This weekend it was back to just me and TH, but the weather was so nice, that we joined what seemed like the rest of Berlin in lying around in the city’s parks. On our first sunny vist to Mauer Park we managed to find some bikes at the flea market, enjoyed the sounds of a gypsy jazz band, and were inspired by the tempting smell of bratwurst to order a small grill for summer cookouts when we got home. I’m excited to keep exploring the summer in Berlin, the best time in the city we’ve been told. From Spree River-side parties and trips to Lake Wannsee in the west to leisurely bike rides along the city’s winding paths, I can’t wait to enjoy more of Berlin’s warm weather!

Taking cue from German-style breakfast, I’ve been eating large bowls of muesli every morning. When I saw this baked oatmeal, I thought it might be nice to make a big batch for a few days, especially with a friend in town for the week. Instead of banana, I used up the rhubarb purée from last week and I tried hazelnut meal and hazelnuts for the nutty flavor.

I’ve also been playing around with more gluten-free recipes—in part because I’m interested in all the fun grains and seeds and also because I like to give my stomach a rest when it comes to digestion. This recipe is totally gluten-free. Oats are naturally gluten-free, but check for the specific variety if you have a strong allergy, as they are often processed with wheat. And millet and amaranth are high-protein grains which add texture and flavor. My friend Jacquie suggested soaking the nuts and grains, which makes them more digestible. It was my first time doing this, and I had fun figuring it out; you can skip this step if you don’t have time or interest but it gives the oatmeal a creamy texture.

My visting friend and I really loved eating this recipe for breakfast all week—although it has thankfully stopped snowing in Berlin, May has been damp, cold, and rainy. This was a warm, cozy way to start the day, with a nice contrast from the creamy and mushy oatmeal to crunchy nuts and of course the sweet strawberries. It reheats wonderfully and is great with a little almond milk or fresh fruit.

Strawberry-Rhubarb Baked Oatmeal, adapted from Edible Perspective and Mainly Green
Yield: 8 to 10 servings

For the Soaked Grains:
2 cups gluten-free rolled oats
½ cup millet
½ cup amaranth
1 cup hazelnuts
4 cups warm water
1 tablespoon apple cider vinegar

Combine the oats, millet, amaranth, and hazelnuts in a baking pan. Cover with warm water and stir in apple cider vinegar. Let sit 24 hours. Drain mixture in a fine mesh strainer and rinse gently. Preheat an oven to 175°F. Place mixture on a sheet tray and dry in oven for 1 to 2 hours.

For the Baked Oatmeal:
2 tablespoons unrefined coconut oil, plus additional for greasing pan
2 cups diced strawberries
¼ cup hazelnut meal
2 tablespoons ground flax meal
¼ cup sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon cinnamon
½ teaspoon salt
1 cup rhubarb purée
1½ cups water
2 tablespoons pure maple syrup

For the Topping:
¼ cup gluten-free rolled oats
¼ cup sugar
¼ cup hazelnuts, chopped
1 teaspoon cinnamon

Preheat your oven to 350°F and grease a 9×13 pan with coconut oil.

Place the diced strawberries in the baking dish. Combine the hazelnut meal, flax meal, sugar, baking powder, cinnamon, and salt. Toss strawberries with the dry mixture then add the Soaked Grains. If you skip soaking the grains, just add the dry 2 cups gluten-free rolled oats, ½ cup millet, ½ cup amaranth, and 1 cup hazelnuts in this step and add an additional ½ cup water to the next step.

Combine the rhubarb, water, maple syrup, and 2 tablespoons coconut oil. Pour the wet mixture carefully over the whole pan, poking holes into the dry mixture to combine everything without stirring.

Bake for 40 minutes. While baking, combine the oats, sugar, hazelnuts, and cinnamon for the Topping. Sprinkle the oatmeal with topping and continue baking for an additional 20 minutes, or until the sides set up and start pulling away from the pan. The oatmeal will continue to set as it cools. Cool for 10 minutes before serving.

Gin and tonics are everywhere these days. The New York Times says the drink is having a comeback, and it made an appearance on Mad Men last week, so I thought I’d get on board. G&Ts also seem to be quite popular in Berlin—we actually ended up at a bar a few weeks ago that sold the gin by the 0.2 liter, with separate tiny bottles of artisan tonic to DIY.

While I have always thought of gin as fairly flavorless, distillers like Alameda’s St. George and Brooklyn’s New York Distilling Company are showing the clear liquor can be floral, botanical, and pungent, and easily stands up to the darker-spirits competition. Although I’m not much of an on-the-rocks kind of girl, the really good stuff is wonderfully refreshing, great to sip on over ice on a warm sunny afternoon. There are a few German distillers making gins that are supposed to be quite good; both Monkey 47 and Berlin-based Adler Gin are on my list to try.

I received three pretty stalks of rhubarb this week in our farm share, and not sure what to make, I realized it has been quite awhile since I’ve made a cocktail for the blog. We still have a nice bottle of St. George Dry Rye Gin from TH’s parents visit and in the spirit of Memorial Day weekend, and the thought of everyone grilling and enjoying the start of summer back at home, I made this refreshing cocktail for us to sip on over the rainy Berlin weekend. The rhubarb syrup, spiked with a touch of orange zest, gives the drink a beautiful pink hue, which is enough to brighten any day.

