Heimweh nach Sauerkraut

When I was home over the holidays, I ate a lot of sauerkraut, which may sound odd given that I live in a country that mein Mann refers to as "Krautland." The thing is that my sister has taken to making her own kraut and it's fabulous. Having lost her driver's license, she managed to get a jar of it through airport security armed with only an expired university id and the argument that the amount of liquid in the jar was less than 3 ounces. I'm not so sure about that, but I am sure that I ate way more than my share. Luckily, I was able to continue my kraut binge on the other end of my vacation at my parents' home because my mother has caught the kraut-making bug and hers was equally delicious. I ate bowls of the the stuff straight from the fridge, but I particularly loved a sandwich she created - aged ham, extra-sharp cheddar, plum chutney, and a small pile of kraut. Back in Germany I've been both under the weather and much busier thanks to a new fuller-time job. Somehow the kraut I've been getting at the bio store doesn't quite merit being eaten by itself (even the better stuff I've found here is limper and the flavor a little duller than what my mom and sister make. Clearly I need to be about getting my own crock and making my own batch and I plan to just as soon as I find the time and energy), but since my grocery store trips are less frequent of late, we've been eating more Abendbrot. I know it isn't what the natives do, but I like a little veg with my bread and cheese and I can report that sauerkraut mixed with grated carrot and thinly sliced radicchio (the only vegetables that happened to be lingering in the refrigerator), spiced up a bit with perhaps a dab of mustard and some herbs if they happen to also be dying in the fridge, makes a very tasty slaw. I've also been making something akin to a vegetarian reuben sandwich ... really just grilled Emmentaler cheese with sauerkraut and mustard or Russian dressing because the only corned beef I've seen in Berlin is truly scary. But the other day I noticed that they have pastrami at my local bio store: nearly authentic reuben sandwiches for dinner (a little light on the meat, but that's a good thing because you can really taste the sauerkraut). Finally, why have I never heard of a Krautburger before? Delicious.

ps. I'm having a hard time finding someone exited about Albanian food....but I'm going to make it happen.

Berlin ist für die Vögel

Early summer was filled with work and in mid-July we headed to the US for (gasp, sigh) almost a whole month of vacation. Three days in New York were much too short and I never feel like I really get to spend enough time with anyone, but there was great Mexican food, cocktails below the High Line, sweatshop work, a mechanical bull accident (not mine), and a speed walk through my beloved Union Square Greenmarket. A week in Nelson County was perfect: a cabin tucked right next to a mountain with just enough space for a creek to run between. Terriers and husband spent much time with their feet in the water (looking for mischief and reading American history, respectively). We hiked, kakayed the James River, picked blackberries (cobbler), heard bluegrass, ate our weight in barbecue, and got attacked (well, surprised, anyway) by a bat in the bedroom). Coming back to Berlin after being gone for so many nice weeks was downright strange. The dictionary lists 31 entries for the word home, but doesn't begin to explain the complexity of this word for me.

I never realized how much I like summer weather until I lived in a place without it (actually Berlin did have a few (as in, like 3) hot days this year). Stepping off the plane in Berlin there was a noticeable chill in the air (mid-August, mind you)...so we've tried to make the most of the pre-winter season.
We've been dodging the rain drops and have been canoeing again in beautiul Feldberg and finally took a day-trip to Leipzig, where we wandered the historic center, lunched on wild boar at the much-better-than-expected Auerbachs Keller, which dates to 1530 (Goethe ate here!), and hung out with these birds during a rainstorm. In other bird-related news, we've been waiting all year for a bird to discover our feeder and this week it finally happened. Unfortunately, we've been found out by the pigeon who lives in the tree across the street. Is this supposed to make me less home-sick for New York?

Drausen und auf den Beinen

Despite the less than stellar weather we've had this spring, we've been out and about and on the move a lot. The German May is packed with holidays like Tag der Arbeit (or May Day, as I like to call it), Himmelfart (aka Ascension and here I need to add that the word ascension (especially in Spanish, but even in comely English) sounds like the ascent to heaven. Himmelfart sounds like a scabby disease: You wouldn't believe how bad my Himmelfart is these days....)) and Pfingesten (aka Pentecost), which turn into long weekends, perfect for escaping the city. I can be pretty grumpy about Berlin, but I will say that one of the best things about this place is how easy it is to get out of here without a car. (I'll let you draw your own conclusions as to what it means that my favorite thing about this place is how easy it is to get out of it.)


