Collected thoughts on cooking in Germany

Let me preface this by saying that the following is more a commentary on my personal skills in the kitchen than a critique of German culture, culinary conventions, or kitchens. As her blog shows, Christina, a friend here in Berlin, is able to produce delicious meals in spite of (even in light of) our location. And, the included picture is not from here in Berlin. It's from a birthday party for John and other friends last year. (We miss you, Yada!) It's just picture evidence that I do cook.

When I go into a Spätkauf (sort of like a convenience store) looking for eggs and get worried because they are not in the refrigerator, I have to remember - Germans don’t refrigerate eggs. I just need to look on the shelves next to the cookies.

Neither sour cream nor cream cheese are sold in 8oz packages. American recipes repeatedly and consistently call for these amounts and I repeatedly have to sprint to the computer (because inevitably I don’t remember this until I’m in the middle of making something) do calculations, run the numbers and then maybe, approximately come out with the correct amount.

Mexicorn does not exist in Germany. However, other canned corn mixes do exist in great variety. zum Beispiel (for example): corn + red peppers and green beans, corn + pineapple, corn + kidney beans, corn + carrots.

My mother has always been “on call” when I’m in the kitchen and this tradition hasn’t stopped just because I live in a radically different time zone. (Thank you Skype, for letting me call US home phones, work phones, and cell phones when necessary.)

zum Beispiel:

Me: “Mom, my cake is bubbling over and out of the bundt pan in the oven. There are blobs of cake cooking all over the bottom of the oven and running down the sides of the pan. Should I take it out?.”

Mom: “Yeah, you can’t save it. You’re going to need to take it out before it makes a bigger mess.”

Me: pause...“So this is a total loss?”

Mom: “Yes, definitely. Go get it out of the oven immediately!”

Cooking without a microwave is really only an inconvenience when it comes time to reheat leftovers. I can soften butter by letting it hang out on the radiator. I can (begrudgingly) do without popcorn for a year. But trying to cook meals that last for more than one sitting is a pain in the butt. Reheating pasta is particularly a challenge (one that requires my special brand of trial and error.)

Why have I had to learn to go to the grocery store with at least two viable recipe options for dinner? Because our grocery store erratically stocks meat. Today it’s nothing but turkey schnitzel and chicken wings. Tomorrow it may be ground beef and pork chops. Oh, they always have sausage. Always.

Nuggets of Knowledge for your Knapsack of Facts

As the holidays approach we miss y'all more than ever. While we're none too pleased that we won't get to see you, we're thankful for the opportunity to be here in Berlin right now and for the year in Germany in general. And since y'all are gearing up for Thanksgiving back home we thought we'd toss some trivia your direction.

"When a celebration was deemed in order, the Puritans were delighted to let their hair down. The first Thanksgiving feast went on for three full days and involved, in addition to copious eating and drinking, such diversions as stoneball, a game similar to croquet, and competitions of running, jumping, arm-wrestling, shooting and throwing."

While I doubt we'll participate in any throwing or jumping, we do plan on celebrating Thanksgiving with the other Berlin Boschies on Saturday. No one has Thursday off which we figured would grossly inhibit food preparation and as the meal is central to Thanksgiving, a deferment was in order. We've got one person on turkey-duty and the rest of us are contributing favorite holiday sides (or at least some version of them as ingredients like Cream of Mushroom soup can be difficult to find).

Speaking of turkeys:

"The colonists were... well acquainted with a New World food that abounded along the eastern seaboard: the turkey. A not unreasonable question is how a native American bird came to be named for a country four thousand miles away. The answer is that when turkeys first appeared in England, some 80 years before the Mayflower set sail, they were mistakenly supposed to have come from Turkey. They had in fact come from Spain, brought there from Mexico by Hernan Cortes's expedition of 1519. Many other European nations made a similar geographical error in naming the bird. The French thought they came from India and thus called them chickens 'd'Inde,' from which comes the modern French dindon. The Germans, Dutch and Swedes were even more specifically inaccurate in their presumptions, tracing the bird to the Indian city of Calicut, and thus gave it their respective names Kalekuttisch Hün, kalkoen, and kalkon. By the 1620s, the turkey was so well known in Europe, and its provenance had so long been assumed to be the Near East, that the Pilgrims were astounded to find them in abundance in their new-found land."

Happy Thanksgiving to you all!!!

Love,

John and Lauren

A big thanks to Bill Bryson's book Made in America for the included trivia tid-bits.

