Eating in Gottingen

A very fancy greengrocer: we bought our fruit and vegetables
at a supermarket where it looked just like at home.

Gaudi Restaurant -- I guess it was our favorite

We asked for Gaudi's English menu, which used the Spanish names for tapas and other foods.
We had tapas including apricots wrapped in bacon, meatballs, octopus, and serrano ham.
A little bite of herring with beets and cream was served before anything else.
How do you say "amuse gueule" in German, Spanish, or English?

Gaudi: ravioli with tuna

Gaudi: Cherries with ginger sauce and ice cream

Sausalito: a Tex-Mex restaurant with a very multi-lingual menu.
The German menu was full of both English and Spanish mixed together.

Sausalito's version of enchiladas. Note the red cabbage in the salad.
Corona beer tonight...

German food at Ratskeller Restaurant Sunday night:
herring with boiled potatoes and a stein of beer.

Paulaner "Zur Alten Brauerei" Thursday

Rosti potatoes with herring (front) or salmon (back) and more beer.

Click on any of these photos to see more Flickr photos of Gottingen.

Aloo Gobi for Louise's Picnic Game

I'm going on a picnic and bringing Aloo Gobi, an Indian dish with potatoes and cauliflower. It's a virtual picnic that takes place July 1. So...

Happy Picnic Day

Louise at Months of Edible Celebrations has come back to blogging and is organizing her popular picnic game where at least 26 bloggers create an alphabetical picnic menu, beginning here with A for Aloo Gobi. On July 1, she will post a list of all 26 dishes, with photos!

Actually, I really did bring real, not virtual aloo gobi on a picnic while I was in Aspen recently; I shared it with one of the Tuesday night barbecues at the Aspen Center for Physics. It's a good dish for a picnic because it's supposed to be served at room temperature.

Here's what it looked like towards the end of cooking, before being garnished with cilantro leaves:

Aloo Gobi made May, 2013 in Aspen, Colorado

I first became aware of this delicious dish around 4 years ago when I saw the film "Bend it Like Beckham." As I wrote in an earlier post about this dish, the heroine of the film wants to be a soccer player, and is very good at it, but her parents believe that it's better to make good aloo gobi than to "bend it like Beckham" -- another concept, this from soccer, that I learned from the film. The line is pretty memorable, but what's very memorable is the DVD extra of the film director, Gurinder Chadha, in the kitchen with her mother and her aunties, who watch and give advice while she's trying to explain to her audience how to make aloo gobi. This extra feature is fabulous, maybe better than the film itself.

One of my earlier efforts to make aloo gobi looked like this:

Aloo Gobi made April, 2009 in La Jolla, California

When I eat in an Indian restaurant, I often try to sample the aloo gobi, which always contains a number of spices along with aloo and gobi (cauliflower and potatoes), and sometimes contains tomatoes and sometimes not. An example of the dish with little or no tomato:

Aloo Gobi at Host Restaurant in Toronto

We had a great meal including the above dish a couple of years ago with our friends Rashmi and Kappu. Kappu sent me her aloo-gobi recipe that I followed last month. I didn't have the turmeric and paprika, but I did have all the fresh spices, cumin, and garam masala, a delicious Indian spice blend that's also good on other things.

Kappu’s Aloo Gobi

Ingredients 

1/4 C Oil (Vegetable or Olive)

1 large Onion- cut into thin slices and each slice cut in half crosswise

1 T cumin seeds

1/2 bunch fresh cilantro – leaves chopped and set aside separately.

1 t turmeric

1/2 t paprika

  salt to taste

2 to 3- Serrano or any green chillis – chopped (depending on how hot you like)

2 large whole tomatoes, chopped

3-4 cloves garlic – minced

2 T fresh ginger – peeled and grated

1 med – large cauliflower, broken into floweret

3 medium potatoes – peeled and cut into 1” cubes.

2 T water

1 t Garam Masala

1 T unsalted butter or ghee

Directions

Heat oil in dutch oven, or large pan with cover, over med- high heat.  Add onion and stir till translucent.  Add cumin seeds.  Cook until onions are light brown – do not burn them. Stir.  Add turmeric, paprika and salt; stir.  Add chillis, tomatoes, garlic, ginger, potatoes & cauliflower and mix till everything is well coated.  Add 2+ T water, stir and cover.   Reduce heat to medium low and let simmer for 20 minutes until the cauliflower is cooked. Stir and add Garam Masala, stir again.  Sprinkle 1 T of unsalted butter or ghee, and cilantro leaves on top of the curry, cover and turn heat off.  Let it sit for as long as possible before serving – up to 15 min.

p.s. Do not cook after adding the garam masala.

