Let me talk a bit more about food (as we all know that I like to do that).

The food planning efforts were very well worth it - the things that we brought onto our trip worked very well, and they were just the right amount. We had a walk into the village of Gorisch on our last Forststeig overnight stay, and had something for dinner there; accordingly there was a little bit of food left over in the end. If we hadn't had the dinner out, we'd have ended up eating odds and ends in a slightly curious combination, but it would have been about the amount necessary to bring us to the end of the trail.

For our evening meals, which were the main meal of the day, we had pre-packed things that would cook quickly and easily, with an appropriate amount of calories, and a variety of tastes. That included potato soup with lots of bacon and some salami; rice with a rich peanut-coconut-sauce spiced with ginger (my favourite of the meals); red lentil curry, again with coconut; and pasta bolognese with sunflower seed "minced meat" (which also worked fairly well). The vegan sausages we took along to try out, eaten with mashed potatoes, were not convincing, though.
I'd packaged the individual meal parts in ziplock bags, and each bag collection was held together with a rubber band; then there was "food roulette" in the evening, when The Most Patient Husband of Them All stuck his hand into his pack and pulled out one of the packages. For breakfast, we had a kind of porridge with added dry fruits, and for food during the day, there were nuts, bread, sausage, and home-made bars. Theoretically, you'd call these "Müsliriegel" in German, or "granola bars" in English, but as we were going for more caloric value per weight unit, they were more like... nut bars. I had made some in several different flavours, and the least favourite for both of us was the most müsli-like one, with rolled oats as basis. For the others, I combined figs, walnuts and cardamom; cashews, pistachio nuts and marzipan; and our favourite variation was made from cashews, poppy seed, marzipan, almonds, and dried apricots. The last one did remind me more of a poppy seed cake than a granola bar, which is a very nice thing on such a trip!

And just in case you want to try it yourself, here's the recipe:

100 g shaved almonds
40 g poppy seed, ground
42 g maple syrup
65 g honey (I used honeydew honey, which to me always seems less sweet than other honeys)
35 g marzipan
30 g almond flour (ground almonds should also work)
55 g dried apricots
100 g cashew nuts, finely chopped or ground

Grate marzipan into small bits and mix these into the ground poppy seed. Mix in the other dry ingredients. Mix honey and maple syrup, maybe adding a little hot water, pour over the dry ingredients and mix well. The mass should be firm and sticky. Bake, either shaped into individual bars/pieces or as one flat piece, in a fan oven at c 150-160°C for about 35 mins. It's more drying the mass than baking. If baked in one piece, cut into pieces of the desired size. I had about 12 bars. They tended to stick together a bit in their little bag, but could be pried apart more or less easily. Wrapping them in rice paper would probably work well to keep them more separatistic, or placing a wafer on top and below each bar.

The apricots were not really taste-able in this mix, and could probably have been left out without a change in taste. You should be able to change the amount of the ingredients according to your preferences; as long as things stick firmly enough together, you should be fine - the individual ingredients are all stuff that keeps well, and their combination, accordingly, should do so too.

I am quite, quite fond of tomatoes - though I remember that as a child and even teenager, I didn't really like them. These days, I do grow them myself, with varying success though unwavering fun. I find it especially fun to have a variety of different breeds, and I do take seeds myself to grow them again the following year (though admittedly I don't take too much care to prevent cross-pollination, so things may deteriorate over time...)

Here's some of the current crop, most of them still working on getting ripe:

[caption id="attachment_5480" align="alignnone" width="640"] This one's a Tigerella - with fancy tiger stripes. Not completely ripe yet, but definitely working on it!


I got the Tigerella seeds a few years back as a present from a friend who's mostly out of touch now - so having these tomatoes also holds some pleasant memories for me.

The next one is a "Sibirische Fleischtomate", literally "Siberian beef tomato". At least that is the name it was sold under when I took one of these from our grocery box, also a few years ago. The plants make just few, but rather large fruits:

[caption id="attachment_5482" align="alignnone" width="902"] Sibirische Fleischtomate!


And finally, a souvenir tomato - I brought back a few packets of different seeds from our last summer holidays, among them one kind of tomato called "Indigo Rose". They are blue on top and ripen to a red-blue mix; tasty both raw and cooked:



Depending on the plant and on how much sun they are getting, the blue part is smaller or larger, and might even go towards a black colour. Definitely also a fun tomato, and looking at them brings back fond memories of hot summer days spent paddling...

