Apfelrotkraut - red cabbage with apples

Apfelrotkraut, or red cabbage with apple, is a great veggie dish to accompany my christmas goose.
These are some of the main ingredients: a nice red cabbage, one or two small apples, half an onion, a shallot, and a small wedge of celery root.


Cut up the vegetable, and add a bay leaf, three cloves, a couple of piment (allspice). Start by frying the onions lightly in some goose fat (coincidentally you might have some from that christmas goose you're making right now..) until they are softened but not browned, then add all the vegetable, salt, pepper, let it gain some heat, and then add a few table spoons of apple cider vinegar - I like that, because it adds to the fruitiness of the dish.
Let it simmer with closed lid until the cabbage is soft - it might take about 40 minutes to 1.5 hrs, depending on how much heat you're using. Which means you can optimize the timing to have perfect Rotkraut coincide with a perfect goose...

Christmas goose - Weihnachtsgans

Try this - classical german christmas birdie with classical stuffing - just to get you started, here is how it looks after 2.5 hrs of baking at 350 deg F:


But how did I get there?
If you start with a frozen goose, you might want to thaw it over night in water, i.e. have it in it's plastic bag in the sink covered in water. Mostly the package tells you how long this will take, but 12 hrs is a safe bet.

Take it out of its bag, drain it, wash it, take its innerds and the neck out, and cut some of the big chunks of fat off the orifices.

Here is a picture of the stuffing before it was baked: cut up
- a bunch of parsley,
- 3-4 small apples,
- half an onion and
- 3-4 shallots,
- 3-4 rolls or an equivalent piece of bread (I like whole wheat bread with good crust and lots of seeds). Mix in
- a cup to two of raisins, chop up
- the goose liver and add it, spice the whole thing with
- pepper and salt, and add
- 250 ml milk,
- 2 eggs and just mix it all nicely together. Smell it, it's already a whole pot of goodness and really nice.. :)Preheat the oven to 350 deg F. Put the bird in a pot that you have put some water in - enough to cover the bottom of the pot.
Stuff the bird with the apple mix, put the whole thing into the oven, and set your timer to 15-20 minutes - the reason being that you want to baste the bird with the juices about every 20 minutes. I put a thermometer into the leg too (typically you want it to reach 175 deg F), although with a stuffed bird that is not too helpful - I changed it later measure the stuffing temperature instead, also to reach 175-180 deg F.
At some point during the baking I add the stomach, heart and neck to the pot. They are done in about half an hour to 40 minutes. I just cut up part of stomach and the heart for my kitty cat and tested a little bit of the stomach myself. That makes for two happy predators in this house.. :)

Altogether, for my about 12 pound bird, it should take about 4 hours to be done - although that depends on whether you stuff it or not, and probably a little bit also with what.

I make Apfelrotkraut to go with this - also very typical for a german christmas dinner.
Merry christmas!

Currywurst revival - BBC close-up

As you might remember, I've written about the famous Currywurst before (at the occasion of eating it in Berlin, and another time for its birthday), but this here caught my eye today - check out this short & sweet BBC report about Berlin's Currywurst!

The music is from Udo Lindenberg - a german musician/songwriter who wrote lots of good music, as this politically & culturally important adaptation of the "Chattanooga Choochoo", which was a funny but loud critique on the DDR/east german regime - they did not like it.
You can listen to the Currywurst song with underlaid supportive/descriptive images in this video :)

Lime-Chili Baiser/Meringue

I'm in the mood for a lemony-spicy dessert - it's too cold for icecream - I'm not in the mood for creamy stuff anyway, and would like some kind of crunch experience.. and it should be something I have not tried before.

How about lime-chili-baiser?

