A homemade life

Last weekend, I felt the need to indulge myself. So I went to the bookstore to pick a book to read explicitly and purely for the joy of reading. But however much I tried in the novel section, I found myself drawn again and again to the cookbooks. Finally, I found a happy compromise in A Homemade Life, by Molly Wizenberg. I had read about this cookbook cum memoir some time ago in Sunset Magazine, and I am awed by the clean beauty and lovely writing on Molly's blog, Orangette. This, I think, is one of the most well written blogs I know, every entry is flawless and professional (although sometimes a bit on the long side, for my personal taste). So I was looking forward to reading an actual book by this very same author.

I really enjoyed her writing, as always. It's just beautiful. She put in an essay that she wrote in high school, about how she started cooking, and, I swear to god, she wrote better in high school than I will in my whole life, ever. The story is uplifting- In a nutshell, she grows up in a food centered family, falls in love with France (duh! :)), and, when she finds herself unexcited by her anthropology graduate studies, drops out, moves to Seattle and starts a blog about food, Orangette. Much to her own surprise (not to mine, when you look at the blog), Orangette quickly develops a following (these days, any one of her posts will generate several hundred comments). To make the real life fairy tale complete, she meets her lovely prince and future husband through the blog when he contacts her about one of the recipes. The book ends with a recipe for wedding cake, of course.   

Although I liked the book as a whole, I wasn't too excited by the format of mixing recipes in with the memoir part. Although I enjoy reading cookbooks per se, I find that recipes embedded within a story, like here, somehow interrupt the flow of the tale, and thus take away some of the joy of immersing myself in it. So I ended up skipping over the recipes while I was reading, although many of them are gorgeous by themselves.
I doubt that I will use it much as a reference for cooking (there are too few recipes for me to consider & use it as a "cookbook"). This is too bad, because the recipes sound quite tasty. In my perfect world, Molly would have written two books, one a memoir to read, and one a cookbook to devour. Perhaps the cookbook is still out there, who knows?

Spring

One of the ways to tell that spring is here is if there are people besides you in the community garden. Last weekend, we finally met some of our old gardening friends whom we have missed all winter. They were preparing their beds for spring planting, and we ended up being presented one of their phenomenal red cabbages. I had been admiring those cabbages all winter, asking myself why they were so much bigger and prettier than ours. I'm still not sure, but since they planted earlier, my guess would be they simply got more of the late summer warmth.

Red cabbage, when made the traditional German way, is very good, but always reminds me of Christmas, which is when it is usually served with an apple stuffed roasted goose and potatoes. In order to get around that association, I usually spice up red cabbage when I make it outside of the holidays.

Today, I made honey, beer and mustard braised red cabbage.

I apologize for the vague recipe, but it's one of those improvised dishes that I've never measured the ingredients for.

one head of red cabbage, central stem removed and sliced into fine strips
one large red onion, halved and sliced into thin strips
butter
about 1 tablespoon honey
about 1 tablespoon mustard
about one tablespoon dark raisins
about 2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
about 1 cup of beer (you can substitute chicken broth)

melt butter in a large pan over low-medium heat, add onions and slowly cook until translucent, but not browned, about 10-15 minutes. This takes a little time, but it's well worth the patience- the onions will turn slightly sweet. Add shredded cabbage and other ingredients, turn, cover the pan with a lid, and keep braising over low-medium heat for about 25 minutes. There should always be a little bit of liquid at the bottom to prevent things from sticking, so if you opened the lid too frequently and too much evaporated, just add a little more beer or chicken broth. Season with salt, pepper, and chili flakes if you like it hot (I do). Goes well with beer, of course.

What to do with kale

I didn't know what to do with kale when I first planted it. Of course, there is the traditional German way of making green kale, if you have an hour or three to spare. But a) I usually don't, and b) I wanted a way of cooking them that preserved the vitamins (kale is one of these so called "superfoods").

