Brataepfel - baked apples

One of simplest desserts and unguilty pleasures in the wintertime is this hot fruit assembly - here is one version I like a lot.

This also goes really well with Gluehwein.

Cut 4 apples in half and take the core out.
Fill each apple with raisins, powder cinnamon over them, and turn them upside down in a baking form. Add some raisins & cinnamon also between the apples. Add brown sugar over the apples, about two to three table spoons, and pour enough red wine (merlot works great, or a dry chianti) over it, enough to cover the bottom of the pan and somewhat the raisins, and add a few pieces of unsalted butter between the apple halves.

Bake this at 400 deg F for about 30 minutes.. and enjoy :)

The classical german version of this is typically without redwine, with whole apples without cores (cut out with a special core cutter), filled with raisins and sugar, mostly cinnamon, and sometimes hazelnuts, and also drizzled with honey.
In some parts of germany the Brataepfel are eaten with a hot vanilla sauce, in my home area rather on their own.

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 :)

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.. :)

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!

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. :)

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!

Dinner for One

As we make the transit into 2009, different cultures have different rituals to celebrate this change - New Yorkers drop the ball, in North Carolina they drop an Opossum, in Naples it's either sex or fireworks, and in Germany it is a dinner.

Not just any dinner.

It's Dinner for One.

This is an old theater play, showing the 90th birthday party of an old lady. She celebrates her birthday since many years with her four closest friends. Unfortunately, she has outlived all of them, but does not want to miss out on her fun dinner party. So, for all toasting to the health of the lady, Butler James has to act each guest's part... All in british english, except for the introduction speaker.

The play was recorded in 1963 with british actors in Hamburg, Germany.
Since 1972 it is broadcasted on every New Year's eve on all local TV channels.

Enjoy the dinner! :)

Drink! More! Wine!

We knew it all along that red wine cannot be bad for you ... It even cuts down cancer risk if you marinate your steak in it first - and it tastes great!

So I've read on BBC, check it out if you need more convincing for pairing your favorite cut with a good glass... I wonder whether internally mixing of the ingredients might help against cancer as well? I've been testing that for a couple of years now, and so far it works..

And, if you're more in the beer-mood, that works just fine as well!
In case you need guidance on cooking with beer: here is a german blog describing pork pot roast in a beer sauce, with potato dumplings - the pictures should guide you along pretty well even if you don't understand german :)

Let me remind you also that in the state of looming and lurking economical crises the consumption of goods is essential to keep the business spirit high and deflation low.. so, keep drinking. Keep marinating. And enjoy the transition into the new year, may it be filled with good food & happy news!

The cheap (and easy) way out

My Flammkuchen was not standing under a perfect Flammkuchen-star...
I don't have the special oven, did not have time to make the dough, and most likely a vegetarian coming over. So, no bacon. No bread dough. No really high heat.

[Here is a recipe for the real thing]

Note that Flammkuchen is not really german - it is from Alsace, i.e. a french region at the border to Switzerland & Germany.

Here's the cheap trick for the veggie-version:
I bought crescent dough - a little too sweet, true, but works; roll dough or pizza dough might be better but I wanted it a little flaky. Just because I felt like it.
Rolled it out on a sheet. Mixed sour cream with cream to add fat (for baking that's better, it crumbles otherwise, said my mom. And she knows these things..). Peppered and salted it. Sliced onion, boiled it shortly in water, then mixed it with walnuts and grape quarters.
The sour cream covers the dough, the onion-grape-nut mix is sprinkled over it, and all that is baked for about 15 minutes at about 375 deg F (or whatever your dough would like to be baked at).
It's a really nice, simple, quick version of vegetarian Flammkuchen!


Another veggie-pizza-like item is this here: I simmerd spinach with butter, mixed roasted sunflower seeds and dried tomatoes in, and ricotta. Salt and pepper, and cover the pizza dough of your preference with



Both are quick and easy, and, obviously, versatile. The spinach-ricotta mix is my favorite, the dried tomato gives it a real kick.

Good stuff. :)

More cookies for the world!

The last cookies want to be eaten before the new year begins - I had to take a quick photo before they vanish: here's a short run down on the essential german christmas cookie varieties!


Let's go around the clock:

12: selfmade Schokoladeprasselplaetzchen, I posted the recipe in the last cookie letter..

