Sunday, September 23, 2012

Love!


"all pain and all joy comes from love"

i send you many greetings! i was looking forward to write again, actually i was thinking quite a lot about it during the last week.
it was somehow a rough week and this post will be short, but filled with some important confessions and also some yummy recipes. or just one, we will see. 
it was my dear husbands birthday last week thursday. i just thought about that and i realized, how thankful i am to have him. he is really a man of a special kind. and how cool is that, he is mine :-). i do love him. yes.

we had a nice birthday coffee and cake celebration, a typical german tradition. besides some other things,i made an american white chocolate cheesecake- delicious! 
you need 120 grams (about two thirds of a cup) of simple cookies. put them in a plastic bag and crush them into crumbs. melt 70 grams of butter and mix with the cookie crumbs. put it on the bottom of a baking pan and squeeze it with a spoon. you know, make it flat :-).
cool it. melt 300 grams of white chocolate. let it cool down a bit.
take the inside of a vanilla pod, 600 grams of cream cheese, 40grams of powdered sugar and the zests of the peel of an organic orange. mix everything very well and put it on the cookie bottom (o man, this is bad language. i still do my best...) cover with foil and cool the cake for at least four hours.
decorate it with fresh raspberries(or any other berries) and chocolate flakes.
this is so good, you will see.
often, when i bake or cook or decorate  something, my kids would say :"is it for  the blog?!" well, of course i make photos and i might post it or write about it. but the truth is, that i do these things for my family. i really want  them to live in a beautiful and cosy environment. i want them to eat well and healthy and delicious. 
they are probably not aware of it, but they are the real reason for my passion. because they are the biggest treasure i have on earth. a little pathetic, but I'm in this kind of mood right now. 
my dear kids, my dear husband, i love you and i wish you all possible blessings. you are a blessing to me for sure.
to all my friends and readers: peace to you. 
let me hear from you.
yours ute

























Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Memories!


Hello my friends.

Today, i want to do a little nostalgic detour. just recently i thought about cooking some homemade and nice maultaschen. this is a typical, south german dish, from the area, I'm coming from. i don't live there any more since twenty years. oh my..., really, TWENTY YEARS? how old am i???
ok, even though i consider home, where my family is, i still like going to the place i used to call home. the house i grew up in doesn't belong to my parents any more, but they still live, praise God for life, close to my hometown. 
when i visit my parents and my brother and his family, i always pass by our old house. i always feel a little dizzy and strange in this moments.there are also some more tears that need to be cried sometime. time goes by, and it is a bittersweet feeling indeed. there is a loss in whats over and will not come back. good things and difficult things. but there is future ahead we can looking forward to. even though it is unsure what it may bring. but there is a big chance of better and bigger things than we have seen so far.
back to the maultaschen. my grandmother sometimes made them. in my memory it feels like the whole kitchen was completely covered with maultaschen for many days. the whole lives of all family members where concentrated on this special and favorite food and the making of it. ---probably the reality has not a lot in common with this "memory". but, hey, who cares. its a sweet memory and it brings me closer to my childhood. so, its a good thing.
by the way, i have to be thankful to my grandmother not only for the maultaschenmemory, but, besides of many other things,  also for a sense of beauty and creativity. even though her taste was different, i believe i inherited this gift from her. and also some nice bone china, silverware (real silver!!!!) and some table linen. so, thanks, oma! (she sadly passed away nine years ago)
so, back to the maultaschen. be prepared for some work.
first i made a pasta dough with 1kg of wheat flour, 2 teaspoons of salt, eight eggs and 10 tablespoons of water. mix it into a firm and elastic dough and let it rest, covered with plastic, for one hour.


take 1 kg of good quality ground meat, best is mixed pork and beef, but you can always be creative.
defrost a one pound package of spinach. mix it together with two eggs and two tablespoons of breadcrumps under the meat. 
peel and cut one big onion and sauté in some butter.
cut a half pound of ham in small pieces. 
mix everything very well. season with salt, pepper, nutmeg (muskat) and tarragon (estragon).
roll the dough with a rolling pin very thin. then fill it will the meat mix and cover it with dough. look at the pictures, then you see what i mean ;-).
cut the maultaschen. best is to use a pizza cutter.
boil the maultaschen lightly in saltwater for ten minutes. 
you can serve it in a delicious homemade vegetable broth or you can fry it in butter and serve it with any kind of fresh salad. my dear friends, this is how home tastes. yummy.


the decoration of the week: wonderful crocosmias (gladiolen). every two weeks i get a package with surprise flowers. i think i would not have chosen this kind of flowers, but now, I'm really fascinated. don't you think, their beautiful? i do.

be blessed, thanks for reading. please let me know what you think.
looking forward to next week.
yours ute
























Tuesday, September 4, 2012

The air smells like fall!




This morning, when i walked out of our house (actually its a castle, but i will write about that another day), the sun was shining softly on my face, the wind was blowing a little cool and it smelt, the first time this year, like fall.
to be honest, i love this time of the year. the heat of the summer is past and the cold of the winter is still far away. the colors of the nature are getting more powerful and something new is in the atmosphere. well.
the taste of fall is also one of my favorite. apples, pears, mushrooms, pumpkins. i love that.
so i tried a recipe of a mushroom soup out of a beautiful cookbook written by jamie oliver. and really, it was a revelation. i really never made a mushroom soup before, even though mushrooms are one of my favorites.
 by the way, mushrooms are no vegetable. they are a own kind of plants. and the biggest alive thing on earth is- a mushroom. jaahaa. that is true. its almost the size of a tenth of germany. it grows underneath the earth somewhere in south america.  
back to the soup. take 50 grams of dried porcini mushrooms (steinpilze). put them in a bowl and pour boiling water on it until covered. let it sit for 20 minutes. then take the mushrooms out of the water and cut half if them into small peaces. keep the water.
cut 600 grams of different fresh mushrooms in peaces. cut one onion and two garlic cloves   
into small peaces and sauté it in some hot butter for about five minutes. then put the porcini mushrooms and the mushroom water in the pot. pepper (freshly grounded) and salt it. let boil for twenty minutes, until the liquid is gone. then put the fresh mushrooms and one liter (about 4 cups) of vegetable broth in the pot. let boil for another 20 minutes.
you can blend half of the soup, that gives a creamier taste. stir in 2 tablespoons of cream cheese, best is the italian kind mascarpone. pepper and salt it if needed.
serve it with some fresh squeezed lemon juice. put some of it on the soup and stir in lightly. - tastes like heaven, believe me!
one of the most liked desserts of my family is zwetschgenkompott. in german it has a very old and boring sound. its basically plums boiled in a nice sweet vanilla and orange sirup.
so take about three quarters of a cup with sugar and heat it up in one cup of water. put one vanilla pod in the sweet, sweet water, after you scratched out the inside. also put one or two sternanis ( that is a winterspice, the google translater gave me the german word as translation. i thought it might be like the iceberg or the kindergarten a german word in english. let me know if there is any correct translation to it, please) and some zests of a organic orange peel in the water. let boil for five to ten minutes. then fill the plums in the pot and close it with a lid. turn off the heat after maybe two minutes. let it sit for ten minutes. don't cook too well. we still want to know, what we are eating.
serve it warm with whipped, not sweetened, cream. delicious! you can of course use all kinds of fresh and tasty fruits. 
this recipes really starts the end of the summer. what a time of the year! its bitter sweet.
I'm looking forward meeting you next week.
please comment and sign up as members. 
have a blessed week.


yours ute