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....