This dish became one of my weeknight standards:

Heat pasta water, start frying a pack of Italian sausage mix over medium heat (I usually don't add fat to my nonstick pan- the sausage mix has enough. You can substitute cut up sausages, bacon, or strips of roast chicken breast, if you like). Cook the pasta (I used my first ever home made tagliatelle today, but spaghetti is my standard) according to the package instructions. Meanwhile, wash a bunch of kale (the last of my red Russian kale today- lacinato is also great), cut in thin strips, and add to the boiling pasta two minutes before pasta is done. then drain everything through a colander, toss with sausage mix in the frying pan, and serve with salt, pepper, and grated parmeggiano.

Birds!

Today, I finally planted the lettuce seedlings that I had been nursing along for the last two months. They were magnificent plants, a mix of endives, radicchio, and various heirloom lettuces. I went home for a delicious lunch of just-picked cauliflower, steamed and sprinkled with butter roasted almonds. When I got back to the garden two hours later, my lettuce was gone. I could still see a few stalks here and there, but except for that, it had been razed.

Sigh.

Well, at least they left my savoy cabbage and kale seedlings alone. For now.

Guess I'll seed some more lettuce, then. They will have a better chance of survival later in the season, I hope, when the rest of the gardening community remembers that they have a plot, and my lettuce isn't the only fresh yummy greens in the whole garden. Or maybe I should listen to my husband and make some wire cages, just to get them through the worst...

Leftovers

One of the lessons I learned when I made Tortellini for the first time is that you need a lot less filling than you would think. We ate the remaining roast Garlic/Butternut Squash/Goat cheese mash today in an omelet. Quick and scrumptious. Perfect weeknight food.

For those fledgling cooks amongst you

To make an omelette, open eggs into a bowl. Depending on appetite, plan for 2-3 eggs per adult. Add a small shot of milk, salt, and pepper, and whisk until blended.

Meanwhile, heat about a tablespoon of oil in a skillet over medium-high heat. Pour in egg mixture. Immediately put your filling on top of the still liquid omelet. Fillings could be anything from plain grated cheese to cooked veggies, hummus, avocado dip or any other tasty spread. Put the filling in a line in the center of the omelet, so that it looks like a circle (the omelet in the pan) bisected in the middle by a vertical line (your filling). Careful not to tear the thing, push a spatula under the sides of the omelet and fold them over towards the center. They should overlap each other in the middle to form a tube with your filling running along the center, so aim at folding over about a third of the total width of the omelet. If the sides of the omelet are not completely set at this point, that is perfect, because they will stick together better once it is done. Now keep cooking until the underside is golden brown, turn around, cook again until the folded sides are golden brown, and let it slide onto a plate. The whole process is very quick, about 3 or 4 minutes per omelet, and there is hardly any wash up, just the bowl, the whisk, the spatula, and the pan.

More Pasta Love

Again inspired by the beautiful food photography in my friend’s Jamie Oliver cookbook, I went all out today and made Tortellini from scratch. I used the same dough recipe as before, but I folded some of our own chervil leaves in while rolling out the dough, for optical effect. As filling, I mashed up a few cloves of roasted garlic, some roasted butternut squash (our own- the next-to last one), goat cheese, and just a bit of salt and pepper.


It took a bit of tweaking to figure out the right size for the dough squares, and how much filling to use so it doesn’t squeeze out when you close the square. Also, I had no idea how to fold the things, and my first attempts were more reminiscent of preschool pottery than Tortellini. Here’s where I wished I’d had a Nonna. This is exactly the kind of thing you learn simply by hanging around the kitchen as a child, just because you’ve seen someone else do it before. I guess I can’t complain too much, though... my „Nonnas“ taught me how to bake German christmas cookies and roll rouladen instead.

Anyhow, I can’t wait to eat them. I think I might serve them to the friend who loaned me the machine, sometime when she doesn’t have to work the next day.

Jaime!

My friend has one true love. No matter what others there may be in her life, she has always loved, and will love forever, Jamie Oliver, the naked chef. I hadn't paid much attention to him previously (c'mon, if you have to undress to get attention, what does that imply about the quality of your food?), but little did I know. Recently inspired by Hank Shaw to try something new and make my own pasta, I borrowed a pasta maker and consulted her, the undisputed queen of homemade pasta in our food loving circle of friends.

