Stomachs on legs are proud to present

Potato salad to Germans is a blank canvas to project their identity on. There are regional varieties, but every household has their own favourite recipe, and home-made potato salad is as a rule more delicious than the stuff you'll find at restaurants here.

The potatoes are almost always cut into slices - not the parboiled chunks that seem to characterise potato salad in english-speaking countries.
Some regions of Germany favour the use of mayonnaise. Similar to Japanese potato salad, or the Spanish 'ensaladilla rusa', it's more of a mélange, so it's often hard to tell where the potato ends and the mayo begins. I prefer the vinegar-based recipes, which really show off the savory waxy yellow German potato.

Though naming this stuff 'salad' is a bit misleading ('cold starch dish' might be more honest), potato salad can be a refreshing counterpart to meat or cheese dishes. Our workmate Wulf does an excellent vinegary potato salad with cucumber slices, to accompany his Käsespätzle, baked cheese noodles. The salad and the noodles are both specialties of the Swabia region.

But my favourite potato salad might just be our friend Andreas' spin on a potato salad recipe from Baden-Württemberg (pictured). He made it for a party at an art curator's office on New Year's eve in Berlin, and it was a great way to start the year, after viewing chaotic fireworks from a rooftop above a McDonalds on Alexanderplatz.

Little fat-free bacon specks add a toasty flavour to the mellow acidity of the vinegar-dressed potatoes, dill adds its herbal punch, and Andreas' addition of gherkin adds a little extra crunch & acidity. It really is a work of art.



(Adapt this recipe according to taste...e.g. vary the herbs, the vinegar, leave out the bacon or the gherkin, etc).

1 kg waxy potatoes
6 tbsp wine vinegar
1/8 litre of hot beef broth (from a stock cube)
1 red onion
125g finely chopped bacon without the rind/fat
Salt & Pepper
Pinch sugar
1/2 bunch of parsley dill & chives (Andreas just used dill)
A few gherkins.

Scrub potatoes and add to covered pot of boiling water. cook 30 min. Drain, rinse under cold water and peel off the skins. Cut into slices while still warm, add to a bowl and put the bowl in a warm water bath. Mix with the vinegar and stock/broth.
Finely dice the onion and add to the bowl.
Finely dice the bacon, heat the oil in a pan and sauté the bacon until golden. Season with salt, pepper and sugar. Pour this over the potatoes and mix carefully.
Let the salad bowl sit in a hot water bath for 20 minutes. (Andreas skipped this step)

Wash your herbs, dry them and finely chop along with the pickled gherkins. Add to the salad and serve.

Serve with smoke machine, flashing lights, gin, Britney Spears 'Toxic' and Prince 'U got the look' (optional).

This Taai Popje traveled all around the world in order to have me bite its head off. My sister bought it in a Dutch store in NZ and sent it to me in Germany. The chewy, not-too-sweet coriander-infused Dutch gingerbread is quite different to the more biscuit-like German lebkuchen (also delicious). It melts to a pleasantly sticky-gluggy consistency in your mouth.



There aren't many traditional German dishes that can make me seriously salivate just by looking at a (crap phone-cam) photo of them. Maybe it's my cheese-loving Dutch blood, but our boxing day meal of Swabian Kässpätzle (with vinegary potato-cucumber salad for added carbs) inspired absolute devotion in me. It's a treat I'd definitely recommend to anyone who's skeptical of German cuisine.

Our workmate Wulf comes from the Swabian-speaking area of Baden-Württemberg, where this is a traditional dish. He and his girlfriend Dagmar made the noodle dough and chopped it freestyle off a board in thin strips into the boiling water. Then they baked it in a glass casserole dish coated in a not-too-greasy mix of emmentaler and aged british cheddar cheese, topped with very thin strips of toasted onion.

If angels in heaven eat mac 'n' cheese, I am sure it tastes exactly like this.
Here is a recipe - just swap in your favourite type of cheese.

