May Flowers

A surprise was waiting for me this morning when I went outside to greet the plants and sunshine on my balcony. A sleepy rock rose had catapulted herself into the light, leaving bud-dom behind and taking her place among the flowers. Good morning! Welcome! The pollen-dusted leaves had started emitting an aroma that I’m still undecided about, a little too peppy floral for my taste, but that vibrant pink has won me over. There are more buds waiting in the wings.

There’s quite a lot happening on the balcony – as in my life, which is why there has been over a month of silence. The chives are also in bloom, their subtle lithe lilac blossoms offering a contrast to the explosion of color above. It’s going to be a good year for strawberries – lots are forming, and there are even some Rügen that are starting to go red.

In the next week I anticipate I’ll discover what color sage flowers are: despite the cramped quarters, my toddler sage is reaching up towards the sky in a manner I’ve never seen before. Does she feel growing pains?

The last flowers to share are Roman chamomile. In the planter to the left is borage with its sidekick, New Zealand spinach.

The Forum Holitorium has been silent but not inactive – more adventures and recipes are to come. I hope your gardens and flower boxes and pots of herbs are flourishing and your meals are nourishing, wherever you may be.

How to Eat Your Curds and Whey

You may be inclined to think that oral traditions are nearly extinct in the English-speaking world, but how many of you know the following nursery rhyme?

Little Miss Muffet

Sat on a tuffet,

Eating her curds and whey;

Along came a spider,

Who sat down beside her,

And frightened Miss Muffet away.

I assume that most of you who know the rhyme need a review of what a tuffet is: a piece of furniture covered in cloth and used as a low seat or a support for the feet. Since I didn’t grow up on a dairy farm, this rhyme was my introduction to curds and whey. Bright orange, cheddar cheese curds are easy to come by in Wisconsin. They are the tasty product of the process triggered by introducing rennet (an agent containing the enzyme rennin that is derived from the stomach of a mammal of your choice) into hot milk. One of my earliest memories is visiting a cheese factory and discovering the delightful squeak that occurs when you bite into a curd. But curds are just half of the equation – where there is yang, there must be yin. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I tasted whey for the first time. On my first trip to Austria, I drank Lattella, a drink made of whey mixed with fruit juice. It tastes much better than it sounds and is readily available.

I’ve seriously thought about making my own cheese for at least six years. Frankly, I am amazed it has taken me this long to try it out. It’s so easy! But then again, I do things at my own tempo, molto adagio. I started physically preparing for cheesemaking over a year ago when I bought  unbleached cheesecloth. Then about two weeks ago, I tried out this recipe for saag paneer, an Indian dish also known as palak paneer that pairs spicy spinach with paneer cheese, a fresh cheese made of cow’s milk. Instead of paneer, I used Halloumi, a brined cheese from Cyprus made of milk from sheep and goats (though cheaper versions will often use cows’ milk) as well as my own mixture of garam masala. It turned out delicious. The next time I made saag paneer, I vowed, I would finally make my own cheese.

There are two basic ways to make cheese. Both involve milk, of course. The difference is in how you curdle the milk. Either you introduce an acid of some kind (lemon juice or vinegar), and make farmer’s cheese, Topfen, or queso blanco or you add rennet and end up with Cheddar, Emmentaler,  Parmigiano Reggiano, or Gorgonzola. The rennet cheeses all require aging of some kind, but the acid cheeses are served fresh and are more convenient for the average cook because they take around twenty minutes of actual preparation time to produce. Paneer is made almost exactly like farmer’s cheese.

I used the Farmer Cheese recipe in Sandor Katz’s Wild Fermentation for my paneer. First I brought 680 ml of milk from non-silage fed cows to a boil (Who says German words are always longer than English words? “680 ml Heumilch” is much shorter!).

After tiny bubbles appeared over the entire surface and the milk was boiling, I removed it from the heat and added 21 g / 4 tsp cider vinegar a little bit at a time, stirring with the whisk until the milk curdled.