I got several practical tips from her, which have helped me a lot with my first batch of pasta, which I had for lunch today and which is pictured above. Some gems from her, and the above links- use semolina or 00 flour (I used half semolina and half normal baking flour, which is what I had on hand)- knead until your arms fall off- let the dough rest at least 30-60 minutes- work in small batches, so your dough soesn't dry out too much- freezing of fresh pasta works better than drying- get the right consistency (like the inside of a woman's arm, according to Hank) by rolling the dough through the pastamaker on the widest setting and folding after each turn. This also helps to get some nice square pieces of dough (which actually isn't all that important when you're making tagliatelle, anyways).

In the middle of explaining, she pulled out her Jamie Oliver cookbook (Cook with Jamie: My Guide to Making You a Better Cook) to illustrate a finer point she was making. I started browsing (it's hard to resist the great layout and food photography), and despite my prejudice, I have to admit that I liked it. It has a lot of recipes that, number one, sound very yummy, and, number two, sound like something I realistically could do on a weekday night (ok- I'm not saying every weekday night here). Number two usually determines whether the cookbook will be used by me or not. I have the most gorgeous cookbooks and never use them because the recipes are just too involved for my current level of commitment to cooking. I'd rather just improvise something with under six ingredients. So now I'm debating whether I should buy the Jamie Oliver book or not. Basically, I could just get all the same recipes from his website... but it is a gorgeous book. Here's a recipe for egg pasta similar to the pasta I made above.

Experiment

This is my latest experiment: home made yogurt. Now some of you may ask themselves: who makes yogurt? At least, that's what I asked myself when a friend told me last year how easy it was to make. I thought to myself- well, that's nice if you're a stay at home mom. At the time, I was barely able to hold my stuff together, trying to not quit my job with an eight month old who had not slept more than 4 hours at a stretch ever. And whose usual sleep pattern involved 1-2 hour cycles of napping and feeding. I had no idea this level of exhaustion existed before I had a child.

However, fast forward a year, and some serious catching up in sleep deficit, here I am, making yogurt myself. It is really, seriously, easy. All you need is a gallon of milk, a thermometer, some clean jars, and a camping cooler. Oh, and of course your "starter culture", which is nothing but a cup ful of yoghurt with live yogurt cultures (I used the plain one from Dannone- it even has some funny label saying that the live cultures in the yogurt comply with standards set by the American yogurt association... that makes me chuckle) . Then, all that you neeed to do is

1. Fill camping cooler with 120 F warm water (close the lid, so it stays at 120- don't go above 130, or the yogurt dies)

2. Heat milk to 120 F (don't let boil, that changes the taste)

3. Whisk in starter yogurt (make sure you mix well)

4. Pour hot milk-yogurt mix into clean jars, set into the 120 F water in the cooler and keep there over night.

5. The next morning, eat yogurt for breakfast.


As always when working with milk, you want to be as clean as possible. The dishwasher is ok for the jars, but I boiled the wisk and thermometer, because they'd been in the drawer for a while. Keep your hands clean and don't touch anything that will touch the milk. If your yogurt is firmed up and sour the next morning, you can be pretty sure that those lactobacilli did their thing. Just as with sauerkraut, the low pH kills or inhibits most pathogenic bacteria.

This yogurt turned out a bit less solid than most store bought products (apparently, stabilizers such as gelatine get added to yogurt a lot to make it firm). I love to eat it plain, or with a drop of honey or jam. My daughter loves it, too. It may be coincidence, but over the last week, she has started to say "dodu", for yogurt (came home,went straight to the fridge, pointed at it, and, with commanding voice, "dodu!"). I guess I will be making it again.

