For the Love of Food

I really love throwing a party – and I never need a reason to throw one for friends and/or family. So, with Foodbuzz’s 24,24,24 monthly event, I have an even greater motivation to throw put together some sort of event centered around food.

For this month’s event I have chosen to throw a grill party for family and friends visiting from out of town. My title “Achtung! Die Grillsaison hat begonnen” (“Attention! Grill-Season has begun” translated into English) is a favorite German phrase that you will see and hear everywhere once grilling season starts – which is about mid-May. So, with my grill party I decided to showcase typical German foods that you would find at a grill party. Naturally, there are many many more dishes and meats that are grilled at a German grill party, but these are my favorite that I can get my hands on here in Bavaria.

Our menu consisted of:
Potato Salad
Tossed Salad
Bread
Tzatziki Sauce
Noodle Salad
Grilled Vegetables
Chicken legs
Bratwurst Kebabs (Bratwurstspieße)
Crunchy Kebabs (Knusperspieße)
Pork Steaks
Pork Belly
Rostocker Bratwurst
Poultry Kebabs (mixture of chicken, turkey, and duck)
Cevapcici
Vanilla Pudding with Rote Grütze (red fruit jelly dessert topping)

Let’s just say we had a lot of food and a lot of leftovers! We were expecting some more friends to come by, but after a pipe burst in their home they were busy with more important things. So, there were 9 of us. I prepared everything..well, I do have to add that most of the meats and the potato salad were all marinated/made by the butcher…and my husband grilled with help, every once in a while, from my father-in-law. The rest of our guests enjoyed themselves, relaxed in our garden, and ate until they couldn’t eat anymore.

Our guests wished not to have their photographs on my blog, so here are some pictures of my family:

me “helping” with grilling

Bellow are the dishes that I made, including recipes, and bellow that are the dishes that we didn’t prepare ourselves. On top of all this I had planned a German creamy cucumber salad, but ended up forgetting it at home. We had it the next day for lunch and it was fantastic. But, it went so quickly that I never got a photo of it! Continue Reading »

May 21st was Father’s Day in Germany. The traditional German way to celebrate Father’s day (as a father) is to grab your favorite beer mug, get together with all your buddies, and drink a keg a beer while hiking. It’s on a holiday here in Bavaria (Jesus’ ascension) so this starts as early as 8 or 9am.

We decided to celebrate it a bit more traditionally by having a breakfast in our garden. So, I prepared everything ahead of time and packed our portable electric burner and we had french toast there!

Unfortunately, I can’t find the original recipe that I adapted this from online. Here is my version: Continue Reading »

At the end of last month I participated in Foodbuzz’s 24,24,24 event. Among many other dishes, we grilled a whole suckling pig. Having some meat left over, I was sent home with some leftovers. So, I took the opportunity to make some bbq pulled pork that my husband had been begging me to make for a while.

I didn’t follow a recipe, I just put in the ingredients that I felt would be right. Luckily, I measured everything out and wrote it all down so that I could share with you.

I also made a less traditional addition to the pulled pork by adding a can of some Heinz Baked Beans in tomato sauce that we had bought to try. They added some nice substance to the meat and next time I will double the amount of beans in the recipe. And, next time I will also just use navy beans instead of baked beans in tomato sauce. I found that the baked beans sauce didn’t add (or take away) from the recipe. So, since baked beans are more expensive than plain old navy beans, I will go with the cheaper alternative.

I served these over homemade buttermilk biscuits and with steamed corn. However, because bbq pulled pork is gooey and messy we ate it with a fork a nice and cut the biscuit into it as well. It was absolutely delicious! Continue Reading »

This recipe takes me back to my childhood. The sweet smells that fill my kitchen while cooking this just brings a smile to my face. I find that when I am pregnant I am more homesick for the foods that I grew up with, especially desserts…which I would otherwise rarely eat.

There are plenty of ways to make rice pudding, but the best way is never the quick way…ever. This dish requires time – you will need about 1 hour to prepare it – and you will have to stir it often, so you won’t be able to leave the kitchen.

There are 2 “secret” ingredients that this recipe cannot do without: cinnamon sticks and lime peel. Save the ground cinnamon for sprinkling on afterwards, the sticks will give them a much deeper flavor and the lime peel gives it a special hint of the tropics.  Always remember that “time and lime make it fine”.