For dessert Wulf served us delectable baked apples stuffed with real marzipan (different to the stiff white stuff on wedding cakes), topped with whipped cream and a drizzle of rum.
If I was in the market for a heart attack, I'd eat this menu for a month. It could be a nice way to go.



I am a kitsch-hound and a christmas aficionado, but I do have standards. There's only one Christmas market in the world for me, and it's the Market of Angels on Neumarkt square.

The market by the cathedral is too fake and touristy. The market on Rudolfplatz is too trashy (they sell mobile phones and young hoodlums ride a carousel that includes a motorbike and a police car). The market at Stadtgarten is polite and bourgeois, a haunt of Cologne's liberal elite, where everyone seems to wear brown.
But the market on Neumarkt is just right.

I can't imagine going to these places to buy souvenirs - but to drink two hot mulled glühwein under twinkling star lanterns in the trees is something I actually look forward to all year.

Importantly, the christmas market on Neumarkt also has yummy things to eat. For example, egg-spiked potato pancakes with applesauce. Or the stall selling crispy skinned flame-grilled salmon (nailed to boards over a fire), which drips its grease into soft white rolls smeared with creme fraiche and a lettuce leaf (see pictures above and below).
Our pescatarian friend Celia, visiting from Australia with her winking Irish boyfriend Dave, was quite a fan of these.



Another treat from the Neumarkt christmas market is the Flammkuchen (everything delicious here seems to be born of the flames).

From the Alsace region, similar to a pizza, the brownish sourdough base comes hot from the oven – topped with creme fraiche, little specks of bacon (check the pun: speck means bacon in German) and thin strips of onion. You can alternatively choose a less traditional, but still satisfying, mix of vegetables and salty grilled cheese. This is a market that (unusually) caters well to vegetarians.



It is always tragic when the Christmas markets close for the season, leaving behind a quiet grey snow slush in the absence of twinkles. The stone angels are chained up on trucks on Christmas eve, with a poignant smell of aniseed candies floating on the air. life is all about goodbyes and new beginnings. In this case, a new beginning of me not eating deep fried 'reibekuchen' potato pancakes with apple sauce every other day (until next christmas of course)

Is it that our olive oil reserves get depleted in the six months following Barcelona's Sónar festival in June? Whatever the reason, me & Erik seem to have established a tradition of eating Spanish food at Christmas. All thanks to Anya von Bremzen's cookbook 'The New Spanish Table', which, with a little exploration, yields many bangers (don't be put off by a few clangers - like the cloying almond soup and the too-bready tuna empanada).

Above is the Pollo con Frutos Y Frutas Secas from a recipe she cites by Ferran Adrià (excerpted from his Cooking at Home book). Roast a free range chicken (or use rotisserie if you like). Then cut into pieces and warm with a reduced sauce made of sautéed dried fruits (including sour cherries), citrus peel, pine nuts, cinnamon & tawny port. So delicious!

Cinnamon-infused meats are my main carnivorous buzz right now - from Lebanese or Syrian kibbeh to Mexican baked chicken a la Veracruzana
. Adrià's chicken should definitely be in the cinnamon hall of fame.



Roasted squash soup with saffron ice cream & crispy basil leaf




On Christmas eve me & Erik watched the Australian classic Picnic at Hanging Rock, while chowing down on salty Canary Island-style boiled potatoes with a cumin-chile-paprika-parsley-garlic mojo sauce, tofu salad, and the zorongollo 'salad' above.
It's made by roasting red pepper (roast a green one too if you have it), and marinating with grated tomato (winter supermarket tomato worked fine), thinly sliced white onion, aged sherry vinegar, salt and olive oil. Sprinkled with finely chopped garlic when serving.
Adding a sneaky can of smoked mackerel to your zorongollo comes highly recommended.

Serve with haunting pan flutes, girls in cultish white frocks, and sinister rock formations.

