"Cold Bowl" - a berry soup from my childhood

This year's summer weather here in Germany is - the first time for many years - like summers were in my childhood. Mostly a mix of sunshine and rain with moderate temperatures. 20-25 degrees for the Celsius people, in the high 70s for the Fahrenheit crowd. A few hot days are interspersed and quickly terminated by thunderstorms.

On those days, my mother used to keep the house dark and make either biscuits seeped in buttermilk for lunch or something called "Kaltschale", literally "cold bowl". This is, essentially, a soup made of berries or other fruit and served cold.

This being the 1960s and 70s, the food industry quickly developed "just stir into cold water and serve" packages that were quite popular for some time. But they dropped out of favour in the 1990s, perhaps because of their artificial taste.

They were still served in the cafeteria of the University of Heidelberg when I studied Chemistry there. We used to say they were "full of the vitamins B,A,S and F". Vitamins S and F do not exist, of course, but BASF was the big chemical company just across the Rhine in Ludwigshafen.

Long story short: the weather bringing back my childhood, I decided to make Cold Bowl from fresh ingredients and see if I/we liked it, and it was a success. So I share the recipe with you:


1 handful of fruit per serving
water or suitable fruit juice to well cover the fruit
sugar to taste
1 teaspoon of cornstarch per serving


Clean and cut fruit into cm-size (half inch) pieces. Put in a skillet and cover with water or fruit juice. Cook until desired tenderness. Make a cornstarch slush with additional cold water or juice and stir it into the boiling mixture. it should thicken immediately. Let cool to room temperature. Add water if it's still too thick and chill in refrigerator.

I tried this with rhubarb and currant, using apple juice for extra taste. Some sugar was needed, but these are rather sour fruit and this year's weather wasn't kind to them. Strawberries or raspberries, apricots or peaches might not need sugar at all.

Leftover management

In the past weeks, I was very happy I could just pull something out of the freezer because I was so busy.
My freezer does contain some things I bought: peas, for example, are best bought frozen. They have a very short season, if they're available fresh at all. I generally keep some frozen berries as well for a quick dessert. But mostly, the freezer is a leftover repository.

I've noticed that if I put leftovers just into the fridge, it only delays their being thrown out for a few days. I simply don't eat them before they perish, nor does my family. So I have made a habit of partitioning off any leftovers into portions and freezing them the day they were cooked. I can then pull them out on days when I don't have time to cook.

There is one exception, though: intentional leftovers. Sometimes, it saves time to cook larger portions of something and use them the next day or one day later for something else.

Exemples:
- rice that was a side dish one day become part of a filling for vegetables, or a stir-fry dish, or a burger patty
- boiled potatoes, depending on their type, can be the base of a salad, or get mashed and become gnocchi
- pasta can become the base of a salad, too. And there is a German classic: leftover pasta in the pan with ham and egg scrambled with the whole.

15-minute vegan lunch

There is one thing I learned this Lent: Don't start blogging in earnest when you're in a very busy stretch of your life!

I did most of the shopping and cooking I wanted to do, but simply couldn't keep up with postings. And the last two weeks or so before Easter I was happy I could dig meals out of my freezer I had cooked previously, because there simply was no time for cooking.

Now things have calmed down a bit, and I was so happy with today's lunch that I absolutely wanted to share it.

1 small onion
8 mushrooms
8 twigs of parsley
2Tbsp sesame seed oil

Cut the onion into small dice and the mushrooms into eights. Coarsely chop the parsley. In a pan, heat the sesame seed oil. When hot, stir-fry the onions until golden, then add the mushrooms. Continue stirring. When the mushrooms are soft, add the parsley and stir for another minute or so. Serve with bread or rice.


On Fridays, following a Catholic tradition, I do not eat meat (except if I'm invited into someone's home and they serve it). I sometimes eat fish, but mostly vegetarian dishes. Today's dish happens to be vegan: just plant products and mushrooms (fungi are a domain apart, neither plant nor animal). What I do not want to use are the ersatz animal products that are sold to Vegans. That's industry food which I shun. So if strict Vegans came to my house, I would serve dishes like this: full of plant goodies, but honest and simply cooked up.

