There were heavy snowfalls in Germany yesterday, and there was a little more snow also today, and it's rather cold outside at the moment with the prediction of even lower temperatures during the next few days.

The snow that came down turned everything here into a winter wonderland - it looks really, really pretty!



There's little heaps or cockscombs of snow on every twig and branch. Of course, there's also snow on every willow withy that has not been cut yet:



and it will need to get warmer again before we can continue harvesting; it should be above 0°C for the cutting. For now, though, we enjoy the funny contrast between the cut and the uncut bits, both looking very nice:



Thank goodness we're living in an area that is getting snow regularly and so the logistics are in place to cope, as in there's vehicles to clear the streets. People also tend to know how to drive a car in wintery conditions. We cycled to our milk dispenser yesterday, to get milk, eggs, and a few (blue) potatoes, and there were a few spots on the way where we were really glad about our studded tyres. With those and appropriate clothes, winter cycling really is fun, even if it takes a bit longer and is rather more strenuous in snow and on ice than on clear roads.

Traffic-wise, things are not looking so good in some other parts of Germany, where the snowfall has led to delays or cancellation of public transport, and to some spectacularly bad traffic jam, with people trapped in their cars for hours.

The reason for the cold spell, by the way, is air from the polar zones coming down south... which is linked to global warming. Changes in overall temperature lead to changes in the polar vortices, which are air currents around the pole, which means the cold air isn't contained there anymore, and thus comes to visit... so having winters with hard cold spells is just the opposite of what one would suspect at first glance.

Well. At least the snow we're getting out of this right now is pretty.

 

It's the time of year again - our willow fence has to be pruned. Willow harvest!

I find it absolutely amazing each year to see how much biomass this fence pushes out; and each year there's more of the really thick ones. I'd say withies, but they are more like little trees themselves!

We got started with the cutting yesterday, and as usual, it will take us a while and a few sessions to get through the whole fence. There is definitely a difference visible already, though:



You can see where we got started on the left side. We're always cutting the fence in several (many!) sessions, as there are still some places where the basic structure is not established completely, and it takes some concentration to not cut the wrong bits off. Especially the lower arches are prone to losses, and it's very easy to cut off all possible replacement shoots before realising that one would have been needed to close the gap... It's also still rather nippy in February, and cold hands do not work so well.

When we planted the fence, we made sure to choose a willow variant that is suitable for basketry, but some of them are also used for willowing wool (as in beating it to fluffiness) - and some will become distaffs. Such as these nice, straight, rather sturdy ones:



They are really long - and rather thick at the bottom end, as you can see here with my trusty measurement fingers:



My index and middle finger side by side are exactly 3 cm wide. That has come in handy so many times!

On that note: If you are ever in the need of figuring out how long or wide something is - and who isn't - it is totally worth it to play around with a ruler and figure out how wide your fingers in various combinations are. I get 3, 5, and approximately 1 cm with my fingers, plus an approximately 20 cm with my hand fully spanned out, and there's a lot of measurement questions that can be covered with these units.

I'm currently catching up on paperwork and - lo and behold! - doing some research reading as well. That feels good, both of it! I often feel like I'm not getting enough research time in, but there's always so much mundane stuff to do... like filing taxes (which is a large part of the current paperwork stuff). Or getting the car fixed up so it can pass its prescribed biannual check... sigh.

On the sort-of-plus side, at least the weather is properly wintery, with snow falling and snow lying on the ground outside. And because that makes everything outside white, which is nice, but not very colourful, which would be a good thing in this rather grey and cold time of the year... we had blue potato salad today.



That's the Bavarian/Franconian version of potato salad, seasoned with oil and vinegar, no mayonnaise added. Germany actually has a cultural divide between the mayonnaise potato salad areas and the oil-and-vinegar potato salad areas, and a lot of people have a very firm opinion about which kind (their kind, obviously!) is the One and Only kind, and the other just weird or even awful.

Now... I grew up in Franconia, but my gran comes from mayonnaise country, so the potato salad of my childhood was not the typical local one. Consequently, I like them both, with a pronounced preference for the kind that my gran makes, because, duh. That said, I have had wonderful potato salad specimens of both kinds, and have tasted examples of both kinds gone wrong (as in edible, but definitely not tasty).

The blue one in the picture is not my gran's version, because that involves making mayonnaise (or buying it, but it needs so little that I prefer making just a small amount), boiling eggs, and having both the eggs and all the potatoes cool down completely before final assembly. For weekday lunches, this takes too much time (and/or too much planning ahead). This oil-and-vinegar version can be prepared hot and served warm to lukewarm, and thus is easier to fit within my usual one-hour-for-cooking time-slot.

