Stomachs on legs are proud to present

The German chapter of Sneaker Freaker magazine got together with our local burger joint Beef Brothers recently to make this sneaker-shaped mett cake.

With a greater than usual array of garnishes, this particular hunk of raw pork mince actually looks kind of kicking.

Time to pay tribute to some of the everyday quick bites that are available in this neck of the woods.

Above is the livid pink meat loaf known as 'leberkäse' (literally 'livercheese'). They make the best version of it in southern Germany and Austria. If you can find a bakery or truckstop who'll serve a warm crusty slice of it on a wholegrain bun (ideally with hot mustard instead of the sweet stuff), you'll be in junkfood heaven.



Sauerkraut comes into its own as a side-dish, obviously. But at 25 cents per 100g from the biomarkt delicatessen counter, it could be the healthiest and best value snack ever. And it's good on american-style hotdogs, a worthy late-night indulgence (see photo below).
Yes, I was scared of canned hotdogs in the beginning too.





Sauerkraut has other uses. Like this sourdough bread (from a recipe in Backen Was Allen Schmeckt), which I could eat all day. It's a crunchy-crusted, densely crumbed and moist bread with lots of tang and toastiness. Ingredients include ground caraway and sauerkraut juice, which you can buy bottled at the biomarkt.



A kiwi friend tipped me off to this wasabi-sharp beetroot, sunflower seed and horseradish spread. Apparently it's good on pretzels.

I'm a fan of most foods that come in crazy colours. I also like this spread's red hat logo (the brand name is Zwergenwiese, or 'Dwarf meadows').



'Stuff on bread' is the proverbial German snack. Here is one of my favourite 'stuff on bread' combos. The paté-type spread known as leberwurst, beloved by children, together with electric violet french mustard, with fruity notes of bottom-of-the-wine-bottle-sediment. Sooo good.
This leberwurst is 'Baron Beitzelsche's house-slaughtered' variety, from Manufactum handmade goods emporium.

Our workmate Elke celebrated her birthday last week. As a treat for all the omnivores at the office, she created an iconic 70s German party centrepiece - the 'mettigel', a hedehog made of raw minced pork.

The mettigel is something of an urban legend, and most of my workmates claimed never to have seen one "in the flesh". But here it was, in front of our eyes, all pink and glistening and terrifying.

If I had ever encountered one of these as a kid, I'm sure I would have had recurring nightmares. It's easy to imagine that thing creeping up the stairs and chasing children from their beds, leaving a slimy trail on the banister, shedding pretzel sticks in the thick shag carpet.

If you have the stomach for it, the TV skit below shows unemployed Herbert serving a mettigel as appetiser, main course and dessert to Uta the vegetarian and Klaus the architect.
"If she has a weak stomach, she should have said so. Then I would have used the fresh eggs."


Mettigel - MyVideo

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).

The pleasures and calorific terrors of Christmas eating here in Germany are truly hard to resist (I was encouraged at my Iyengar class yesterday to see that even the most dedicated of yogis had developed seasonal paunches).

As usual, December has been a month of heavy eating for me, but our work Christmas party two days ago was the cherry on the cake. Three colleagues arrived from Munich with a whole sack full of pretzels from cult bakery Hofpfisterei and boiled up a pot of Bavarian weisswurst with sweet mustard.

Then, a couple hours later, we all set off from the office by foot, through the snow, for an evening at a local organic cooking school which holds classes throughout the festive season. The classes are more of an exercise in group bonding & eating than anything, though they do give you some pointers on chopping red cabbage. For minimum stress, they take care of putting the goose in the oven a couple of hours before your group arrives, so you can concentrate mostly on getting drunk.

Knocking out out comfort food classics with workmates was a good time, even though we usually have very different tastes: some people watch their diet, others eat cake every day, some love putrid french cheese, others can't stand any cheese apart from the stuff on pizza, & one is an orange food phobic except when it comes to Fanta. German comfort food brings everyone together.



