fall food in summertime

It's always disconcerting to go grocery shopping in late August and see that the entire front of the store is filled with ripened pumpkins and butternut squash. Surely those things shouldn't be ready until after Labor Day, at the earliest. We're talking about common decency here, and keeping fall things in their proper season, which is fall, which has no business starting in August. (Though last night's horrible weather at the Museumsufer Fest felt like a jump straight back into mid-winter; clearly Frankfurt has no sense of weather decency.)

And yet here I am contributing to this late August indecency, because I bought myself a butternut squash at the end of last week. For shame. I spent a while wondering Friday what I was going to do with it until finally stumbling on a recipe I'd seen before, on both Smitten Kitchen and Orangette, no less, which is pretty much the closest thing a recipe gets to an official stamp of "this is going to be delicious."

Warm Butternut and Chickpea Salad with Tahini Dressing
Adapted from Smitten Kitchen, who adapted it from Orangette, who adapted it from Casa Moro

Yield: four servings (more like two servings as a main dish, four as a side)

For salad:
1 medium butternut squash (about 2 to 2 1/2 pounds), peeled, seeded, and cut into 1 1/2-inch pieces
1 medium garlic clove, minced or pressed
2 tablespoons olive oil
Salt
One 15-ounce can chickpeas, drained and rinsed (1 1/2 cups)
1/4 of a medium red onion, finely chopped (I don't love red onion and so used white onion instead)
1/4 cup coarsely chopped fresh cilantro or parsley (I went with parsley)

For tahini dressing:
1 medium garlic clove
1/4 cup lemon juice
3 tablespoons well-stirred tahini
2 tablespoons water
2 tablespoons olive oil, plus more to taste
sea salt and pepper to taste

Preheat the oven to 220°C/425°F.

In a large bowl, combine the butternut squash, garlic, olive oil, and a few pinches of salt. Toss the squash pieces until evenly coated. Roast them on a baking sheet for 25 minutes, or until soft (25 minutes was just right for me and my mini-oven). Remove from the oven and let cool a little.

Meanwhile, make the tahini dressing: In a small bowl, whisk together the garlic and lemon juice. Add the tahini, and whisk to blend. Add the water and olive oil, whisk well, and taste for seasoning, adding salt and pepper if you want. The sauce should have plenty of nutty tahini flavor, but also a little kick of lemon. I added a little bit of extra olive oil and water to balance things out, and a few cracks of pepper and sea salt.

To assemble the salad, combine the squash, chickpeas, onion, and cilantro or parsley in a mixing bowl. Add about a third of the tahini dressing to taste, and toss carefully, and serve with remaining dressing on the side.

I stored the leftover dressing separately from the salad and added it to taste just before eating. You can warm the leftovers back up in the microwave before dressing and eating, or so I hear; having no microwave, I can only vouch for the fact that the leftovers are also quite tasty left cold.

hurrah

I'm hoping this wasn't the last hot beautiful weekend, but if it was, it was a good one. Aperol spritzes and a rooftop BBQ, a long bike ride along the Main, two lakes*, one pool**, train rides, homemade Pfifferlinge salad, the most dangerous brownies (with sea salt on top), and a full afternoon spent reading my guidebook in preparation for Ann's visit (two weeks from Friday!) and plotting all of the things I still want to do in Germany. It's a good thing I don't have anything in the way of a departure date from Frankfurt yet, because I am in no way ready to be done with this country.

*Lake 1: Grüner See in Dietesheim, which a lot of Germans rate quite highly, but Megan and I found the algae a little off-putting, and I was cowed by the signs proclaiming swimming to be illegal (though apparently no one enforces this. Lake 2: Strandbad Spessartblick on See Freigericht-West in Großkrotzenburg, which was a seven-minute train ride from Hanau and was my favorite FFM-area lake yet. There's not much a view of the Spessart hills from the lake itself, but you can see the Spessart in the background a little bit as you approach, and the lake itself is lovely.
**Freibad Eschersheim was a delightful relief on Saturday after Megan and I gave up on trying to reach Strandbad Spessartblick by bicycle and decided we were not really interested in swimming in Grüner See.

sweet, soft & lazy

I spent this past weekend visiting Mandie, who just moved to Hannover to do an eleven-month business school program. We spent Saturday eating large German breakfast, visiting Maschseefest (a city festival on the lake, featuring a mini regatta and introducing us to the possibility of renting a paddleboat in the shape of a VW Bug), and walking all over the entire city. Our feet hurt intensely on Sunday, so it's a good thing it was cold and pouring rain and we could spend the day huddling indoors and watching a movie that turned out to have been partially set on Sylt ("I recognize this place!!" I hollered at the screen at one point). We finally emerged in the late afternoon to eat at Mister Q's, which claims to be "a culinary trip around the world", and is something of a trip, all right: think a German version of Applebee's with vaguely Asian decor and the added bonus that what you think you're ordering will not necessarily be what shows up on your plate. Empanadas and fried calamari strips are totally the same thing. Mister Q's: where ordering is always an adventure! Just not necessarily a good one.

summer goal: complete

I only had one official goal for summer 2010 in Germany: find an outdoor place in the Frankfurt area in which one may swim and that is reachable by public transportation, and swim in it. It might seem like I was setting my standards low, but this is not the case -- fulfilling all of those requirements was a surprisingly difficult task, requiring many rounds of questioning locals. As far as I can tell, the entire idea of "it is summertime, so let us go somewhere outside where there is cool, refreshing water, and submerse ourselves in it!" is a foreign notion for the immediate Frankfurt area.

But I persevered in my quest, and so on Saturday Megan, Lucy, and I went to Langener Waldsee, just to the south of Frankfurt, which is a former gravel quarry turned lake, and is fantastic and beautiful and bizarre. Where else in the world can you see, all at once, a beach, a nude beach, a yacht club, gravel quarry equipment, and planes taking off and landing at an international airport? Re: the nude beach, we'd been aware that Langener Waldsee had an FKK area (FKK = free body culture = clothing decidedly optional) but we hadn't realized that said FKK area would be separated from the regular beach by nothing but a flimsy little fence. See the sandy area in the picture above? That's the normal beach. See the grassy area just around the curve of the lake? That's the nude beach. Constant entertainment! Every time we looked across the way, we'd find something new to stare at: nudists sunning themselves on the wooden bathing platforms in the middle of the lake, for instance, or wearing nothing but hats and flip-flops to walk to the bathroom. Thanks, greater Frankfurt area. Stay weird.