Bummer

Remember how I was raving about Romanesco cauliflower the other day? Well, this year's are a bit of a letdown. The heads are tiny! I'm sure that they'll taste great, but I had to harvest three plants for one dinner. I wonder if it is because I bought seedlings from the store? I usually start from seed, but my own cabbage seedlings this year had been completely decimated by birds and/or mice. Twice. When I took down the Romanesco plants after harvesting the tiny heads, the root system seemed to be confined mainly to what was in the seedling pots to begin with. Perhaps they were kind of old seedlings and didn't make new roots. And then they became all stunted because they couldn't get enough nutrients... Well, at least I have some harvest from that plot.

Salad mix

One of the nice things about growing one's own veggies is that salad mix is different each time, depending on the time of year, what you've been growing, what seeded itself out from last season (wild arugula is great- seed it once and you'll have volunteers forever), and what weeds you have in your garden (I used to have a ton of purslane in both my plots. Unfortunately I didn't realize it was an edible weed until I had already pretty much eradicated it). My dinner tonight, part of which you can see above, has four different kinds of lettuce, endive, frisee, mache, rocket, wild arugula, parsley, and chervil.

Cleaning up

Just a brief stint in the garden today, weeded some beds, re-seeded lettuce, mache, and kohlrabi, and cleaned up some old collard plants. All the lower leaves were half eaten; I suspect the mice that I've been seeing a lot of lately, there appears to be some kind of population explosion. Last spring, we temporarily housed a gopher snake in our fava bean plot- it was great. After loosing about 90 % of our winter plantings to gophers, the snake took care of business and we had almost no losses for the rest of the summer (with the exception of a few tomato plants). I am hoping that he or she will return and conduct some more biologic warfare on our behalf. We briefly toyed with the idea of trapping gophers and mice. However, after a little demonstration of how the trap works by our (semi-pro) garden neighbor, we decided that even loosing 90 % of our plants somehow couldn't justify essentially impaling a sentient creature and letting it die a slow and very painful death. I know many will disagree, but since my family doesn't depend on the food, I'd rather "waste" my time planting it and having it eaten than killing small mammals.

I still managed to get enough young and fresh leaves from my plants for some yummy acacia honey and mustard braised collard greens tonight. It tasted great with some rosemary sausages we had in the freezer, and, as always, it was extremely satisfying to eat our own food.

It's done...

It's done... my first hand knit pullover in more than twenty years. It's soft, and light, and my daughter loves it. It was fun to make, but as always, I hit that strange spot around the 90% completion mark where I didn't touch the project for about two weeks. I've had projects in the past that I almost completed and then just never touched again. I wonder why that is? Anyhow- today I finished it, and I think it turned out all right.

Magic moment

Last weekend, it was finally dry enough to put my seed potatoes in the ground. I had seven different kinds of wonderful potatoes, yellow, red, and blue. They were all from the store, rather than dedicated seed potatoes. Experts advise against using store bought potatoes as seeds, because they get some sort of anti-germination treatment that supposedly inhibits sprouting. However, for some inexplicable reason, my pantry appears to provide ideal conditions for potato germination. So over the last few months, I simply kept the ones that started having eyes in a paper bag on the top shelf. Now, I really needed to get them in the ground, as some of the sprouts had become rather long (which is apparently another no-no in potato-growing circles).

So come sunday, the sun was out and the ground was not too bad and I grabbed both hubby and daughter for a stint in the garden. I turned the earth where I was going to plant, and was amazed by the number of earthworms in it. We've had this plot for just one season. When we got it, it was completely compacted with nothing but crabgrass growing on it. In several weekends of back breaking labor, we loosened the soil using nothing but a spading fork and tons of persistence. The ground was so hard that I had to stand on the spading fork and rock side to side in order to be able to drive it into the ground. We added horse manure generously, once in the summer and once in fall. By now, the presence of all that organic material had attracted literally thousands of earth worms. As a result, the soil was so loose that for the most part, I was able to dig "hands only", not even needing the extra weight of my foot to push the spading fork completely into the ground.

This time, it took only about an hour to dig the potato bed, which takes up half the current plot (about 200 sqft). Another 45 minutes later, I'd popped my seed spuds in. For almost the entire time, I noticed a small, brilliant blue, russet and tan western blue bird sitting on the fencepost in the next plot. He was very clearly observing me, cocking his little head this way and that while he was checking out what I was doing. The moment I moved away from the plot, he dove down and immediately started pulling fat earthworms out of the ground. Good for him- I think we really have a few to spare!

