Kategorie: With Recipe

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My Sweet Tooth With Recipe

My American Pancakes

I might have been obsessed with American style pancakes ever since my first trip to California back when I was thirteen. It was then and there I had my first original pancakes, all soft and tasty, drenched in maple syrup, most likely with a side of crisp bacon.

For years now I’ve been trying to make the perfect pancakes. I admit that I haven’t been trying the whole time, there’s been phases. I also admit that I have used pancake mixes, partly because there have been enough lazy mornings and partly because some of those mixes are actually really good. I have also had my fair share of disappointments, mornings when the pancakes didn’t turn out even close to perfect, quite the opposite actually. And then there were mornings when they turned out pretty fine, sometimes even exactly how they’re supposed to be. Light, fluffy, amber colored, ready to soak up the syrup I was going to pour over them. Even better with a bit of butter and a large spoonful of sour cream on top of it.

Recently those perfect pancake mornings were pretty common around here. It could be a lucky streak, but I’m optmistic and would rather say that I have finally found the right way to make American pancakes and so I wouldn’t want to keep it from fellow pancake lovers anymore. I’m not sure what exactly the secret is, the long whisking of the eggs, the right amount of baking powder or maybe just the bit of patience you need to let the mixture stand a while before actually making the pancakes. Whatever it is… I can only hope I finally found it.


American Pancakes

1 egg
1 tablespoon sugar
A pinch of salt
250 ml buttermilk
1 heaped teaspoon baking powder
120 g flour
1 tablespoon butter

  1. Melt the butter in a pan, preferably the pan you want to make the pancakes with, for no other reason than having less dishes to wash afterwards.
  2. Mix the egg, sugar and salt in a bowl and whisk until nearly white and very creamy.
  3. Add the buttermilk and mix in quickly, then add the baking powder and flour and mix in really quickly as well. If the dough is too runny, add a bit more flour, if it is too firm add some more buttermilk or just regular milk.
  4. At last mix in the melted butter.
  5. Let the dough stand for about 15 to 30 minutes. I actually don’t know how long it should rest to get the best results since I usually get to impatient, so the dough hardly ever gets to rest longer than 15 minutes in our kitchen.
  6. Reheat the pan and fry the pancakes one at a time. Usually a small ladle of dough will be enough for one pancake. Wait until bubbles start to form on the top and the turn the pancake over, bake until golden and then keep warm until all the pancakes are done. I just heat the oven to a very small temperature (about 50°C) and transfer them there right from the pan.
  7. Serve warm with maple or pancake syrup, butter and/or sour cream. Personally I love the way how the sweet and slightly sour tastes of the syrup and cream melt together, but Peter prefers his just with butter and syrup. And of course we nearly always have a few strips of bacon as a side, making this glorious Sunday morning breakfast complete.


Serves 2 good pancake eaters.

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My Sweet Tooth With Recipe

Fluffernutter Madness

The German blog Schönes Blog recently featured the amazing Fluffernutter Sandwich. Of course I have made myself some bagels with peanut butter before. And of course I had noticed the tempting jars of semi-liquid marshmallowy stuff. How could I not? Still I never actually had imagined that you could combine peanut butter and marshmallow fluff and two slices of toast and get something so utterly hilarious and tooth-achingly sweet, yet oddly satisfying as the great and unique Fluffernutter sandwich.

It’s sweet, it’s bound to drive your husband or boyfriend – he, who (for all I know) combines jam and cheese, so how dare he judge my tastes! – to a whole new level of insanity1, it’s made in about 45 seconds.

To make this short: I love it.

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Dinner is Ready With Recipe

Roasted Potatoes

With Peter being in Malta for four weeks, I suddenly was challenged to cook for only one. How long has it been since I had to do that? (Well, actually not so long. I remember a lovely dinner for one I had one time Peter was away in Frankfurt for a few days, but still.)

I was kind of confused at the supermarket and suddenly couldn’t decide what to buy. For some reason, those tiny potatoes caught my eyes. They looked cute and lovely and just perfect for my dinner for one. I hardly ever buy potatoes, usually I just get some when I have a recipe calling for them, so I don’t have a lot of potato experience. But nevertheless I decided to go crazy and just figure out what to do with them later at home.

You can’t go wrong with cute little potatoes, can you? I think I even might have had a little crush there.

What I had in mind was roasted potatoes, probably with garlic and a side of green salad and tomatoes. Tonight I got out Nigella Lawson’s How To Eat for some great tips of this domestic goddess. There was a recipe for roasted poatoes with garlic infused oil and herbs which I adapted to my taste (and what I had in the pantry). The result was better than I thought. Dessert will be a slice of the tarte tatin I made last night. So, all is well so far.

