German Food – Southern Fusion Cooking

Mulled Wine Season is Here!

Mulled wine, aka Glühwein in German, is one of the most wicked drinks ever devised. And even though our Fall weather has been unbelievably mild, with no freezing weather before Thanksgiving a likelihood, our old French/US hybrid double boiler has been getting a workout. Here’s a classic German mulled wine recipe.

Ingredients

1/2 bottle Red Wine

1 slice Lemon with five Cloves

5 Cardamom seeds

1 stick Cinnamon

Sugar to taste

Heat this combo until it reaches the boiling point, but do not let it boil. We have been so overly enthusiastic that I even hopped on the flea bay train, and bought a couple of those little German Christmas market mulled wine mugs from the Munich Christmas market, the Münchner Christkindlmarkt. An explanation of why the markets are called “Christ Child Markets” deserves a dissertation.

Martin Luther, in his tireless pursuit of reform, put a bullseye on Christmas, the most holy of holy days. Pre-Luther, presents were exchanged on December 6, which is Saint Nicholas’ Day. Saint Nick himself was the present bearer. Luther was having none of that.

Luther said presents should be exchanged on December 24, which is still the custom in Germany. Additionally, no Catholic saints were to be allowed- the Christkind, or Christ child, would deliver the goods personally. The Christ child was an invisible spirit of Christmas, which came to be considered to be a teenaged young woman. I’ll take the Christkind over a big fat guy every time.

Nürnberg (Nuremberg), a city that knows how to do Christmas properly, has the most famous Christkind around, a young woman who is elected to serve a two year term, beginning each year at Advent. She wears a white robe with gold threads, a long blonde wig, and a gold crown. The Christkind opens the yearly Nürnberger Christkindlsmarkt with a traditional speech, which is among the finest of Christmas spectacles.

Meanwhile, back to the drink. It can be served with an additional shot of rum, but beware. Too much Christmas spirit is still too much.

Turkey Schnitzel with Shoestring Potatoes and Fried Egg

Twice a week I am dispatched into a land that is riddled with followers of the VLF–the Virus Liberation Front. Mask-less marauders are legion, but I am an expert at evasion, and they rarely come within ten feet of me. If one tries to, I give them the dreaded contemptuous stare of disapproval.

Let’s have a celebration, a classic German dish, to honor the Fauci ouchie shots. I’ll be ready for the booster in a few months. Schnitzel time!

Ingredients

Two Turkey breast cutlets

1/2 cup of bread crumbs

1 Egg

Pork fat and olive oil, for frying

Schnitzel-izing the Turkey breast is actually the middle thing you want to do. Cook these first.

The tater is peeled and sliced with a mandolin–not the musical kind. I have to have some pork fat to cook mine in. As with all taters, don’t forget the salt. This is the base layer the schnitzel rests on.

The last stage is to fry two eggs for the top layer, and these are from our birds. I always fry eggs in olive oil, though that is looked down upon by some experts. Fine, experts, just don’t come to our house looking for some eggs. Make them as runny as you like as well.

The VLF reminds me of an actual group, the ALF, or Animal Liberation Front. I can only look at their website a couple of times a year, because I am still too young to die from a terminal fit of laughing. ALF is a group of militant Vegans, whose goal is to liberate all the livestock on Earth. Their home page formally featured an attractive young woman wearing a Ninja suit, holding a pink nosed bunny that she had no doubt liberated from some tyrant’s rabbit hutch.

They are also the topic of a magnificent short story, “Carnal Knowledge,” where a group of them attempt to liberate an entire farm full of Turkeys. The narrator, who is something of a dipstick, gets trampled by an whole building of gobblers, and finds himself face down in a pile of Turkey shit. Naturally, all the liberated Turkeys end up being run over by a semi.

Irony rules. Let’s just hope the VLF don’t get their hands on a vial of Smallpox virus.