Baiser (which you might know better as Meringue) are an unusual pastry, simply eggwhites wipped stiff with sugar, and baked until completely dry. In this case, for 2 hours at 266 deg F or 130 deg C.
Classically, they are used as a cake base, as baskets to be filled with fruits, as little desserts and ornaments.
In that sense, I'm doing a very classical thing here, just the flavoring is a bit .. unusual.
I used a zester to peel the skin of two limes:


The zest I put in a food processor with 225 g sugar, until the sugar has a lightly green tint and the zest shows up as little green speckles.
This I put in the fridge over night, first because I did not have time that night to finish the Baiser, second in the hope that the lime flavor would intensify with time.
Today, I wipped 5 egg white with the sugar until it was stiff:
Then I measured off little "dumplings" from this baiser-dough with two spoons onto a baking sheet, and baked them at 266 deg F for two hours. This is how they look afterwards:
Now, this was the version with pure lime, assuming that one cannot go wrong with this flavor, and having enough left over to mix with a chili baiser that would be much more risky..

Same procedure with the chili: I put half a red jalapeno pepper with 100 g sugar into the processor until the sugar was lightly reddish/pink. I removed the bigger chunks of pepper at that point, because the hotness will definitely intensify with time and baking. It should be a nice kick, not a punch in the face..

This sugar I whipped with 2 eggwhites, and lifted that carefully under the left over lime baiser - creating a red-green marbled baiser, that is limey and spicy and sweet. :)


Note to self - and you - the chili version needs some experimentation. Actually, zest of two limes for 4-5 egg whites turned out perfect, creating a wonderful lime smell and flavor, which turns down the sweetness a little and gives the whole pastry a real unique touch, to the point that you can eat lots of them without feeling sugared-out. Very very nice.
I think, next time I would add chili to that mix, rather than replace part of the lime with a pure chili-baiser, simply because the lime works so well, and the chili adds an accent which is very nice, but does not tone down the sweetness. My chili turned out too weak, you had a slight aftertaste, a light hotness in the background which was not bad but way weaker than I had intended. Next time - more chili? Cayenne pepper? The concept is great though, and the lime baiser are phantastic....

Crazy fusion

My friend says I am the craziest fusion cook he knows. Him being crazy himself, I take it as a compliment, and feel compelled to share what triggered his remark.

I wanted to cook something quickly. I had chicken. Spaghetti are fast. And I had fresh tomatoes from the garden of good friends. There are always onions and various spices around.
Simple.
But now about that madness aspect of it...
Take some garam masala and curry powder (or ingredients thereof of your choice), fry it in a little olive oil, add some chopped onion and black pepper, until the spices' smell reaches its peak. Then add the chicken (pieces of breast meat in that case) to brown it and get it happily accustomed to its flavoring friends. When the chicken is nice and brown, add some tomatoes, and to give it a little edge, some apple cider vinegar. Just a dash will do to bring out the tomato acidity a little better and contrast what is coming next: add the raisins.
Oh, I forgot that chili pepper I threw in with the spices for good measure.. but you probably thought of that yourself..And this is how this fused italian curry looks on spaghetti..
Oh, and what my friend means with "crazy" is "crazy good"..

Kaesespaetzle

Previously I have described how to make Spaetzle, the egg noodles of various shapes that are typical for the german south, specifically Schwaben. But, once you got these beautiful noodles, what to do with them?
Traditionally they are a side dish to a sunday potroast with a nice dark gravy, or some other piece of meat with sauce - or you use them for Kaesespaetzle.

Here is how to do that:
you start with the simple stuff: grate some cheese. I typically use gouda, but this time I used a mix of emmental and gouda, to mix it up and give it a little more of an edge.

Chop up a big onion, or a couple of small ones, and brown them lightly in a pan, stirring a lot, making sure they get golden and soft, not crispy. When they are happy, set them aside.

Next, prepare Spaetzle: eggs, flour, salt, a little water (check back on my previous post for the details), scrape them off a board into boiling water, and set aside for what you got in store for them.

Set the oven to 400 deg F.
Find a big baking pan. Put a layer of spaetzle in to the pan, then a layer of onions, then cheese, then again spaetzle, onion and finally cheese again.
Let it bake for about 20 minutes (til the cheese is browned on top, don't take it out as early as I did here.. but we were hungry..), get the salad to go with it ready and enjoy traditional Kaesespaetzle!
My friend Dennis took this beautiful photo of the last one I made - next time I'll make it we'll see whether we get a shot of a cross-section.. :)

Magic in La Cordonnerie

If you ever go to Paris, go to La Cordonnerie (20, rue St-Roch, Paris 75001, France ). Here are some tripadvisor reviews - this is where we found out about it, looking for a restaurant close to where we were staying.