It consists of diced onion, on which you pour a bit of hot broth (or hot water and then add some broth powder) so they mellow out a little; a bit of smoked bacon (the German kind can be eaten uncooked; if you can't get that, you can always fry your bacon cubes and add them afterwards); a dash of the liquid that your pickled cucumbers swim in; some of said pickled cucumbers. Add the hot boiled, peeled, sliced potatoes, which will soak up the liquids; then add salt, pepper, fresh parsley (if you have), more vinegar or pickle liquid, and oil to taste.

Proportions are entirely up to you - I like quite a bit of onion and cucumber in the salad, so I will use about a medium-sized onion and at least two large pickled cucumbers for the two-person salad (which is about 500 g of potatoes, and usually is not consumed completely in one go).

Something that has been tickling my "oooh, I'd like to try that"-fancy for years now is making my own Sauerkraut. Not that it's not possible to buy that stuff here, in good quality too (and in all kinds of packaging: plastic bags from the regional farm stores, plastic sachets, cans, and glass jars in the supermarket, and in different sizes as well), but there's a temptation towards making your own somehow. At least for me. Added benefit: Even though Sauerkraut can be bought in different amounts, it's usually either too little or too much for the two of us.

Also. Fermenting. The wonder of bacteria doing their thing, and of good stuff going different and somehow even better than before. Fermenting food is a very old method of making things keep, and some kind of fermenting procedure, for a variety of foodstuff, can be found in most cultures. Germany is probably most famous for its Sauerkraut - cabbage, usually white cabbage, fermented and thus soured.

All you need for making Sauerkraut is cabbage and salt - that's it. And maybe a little bit of water. Key for success here is that the fermenting stuff is always and completely submerged under its juice, which has salt added to it (0.5-3 % of prepared cabbage weight is the spectrum that I found); otherwise there can be mould growth.

I tried fermenting green beans in a glass jar a few years ago (which went middling well) and also tried to make salt lemons (essentially the same thing - put lemons and salt in a jar and wait for fermentation), which went horribly wrong. For Sauerkraut, though, I felt like it would be smart to use a special fermentation crock - because, well, making just a tiny glass jar of the stuff didn't really feel like the thing to do, and from my previous two tries at fermenting things, I was pretty sure it would be easier with a larger amount in a proper vessel.

A short time before Christmas, I finally managed to get my hands on a proper pot... through our town's special small ads board. Said board, called "Verschenkbörse" (give-away-market, more or less) is mostly used to list things that you don't need anymore, but that are too good to throw away. You list them and either say you give them away for free, or ask for something else in exchange - the one rule is strictly goods only, no vouchers and no money as exchange goods. It's also possible to do a "in search of" ad, which is what I did - and ended up with a 20 l fermentation pot (which is quite large, yes, and a 10 l one would have been fine too, but it's no problem leaving space in a large one).

Little more than a week ago, we raided the market for a few kilograms of cabbage, and an evening was spent shredding, kneading, and pressing everything into the container. So far, it's going well - a first taste test has already proven the contents to be quite delicious, and in a few more weeks, it will be all ready.

[caption id="attachment_5761" align="alignnone" width="854"] A glimpse into the pot - two weights come with these kinds of fermentation vats, to keep all things nicely pressed down under the surface of the liquid. You can see some foam (that is normal); the black spots are discolorations of the weights. Unfortunately it's not possible to photograph the pleasantly acidic scent!


I'm already looking forward to wonderful Sauerkraut...

I've mentioned my or our quest to reduce plastic, especially single-use plastic, in our life. It's still ongoing, this quest, of course - and some things prove to be trickier than others.

For instance, it's fairly easy to get some things free of any packaging. There's a shop selling fairtrade coffee in Erlangen where you can bring your own container. (Not currently, as they are closed under the restrictions of the lockdown, but generally, they are there.) Oil and vinegar can be bought in a shop offering liquids from the vat, so you can get as much or as little as you want into your own bottle, very handy. Dry legumes, such as beans and lentils, and pasta are available in bulk with reasonable (or no) packaging, for reasonable prices (maybe with a little bit of searching). For fresh produce, we've been going to the market anyways, and there's unpackaged stuff in the supermarket as well, where you can bring your own nets or bags to pack it and carry it home.

Milk products were one of our main waste producers for a good while, but we've found nice Quark sold in deposit glasses, and we're getting our milk straight from the farm these days - there's a filling station, you bring your own bottle, and pump as much raw milk as you would like. Right beside that machine there's a vending machine with eggs and potatoes as well. We also found the one brand of butter that is wrapped in (special, but plastic-free) paper only. So... lots of things dealt with.

