For the Love of Food

I thought I’d share some nice summer-time eye candy with you while I spend a few days processing the tons of photos I took while on my vacation.

I had a really great time, but I am happy to be back home where the temperature is mild and the fruit tastes like, well, fruit!

And, that’s the story I want to tell you… Continue Reading »

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 »

Happy 1st of May everyone!

I wanted to share these ice cream sandwiches that my husband and I made together over a week ago. They still need some tweaking before they are good enough to give you the recipe to…such as baking time and ice cream amounts, but I thought you’d enjoy some nice images today.

Well, I am quite pleased to say that our potluck was a huge success.  Not only did we had over 30 people show up for dinner, but we had many people show-up in the morning to help with our garden Spring Cleaning event.  And, after many hours of hard work in the garden and in front of the grill, we were all ready to sit down and share a nice large meal together.

The buffet was full and everything was picked away to the last piece!  The chocolate-coated fruit was a huge hit with the children and it was gone within minutes!

The whole event was such a great success and made all our gardeners so happy that they asked what we had to do to have another event like this.  I got so many compliments on organizing the event and thanks to our “sponsor” – Foodbuzz – for making this possible.  So…we are thinking and hopefully next month we will come-up with something new and exciting for Foodbuzz 24,24,24 again.

See recipes bellow: Continue Reading »

Happy Friday everyone.

I just thought this would make you giggle a little bit before the weekend.

This is what my son ate for breakfast the other day.

What is it?
Well, there’s a turkey hot dog and the more interesting item is a slice of apple with a slice of Gelbwurst (yellow sausage – a type of bland deli meat that is very popular among young children).

He ate all of it and enjoyed every bite!

I just wanted to share something really cool with you guys.

The other day when my mom was in town we decided to take a day trip to see Regensburg – a city in central Bavaria. We basically just had lunch there – at a brewery – and walked around a bit.

In the brewery where we ate there was a sort of locker called a Bierkrugtressor which translates exactly to Beer Krug Treasury. It’s for the “regulars” who have their own beer mugs at the brewery. They keep them locked up for them so that their mugs are always there to use when they come for a drink.

Cool huh?

This year I “discovered” a small, warm,and romantic Christmas market in my town. Who knew my town had 2 Christmas markets??!!

Apparently, each year for 10 days during Advent there is a Christmas market in the historic downtown of my town (Fürth). And, it’s a more traditional one – or so I would guess.

It just finished this Saturday, but it will be back next year.

There we found:

An Iron Smith:

A glass blower:

A Carpenter:

A Tin Man:

Felt Crafters:

A Paper Book/Journal Crafter:

Warm drinks and friendly chatter:

And this guy…who closes the market every evening:

It’s a small market…but a fine one.

Last Thursday our local Christmas Market opened its doors. It always gives me such a nice warm and fuzzy feeling to walk through in the evening and enjoy the dimmed lights and people chatting over a cup of warm spiced wine.

I know many of you, my readers in the US especially, do not have Christmas Markets in your area and have never been to Germany to see one. So, I am sharing mine with you. Continue Reading »

Back in September my brother came to visit me for the first time while I’ve been living in Germany. As a birthday present, he and my mom gave me enough new spice containers to “renovate” my entire spice drawer.

These spice jars are great because I can finally scoop spices out of the jars with my measuring spoons as well as stick my fingers in for pinches of spices – my favorite mode of measuring.

Anyways, let me share my happiness in new organization with you:

All different sizes of spice jars:

4oz:

8oz:

only 3 empty jars left from 48!

This is what my counter top looked like during the transfer process:

All the empty store-bought spice jars and bag:

Originally, I had wanted to organize it as I had it before – by spice family, but it was too chaotic when all the jars of different sizes came together.

So, I settled on alphabetical order:

This is how the drawer is complete:

I keep my garbage bags as well as wax and parchments papers, meat thermometers, and butter in this drawer.

I think I am going to have to go to Ikea and get a bar to go across the inside of the drawer to keep the spice jars in place.  Although it looks like I have a lot of jars – and I do – they’re not enough to fill my 80cm deep drawer.  So, they shift around to my annoyance.  Anyone else have and ideas on how I could keep these babies in place without adding a metal bar to the inside of my drawer???

So..tomorrow I will share more of my other birthday presents with you, and the day after then, I will introduce you to my (fianlly) renovated kitchen!!

!!Update!! – You can buy these containers here.  The small containers are 4oz and the larger ones are 8oz.  The 4oz ones fit a “normal” sized spice container from the grocery store perfectly.  As mentioned before, my brother brought these to me when he visited because shipping outisde the US is only for orders of 1000 or more!!

The other day I went to my local baker and found there Maple Walnut Plaits. I had never seen them before, and once I tasted them I knew why.

They are so good that they sell out by 8am!!

I had to pre-order 4 days in advance to secure 4 of these babies. They are like eating light and flaky pecan pie slices

I want the recipe, but I cannot find one anywhere. I have come up with some conclusions:
-they use puff pastry dough
-they add the walnuts at the end of the baking process
-they brush the tops with apricot jam

But, how do they make the liquidy pie filling that I am so used to making when I make pecan pie. How do they braid it? How long do they bake it??

If anyone out there has a similar recipe, oh, please share!!