May Day Breakfast with New Taters, Homegrown Eggs, and Leftovers

We started off International Worker’s Day the right way, with our once every weekend Farmer’s Omelette. We had to celebrate the needs of workers to conserve every penny, so we made this partly with leftovers, although they were no ordinary leftovers. Having grown up on what we call a “dirt farm,” I know how to use a leftover.

The Base

Heaviest Skillet available

1 slice good Bacon (preferably organic)

New Taters, Precious

First, cook the slice of bacon. The real purpose of this is to render out the fat needed to fry the taters. I like to add some olive oil for extra flavor, if needed. These little gems didn’t need any. The Yukon Golds were so tender I didn’t even peel them. Naturally, I had planted them in composted chicken manure to begin with.

Fry the taters until practically done, and chop the bacon. Turn the oven on to 400 F. Time for the magic leftovers.

Leftovers

Grilled organic Onions

Grilled organic cherry Tomatoes

Chicken kabobs on Friday night, grilled over hardwood charcoal. It was all too good, and had those two left over. The Florida Maters were halved, and the onions diced. They just needed to be warmed, so I threw them in with the chopped bacon. Then came the money shot.

Eggs

Homegrown Eggs

Our chickens are getting fat and happy, and we had nine eggs on two days each last month–and we only have eight hens. Currently we are feeding about five families with our eggs. The birds will without doubt be demanding overtime feed soon.

Cook the eggs over-easy style in the oven, but without turning them over. Watch this like a chicken on lookout for a hawk, and take out while the yolk is still runny. This is more than enough to feed the two of us, plus a snack for our two dogs. They especially like the taters.

Feeding the Asparagus

MJ thinks my cardboard mulch is tacky, but after I read a “gardening expert” on the interwebs who said that cardboard is impermeable to water, which is hilariously stupid, I had to try it. It killed all the weeds around our Asparagus bed.

So I planted my thirty new Asparagus crowns, and decided to give the whole bed a banquet of Chicken manure–composted, of course. You have to feed the veg if you want the veg to feed you.

The next layer was composted crushed egg shells–aka, calcium. The chickens just keep on giving.

Last of all was something that I actually had to purchase–pelletized lime. The good news is that it goes for about ten cents a pound.

Spargelzeit (Asparagus time) cannot get here fast enough.

Sage “Berggarten”

Due to the ever increasing vagaries of our climate, no doubt caused by Anthropogenic Climate Disruption (the technical term for Global Warming), our herb gardening is now confined to containers. We have one sage plant that is at least ten years old, and it has to be root bound like nobody’s business. Then I saw this plant, with the German name of Berggarten (Mountain Garden), at our local plant seller. That made it a done deal.

Yikes! I planted it in this giant Mexican terra cotta container with a white Martagon lily, and the sage began growing like it was trying to escape back to the mountains of Deutschland. (I probably should add that the plant is in fact named after one of the gardens of Herrenhausen Palace in Hanover, Lower Saxony, which is not on a mountain). The interwebs descriptions call the plant “compact.” Draw your own conclusion.

Fortunately, the taste of this plant equals its magnitude. No holiday around here is complete without some cornbread dressing that tastes of sage as much as it does of cornbread. I can see a serious herb drying project in my near future.

Lard Help Us, Part Three–Rendering Lard

We must have been particularly good last year, as we received $125 of gift cards for Christmas to our two best local meat producers, and then a real kicker, a giant cooler full of meat from cows and pigs grown by my brother and sister in law. We probably have about a six month supply of meats.

The first to go were some pork chops, which were the finest I’ve eaten since childhood. I made two into schnitzels (take that, Deutschland), and the other two are now marry-nating. And that was one fat hog, so I trimmed the chops and rendered down some lard from the fat.

The key to proper rendering is to melt the fat at the lowest possible temperature, so I set my 6000 BTU burner at its bottom level. The lard is rendered when the fat turns into rinds, and stops sizzling.