Over the last month or two I have taken time out from my afterwork curriculum to practice being a little bit more German. It's difficult to say what prompted this. For a long time I felt that I ended up in this country by accident rather than choice. For a few years, I felt comfortable as a citizen of no-place. But something seems to have shifted. I don't feel like I'll ever want to become German per se, but I finally feel at home enough that I allow myself a certain adopted pride for some of those quaint, old-fashioned customs... like making baked apples stuffed with rosehips, marzipan and hazelnuts, or autumn flower arrangements that include tiny crab apples.

After four years of living in Cologne, I've finally committed to my bicycle as a means of daily transport - using a 2nd hand foldable '50s klapprad to traverse the terrifyingly fast bicycle lanes and negotiate traffic (preferably with Erik alongside me as bikecoach).

In order to make my work-permit stick like glue, I recently participated in a nine-day state-subsidised integration course. I was hoping to be schooled in sausage varieties, but instead bonded with Phillipino, Jamaican, Dominican Republican and Kurdish classmates over parliamentary processes and Kentucky Fried Chicken.

At the start of the first day of our integration course, the tutor, a nice Turkish man named Herr Kaygisiz, asked us what we thought was typically German. Naturally, the first things that sprang to my mind were beer & cake.

Although I never drank beer before moving to Germany, I now enjoy a daily schwarzbier or pils. Unfortunately I don't like the local brew Kölsch so much.

Cake is a bit more difficult. Although my friends might deny it, cake still plays an integral or even iconic role in the lives of young Germans. Our pals love to spend an occasional Sunday eating cake, drinking coffee and gossiping the afternoon away. Below is a picture of Carmen's birthday tea-break - a symphony of cake.



For my own part, I would usually rather eat a sandwich. Although I admire many German cakes - rustic, not too sweet, using yeasted bases and seasonal fruit like zwetschgen plums, or copious poppyseeds or light quark cheesecake formulas - I am not a committed cake fan. Manufactum has one apple, walnut & poppyseed cake that I especially love (in photo below, with a crust of poppyseeds like purple volcanic sand). But I have never felt the need to bake a German cake.



I bake very rarely, and when I do it tends to be things like strawberry-lavender muffins, sweet potato pie, or blueberry-molasses cake, from Canadian or American books and websites. This is my habit generally when cooking - to make food I can't buy around the corner from my house. Variety is the spice of life, as they say, but of course going against the local culinary grain is also a way of satisfying nostalgia and creating a bubble in which to feel at home when you live abroad.

So for my birthday in early August, we made a nostalgic yum cha homage lunch: steamed buns, scallop shiu-mai, chinese broccoli and black sesame dumplings all made from scratch (to my chagrin it turned out Erik is much more talented at dumpling construction than me). It was a perfect lazy Sunday. And the German birthday cake that Ina brought along turned out to be the perfect dessert to follow this meal. A coconut-date cake, it was very light, fluffy and moist - so moist it was almost juicy in texture, rather than crumbly and cakey, and exactly as I like it: not too sweet.

Although I am quite keen to experiment with poppyseed-streaked muffins, if there is any cake that might start me on a path of German baking, I think it will be this delightful coconut-buttermilk-date cake.

INA'S COCOS-BUTTERMILK-DATE CAKE

Ingredients:
3 eggs
1 & 1/4 cups raw sugar (or more, to taste)
2 cups buttermilk
4 cups flour
22 g, 5.25 tsp or 1 & 1/2 packets of German baking powder (supposedly American/UK baking powder is 'double-acting', so you might use less than this recipe calls for - perhaps 4 teaspoons)
2 cups dessicated coconut
1/2 cup sugar (or more, to taste)
1/2 cup chopped dried dates
400 ml cream (or two 'becher' pottles)

Mix the first five ingredients together and pour into a greased pan. Mix the coconut, sugar and dates together and spread over the top. Bake for around 30 minutes at 140 degrees.
As soon as you remove it from the oven, pour 400 ml cream over top and let cool.