In my opinion, La Cordonnerie is outstanding in style, setup, quality, taste, and the art going into each dish. We had a table right next to the chef and his surprisingly tiny kitchen. He told us a little about the daily specials while chopping chives and onions, and when he had more time, came to our table to explain each dish, with emphasis on the specials, and showed the ingredients, and, whenever he had something plated for another table, the final piece.

We decided to try them all - three starters, two entrees:
- Smoked salmon mousse in crispy fried crepes -
- Arugula salad with fried mushrooms (Girolles, similar to chanterelles)
- Pan-fried foie gras with balsamic-cocoa happiness
- Seaered scallops in tarragon sauce with couscous and green beans
- veal stew in mustard sauce with potatoe gratin and pinto beans
All of these dishes had a combination of textures and flavors that made them very exciting and memorable. The most impressive was the crema di balsamico with cocoa surrounding the foie gras - for me the most unexpected combination and amazingly good. The scallops were seared to almost crispy caramelization on one side, much more than we would have thought possible, but tender and perfect inside, and wonderfully tasty with their tarragon sauce.

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The really unusual thing was that although some of the combinations seemed at first thought odd to me (which I definitely go for..) they tasted so well together that it became entirely natural to think of them as made for each other. The combined tastes made perfectly sense.

I found another, really cool food blog telling about La Cordonnerie and chef Hugo - Angela experienced a different special (perch with tarragon) and has more pictures to show (the one on top is linked from that blog, actually..) - we were simply too perplexed and captivated by what we saw and smelled and tasted to even remember taking photos..
Go to Paris! And go have your perfect dinner!

Cheeeeeese...

Cheese is at home here. The best way to taste that is to experience the traditional, deep-rooted specialties Switzerland has to offer, for example in Zuerich. After a day of exploring bridges bridging the Sihl, churches with varying sized clock faces, and brigthly colored glass windows, photographing people and places while roasting in the much hotter sun than we had expected while drinking cool beers, we went to Swiss Chuchi, the "swiss Kitchen", to indulge in Cheese Fondue and Raclette.

The cheese fondue reminded me in flavor very much on what I had tasted 10 years earlier, when my at that time roommate from the swiss canton Wallis made the fondue the way he had eaten it growing up - rubbing the bottom of a clay pot with garlic, mixing starch and kirschwasser (cherry schnaps), grating raclette cheese and appenzeller, if I remember correctly, half and half, and melting the cheese in the clay pot over medium heat, adding starch-schnaps to bind it and stirring patiently, continuously, vigorously, and yes, arm-tiringly. At Swiss Chuchi, you'll be served your clay pot on a little heater full of perfectly molten, creamy cheese happiness, a basket of bread cubes, and a fork to pick up the bread and stir the cheese with it and ... indulge. Yes, I know, I am repeating myself. :)


From what I could find online, I understood that the fondue here, called a traditional Waadtlaender fondue, is made using Greyerzer of various ages. It tasted really good, and like the home-made cheese fondue I knew. There were lots of yummy garlic slices in it as I noticed when finally reaching the pot's bottom, and the "Nonne" was very nice, but just a little crispy as my flame went out a little too early. I could not finish my fondue, the portion is clearly too generous for my stomach (surprising)..
As for the raclette, the restaurant is using the modern raclette approach (here I found a few more options to buy), a little electrical raclette oven with small pans to lay a slice of raclette cheese in and let it melt in the oven - my friend became more and more courageous at extending the cheese melting duration and finally reached a level of bubbliness and light caramelization reminding me of the origins of this dish - imagine the shepherds up on the alm, having a bag of potatoes, and maybe some pickles, and all the dairy they can get from their cattle for the whole summer. They boiled some potatoes, put a quarter cheese round on a stick, held it over the fire and scraped the molten yumminess onto the potatoes. The cheese must have been creamy, maybe lighlty burned at the rinds, dripping of the chunk and smelling just like that raclette cheese from this little raclette oven..
Swiss chuchi serves raclette with a cute Jute-bag of boiled potatoes, pickle slices, pickled little baby corn and mushrooms, and pearl onions. It can be ordered with various meat add-ons - my friend opted for rabbit, that comes in thin slices that can be fried right there at the table on the griddle part of the little raclette oven.
We were, as one would expect, sleepy after this meal and had to take and extended cheese-processing nap...