Anyway, to celebrate (or cure our) Himmelfart, we biked north to Usedom. Or tried. Things went pretty well for the first two days. The weather was unwaveringly gray and chilly, but the scenery was lovely (lots of canola fields and blossoming apple trees), and those of us about 20 years out of bike practice were really appreciating how flat things are between Berlin and the Baltic Sea. Because of the weather, we decided not to camp, but to stay in the hotel in whichever small town we ended up in at the end of the day. The first was the Hotel Panorama, which lived up to its name if you consider a construction site with a pink crane outside your window to be a panorama (defined by www.dictionary.com as: an unobstructed and wide view of an extensive area in all directions.) The food on the trip, aside from our picnic lunches, of course, was nothing to write home about, but the Panorama (which had some odd delusions of grandeur), did have a pretty decent breakfast spread, including pumpkin seed butter, which I'd never seen before (although pumpkin seeds and pumpkin seed oil are typical products from this corner of Germany) and was quite good. We spend the second night in a totally unremarkable hotel in the town of Pasewalk and woke up to pouring rain. There was nothing to do but take the train back to Berlin (and the 10-minute bike ride to the train station was pretty miserable), where we discovered the best (by far) Doener Kebab in Berlin (and I wrote my Masters thesis on Doener, so I'm definitely qualified to make this proclamation), rented videos, and spent the rest of the weekend on the couch under a pile of blankets.

But you can't keep us down for long. Last weekend we headed out again, this time with a few friends, to camp-canoe in Müritz. Somehow, even though the weather was again mostly gray and chilly (and soggy at times), I still managed to get a little sunburn. I also managed to flip my very stable canoe and end up in the water, but that's another story. We did some very good picnicking and campfire cooking this trip, including a giant muffuletta sandwich, marinated sausages, and grilled asparagus. I also continued my crusade to persuade Germans of the absolute deliciousness of s'mores and I think I made some headway this trip, although I can't seem to get the Germans to understand that bar cookies are not all called brownies. They also seem to think I invented oatmeal chocolate chip bars.

Schöneberg ist Schön

We haven't been on any big adventures lately (although the intermittent spring weather has allowed for a few nice outings (a long walk from train station in Potsdam through the woods to Albert Einstein's summer house in Caputh with BR & co. with well-earned Spargel (if all Spargel was this good, I would understand what all the fuss is about), a very nice walk from my apartment past the zoo (great view of lounging kangaroos through the fence) to the western end of the Landwehr Kanal concluding with a delicious picnic with egg salad and homegrown cress, and a long-awaited visit to the Holländische Viertel (Dutch Quarter) in Potsdam (no idea what all the fuss is about) and a lovely stroll through Babelsberg Park.)) While we are gearing up for upcoming adventures (Return to Barcelona (will it be as magical as I remember it? Do I still speak Spanish? How much ham will I be able to eat in three days?) and The Effect of DC Summer Weather on a Certain German (aka almost an entire month on the East Coast!!!), I will leave you with a few cool things in my neighborhood:

1. There is a saddle shop around the corner. I'm not a horse person at all, but I love the fact that two minutes from my front door, I can buy handmade reins and a saddle and other leather horse paraphernalia.

2. A few doors down is a little Italian coffee place, mostly selling expensive espresso machines and other overpriced kitchen equipment, but they also make espresso and capuccino (no Milchkaffee here!) and the like. The store is owned and staffed by real Italians with a good understanding of what coffee can be (it's hit or miss when it comes to good coffee in this town). By now I can usually tell by looking which places will have undrinkable coffee, but so many seemingly nice places have just average coffee. It's discouraging, but a good reason to grind my own and drink at home or patronize our very local businesses). My favorite thing about the shop, though, is their mascot, this funny French bulldog who can always be found lounging on the rug inside the shop or (in nicer weather) keeping watch near the door.

3. A few streets away, over the S-Bahn tracks is The Museum of Unheard of Things (Museum der Unerhörten Dinge), which is about the size of my pantry (another thing I like about my neighborhood is that I have a pantry). This free museum is the pet project of Roland Albrecht and he displays small objects, such as a plastic bird representing the canary of Fraxern, a crystallized rose similar to the one Goethe had, and other totally random things on the shelf and walls lining the tiny room. My completely unfair beef with the museum is that the description for each object is a full page, single-spaced, back and front in German. I am a very, very slow and unhappy reader of German and so I must admit I didn't understand a lot of what I saw, but I really like the spirit of the museum and the fact that I can pop in on my way to the grocery store.

