Bittersweet risotto

As the long holiday weekend wound down, we combed the fridge for the remnants of our Saturday market shopping binge, trying to put together one last meal. Besides a few lamb bones and some stale bread, we had one head of lettuce, some radishes, rainbow chard, a chunk of Romano, bouillon cubes, a bag of Arborio rice and lots of Easter eggs.

My friend and I chopped and stirred together with ease, me making mayonnaise the old-fashioned way, she browning rice and onion in some butter. Talking about everything and nothing, I stuffed eggs, she made broth and swept under the table. I sautéed chard, she stirred down the rice and pulled out a stack of plates. I made salad and stuffed the eggs, she rounded up the muddy kids (we had walkie-talkies to reach them in the dark shadows of the forest) and got them washed up. Together, we created the meal. After our hearty lunch, we revisited the cakes, demolishing at least one, then we all piled in the cars to take them to the train station.

We will see them again this summer as we officially celebrate their nuptials, but I realize just how much I miss being able to call up and let the kids play while we hang out—creating a meal and community together.

A rich Easter

We are winding down one of the most relaxing vacations in memory, staying at a farm outside of my husband’s native village of Ravensburg, where we are surrounded by orchards, fields and woods full of wildflowers. Good friends and their friends came to visit, and the whole culminated in a rich Easter fest.

Melding traditions, the kids wove construction paper Easter baskets, and set them outside the door for the Bunny. In the morning, they came downstairs to a table set for a king: a huge Zopfbrot (a buttery braided loaf with raisins and nuts), delivered on an egg-bedecked tray on Easter eve, was the centerpiece, surrounded by a passel of chocolate chicks. I had started a sponge for hot cross buns the night before and was finishing that up when I opened the fridge to get an egg for the wash. I gasped in surprise and the kids came running; the fridge was piled high with colored eggs. The rainbow-filled bowl went onto the table as well. Honey from my father-in-law’s bees, elderberry jam filched from my mother-in-law’s larder and a huge pat of butter were spread on the bread, all washed down with coffee, tea and cocoa.

Our jet-lagged visitors thought they were a bit overwhelmed by breakfast, but then we started in on the midday meal. We had spent Saturday morning trolling the market for the best the season and region had to offer while our spouses herded kidlets through the town’s Easter programs (balloons, sausage stands, playgrounds, street musicians, etc.). We picked up a freshly slaughtered lamb-leg and ribs, tender green asparagus, zucchini and green beans, three heads of lettuce, a kilo of mâche, and five pounds of potatoes for German potato salad, along with a myriad of little extras: fresh olive oil, wild boar salami, white icicle radishes, fresh butter and local free range eggs.

I laid in the potato salad the night before (it soaked more than a quart of oily broth), and we spiked the leg of lamb with garlic and rosemary and popped it in a slow oven. The ribs received the same treatment, and the veggies were subjected to an olive oil marinade in preparation for grilling over the fire pit (down past the swing set, across from the duck pond). Curls of butter adorned the red and white radishes, with another pat added to the lightly steamed beans. We pushed back from the table after an hour or so, with just a few token rib bones left on our plates.

A German saying dictates that we must either rest or take 1,000 steps after a big meal: my mother-in-law held down the fort (cobbler in the oven), while we went for a long walk through the woods over to an interesting building we could see over the fields. The forest floor was covered in Bärlauch, a mild, garlicky plant featured in many early spring dishes, together with oodles of delicate wildflowers. Strategically placed benches punctuated our sun-drenched promenade, and the thought of the traditional Kaffeekuchen helped motivate both weary and short legs to return home.

Preparation consisted of boiling water for tea and whipping a full liter of thick cream with vanilla sugar. Four cakes graced the table: A Käsekremkuchen (quark thickened with cornstarch, studded with raisins), a gedeckter Apfelkuchen (a deep-dish covered apple pie with delicate rum-flavored raisins), a chocolate-marzipan cream cake, and a still-warm-from-the-oven Belle Hélène cobbler. The first two were well-loved favorites from my mother-in-law’s kitchen, the last two my modest contributions, if only to insure chocolate was on the table.

