My favorite color is - RED! A recipe for the most red food I know: Borschtsch

Confession: I grew up hating Borschtsch. I don't know what went wrong, my mom is a good cook and did all the right things to encourage us to eat a variety of foods. Maybe hers was a long-range plan, and if that was the case, it worked out. When I was desperate to try to find something - anything - involving beets that my family was willing to eat, I made Borschtsch. It's great winter food. Root vegetables, fermented kraut, a little stew meat that goes a long way. Add sour cream for serving, which always makes my middle child happy, and you're all set for dinner. At 10am, no less, because this is ideal slow cooker territory.

Add to a large slow cooker in the morning:

4 medium beets, diced
2 onions, diced
2 large carrots, diced
1 lbs stew beef, diced
3 cups or so of sauerkraut 
1 small can of tomato paste
1 bay leaf
1 Tbsp beef bouillon
1/2 tsp caraway seeds (if not already in your kraut)
1/2 tsp cumin seeds
1 tsp dried dill weed (Russian food must have dill weed, from what I have observed)
Water to cover the whole mess generously (since you will add some potatoes later)

If you want maximum redness (not pictured): Use dark red beets, red onions, fermented red cabbage and purple carrots :-). You can even use purple potatoes if you so desire and are a little OCD about the concept. Of course this is hypothetical, and not something I would ever do. Ever.


Add 4 medium peeled and cubed potatoes to the slow cooker about 2-3 hours before dinner. There, all set.

OK, this one didn't actually come out very red at all, because I had those beautiful candy stripe beets instead of the 'real' kind. But as I said before, there are basically no limits to redness in this dish. One way or the other, serve it hot with a scoop of cold sour cream added to the top. Delicious and so good on a cold winter night.

Wild Fermented Sauerkraut

You can't read a blog written by a German and expect to get away without a sauerkraut recipe. What is sold around here as sauerkraut is way too sour for my taste, and the imported stuff from the German grocer is extremely pricey (and not even organic...). So I have learned to make my own, and this process, simple as can be, has not failed me yet. Even the husband who is generally underwhelmed by kraut (and potatoes! How did I fall in love with this man??) likes it, as do the children. You can cook it in a slow cooker with a little chopped apple, and a slice of ham steak or some franks thrown in. It's a great meal that's healthy, yet comforting and satisfying. Of course it's probably healthiest eaten raw. 

Ingredients: 

1 medium head of cabbage, white or red
2-3 Tbsp sea salt 

The kraut weighed down by the plastic bag 'stopper' 

Method: 

1. Have very clean hands and a clean workspace. This step shouldn't need saying, but it's especially important for fermented foods.

2. Slice the cabbage in a mandolin. Layer the cabbage into a large bowl as you shred, adding about a tsp of salt every inch of cabbage. You can adjust the salt based on personal taste but adding too little is probably a bad idea, food-safety-wise. You should add something like 2 Tbsp total for a medium head of cabbage. 

2b. OPTIONAL: add a small amount of caraway seeds at each layer, if you like the spice.

3. Then you need to massage the cabbage with your hands. This is kind of exhausting on the wrists. You will know when it's 'happening'. The cabbage will soften considerably, wilt and exude liquid. Ideally, there will be enough liquid to cover the kraut in a crock, but you may have to make some salt brine for backup. 

4. For some backup brine, boil water and add salt till it tastes salty but edible. Maybe a cup and a tsp? I eyeball it.  Let it cool down. Actually, you may want to do that first thing :-)

5. Then you put the kraut into a clean wide-mouth mason jar, or other clean crock, and push it down pretty hard. You don't want air bubbles. Keep it wet, too, with its own juice or add brine. When you're running out of cabbage, make sure the liquid covers the top and no kraut sticks to the side of the jar at the top, because that would get gross. 

6. Some people add a piece of cabbage leaf as a sort of 'lid' to hold the shredded cabbage down. I have not tried that yet. The method that works great for me is to insert a clean, new, food storage plastic bag into the top of the crock/jar and fill it with water. That sort of pushes out any air in there, you may help with something like a wooden chopstick to get bubbles out. 

7. Then you put a clean kitchen towel over the top of all that, secure with a rubber band, and set in on a plate (something always runs over and spills but better than getting air in). Put it in a cool dark place for 1-2 weeks. I had one sit for 6 weeks just now and it was totally good after that still. 