Next, I transferred the curds to the cheesecloth lining a sieve, sprinkling it with 1/2 tsp salt and mixing it in so more whey is released and the final cheese is solid – a plus when cutting paneer into cubes to fry. If you want farmer’s cheese, simply omit the salt. The greenish, protein-rich whey drained out into the bowl below. Whey can be reheated to make ricotta (which literally means recooked), substituted for milk in most baking recipes, added to a vegetable ferment as a starter, or used in place of water to soak grains to prepare them for cooking. Ours won’t go to waste.

The cheese can be hung up to dry or it can be weighted down for twenty minutes to several hours. I left mine hanging overnight and transferred it to the fridge this morning. Since it already started to smell slightly ripened, next time I’ll transfer it quicker because I like my fresh cheese fresh. No spiders are going to scare me away from eating my first homemade cheese!

Degrowing my Kitchen

From October 20 to March 22, this humble wooden bench served as my refrigerator. Whenever I travel for more than a week at a time, I try to eat everything up and turn off the fridge. Any leftovers I give away to friends and neighbors, and any odd bottles and jars that can be kept at room temperature like rosewater, walnut oil, and mustard are placed in the coolest spot in the apartment while I’m away. After our three week journey in October and November, TC and I returned home to winter temperatures and decided not to turn on the fridge until warmer weather made it necessary. The bench was not in its current spring and summer position shown above but against another wall where it is mostly sheltered from snowfall.

I first thought of unplugging my fridge after reading an article printed over five years ago in La Décroissance (Degrowth), a highly polemical French monthly – which I must confess I enjoy reading when I come across it – that rails against the West’s unbridled faith in growth and advocates reducing consumption. One way of lowering electricity consumption is to stop using your refrigerator 24/7. It took me a few years to try this out, but try I did in my previous apartment, a studio on the third floor with a huge balcony and a very loud refrigerator. When winter arrived, I pulled the plug and put my dairy products outside on the balcony until spring. It worked out fine, I slept better, and so I did it again. This winter I tried it out with my current refrigerator.

The Royal Society in London deemed refrigeration the most significant invention in the history of food and drink. I’m not sure it deserves this superlative, but it has definitely shaped our habits – and for those who benefit from modern medicine, which would be impossible without refrigeration, many have their lives to thank for it. The average person, however, can live without a refrigerator, and it’s not just me and some French people unplugging but North Americans as well. The problem with refrigerators is their use of electricity derived from non-renewable energy sources and the use of harmful chemicals like Freon. The solution is to reconsider if we need to refrigerate as much as we do and when it is necessary, to rethink how we do it and create alternative refrigeration technologies with less of an environmental impact. One pioneer in this field is Yasuyuki Fujimura, a Japanese engineer who developed a non-electric refrigerator now used by nomads in Mongolia to keep mutton cool.

Which brings me to one reason why it is easier for me to go without a refrigerator and freezer: I don’t eat meat. I do, however, eat dairy products, which is why my refrigerator only takes a break in winter and doesn’t remain off. That being said, most of us refrigerate more than necessary. Butter and eggs, for example, can remain at room temperature for up to a week. I had a roommate in college that left the butter out and I was really horrified at first, but she learned it at home from her mother, who had grown up on a farm, and I have come to do the same myself. As for produce, vegetables such as beets, turnips, squash, onions, garlic, and leeks and non-berry fruit can all be kept at room temperature, though in my experience carrots tend to shrivel up quickly. Leafy greens need the cold so they don’t wilt as quickly. The Austrian government has a website dealing with refrigeration and recommends NOT refrigerating the following fruits and vegetables as they are sensitive to cold: avocado, bananas, pomegranates, mangos, citrus fruit, eggplant, cucumbers, potatoes, tomatoes, and zucchini. When there are leftovers, they normally disappear the next day, so I just leave them out on top of the stove or in the oven. My leftovers are usually vegetable or bean soups, vegetable turnovers, or quiche that I reheat before eating. On hot summer days I am more cautious and quicker to refrigerate.