Fighting Thirst in Germany

As Lauren and I sat in a restaurant the other night, savoring the last few sips of our dinner-time beverages, we concluded that the average American must drink more than the average German (maybe European) because we are always thirsty and always underwhelmed by German drink quantities. This frustrating truth manifests itself almost everyday in a number of ways (disclaimer: this doesn't have anything to do with German beer quantities nor with the American tendency to order a 64oz drum of coke):

1. No free glasses of water with a meal. Why is it that I must instead buy a (small) bottle of fresh bubbly mineral water to complement my meal? The tap water isn't toxic, and let's be honest: water is water. At home, regardless of my choice of beverage, I would gulp down four glasses of tap water without even thinking twice. Instead, I'll either pay for a 5 euro bottle of exquisite mineral water fresh from a secret glacial spring high in the Italian Alps, or just order a beer.

2. It's certainly a cafe culture over here. Lauren and I have been known to sit in a single cafe for three hours with a single cup of coffee. Not that the cups of coffee are of a sufficient size to last an entire sitting. In fact, they are sized to last a maximum of 7.5 minutes, and that's if you're willing to let it approach room temperature. You see, what they call a Tasse (cup), we would consider an espresso shot. Three generous sips and I'm done-ski. What they call a Pott is really a mere mockery of the American equivalent and just the size of a standard American coffee mug. At work, I initially made the mistake of ordering a Tasse because I thought ordering a Pott sounded a little outlandish, only to get a mug filled almost halfway. Now I order a full Pott and it almost fills the mug. Lauren has remarked that Starbuck's often wins out over the cute charming Berlin equivalent simply because you get enough coffee to make the trip worth it. Maybe it's just that, despite the extraordinary number of coffee shops around, coffee is a scarce commodity over here.

3. At work, I'm the only one I know that drinks out of the "large" glass. "Large," it should be noted, is 0.4 liters, or about the size of a coke can. The small is half that size and again, another mockery of anyone who enjoys the act of drinking. What's more staggering is that many colleagues never get anything to drink with their meal at all: to me there are few things worse than eating a meal without some form of liquid at least to clear the palate and wash it all down. But I make up for that, because you better believe that I get a large syrupy glass of in-your-face freedom-loving Coca-Cola every day, not only because it's out of a fountain (as rare as the basic concept of free refills) but oftentimes just for the effect it has on my baffled-looking German colleagues.

Which all leads me back to my original query: how do Germans stay hydrated? My common solution - bringing a Nalgene of tap water from home - still evokes furrowed brows and confused stares. And there aren't water fountains around. I did discover that one colleague of mine solves the problem by stashing three crates of mineral water behind the desk, but that's an expensive solution that I just can't justify.

Well, if you'll now excuse me, I'm off to search for something to drink.

Odds and Ends

This weekend I realized we never posted the other zoo video and thus left you (I'm sure) anxiously awaiting Zooscapades part TWO. My apologies, dear reader. I have tried twice now to upload the video but something is amiss. Hopefully, we can get that fixed and you can witness the excitement soon!

And we're back!!!

Why is this of interest? Pay attention to the zoo man and how he interacts with the big male. Watch how the big male responds to the zoo man. Pretty crazy, my friends!

On a side note: Saturday I attended a wedding expo with some of the Bosch ladies. The lovely Ampelhead wrote a fabulous blog entry on the event and included some great pictures. It's sure to raise your eyebrows. Check it out here: http://ampelhead.blogspot.com/

And finally: John and I visited the Neues Museum on Sunday afternoon, which was just recently reopened, bringing Berlin ever closer to returning Museum Island to its former, pre-war glory. The Museum is a Pre-History buff and Egyptologist's delight (neither of which I am). There are a lot of burial objects, bones of cavemen, general ancient stuff. It's a cabinet of curiosity on a much larger scale.

What's really interesting (in my humble opinion) is the building itself. Utterly desecrated during WWII and left to ruin for decades, the minds behind the renovation aimed (according to the audio-guide) to honor the museum's rocky past but made dramatic changes to the architecture of the 19th century building. After doing some reading, I discovered that the renovation was the source of intense debate in Berlin. Here is an article on the topic if you're looking to continue procrastinating.

All that aside, I found myself turning my camera more often at the ceiling and walls than at the collection itself. To show you what I mean:

That one is just for fun. He's thinking hard.

Making sense of history

It’s hard to know what to say about the fall of the Berlin Wall, whose 20th anniversary we celebrated here this week. Where does one even begin to describe arguably the most important single event of the last half century? We’ve heard for months about the celebrations being planned, and naturally it’s been the hot topic here all year. We’ve also had lots of people asking us about the mood here in Berlin. So I’ve been asking a lot of people what the Mauerfall (wall fall) means to them, and oddly enough, the opinions are all over the place, depending on whether you ask a man or woman, twenty-something or a retiree, and most importantly, a Wessi (former west German) or an Ossi (former east German). Their reactions cover a full range of emotions: joy, pride, confidence, relief, liberation, and optimism but also disappointment, frustration, uncertainty, disillusionment, and confusion. This latter set of emotions has for a long time struck me as odd, and it was only until recently that I began to understand it for myself.

