Thinking about Food Matters

I have been thinking a lot about food lately. This time of year I miss a lot of the special foods from Germany. But then again, I think it's just well I can't have them. German Christmas treats aren't exactly healthy. Still, I can't help but feel I ate much healthier food when I lived in the Vaterland.

Needless to say, I was a bit shocked when I came back from my trip to Germany this summer, and hopped on the scales. REALLY. I had gained 8 pounds in less than two weeks? That's crazy. Is there something wrong with my memory? Or was it just that everybody fed me sweets and cakes when I came to visit because they missed me so much?

I have worked really hard since June to get rid of the extra pounds. When I need a break from sewing I go to the gym. I try to go a minimum of 3 times a week. I am proud to say I can withstand an hour of torture on the elliptical machine these days. Don't even feel winded afterwords. Still, I have not been able to shed all the extra pounds. I hover around the same weight. And it's driving me nuts. What is it with your body not cooperating any more once you hit 40? What happened to the good times? I can't even have a glass of wine any more without waking up the next morning with a bad headache.

So I went to the library to check out some books on nutrition and dieting. It's not that I am overweight. People who know me laugh at me when I say I need to lose weight. Why you? You are skinny. That is nuts. I just don't like the lack of energy. I don't enjoy feeling tired all the time.

Why not try a new approach? I stumbled upon Mark Bittman's book Food Matters and I have decided that it's perfect for me. It expresses a lot of the thoughts and emotions I have had around food and eating. From the day I moved to the US I have struggled to adjust to the different diet. I guess what I miss mostly from home is bread. In Germany it was one of my main food staples. You know, the daily bread thing goes a long way when you are a poor student in Berlin. But here? If I want to buy a decent loaf of bread I have to drive 50 miles and spend oodles of money. I highly recommend the Prussian Rye at Whole Foods Market! It comes closest to what people eat in Germany.

The first couple of years I tried to bake my own bread. Unfortunately it didn't go so well. I found high altitude baking in Colorado very challenging. I finally gave up and resigned myself to the stuff they call bread in the grocery stores here. It has about 5 million ingredients, including sugar and preservatives. Even the supposedly "healthy" overpriced loaves are full of sugar and sweeteners.

But like I said, I am tired of feeling tired, and I am ready to try Mark Bittman's approach. I want to cut out as many highly processed foods, white sugar, and as much meat as I can. Maybe I'll  even give baking my own bread another try. Just hope hubby won't suggest burning it in the woodstove again. That's what happened to that last German-style sourdough bread I baked years ago.

Memories of Cooking

I think cooking together as a family is so much fun. I also find it important that we teach our children how to cook as they are getting older. I don't want them to go off to college and feel as helpless in the kitchen as some of my roommates in Berlin were. Honestly, there was this guy, who cooked pasta and cracked a raw egg on top it stirred it around, threw some ketchup on it - and called that a meal. Really dude? But most of the time he'd beg food off of other people, his excuse being that he didn't know how to cook.

I am very glad my mother taught me a thing or two. I still wish I had learned more from her and asked her more questions about cooking when she was around. But now that she is gone all I have left is the memories of the meals we cooked together as I was growing up. Pretty much every weekend was spent cooking and baking with my mother. I hope I can pass on some of those skills to my children and hopefully answer all their questions.

We cook together as a family as often as we can. Have you ever heard of Naan? It's a type of flatbread from India. Not exactly a German food and something I would have cooked with my mom but we decided to give it a try the other day. I had made it once before during a visit with my oldest sister in Germany. Do you sense a theme here?

If you want to try the Naan recipe we used, you can find  it on the NaturalKids team blog. I hope you try it. At first glance it may look a bit complicated and like a lot of work. But I promise it's not that hard and your kids will love making it. We served it on the side with a chicken curry dish. It was really delicious and there was none left over.

Fougasse - Easy to make French Bread

Being a German Immigrant I often get this question: What do you miss most about Germany? Over the years the answer has remained the same. Besides family, of course, the thing I miss most about Germany is bread. After living in the US for over 15 years, I still have a hard time finding decent bread in the grocery store. The first couple of years I was so depressed about the choices here that I tried to bake my own. But living at high altitude, I found it very difficult to bake good bread. I gave up on sourdough breads completely, when one day I managed to produce a loaf that was so hard, it resembled a brick, and my husband suggested we try burn it in the fire place...

But never mind my failures. I found one great recipe that works even at high elevations. It is really fun and easy to make. I make it to go along with soups. The whole family loves the flavor, and the kids have been intrigued with the bread's leaf-shape since they were little and started to reach for the breadbasket.
I found the recipe in a cooking magazine many years ago. It's been so long I can't even recall where it came from. But it's a French style bread called Fougasse.
Here is what you need to make it:
4 cups of flour (I use 1 cup of whole wheat flour and 3 cups of regular flour)
1.5 cups of lukewarm water
tsp of yeast
1-2 tsp of sea salt ( I use 1 tsp since I try to cut down on sodium)
2 Tsp of Herbs de Provence
2 Tsp of extra Virgin Olive Oil plus some more
corn meal