In general, I'm not too fond of raisins. There are people who put them into apple cake, and into cheese cake, and I find that... um... unattractive. Very unattractive. Same is true for raisins in muesli, and in chocolate (there's nut-and-raisin chocolate available in Germany, and I only eat that very rarely as a reminder of childhood days). I'm also not too fond of them in trail mix.

There's a few places, though, where I find them acceptable - or even necessary. One prime example?

Scones.



I love scones. Preferably with clotted cream (which is hard to get in Germany). So here's my recipe for scones, just in case you are feeling like going on a bit of a pandemic baking spree, like so many others:

75 g raisins or currants (I prefer currants)
115 g buttermilk

75 g butter
45-50 g sugar
1 large egg
pinch of salt
15 g baking powder (amount generally recommended for 500 g of flour)
340 g flour (typically wheat, I use spelt)
optional: quarter teaspoon of baking soda (or less)

Soak raisins or currants in buttermilk for at least one hour.

Mix cold butter, flour, salt, baking soda and baking powder to prepare for making a shortcrust-type dough. Form into a ring on your work surface, add buttermilk, currants, and egg to the inside of the ring; knead until it forms a smooth dough.
Roll out your dough straight away (no rest needed), to about 2.5 cm of thickness on a floured surface, then use a glass or a suitably sized round cookie cutter to cut circles. Put on baking sheet and wash with leftover buttermilk or an egg-buttermilk-mix or just egg. (I tip the buttermilk and currants into the floury ring, then whisk the egg in the now-vacated bowl, then tip it into the ring as well. The bits of egg and buttermilk left in that bowl are enough  or almost enough to glaze the scones; they definitely are if another small bit of buttermilk is added.)

Bake at 189-190°C in a non-fan oven, for about 15 minutes.

They still taste nice the day after baking, and even the day after that. They never survived for longer in our household...

First of all, here's a link to an interesting article about the comparisons of the Black Death to our current Corona pandemic, written by Going Medieval.  And while I'm throwing things at you to read, here is a long blogpost about Macchiavelli, written by Ada Palmer. Just so you have something to do, in case you haven't.

Here, things had more or less settled into a new routine, with both of us working in the home office - but now things have changed up a bit again, as the Most Patient Husband's company has shut down for the Easter holidays. Which means that this week and next week, he has time off work, so I'll probably cut down on my own worktime a bit as well, so we can make good use of his free time. (Which also means that I might accidentally skip a blogpost or two. I don't plan to, currently, but it might happen.)

Otherwise, nothing really newsworthy is going on here. Well, unless you count little things; little things that brightened up our weekend, and make things somehow much nicer and much better. Little things like a few new plants for our garden, ordered from that local nursery, which arrived on Friday and were duly re-potted on Saturday. Activities on that day also included a very, very fun bread-baking action:

One of our friends had offered via his Whatsapp-Status to bake bread together; nice, simple, down-to-earth rye bread with sourdough. He'd prepare a sourdough starter for the local people (which we collected contactless, of course), and then on Saturday, there was a video group call at several points in time, with explanation and instructions on what to do to bake the bread.

Many years ago, I used to make my own bread purely for fun, so it wasn't all new to me - but it was definitely something else to do it in a group, with a few hilarious technical issues, and a number of lovely rye breads at the end of the action.

This was my result:



It's a nice, proper sourdough rye bread, tasting just like it is supposed to be. I also have a starter in the fridge now, and I do suspect there will be a bit more bread-baking in my future again...

There is a number of recipes intended to use up bread that is getting old - and I'm rather fond of this type of food. Whenever bread hereabouts threatens to get too old, it gets cut up into cubes, these are dried, and then they get packed away until needed. (Because we buy our bread in relatively small units in the bakery close-by, this is a rare occurrence... but then, there's the Textile Forum, where the caterers tend to bring way, way too much bread. Which, you've guessed it, gets cut up into cubes... and travels back home with me, causing much joy and serving as the base for quite a few servings of bread-based meals. It's not only delicious, it's also cutting down on food waste. Two good things in one.)

[caption id="attachment_5086" align="alignnone" width="486"] Bread mix, soaking. As you can see, it's a wild mix of all kinds of different breads... which can be a little surprising sometimes, when there's suddenly some pumpkin seed turning up!