Kniddelen... Mehlknepp..

The last weeks, and months, have seen me crazy and busy, once more, so cooking was reduced, documentation was little, and writing about food was boiled down to nothing. Now I am sitting, after a cheesy dinner, in my hotel room in Zuerich, enjoying the end of my first day of real VACATION and finally have the time and pleasure to continue what got started by a dinner my parents once had.


A few months ago I promised myself to cook Lea Linster's luxembourgish kniddelen, that are just slightly different from the "Mehlknoedel" of my home of Saarland. And I did cook them!
Here is the procedure step by step as a picture book -

Cut bread into cubes, mix with flour, add vegetable broth and eggs to form a dough.




Form dumplings from the dough and boil them until they do not drow in the water any longer but swim to the top.
Then make a sauce from fried bacon and milk, and add to the dumplings.
As you can see, it is a farily simple dish, as many traditional meals, making the best out of a few ingredients, cheap for not too well to do locals, to feed a family with the little one always has in store..

The wonderful thing about these Knoedel/Kniddelen/Knepp is that they really taste like home to me - a rare thing to find in a cookbook, but maybe not if that cookbook was written by one of the best chefs out there - thank you, Lea Linster, for sharing this little gem!

Potapigrapesagne

With all that talk about swine flu I got inspired.
Actually, that's a lie.
I just have a thing for pork in combination with all fruits I can find in my kitchen. Somehow it always works.

It may have to do with my mom's cooking.
It may be related to the sweet&savory combination dishes that are normal in Saarland.
Or it plain and simply just tastes good..

Here just quickly another example in the long list of fruity animals I have delivered at this site already -
olive oil in the pan, lay it out with potato slices. They fry a tiny bit, optimally to get them a bit brown (my impatience and hunger did not allow that to happen this time..)
Then lay thin pork cutlets on top of the potatoes, add a layer of grapes, then a layer of apple, throw some spring onion, thyme (generous!), black pepper and salt over this potapigrape-sagne, cover with a lid, set to something in the medium range and walk away.
Eventually, come back (I would suggest after 15 minutes; smell-driven also earlier).This is one of those dishes that you will keep in your list of quick and dirty yet amazing. Promised. :)

Frozen easterbunny special

This is the last of this year's easter presents:


Easter ice cream!

Take 200g carrot puree, add some lemon juice (probably 1-2 table spoons) and 150 g sugar. Adjust the flavor with a little bit of maple sirup, and mix 1/8 l heavy cream into it. Cool that mixture down in the fridge, and when it's cold, stir it well again (or don't if you'd like it to be orangy-marbled) and pour it into your ice cream machine. After 20-40 minutes you should have some beautiful creamy carrot-bunny-easter-special ice cream, that you can serve with caramelized walnuts.

Keep in mind - I have not yet tried this recipe myself (I create to many recipes and can't keep up with testing them..).
Depending on your taste & how sweet your carrots are you might have to play a little with the proportions, but based on my icing-experience this should make a real cool easter treat :-)

Introducing: Icecream Madness

Last week I had a visitor, Christian, who loves ice cream and always discovers the newest, strangest and most delicious ice cream creations in the freezer section, local ice creamery and private cookbook of secret ice creamers.. When I saw him last, he introduced me to Pomegranate-Chocolate, which is outstanding. This time, in Nashville, there were no really wild things to be found, but we ate lots of ice cream anyway...

This morning I remembered that there is one ice creamer in Nashville who is really crazy. She designs ice cream that no one has ever heard of, creations so utterly unspeakable that I have to talk about them here, starting now, tasting soon... Without further introduction:

Welcome to the new section of TasteBuds: Icecream Madness!, by Elin

My ice cream inventions date back to my first ice cream maker, obtained as a gift from my dear & master-chef mom in 1996, I believe. Maybe christmas 1995. A while ago.