We are willing, by the way, to forego quite a few things instead of buying them plastic-wrapped; but for most of our staple daily-life things, we have sources now.

The last troublesome items on our regular shopping list are meat and fish... and decaf coffee. Meat and fish are still mostly unsolved problems, partly due to current Corona-induced hygiene restrictions, so that's something where we try to reduce the plastic consumption but accept that it is not zero just yet.

Decaf coffee is consumed more than regular coffee in our household, and the shop in Erlangen doesn't offer decaf... so we did stick with our previous solution for a while, which was a delicious, fair trade decaf packaged in the usual plastic bag. Now, though, we've found a supplier for decaf coffee beans, willing to send things in paper upon request (which is necessary due to some other weird German regulations) - selling fair trade coffee roasted by hand by himself, with lots of passion. Hooray! Plus I'm endlessly amused by the name of his shop: Dr. Kaffee's Röstorium. (We all know by now I'm easily amused, right?)

And now... I think I'll have some coffee.

 
 
 

Happy New Year to you!

I hope you had a good transition into 2021, and that it may bring you joy and see you in good health throughout!

We've very much enjoyed our time off, even though things were much different from how we usually spend both the holidays around Christmas and New Year's eve plus the days afterwards. There was no larger family gathering at Christmas, but we did get to see both sets of parents, spaced apart to make sure there was no risk of carrying any bugs from here to there. There was also no hanging out with a bunch of friends like we usually do - so we ended up having a fondue with just the two of us (delicious, but a little weird, and not as much fun as having a whole group around the table), and having our traditionally "toasting mousse au chocolat", and chatting with friends via videochat instead of being together in real life. There were walks, and boardgames, and mini painting (more about that later), and generally we had a really nice time.

Now it's back to the usual work for both of us. One of the first tasks, of course, is catching up on emails and other things that came in, and sorting out those. For me, that also means doing all the start-of-year bureaucracy things, such as tax-related stuff (Germany is going back to 19% VAT rate), and this year, no hooray for that, also figuring out the impact of Brexit on my shop. Which has happened by now, but deserves its own post!

Like in the preceding years, I spent some of the time painting miniatures. The last batch that was finished has long since gone off to its new home together with the game, because one of our friends definitely needed their own copy of Flashpoint... and we'd actually run out of minis in our own games.

[caption id="attachment_5741" align="alignnone" width="300"] The finished Flashpoint minis.


Originally, the Flashpoint guys are all solid colour in the player colours, and there's six of them. I've painted only the figures themselves, leaving the bases in the player colour base, and adding the corresponding colour stripe as a detail to the oxygen tank they all carry on their back.

The minis are not very detailed, but there's enough of it to serve as a guideline when painting, and I had a lot of fun trying to do the day-glo and reflection stripes on the jackets and trousers as close to US firefighter reality as possible. I've also tried to hint at fire reflecting in the face shields, more or less successfully. Most importantly, though, I did have fun.

Also, comparing them to the minis in our own FP game, it was very obvious that I've gotten some more practise! Flashpoint were the very first ones that I ever painted, and the colour range was more limited back then, plus I didn't look up the actual real-life uniforms. They do look quite, quite different as a result (though I'm not unhappy with ours at all).



Plus there were two last unpainted special minis for our own game, so I did get to add some of the newer style, and painted with a somewhat defter hand, to our collection.

And then... there were no more minis left. Which started to feel a bit sad with the end of year approaching, because it's been a favourite pastime during that time for the last years. Fortunately, another friend of ours has plenty of games with plenty of miniatures, and not the time and ambition to paint them all himself. So he was able to come to my rescue, and I'm now good for another while painting the fancy cubes from Quodd Heroes...

How was your transition into 2021? Did you do things "as typical as possible", or something completely different?

I'm slowly running out of new seasonal cookie recipes to post... which is not really a surprise, since I'm making mostly the same types of cookies each year, with only a little new stuff thrown in, and I've been posting recipes for a while now.

So this year, I'll just share a few general "baking life hacks" that you will hopefully find useful!