This is what our refrigerator looked like when we started it up again on Friday. What begs for refrigeration are the dairy products and the leafy greens, though the oils and juice in the door are also thankful for the cold. It turns out that I was a little hasty in turning on the fridge: the temperature plunged back down below freezing and the snow keeps on coming down. Since the sun won’t shine here, I have to make it shine in my lunch bowl. Incidentally, the ingredients in the next recipe don’t need to be refrigerated.

Hidden Sunshine Polenta

Take 1/2 cup polenta (mine was a white heirloom variety from Italy) and mix it in 2 cups of water. Bring to a boil in a small pot. Keep stirring with a whisk. When the polenta has thickened, break an egg onto the top of the polenta in the middle of the pot. Stir around the egg so as not to disturb the egg yolk (and to keep the polenta from spitting). Slowly incorporate the egg white into the polenta. When the egg white has cooked (you’ll see specks of egg white in the polenta), transfer the whole mixture to a bowl. I covered the egg yolk with polenta and then deliberately stirred where the yolk was, letting the yolk run into the polenta and giving it a nice yellow hue. Add salt and pepper to taste and enjoy.

Failing to See

As a child, I spent a lot of time in my grandma’s kitchen. A mixture of white and that burnt orange ubiquitous in the seventies, it contained the standard kitchen appliances, a narrow pantry full of jars containing not just flour and sugar but all that great junk food I couldn’t eat at home, and a table to seat four. Behind the door were the pencil marks on the wall indicating how tall my cousin and I were at various stages of our childhood. Two windows opened up onto the long narrow lot the house was situated on, the view to the humongous garden blocked by the garage and car port. If you looked at the walls instead of gazing outside, there was a sign that read “Even my failures are edible.”

The plan Sunday night was to throw together a bunch of vegetables, ditalini (“little thimbles”) pasta, and water in a big pot and call it dinner. It was finally time do something with the carrots and leeks bought with good intentions. I also thought we could make thrifty use of the sad looking remnants of a head of Savoy cabbage, a sprouting red onion, and a wee red cabbage that was too small to play a serious role in anything, even a ferment. In the soup bowl, the vegetables looked so crowded. I had envisioned distinct leek and carrot coins in a wholesome, herby broth. The Savoy cabbage, however, had swollen up with pride, hogging all the space yet remaining maddeningly al dente. The red cabbage had slyly cast a rubious sheen on the concoction. I sipped the quite flavorful, nutritious broth and avoided the bulky mass of cabbage. Not what I had hoped to eat for dinner, this “failure” was nonetheless tasty.

After the soup had cooled down, I set out to deal with the leftovers. Most of the broth had been absorbed by the vegetables and the red cabbage had turned a bluish-purple thanks to its anthocyanins. The blue hue was stronger in person than in the picture above. Though I was really impressed that such a color could come from real food and not artificial food coloring, the leftovers still looked unappetizing. I was a bit worried about how to salvage the soup. It didn’t seem right to throw away something that healthy and of such great volume. The handy thing about soups is that they can be puréed, so the next incarnation of the soup looked like this:

TC commented on how it reminded him of the biowaste used to make biogas for power generation. I thought it just looked like bean soup or refried beans. Picky me opted for polenta Monday night, but TC ate the biosoup and said it was delicious.

To what extent is it meaningful to attach the word “failure” to something we have cooked? It makes sense to talk about failure if we burn something beyond repair, rendering it inedible, but do we fail if we attempt to create a dish that tastes just like our memory of it or that matches an ideal or projection and don’t arrive at this goal? I don’t think so. Our society has conditioned us to see so much in dualistic terms. It’s either black or white, a success or a failure. Something is judged to be a success when specific expectations are met and a failure when they are not.

What if we take a more experimental approach to creating in the kitchen? What if we throw some ingredients together and see what happens, observing the results and our sensations in response to them? What if we even set out to cook without any expectations beyond producing something edible? Perhaps the real issue is an inability to look at a situation from several different angles and respond creatively to whatever lands on your plate.

Better Living through Butter

There is something missing when French toast or blueberry pancakes are naked of a pat of butter melting and spreading all over their surface. This milk derivative also enriches the standard Wiener Frühstück (Viennese breakfast) offered in cafés: rolls with butter and jam (preferably apricot) accompanied by a cup of coffee. Crêpes taste and turn out the best when butter is used to grease the pan. And sometimes a dollop of butter on top is all a bowl of polenta needs on a cold winter’s night.