The Mauerfall for many Germans seems not to represent a single moment in history but the start of a long and often painful process that most non-Germans simply don’t grasp. Millions of Ossis lost their jobs, their ideological system, their national anthem and flag, their schools and textbooks, their favorite consumer products, currency (and with it their savings), and their identity as a people. For the Wessis, there often is resentment that they’ve had to pay for the adjustments in the East with little to show for it. And even though the Ossis love freedom as much as the Wessis, many seem disillusioned with the promises of the West and the way things have (or rather not) progressed. Wessis, conversely, often read this as ungratefulness. This complicates feelings, leading to a strange nostalgia for the old days when the two Germanys were still divided (described here and here and here). Many say that while the Berlin Wall has fallen, the wall still remains in the minds of many Germans. What I find interesting is that so many Germans have been willing to discuss this openly with me.

Thus the reason for the array of emotions that the Mauerfall creates over here in Berlin, which I’ve tried to describe as best I could. It’s been a truly priceless experience - not only to be a part of all the incredible festivities that transpired on Monday, but also to witness the living history that is still slowly working itself out, even twenty years later.

Amateurs at a Major Event

Monday night John and I joined the tens of thousands of people at the Brandenburg Gate to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. If you didn't see the professional coverage of the night, you can read about it and watch some of it here. Or, you can check out our video below, which is by no means professional, but does give you our view of the dominoes falling. I've also included some pictures from Saturday when we went to see the dominoes in the full light! Enjoy!

Somewhere between 800 and 1,000 dominoes were sent from all over Germany and around the world to be part of this exhibition.

The dominoes stretched from Potsdamer Platz, past the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag, to the Spree River. The official website for the dominoes (in English) is here.

Here we are!

And this was the Spree end of the domino chain.

Zooscapades (part 1)

On Sunday we went to the Berlin Zoo for the first time. We were very excited to see the feeding of some of the animals, especially the lions. While we were waiting for them to be fed this happened:

After that little display of impatience, they were finally fed. We also videotaped that event but we'll have to show you that in another post.

We took a lot of pictures but the following three were by far my favorites. Something about this bear cracked me up. Maybe it was the way he was sitting. Maybe it was because he seemed disappointed that Knut,the polar bear, whose pen is just across the way, gets all the attention in the zoo.

Just hanging out, doing his bear thing.

Pondering life.

Totally bored.

Stay tuned for part 2 and the crazy, reckless behavior of the Berlin zoo-man in charge of feeding the lions.

We never said we weren't nerdy

There are a number of moments in the last 8 years that foreshadowed mine and John's eventual nuptials. Many of you were witnesses along the way to the various hints at our burgeoning love; however, one you may not have seen was our time together in Professor Lazar's class at UNC, "The Poor, the Whore, the Devil and the Witch." That title may not inspire you to romance, but in the realm of nerdom that John and I inhabit, it was fodder for the heart. The class taught us many things: the history of the church in all its glory and gore, the interconnectedness of art and religion in Europe, and that we should never take a class together ever again (more on that another time).

In order to celebrate our own religious history, perhaps in order to kindle old flames, we bundled up on Saturday and headed to Lutherstadt Wittenberg, the little town in which Martin Luther boldly nailed his 95 Theses to the door of All Saints' Church on October 31, 1517, setting into motion the events that would herald in the Protestant Reformation.

Wittenberg did not disappoint. There was a beautiful blue sky (albeit near freezing temperatures), the Reformation Fest (the annual celebration of Luther's revolutionary act) and even the Rennaisance Music Festival (a more elaborate and hopefully more authentic version of the festival you know and love as it makes its yearly stop in your town). It was a bit difficult to distinguish between the two competing festivals. We were as likely to eat lunch with knights as we were with nuns and Luther spent the day leading a parade of children and fully regaled Arthurian soldiers. The whole experience was a bit surreal but we are in agreement that it was perhaps, the most entertaining day in Germany so far.

Here are a few of the highlights:

What's that? Oh, just Luther's own markings in his personal Bible.

And this is one of the original New Testaments translated by Luther and illustrated by Albrecht Dürer and Lucas Cranach the Elder (only 2 of the greatest wood cutters in all of history).

One of the oldest surviving copies of Luther's hymn "A Mighty Fortress is our God" which we sang, in German, Saturday night in All Saints' Church.

(While we grant that this hymn is perhaps one of the best ever written, we are both of the opinion that as a hymn writer Luther doesn't hold a candle to the Wesley brothers. I mean, we're just saying...)

There's the old boy himself leading a parade through town. Even Protestant saints have to contend with the paparazzi.

That's me in the black coat, sipping some hot apple wine, next to the monk, across from the knight, at the table with the lady of the court. You know, just another day in Germany.

I'm going to work on putting all of the pictures up on Picasa after this, so head there to get a fuller look at this rather ridiculous day.