I took a walk with the hubby and baby to go check out the other plot. When we came back, the area surrounding the freshly dug plot was swarming with birds. Literally. They were all snacking on the myriad of bugs and critters that my digging had disturbed, snapping them up as fast as they could before they would hide back under ground. Since we were talking, my husband and I weren't paying attention. It was the baby who spotted them first. She cried out excitedly and almost jumped off my arm. We looked up and saw them taking flight ahead of us, twenty or thirty birds from various species. It was a magical moment, and I felt blessed- for my daughter, her joy, the birds, and for having contributed to their existence in a small way.

Knitting

Lately, I've been knitting. It's something I've been doing on and off in phases throughout my life. I like the mindfulness it generates. It's something I can do in the car when I'm not driving. Currently, I'm working on a really simple light green sweater for the little one.

I was thinking about the environmental impact of knitting. In theory, the less you'd rely on industrialized methods to generate what you need, the less you should impact, and the fewer resources you should need. But what about the logistics of shipping extremely small batches of wool to a store for me to buy, having someone work there to sell it to me, etc? Perhaps, on a per sweater basis, it uses fewer resources to have them mass produced in China and shipped in giant batches to Old Navy and and Baby Gap.

I guess unless you order your wool directly from one of these small outfits that raise the sheep, shear them, spin and dye the wool, and then ship it to you using the regular mail, it's going to be very hard to be sure. Anybody know a good source?

Alas, in the meanwhile I'll just enjoy sitting down at the end of a day for a few rows and a cup of tea with the hubby.

Buddha's Hand

Friends gave us a Buddha's Hand Citron today, a fruit I had never heard of. It is an ancient citrus variety that is not grown for its flesh (it has none), but for its aroma, and for the zest. It looks spectacular, like a gnarly old lemon hand (apparently there are "closed" hand fruit that resemble hands folded for a buddhist prayer. They are used as religious offerings. Ours was an "open" handed fruit, and more resembled a lemon Medusa).

The aroma from this fruit is unbelievable. Imagine lemon scent, but more intense, and with a more flowery and perfume like fragrance. I am cutting it up and making candied Buddha's Hand from it. I will also keep the syrup to use for baking instead of sugar. I can't wait to feed some of it back to our friends!


This is one of the things I love best about growing my own food (however little part of it). What is surplus to me, and might end up going bad on the compost, is treasured by our friends. And it starts a circle of giving. My friends give me a lemon, I will invite them back over for fruit cake that I've made using the fruit... the next time, I will give them some zucchini flowers (they are ridiculously enthusiastic about zucchini flowers), and they will fill them and feed them back to everybody. It goes on and on.

Meat

I read about a study yesterday that investigated the eating habits of over half a million people over a number of years. This number of people gives you the ability to come up with some darn high power data, so the findings should be a bit more reliable than your latest diet fad (FLAXSEED OIL FOUND TO CURE CANCER!!!!).

What they found confirmed something we already kind of knew: white meat is healthier than red meat, processed meat is a no-no. What shocked me was the strength of the effect that was observed. Essentially, people were grouped into five groups according to how much of each kind of meat they consumed. The groups were then analyzed for differences in the overall chance of death, as well as the chance of death from cancer, and cardiovascular disease. Turns out that the ones that were in the highest group for red meat consumption had a roughly 30 % higher likelihood of dying during the observation period than those in the lowest group. 30 %! That's crazy. People who ate more white meat were actually LESS likely to die than those who ate less (bad news for vegetarians, I guess), but the effect was not as shockingly high.

So I went ahead and calculated from the numbers that those groups ate what would actually be the healthiest amount of meat to eat. Because "eat more white meat, less red meat" could mean a lot of things, depending on where you started. Here came the second surprise. According to the data in the study, my life expectancy will be highest if I eat about a pound of white meat per week, less than a quarter of a pound of red meat per week, and a whooping 156 g of processed meat PER YEAR. That's less than six ounces of processed meat PER YEAR. Bye bye bacon.

