merry christmas from the dog

Sunny doesn't much like being an elf.

weihnachtsmarkt

I'm in Virginia Beach for the holidays, but first a couple of pictures from the Frankfurt Christmas market.

1. The star lights you see all over the place in Germany during the holidays.

2. What happens when you rubberband two full packages of 40 sparklers each and light them on fire. (I stood waaay back.)

Happy holidays!

thanksgiving

My very favorite of holidays, without a doubt. This was my third Thanksgiving in Frankfurt, and . . . fifth? away from home overall, so I'm pretty used to missing my family on Thanksgiving. Still, Thanksgiving with good friends in Frankfurt (plus Mandie joining from Cologne!) was excellent. Everyone brought or made something to share (even my friends who had just gotten back from Australia), and I made:

+ mashed potatoes (with Greek yogurt, like Rachel says to do it)

+ cornbread stuffing (adapted from here -- no sausage, and subbing vegetable broth for chicken broth)

+ mushroom gravy (this one, which is a bit hard to follow as far as amounts go, but I used 500g of white button mushrooms and 800g of vegetable broth, added over time as needed, and it was amazingly good)

+ caramelized corn with fresh mint from the NY Times, which I made for the third year running! Its first appearance was at Thanksgiving 2009, where I was turned into a pumpkin.

+ pumpkin pie (from here, plus homemade whipped cream that I accidentally almost whipped all the way into butter)

+ raspberry pie (Katherine-style: Betty Crocker-esque double crust made with all butter, filling of frozen raspberries, some sugar, and some flour all tossed together, a few pats of butter here and there. Delicious.)

+ cranberry sauce (okay, I didn't so much make it as pop open the lid on the can, but the can of jellied cranberry sauce is one place where I don't mess with tradition. I was completely happy to leave turkey off the list (there would not have been turkey at all were it not for Kylie's last-minute decision to purchase and roast turkey legs!), but I don't mess around when it comes to my Ocean Spray.)

The stars of the show, though, were Mandie's green bean casserole (totally homemade, if only because you can't just go out and buy a can of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup here) and Rebecca's honey spice cheesecake with some kind of graham cracker-esque crust. Deadly.

I'll make it home for Thanksgiving again one of these years, but this was a mighty fine expat Thanksgiving.

park

Günthersburgpark was showing off more than a little earlier. I love blue-skied fall.

night of the near-death experience

A short guide to Bonfire Night festivities at Wimbledon:

1. Consume gross hot chocolate from a Cadbury truck in the middle of a field.

2. Watch Guy Fawkes burn in effigy. Feel slightly uncomfortable at the realization that watching live people burn probably used to be a whole family kinda event, too.

3. Watch fireworks set off to the rhythm of Glee covers and Disney hits. Try to avoid being set on fire by burning bits of paper falling from the sky.

4. Decide it is a totally great idea to go on the spinny thing, you know, that one over there at the carnival. Realize only once you are strapped in to the twirling wheel of doom that the spinny thing is exactly as sketchy you would expect out of a ride called "Body Count" that is pumping dance music and oh my God it's flipping you upside down you did not know it would do this otherwise you never would have gotten on in the first place why is this ride lasting forever we are going to die.

5. Survive ride, and realize that the spinny thing you rode is not even the actual spinny thing you had intended to ride. This is okay, because the spinny thing you had intended to ride looks even worse.

6. Go on another ride anyway, in spite of your recent near-death experience, because obviously you never learn. Bruise the crap out of your friend's right side as you slam into her with your full body weight every time the car swings outwards. Also, whack her in the face with your hair repeatedly. By the end of the ride, your hair looks like this, which is to say, super hot.

7. Walk from Wimbledon to Wandsworth. Acquire glowing neon bracelets along the way from a guy who is selling them for 50 pence each, or £2 for six just for you (the "Recession special"). You'll need these to torment your cab driver with later.

8. Go to Chez Bruce and overeat like a champion to comfort yourself, post-carnival trauma.

9. Take a cab home, and be terrible to your cab driver. "That was your iPhone that just got a text message, wasn't it? I'm just saying, it wasn't one of ours. Did you get a good message? Was it from your girlfriend? Oooh, I bet it was. Do you want some glowing neon bracelets? That's all right. We're giving them to you anyway. Here, I am putting them on the gear shift. Oh, they fell on the floor. Here's a really big tip, byyye!"

Obviously, England loved us.

london eats

     

Megan and I visited Lucy in London again last weekend, for Lucy's birthday. If there's any question as to whether we ate a whole bunch of delicious things, you don't know me (or this blog) at all.

1-7. Ottolenghi, Belgravia: I'd been seeing Yotam Ottolenghi's name on food blogs for a while, and figured on good things at one of his four restaurants, but oh boy. This food was AMAZING. I got a lunch plate of four salads (£13.70) and all were phenomenal, particularly the green beans (front and center on the dark blue plate). I was glad to see that that recipe is also in Ottolenghi's cookbook, Plenty, with which I am obsessed. The Belgravia location only has one large table in the restaurant, but there was also an adorable bit of outdoor seating out back -- perfect for a surprisingly mild November day.

