The Art of Cooking

Something really strange is happening: I can’t cook anymore. I mean, I guess I can still cook but it is not easy and natural anymore. Back home in California it has – at times – been hard to think of something to prepare and I remember frantic searches on the Internet and leafing through cook books just to come up with nothing and then ending up preparing pasta. But I also remember times when we needed dinner and nobody had gone shopping and I just opened the fridge and the freezer and grabbed some stuff and came up with a dinner that everybody – including picky “I hate veggies” geek boy liked. In my blissful memory the latter scenario is much more frequent than the former.

Another day another Schnitzel (c) Tina Baumgartner

And now I am stuck in scenario 1 – pasta with meat sauce. It is literally all I can ever come up with, well there is Schnitzel and sandwiches – but sandwiches don’t count as cooking, really. I wreck my brain to think of what I prepared at home in California and I draw a blank. Pasta? Schnitzel? I know there was other stuff, and it wasn’t sushi because we go out for sushi. Maybe it was fajitas, that must be it and fajitas is really not much of an option here, but then fajitas were prepared every other week at best. So what is different, what turned me into this unimaginative non-cook?

I can only speculate. The kitchen is tiny, I mean “bump into each other when turning around” tiny. Just a few minutes ago I felt like yelling at geek-boy to get the hell out of the darn kitchen because between his dad and myself there simply wasn’t enough space for a third person.

I also don’t have the provisions I have in California where I have stuff in the pantry and the freezer, where I actually have a pantry and a freeze which deserve the names.

Then there is all that German food that I am all of a sudden apparently expected by the world to prepare. I go to the store and find “Sauerbraten” spices (Sauerbraten is a special kind of German roast that is marinated in wine and/or vinegar overnight to make it slightly sour. It is eaten with Knoedel). I haven’t made a Sauerbraten in like – ever, literally and since I moved to the US I made Knoedel once. I mean, seriously, Sauerbraten spices?? The flip side is that I can’t find the stuff I need for survival. Today I was trying to find Tapatio – no luck, neither did I get Tajin, my favorite spicy, limey Mexican spice – and soy sauces comes in tiny bottles.

Of course, one can argue that it is possible to cook without Tajin and maybe it is indeed. I am about to find out.

It’s All in the Head

I remember my delight finding s particular German brand of chocolate in a small local grocery store in Sunnyvale.  A couple of flavors of that chocolate were also available widely at TJ’s – but only two or three and not my favorites.

So when I found this little store which sells cheap veggies and the most eclectic mixture of Russian sausages, Breads from Israel, Greek feta and German chocolate (in a German-language wrapper) and is run by Mexicans I was ecstatic – oh the selection!  I bought nougat and various seasonal flavors,  yoghurt, mint – yum.  The chocolate consumption – never really low in our house – increased even more and I needed to dream up all sorts of new hiding places to keep geek-boy out of the stash.

Of course, even there we only had a limited selection and I found myself at times standing in front of the chocolate shelf thinking: “if only they had this-or-that flavor that I so used to like at home! Oh, the good old days!!”

Fast forward to now and imagine my standing in fron of the chocolate shelf in a German supermarket starring at the selection. Of course there are the usual suspect flavors, the milk and dark, and the classics like yoghurt and nougat and a few exotic flavors I have never hear of.  I take in the selection and my eye gets get stuck on the milk-cookie version: milk chocolate layered around a large butter cookie. A perfectly yummy chocolate but never my favorite, for one it is hard to break into small pieces to meter out to geek-boy.  However, this one is available everywhere in California (well Silicon Valley).

So I stand there, starring at that flavor lovingly thinking “Oh, cookie-milk, just like at home.”

I catch the absurdity of this right away, grab a bunch of bars (not milk-cookie) and make a silent vow to myself to a) not let my head play such games on me in the future and b) find a new hiding place to keep the stack from geek-boy.

 

 

 

 

Little Things

It’s the little things that end up making live hard when one first leaves the comfort of the world one knows.  With me it was – correction is – bread.  German bread is just awesome, bread making is an art there and the variety and different flavors available there I have never found anywhere else, not even close.

German bread is the best in the world … prove me wrong. pic: http://www.rlv.de

The late 90s on the East Coast was a particularly dire time for bread.  What was served there under this name didn’t deserve it.  It was some white, spongy material that tasted of nothing and could be compressed to about 10% its size and would then spring back to its original shape.  California of the 2010s is a lot better, we even have a German bakery with good bread – if one can afford it.

Chocolate was similar, German chocolate is okay, Swiss chocolate is great and Switzerland is closer to my home town than the next school district for us now. So I grew up on awesome chocolate and found Hershey’s inedible.  I missed bread and chocolate and quark which simply does not exist in the US  (for an explanation of this diary look here).

Banking was another almost insurmountable issue when I moved here.  Back then (as now but less) people wrote checks.  They would go to the drug store, buy a bottle of shampoo and pay with a check.  I had never seen anything like it.  People don’t pay with checks in Germany, they pay with cash (or debit and credit cards, but much less than here, cash rules supreme in your friendly neighborhood supermarket).  When I moved to San Francisco my bank of choice  sent me what must have been several 1000 checks (no kidding).  I moved out of my SF flat 11 years ago and the occasional check I write still shows my SF address – and I am not even half way through the stash.

What I will miss most about California I don’t know yet but I have a suspicion that not being able to go shopping on Sundays will be a biggy, and where will I get those yummy little yellow mangoes from, and the Mexican spices?