 

 
Shared at Wildcrafting Wednesday

Heat Wave Cake

My sweet Babee turned three yesterday. Somehow, three is a huge milestone in my head. I think of it as the transition from toddler to preschooler, which she will be come September. And we all know how big preschoolers are...

We have a tradition of a poundcake for breakfast in our house, while the birthday person opens their presents. I waited until 10pm the night before, but the temperature outside was still in the 90ies. I made a sourcream poundcake and went to bed hot and exhausted.

Come morning (temps in the 90ies again), I was really in no mood to crank up the oven for a cake for her sweet little birthday gathering that afternoon. Enter: Biskuitrolle. This is the German name for a very low fat, low fuss roll cake. I used to make it so often as a teenager, it's like a baking recipe and craft project rolled into one (hah!). Think Angel Food in sheet form, wrapped around a light and fruity filling. This recipe feeds about 8 people.

The upside: It bakes for only 10 minutes. Perfect for baking during a heat wave.

The downside: There is no downside. 

Ingredients:

5 egg whites, beat until stiff peaks form

5 egg yolks

125g sugar (just a tad over 1/2 cup)

125g flour (1 cup)

splash of vanilla, pinch of lemon zest

Method:

Beat the egg yolks, vanilla, lemon zest and sugar until the sugar dissolves and the mix is custardy and pale yellow.

 Fold in the flour a little.

 Fold in the eggwhites.

Spread the batter onto a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper. Try for a neat rectangle.

Bake for 10 minutes at 350F (this is for a convection oven. Your baking time may be a tad longer). It should look golden yellow when done.

Invert onto a clean kitchen towel that has been generously sprinkled with sugar. Peel off parchment paper.

 Starting at one of the long sides, roll up the cake gently, including the towel. Do this while the cake is still hot!

Let the towel-cake-sausage rest and cool down completely.

Meanwhile, make and refrigerate this delicious whipped creamcheese frosting, and go pick some raspberries. Or, if you find yourself in this completely hypothetical situation where you did pick your raspberries only to discover that your husband had proceeded to eat them, you may have to acquire a second batch from a commercial source. Ahem. You'll need about 2 cups, give or take.

When you have the cake has cooled down, you can very very gently unroll it, and get the towel out of the middle of it. Leave it in place under the cake, though! You're going to spread most of the frosting, starting from the middle of the roll, and not going all the way to the outer edge. Then, sprinkle the raspberries onto the frosting and roll the whole thing up very gently.

 Use the towel to help guide the roll onto a pretty platter, with the seam side down.

Cut the ends off cleanly at a slight angle. I then piped the remaining frosting onto the top of the cake and decorated with edible flowers: nasturtium, oregano flowers, lemon balm leaves, borage flowers, rose petals. If you want to go classic, just put a few raspberries on top of the piped frosting.

I discovered you can pluck the whole set of petals off a spray rose, and without letting go, plant the whole thing into the frosting, to form a decorative edible rose. The girls loved that, after learning that rose petals are indeed edible.

 The birthday girl refused to blow out her candles, but luckily she had enthusiastic helpers!

 

Fluffy Strawberry Almond Waffles

We're nearing the end of strawberry picking in our garden, and that means a lot of the berries that even make it into the house have some small imperfections and are best suited to chopping up and cooking or baking. This morning, I picked just a scant pint, which turned into a cup full of chopped and cleaned berry pieces:

 How what to do with those? A rainy cool morning outside, and nobody much motivated to go out and do things, so we made strawberry waffles. This recipe is an adaptation of the 'Nusswaffeln' (nut waffles) in one in my most beloved German cookbook called 'Ich helf dir kochen' (I'll help you cook), an absolute classic. I learned cooking by reading the original 1973 edition, and my mother gave me an updated version at some point of my 'moving out and becoming my own person' journey. The original recipe was modified a tad, to accommodate the strawberries, and a little flax seed for good measure.

Ingredients:

1 stick butter
1/2 cup sugar
4 eggs, separated and the whites beaten to stiff peaks
pinch of salt
2 tbsp vanilla
pinch of lemon zest
1 1/2 cups milk (I used coconut milk today because we're out of milk)
1 cup flour, I use half whole wheat as usual
1/2 tsp baking powder
1 cup almond flour
3 Tbsp flax seed meal
1 cup chopped strawberries

Method:

1. Preheat your waffle iron

2. Beat the butter, sugar and egg yolk until they are creamy and fluffy. Add salt, vanilla, lemon zest. 

3. Turn down the mixer and add flours, flax seed meal and milk. Go easy on the milk, the exact amount may depend on the type of flour used. Don't overbeat, it should look somewhat thick and lumpy still. The strawberries will add a bunch of moisture to the batter.