Butter is predominantly made from milk from cows. When cow’s milk is left to rest, the rich cream will separate and rise to the top. This cream can either be churned directly to make sweet cream butter (common in the U.S. and U.K.) or fermented and then churned to make cultured butter (common in continental Europe). Salt may be added as a preservative. The color of butter depends on the animal’s diet. Grass-fed cows produce yellower butter thanks to the carotenoids in grass. Unfortunately, it is hard to tell just by looking at butter what the cows ate because the food industry regularly dyes butter obtained from grain-fed cows to make it look more authentic to consumers. Milk from grass-fed cows contains more Omega-3 fatty acids and conjugated linoleic acid than milk from grain-fed cows. We are lucky here that Heumilch (literally “hay milk,” referring to milk from pasture-fed cows) products make up 15% of all milk products made in Austria.

I had been wanting to try my hand at homemade butter since reading a book about making all sorts of food at home. Last month I reread the Laura Ingalls Wilder Little House books still in my possession, which brought home to me how much I was influenced by the whole DIY pioneer ethic of the series. The first book in the series sets Thursday as the day of the week to churn butter. But it wasn’t just the influence of books that led to this project. One of my goals this year is to reduce the amount of packaging I bring home. Cream at the organic grocery store comes in jars that can be returned while butter comes in packaging that must be thrown away. In short, the time was finally ripe.

I bought a jar of cream (36% fat, 250 ml) and let it come to room temperature. After I had brought the cream to room temperature, got distracted or lazy, and recooled it three times, TC finally took charge of the situation and prepared to churn. Well, mix. Though we have a butter mold lying around from days of yore, no churn has survived. We could have chose to shake, but all our glass jars were busy storing dried goods and jam.

It was surprising how quickly we had butter. In just about three minutes, the buttermilk and butter began to separate.

The newborn butter should be rinsed in cold water and kneaded to force out any remaining buttermilk, whose presence increases the likelihood that the butter will become rancid.

Our butter yield was about half the weight of the cream, approximately 125 g, plus a glass of buttermilk for  master mixer TC. Though it is true that we pay more out of our own pockets to make butter instead of buying it (EUR 1.99 for 250 g organic butter vs. EUR 1.69 for 250 g organic cream yielding 125 g butter), we are planning on continuing to make butter ourselves for a few reasons. First, it’s fun. Second, it decreases the packaging we throw away (and avoids consuming energy to make and then dispose of the packaging). Finally, assuming that our butter consumption remains the same as it was in 2012 (an average of 2.5 kilos per person), the difference in cost between making our own butter and buying it ready made for one year is roughly what it costs for the two of us to go out to dinner one time. In the end, small “sacrifices” (i.e. not going out to eat once, which many times is not a sacrifice at all) can add up to savings (20 butter wrappers that don’t need to be produced and disposed of) somewhere else in the system.

The Festivals of Februarius

Ash Wednesday. I remember going to mass, the priest’s thumb smudging my forehead with grey. “…unto dust you shall return,” he droned over and over. I have no strong memories of how I felt about this ritual at the beginning of Lent. What was more salient was the feast of St. Blaise on February 3, when my class trudged through the cold from the school building past the convent to the church. It was time to get our throats blessed. That seemed much more sensible – after all, whenever I got sick, it was something throat-related. Though I can’t say that the crossing of the candles in front of my throat ever helped much. To this day, when I get sick, it always involves a malady of the respiratory tract.

February has been a month of celebrations for a long time. Februarius was the last month of the year in the Roman calendar. Starting on February 13, the nine-day Parentalia festival honored a family’s ancestors. Thoughts turned to those deceased at the same time that winter gave way to spring, death leading to rebirth. February 15 was the Roman holiday Februa devoted to purification. It was time to wash, clean, and prepare for spring and the new year.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? The Chinese just welcomed in the Year of the Snake on Sunday, the second new moon after the winter solstice. It is also customary to remember ancestors that have died. Preparations for the new year involve cleaning your house and sweeping out any bad luck from the previous year.

