What's for Dinner?

Chicken Marsala, Candied Carrots, and Mom's cucumber salad.

All with a side order of pizza- Thing1 had wanted pizza for linch but got grilled putenwurst instead, so we picked up a mini-cheese and both the girls had a slice, with a bit of chicken and a few carrots. Luckily, the German chowed down. otherwise it is just depressing doing all this cooking.

Mom's Cucumber Salad:

3 good sized cucumbers

1/2 cup water

1/2 cup white vinegar

sugar to taste

Peel cucumbers, then slice thinly. Sprinkle slices with salt, allow to sit for 35 minutes. Squeeze well! Place in non-reactive bowl, add water/vinegar/sugar (already mixed to taste). Add fresh dill, ground pepper, very thinly sliced onion, either red or white. Sprinkle freshly minced Italian parsley, if desired.

I didn't have any white vinegar, so I used white wine vinegar. I added 4 onions (equivalent to one good sized onion), because I like onion. No parsley, even though I have it on hand (in a vase in the kitchen) because I prefer it without. I love this recipe.

The carrots were made to take care of an old package that was starting to get a bit whiskery and I wish that we had made more. A very simple recipe that I jiggered to gether based on the glazed sweet potatoes I made last week:

Candied Carrots: As many carrots as you like, sliced. Add some water, brown sugar to taste, a T of butter, a turn of the salt mill. Cook in a saucepan on the stovetop until as done as you like them. With 7 carrots I used about 1/4 cup brown sugar and the same water.

What I haven't been blogging about...

(With all due credit to Diane, from whom I stole the idea)

• I started another German class two weeks ago. I had thought that I would take some time off, but no, I signed up for another. I really like my teacher, K, and the location (walking distance) really can't be beat, but I'm already a little fatigued by it: the weather has been gorgeous and it's just depressing that I am inside most of the day. I have 90 minutes after class before the girls come home and that seems to give me just enough time to make a run to the supermarket. I am definitely going to be taking days off here and there. I had also hoped that my friend Y would take this next class and that we would get a chance to see each other, but I think she is taking the summer off as a vacation.


• We are spending far too much time apartment hunting. Ah, Germany, the land where real estate brokers still make a monopolistic, non-transparent market commission, where they don't work most weekends, and where they don't bother to return calls. Reminds me a bit of Manhattan in 2000, before the dot-com crash. And yet prices are quite low here.


• Berlin is also the land of the insane property owner, who thinks that one can rent apartments without kitchens or appliances, or apartments with an estimated 3 months of renovations (with costs to be borne by tenant) or where a landlord offered to have us pay for his kitchen, while he would retain ownership!


• We didn't go to Amsterdam (or the originally planned Venice) this weekend. The German's work interfered: a crisis/deliverable timeline change cancelled our plans. So instead, we will be going to see the wild horse round up in the Duelmen area, which is held the last Saturday in May outside Muenster. This is only about a 90 minute drive from my in-laws, but the German has never seen it. It's quite famous and I think that a lot of the extended family will join us, so it should be great fun. In a funny bit of serendipity, I read about this last week in class (the theme for the week was little known but interesting attractions in Germany and the area) and I was so excited that I went home to google it and to ensure that we could actually still make it, then we rebooked a visit from my sister-in-law and her friend so that we could go. This link is to a Flickr slideshow from the round up.


• We went to a concert on May 10th, on the third anniversary of the opening of the memorial at the Holocaust Denkmal. (This is a stock photo, I haven't downloaded mine yet). It was fascinating and I may try to add more. It was performance art in music and it was indeed very moving. There was also a poetry reading, which of course I could only understand the smallest amount of, of work by a Holocaust victim. The concert itself was held by musicians scattered throughout the memorial, which is composed of stones varying in size and orientation laid out in a pattern. The "stelae" made the sound waver in and out, be audible and inaudible, loud and soft, as we moved between them while the musicians were playing from their stations in the memorial. It was haunting and evocative.

Happy Birthday, Dad

We all love you and miss you.

Things I didn't do this weekend...

• The Karneval des Kulturen ( and it looks like it was fabulous: check out Braving it in Berlin and Snooker in Berlin to see what I missed)


• the make up meeting for the Berlin Booker book club
  

We had planned on it, we kept saying that we would, but instead we wound up

• Having some of the German's friends over, first for a long pleasant walk at the Zoo, and then for our first on-terasse grill session. We had putenwurst and we also brought in some felafel take-out from Habibi. It was a surprise (three day's notice) visit of the German's best man with his girlfriend and another couple. It was very nice.


• Taking the girls out to practice bike riding. Thing1 is pedalling now and Thing2 is resisting moving from the trike to the laufrad.


• Hitting a week market again and loading up on more tomatoes, green beans and spargel (and this time I was able to find green). I also got a bunch of flowers for 50% of the price at the shop by us, which I am still enjoying. We had the tomato and green bean salad again today and I need to find a good spargel recipe for tomorrow.


• I made banana bread again. This time I added raspberries and I am interested to see how it turns out. I never put in the 1/2 cup of nuts the recipe calls for (because I really don't like nuts in food), so I think that I'll start trying different additions every time that I make it. It smells delicious and I'll add a photo later.--- Here it is. It was delicious: the raspberries really lightened up the density of the bread.