One especially delicious way to use up that bread are Speckknödel (bacon dumplings). I was first introduced to those in Austria, and they are wonderful. Wonderful. It's basically old bread soaked in milk and/or water to make it soft again, mixed with egg (to hold it all together), onion, and smoked bacon, seasoned with salt and parsley, and then simmered in water. Traditionally, they are served with browned butter; a salad goes along with them nicely, as does red cabbage, or some other cabbagy vegetable.

Here's the recipe I usually use - the amount of liquid you need may vary depending on your bread:

250 g dry bread, cut into small cubes (c 1 cm side length works very well)
250 ml milk (or half milk, half water)
2 eggs
1 medium onion (ca. 80 g)
2 tablespoons chopped parsley
80-100 g bacon (smoked bacon), diced
3 tablespoons flour (c 45 g)
salt
butter

Pour your liquid over the diced bread and let it stand for a while (at least an hour, so the moisture can spread out through the bread). Dice the onion finely, then sautee it until translucent. Mix onions and bacon with the moistened bread. Beat the eggs, add salt and chopped parsley, and add that mixture to the bread mix as well. Let sit for about 15 minutes.
In a sufficiently large pot, bring water to the boil. Add salt and turn heat down a bit. Form dumplings from the bread mix (I get about 12-14 dumplings from the mix) and gently place into the water; they should now simmer (not boil) for about 15 minutes.

Meanwhile, brown some butter in a small pan or pot.

[caption id="attachment_5087" align="alignnone" width="640"] Dumplings!


Serve dumplings with browned butter and salad, or another side. Leftover dumplings are very nice sliced up and fried in butter, or sliced up and eaten cold.

The water used to simmer the dumplings also makes a very nice base for a soup on the next day...

There's people who eat breakfast, and people who don't, and I've been in both groups at different times in my life. I've never been someone to skip a special occasion breakfast, though - you can always get me with a good breakfast buffet, which means that staying at a hotel with breakfast, for whatever reason, always feels like an extra-special treat for me.

Recently, I've been introduced to Bircher Muesli (by my brother-in-law, from Switzerland, fittingly) - and it has become one of my weekday breakfast delights since. I've never been really fond of the typical German Müsli, which is rolled oats and other grains together with dried fruits, plus some flakes or pops; you pour milk over this and eat it. The grains are rather hard, which I don't find too pleasant, and the flakes and pops go soggy quickly, which I also don't find pleasant, and the dried fruit is just... eh. Especially if it's raisins. (It's usually raisins.)

Bircher Muesli, however, is basically overnight oats, only invented way before they became the current In Thing. The original version is a bit of oats with a good amount of apple and some hazelnuts; the oats are soaked overnight, the apple is added fresh, as are the ground or chopped nuts.

Obviously, there's a gazillion of variations (this Guardian article gives you some); I soak my oats in low-fat yoghurt and a bit of water, add a small apple (about 120 g), coarsely grated, to 60 g of oats and about 120 g of yoghurt, leave out the hazelnuts and put in a dash of lemon juice, plus some additional fruit such as a bit of sliced banana and diced orange. That makes for two servings - half of it just goes back into the fridge and is just fine the day after.



The oats are nice and soft and squishy, the yoghurt and lemon plus a tart apple add some tang, and the grated apple makes the consistency somehow fluffy, which I really like. The extra fruit adds some interest and variation plus sweetness, and if not enough of the latter, a little bit of honey drizzled on top does the job nicely.

So in case you're looking for a breakfast idea - give it a try, you might be surprised!

As traditional by now, I'm posting the yearly recipe for some seasonal bakery shenanigans. This year's recipe is a special one for me - and it comes with a bit of backstory.

When I was a child, we'd visit my paternal grandmother for the seasonal holidays - Easter and Christmas. She lived not too far away, but too far for just a casual visit; in a small house that was rather simple and old-fashioned. I remember the very small toilet, which had no sink; you had to go into the kitchen to wash your hands, where there was a small sink, and I also remember the water being quite, quite cold.

My grandmother always served us food, all home-cooked and home-made from scratch, and very different from what my mum made. She came from Czechoslovakia, and that did show in her cooking and baking. She'd also serve us cake for coffee, and there was always whipped cream, and hot chocolate for the children. (True to her geographical roots, by the way, the coffee was very, very strong to a German's taste.) She took a lot of pride in her cooking and baking - and the baking, oh, the baking, there were some glorious things that are firmly connected to childhood birthday and holiday memories. One of them was a special kind of layered cake she'd make on my request - it was my firm favourite, and it was called "Schnittchen". Another happy memory was of her Christmas cookies, which we'd get to take home after our visit: several large tins, filled with a variety of cookies, all lovingly hand-made. There were a few staples that you'd always find, each and every year, and then some varieties that might be there or might not. Those cookies were part of Christmas for me just like the tree, and the visit, and the other things that make the festivity what it is.