Yesterday was the last day of Fasching, or Carnival. Normally there is a big parade through the center of town, but much to my surprise it was called off this year due to the World Ski Championships. I imagine there must have been a lot of disappointed little kids since this is kind of the Austrian equivalent of Halloween, when (not just) children dress up and party. Well, I’m sure they dressed up and partied anyways, just without the highlight of the parade. In fact, the dressing up and partying has been going on in Austria since November 11 at 11:11 A.M., when Fasching officially started. The height of the ball season – including the famous Opernball at the Vienna State Opera last Thursday - coincides with Fasching.

The last day of Carnival is called Mardi Gras in the Francophone world and parts of the Americas. I remember making crepes in French class in high school, learning to hold a coin in one hand for good luck while flipping the crepe in the other. I often make crepes for Fat Tuesday, but yesterday a steaming bowl of chickpea, Swiss chard, and ditalini soup was more inviting.

So here we are on the first day of Lent. Though it is supposed to be a dreary time of renunciation and penance and mortification, at some point I started to see Lent as a time where you can start over again, break a bad habit, change your life for the better, or simply experiment and do something new. Lent provides a framework for a new beginning. Kind of like a second stab at a New Year’s resolution. That said, I won’t be giving anything up for Lent this year because I have already given up alcohol and caffeine for 2013. Just to see if I can. Well, for health reasons too.

Though I have been thinking about deceased ancestors (the whole discussion surrounding Ratzinger’s resignation brings me back to the death of my grandma several days after the death of Pope John Paul II), my focus has been more on the cleaning and purification aspects of February festivals. For the past month, I have been sorting, decluttering, and organizing absolutely everything in my possession. Friday and Saturday, for example, I tackled my collection of recipes. I tossed a bunch and then put the ones I still want to try in a separate folder. I organized them by the season in which the ingredients can be sourced locally. Finally, I made a list so I can see quickly what recipes are in the folder. If I haven’t tried a recipe within one year, I will throw it away next February. Last night’s soup was the result of this fit of organization. The next step: going through all the recipes I have saved on my computer.

Hope you too get bit by the organization bug and enjoy preparing for the coming explosion of spring!

Barley from Head to Toe

In 1324, Edward II of England decreed that one inch is equal to the length of three barleycorns. If this were knitting and each barleycorn a stitch, I would be in big trouble and the sweater wouldn’t fit. Believe it or not, American and UK shoe sizes also date back to the barleycorn unit of measurement. It looks so simple and demure lying next to the tape measure, but barley hides many secrets. I bet you didn’t know that barley’s genome is 1.3 times larger than the human genome and that researchers have identified 20 different foods and beverages made of barley that are commonly consumed in Ethiopia.

When was the last time you ate barley? Hordeum vulgare was domesticated 10,000 years ago in what is today Israel and Jordan, from where it spread to become a staple food in ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, and India. Growing rapidly in a variety of climates, it is a part of the cuisines of areas of the world as diverse as Morocco, India, Tibet, and the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. The EU is the world’s largest producer and consumer of barley – though I suspect that the majority of the crop goes into feeding animals and making beer. That is the case in the U.S., where English and Scandinavian immigrants introduced the crop so they could continue to brew in the New World. Barley can be grown as a winter crop or a summer crop. Here in Austria, winter crops yield more and are used for animal feed while summer crops go into beer production. I found a statistic stating that in 2002, the average European consumed 1.6 kilograms of barley per year. While I was way below that average last year, I plan on doing my part to increase my personal barley consumption in 2013.

Beans and Barley Soup

This soup grew out of my (still unfulfilled) desire to reproduce the thick orzo e fagioli soups I have eaten in Italy. I have made three different versions in the past three weeks. The basic bean and barley base doesn’t change, but you can alter the melody by mixing and matching the vegetables and herbs.

