer was daunting and both thought it was some sort of bacon.  I don’t mind fat, so I tried it and, in fact, it turned out to be pork breast. Personally, I enjoy pork breast when it’s barbecued with Chinese spices, or when it’s smoked for 8 hours with hickory wood.  But a cheap, fatty cut of meat like that simply has no place in an intimate duet in which each bite is costing the patron a minimum of 10 francs.  In true Woody Allen style, I thought to myself: the food was terrible and the portions were so small!

Sadly, dessert provided no respite.  The “sorbet” was no sorbet, but a small dollop of cream-based banana ice cream of no particular distinction. Nor was it fresh; its texture screamed of stabilizers and, though uneaten portions sat on my neighbors’ plates for quite a while, they never actually seemed to melt. It was accompanied by a flat, square portion of chocolate mouse about three centimenters on a side. A teaspoon of mashed banana concoction (the “chutney ,” apparently) was lumped on one corner. “Gummy”  and “flat” seem to win out as the descriptive words of the day.

When I pay good money for restaurant food, I expect to get good food for the money.  I hadn’t balked, a week ago, when I’d paid almost exactly the same price for the same amount of food at Kabuki restaurant in the Markthalle.  But every taste had been a delight and all the ingredients were fresh and perfectly textured. I will not be returning to any events held at the Schweizerhof.  Nor am I inclined to try their restaurant, Jack’s. It’s a sad thing when a 5-star hotel produces catered meals that drive away customers.