We were fitted with aprons, served wine or rosewater bubbly and a toasted coconut and lentil soup as a starter, then set to work peeling parsnips, chopping a massive pot full of red cabbage, and mixing ground almonds with rosewater & honey for chocolate-coated marzipan bonbons, at three different workstations (one for salad, and seitan for the vegetarians, one for hot side dishes, and one for dessert).



Within a short space of time, fingers stained purple from the cabbage, we were feasting on the goose with psychedelic-hued 'rotkohl' in a buttery-textured apple juice and spice reduction, potato-parsnip-horseradish mash topped with crunchy candied pumpkin seeds, and a warm 'chutney' made of chopped chestnuts with rosemary and organic store-bought marmalade. Followed by the dark chocolate marzipan bon bons and a frozen parfait that our dessert team had made just a couple of hours earlier from whipped soya cream and crumbled spicy 'lebkuchen' gingerbread pieces.

To me, it seemed the soya cream didn't leave the same sour, sick sensation in the stomach that large amounts of regular cream tend to. So I felt it was my duty to indulge in multiple servings, each one doused with a spicy warm plum compote.
I'm sure I've never eaten so many ostensibly wholesome calories at one sitting.
But you know what they say. Gluttony only comes once a year.


Denis sorting 'postelein' leaves for the salad.



Erik the chestnut-preppin' weapon.


'Bonbonbaklat', said Jens.


Yannick's brother Sven has 3 michelin stars. Yannick doesn't eat a lot, but he's pretty good at cutting cabbage.


Genesis of rotkohl.




Christmas is coming, the Goose is getting fat (me too).


Lebkuchen parfait penitence.

A medieval festival at a schoolyard in Bonn



Parents who long to save their children from the perils of computer gaming, bad German rap and supermarket curry-ketchup can do worse than to visit regional Medieval festivals, where wholesome activities abound: from carving wooden daggers to weaving and paper making.

Food-wise, naturally there are the German staples of cake and currywurst, but there's also 'flammkuchen' roasted alsace flatbread with onions and bacon, and roasted wild boar - authentically unsalted, served from a dirty plank - and an activity of making campfire bread wrapped on sticks, which isn't typically medieval but keeps your little dragon-slayers silent and morose for 20 minutes or so.

Parents can enjoy wearing dead animals strapped to their belts, smoking fags next to the fake gallows and reminiscing about the days when German criminals were tortured with methods that resembled food preparation: hot oil, boiling and roasting. When gothic fonts were totally de rigeur, and sin was something to be wallowed in. What could be more wholesome than that?

Satirical German magazine Titanic this week lampoons presidential candidate Christian Wulff by comparing him to a knödel dumpling. The headline reads: "Merkel's Recipe for a Crisis: Now a Knödel will become president."

The magazine has a history of food-related gags - publishing caricatures of former chancellor Kohl's head as a pear in the '80s. They spoofed East German's obsession with bananas following the fall of the wall, with the cover depicting an Easterner holding her "first banana" which is in fact a cucumber.

My dear workmate Niklas went to Düsseldorf on Saturday to join the festivities for the world's longest vegetarian bratwurst (101 meters) held by Metzgerei Schnitzel e.V.

Niklas kindly shared these pics with Gut Feelings, writing: "I am still somewhat dazzled by yesterday's events, but I am sure the photos give a first impression of the Wurst-Stimmung (vibe). Sadly I do not have any shots of Rüdiger Shaw (you couldn't make that up), the english-accented official of the Guiness Book Of Records who kept parading around, wearing a strict face and a big badge....

The best thing about the evening was that it was exactly like you would wish a "strassenfest" to be, what with the marching band, kids collecting empty bottles for sweets-money, and the general good natured spirit of things. i should go to düsseldorf more, really."

The rest of the photos below show the entire event from start to finish. Personally I find it very charming to see all these people coming together around a really long sausage.





The sausage was cooked on the disposable foil BBQ trays you can buy at every supermarket.

