When I started cooking German dishes for my children more than a decade ago, my main motive was to introduce them to the foods I had loved as a child. I did not realize it at the time but it was not just the taste for things like spaetzle that I was trying to instill in them, it was subconsciously also the attitude towards fresh food that I had grown up with: Enjoy produce when it’s in season because that is when it tastes best. Continue reading
In recent years, the gluten-free diet wave has swept through Germany like through so many other industrialized countries. It catapulted the book Wheat Belly by US physician William Davis to the bestseller list (its German title, Die Weizenwampe, is even more colorful than the English – “Wampe” means fat belly in German). And, with the gluten-free wave, scores of gluten-free products have been washed onto supermarket shelves. Continue reading
“Whenever I go out to eat at a place with great bread,” writes German-born, Los-Angeles-based chef Hans Röckenwagner about his Sourdough Roggen Brot, I always stash a little nub by my napkin so it’s safe from the servers dutifully cleaning up the table. No matter what I’ve had for dinner or dessert, I must end my meal with one last bite of bread.”
I don’t do exactly that but I am equally obsessed with real, good bread. All of my German expat friends are too. The love for good bread must be in our genes, no matter how far away from Germany we live, or how long we’ve been away. Continue reading
Spoonfuls of Germany 