Olive oil

1 onion, diced

2-4 carrots or leeks sliced into coins

2 turnips or potatoes, diced

2 L / 8 cups water

400 g / 15 oz. cooked cannellini or other white beans

100g / 3.5 oz. barley

2 sprigs or 1 tsp dried herbs (rosemary, thyme, savory)

1 tsp salt

Optional: a few bunches of Swiss chard, kale, or other greens

In a large soup pot, sauté the onion in olive oil until glassy. Add the carrots, turnips, water, and herbs and bring to a boil. Simmer until the vegetables are al dente. Add the beans, barley, and salt and simmer another 30 minutes or until the barley is cooked through. If you are adding greens, put them in about 5-10 minutes before you plan to serve the soup. Serve with freshly ground pepper.

Now that I’m fortified with barley soup and sporting bright new handknit wool socks on my feet, it will be easier to wait out the rest of the winter. Hope you are enjoying the lengthening of the days!

Turnips Spring Eternal

The first time we bought vegetables after returning from our winter voyage, we went to the market we normally frequent during the more pleasant half of the year. At the first stand, a woman was selling turnips, a vegetable we had recently seen plenty of in France and Italy but which is underappreciated here. I bought a few, ready to start the new year off by getting to know this food better. The turnips lazed around on the kitchen counter for a few days before we noticed something quite interesting: they were sprouting tiny tufts of green. There is something awesome (as in its original meaning of inspiring awe as well as in its current colloquial meaning of really cool) about seeing how strong the life force is – even in the dead of winter. I put the tops of the three most promising turnips in a bowl of water, where they continue to grow. Can I keep them going until March, when it is possible to plant turnips here, or will TC not be able to resist the urge to nibble on them?

We planted turnips last spring, a variety with the colorful name Di milano a colletto viola (“From Milan with a purple collar”). My vegetable-growing bible said that turnips planted in spring do not need to be fertilized, yet ours were quite small, barely reaching the size of radishes. We had more success with the greens, which can be prepared as any leafy green and are chock full of vitamins, folate, calcium, and lutein. The turnips we bought this month at the market ended up on our table in the following way.

Turnip Gratin

Slice 3 fist-sized turnips into thin slices. Arrange on a baking sheet and sprinkle with salt, pepper, and thyme. Bake at 180° C / 350° F around 20 minutes until puffy.

Butter a gratin dish. Put the sliced turnips in the dish, covering them with 1-2 minced cloves of garlic and 125 ml / 1/2 cup cream. Top with bread crumbs and grated cheese. We used Vorarlberger Alpkäse, but a good Swiss or Emmentaler would do fine.

Bake 20 minutes until the turnips are tender. Serve with a green salad, for example escarole with walnut oil dressing.

Why aren’t turnips more popular? Did the rise of the potato lead to the fall of the neep, which was appreciated by the ancient Greeks and Romans? How do you, dear reader, prepare turnips? This leads me to a handful of resolutions for 2013 – for what would a January blog entry be without a few? This year I would like to get to know at least 10 new foods, expanding my repertoire of recipes to include them on a regular rotation. I hope to post at least 40 times and win over 15 new followers. I’d like to finally start composting our organic kitchen waste on the balcony and to dramatically reduce the amount of plastic we bring into our home via food packaging through better grocery shopping planning.

There are a few non-food related resolutions, such as knitting a pair of socks every month and finally working my way through a stack of 24 books that I didn’t make a dent in last year, but since the sun has now set on the wintry landscape outside the window shown above, it’s time to stop for this week. Stay warm and well-fed wherever you may be.

From the Land of Fondue to the Land of Lemons

It started with Christmas Day fondue in Fribourg, Switzerland. When I am a hostess, I like knowing what my guests enjoy eating so I can do what I can to make them happy. Yet I felt hesitant as a guest to say that all I wanted for Christmas was the chance to eat melted cheese. Maybe my hosts could read my mind; when I found out they had planned on fondue for dinner, it was the best Christmas gift ever. We enjoyed dipping bread, potatoes, and apples into the unctuous mass of Vacherin.

Switzerland. The Edelweiss flower kitsch is classier than in Austria, adorning chocolate instead of umbrellas, and accordingly everything is more expensive. A country that boasts impressive Alpine landscapes and stunning lakes and was recently ranked number one on the Where-to-be-Born Index in 2013, it leaves me cold (except after eating fondue, of course). I’ve been there several times to visit friends, who thankfully provide the necessary warmth.