You could try it with beer I guess, but we enjoyed it with a 2008 Rheinhesser Grauer Burgunder (a dry Pinot Grigio). The cake-baker is pictured with her family below.

...naked egg slice rolls get hip. Kind of attractive but unappealing I'm afraid. Below is possibly the scariest looking marzipan bunny I've ever seen. (All items pictured @ Rewe supermarkt, Brüsselerstrasse, Cologne)

What happens when two of Siem Reap's sexiest and hospitable French expats join forces to open a restaurant and bar?

Owners and very good friends of ours, Renaud Fichet (front of house) and Pascal Schmit (chef) are famous in our books for their great wine, excellent food (especially the foie gras), and great service. Most locals and tourists agree.

Menu


Well priced French wines


Amuse Chilled Potato Soup with Salmon Caviar


Foie Gras


My Fresh Sea Bass with vegetable risotto and spinach


yup Siem Reap has come a long way from the days when you couldn't even get fresh cream

Hock's extremely large t-bone steak

note: not all portions are this big Pascal was trying to show off

Le Cheque


After dinner wander over to the garden bar, say hello to Oscar the friendly dog/wolf and have a drink at the bar. Hang around long enough and you'll usually get lots of inside temple tips, generous pours and maybe even a good night kiss.

Abacus
Garden Restaurant and Bar
BP 93108, Route 6 to the Airport
1st Turn after Angkor Hotel (near western union sign)
Siem Reap, Cambodia
Phone 012644 286
cafeabacus.com

Frohe Weihnachten from Cologne, Germany. Over here the main day of celebration is on Christmas eve, but it's today, the 25th, that we'll spend with Erik's family.

So yesterday (the main Christmas day to Erik) I was reflecting on what Christmas means to me. Apart from being a welcome distraction from the onset of the cold winter months, with Cologne's city squares filled with pretty lights, roasting chestnuts and the smell of aniseed candies.

My mother didn't manage to pass on her christian beliefs to me, and her take on big family gatherings is that they are inherently dysfunctional, but she always shows a cute child-like enthusiasm about celebrating special occasions in small and personal ways. And I think this is something I try to emulate, wherever I am celebrating Christmas.

As Chicago chef Rick Bayless points out in the intro to his excellent 'Mexican Everyday' cookbook, fabulous feasts, whether once a week or for special occasions, more often, are an essential part of life.

In other words, when else but christmas would I spend ten euros on a jar of handsome duck pate with 'wild chinese mushrooms' (pictured above) sitting in a cloak of congealed fat? Or dunk Italian christmas bread speckled with raisins and citrus peel into my coffee two days in a row?



So yesterday morning (we went to Manufactum and bought three loaves of their impeccable bread, including the springy 'wurzelbrot' above, which we ate with fennel-infused salami from the Italian supermarket, where they were also giving out espressos yesterday. I made a garlicky tomato soup for lunch with fried chillies and lots of roasted red peppers.





Later on Erik made one of our favourite Catalonian snacks: 'pa amb tomaquet', with the silvery anchovies which I'd been saving up from our Barcelona trip. There's something about anchovies draped on tomato bread.... sharp but mellow and rounded in flavour, it's almost like a really really next level marmite on toast.
Pa amb tomaquet hinges on really good bread in my opinion: this was Manufactum's french-style baguette soaked in olive oil, garlic and tomato juices.



Much later, after Erik had napped and I had put my books away, we made patatas bravas (another of those simple faves from Spain - crunchy potato bits with a spicy tomato sauce and garlic aioli), a salad, and Rick Bayless' recipe for chipotle meatballs with bacon and mint which are really, truly impolite-mouth-smackingly awesome. I'll post the recipe soon.

Erik made julep cocktails with ice and ground ginger - and I made strange concoctions of rhubarb juice, feijoa vodka and sparkling water, or manuka honey vodka with pear nectar from the italian supermarket, both of which tasted nicely of medicine.