8-9. Chez Bruce, Wandsworth: Megan, Lucy, and I are beginning to collect Michelin-starred restaurants as we travel now, which sounds like a bad idea for the wallet (though as Michelin-starred restaurants go, Chez Bruce is hardly a bank-breaker: £45 for a three-course meal) and maybe also a bad idea for the stomach. We were so full after this dinner that the cab ride home was torture. (In the sense that we tortured the cab driver. We were fine, ourselves.) Megan left some chocolate on the table, uneaten, for the first time in her life. Worth it. We get why it's Lucy's favorite restaurant now.

10-11. Byron Hamburgers, Putney: Fresh, delicious ingredients for burgers that they actually cook rare upon request without looking at you like you have two heads? Oh Byron, be mine. Frankfurt's burger scene may have worn me down a little, but even apart from that Byron has great food: jacket-on potato wedges, crunchy, peppery coleslaw, homemade milkshakes, and all kinds of excellent burger options.

12-13. Bluebird, Chelsea: After multiple days of overeating terribly, a latte, a fresh-squeezed orange juice, and an order of eggs florentine were exactly what I needed in my life. I did not, however, need to know that the London Anthro is just down the street, nor that the shopping on the King's Road is all-over glorious.

kölner tag

A week ago Sunday, Megan and I hopped over to Cologne to meet up with Mandie and go to the Bon Iver concert at the E-Werk (so good! so full of German hipsters!). It was a Verkaufsoffener Sonntag, so we got to make the unfortunate discovery that Cologne has a lot of nice stores Frankfurt doesn't have (including Muji, maker of my favorite pens). We also rode the little yellow and green Bimmelbahn train around the city (EUR 6, in both German and English, though the degree to which the German commentary was translated into English left a little something to be desired -- "a little something" to the tune of 5/6 of the commentary), drank Kölsch and ate dinner down by the Rhine, and ate leisurely brunch at Cafe Spitz, which, in addition to being in a gorgeous little area of the city and having an excellent summer terrace, introduced us to the glory that is sauerkraut lasagne, which will need to be recreated at home post-haste.

dinner

A few shots from a potluck dinner with work friends a couple weeks back.

tomato jam

A month or so after bookmarking Luisa's version of Mark Bittman's tomato jam I had some leftover tomatoes from making Yotam Ottolenghi's shakshuka and decided it was jam time.

I was a little wary of following Luisa's lazy-person canning tip (just boil the jars for a while to sterilize them, then dry them out, fill them with hot jam, close them up, and turn them upside down for a while, and you should hear the sound of the jars sealing themselves as they cool) but I gave it a try, figuring worst-case I would just refrigerate the jam once it was cool and eat it up quickly. But, sure enough, there was the unmistakable sound of jar lids popping as they sealed in the kitchen about a half an hour after I filled them. Wild! I will eventually get up the nerve to give hot water bath canning a try (it doesn't sound terribly hard or anything), but I was pretty pleased with my first canning experiment.

As for the jam itself, I was somehow expecting it to taste more savory than it did. Make no mistake, this is jam. It's sweet. But it's also got a more complex thing going on than blueberry or blackberry jam does. There are definitely some spicy, savory notes to it, and as long as you eat it as you would any other kind of jam it'll be a lovely little surprise. My favorite thing to do with jam is put it on bread with Frischkäse (Neuchatel cheese, in the U.S. -- lighter than regular cream cheese), and tomato jam + Frischkäse, pictured above, is one seriously delicious combination. I've promised my third and last jar of tomato jam to my friend Ann, and I had better get that package in the mail sooner rather than later. Otherwise, it's going to be a jam-free package.

fall light

  

Pretty fall weather down by the Main Café on Sunday, and nice light on Oeder Weg.

two weekends of friends

  
[full set here]
Two weeks ago: Lucy! Signs at the airport. Breakfast at Cafe Karin. Potters' balcony x 2. Dinner at Lobster. Park lounging. Mainufer lounging. Frankfurter Oktoberfest. The Tree House, Round One.

This past weekend: Suz! Gaststätte Mosebach: delicious Grüne Soße and the best Bratkartoffeln I've ever had. The Tree House, Round Two. This shakshuka. This pumpkin bread pudding (topped with Greek yogurt = yowza, though it could do with about half the butter, and be sure to soak the bread in the custard before baking). Family-style Vietnamese at Toan, plus homemade chocolate cake and berry-topped cheesecake (and emergency cupcakes). Apfelwein at O-Ton.

I think we're firmly entrenched in fall now, but after the glory that was the long weekend when Lucy was here, I'm all right with that. It's allowed to be fall in October.