The rest of the afternoon passed in slow-motion, bathed in warm sunlight: A foursome of adults hopped into the car to spend an hour poking around the medieval town with the native guide (Darling Husband), while two of us remained to quasi-watch children. An expedition into the forest was led, ostensibly to gather more wood to revive the fire. Number One Son used his two-match allotment and managed to coax new flames, with the help of the light breeze (my pyromaniac friend has taught him how to set a fire, a skill every child needs). Then the farmer’s wife appeared with a gentle old pony and led the kids on a lovely evening ride up the hill, where we could see all the way to the castle we had visited earlier in the week. Once the adults returned, we threw some skinny white sausages on the grill, steamed some thick carrots, boiled some gnocchi and made a salad. A bit of pesto and butter on the table helped it all slide down. As the chairs groaned under our growing weight, Little One filled a lull in the conversation, saying, “I wish every day could be Easter!” Laughter all around, but inside we were all wishing the same thing.

It was late as we all tumbled into bed, happy and tired. I turned my pillow around so I could see the stars through the skylight, but admit to only seeing a few before my eyes dimmed as well.

Cake of love

I have a recipe for a dessert called the Persian Love Cake. It’s not something you would find on a Persian table, but rather, it takes its cues from Persian cuisine: cardamom, rose water and pistachio lend their delicate flavors. It’s very showy, not too sweet, and extremely romantic, covered in candied rose petals and yielding in your mouth. I’ve made it for dear friends and anniversaries over the years, but this time, I’m making it for two friends who recently married. What makes it special is that they didn’t have the right to marry in the States, so they moved back to Switzerland (they’re a culturally ‘mixed’ couple like me and Darling Husband) where they chose to marry on Valentine’s day. I think a celebration is in order.

Candied rose petals
1 large egg white
¼ cup superfine sugar
Petals from 1 organic rose

The challenge of making this cake is not in the kitchen, it’s in sourcing the ingredients. I decided to make a half-cake, since Easter and lots of chocolate eggs are around the corner. The recipe starts with the garnish: candied covered rose petals. In the past, I have picked fragrant summer roses from the gardens of friends whom I know do not spray, or, in the dead of winter, have resorted to using salad flowers purchased at the co-op. Here, my fall-back plan was purchased marzipan roses and/or pansies. But I found pale pink Duftrosen, and I’ve purchased superfine sugar and free range eggs to candy them. The sugar hunt was an adventure, with many types vying for my attention: The everyday sugar used by German Hausfrauen is rather course, fine for everyday baking and sweetening coffee, but woefully inadequate for delicate rose petals. Powdered sugar is also represented, along with cubes (double-sized; if you want one lump, you have to break it in half), brown sugar, fruit sugar (as opposed to beet sugar), and jelling sugar, with added pectin. There’s also the Zuckerhut, or sugar hat, a cone of pressed sugar that features in a holiday specialty where hot rum punch is poured over the cone (I’m not really clear on this, but understand it’s a tradition not to be messed with).

Cake
½ cup cake flour
7 tablespoons baker's sugar or superfine sugar, divided
¾ teaspoons baking powder
pinch coarse kosher salt
2 large eggs, separated
4 tablespoons water
1/8 cup canola oil
½ teaspoon grated lemon peel
¼ teaspoon whole cardamom seeds (removed from about 5 green cardamom pods)

Flour in most of Europe is Type 405, a bit finer grind, with less gluten than we’re used to, but it will work fine, since there’s no separate flour used for pastry here. Baking powder in the US and the UK is what we call double-acting, and contains two leavening agents. I could go down to the pharmacy and ask for Natrium Karbonate (sodium bicarbonate) to rev up the German packet of Bakpulver, but I know from experience that this single-acting powder works well with Type 405. (There was actually a little jar of “household soda” in the baking section of the supermarket, but since they don’t list the ingredients, I’ll stick with the regular stuff, I’ll just use a wee bit more than usual.) Going down the list, everything else poses no problem whatsoever, until I get to the cardamom. Anticipating a problem, I picked up ground cardamom during my shopping spree in France earlier this week. The natural food store here in Ravensburg actually did have some, but nary a full pod of cardamom is to be seen anywhere in this burg.

