For the Love of Food

I know, I know, hops are not even the majority of what beer is made of, but I do grow hops in my garden so that we can brew our own beer.

Fun huh? When we finally have some, I’ll be sharing it with you!

Don’t they just look heavenly?

So, to continue sharing with you all that I have been keeping busy doing the past few months…while I wasn’t blogging…I want to share with you my garden!

I have been busy growing may types of plants – most importantly the ones that I can’t get here in Germany like Tomatillos and Jalapeños. By the time September roles around I hope to be making Tomatillo salsa and canning it to hold us over for the winter.

For the past 4 garden seasons I have not had any luck with cucumbers. This year I tried a different type that seens have be doing very very well in my garden. I have harvested 7 of these so far and more are growing! It’s so exciting to eat food you have grown yourself. Check out these slices: 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 »

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 »

*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 »

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 »

Well, my garden isn’t full of tomatoes anymore, but it still was in September when this shot was taken.

I had such a great selection in my garden this summer. I had sweet early-blooming yellow tomatoes, grainy and pretty looking Reisetomatos, cherry tomatoes, pear tomatoes, Roma tomatoes, yellow currant tomatoes, and my all time favorite: super sweet black zebra tomatoes. Continue Reading »