1: Anise cookies - they are close to Macaroon-style cookies, with beaten egg white, but also added flower. Very dry and crunchy, and nicely anisy.

3: Cinnamon wafers - those are special, one needs optimally a special device to bake them - like for normal waffles, but heavier, making them thinner, and imprinting different pictures in them.
The recipes I saw are simple and similar to this: 250 g butter, 8 eggs, 400g flour, 400g sugar, 40g cinnamon, mix it up, put little portions into the waffle baker and bake it..

5-6: these are tiny Weihnachtsstollen! Stollen are actually big cakes with dried fruits in them, check out the wiki description, it's pretty complete.. These cookies though are the tiny modern version for people like me... I don't like Stollen.. too much dough. Too much dried fruit that got a strange texture when you bite on it.. But the cookies: one type is filled with ground poppyseeds, one with marzipan, just like the real big Stollen can be, but they are so tiny, that there is a much higher ratio of filling to dough! Lovely... :)
Stollen is typically baked weeks before christmas and stored wrapped in waxpaper in an airtight container.

7: Spritzgebaeck ("spritz" is best translated by 'squirt') - they are made with butter, sugar, eggs, and a little flour. The very creamy dough is put into a bag with tip cut off, and squirted onto a baking sheet in different simple forms (typically just circles). They are best eaten very fresh.

9: Schokolebkuchen - these are similar to little gingerbreads that are covered in dark chocolate. Also best when they are fresh, or stored well and airtight not to get very dry.

10: Anisplaetzchen - yes, another one! This one is acutally an Anisstern, i.e. anise star. Obviously. It is a hazelnut or almond macaroon, with anise sugar icing brushed on.

11: simple, classical hazelnut macaroons - best fresh out of the oven...

That complete's this years christmas cookie section - one should not need many more than these...
Hope you didn't eat too many! :)

Christmas cookies

It's time to get started, seriously. December 6th and no single christmas cookie baked yet? Unbelievable...

But, here we go, the first badge of cookies, quite a selection of quickly whipped up little critters that will disappear in no time, but remind me on how easy it is to make these things, if you're simpleminded like I am.. :)
There they are:
- chocolate cookies ("Schokoladen Prasselplaetzchen"), some covered in hazelnuts, some in sugar
The recipe is from a Chocolate cookbook from teh Bechtermuenz Verlag: melt 200g dark chocolate with 90g butter, add 115g sugar and vanilla, beat in 3 eggs, and then add 200 g flour with 1/2 tea spoon baking powder, and a little salt. They ask for 25 cocoa powder as well, which I did not add. Let the dough sit cold for a bit before you form it into little balls, roll them in ground hazelnuts, or powder sugar, and then bake them for 10-15 minutes at 160 deg C (320 deg F).

- hazelnut macaroons
I had some leftover eggwhite, added sugar and hazelnuts, and baked it at 400 deg F for about 10 minutes.

- coconut cookies
These are not quite macaroons because there's egg yolk in them - that's why they are so yellow. Temperature is about the same as for the hazelnut macaroons.

- Spekulatius cookies
These are based on flour, baking powder, sugar, egg, a little heavy cream, and, spekulatius spice, which contains cinnamon, orange and lemon peel, cardamom, cloves, coriander and nutmeg.

Spekulatius is actually a traditional central european christmas cookie, which is entirely different from what I made here - I just threw somewhat randomly things together that result in something with a good taste and a cookie appearance, and coincidentally I had Spekulatius spice to add to the mix :-)
But here's how real Spekulatius looks like:
Check out this recipe for Spekulatius (supposedly belgian, but they are very similar in Germany), a little more work than I was willing to put in today.. but well worth it!

Happy Nikolaus-Day!

Fire it up!

Another cold day, and the temperatures are a good reason to think up other ways of keeping warm.

Around this time of the year, there is a great tradition in Tuebingen, an very old picturesque town in southern Germany..On the "Haagtorplatz", outdoors, the movie "Die Feuerzangenbowle" is shown at night, when it is freezing cold, sometimes snowing. People gather, wrapped up in woolen scarves to protect themselves from the icy wind, and watch this great movie, and drink the "Feuerzangenbowle", prepared on the spot, for a huge crowd - here's how that looks & sounds:


Feuer (fire) zangen (tongs) bowle (punch) - hear how it's pronounced - is Gluehwein (mulled wine), with a sugar cone placed over it, the sugar cone being soaked in rum, and then lit. The sugar burns, more rum is poured over it, while it burns, it all drips into the mulled wine. When the sugar has all disappeared in the wine, it is ready to drink - warm and highly alcoholic, and really really tasty..