Frosting
2 1/2 cups chilled heavy whipping cream, divided
Pinch of saffron threads
2/3 cup powdered sugar
1 teaspoon rose water

German whipping cream is barely thick enough to whip, but I found some organic cream at the tiny cut-rate grocery store down the street, and it should hold together. I’m also tempted by a soy product from SoyaToo that consists of a tiny aseptic package of soy milk thickened with algae that’s supposed to whip up like cream. I think I’ll stick with cow’s cream for now, though. Saffron was missing from the shelves of Kaufland, but the natural grocery in town had a packet of saffron threads from India. These will be infused into the cream, which, once whipped a bit, receives some powdered sugar to sweeten it and rose water to augment the petals decorating the cake. I was expecting to find the rose water in France, but I found nothing like it there; it was the natural food store here in Ravensburg, tiny hole-in-the-wall that it is, that gave me a precious bottle—not only rose water, but from organic roses to boot.

Garnish
2 tablespoons natural unsalted pistachios

The green nuts set off the pink rose petals nicely, but they prove quite elusive. Finally, a tiny packet beckons from a Kaufland shelf. I don’t usually pay huge attention to price, but 100 grams of green pistachios from Israel set me back nearly three Euro—close to four dollars.

Our apartment has everything I need, except a mixer, but my accommodating Mother-in-law produces her backup hand mixer that I may borrow. The oven here on the farm even offers me a convection setting, so, we’re ready to bake. I’ll pop the finished cake in the fridge, awaiting the arrival of good friends. We’re hoping for a weekend of enjoying each other’s company, making a dent in all those bottles of French wine, and finding lots of chocolate eggs.

Three French squares

There is a certain irony that we bring our small family thousands of miles over the ocean, only to spend our “vacation” following a logic-defying route based on other’s schedules, sleeping on sofa beds and in guest rooms. We are working on setting up household in one spot and trying to convince people to come to us, and we’re having a bit of success. After a day of compiling a list of the usual suspects, using up all our prepaid cell phone credits and scheduling them in, we realized we had a single day for ourselves. Eager from a break of the grind of social obligations, we looked at each other and said, “France!” And France it was.

Despite the German Transportation Department’s best efforts, we spent the better part of the morning weaving our way west through a sun-soaked Swabia, the infamous Black Forest (still had a few patches of snow), and down to the Rhine Valley. With a quick stop in Freiburg, home to our Alma Mater, we headed, mapless, through the Kaiserstuhl (sunniest place in Germany=great wines) over to our old haunt, the Île de Rhin.

Quite literally neither here nor there, it is technically France, though the cell phone reception is both German and French, depending on which way you’re facing. Our destination was Le Ranch, a well-tended restaurant on the less popular side of the island, attached to riding stables. One side of the dining room offers a glassed-in view of the riding rink, a welcome distraction while you wait for your meal.

It was to this restaurant that we brought our guests when they visited us in Freiburg: my cousin Nickie, who stopped by on a ski trip to Switzerland, and my mother, who didn’t yet know of our engagement. Together we enjoyed excellent food at typically fair prices, delving into exotic dishes such as stewed rabbit and creamed salsify. Twenty years later, the restaurant sports a new coat of paint (pink!) and kitschy farm decorations, but the riding rink and the regulars are still here. We settle on a traditional Alsatian dish called Tarte Flambée (or Flammekueche in Alsatian), washed down with a glass of local Riesling. I describe it to our non-francophone kidlets as a French pizza: impossibly thin bread dough covered in thickened cream, cubed bacon and thinly-sliced onion, topped with a hint of Gruyère, and slipped into a hot bread oven for only a few seconds. We can’t quite finish them, so we wrap the last few up in a paper napkin for later.

At home, shopping is just another chore: here it is pure adventure. We take our full bellies to Colmar, where we opt for LeClerc, a typical example of the French hypermarché. Small boutiques line the entrance, but we push our cart into a refreshingly empty store. After an hour, we have an embarrassing assortment of the finest things la Belle France can offer: salt, mustard, herbes de Provence, chocolate, wine, cheese, bread and pastries. We happily pack the bottles into the back of our car, nestling them between the bags of groceries and unused coats.

