Authentic Food

[Jeremyll33]

Hello there, I am a stay at home Dad living in southern Germany who would love to hear all your nice cookery hints!

Thanks to German supermarkets being awful you have to really hunt down lots of things down here if you want quality. No luxury of the Waitrose or Tesco home delivery here, but you can get organic veg and more importantly beer sent to the door.

My newest hobby is cookery which started out of my interest in gardening which leads me to eplore lots of local small businesses to procure my groceries. A farm on the other side of our town produces fantastic honey. Another nearby a few hundred metres away sells us fresh milk from the cow at 5.30pm Mon Weds and Fridays. We drive to another village where we buy farm fresh free range eggs for 2 Euros dropped in a dish in the fridge where they leave the eggs. Our fish are driven from the port of Hamburg down to us and sold by a charming family who own an idyllic watermill near us. But Finally our meat comes from a farmhouse where they also do free range - the Americanlady who has lived in Germany since 1952 owns 1400 chickens.

However all that sounds great but if you have been ill for a few days with wife away on a business trip then all that goes out of the window. The family will be lucky to get a pizza tonight. Not home made from scratch with my own pizza dough this time as usual.

cookery is a calling not a hobby

is there not a bratwurst stall somewhere off the autobahn you could nip out to?

Sounds idyllic - until I read the last paragraph!

I'm on a Use-Up Mission this week. Clear out the freezer, use up all the odds and ends of packets of dry goods, empty all the jars, etc, and start again. Four fresh tubs of yummy home-made ratatouille in the freezer already.

The other day I made a sponge cake with just one tablespoonful of sugar and replaced butter with grated cheese. Called it 'savoury cake' and served it iced with ketchup. The children scoffed the lot! Now that was a good useup .

Actually came on line to see if I could find some inspiration what to do with a frozen leg of Tika Russus (?) venison and some beetroot. The things that lurk in my freezer...

SuzyW about a year ago I started us on the health thing, by buying fish from tasty blonde every Friday from her small van near our local veg shop.

The veg growing thing has taken off but I didnt have a clue what I was doing, both with gardening and cookery. Now it's better - I am now a bit less clueless.

as for Bratwurst, you mean the "stehcafes" - they have these stand up tables in Munch where you can catch a quick bite to eat. We do in fact live not far from one of the most dangerous Autobahns in Europe - full of Italians, Greeks and Poles who fall asleep at their lorries in deep winter. Horrible road. The most famous comes from Nurembueg which you can buy in all supermarkets here.

Hi Jeremy, sorry you're going through a rough patch. Hope you feel more healthy soon. I find frozen Blätterteig useful for quick meals. Flakey pastry is a pain to make yourself. I mix up what I have (left over vegetables, some ham, cream cheese or whatever is handy) as a pie or turnover filling, cover with pastry and brush with egg yolk or cream and sprinkle sesame seeds on top. Goes down well, very quick to make and not a pile of junk.

Couple of days ago I put creamed spinach cooked with a bit of onion/garlic in a pie dish, chopped a couple of boiled eggs over it and some feta. Covered with the pastry and baked for about 40 minutes.

I'm not much of a cook mind you, loathe cooking but I hope when you feel better you'll be coming back to share some of your ideas!

Could you have some pasta sauces made up and frozen for next time illness strikes? That kind of thing maybe?

Sandy, thanks for the concern. No I don't get ill very often and am now on the mend, but tired. Yesterday I chopped up about 2 inches of ginger root and poured a litre of boiled water over it to settle my stomach. Now when I did this last I didnt get the instant results I expected. Problem is when you take say a Paracetamol tablet I heard somewhere they put caffeine in it to speed it up round your system, so it may be that I was expecting instant results. However today my tummy was better after a night's rest.

Today though, I did indeed make up a pizza dough based on the Jamie Oliver recipe as I am bored of the instant roll out pizza and jar of sauce you get in our supermarkets (I assume you get that in UK). Having a mixer with a kneading hook helps. I plopped it on top of the Austrian tile stove for an hour then slapped it ont he baking tray on baking paper.

Based on the combination of spinach and ham I heard about in Jamie Oliver's book, I just put about 300g spinach in a frying pan and dry cooked it - without oil, to shrink it down as it is full of water - you should always store spinach in a bag in the frisge with a few drops of water added, according to our local veg shop man. Then I put it with ham on the top of a pizza then smothered it with cheese.

I also baked at the same time a wholewheat bread loaf thanks to a Deila Online recipe. The bread I had milled for me in the local health food shop. The taste is encouraging, as most of my breads till now have been either door stops or rubbery white loaves with no flavour!

So when are you opening up your restaurant then?!

I'm in Berlin

Sandy - as stay at home Dad with till recently no self esteem this cookery thing has given me a pride I haven't had in ages. I understand Jamie Oliver gets a hard time in Britain - I saw him roasted on Breakfast TV but I still like him.

My wife paid me a lovely compliment. I asked should we all go out for dinner and she replied. "Why, you make better food than any restaurant"! And all I am doing at the moment is following ordinary recipes! Absolootly nothing special.

I still have no clue about food but love learning all about it. My dream would be to open a new kind of beer garden where the restaurant is right in the veg garden. Bit like those seafood restaurants in Spain where you pick the lobster - get the drift? Only you get to pick the cauli or whatever it is you want cooking. I'd call it real honesty in food. You'd know exactly where it came from.

We're near Dusseldorf and have access to a British supermarket if there's anything you all crave and can't get in Marktkauf or wherever - I'll send a Deutsche Post food parcel down! Making your own bread is a great way to simplify your shopping and cooking - you can make your own naan bread too using yogurt instead of water. Mind you, you'd have to learn to cook curry from scratch too as we haven't managed to find anywhere that does decent ones here.