• Silicon baking sheets. I have four of these, and using them has brought down cookie breakage from significant to about zero for me. Even now that I have newer non-stick baking sheets, I still use them. Additional benefit: The silicone sheet can be placed on the counter and filled with cookies, then you carefully pull the sheet onto the baking sheet or the grid.
  I also use the sheets if a recipe tells me to roll dough out between layers of clingfilm, or other single-use plastic sheets, as I refuse to use single-use plastics for that (and have done so for years, even before the most recent quest to ban more plastics from our life). If you do that, and it gets harder to roll it out, it helps to remove the sheet from time to time, so the dough can spread again.
• Peeling almonds. Some of my recipes call for peeled/blanched almonds. I've always bought the whole things and done any grinding myself, and that means peeling also has to be done. Usually, instructions tell you to pour boiling water over the almonds, wait a bit and then pull off the skins. I've often struggled with that... until one day, I forgot to peel them right away and the water had gone too cool. So I poured off the cold water then poured fresh boiling water over them again. They were amazingly easy to peel afterwards! I've done it similarly ever since: Steep in boiling water for a few minutes, pour off the water, add fresh boiling water, wait a little, then peel while still hot.
• Grinding nuts - I've always used an old-fashioned grinding thingie, which would yield medium-sized to rather coarse bits. I've recently discovered the trick to get the finely ground nuts or almonds, like those you can buy ready-made: Use a meat grinder with a fine disc.
• While we're talking of chopping up things, another new discovery for me: A food processor can be used to help prepare cookie dough. I've found out about that trick on American recipe sites. Fill flour, cold butter cut into thin slices, and possibly some or all of the sugar into the food processor and blitz until the butter has been transformed into small bits, covered by the flour. Then tip onto the table, add eggs and other ingredients as called for by your recipe, and knead together. This saves the cutting and crumbling up stage to mix the butter and the flour together.
• Choose cookie cutters wisely. For years, we bought a new cutter every advent, because... well, no real reason needed, right? (Actually, it was just a nice little thing to buy at a Christmas market.) However, the cutters had to pass the test - in the shop or at the market stall, we'd take several of the same cutter and try to stack them together as closely as possible. If their forms meant large spaces between the individual cutters, they'd stay right where they were. Cookie cutters with a form that will fit itself well means little space between cookies, and thus little leftover dough after each run, and thus better dough quality until the end (because you don't have to roll it out again so often, and that means less flour uptake).
• Speaking of rolling out and flour uptake: I roll my dough out on a clean cotton tea towel that gets lightly sprinkled with flour. Due to some reason, that constellation means less flour is needed. For the basic cookies that I make and that get rolled out thinly, there's the additional thickness control built in: They are thin enough when the checkered-pattern stripes of the towel start to be visible through the sheet of dough.
• Four times is about the limit of how often I roll out pastry dough. Initially, I divide the dough into pieces of suitable size for rolling out. Leftovers from the first goes are collected, all kneaded together and rolled out again. After that, depending on how much dough is left, it gets rolled out either once or twice more. At the stage where there is only a small circle of dough after rolling out, a few cookies are cut from the sheet with plenty of space inbetween, and the rest baked as it is (or maybe cut with a knife into handle-able parts). That will get you an ugly cookie or more, which are just as tasty as the nicely-shaped ones, and include the perfect excuse to eat them whenever you wish. Because obviously, ugly cookies cannot be served to others, right?
• I use the butter wrapping papers to grease sheets and forms. Once the butter has been unpacked, I fold them once or twice and stick them into the freezer compartment of our fridge. When something needs to be greased, I take one out, let it thaw for a few seconds, unfold it and rub the something with the buttery side. No greasy fingers, quick, easy, and no waste of the butter film always clinging to the wrapper no matter what.
• Leftovers after decorating? For my reindeer cookies, I make a glaze from orange juice and confectioner's sugar, plus very finely ground off orange peel. The latter is the secret to having a proper, strong enough orange taste to the glaze. Anything left of that after glazing the proper cookies goes onto the ugly cookies, making them even tastier.
  Leftover chocolate from covering cookies, or other things? This can be mixed up with cornflakes to make choco crossies, chopped nuts to make nut clusters, or crumbled up cookies can be mixed in. Be creative. Bonus: The outcome can probably be classified as "ugly".
• For quite liquid glazes like the orange sugar glaze, I use a brush. For everything else that needs to be applied to a surface, such as jam or molten chocolate, I use a pastry fork - for me, that works much better and is less messy than a brush. The fork is also very convenient to stirring up the jam to make it smooth enough for application. I've tried heating it up once, but that seemed to make only a very small difference, if one at all, in the end product, so I've gone back to using the cold jam, stirring it up and applying it.

Happy baking, I hope you find something useful among these tricks!

If you're looking for proper recipes for baking, the 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)
• Nougatmützchen (cookies with a praline-crisp topping)