We have a dessert of chocolate éclairs in the parking lot, and then turn back. After a quick stop for fruit and tea in a friend’s garden, we wend our way home. In the fading light, before the boys start their backseat ‘he’s-looking-at-me-are-we-there-yet’ game, we spot a sign for some Roman ruins. It is the perfect spot to pop open the back of our rented Renault Kangoo for a tailgate picnic à la française. A Laguiole knife slices open a crispy baguette, which opens wide to receive a smear of Rouleau cheese from Rians, a little village outside the town where we met and married. The remaining Tarte Flambée proves tasty even when cold. Badoit mineral water is our beverage of choice, though the wine is seriously tempting. A glug of the fizzy water transports me to the café across from our hotel room in the Marais, my first taste of Paris so many years ago. A few bits of dark raspberry-infused chocolate are our dessert. We arrive home well past bedtime, and fall into bed happy.

We continued our indulgence the next day with petit déjeuner: cups of Banania (a tasty concoction of cocoa fortified with grains and bananas, an important part of a balanced breakfast for the cleverest kids), with pain au chocolat to dunk in it.

Our three meals have consumed most of the fresh food, but I know that the remainder of these three bags of groceries will fill the corner of my larder for the months to come, each time re-filling me with the satisfaction of this warm day spent with my family.

Continental breakfast

We arrived mid-morning in Friedrichshafen, home to Zeppelins and only a short jaunt away from Darling Husband’s home town of Ravensburg, where a homemade cake (Käsecremekuchen) and tea (black) was waiting to greet us. Since German stores close at noon on Saturday, we figured we needed to eat quickly so we could shop for food for our Ferienwohnung (holiday flat). Relax, says my father-in-law, Kaufland is open until 10 pm tonight. And, interjects my mother-in-law, there’s another store on the other side of town that’s open all night. They seem so proud that this Americanism has come to their small town; never mind that they pointed out the folly of our ways when they visited the States for the first time 20 years ago.

So, off we went to the temple of retail, jockeying for a parking place, past the woman plying Tupperware and the towering aisles of Huggies and Pampers, finally reaching the “fresh” produce section. We are greeted by huge amounts of apples and oranges, basketball-sized heads of cabbage and leeks the size of little league baseball bats. But I am not in the least tempted by the lack of freshness; limp lettuces and tomatoes packed in plastic are testimony that this produce is anything but fresh. The same can be said of the vacuum-packed meats and little wrapped cheeses and yogurts. We do find a few attractive soy products (from Alpro), which are largely unaffected by their travels and the glaring lights due to their aseptic packaging.

Indeed, local products prove elusive; our most local purchase is not milk or produce, but a Late harvest burgundy (Spätburgunder) from Meersburg, a little town down the road graced by a lovely old castle.

We do swing by a Demeter bakery on the way out and pick up three salty pretzels and four Seelen (literally, “souls,” long wet-baked loaves garnished with coarse salt and caraway seeds). We’ll slather them in organic sweet cream butter and chocolate hazelnut spread for our Sunday breakfast.

I am always amazed at the examples of “greenness” that are widespread and acceptable in this conservative land (Southern Germany is very Catholic): Everywhere we look, we see huge barns covered in photovoltaic solar panels, green roofs crowning kindergartens, rain barrels in backyards, and grasscrete in parking lots and on the shoulders of narrow lanes. When we buy our orange juice, it comes in reusable glass bottles that we pay a deposit on, just like when I was a kid. But the temptation of inexpensive consumer goods is a strong force, and places like Kaufland are too attractive for most to resist. Come Monday, though, you will find me with my shopping bags downtown, shopping the small shops for local produce to sustain us.

Chill farewell

Our last day in Dublin dawned cloudy and cold, just barely above the freezing mark. The chill breeze seems at odds with all the cheery daffodils everywhere we turn, along with the summery dresses and shoes in the shop windows. We decided to play tourist (since that’s what we are) and hopped onto a double-decker tour bus that took us around town, letting us off wherever we wanted. Only a few brave souls dared sit in the open top, ourselves among them.