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Heaven in a Bowl With Recipe

Süße Kübiscremesuppe – Sweet(ish) Pumpkin Soup

Recently I stumbled upon a recipe for a Maple Apple Squash Soup on the internet. The original recipe used butternut squash and I first had to do some research to find out what butternut squash is called in German. It’s Birnenkürbis (pear pumpkin), by the way, which makes sense, since they look like really big pears.

Unfortunately my local supermarkets and grocery stores don’t carry a wide variety of pumpkins, so I eventually settled on the reliable Hokkaido pumpkin. (Side note: You won’t believe the lengths I went to just now to find out what the proper English term is. I still don’t know. Maybe it’s just pumpkin. Maybe wikipedia isn’t as great as everyone says. All I know is that the French term is potimarron, so maybe that’ll help.) I figured, since I’ve never ever handled a pumpkin before it would be save to start with the most common and pumpkin-like pumpkin I know. The Hokkaido pumpkin immediately sprang to mind.

I then proudly carried my little friend home and embarked on my first adventure with pumpkins. The one thing I’ve learned is that pumpkins are very easy to handle. With Hokkaido pumpkins you don’t even have to worry about the skin. Just cut it into pieces with the skin and cook until tender. Easy.

This is a very low maintenance soup, just perfect for a pumpkin greenhorn like me. It turns out pretty sweet, not surprisingly, since maple syrup, brown sugar and apple sauce are also added. I like to sprinkle it with chili flakes and pepper before serving to spice it up a bit.

The recipe said you should prepare the soup one day in advance, refrigerate it overnight and reheat it the next day. Though you can surely refrigerate and reheat, I don’t see why it can’t be enjoyed the very same evening it was cooked. I, at least, broke the rule and had my first bowl of soup the same evening it was cooked and I enjoyed it just as much.

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Baking With Recipe

Omas Lebkuchen – My Grandma’s Gingerbread

Lebkuchen

There are those few recipes that are so loaded with memories and childhood nostalgia that you really start to wonder if you are ready to share it with the rest of the world. For these are the recipes that truly deserve to be kept a family secret. My grandmother’s Lebkuchen is one of those rare recipes. Though I think the English term for Lebkuchen is gingerbread, it doesn’t feel right to call them that, since there isn’t actually any ginger involved. Try to think of it as the German variety. Different, but just as good.

When I grew up we lived with my grandparents, and every year in November my grandmother made Lebkuchen for St. Martin’s Day. St. Martin is a tradition here, celebrating a certain St. Martin who – as the legend goes – on a bitterly cold night met a beggar who was freezing to death and didn’t hesitate to cut his warm coat in two parts and share it with him, thus saving him from dying. To celebrate this children make colorful lanterns and go from door to door singing songs and getting sweets. It’s kind of a cute Halloween without the dressing up and blackmailing harmless people into giving you treats. Back then we lived in a suburb of Cologne, kind of like a little village, only instead of being surrounded by fields and forests we had the highway on one and another main road on the other side. The thing was that everybody knew everybody and you could cover more than half of the houses in one night.

Another fond memory and one of the few moments where I will actually get into „back in the olden days“ mood is that we used candles to light our lanterns. Today all I see is those little light bulbs swinging from side to side. Sure, using candles also meant that probably everyone remembers that one year when their lantern burnt down, but I also do believe that the charm of real candlelight totally made up for that one rather catastrophic night.

However, every year my grandmother made her Lebkuchen to give as a treat (instead of bought sweets or fruit) and I also remember people saying that this was their favorite treat to get. Unfortunately we never get St. Martin visitors here (or rather, one group of children in four years of living here), so there goes my chance of becoming equally famous. This hasn’t stopped me from getting the recipe from my aunt and making my first batch of Lebkuchen this year. My aunt told me that the recipe usually gets her about 1 1/2 baking trays, though I got exactly two trays out of it. I guess my trays are just a bit smaller. Two trays equals a lot of Lebkuchen, so I brought some to work for everyone to enjoy and still have a lot left. If you don’t plan on feeding everyone at the office, you should probably just use half the recipe and still have plenty of yummy pre-Christmas Lebkuchen to enjoy.

Omas Lebkuchen

Note: Cups here do not refer to the standard American measurement, but rather ordinary coffee or tea cups, which I guess is about the same, but I thought I’d mention it anyway.

