cooking

French pretzels with blueberry sauce

Oktoberfest: breakfast of champions

French pretzels with blueberry sauce

We (along with most everyone else in Munich) are hosting a lot of house guests these days. Seems like as good a time as any to add to my breakfast-making repertoire. Plus, I like to make up recipes. Our most recent guests (the delightful Redenii) inspired this experiment with their love of German pretzels. We had a few left over one day, and I was trying to figure out what to do with them before they went stale. At the same time, I was thinking about the next day’s breakfast, which was possibly going to be french toast. You can probably figure out where this is going. 

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What’s that wacky German food? Spargel

white asparagus = spargel

It’s here! Spargelzeit is here! What, you mean you don’t celebrate asparagus time where you live?

The Germans are crazy about white asparagus, a special breed that grows underground and is only harvested for a couple months each spring. Restaurants have special menus featuring white asparagus done every which way, and all the fruit and veggie stands display big piles of it, as if it’s the only thing worth eating this time of year. Preparing this Teutonic vegetable is relatively easy, but there are a few things you should know before doing it for the first time.

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Expat eats: in search of salsa

Maybe it’s all the Mexican food we ate on our recent trip to the US, but I’ve had enough of the crappy salsa offerings in Germany. Standard German grocery stores tend to stock one brand of salsa, usually Old El Paso. My attempts to find alternatives have not been good. I once joyfully bought up several types of salsa from a small Mexican store near Pariser Platz, only to discover at home that every single one of the jars had expired. A long time ago. (I ate them anyway.) And then this, the last straw:

Don't buy this.

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Ask the Expat: how to eat zucchini flowers

Do you ever post recipes? I had somewhere heard you could eat the zucchini with their flowers, but I’d never seen it done.

 

One of the reasons I was so excited to start a balcony garden was realizing that I could have a cheap and plentiful supply of zucchini flowers. Yum yum yum.

Zucchini flowers are quite easy to cook and eat. You can pick (easiest with scissors) male or female* flowers, preferably on the day they bloom. Wash them gently, inside and out, and pat them dry with paper towels. Pluck out the sexual organs inside, if you’re so inclined. The flowers can be refrigerated and kept for a day or so, but it’s best to eat them the same day you pick them.

Read moreAsk the Expat: how to eat zucchini flowers

Chocolate chips for expats

As ubiquitous as they are in the US, chocolate chips are practically unheard-of in the rest of the world’s supermarkets. Sometimes the clever expat must improvise:

1. Unwrap a bunch of dark chocolate bars (extra bonus step – freeze them first)
2. put them in a ziplock bag and seal it
3. break up the chocolate in the manner of your choosing (drop the bag on the floor several times, take a wooden mallet to it, etc. etc. Be creative!)

This little tip isn’t new… in fact American expats have been making their own chocolate chips using this method for decades, if not centuries.

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baskets of foraged mushrooms

Eating and drinking our way through southern France

Wednesday evening we hopped on an overnight train to go visit our friends who live on the southern coast of France. Being on a French train and all, we had a couple of unscheduled delays, but in the end we were content to arrive at our destination a mere two hours late (yay, no strikes). We spent these extra two hours talking about how much we love Swiss trains, and vowing to never leave our country again.

Things only improved from there. Our friends picked us up at the train station and whisked us back to their home by the sea in St. Pierre la Mer, a tiny village of 500 inhabitants which swells to 100,000 during the tourist invasion of the summer vacation months. We spent the morning wandering the outdoor market by the beach, marveling at treats such as fresh almonds (which had furry green coats) and baby artichokes.

The afternoon was spent hopping from winery to winery, sampling everything the region had to offer.

Read moreEating and drinking our way through southern France