I started simple: lemon ice cream, the most difficult and complex of the simple flavors that I know of. I tend to eat lemon ice cream in any ice cream store, first thing, to find out how they do it, what their philosophy is about and whether I wanna steal their recipe..
After years of making cream, yoghurt, and buttermilk based lemon flavors I figured that it is one of those things that one day I will discover perfection and die with heavenly lemon ice cream on the tip of my tongue.
So, I haven't tried anymore, I'll start again maybe when I turn 80 or so.. just in case I'm right.

After the first lemon, I became inventive. Some of it is actually quite good, although opinions varied about the smoked trout ice cream on horseradish whipped cream..

I wrote my private ice cream cookbook (and one I gifted to my mom a few years back, with pencil drawings of each recipe), containing some tested and lots of never realized recipes, ranging from classic sweet to savory, from standard compositions to crazy concoctions - be prepared, they will make their entrance into the world on online cooking.

Now.

:)

Easterbread

Happy easter!
As you can see, the easter bunny dropped in for a visit!
..and, no, this is not my cat but some poor kitty that could not fend of his/her can-opener's silliness and ended up engraved as feline easter bunny in the net.


Eastern in Germany is still a big holiday, actually the most important one after christmas. People visit family, children receive gifts, there is a lot of cooking and eating, and most of this is still somewhat traditional, at least there is a common framework to it all.

And it starts with breakfast (let me skip Karfreitag etc. which is not commonly observed, unless church is involved, and go straight for the good food..)
Besides the religious aspects of it, Eastern is a holiday that revolves around symbols for renewal, fertility and spring. Easter sunday starts in that spirit with a special breakfast, sporting more eggs and presenting them much nicer than usual.

Traditional easterbread dough is braided around hardboiled eggs and then baked - so your first food will be fresh, warm bread, from white flour, sometimes with raisins, very light and fluffy, typically with a crunchy crust - but also an egg, perfectly held in place by the bread like in a little basket, sometimes painted before baking.

German breakfast typically consists of bread, butter, sweet spreads such as marmelades and honey, boiled eggs, and sometimes sliced sausages/salami/ham and cheeses. Thus, while the general notion of bread, egg and things for a sunday breakfast is not out of the normal, the specialty about this breakfast is the presentation as well as the recipe for easter bread itself.

From the above bread version one makes typically one for each person at the table; but the larger part of the breakfast bread will be coming from this:


In my case, this is the same dough recipe as the egg-basket, only that this bread is braided and bigger. It is a yeast & white flour dough, with milk as the main liquid, some molten butter & eggs (about 3 eggs for 700 g flour). Typically it has a little bit sugar in it as well, and sometimes raisins; I added flax and sunflower seeds. The proportions of liquid to flour depend on how your flour behaves and on the size of the eggs - start with 1 cup or ~ 250 ml liquid, but be prepared to double that as you need it to be able to shape the dough but not have it stick to your hands like wet clay.. I typically warm up the milk with some sugar (~ 100g) and butter (about a stick, i.e. about 125 g) and then stir in my dried yeast and let it go for a little while. Dry yeast does not need that treatment, but it smells awesome..
Treat it like a normal yeast dough - let it rise, knead it, and give it some warmth and time before shaping it into the braids.
Brush it with egg yolk mixed with a little bit water, and bake it at 350 deg F for 50 minutes.

And then: have a wonderful breakfast!

Carrots for the easter bunny

Where there is an easter bunny there must be carrots.

While this is not a real traditional saying, there is certainly truth to it. During the easter holidays, carrots show up in form of Marzipan treats, as sugary decoration on pies, and, most importantly, in the carrot cake.

My version, as almost any other I've ever seen, has a combination of all, sugary, marzipany, and real veggie carrots to make sure the bunny gets plenty of vitamine A..