300 g sugar
500 g honey
125 g butter
1 egg
a pinch of salt
3 cups milk
1 cups strong coffee
about 1 kg flour (maybe more)
2 packages baking powder
3 teaspoons baking soda
1 tablespoons real cocoa
2 teaspoons cinnamon
2 teaspoons whole aniseed (as in not ground)
1 teaspoons ground cloves

Preheat the oven to 180°C (about 350° F or gas mark 6).

The main thing about this recipe is that the difficulty – if there is any – rather lies in getting all the ingredients, not in the actual making of the dough. When my aunt gave me the recipe, handwritten on a piece of paper, half of page was a list of the ingredients, followed by two sentences.

This is a simple dough, so the first sentence was something along the line of: Mix it. I would add that if you’re going for the recipe exactly as written above (not half of it) you should probably go for the biggest bowl you have. Apart from that it’s as simple as that. Mix it. You want a smooth dough, so add some flour if it appears too liquid or some milk if it appears too solid.

Then prepare the tray(s), first buttering and then spreading it with flour (because this is how we did it in the olden days). Then spread the dough on it and you’re ready to go. Bake the Lebkuchen for about 30 to 45 minutes until they’re golden brown. Get it out of the oven, let cool, cut into squares and enjoy.

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Dinner is Ready With Recipe

Pflaumencremesuppe mit Barbarie-Ente – Plum Cream Soup with Roasted Barbarie Duck

There’s this show here in Germany called „Das perfekte Dinner“ (The Perfect Dinner), which is kind of a mix between a cooking and a reality competition something show. It’s broadcasted daily from Monday to Friday and it works like this:

Every week a group of five people from the same town (or at least region) get together for five attempts at the perfect dinner. Every day someone else prepares and serves a three course dinner for the rest of the group. The dinner then gets „graded“ by the servees and the one contestant who served the best dinner wins. It’s that easy and a lot of fun, because you get all the kitchen drama, a sneak peek into other people’s lifes and the one or other culinary hint all at the same time.

This week one of the contestants started his dinner with a strange plum cream soup, which according to him he once ate in a Berlin restaurant and managed to get the recipe. It was served with roasted duck and the idea of a plum soup alone sounded so weird that I had to try this out. The recipes get published on the TV station’s website, so I had no problems getting it.

Since the recipe I had was intended for five people I roughly halved the measurements thinking I’d get about as much to feed two and still have some left. But apparently we eat too little (which for the life of me I cannot believe), because what I got felt like it could easily serve five or six. So, for a lovely dinner for two I’d recommend roughly halving the recipe again, although you might want to concentrate on the plums and liquids, and leave everything else as it is.

Vegetarians just leave out the bacon and duck and you’ll have nothing to fear. As for regular meat eaters, the duck is not exactly mandatory, but it adds some luxury – and of course a lot of additional flavor – to the dish.

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Dinner is Ready With Recipe

My Very Special Pasta Salad

Pasta Salad
It occurs to me that I have this thing for dishes that can be prepared in large quantities, so that you can prepare them Friday evening or Saturday morning and then don’t have to think about cooking for the rest of the weekend. The downside here is that you have to like that one dish so much that you don’t mind – in fact, actually enjoy – eating nothing much beside it.

So, if you think about spending and adventurous weekend, doing exciting stuff and maybe eating out or preparing a fabulous dinner, this is not the thing for you. If you want to spend the weekend mostly on the couch, watching DVDs and reading, this might exactly be what you want. And in my opinion there’s nothing wrong with a weekend spent on the couch. In fact, I love those lazy-ass weekends every once in a while. There’s always a tiny little feeling of guilt, a little voice that tells me „You should get out and do something“, but I learned to ignore it.

So there I have two special dishes that I make on these occasions. One is my oh-so-yummy Chili con carne, which I usually serve with some kind of pasta to make it last longer, the other is My Very Special Pasta Salad.

Please be aware that this is in no way healthy food, but to me it is comfort food at its best. I bet it has a lot of calories too, especially since there’s mayonnaise involved, but I’m not a calory-counter. If I like it, I like it and that’s that. So, if you’re looking for a healthy and diet-approved meal, skip it, please. You won’t be happy with what you’ll get. If you’re looking for something to eat while watching your favorite TV shows (which means Gilmore Girls, Veronica Mars and a lot more) on a couch, probably cuddled up under a blanket, then this might be the one.

In my experience it lasts up to three days, if stored properly, but it’s usually best on the second day. So I would prepare it on Friday evening, enjoy your first bites while the pasta is still warm and then spend the next day running from the living room to the kitchen and back to get another serving. At least that’s what I do.

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