Yesterday we spent the afternoon poking around the countryside, discovering a little corner we’ve never visited before just the other side of the Wicklow mountains. We found an exceedingly picturesque town called Moone, that has not only a 17^th century mill and manor house, but a thousand year-old high cross. When we finally located the cross (on the other side of the bridge with the swans swimming below), it was absolutely pouring rain, so we huddled in the car and read aloud about the Master of Moone, who took course granite and created delightful renderings of biblical stories and a bestiary to make a monk proud.

On both outings, we needed to warm up afterwards. With our fill of Celtic carvings, we headed up the road, stopping short of the Dublin suburbs and found an Edwardian-era pub, complete with (fake) peat fire, where we filled our bellies with pub grub and cider. Number One Son decided he wanted some meat, and ordered a cheeseburger—nothing like the McWhatever, this one was a hefty patty of Wicklow County beef, with real local cheddar melted on top. Little One’s fish and chips (malt vinegar on the side) were more fish than chips, and it wasn’t a small portion of chips. I enjoyed a “salad” of smoked salmon and shrimp (what they call prawns), while Darling Husband swapped me his chips for my brown bread and Kerry butter.

This afternoon, our cheeks reddened from the upper bus deck, we alit in Phoenix Park and found a tiny tea house, where a frothy cup of Cadbury cocoa and toffee biscuit cake made our noses run as they thawed.

We’ll have supper in tonight, and polish off our own breaded haddock and brown rice with Bullmer’s cider. Unfortunately, real lettuce could not be found, so it’s salad from a bag, and designer peas from Marks and Spencer (“petit pois and baby onions”). Our (very) early breakfast tomorrow will already be continental; pain au chocolat and orange juice eaten on the airport shuttle bus.

Square cakes in round holes

I can still vividly recall my first night in Germany, some twenty years ago. We arrived late, and settled into borrowed dorm room accommodations quickly thereafter. Curled up under an incredibly warm feather duvet, I realized I needed to go to the bathroom. Not wanting to disturb the whole floor, I slipped quietly to the bathroom, closed the door ever so gently, and reached out to turn on the light. But my hand met only bare wall. It took what seemed forever to find the switch, groping in the darkness, the time likely amplified by the growing pressure in my bladder. In the light of day, I could see that all the switches were about ten inches lower than I was expecting or used to. My Darling Husband (who was just a Handsome Boyfriend at the time), explained that the switches were low down so children could reach them. I figured we put them up higher so kids couldn’t reach them.

When Number One Son was but a wee two, we spent a cold January in Dublin in what is called a self-catering flat, really a short stay row house. It had every modern convenience (a dishwasher would have been entirely too modern) and the property manager was most proud of the power shower. It was, alarmingly, an electric box that hung in the shower itself—as if there was plenty of room in the already cramped quarters for a small appliance—and boosted either the water pressure or temperature. Truth be told, neither of us ever really figured out what it was supposed to do, as it generally gave us a tepid dribble no matter how we set it. But we did discover it was a lesser, colder dribble with the thing turned off.

Last week, as I scoured Tesco’s shelves for some crackers that might be a tasty wheat-free alternative for some tempting Wexford cheese, I found a package of rye crackers, and chuckled when I noted they were round. My cheddar cheese is square however, so the corners hang off—for easily nibbling, I suppose. I didn’t see any rice cakes, or so I thought. But wait, here they are, and they’re square! (They’re also smaller, so you can easily have a little something.) It’s just the opposite of home, where rye crackers are square and rice cakes are round (and big).

When we are removed from our habits and comfort zone, it is easy to dwell on the differences. Even as experienced world travelers, we sometimes refer to our travels as adventures in plumbing. But when we dig past the superficial differences, we realize that there far more similarity than difference. Light switches still allow electricity to pass, regardless of the current or their position on the walls; knobs and valves still allow water (however warm) to pass through pipes onto our shampooed heads; and foods play the same role.

This evening at dinner (rosemary tofu, rice, broccoli and the sweetest carrots from down the road near Cheddar) our olio of nationalities mused at how different the world would be if everyone (and especially world leaders) were required to spend a few months living in another culture. By learning the differences on a visceral, everyday level, they just might discover that we have far more in common than we think.