Bon appetite

Louise's Picnic Game Logo:
See This Post for Details

Famous German Asparagus

We arrived in Gottingen, Germany, early this afternoon after a night on a plane from Detroit to Frankfort and a morning on a train. It's the end of asparagus season, which is taken very seriously in Germany, as I had always heard. This white asparagus special dinner included the fresh asparagus, Hollandaise sauce, boiled potatoes, and a breaded pork cutlet. And local draft beer. Lovely! I enjoyed my asparagus, while Len tried a particular type of herring, also in season, which also was on the special menu.

The town is really lovely, and was especially appealing as we walked around before and after dinner in the long rays of midsummer sunlight. Small placards on many buildings commemorate the numerous famous people who have worked and studied here. I recognized the names of at least two Romantic poets, Tieck and Brentano, who lived or visited here for at least a little while. The physicists recognized scientists and mathematicians -- we walked by a statue of Gauss talking to his younger colleague Wilhelm Weber and another statue of the chemist Friedrich Wöhler who described the molecular structure of urea in 1828. The chemical formula is inscribed in the cobblestones at the foot of the statue.

Statue of Lisel the Goosegirl: tradition requires every new PhD student
to climb up on the fountain and kiss her.
She's holding some flowers left from the most recent such event.

Wednesday Night Farmers Market

Garlic Scapes from Dyer Farm;
Early green vegetables at the market stall behind the garlic table.

The Dyers grow dozens of varieties of garlic, and sell garlic scapes for around 2 weeks each spring.
The garlic bulbs are available later in the growing season; each variety is carefully labeled and described.
Unfortunately, at the moment I was not able to try out this delicacy -- maybe next year.

It's so early in the season that the market wasn't very busy last night.
I bought some potatoes and lettuce.
Quite a few mobile food trucks were also at the market, with tables available for those who wanted dinner.

Food in Aspen

All the most famous food TV and journalism writers and sellers of chi-chi products are in Aspen right now for the Aspen Food and Wine Classic, which starts today or tomorrow. Huge white tents full of chairs, demo booths, or tables have been under construction all week in every open, level space in town. At the foot of the Gondola, in the main parks, in front of the Art Museum, and in little spaces all over busy worker-bees are setting up things for the arrival of all the stars of the foodie world.

The nice quiet atmosphere that we enjoyed for our first two weeks here is shattered. There's no place to park. Even the bike racks are pretty full!

My Bike Friday had to be on the wrong side of the bike rack.
Though most of the bikes probably don't belong to Foodies.

We're leaving tomorrow, luckily, so we don't have to deal with the Food and Wine Classic very much. Both the admission price (e.g. hundreds of dollars just to taste a few desserts, plus registration fees) and the philosophy (sell sell sell) of the event fail to attract me; despite being very interested in food and wine, I would not want to go -- I felt the same way 2 years ago when we were here during the same event.

  

Tents Everywhere!

As for ourselves, we have been eating rather simple food while here, going on picnics and to the weekly Tuesday BBQ at the Physics Center, and joined the other workshop participants for a meal out once. Also, we enjoyed several restaurants in Aspen, though we have not eaten out a great deal. I've posted on one or two meals out, and here are a few photos to wrap up what we ate:

Food at the Little Nell Restaurant "Element 47"
L to R, top to bottom --Fois gras with lots of decorations;
mixed vegetable salad; salmon; ravioli with various mushrooms;
cheesecake with lots of decorations.
All the food was over-presented though not bad. Service was very disappointing.

Breakfast at a cafe near our apartment yesterday:
crowding was a result of people getting ready to set up the Food & Wine Classic!

    

Red Onion Restaurant for Lunch

Maria at Red Onion

Sandwiches at the restaurant at the top of the gondola:
Tuna melt and turkey with bacon, aioli, cheese, and more

Whole fish at the Wild Fig restaurant.
A truly delicious dish
Background: my veal dish!

Pacifica Restaurant Lunch:
Very expensive tuna salad

Our shared sashimi at Asie: followed by a seafood dish and moo-shu duck:
a very nice meal at a quite good Asian fusion restaurant.

