Swiss Food

Because August 1st is a relevant day in the life of me and I wanted to live in Geneva after visiting it just once, I thought I’d play along with Zorra’s Swiss National Day event.
Either make something Swiss, or make something red and/or white.

My knowledge of Swiss foods doesn’t extend beyond rösti, müesli, cheese, chocolate, fondue, and some mysterious dish generally referred to as “raclette” which I suspect involves cheese, but that won’t stop me.

With the recent trip and the moving and me finding out about it relatively late, this is going to be something simple. Initially I wanted to make some rösti because I love that stuff and unlike the other Swiss foods I know about, it’s vegan by default. However, when looking for some instructions, I came across this lovely recipe video mentioning something about chilling the potatoes overnight being necessary. And with the deadline being today, well, that wouldn’t have worked.
It also taught me Dutch people tend to mispronounce rösti, even when they remember the ümlaut.

So I googled for a bit, working my way through a variety of NOT VEGAN meat-and-potato-and often-also-cheese dishes before realising I’d probably best stick to some traditional Birchermüesli. While I’ve spent a good many mornings breaking my fast with something the label insisted was, in fact, müesli, or at the very least muesli or even cruesli, I don’t recall ever eating anything like the original version.
So. No time like the present, eh? And what better occasion than Swiss celebration.

While there are many variations, I figured I’d best start with the basics, which also serves the purpose of this post best.

Some of the recipes I found specified that the apples should be the sour sort. While I like my apples, I’m not sure which ones are generally seen as sour, though I wouldn’t be surprised if the Granny Smith was on that list. I just got whatever organic local kind I could find at the supermarket, which ended up a good old-fashioned jonagold.

What I made:

How I made it:

-Soaked a tablespoon of oats in three tablespoons of water and a tablespoon of (bottled, not freshly squeezed) lemon juice.
-Let it stand for a while.
-Added a tablespoon of soyamilk.
-Cut a jonagold apple, with my Swiss Army knife of course, and shredded it over the oats.
-Mixed it all up.
-Ate it, enjoyed it.

I think I may have messed up with the quantities somewhere. I ended up with a little bit of oatmeal-like stuff and a lot of grated apple.

As for some more random Swiss-ness, mixing it up with some veg*an-ness, there’s this vegetarian restaurant, Hiltl, in Zürich, which is over a hundred years old. I want to visit it.

And to mix random Swiss-ness up with some lovely piping, something I loved before I even knew about veganism, I give you this, a video of an old Swiss bagpipe.