Potatoes

They are great stuff, and come in many varieties. The indigenous people of the Andes know more kinds than our supermarkets will ever offer.
Here in Germany, the varieties are sorted into three categories that have a different starch composition which gives them different cooking characteristics:

1. "festkochend" (meaning "firm when cooked"), also called "Salad potatoes"
As their name indicates, they stay firm even when fully cooked. That takes longer than with the other varieties, too.
When cut up after cooking, they retain their shape and edges, which makes them ideal for salads because they don't break up. If you use them for mashed potatoes, however, you will always have some small lumps in the mash (which could of course be a desired effect)

2. "vorwiegend festkochend" (mostly firm when cooked)
They are the most versatile, standard variety. The can be used for boiled potatoes (peeled either before or after cooking), baked potatoes, fries, roast potatoes, mash...
They break up when sliced, however, so they are not the preferred choice for potato salads. Also, you cannot make Swiss "rösti" with them or other dishes like Italian "gnocchi" where starch needs to leach out to keep the dish together.

3. "mehlig kochend" (literally: cooking to flour)
Those varieties give up a lot of starch when they're cooked, and the pieces tend to stick together.
This is desired when making some special dishes, as mentioned above. Also, these potatoes fall apart easily and so they are the perfect choice for mash

Friends who have been living in China as expatriates have told us they didn't cook potatoes there: the merchants mixed the different varieties. Whenever they cooked them, they ended up with a mix of mash and firm potatoes, and that wasn't very palatable!

Day two: Zucchini e patate al forno

1 1-pound zucchino             0,87 €
1 pound potatoes                 0,40 €
200 ml whipping cream        0,40 €
100 g grated cheese            1,30 €


Wash the vegetables, peel the potatoes and cut them crosswise into slices about 2 mm thick. Layer the slices into a pan or casserole that can go into the oven.
Mix cream with 1 teaspoon of salt, pepper and nutmeg or allspice to taste.

Bake in oven at 200°C/420′F for 30 minutes, then take out, sprinkle liberally with grated cheese and put it back into the oven to melt and brown the cheese (another 10-15 minutes)

preparation: 10 minutes + 45 minutes baking time



Of course this is not a recipe to start when you come home hungry. But while the bake is in the oven, there is time to do other things like reading, checking mail, talking....


Total cost: about 3 € for three people, so 1 € per person

Day one: gnocchi and tomato sauce

shopping list:
1 pack of gnocchi (500g)        0.75 €
1 can pizza tomatoes              0.39 €
1 pot basil                               1.19 €

from stock: 1 onion, 1 Tbsp olive oil, salt, herb mix


In a large pot, bring salted water to a vivid boil.

Chop onion into moderate-sized cubes (1/2 cm). Heat olive oil in a skillet and cook onion cubes until glassy, stirring repeatedly. Pour in pizza tomatoes and continue stirring. Reduce heat to minimum and keep until gnocchi are ready, stirring occasionally. When the gnocchi are done, add a few leaves of basil.

When the water boils, pour in gnocchi and keep heat high. After a few minutes, the gnocchi will rise up. Take them out with a wire spoon and put them into the serving bowl. Serve with the sauce.


Preparation: 20 minutes in total
Cost: About 2.50 € for two people: 1.25 € per person

Lent project: Cooking up on a budget

One thing that's often said is a hindrance to cooking with little industry food is "It's expensive to buy good natural ingredients".

I doubt that this is true. For one thing, here in Germany we have the farmer's markets where you can buy local produce for very little money. So many people say "Yes, but I work all week and don't have the time to go there".

Good, so here is my project for this year's Lent (the 7 weeks before Easter): I will cook up only with things I can find in my discount supermarket, and write here how much I spent, how much time it took and the recipe.

I will not buy meat or meat products at the discounter, however. I am a conscious "nose to tail" animal eater, but I do not approve of the conditions animals are kept in to produce low-cost meat. So most of the meals will be vegetarian, as the old rules of Lent eating demanded. Actually, it was even vegan food that was mandated in centuries past, because milk products and eggs were forbidden as well.