4. Fold the strawberries in with a spatula first, and then fold in the beaten egg whites until just about mixed. 

 5. Add batter to the hot iron. If in doubt, use some butter or oil to coat it, these waffles tend do stick! The amount will depend on your iron. Mine is very deep, which gave me a few problems with this recipe. I learned quickly that less is more.... do NOT overfill!

6. Set your iron to a darker setting than you normally would. I'm not going to lie, extracting the waffles was very tricky (as is often the case with fruit waffles, I think). Less batter, more baking, and either flipping the iron to its side, or taking one quarter out at a time, were my most successful attempts. 

Trust me, I wouldn't blog about this recipe if it wasn't worth the trouble. Even those waffles that came out jumbled, were absolutely delicious. And it may well be that if your iron isn't as ridiculously deep as mine, you'll do just fine!

I wonder what they'd be like as pancakes? Hope you enjoy the end of strawberry season! Soon, we'll talk raspberries, very soon!

Rhubarb cake is the German Word for spring

That's not really true, of course. But it may as well be. Spring is when rhubarb grows, the first 'fruit' to arrive, and rhubarb is best eaten in cake form. Cake is serious business to us Germans, and my favorite mealtime isn't breakfast, lunch or dinner, it's 'coffee'. If someone German asks you 'would you like to come for coffee?' , you've been invited to a sit-down meal with coffee, cake, whipped cream and pleasant conversation. And you should most certainly accept. It takes place at 3 or 4 in the afternoon, so cake is not really considered a dessert.
Now that you're properly educated on the merits of eating cake as a standalone meal, here is a very simple recipe that is utterly delicious with its perfect combination of sweet and tart, soft and crumbly.

....still tiny in my backyard.

You start by getting rhubarb in your backyard, or at your favorite farm stand. May's the month for that around here! Gather some eggs as well... I love how mine have personality.


I like to use half whole wheat flour in most of my baking, including in this recipe. I don't like 100% whole wheat as it changes the texture and taste of cakes and pastries too much, but I find that if you stay under 50%, it's barely noticeable and still healthier!

Ingredients for a sheet cake the size of my deep broiler pan: 

For the batter:

1/2 cup butter (one stick)
2/3 cup sugar
4 eggs
3 generous tbsp sour cream
2 tbsp rum
1-2 tsp vanilla
2 3/4 cups flour (up to 50% whole wheat)
3 tsp baking powder
1/4 cup milk

1lbs rhubarb (more won't hurt!)

For the streusel topping:

2/3 stick butter
1/4 cup sugar
3/4 cup flour (up to 50% whole wheat)

Method:

1. Line the bottom of your deep broiler pan with parchment paper and butter the paper as well as the sides of the pan. Preheat oven to 350F, I like to use the 'speedbake' function which uses convection.

2. Cream the butter, then add eggs and sugar. Beat on high while you get the rhubarb ready.

3. Wash the rhubarb. Cut off tops and bottoms and peel as you see fit. I peel the thicker stalks almost completely and thinner stalks only if they seem woodsy. Then cut the rhubarb into 1/2in slices.

 

4. Add sour cream, rum, vanilla to the egg and butter mixture. Then turn the mixer down. 

5. Mix baking powder and flour, then add, alternating with the milk, until a thick smooth batter forms. Stop beating. Spread the batter out on the pan, and sprinkle with the rhubarb pieces.

 

 6. Make streusel topping by cutting together butter, flour and sugar. I begin with a pastry cutter and finish with my hands, until it comes together and can be made into 'crumbles'. Sprinkle over the cake.

7. Bake at 350F for about 30 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean.

8. Serve as a standalone or with whipped cream.

 

Bonus anecdote: My 4yo and I went to pick up some pullets (teenage chickens) at a breeder, and as she gets out of the car, she ignores the chicken cages, even the fancy white peacocks, and says to the proprietor: "You have really beautiful rhubarb!". Oh my heart.


I shared this post over at Growing Home!