Years go on, though, and people get older, and she eventually suffered a stroke and could not live at home on her own anymore - she moved into an old people's home, and that stroke also set an end to her baking and cooking. So... I took over.

Unfortunately, the fact that she took a lot of pride in her kitchen skills came with a downside: She would not share recipes. If asked, she'd say "oh you take this and that and a few eggs and then you make the dough and then you bake it" - and refuse to give you proper amounts, or ingredients, or descriptions. So I never knew how she made the Schnittchen, or the many different cookies she'd bake. I remembered the staples, though, and some of the special ones. So I tried to re-create all the ones that were important to me, with mixed success. Some, I'm sure, have a very different dough from what she used, but for me, the fillings are the important bit, and the fact that there are cookies coated with chocolate and filled with praliné, and ones also chocolate-coated and filled with redcurrant jelly, and Vanillekipferl, and then there's walnut baisers. I also remember that she'd make apples and pears that had a sugar glaze, but I never recreated these - they were mostly sweet, my parents didn't much care for that variety, and so they got relegated to memory only status, not resurrected.

For years now, I've made these important-to-me varieties. Then, after my gran died, some of her recipe collection fell into my hands... and I actually found a cookie recipe that she had used, with her notations on the journal cutout with the recipe. It was one of my favourites among the not-there-every-time cookies, and it's called Nougatmützchen (little praliné hats). When I made these and then ate the first one, it was like a time travel back - and a very, very emotional moment ensued.

Making those is a three-step process, it involves a lot of praliné and chocolate, it is rather messy... and, if you ask me, totally worth it even if you don't have the deep historical connection to these cookies that I have. Also, because my gran's refusal taught me that sharing your recipes is important, it's also the recipe I'll share with you this year.

Nougatmützchen:

Cookie basis:

150 g flour
3 g baking powder
50 g sugar
1 pack vanilla sugar
1 pack rum aroma
pinch of salt
2 tablespoons milk
50 g butter

praliné mix:
400 g praliné (This is the German "Nougat" or "Nuß-Nougat", a soft concoction from hazelnuts and cocoa or chocolate. If you've never heard about this before, you can find more info here.)
100 g almond splinters (I usually take almond flakes and cut them smaller with a knife)
c 50-80 g of crushed cookies

plus milk chocolate to cover (c 200-250 g)

Make a pastry dough from the dough ingredients; let the dough sit in the cool for a while to rest, then roll out (about 2 mm of thickness) and cut out circles; the original recipe suggests 4 cm diameter, mine are a bit smaller. Bake in a pre-heated fan oven for 8 minutes at 175° C.

The original recipe now tells you to crush one third of the finished cookies into fine crumbs. I prefer to bake some of the bits that are left over between the circles that I cut out, because I'm lazy that way. I also use more of the similar leftover bits (you know that stage when your dough leftover bits are not really worth rolling out again? perfect for this) from the other cookie dough.

Warm the praliné and stir it until smooth, then mix in the cookie crumbs plus the almonds.



Now comes the messy bit, part one: each of the round cookies should get a mound of the praliné mass on top. It helps if the mass is not too warm.



Let them sit in a cool place until the praliné has firmed up; melt up the chocolate. This is messy bit, part two: Cover the tops with chocolate. I do this by grasping each cookie with two fingers, dipping it into the molten choc, then use a third finger or one of my second hand to turn them right side up again, then set it onto a rack to firm.



I get about 80-100 cookies out of this, depending on how thin I roll out the dough.

And that's your seasonal recipe for 2019. Let me know if you made it - and how you liked it!

The other seasonal recipes that I blogged in the past are:

• Linzer Plätzchen
• Lemon Lozenges
• Chocolate-Coffee-Nut Spheroids
• Schokogongs (Chocolate THINGS) and how to make the praliné for filling them
• Marzipan-stuffed dates
• Gingerbread, without flour (Nuremberg type)
• Basic cookie dough (or five types of cookies from one batch of dough)
• Vanillekipferl (vanilla crescents)
• Spitzbuben (jam-filled cookies)