Three workshop participants at Asie for group dinner

Annette's Bakery: a good French-style macaron
She said it took her months to figure out how to make the recipe work at high altitude.

I took lots of photos in Aspen restaurants last time we were here, too. See this Flickr set.

The Trail to Woody Creek Tavern

Beside the trail snowmelt drips from the rocks

So much to look at (but the trail on the other side drops precipitously so one tries to skip the distractions)

Maria, my riding companion

A lemonade stand beside the trail

Not very far past the lemonade stand is the hamlet of Woody Creek, and our goal the Woody Creek Tavern. My menu choice: house-made tortilla chips with guac and salsa followed by green chili with posole. Maria and I arrived by bike; her husband Mark and Len met us after attending a talk, and we all had a fun lunch. Maria cycled back up the trail. My bike and I came back in the car.

 Note: I posted a lot of photos of food and decor of the Woody Creek Tavern before. Here's one food photo from our visit a couple years ago (click on photo to see more on Flickr):

In June 2011, Len had the pulled pork -- Maria had it today
ALL good!

The Physics of Cooking

Len introducing Dave Weitz

Yesterday we attended a public lecture on The Physics of Cooking sponsored by the Aspen Center for Physics, held at one of the veneus of the Aspen Institute. Speaker Dave Weitz began with  a detailed description of the course he teaches at Harvard on science and cooking, and on the various collaborators he has worked with, beginning with very famous chef Ferran Adria of Barcelona.

Weitz then discussed and demonstrated several topics in the physics of cooking, including brief summaries of egg-cooking; using a pressure cooker (which was invented, he said, by the British Royal Society); distilling and super-cooling a liquid to make a sort of tower of ice; measuring the elasticity of boiled eggs or broiled steaks; using gels in post-modern cooking processes; understanding foams; and finally, a bit of the physics of mixing a drink.

Freezing an egg in liquid nitrogen: Carolyn Boyd, student helper with Dave Weitz

Using three sous-vide cookers Dave demonstrated the difference between eggs cooked precisely to three very close temperatures -- 61, 63, and 65 degrees Celsius, and how the protein in the egg reacted to the different temperatures. Results: a watery egg, an semi-watery egg, and an egg that looked like a regular poached egg with a soft but solid white and oozy yolk. Caroline Boyd walked two of the eggs around the audience in the fairly large hall so that we could see the difference.

Aspen Chef Robert McCormick demonstrates how to encapsulate cucumber juice in
a thin membrane using agar and Ca2. Result "cucumber caviar."

After McCormick's demo of cucumber caviar, a gel, Dave briefly discussed foams like beer foam, whipped cream, and ice cream, pointing out that whipping cream with a whisk made a more stable foam than the faster method of injecting gas, using a device that appears in the photo above (in front of McCormick's apron).

Local bartender Jimmy Yaeger gave the final demonstration of how to mix a Negroni and how to make a perfectly clear and spherical ice cube (using very elaborate though low-tech equipment).  Yaeger uses a water-circulating ice freezer to make giant blocks of perfectly clear ice -- the circulating device removes the air bubbles that make ordinary ice cubes cloudy. He saws up the big ice block into various-sized ice cubes to provide a distinctive touch for the drinks in his bar. I was very interested in the copper pressure device used for processing a 3 inch cube of ice into a spherical ice cube. The heat-conducting property of copper causes the corners of the cube to just melt away!

After the end of the talk was an outdoor demo of making ice cream in sealed plastic bags surrounded by another baggie of ice and salt.

Aspen Physics Center Picnic

The physics center has several gas grills and lots of picnic tables, which are all in use at the Tuesday night picnic. All the current workshop participants and their families are invited; I think most show up. Steak, chicken, vegetables, veggie patties, and lots of other grilled things are all cooked at once; people bring dinner for themselves or occasionally to share in small groups. The center offers paper and tableware, nice grilling tools, beverages (for purchase), potato chips, and watermelon. If they ever serve anything except potato chips and watermelon, I'm not aware of it.

Aspen Physics Center Tuesday Night Picnic

After dinner conversations

Aromas and Flavors from Jeanie

My blogger friend Jeanie recently wrote about her visit to Grand Oak Herb Farm in mid-Michigan to enjoy a flavorful tea and learn some new aromatherapy ideas. Her blog post about the farm had lots of thoughts on delightful aromas and flavors that contrast with the reading I've been doing, and especially because she included a number of ideas for crafting sachets and other aromatic items. I'm not much into crafting, but I thought it was a wonderful way to think more about the world of fragrance and flavor.