The recipe is based on a simple cake batter: equal parts (weights) flour, sugar, butter & eggs are mixed together, with some baking powder. To make it a carrot cake, one essentially replaces the flour with carrots, and, adds typically ground almonds, or, what I like a lot, ground walnuts. Either tastes great. I usually use 300 g each, and instead of 300 g flour I'd use 250 g finely shredded carrots + 50 g flour + 100 g walnuts. I also replace the usual white sugar with brown sugar, and some dark honey.
All that will make a thick flowing batter that is baked at 375 deg F (170-180 deg C) for about an hour.
The decoration, as seen on my cake on top, is easily made by squirting bought colored frosting onto parchment paper. Try to squirt it on in carrot shape to begin with, but it can be formed using a wet finger. Let it dry, and let the cake be cooled down before moving the deco carrots onto the cake..


Only with such a cake to hope for, the easter bunny may be in the mood to lay those nicely colored eggs in the carefully prepared nests which we as a kid still had to build from moss that we collected around the house. A nice, soft, green nest that would be filled the next day with eggs and chocolate and all kinds of cool things a rabbit could carry on his back...


Coloring eggs by the way is real fun, and can be done in very natural & creative ways - for example, onion skin is a good coloring agent - wrap the eggs in several layers of onion skin, tie it up with some thread and boil it - use yellow and red onions for different colors. Wrap the eggs first in textured cloth, then surround that by onion, or blue cabbage, and boil it - the egg will have a nice texture, showing the structure and boundaries of the cloth wrap.
However, buying coloring agents will help you to those very strong colors, of course. Onion peel is not quite that potent.

If there are kids around, I leave a little dough of the carrot cake out before the carrots are added, and bake it as two cookies that are flown together - when it is done, I carve out ears from the one "cookie", paint a face on the treat and glue it into a small nest that I made from green frosting. You can even "glue" some little sugar eggs into the nest, that also helps stabilizing the cookie bunny standing up.

After all that carrot cake, that makes one real happy easterbunny! :)

Lea in Luxembourg

Luxembourg is a beautiful tiny country between France, Germany and Belgium. It's native language sounds like a mix between french and german (here is a sound example with german translation), and is very similar to the local dialect of my home state Saarland, which is immediately bordering Luxembourg. The two languages are actually more similar to each other, than my dialect is to german. Naturally, the food and local traditions I grew up with are also very common to Luxembourg, and all this closeness gives me a sense of family pride when I write about Lea Linster.

Lea Linster received the Bocuse d'Or in 1989 (look at photos from this year's challenge), as the first, and to this day still the only, female chef. My parents recently had the "Menu BOCUSE D'OR" at Lea's restaurant, and my mom described it as "Just perfect." I never heard a rating that simple, almost speechless and admiring from her - she has praised chefs before, but perfect? I'm stunned. It sounds like it is not only worth writing home about, but also very worth looking at the menu a little bit closer. Here are two courses of the Menu Bocuse d'Or, photographed by my parents.

LOBSTER
Cooked in stock, unshelled, served with a small salad, tarragon sauceLAMB
Saddle of lamb in potato crust from the oven, in itss juice perfumed with rosemary

Lea is a very personable warm lady, and inquired about me when my parents told her they would come back with me some day, and that they took pictures of the meal to send them to me - when she heard that I like to cook, and that last time I visited home was especially into all that local traditional food that you cannot get anywhere else, she got excited and gave them a present for me: her cookbook, with a really sweet note she wrote to me:
Here is also a link to some of her recipes. Her cookbook is on the way to me, and she told my parents that there is also a great recipe for kniddelen in it, which are known as "Mehlknepp" or Mehlknoedel in Saarland. I look forward to reading her book, rediscover this dish, and will try it out and report as soon as I got the book in my hands.

Until then, when you go to Luxembourg, visit Lea Linster, give her my best regards and thanks, and have a "perfect" dinner. :)

Food for thought: The Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus Oracle

Nice toy on iGoogle, for those who use & love words, and those who need to brush up their vocabulary, and finally those who are just a little lost in this world.
I currently subscribe to the latter interpretation of self.

Clicking "random word" oracles:
american lobster
cordon bleu -> blue ribbon
trespass -> transgress & encroachment

Now I will drink my wine and try to interpret the hell out of this..
What do your oracles tell you?