Oh, and guess which group I'm in at the moment...?

Whatever. Lentils for dinner today.

Anybody have a good recipe?

How much?

We have been thinking about the people in Haiti this last week. Each day that went by, thousands died, trapped under debris, who could have been saved if help had been there. The waste of all these lives, all these people, makes me feel helpless and angry. So the obvious thing was to make a donation, to a hospital which is still operating in Port-au-Prince. At this point, where there is little hope of finding a lot more survivors under the rubble, we figured that this was a direct way to help save lives (surgery for infected wounds, and clean drinking water, are probably going to save the most lives at this point).

But how much to give? On the one hand, my compassion tells me to immediately wire the content of my bank account to Haiti. It is indisputable that they need it more than I do. On the other hand, I'm not exactly what you'd call affluent. So the number I was thinking made my husband swallow hard.

In the end, we decided to give the amount that we would normally spend on eating out in one month. There will be no restaurant dinners in February, no visits to the coffee shop for a latte, and all workday lunches will be packed. It adds up. And while eating out (even) less has been on my agenda for a long time (for physical and financial well being), I find that the thought of the money doing some real good instead gives me a resolve that I have never known before.

Circle of life

While seeding my old country cabbages last week, I ran out of potting mix. So I finally had to face the somewhat gruesome task of turning the compost. Turning aerates compost and makes it rot faster and more uniformly. So in principle, it is a good thing. The more often you turn, the better. I hear the Prince of Wales has the compost heaps in his organic gardens turned every week, which gives him mature compost in three months. The key is, though, he doesn’t do it by himself. He has someone else do it for him. So I’m more a fan of the three heap method, where you fill one compost heap, let one rot undisturbed, and have one mature heap which you deplete. The problem is, three decent sized compost heaps would take up about one tenth of my entire growing space. So rather than give up that much space, I chose to just have one pile. I fill it with whatever organic materials come out of the garden, plus our kitchen scraps, and the occasional bag of coffee grounds from our friendly neighborhood coffee shop. Whenever I need new potting mix, or whenever I really really can’t squeeze any more in, I simply take off the top layers until I reach the stuff that’s decomposed, take that out, mix the remaining material, and refill the compost with it. It’s not pretty. Unless you have a morbid fascination with invertebrates and funghi, the circle of life is one of those things that are best left to themselves.

Rainy weekend

This was a slow weekend, with rainy weather. Not so nice outside, but perfect for making jam. I had three little sweet pumpkins that I had harvested from our „three sisters plot“, and for the longest time, I didn´t know what to do with them. They seemed too precious to just carve up as Jack o´lanterns for halloween, and I´m not such a big fan of pumpkin pie. Finally, I came across two recipes for pumpkin preserve, and my three little guys met the knife at last. One recipe is pumpkin orange jam (I used blood oranges, for dramatic effect), and the other is a savory pumpkin spread with chili and ginger. I have not tried them yet, but they sure look very nice in their little glasses.

We also had some friends over for brunch which included, among other dishes, squash soup made from our own squash. Due to my friend’s garlic aversion I couldn’t do my favorite butternut and roasted garlic standard. Instead, I tried a recipe with onion, cream, honey and balsmic vinegar. I don’t know. It sounded good on paper, and our guests claimed to like it, but I’m not so sure about the vinegar. Maybe it would have been convincing with a more savory type of winter squash, like Hokkaido squash, or Muscat de Provence pumpkin. I have some seeds for both and am planning to plant them this year for the first time. Can’t wait for summer!

Meanwhile, the garden looks totally soaked and the grass in the paths is higher than the plants in my (raised) beds. I weeded just one path on saturday, before deciding that it was too wet. Interestingly, this path now has puddles of rainwater standing on it, whereas all the other paths are wet (and weedy), but the water is not standing on them. The ground must have been totally compacted by me simply standing on it for a few minutes! I guess it is true then that you should never ever step on or work your ground when it’s wet. Hmmm. Guess I had to try that one out for myself.