How to make it:
Put the flour, herbs de Provence, and salt in a large mixing bowl. Sprinkle the yeast on top of the lukewarm water in the measuring cup. Let it sit for about 10 minutes. Then add the water with yeast to the flour, add the tablespoons of olive oil and knead everything together. If you have a KitchenAid mixer, you can just stand by and watch as the dough hook does all the work for you. If not, roll up your sleeves and with some elbow grease you can do it. It's not so bad! Once the you have a nice big ball of sticky dough, put a little olive oil into the bowl and coat the outside of your dough ball with it. Cover with a towel and let rise in a warm place.
After the dough has risen for about an hour split it into two equal parts. Roll out each into a flat roundish disk shape. Use a Pizza wheel and cut slits in the shape of the veins on a leave into your bread. Pull the dough slightly apart to make the holes bigger where you cut it.
Place each loaf on a cookie sheet that you have sprinkled with corn meal. This will keep your bread from sticking to the sheet plus give it a nice crispy bottom crust!
Cover both breads with kitchen towels and let them rise in a warm place. While they are rising, arrange the racks in your oven so that you can bake two loaves at the same time in it! Preheat oven to 425 degrees Fahrenheit.
Rub some olive oil on the loaves of bread right before you put them into the oven! Put loaves in and set the timer for 9 minutes. After 9 minutes switch the two cookie sheets around. The bread that was baking on the top needs to go to the bottom and vice versa. After switching them around continue baking for another 9 minutes or until crust gets golden brown.
Can you smell the beautiful aroma of the Herbs de Provence yet? Yummy! It's so good! And you get two loaves at once. We eat loaf with our soup. The other I used for fixing school lunch sandwiches.

Christstollen - The Oldest German Christmas Delicacy!

Ever heard of Christstollen? It's only the oldest German Christmas sweet around. What is it?
Here is a quote from Wikipedia. In case you ever wondered why reformation was inevitable. You know it was not about religion - but about butter, really! =)

"The old name Striezel came from Strüzel or Stroczel, "awaken" (Old Prussian: troskeilis), which came to mean "early-baked loaf of bread". The shape of the cake was originally meant to represent the baby Jesus wrapped in swaddling clothes.[6]

The early Stollen was a different pastry, the ingredients were very different - flour, oats and water.[7]

As a Christmas pastry, Stollen was baked for the first time at the Saxon Royal Court in 1427,[8] and was made with flour, yeast, oil and water.

The Advent season was a time of fasting, and bakers were not allowed to use butter, only oil, and the cake was tasteless and hard.[4]

In the 15th century, in medieval Saxony (a region in the eastern part of Germany, north of Bavaria and south of Brandenburg), the Prince Elector Ernst (1441 - 1486) and his brother Duke Albrecht (1443 –1500) decided to remedy this by writing to the Pope in Rome. The Saxon bakers needed to use butter, as oil in Saxony was expensive and hard to come by, and had to be made from turnips, which was unhealthy.

Pope Nicholas V (1397 – 1455), in 1450 denied the first appeal. Five popes died until finally, Pope Innocent VIII, (1432 – 1492) [8] in 1490 sent a letter to the Prince, known as the "Butter-Letter" which granted the use of butter (without having to pay a fine) - but only for the Prince-Elector and his family and household.

Others were also permitted to use butter, but with the condition of having to pay annually 1/20th of a gold Gulden to support the building of the Freiburg Minster. The ban on butter was removed when Saxony became Protestant.

Over the centuries, the cake changed from being a simple, fairly tasteless "bread" to a sweeter cake with richer ingredients, such as marzipan, although the traditional Stollen is not as sweet, light and airy as the copies made around the world."

During Advent I like to bake a few batches of Stollen loaves to give to some special people who have made my life better over the year.

It usually takes me a whole day to bake a couple of loaves, since there are so many steps involved. As we say in German: Gut' Ding will Weile haben!" In translation: All good things take time. Stollen are made with yeast. Yeast means rising time. Rising means waiting. It's a good way to celebrate Advent. After all it's about waiting, right? There are so many different steps involved. I was going to post a recipe here. But since this post is so lengthy already I shall have to make you wait. It's Advent after all! LOL

Pumpkin Rolls / Kuerbisbroetchen

In my desperate search to find more recipes to use up our organically grown Zucca Barucca squashes, I found a recipe for rolls in one of my German bread baking books. Have you ever heard of pumpkin rolls? They sell them in German bakeries this time of year. The perfect side to go with your Thanksgiving dinner! It's not too late! You can still whip some up!

I changed up the German recipe slightly since I did not like that it used all white flour.

• 300 grams of pumpkin puree
• 250 grams of whole wheat flour
• 250 grams of regular flour
• 1/2 tsp. of salt
• touch of nutmeg
• 200 ml of milk
• 3 tsp. of dry yeast

1. Sift flour, add the salt and nutmeg.Put milk in microwave for one and a half minutes and warm up to a little warmer than room temperature. Add yeast to milk and stir until it is blended in with the milk.
2. Add the milk yeast mixture to flour. Add pumpkin puree. Knead together until it stick together. You want a nice dough that is not too sticky. Add more flour if needed.
3. Place dough in bowl and place towel over it. Let rise in a warm spot. I like to put mine on the radiators. Works great this time of year...
4. Once the dough has about doubled in size knead again. Shape into 15 little rolls and place on greased cookie sheet. While the oven is warming to 400 degrees let the buns rest and rise once more.
5. When the oven has reached temperature put buns in and bake for about 20-25 minutes. They are ready when they are turning brown and sound hollow when you tap on the bottom of the bun!

Delicious! I got to run and whip up another load for the feast since the kids have been chewing them up already...You need lots of buns for Thanksgiving. But they can be enjoyed throughout the season! It also helps keep the house warm...