4. I grocery shop a lot. Sometimes six times a week. I love to grocery shop and while I do find food shopping in Berlin not quite up to what is was in the other cities I've lived in (oh the covered markets in Barcelona! or the Union Square Greenmarket in NYC!), things have improved since we moved. I've shopped at more than my share of the organic markets in Berlin and I can say only good things about the Bio Company (at least the one on Hauptstrasse). The produce is fresher than in any of the other organic markets I've used, the quality of the meat is truly impressive, they make a real effort to stock local products (it's not perfect, but I have to take what I can get) and the service is practically American. A good grocery store may not make or break your neighborhood, but it makes a huge difference in my life.

5. One of my main gripes about Berlin is that you can't go out for ice cream after 8 pm. I guess there must be a few exceptions, but most ice cream places close at 8, which means that if you go for an after-dinner stroll or want to grab a cone after an evening movie, you're out of luck. Germans eat a lot of ice cream and according to my observations, most of it is eaten in the late afternoon. This doesn't work for me because it ruins my American dinner (not the case for the Germans who are happy to eat some cheese and bread and wurst (aka Abendbrot) whenever they get hungry. Anyway, once in a while I decide I need an ice cream in the afternoon (early enough not to spoil my supper, of course) and my favorite place is Inka Eis. The ice cream is good if not great and they specialize in Latin American flavors, most of which I know and miss from my former life as a Latin Americanist. I always get lúcuma, which takes me back to my junior year abroad in Santiago de Chile. Lúcuma is a subtropical Andean fruit - I've never seen it fresh and have also never had it outside of Latin America (maybe it has followed açaí to New York?) - it's delicious in ice creams and mousses with a flavor that is something of a cross between caramel, maple syrup, and sweet potato. Who knew I would rediscover this treat in Berlin?

Nördlich für Ostern

You have to hand it to the Germans for stretching Easter into a four-day holiday (even the Italians cram it into three days). But, when in Rome, as they say, and so we packed our bags and headed north to visit mein Mann's godmother at her country cottage in Bergenhusen. It was a little chilly (Bergenhusen is way up north, almost at the Danish border), but even so, it is one of the prettiest parts of Germany I've seen so far (although I may be subconsciously biased as two of my ancestors hail from the region of Schleswig-Holstein where Bergenhusen is located). The land is above all else, flat (think: lots of storks (who appreciate the flatness b/c it enables them to see for long distances) and windmills). There are lots of farms and many, many sheep, including, these days the tiniest of lambs. Traditional houses have straw roofs, which you might be able to see next to the stork nest here. We spent most of the mini-vacation in the village, but did manage to take two excursions. One to visit a friend of mein Manns who hails from a nearby village and looks strikingly like a distant cousin (a lost lost relative perhaps?!). We also drove out to the Hamburger Hallig, a low-lying area, which floods twice a day so that all buildings (there were only a few) must be built on man-made hills (Warften). Because of the frequent (salt water) flooding, the sheep that graze in these areas (I guess they know to go up on the hills when the tide comes in?) are pre-salted and supposedly quite delicious. Unfortunately, we didn't have lamb for Easter dinner (many Germans, including our hosts, claim not to like lamb (they usually associate it with the scary southern and/or "immigrant cuisines" that deal in (gasp) garlic and/or have only had grocery store lamb, which, at least in Germany, is pretty bad), but I did manage to have a lamb patty (Frikadelle) at the little restaurant at Hamburger Hallig and it was quite tasty.
(Culinary side-story: Germans sometimes give Easter presents, which I don't quite understand, but willingly accept. This year Mein Mann (who arrived a day ahead of me, which happened to be market day, got me lamb ham (a la turkey bacon (tastes like corned beef), really excellent regular pig ham, and some tiny locally harvested (?) shrimp, which my godmother-in-law made into a delicious Abendbrot or evening bread, the German dinner of open-faced sandwiches. (They do look a bit like worms, though....) We also stopped to wander through the town of Husum, which has a fairly standard Schloss surrounded by a breathtaking field of purple crocuses. I was particularly taken by these napping ducks.