Watch this video to see how it is done - you might want to do that at a good distance from your smoke-detectors...

Spice it up!

It is still cold. My rum has gone the path that all good rum, in my house, has to take eventually, and has disappeared in those last sips of hot tea. Grog, that is.

Now what?

I will follow the leads of my ancestors who had the great insight to heat up whatever alcoholic beverage they could find, and add spices as they found appropriate for the season.

So, how about a glass of hot wine?

The "Gluehwein" (glowing wine, or mulled wine) concept is simple: warm up red wine with sugar and christmas spices, such as cinnamon, cardamom, ginger, nutmeg, and cloves, and a slice or two of orange (some add lemon, I prefer orange). If you let the wine stand for a while first with the spices, and then heat them up to warm them for 10-20 minutes (without ever boiling it) the spices will nicely get into the wine. You can try now and then to test whether it needs more sugar, or more time to spice it up.

Here is a nice recipe you might want to try, and here another one that sounds great as well. Most recipes I found online use water. I never do that, the wine itself with sugar & spices is just fine.. however, admittedly, somewhat deadly. Even more deadly is this one: with brandy! Sounds great..
Try & find out what you like.

In germany, you will find Gluehwein sold on every christmas market, in bottles or cardboard boxes (like juice/milk boxes) for sale in the grocerie store, all ready to warm & drink, and there are Gluehwein-spice teabags as well that can be put into the wine while heating it up.

It'll make you happy and fuzzy and guaranteed very warm..
Enjoy!

Heat it up!

It's frickin' cold. It really is. I've been freezing on my way home, and now, two hours and two bowls of hot spicy thai-style chicken coconut broccoli soup laterI finally feel that my bodytemperature has somewhat recovered.
To get it back up to normal & cozy, I do what is a custom thing to do among freezing people in Germany.. I drink a Grog.
Originally, it may have been hot tea with a splash of rum, possibly after 18th-century British admiral Edward Vernon, nicknamed Old Grog for the grogram fabric cloak he wore (although wiki gives various possible backgrounds), who made his sailors drink rum with water, sugar and lime to help against scurvy.
But the following recipe, the best I know, gives you the spirit of what it is about - a warm, and warming, drink at a cold winter night:

Rum muss.
Zucker kann.
Wasser braucht nicht.

Rum a must. Sugar optional. Water not needed.

If this recipe is too light for you, here is another one from one of my favorite writers that is more "spirited":

Kurt Tucholsky:
"Aus meinem Privatkochbuch: Man nehme guten alten Whiskey, fülle ihn in eine nicht zu kleine Suppenterrine, rühre gut um, und geniesse das Getränk - soweit angängig - nüchtern. Anmerkung: Der Whiskey muss von Zeit zu Zeit erneuert werden."

From my private cookbook: take good old whiskey, fill it into a soup bowl, stir well, and enjoy the beverage - as far as agreeable - without food. Note: the whiskey has to be renewed from time to time.
Note from me: there is no harm in using Rum instead of Whiskey.

Now I feel warmer.. :)

Cordon vert

My last night's dinner reminded me on another variation on the theme of fruit, pork & cheese.. Cordon vert.
No worries, you have not forgotten anything essential, I made that one up. Still good.

A dish very typical for rural area german restaurants is "Cordon bleu" (blue ribbon, supposedly not named after the culinary school, but after the blue ribbon of excellence), also common in Austria, I assume. It is veal cut open and filled with cheese and ham, battered and fried, similar to a "Wiener Schnitzel", just stuffed, as can be seen on the right.


My "cordon vert" (green ribbon), first of all, is with pork, i.e. makes the ham obsolete, is not battered, has a different cheese (correct, my alltime favorite gruyere), and is green, because it contains fruit/veggie matter. The upscale healthy choice, sort of.

This is before frying it:Pork cutlet or pork chop without bones, filled with apple slices and gruyere, fried with black pepper, parsley and spring onions.
This is it when it's done, ready for the happy eater:
Enjoy :)