Churrasco is the Brazilian kind of barbecue. Grilling meat seems to be such a favourite around here that most houses that have any sort of ‘mod cons’ come equipped with their own outdoor churrasco station. Private houses. Embassies. Pre-schools. They all have one. Continue reading
I put chocolate and some orange marmalade into this one… oh yeah.
I like something sweet with my 11 o’clock coffee at the office, but the coffee shop at the corner offers mostly cakes, or overly sweet or heavy pastries. And I couldn’t really afford to keep up a daily cake habit, not for my waistline nor for my wallet!
Luckily, there are scones. Deliciously crumbly and not too sweet, they are perfect as a mid-morning snack. I make a batch once or twice a week most weeks. Now, I know, can’t nobody be dealing with complicated recipes and mountains of washing up twice weekly in the evening after work and commuting and possibly even a stab at a social life. But the recipe I am sharing today is not called “Weekday Scones” for nothing. It takes about 45 minutes from the moment you pull out your mixing bowl until you’re done, washing-up included. Ooohhh…magic. Continue reading
A few Sundays ago, I made my first jam. Orange marmalade to be precise, from untreated
Sicilian blood oranges. It took me a few hours, and I had to wash the kitchen floor and myself afterwards because everything got a bit sticky, but I did it. That evening I was sitting on my couch just looking at those glorious five jam jars with their orange-red filling. Proud as if I’d laid an egg.
Since then, I’ve made my own apple sauce and taralli (sort of pretzels), and there’s a box of orange peel in my freezer waiting to be candied. I am a bit surprised myself by my recent domestic adventures. But there is a reason behind all this. What inspired me to the jam-making…well, actually, that’s the point. I was not inspired, I was pushed. By 10kg of beautiful Sicilian oranges sitting in my hallway. My colleague’s brother has an orchard somewhere at the south-eastern corner of Sicily, and she organised a delivery of oranges up to Piemonte, for a good price, but you had to take 10kg minimum. What are you going to do with so many oranges? Marmalade, that’s what. Because you don’t want a single one of them go to waste… Continue reading
Mmmmh… beans… hero of weekend breakfasts, lively companion of the humble baked potato, saviour of hungry evenings when you have not managed to buy food for a proper dinner and come home from the office absolutely starving…
Those are not the days however when you should be making homemade baked beans, because that takes about 14 hours, all told. Why then should you go through the trouble at all? Easy, my friend: flavour. Imagine the goodness of soft warm beans in a fruity-fresh sauce with a little sparkle of spices, not too sweet, not too salty, just as you like it. Continue reading
Fog shrouds the city
Hidden opportunities
I can’t find my keys
…Four years and four months ago, I left Ireland after living there for ten years and moved to Parma, Italy, to attend a masters course. Part of the course was a writing workshop, where I came up with these gems of wisdom that I would not want to keep from you…
Nebel auf Brücken
Der Fluss fliesst unermüdlich
Warum? Wasser halt
Fog on the bridges
The river never tiring
Why? Well, it’s water
Po-Ebene – Schnee
Zugfahrt ins neue Leben
Erstmal ‘nen Kaffee
Twenty-six boxes
Ten years worth of memories
Where the hell are they?
Imagine a street festival where you can buy delicious food from different countries at every stall, everyone shows up in their hippest summer gear, there’s microbrewery beer and good wine but no mosquitoes and it happens every Thursday… too good to be true? Not at all! It’s the new Street Food Thursday at Markthalle Neun in Kreuzberg. I was there yesterday and enjoyed an insight into this year’s hipster summer fashion (cut-off jeans, men’s shirts and tousled hair) as well as a Kimchi beef taco from Fräulein Kimchi. Delicious.
You may also feel like Vietnamese pork sandwiches, Jamaican brown stew, a cheese and meat board, house-smoked fish or Thai papaya salad served on a banana leaf and I say go for it, grab a beer brewed in-house by Heidenpeters and let the summer season begin!
Image by Street Food Thursday
PS. Nobody pays me to write this. It’s just great that people are putting all these things together and making the city an even more fun place to be.
Since the beginning of February, I have been taking part in a weekly poetry writing workshop, organized through The Reader Berlin. I don’t fancy myself as much of a poet, but not least since reading Christopher Johnson’s Microstyle: The Art of Writing Little, I think that poetic skills are very useful also in other writing situations, such as crafting snappy headlines. Every week, we read some poems that the participants have handed in (everyone gets to do two during the course), and discuss them. You read your own poem, but don’t take part in the discussion – that works quite well. I am enjoying the workshops a lot.
Here is the poem I have submitted for next Wednesday’s meeting …
I have tried out the the first recipe from my granny’s recipe collection: the “Billiger Kuchen“. It’s not the first one in the notebook, but I was intrigued, because “Billiger Kuchen” means “Cheap Cake”, and I was wondering about that. I figured it might just be a way of saying “simple cake”. After all, these are just notes, and it is a pretty simple cake of the Rührkuchen variety, as in, the ingredients are more or less just stirred together (rühren means stirring) – flour, eggs, butter, sugar, milk, baking powder, and lemon zest for flavouring.
As it turns out, the cake would probably have been considered cheap as well as easy, but I fear, so would the hostess. At least the first part…
Are you intimidated by risotto? Have you heard people saying that it is complicated and 
a lot of work? Then you probably are a victim of the Very Secret Risotto Cooking Society. It exists, I can only presume (it is Very Secret), to scare people off preparing this very delicious and simple dish and thus making the people who do prepare it (probably all sworn members of the VSRCS) look all the more accomplished and fabulous. It’s a conspiracy. I know it.
Because making risotto is neither complicated nor any more work than your average dish of pasta (there aren’t even a lot of dishes to wash, because we need just one pan and one bowl to hold the stock). And you can adjust it in many ways to suit your taste, with seafood or vegetables or meat… Continue reading
The taste of cheese curd changed my life.
I had been well-trained in the art of composing a cheese board: combine fresh with aged cheeses, cow milk with goat and sheep, soft textures with firm, subtle aromas with pungent. Add wine. Achieve satisfaction. I was even getting rather proficient in remembering the curriculum of particular cheeses: this one from high mountain ranges, covered in luscious pastures, that one from craggy hills where sheep roam freely nibbling on wild herbs. But I hadn’t yet quite understood cheese. Continue reading
Spoons and Books 