And finally, a few of my own Easter creations: Easter egg nest cupcakes for some of my most annoying clients to date. And, marbelized Easter eggs (thanks, Martha). I am in love with my egg holder, it definitely lives on the bar of at least one of the imaginary restaurants in my head.

Ausflug nach Dresden

A recent visitor took pity on me and left behind a copy of the New Yorker (an international subscription costs $120), which happened to contain a really interesting (although, not without serious faults that I won't go on about here) article on the city of Dresden. Dresden is only a little over an hour from Berlin by car, but somehow despite our wandering ways, we had never made the trek. A few weeks later, my Schwiegervater (aka father-in-law) made an unexpected visit to Berlin and suggested a day-trip, which, of course, we had to accept. We only got a taste of the city (along with a tiny sampling of Meissen, the nearby town, which you probably know for it's porcelain manufacture). I can, however, recommend the Residenzschloss, which houses the Grünes Gewölbe (or, Green Vault), an exhibition of the collections of the Wettin rulers. These Wettins were serious collectors and you can check out such treasures as a cherry pit with 185 faces carved into it, a massive and extremely ornate diorama of the Royal Household of the Grand Mogul, and about 1,078 other beautiful, but useless items.

I can also recommend stopping for snacks at the self-proclaimed "most beautiful dairy (store) in the world," Pfunds Molkerei. It is a bit touristy, but the dairy products were actually pretty tasty (I seem to be making a habit of visiting dairies of late, so I'm definitely qualified here). We shared an east German cheese plate (which made me wonder what the store was like during the GDR, when as I understand it, there were only a couple types of cheese available) and glasses of fresh milk/buttermilk.


In other news, it seems to have finally stopped snowing here (knock on wood): once last week I went out without a coat (!) and there are even little buds on all the trees! It's exciting. To inaugurate the change of seasons, we S-Bahned out to the Pfaueninsel where we strolled among fake ruins (very cartoonish in appearance and just plain odd) and real live peacocks (also odd, but quite nice), all of which I neglected to document, alas. There was actually a Meierei (dairy) there, too, but it was closed....luckily, we had packed our own cheese sandwiches (with pickled pepper for me and extra mustard for mein Mann) for the first official picnic of the year!

Waffeln und mehr

In our new (maybe not so new) role as Jetsetters, mein Mann and I spent the weekend in Brussels. I was there several years ago with my sister on our European Backpacking Adventure and remember rainy weather and discovering real Belgian waffles (gaufre de Liège to be specific) purchased from a stand in the subway or train station (I also remember that for some reason we (both non-French speakers) found the word gaufre quite hysterical). It was, for me, a waffle epiphany: the waffles sold all over Brussels from snack shops and carts are similar only in shape to what they call Belgian waffles in the States. These taste like caramelized brioche and there is no need for maple syrup. Actually, here I'm a purist - you can order them with whipped cream and chocolate sauce, but this only detracts from the basic deliciousness. Anyway, the flavor remained with me over the years (in my head), so I was very excited at the chance to sample them again. I think mein Mann was already sick of waffles by the time we got there as I had been talking about them so much. The waffles were every bit as good as I remembered and I'm determined to make them at home soon. But, if I'm lucky, mein Mann (who I left behind so he could hang out at NATO for a couple days) will return with one more for me... (I know they're best hot off the waffle iron, but they're really pretty good at room temperature, too.)

We did manage to eat a few things besides waffles: We started the weekend off with moules-frites and a healthy serving of Belgian customer service - when we tried to order 1.5 kilos of mussels to share (plus the frites and beers), we were told this was not acceptable and we would both have to order our own kilo, which is not exactly obscene, but is a lot of mussels (especially when you have the frites and beer and impending waffle binge to consider). Usually I try to go with the local customs, but this just struck me as too stupid so we put our foot down (sort of). They agreed to let us share if we also ordered a salad, which was mostly Belgian endive as it turned out and quite delicious.


Someone else wrote about the delicious Moroccan crepe-like wraps that you can buy at the Marche du Midi on Sunday mornings. The market itself was not all that spectacular - the kind of place you can buy your underwear, a toaster, and a case of avocados for a Euro - but the Moroccan "crepes" were really delicious and the sun came out so we could sit at the wooden tables on the side of market eating while we scarfed (the only way with these messy treats) and sipped fresh mint tea. Sorry for the bad documentation of this snack - the mob around the stand was a testament to how good they were, but posed a challenge to the tourist-photographer, and once you're holding it, there's nothing to do but eat.