Merry spicy tomatoes, potatoes and bread with weird medicinal drinks to one and all. Or perhaps I should say: feliz navidad mis cocineros.

In my opinion mashed potatoes are sad and forlorn without a spot of gravy.

In case you feel that way too, here are two handy gravy recipes that are easy to whip up any time. They don't rely on your having a roasting tray swirling with meat juices at hand.

Both of these recipes - which should more correctly be titled in parentheses as 'gravy', or 'tasty miso-based sauces' – have deep flavour. One (pictured above) is garlicky, rich and tangy.

The other is more like traditional gravy: warm & silky, with a mellow savouriness from the powdered garlic & inactive yeast. The latter two ingredients are worthwhile keeping in the pantry (as well as miso in the fridge of course), in order to jazz up potatoes at a moment's notice.

Miso Gravy by Ani Phyo
Serves four

1/4 cup miso
1 tbsp cider vinegar
1 clove garlic
1/2 orange, peeled & seeded
1/3 cup extra virgin olive oil
2 tbsp pitted dates

Blend until smooth - will keep for four days in the fridge. Tastes excellent with mashed sweet potato.


Miso Gravy by Fresh, Toronto
Serves four

4 & 1/2 tbsp flour
1/2 tsp garlic powder
3/4 cup inactive yeast (I use Naturata Würz Hefeflocken)
1 & 1/2 cups stock or water (I use store-bought goose stock)
1/3 cup sunflower oil
1 & 1/2 tsp hot dijon mustard
3 tbsp miso paste, light or dark
3/4 tsp salt

1. Put dry ingredients except salt in a saucepan over low heat. Whisk in the stock to make a paste. Let this come to a boil & simmer for 30 sec.
2. Add oil, mustard, miso & salt to the saucepan, whisk until thickened & velveteen. Serve hot!



Perhaps the ultimate beige food?



Served with pan-fried tofu steaks (marinated beforehand in half cup each tamari & water plus a teaspoon each of coriander powder & garlic powder); a pile of mashed potatoes with a little cream & nutmeg; and the New York Times' apple-mustard coleslaw to which we added a little extra apple sauce & grated radish, and smoked almonds instead of walnuts, thereby making the slaw kick even more butt than before.


A rapper named Gravy:



A song called Gravy by Bun B & UKG (it's all about the chorus):

I know, I know, the competition's hardly over yet, but I'm pretty convinced that these pics from YYZ-dwellers My Man Henri, Jonathan Ramos and Celine Wong will remain my faves for 08.

There's something poignant about the above wine-glass-as-hour-glass shot, with those berries languishing there in the foreground..

You can see more heart-warming pictures on Henri's blog, and listen to a great disco edit that he's added at the bottom of the post.

One love, Toronto!

Last night we decided to have a Christmas dinner with our friends Demi & Carmen before they went to visit their families in the countryside.

I found a bunch of recipes on websites (something I rarely do - I prefer the analog world of cookbooks), and Carmen heated up some apple wine from a quirky old commune called Matsch & Brei ('smash & mash'), where they grow the apple trees in the traditional German permaculture style. The reason she heated it and added cinnamon and cloves, was due to her experience serving it to a family in Chicago, whose reaction was that it tasted like vomit. It is sort of watery, sour and dry, but I found that served this way I enjoyed it.

While meat, mashed potatoes, mint sauce and gravy might be the backbone of a kiwi christmas, having lived in Germany for a few years, this kind of solid repast isn't especially celebratory to me anymore. Plus I'm not necessarily a huge fan of traditional roasted meats: give me simmered, sautéed, smoked, braised or barbecued any day. It's great to have such hearty pub-food at the Brauhaus from time to time, but to feel like I'm making real seasonal celebrational dishes, I want something that doesn't feel like everyday fare: something with buttery spiciness, creaminess, apples and oranges. Preferably arranged in huge piles.