Warmth from the surroundings can be found further south. After visiting family in Piemonte and being stuffed with Panettone and clementines, we traversed the last Alps remaining between us and the Mediterranean, arriving in Menton in time to ring in the new year. Though I can’t say that we went there to “get re-kindle the authentic” as one tourism website states is possible, it was great to be able to breathe in the sea air, soak up the sunshine, and walk along the beach. I am a firm believer in the restorative properties of a good stroll – no rush, no hurry, no goal. The market hall above was full of delights including kaki-pommes, fruit that are a cross between an apple and a persimmon whose English name I have yet to discover, and fougasse mentonnaise, a sweet cake with anise, pine nuts, almonds, and raisins. A kilo jar of honey from the garrigue from Sospel found its way into our pantry. Its sweetness will cheer us up for weeks to come.

Monaco is just a hop, skip, and a jump west of Menton. We checked out one of its markets, the Marché de la Condamine, on the Place d’Armes. Covered in tiles with different fruit and vegetable motifs, the square itself was more impressive than the wares offered at the market. Menton was ruled by Monaco until 1848, when it became a free city to avoid paying export taxes to Monaco for its lemons. The city is the only area in France with a climate mild enough to produce these sour fruits. Two lemons accompanied us home and are patiently waiting in the fruit bowl to be turned into something good to eat. What shall I make with them?

The solace of solstice

At 12:12 PM Central European time, precisely as I was walking in the direction of home after completing my formal responsibilities for this calendar year, the winter solstice occurred. The sun was the lowest it had been in the sky at high – no, at solar noon since last year. The word “solstice” is derived from the Latin sol (=sun) and sistere (=to come to a stop, make stand still). Since the city was shrouded in its normal grey cloud of winter smog, I must confess I didn’t notice anything. Nonetheless, this pause has great ramifications. Starting tomorrow, the sun will appear to rise higher and higher in the sky, and the darkness which has gained the upper hand as of late will start to retreat. Back and forth, the cyclical flirtation of light and dark starts anew.

Color did break through the gradients of black and white in the mixture of almonds and candied cherries pictured above. Following my grandma’s recipe, I made a batch of decadent Tuscan bar cookies for a musical pre-Christmas gathering. Dinners in December have been very green too. Not because of an advent wreath (we have opted for the minimalist version of four beeswax candles on a dessert plate), but because TC and I have taken a fancy to devouring numerous baking sheets full of strips of kale drizzled with olive oil, salted, and baked for 10 minutes at 200° C /400° F until slightly browned.

Yes, this year could be described as the year of cruciferous vegetables, in which I learned how to esteem cabbage and its many kissing cousins. I embraced making homemade sauerkraut, prepared broccoli and cauliflower with more enthusiasm than ever before, and fell head over heels in love with kale. It was a year in which I started blogging again, and much to my surprise, my readership expanded from family and friends to include complete strangers from all around the world. Thank you, dear readers, for your interest!

This blog will be silent through the twelve days of Christmas, through the Rauhnächte (a good explanation of this and other New Year’s customs in the German-speaking world can be found here), as I embark upon a road trip and start dreaming about what I hope 2013 will bring. I will leave you with one more recipe to enjoy – perhaps it will warm you and someone you love on a cold and snowy day. This recipe grew out of a desire to make Mollie Katzen’s Cottage Cheese and Apple Pancakes recipe from the Moosewood Cookbook while avoiding any grill smell in the kitchen.

Apple Topfen Delight

4 eggs

150 g / 5.5 oz. Topfen, cottage cheese, ricotta, or farmer’s cheese

1 or 2 grated apples

90 g / 3/4 cup flour

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 tsp cinnamon

3 Tbs raisins

2 Tbs butter

Melt the butter in a cast-iron skillet. Mix the rest of the ingredients together in a bowl and pour into the skillet while the butter is still hot. Bake 20 minutes at 200° C / 400° F.