White bread, black bread or even rye bread? Ask your friends and neighbours and they will tell you that toast is a first-class delicacy. It tastes good and has never been the cause of anyone losing their drivers' license. It keeps you fit and your body needs it.

While in London recently, I visited one of the UK's first major Dieter Rams retrospectives at the London Design Museum close to Tower Bridge.

The stylishly be-spectacled Dieter Rams was director of design for Braun for nearly three decades.
Attractive archaic Rams pieces include the cucumber slicer in the video below and the pretty drip coffee machines.

The Braun toaster, which was selected for inclusion at the New York Museum of Modern Art, is another fine Rams creation: but it's a design innovation which may have been lost on Rams' compatriots.

Germans are not big on toast, and most people I know would not dream of toasting brown or black bread. The only bread deemed worthy of toasting in Germany is '50s-esque miniature white bread squares for toasted sandwiches, packets of which are actually labeled specifically as 'toast'.

Dieter Rams: toast visionary?

Tis the season for snow, flight delays and eurostar trains getting stuck in the chunnel due to blizzard convection currents.
The time of year when it's comforting to eat warm and stodgy fare; when you feel you have a valid excuse to pad yourself with porridge for breakfast (rice or oat) and dumplings for dinner.

There are quite a few German dumpling variations: from plum-sized klöse, made from potato (a nice side next to roasted meats) - through to dampfnudeln desserts, which are similar to a Bao Zi steamed bun, but with a fruit compote or warm vanilla custard on the side.

Knödel are large savoury boiled dumplings, made from potato or bread, and if you have leftovers, they can be served in grilled slices. Golden chanterelle mushrooms make an especially delicious sauce with which to augment a fat Knödel.

I admit that snow or shine, sober or drunk, I'm partial to any sort of dumpling. It's possible that in place of a heart, I have a round, damp, chewy lump of dough.
If you have similar dumpling sentiments, you might like to try this easy-to-make recipe for Bavarian-style bread-based dumplings.



Spinach & Cheese Semmel-Knödel (adapted from a recipe in Landlust magazine)
Serves 4

400g bread (we used a mix of white and a light rye. it should be a reasonably delicious and medium-dense sort of bread: no tip top, and no gritty multigrain)
1 onion & 1 clove garlic (finely chopped)
300 g blanched spinach (drained & roughly chopped)
200 ml milk
200g gouda & 100g Emmental (or a mix of your preference), grated
4 eggs
Salt & pepper
olive oil
100 g parmesan (optional)

Cut the bread in thin slices and put into a bowl.
Sauté the onion & garlic in a little olive oil until transparent. Add the spinach & sauté one more minute.
Add the milk and heat to luke warm.
Beat the eggs with this mixture and add to the bread. Let rest 15 min.
Add grated cheese + salt & pepper.
Mix with your hands to combine.
Form 12 dumplings of a similar size.
Add to boiling salted water then reduce heat & simmer for about 20 minutes. Drain and if you like, sprinkle with grated parmesan.

Serve with salad, or any kind of spicy stew.
Cheese and spinach can be reduced, or omitted completely for a traditional accompaniment to roasted or braised meat (you'll want to have some kind of gravy or sauce in play).

We ate them in a manner that Erik said was highly unorthodox: with leftover Mexican Chicken Veracruz (baked with tomatoes, cinnamon and jalapeno pickles), and steamed broccoli. Definitely not healthfood - but, served with veg and spiciness, they weren't as rich and heavy as you might expect.

My friend Y's brother is one of Germany's top michelin-starred chefs, and Y took these pics of their dinner together last week. I can't mention either of them by name, because the man has a PR department who might come and murder me in my sleep – so you'll just have to take my word for it, natch.

On the menu: wagyu steaks with poached egg, truffle, spinach puree, capsicum-bratkartoffeln and champagne. Plus salmon with caviar and creme fraiche from France, doled out on a nice gingham tablecloth.
The dining table (not pictured) featured sparkly foil scattered around & bottles of vintage champagne (more booze than food, Y said).