I believe this recipe was passed down to my mother from my father’s uncle’s mother who is Cuban. Continue Reading »

Well, this is the last Taste&Create I will be participating in until August. I am on vacation as of this Sunday when the in-laws arrive.

This month I was partnered with Temperance from High on the Hog. It was a tough decision deciding what to make. I really wanted to try to make her Golden Vanilla Bean Caramels, but knowing that my in-laws would be arriving soon and the tons of things I had (and still have to!!) accomplish before they arrive made me chose a dish that I could make as a meal.

I chose to make High on the Hog’s Chicken Frarej - a blackened chicken with lots of lemon, garlic, and potatoes. I figured it would be easy and very tasty.

I do have to say that the meal was very tasty, but only after some major tweaking.

I decided to take Temperance’s recommendation of baking a whole chicken (this would give us a meal for a few days and allow me to get more accomplished around the house). I prepared and baked it according to her directions, but after 1 hours in the oven, the chicken was quite tasteless, the potatoes still hard, the chicken was swimming in juice, and the skin not blackened. I am pretty sure this would have turned out differently had I used the chicken breasts because they are a drier meat and would have soaked up much more the the liquid and flavors of the marinade.

We were hungry, so we ate some for lunch, and since the oven was still warm, I decided to make some adjustments and put it back in for some more oven time. The changes I made were: I removed 3/4ths of the juices in the casserole dish, and added lots of pepper to the chicken. I baked it another 45 minutes and it came out fantastic.

I will definitely make this dish again, but with further adjustments. Bellow is the recipe I would use when I make this again: Continue Reading »

Many children grow-up eating cookies for dessert after dinner, but not me. I grew up eating Cuban cream cheese and guava pastries.

I left south Florida almost exactly 11 years ago. And, until yesterday I hadn’t eaten a guava pastry in almost 11 years.

Two years ago my best friend, who still lives in south Florida, sent me a care package, and in it was a block of guava paste. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to use it because it is made with sugar…and I couldn’t eat sugar until 6 months ago. Yesterday I finally had the chance to use it.

This was a very simple recipe to make, the hardest part is the wait: waiting for them to cool down so you can eat them!

This is a trial and error recipe. I found that I used twice as much guava as I should have and half as much cream cheese sauce as I should have.  Many of the ingredients and ideas came from here.  The recipe that follows is my revised version. Continue Reading »

I have finally made a spaghetti sauce that’s worth talking about.  It’s easy, tasty, and done in an hour. Continue Reading »

*Here is another blog post I found in my Drafts folder from August 2007!! It’s not only cheap, but delicious, filling, and very easy to make.  Because I do not own a grill, I broiled the skewers in my oven.*

Usually my husband and I usually reserve Greek dining for special occasions since Greek restaurants can be a bit pricey (in our town). Then I got to thinking, I can cook Greek too…and it’s amazing how simple and inexpensive it is!

Here I have made Suvlaki, Tzatziki, and Salad and I served it with some döner bread that I bought at my local Turkish store. The souvlaki recipe is based on Suvlaki Hoirino on About.com.

Continue Reading »

Right before our trip to the US we canned a whole bunch of tomatoes from our garden (a post about that will follow eventually). We had a few ingredients left over that we needed to preserve since everyone else we knew was also going on vacation at the same time.

We decided to make a sort of pico de gallo. Now that it has a had a few weeks to set and soak in the flavors, we opened a jar to have with some breakfast tacos.

It was lacking in flavor. The lemon juice flavor was gone and it needs much more salt to taste. Everything also should have been diced instead of chopped. What can I say…after a whole day of canning, we were lazy.

What I did end up making was a great pre-salsa. This would be the great foundations of a salsa. I would pulse this in the food processor a few times. Then, just add some more tomato, cilantro, lime juice, salt, and some seasonings. Continue Reading »

Back in March I was asked to host another brunch at the preschool where my son attends mother’s-day-out. I came up with a simple spread that I could make ahead of time because of time constraints.

In search of a really creamy egg salad sandwich, I set to the web to see what I could find. And, while I didn’t find 1 single recipe that appealed to me, I cut and pasted many different recipes together to come up with my own. In the end, I had a perfectly cream sandwich spread that was gobbled-up in record time.

My only personal wish was that I could have added some dill relish for a slightly tangy flavor, which is how I grew-up eating egg salad. But, not having any dill pickles or relish available at the time, I left it out. Continue Reading »