After a night in the fridge, the lard congeals and is ready to use. Never make any beef dish without it, and never buy commercially produced lard, if possible.

Germany’s Most Beautiful Cow Is Dead

Sad news from Deutsche Welle, the Voice of Germany. The German cow who won more cow beauty pageants than any other, is dead at the age of thirteen. She actually won more than twenty bovine beauty contests, and was named “Lady Gaga.” I wish I could make this up.

Worse than that, this Holstein was born in France.

“Schnitzel Alarm” in Germany!

Achtung! There’s a schnitzel crisis in Germany, according to the authoritative website Deutsche Welle (that’s Voice of Germany). EU exports to China have caused a tripling of pork prices on the continent.

The cause–Swine Fever, which is killing pigs in China faster than an abacus can count. DW also reports that China plans to import three million tons of pork, much of it from the EU. And I have always loved sweet and sour pork.

So keep an eye on your pigs. Globalization is also a pig problem, and not just with Kapitalistenschwein (that’s capitalist pigs). According to the head of Germany’s Meat Association, “Sausage will definitely be more expensive next year.”

It’s time to invest in pork belly futures again.

Update! Denmark is considering building a wall along their border with Germany, to keep out the notorious wild German pigs, who may or may not be carrying Swine Fever–currently, there are no confirmed cases. The Germans have nicknamed it the “Boar-der Wall.” Now that is droll.

Sauerkraut Season

What with the fall cabbage harvest coming in, it’s time to turn that surplus into a German, and German-American, specialty. Namely, fermented sliced cabbage, better known as Sauerkraut.

Pictured above is a first day ferment, complete with fermentation lids, made by yours truly for next to nothing, and a nice quart I made last spring. My mother in law Agnes Olga would fiddle around with giant crocks full of cabbage, but not me. Give me a lid and an airlock any day.

Ingredients

One medium Cabbage, sliced

Salt

Caraway Seeds

Apple Wine (substitute any white wine)

This not exactly traditional recipe is kicked up by the addition of the wine. Among other things, it insures the fermenting cabbage will not be exposed to the air. Also, a bludgeoning tool is most efficacious when it comes to stomping down some fresh cabbage.

The sliced cabbage needs to be crushed to release the water contained in the leaves. The big one does that, and the small one is used to pack the jars. A medium cabbage only makes two pints of kraut, if they are properly stomped on. Ferment for three to six weeks, depending on how sauer you like your kraut.

This is a great first fermentation project. That, and the final product tastes great on a good bratwurst.

Festhalle Farmer’s Market

While the farmer’s market season is technically over for the year at the Festhalle in Cullman, Alabama, the authorities at Parks and Rec have been convinced to let farmer’s still sell after the official end of the season–for free. The strange thing about this early closure is that anyone who has ever grown any greens, knows this is the prime season for them in this area. Cool weather and abundant moisture make for the best greens, especially collards.

Case in point. This past Saturday was both cold and windy, but our favorite seller was there early in the morning with an assortment of greens. It had been so warm up to this point that he even had tomatoes! Best of all he had what is said to be the largest timber framed structure in the Southeast all to himself.

We loaded up on tomatoes, as we have greens left over from the week before. Then, right behind us, was the brand new tribute to our German roots. A Weihnachtspyramide, and a big one at that.

Not satisfied with having the largest timber framed building around, the Mayor and Parks and Rec went straight to the Erzgebirge (Ore Mountains) in Deutschland, and commissioned this gigantic ornament. It even has a carved replica of Colonel Cullman on the second level from the top. Not only does it dwarf the gazebo behind it, it is documented to be the largest Christmas Pyramid in the US.

Three big guys actually came over from the Erzgebirge to assemble this thing, although while I was reading a version of this story in German, Google translate kicked in, and said there were “woodpeckers” coming over to assemble it. If the woodpeckers looked across the parking lot, this is what they saw on the side of the office for the Festhalle.

Judging by the size of them, I would say that they agreed with this sentiment.

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