The Raclettes

Last Friday, an American friend in town invited me to a Girls’ Night In at her apartment. The main event would be melted cheese, or rather, raclette. Raclette is a fatty Swiss cheese that melts easily, tastes good on pretty much everything, and has evolved from a goatherd’s tasty dinner-to-go to a group meal centered around a two-level grill for leisurely eating with more individuality than with cheese fondue. It’s fun for dinner parties or family gatherings like Second Christmas (December 26).

Here’s how it works: the top surface of the grill is for cooking a variety of meats, like ground beef patties and Greek-spiced chicken. The underside of the grill is very hot and conducive to melting. Either you can load up what looks like a sand shovel with veggies, meat, potatoes, etc. + a slice of cheese and lay this under the heat to melt; or you can melt the cheese by itself and then scrape it (with a handily provided scraper, of course) over your collection of veggies, meat, potatoes, etc. Whole recipe books exist which detail what to serve for various themes, but our table was laden with a variety of yummy things to eat: tomatoes, corn, onion, pickles olives, red pepper, mushrooms, tuna fish, tsiziki, potatoes, rice, noodles, flat bread, 3 or 4 kinds of cheese, and ham and pineapple for a Hawai’ian-themed dessert. It looked delicious and tasted even better. The downside to raclette is that because most of what you eat is prepared in little batches, it is difficult to gauge how much you have eaten. So afterwards we played Wii to burn off some of the calories!

This was my first creation: tuna fish, onion, red pepper, and raclette cheese.