these Saturday mornings are the best

 I woke up to blue skies, and went down to the market. It's the best part of living where we do: the weekly Saturday morning organic market is literally outside the door. I got some fresh eggs, bread from the baker, onions, and spinach. And I got some nice honey and homemade jam as a treat. :)

When I got home, I roasted butternut squash, sunchokes, onions and garlic, pureed them all (I love my immersion blender so so much), and now they are simmering on the stove for some afternoon soup. Yum. I am excited for spring...but making the most of the wintery veggies we have.

Unfortunately the market is in the shadow of the buildings to the east, so it's hard to show how beautiful this day is looking. Spring flowers are starting to come to the florists, and people are getting out more. I love living in Berlin!

Recipe: Sunchoke-Squash Soup

one large onion

one head of garlic (yes...)

smallish butternut squash

2 lbs sunchokes 

1/2 cup cream

1 cup stock/water

juice of half lemon

salt/pepper

1. Prepare a cookie sheet with parchment paper. Cut 1/2 inch off head of garlic. Cut squash in half lengthwise, scoop seeds out. Wash sunchokes and cut into 1/2 inch pieces. (many American recipes say to skip the peeling part but wash well. they are so weird and knobby-shaped it definitely makes things easier, but you end up with small, potato-like skins in your soup. pros/cons...I left the skins on). Toss everything with a little olive oil, and ROAST all this stuff in the oven 45 mins (squash skin-side up, garlic open-end exposed).

2. When soft, throw it into a pot, thin with a little water or stock, and puree. Stir in cream at end and season with salt/pepper. The roasted garlic is amazing, and the lemon juice really adds something, too. I didn't get quite the consistency I wanted. If I did it again, I would maybe saute the sunchokes with the onion until soft, but roast the squash and garlic, and then add everything together and puree. The sunchokes were still a bit hard (you can see the not-so-smooth texture in the picture), but still delicious.

scary, fun, beautiful produce

It's another gray, and probably the most freezing cold day in Berlin yet. Good for baking a nice warm meal. At the market this morning I got some more of the beautiful violet-orange carrots, to make for lunch with baked chicken with a paprika garlic marinade.

I also had the Schwarzwurzel to try. The farmer I bought it from warned me that they can be difficult to work with, that they get all sticky. So I looked it up online and almost everyone said to make sure to wear gloves when peeling--for some reason the exposed root turns glue-like with skin contact. Strange! And so freaky weird looking!  And it has to be put in an acid right away, or it discolors (I used a milk/lemon mixture). It's often compared to Spargel, or white asparagus, and is used the same way in recipes (the Germans most often pair asparagus with hollandaise sauce or butter). I just made a lemony sauce to go with it. Nothing amazing. Not like the Topinambur (sunchoke), which I will make again for sure. Maybe I didn't cook it well, but we wanted to taste the root, and know what it was like. Maybe I should give it one more try...

Every time I get chicken I think of my dad...who finds it crazy how many people buy boneless, skinless chicken breasts. He's has told me multiple times that it's cheaper to buy a whole chicken and cut the breasts off. :) And finally, after years of being afraid of breaking down chickens, I finally do it. And make stock with the carcass. It makes me feel good to use all the parts, too, and once you've done it a time or two it's not so scary to attack a whole chicken.

fun with roots

This week and last I got some really beautiful produce at the organic market on Chamissoplatz: Last week, a mixture of fresh herbs, purplish carrots, parsley root, zucchini and rutabaga (I love its violet/green color). The onions, too, were a mixture of deep red and golden. One of my permanent resolutions is to keep trying to cook with things I'm not very familiar with, and always try new recipes. Outcomes so far: kohlrabi has become a regular on our salads (grated raw) and I love roasting root vegetables.

This morning at the market I got Topinambur (sunchoke/jerusalem artichoke) and Schwarzwurzel (literally "black root"), along with some brussel sprouts, beets and eggs. I  have eaten both sunchoke and Schwarzwurzel, but never cooked them. We had Schwarzwurzel at Restaurant e.t.a. hoffmann  and it was delicious, and I got to try some sunchoke at Little Otik last week. They cooked it whole, and it kinda flaked open (don't remember whether it was peeled or not). Yum.

So for lunch today we sautéd up some sunchokes with herbs, bay leaves and garlic, and they were delicious. I wish I had got a lot more. I don't know how to describe the flavor, but definitely sweeter than the potato.

inspired by Jamie Oliver recipe for sautéd jerusalem artichoke.

arroz con pollo

Going back to Michael's Miami roots...we have been wanting to make arroz con pollo for a while. It was delicious and worth the work.