Wirsing cabbage

My third German cabbage is called Wirsing, and I haven’t come across an english word for it. It has very crinkly leaves that form a compact head, and it’s just one of those cabbages that you can eat slow cooked. With a few shallots (I like to puree them before adding, while they are still raw), nutmeg, salt, pepper, and sweet cream, it’s one of the more elegant versions of winter cabbage that I personally know. If cabbage can be called elegant at all. I guess it can, if you are willing to include such beauties as romanesco cauliflower in the cabbage family. I have a few of those little guys overwintering in one of my beds. It took growing my own cauliflower to convince me that this actually is a tasty vegetable. Before, I knew only the huge white Supermarket variety, which basically tastes like nothing much, except, well, cauliflower. Yikes.
Then, we ate the first of our own. They were comparatively tiny white, yellowish green, and purple heads that I had picked in the cold just a few hours before steaming them in a bamboo steamer for about four or five minutes. I browned a few almond slivers in butter, poured everything on top of the cauliflower heads, and there was dinner. Boy, were we in for a surprise. They did not taste like „cauliflower“ at all. They were sweet. They had a subtle, complex, nutty aroma that was different in each of the three varieties we were eating. Togehter with the butter and the slivered almonds, it was a simple and unbelievably tasty meal. If I had to make a list of veggies that are the most different from supermarket standard when they are home grown, cauliflower would be way up there alongside tomatoes. Once you’ve tasted your own, there’s basically no going back to supermarket. Even farmers’ market doesn’t come close. Go ahead, call me a food snob.

White cabbage

My second German cabbage is white cabbage (Weisskohl), which is either eaten fresh or used to make Sauerkraut. Now. I have never gone to the extreme of making Sauerkraut myself. Essentially, the cabbage is cut up very finely, spiced, salted, and packed tightly under pressure to exclude air. Anaerobic fermentation then produces lactic acid, which is sour. It gives Sauerkraut it’s obvious taste and name, and prevents food spoiling bacteria from taking over (they don’t like low pH). From what I remember from my Grandmother´s cold room, it’s a bit of a smelly affair. Apparently, my great grandparents, who had a big farm in northern Germany and many mouths to feed, used a whole dedicated basement room to make sauerkraut. At harvest, they would fill the entire room with successive layers of cabbage, salt, and spices, and people would walk around on it (clean shoes, I hope) to compact it and drive out the air. Then, once the fermentation process was done, they would eat it all winter until the room was empty.
I haven’t decided yet whether I’m actually going to venture out and make my own. It’s kind of... out there, and I definitely don’t want the smell in my kitchen. But I do crave it, once or twice a year, and it’s not like you can just go to the supermarket here and simply buy a can or two of decent Sauerkraut... there’s always the garage, I guess.

Happy new year!

Happy new year everyone! After a well deserved winter break, mus is back. I love the holidays, because even though they are busy in many ways, they are the only time of the year when you can go away and your garden will be totally fine when you come back a few weeks later. Allright, maybe a few more weeds in our neck of the woods, but that´s highly acceptable in exchange for the renewed motivation to go out there and pull them. So today, I have done my first gardening act of the year (ecxept harvesting a few rutabagas and picking a bagful of greens last weekend). I have started a flat of my first vegetable seedlings for the new year. In addition to some oldies goldies (onions, green onions, leeks, various kinds of greens, and my favorite Lacinato (aka tuscan or dinosaur) kale, I have seeded a few varieties of cabbages and brassica that I brought home from the old country. My favorite is the green kale (Grünkohl), which used to be a northern German winter staple in the times before 8000 mile Chilean midwinter raspberries. It is slow cooked together with a little onion, cured meats, and sausages (some people even add goose lard). It is then eaten either by itself or as part of the chistmas dinner, along with potatoes, red cabbage, and apple-stuffed goose. If this sounds heavy, that´s cause it is. But on a cold winter day, combined with a Jever beer and a Korn (schnaps) for those who like it, it is unapologetically satisfying.