With the recipes gleaned from sites like Epicurious and the Fork in the Road blog, we did an all-vege menu: with two of us cooking the whole thing took probably an hour and a half.



1) Potato gratin with strips of poblano chile. This was realllly good. For those of us not living in places where fresh poblanos are readily accessible, you can quite easily buy little tins of rajas (poblano strips) from Mexican import companies. We used a 250 g tin.

2)Broccoli with wine, citrus zest & garlic
. This was the only dish that didn't make me break out in 'ooh's and 'aaah's, but the slight bitterness and the citrus zest added a lot to the overall Christmas vibes of the table. Marks for effort.

3) Savoy cabbage coleslaw with creamy mustard-apple vinaigrette & walnuts. Refreshing and crunchy, I really enjoyed this, though Germans who like their kraut-salat a bit softer could prepare it the day before serving.



4) Buttery green beans with ginger & roasted, salted crushed cashews. Simply: DOPE.

5) Little baby jesus cake. Obviously, the main reason I wanted to make this was because of the name. It's a lighter version of sticky date pudding: there's three tablespoons of butter in the cake itself, with two more (and a half cup of cream) in the sauce. I baked it in a flan/quiche dish so it took less time to cook than the recipe says, about 30 minutes: count on the full recipe serving eight people, otherwise you will end up eating it for breakfast with a hint of regret, as I did. Easy to whip it up while your guests are festively huddling around the computer after the main course, looking at sneakers online.



Serve dessert warm, straight out of the oven, with butter & brown sugar sauce, persimmon and greek yoghurt. Complimented by Pegovino grenache/syrah and a sentimental 80s flick like When Harry Met Sally.
I found that Meg Ryan goes over quite well when you're on your third serving of Baby Jesus.

Baked Christmas goods, like people, can be charming when they are a bit misshapen.

It's one of the few things the bakery across the road from our work (on the corner of Boisseréestrasse in Cologne) does quite well.

I think the spiced printen sheets below are for making gingerbread houses... The white bread tree with chocolate chips was quite enjoyable to eat, in a very unsurprising sort of way.

These lucky swine look a bit envious of their marzipan snowman counterpart. People like him better lately.
Note how they are all wearing lucky chimney sweep hats.

By the way, German marzipan is delicious. My favourite is the marzipan kartoffeln (like small potatoes dusted with dirt).

(spotted at Rewe supermarket on Brusselerstrasse, Cologne)

"Please accept this fun salami-holder, including salami, as a token of my appreciation."

In case you were worried your winter salami might dry out in the refrigerator, you can make use of one of these creepy santa tubes.

(Spotted yesterday at Kaiser's Supermarket on Zulpicherplatz, Cologne)

...is what I wandered around Shinjuku saying to perplexed looking Japanese policemen....(something about my squashed kiwi vowels just doesn't translate well in Japanese)

We were looking for a Japanese restaurant that specialises in crab done several ways. Ever since our last trip to Japan where I spotted several of these restaurants (they are a chain) but never managed to indulge my crab fetish its been on the list of "to eats"

Although we wandered around for nearly an hour looking for it, it wasn't until I decided to go into Zara to check out clothing that we spotted that it was in the same building, 4th floor.

Giant Mechanical Crab


From the moment you enter this place it is made perfectly clear that they are serious about crab

Live Crabs






We choose a set menu which appeared to be huge and plenty for two, plus a cloudy sake.....purely through a series of pointing at photos and elaborate hand gestures an flailing of hands. God I love the freedom of being a tourist for four days, not having to learn the language and reverting back to universals such as pointing and nodding. Communication was a success and a series of trays began to arrive at our table.

Place setting including crab scrapper


Crab egg pate


Steamed crab


Crab Sashimi


This was unbelievable, fresh, sweet and almost creamy

Table top charcoal grilled crab


Simple and gave off that irresistible smell of seafood shells being roasted

Crab Nabe (Hotpot)




Rice Soup






Green Tea Icecream


Mildly helpful link in Japanese