1. marinate chicken in lime juice/garlic/salt brine  (2-4 hrs)
2. brown chicken
3. make sofrito: peppers, onion, garlic, saffron, oregano, bay leaf
4. add chicken back in, cook down
5. add rice and chicken stock
6. finish off with a beer (seriously, poured into the pot)




We found the recipe here: Arroz con Pollo, from arroz y frijoles

making Christmas...

I may have already mentioned that my sister has more Christmas spirit than Santa's elves...She got busy today "making Christmas" in the apartment. We strung Christmas lights, bought pine boughs, made cranberry ginger scones...perfect for a rainy Berlin day. And for dinner we made a big pot of borscht. Enough to feed a peasant village. Today was both a recovery from yesterday, and a warm-up for tomorrow's Christmas intensity: a four-hour baking class with Stollen, Lebkuchen, and Plätzchen on the program. Yes!

Gemüsekiste: was wir kochen II

Sorry to disappoint if you were looking for some creative use of celery root. I looked online a bit, and it seems Germans either make soup stock with it (aromatic like celery) or, another popular item: "Sellerie-Schnitzel", where you cut it in disks, bread it and fry or bake it. Not really how I love to eat my veggies. So we went with soup.

Tonight's dinner used from the Gemüsekiste: the celery root, two beets, an apple, and some of the winter lettuce.

We made a pumpkin-celery root soup, spiced with Indian spices (leftovers from my cooking class: chili, fresh ginger and turmeric root, some other weird root-like thing, no idea what it was), and apple-beet salad. Tomorrow the week is up, and we still have the spaghetti squash, potatoes, two beets, a couple of apples and a bit of salad. It was good to try out...definitely a lot of veggies for two people!  You have to be strategic about what you use first!

Gemüsekiste: was wir kochen

This week has had its ups and downs, and we've been very busy: seeing modern stagings of classic plays--Kleist's Hermannsschlacht and Penthesilea, running a 10 K Schmalzstollenlauf race in a beautiful German forest (with bread/lard as the prize), trekking out to a newspaper archive, spending lots of time in the library and attending some classes...Biggest downer: Yesterday when coming home I turned the key in the lock of the front door and it BROKE off. I was in a rush, so Michael dealt with the Schlosser, the locksmith who came, and after 30 mins and taking the lock apart finally got it out (60 EUR bill...). He said the lock was very old and Michael was fascinated with the mechanics of the ordeal. So today we got a new key made as well. Just another day in the life, which happened to be an expensive one... Anyways, between all that we've been making some really delicious meals out of our Gemüsekiste we got on Friday from this organic farm. Above: roasted chicken with root vegetables (carrots, parnsips, onions), chard (mangold) pizza with tomatoes, pine nuts, salami, parmesan (Michael claimed it was "the best pizza ever"), and cabbage and caramelized onion tart with gruyère (inspired by last week's episode of The Office and mention of Dwight's cabbage pie..."We should make cabbage pie!" "Seriously?" "Yes!"). sehr lecker.  Recipe for the cabbage tart here.

Kochkurs I: Süd Indien

Today I went to a four-hour cooking class entitled "Süd-Indien: Exotik Pur" at one of Berlin's many community ed locations (left, in Treptow-Köpenick).  It was an interesting cultural experience, an American learning to cook Indian food in Germany...I really really want to learn how to cook Indian food, but I didn't really know what to expect with the class. In Germany it's hard to find a good Indian restaurant...Germans tend not to like spicy food. (Also, I just learned today that many people don't like fresh cilantro...they say it tastes like Seifenblasen, soap bubbles! This was new to me, but seemed to be a larger consensus among the course participants!)

The instructor was really good, super friendly and helpful. He lived in India for 5 years and also started up a bakery there and worked as a cook while he was there. So his perspective was interesting, although still seemed to have a more "German" palate (spiciness-wise). We learned a few dishes, but it was still pretty basic, and I'm not sure how authentic...I can't really be the judge of that, but maybe Hannah and Jennie?  We made baked chicken, pumpkin-mango chutney, vegetable rice, shrimp with tomato curry, zucchini-chickpea-masala, flatbread, and bananas fried with coconut-vanilla for dessert. It was really fun for me, not only to cook with people, but to chat with them. After cooking we all sat down and ate together (the whole thing lasted about 4 hours). I'm going to try to do more cooking courses...not only for my cooking skills, but it's a fun way to use German in new ways. :)