And here is the James Beard recipe my mother has passed on to me:

Banana Bread:
2 Cups sifted flour (I don't have a sifter here, so I don't sift);1 tsp baking soda; 1/2 tsp salt; 1/2 cup butter, 1 cup granulated sugar,2 eggs; 1 cup mashed, very ripe bananas (about 2, I have used up to three);1/3 cup milk (I use fat-free because I save the whole organic for the girls);1 tsp lemon juice; 1/2 cup chopped nuts (which I never use and here replaced with raspberries)

Sift flour with soda and salt (I throw them all min together). Cream butter and gradually add sugar. Mix well. Add eggs and bananas and blend thoroughly (I have done this all by hand, in which case I soften the butter by leaving it on the counter and add the milk when I am creaming the butter and sugar). Combine milk and lemon juice, which will curdle a little when placed together (I just pour them in together). Slowly and alternately fold in the flour mixture and the milk mixture beginning and ending with the dry ingredients (I always just pour the liquid into the dry). Blend well after each addition. Stir in the nuts (or not, or raspberries...), then pur the batter into a lavishly (love his use of the word) buttered (I use Pam spray) 9x5x3 pan (here I am using a bread loaf tin) and bake in pre-heated 350F (180C, 170 convection) oven for 1 hour or until bread springs back when lightly touched in the center.

Who would have known... now it all makes sense...

This tip is from Alice at My Wintersong and after I read it I hit my head with the back of my hand, went to my kitchen, examined my generic (Ja brand) plastic and foil wrap, and said to myself: "Dur". Join me in my feeling of idiocy.

Who ever looks at the end of your aluminum foil box? What a fantastic idea. Now,if someone would just make plastic wrap that didn’t stick to itself.I’ve been using aluminum foil for more years than I care to remember. Great stuff, but sometimes it can be a pain. You know, like when you are in the middle of doing something and you try to pull some foil out and the roll comes out of the box. Then you have to put the roll back in the box and start over. The darn roll always comes out at the wrong time. Well, I would like to share this with you. Yesterday I went to throw out an empty Reynolds foil box and for some reason I turned it and looked at the end of the box. And written on the end it said, ”Press here to lock end”. Right there on the end of the box is a tab to lock the roll in place. How long has this little locking tab been there? I then looked at a generic brand of aluminum foil and it had one, too. I then looked at a box of Saran wrap and it had one too! I can’t count the number of times the Saran warp roll has jumped out when I was trying to cover something up. I’m sharing this with my friends that did not know this. If you all ready know this, delete this message and don’t e-mail me and make me feel dumber than I already feel. If you didn’t know this, e-mail me and let me know so I won’t feel so dumb. I hope I’m not the only person that didn’t know about this.

Happy Mother's Day to all...

Imagine...

Ok, I just saw an Amnesty, Intl. ad with the music from Lennon's Imagine and the tears started slipping from my eyes. Is this a permanent side effect of motherhood or is this a result of growing older and sadder? Or of remembering the day that John Lennon was murdered?



Or perhaps it's the contrast with what is happening right now in Darfur and Myanmar and many other places...

Lime (no, that's Lemon Chicken)

And I don't mean the Lemon Chicken that I made yesterday.

This was meant to be Lime Chicken from Kitchen Parade (a great site filled with fast and easy yet flavorful recipes)but I had only lemons, so I substituted the lime juice and zest with lemon juice and zest. I used Dijon mustard with the German's favorite creamy honey for the honey mustard (and boy, was that zippy: I usually hate honey mustard, but this was great) and our Kikkoman for the soy sauce. Still out of garlic and used leeks this time to dice and substitute. A very refreshing dish.



I also made mashed sweet potatoes to use up the 4 (they were actually yams) that I had sitting in a basket. Very simple, only requiring the always difficult to find in Germany brown sugar. Nice meal, not too sweet, since I used a little less sugar and 1/3 more yams than the recipe called for.
I am really trying to live with having to shop every other day and that anything I purchase will go bad within 3 days and I am gettimg better at it.

Lemon Chicken

I made Lemon Chicken from Simply Recipes and I am copying Elise's photo here, with all credit to her: the recipe, when finished, did look exactly like this, but her plates are better and I forgot to take a picture because the German was too busy complaining that the meat was on the bone.

Fair enough, he hates poultry on the bone and here in Germany, where the chickens are basically miniature, it's difficult enough to get the meat off. I had followed the recipe and used hahnchen schenkels and wings and I had to cut the meat off for all three of my peeps. The marinade was very good, it permeated the meat well, and I think I will try it again sometime, either with poultry breasts or back in the States where I can expect more meat on other pieces. I substituted shallots for garlic because I was out and also threw in some granulated garlic that I had on hand.

I served it wath parsley-garlic mashed potatoes that I made with chicken stock. The German and Thing2 loved them, Thing1, of course, had an apple.

Tedious Tuesday

This is the reason I spent the first part of the day without power and most of the rest without water. It was a more amusing picture when it had the street cleaning machine (about the size of a Smart) stuck in it, but I didn't want to run up 5 floors and then back down again with a camera after I carried the girls and the car seat down the stairs to catch the school bus.
It's a bit of a pain because the bus is used for a second run picking up older children and therefore there is no room to keep the second seat on board so I need to carry it back and forth daily. We sent a lighter seat over from the States because I can't manage Thing2 and their regular Britax marathon togther, but I'm not willing to put Thing2 in just a booster pad as is done here in Germany: she's too small by US regulations and I think a 5-point harness is far safer.

So the cleaning machine was driving down the sidewalk when it fell through. This is the same spot where there had been a prior water main break so I am assuming that when they repaired it the workers did not shore up the street enough. They turned the electricity back on around 11 am but the water was not repaired until 18:45. We ordered in Indian. I asked for scharf, but it was bland. Sigh.