Jeanie kindly gave me permission to make a long excerpt from her blog post, "Taking Tea at Grand Oak Herb Farm." She wrote:

We arrived a little early -- with a bit of time to walk around the grounds and check out the greenhouse, where fairy gardens were plentiful!

Numerous flights of fancy passed through our minds as we enjoyed the wee gardens and the soon-to-be larger plants within.

Then on to tea, ...and entering the tea room.

The table was lovely with easy-to-make tiered sandwich/dessert trays, ...

They were packed with sandwiches and sweets. We learned that the savory flavors were at the bottom, the saltier bits might be on the next level and at the top, the sweets! And, that you eat from the bottom up!

My plate included Beulah's wonderful basil-curry chicken salad, ham with orange marmelade and dill on pumpernickel, a potato quesadilla and the most divine crostini with an herb butter that included herbs and parmesan cheese. (I could have eaten the whole plate of that!) Other sandwiches included an open face corned beef with horshradish and mint and wee cucumber sandwich rounds.

We were most captivated by her candles. Here's how to do it: In jars, put lemon verbena and orange wedges at the bottom, add a few more fragrant greens if you like. Add water and add a floating candle. What sweet fragrance! 

We had an iced and hot tea. Beulah makes her own teas and both were delicious!

 

After we worked our way up the tray, Beulah and Peg offered a variety of demonstrations and sharing of products they make and sell at the shop -- and were generous in sharing their. Because I don't sew, 

 

I bought one of the micro-or-freezer sinus pillows, made from lavender, eucalyptus, rosemary and mint. Lavender brings with it healing properties -- and of course it smells wonderful!

My favorite was the firestarters and I will be collecting pine cones to do this. 

 

Start with a dried pine cone and tie a long wick around the middle and knot it, so it has two ends. With twine or curling ribbon, tie dried lavender stems and if need be, a drop of lavender oil. Then melt wax -- soy wax is recommended over paraffin, but I suppose both would work. drip that on the knot. Then using a piece of pretty fabric, tie a knot. (The one I bought as a sample at the shop also had a blob of the wax on the bottom of the firestarter, too.) Light both ends of the wicks and off you go! (I suppose you could use wheat or raffia in place of the fabric for a different look.) 

 

Another easy idea -- buy or make muslin tie bags, fill them with dried lavender buds and use in the dryer.

 

Peg showed us how to make bath bags -- use epsom salts, lavender, ice cream salts, baking soda and a few drops of lavender and bergemot essential oils. Put into a bag to hand over the shower nozzle or  hang over the faucet/float in the tub.

(With all items, using a cellophane bag is better than a poly one or baggie because the fragrance will leak.

Another idea -- a hankie pillow. Instead of tossing Grandma's tatted hankie, fold in half, stitch along two sides, fill with fragrance (they used lavender, lemon verbena, bergemot and mint) and stitch the top. Place between your pillows for a healing sleep!

...

They also discussed tinctures -- the importance of essential oils which are pure and so much more! They make their own moth repellent with cedar shavings, dried cedar, rosemary, lavender, cloves and bay along with eucalyptus oil. No chemicals. No moths, either!

...

I think our tea with Peg and Beulah was over too soon -- so much to learn, to savor, to sniff, to see! We wrapped up our visit exploring the grounds a bit more...

For those who live in the mid-Michigan area, Grand Oak Herb Farm is well worth the drive to Bancroft, a small town easily accessible by I-69. To give you an idea how popular this spot is, we had guests at our table from as far as Detroit! Please check out the website HERE for additional teas and workshops this summer and return for ones this fall.

Again, I thank Jeanie for allowing me to excerpt this from her blog, The Marmelade Gypsy.

Claudia Roden Portrait

Roden as seen in More Intelligent Life

The magazine More Intelligent Life today offers an overview of the work of Claudia Roden: "Claudia Roden's Succinct Taste."

I'm fond of Roden's cookbooks, both as works of cooking literature and as sources to cook from. My favorite is A Book of Jewish Food: An Odyssey from Samarkand and Vilna to the Present Day. I agree with the article's author, Josie Delap, that "Roden channels a thousand years of Middle Eastern and Jewish cooks, from the medieval palaces of Baghdad to the shtetls of eastern Europe."