Apple of many seeds

Sometimes the world is so in admiration of something, that it cannot get enough of it - over and over you encounter this one single item, as if there is nothing else noteworthy in this life. So, you trust the spirits, the vibes, the improbability accumulation and your coincidence detector, and enjoy what is offered to you.

Good choice!

That's how it felt to me last week, when I repeatedly encountered pomegranates in all forms and disguises.A worthy fruit to be detected, discovered, and deliciously combined with flavors, textures and colors.

So, what did I encounter? I'll focus on two only, to not overwhelm the worthy fruit-lover..

First, pomegranate icecream with chocolate chips. DARK chocolate, that is. I know people who cannot stand the combination of fruit & choc, but I really love it. Pomegranate is the perfect candidate for such a mix, because it brings a robust acidity into the marriage, paired with distinct fruitiness - together with the rich aroma of cocoa beans this adds up to something that does not allow not to be eaten up. Entirely. And still, you feel really okay afterwards!
Second: The next wonder of the pomegranate world I met was at "Jayne's gastropub" in San Diego. If you're in the area, check it out - it is a beautiful little restaurant, all european feeling, where me and my two german friends were debating which place in Germany (or France?) (or where?) this looked similar to. Beautiful tile floor (reminding me of my grandparents house), walls half dark wooden, half white, covered with large mirrors, a british flag and other treasures from across the sea.. the kitchen open, visible from the bar, with beautiful stainless steel gas stove in action - sip on your first glass of Cabernet and enjoy the skillful wrist movements of the chef that let the skillet merely wiggle, but every food in it jumps up & down, just like you inside. I'm like a big kid in a toystore in these kind of places.

Here is what I ate:
Oven Roasted Maple Leaf Duck Breast potato gnocchi, savoy cabbage, spinach, pearl onions, shitake & cremini mushrooms, pomegranate balsamic reduction
The picture I found is only similar, I was too focused during dinner to remember taking a picture.. my duck actually was medium rare, nice and red inside, grilled & almost crispy outside - the gnocchi and vegetable were tossed together, a really great combination, gnocchi, savoy cabbage & spinach? Man, so phantastic.. Savoy cabbage is pure magic anyway..
But the pomegranate sauce was really interesting - I'm not entirely convinced that there is something gained from adding balsamico to pomegranate, because they both hit the same spots, fruity, only lightly sweet, acidic.. but that is just me wondering - the result, along with the duck dipped in it, was beautiful and very tasty.

Let this be enough of my pomegranate encounters. Check out this site here to dive deeper.. enjoy & let me know how your encounters turned out!

Happy Wurst!

Last year I reported about my culinary experiences in Berlin - now this beautiful buzzing place of is celebrating the king of german fastfoods, as you can see in this video:

Happy 50th birthday, dear Currywurst!

Muesli-daughters and culinary health advice

Odd tidbits about food and science, or tidbits of food with odd science... I don't know anymore which is which..

Eat Muesli to conceive a baby-girl! Eat more calories to get a boy! However, ignore statistics if relying on that sort of measure. But, it can't hurt to try (in case of you wanting a boy it just might get you a little on the heavy side..)

Drink coffee to have those fun hallucinations! Why spend tons of money in shady places for getting and using nasty drugs, if you can have it all at home every morning, during work all day and every one encountering you while getting yourself high just gives you that relaxed smile of mhmmm.. that fresh coffee smell...

About that coffee.. not only may it get you to see and hear things.. but do lots of good for women's health!
- Ward off dementia
- Improve sex-drive
WebMD.com has this to say about the magic potion some of us ingest daily, in more or less vast quantities: "Want a drug that could lower your risk of diabetes, Parkinson's disease, and colon cancer? That could lift your mood and treat headaches? That could lower your risk of cavities?"


Another, less and less debated item is my favorite fountain of youth, red wine..

Taken together this sums up to: me as low-calory muesli- and vegetable-eating, coffee- and red wine-consuming woman should stay lean, healthy-hearted, non-dement and otherwise protected from neural issues, won't have cancer, will grow old & be sexually active, and follwing that most likely will have a daugther.

Welcome to the modern ways of reading the future from coffee grounds.. :)