Rhubarb-Orange Syrup
Servings: 3 cups
1½ cups water
1 cup sugar
3 stalks rhubarb, rinsed, leaves removed, and cut into ½-inch pieces
1 tablespoon orange zest

In a medium pot, combine the water and sugar. Bring to a boil and add the rhubarb and orange zest. Reduce to a simmer and cook for 20 minutes, stirring occasionally. Strain, pushing the rhubarb pulp* with the back of a spoon to release all of the juice. Cool the liquid.
* I reserved the rhubarb pulp to make a baked oatmeal dish. Recipe coming soon!

Rhubarb Gin and Tonic, adapted from The Year in Food
Servings: 1 drink
4 ounces rhubarb juice
3 ounces gin
5 ounces tonic water

Combine the rhubarb, gin, and ice in a cocktail shaker. Strain into a highball glass and top with the tonic water.

In the few days we have been here already, we have seen and done so much. We quickly made ourselves useful on day one, cooking a casual dinner for friends, family, and other helpexers in Madeline’s impressive kitchen, roasting artichokes from the garden into a pilaf and finding a use for the chickpea flour with a Moroccan-style crepe. I’ve been constantly reminded of my mother and grandmother during the morning’s weeding sessions, surrounded by the property’s poppies, something both women loved. Afternoons have been spent walking the family’s beautiful new Maremma puppies, and the landscape is just breathtaking—the hillsides go on for miles and miles in every direction. And we had the lucky opportunity to attend a presentation of the Civetlla Ranieri Foundation’s current fellows, a collection of visual artists, writers, composers, and poets spending a few weeks working in Italy; Melanie and I were both a little star struck to hear regular New Yorker poet Jane Hirshfield read her works.

The plan for the rest of the week is just as exciting. Tonight we are headed into Cortona to pick up Madeline’s daughter for a weekend visit, where we will all enjoy a pizza dinner and possibly look for new summer sandals. Saturday we have a wonderful dinner party for 20 planned, a menu of fresh, light dishes along with a three-piece jazz band. Hopefully there will be time for a visit to a special gelato shop in Perugia, a nearby town, as well. In between all the fun, I’m putting my skills to work trying to help Madeline with her website and blogging, as well as with weeding projects (a great way to work on my tan!), and cooking for the group (which I find so relaxing). All in all, it may not be tanning poolside,  but it is a wonderful break from the rush of work and life in Berlin and really so lovely to get to know these new people, hear their thoughts and perspectives on life, and breath this fresh Italian air.

Melanie and I have been waking up each morning to clear our heads and prepare for the day with some yoga. Looking out of the terrace during my stretches I face the heart-shaped hillside opposite Gudiolo. I find the view to be so positive that I know I will certainly come away from the trip feeling quite rejuvenated and renewed in spirit.

The Dialogue Book Club took off this month (as the actual brick-and-mortar closed up shop in April and the team is re-focusing energies on events in Berlin and e-publishing) so I thought I’d share instead a book that I’ve been particularity smitten with lately. I came across Oma & Bella a few months ago, a heart-warming story of two grandmothers, Polish-born Oma and Lithuanian Bella, who survived the Holocaust’s concentration camps and keep each other company today living together in Berlin. Oma’s granddaughter, Alexa Karolinski, filmed their day-to-day life, much of which revolves around food; the intimate story shows simple scenes of shopping at the market, cleaning produce in their night robes, checking on roasting stews in the late hours, enjoying Berlin’s sunny summer sipping Berliner Weiße, preparing for a dinner party, relaxing after a long day with a snack. Most of the film takes place in the kitchen and the food leaps off the screen—you can almost taste the soup, you want to nibble on the cookies. These woman live and breathe cooking, it’s what keeps them going, all day, every day.

After seeing this dedication to cuisine, I couldn’t wait to get the accompanying cookbook and went to three Berlin stores until I stumbled on it at the wonderful culinary outpost Goldhahn und Sampson. Everyone else can order it here (and I think it would make quite the gift, perhaps for upcoming Mother’s Day). The book is a charming little collection of recipes and illustrations, in both German and English, highlighting traditional Eastern European and Jewish dishes including chopped liver, matzah balls, potato kugel, and gefillte fish. Reading through this simple book is like chatting with an old friend—“the food, at its most fundamental, is made for the pleasure of eating. It represents all of the love and warmth that a grandmother has for her family.” The words could not be more mine if I had written them myself. The recipes are straightforward, and most only call for a few basic pantry ingredients, but they are written with love.

Written by Alexa, the cookbook is an attempt to preserve the food her family grew up with and the memories of these women. I am constantly surprised when I meet someone who is disoriented by the concept of cooking without a recipe, cooking only with what you have, cooking by taste. This is the way that Oma and Bella cook; after years of cooking for their families, their recipes are not specific but are second nature. As Alexa explains it, in order to translate that free-nature way of cooking into a methodology for the cookbook, she spent years cooking with the grandmothers, translating the “handfuls into half cups, the pinches into teaspoons.” I believe anyone that reads a book like this, that comes first from a place where cooking is rooted in second nature, will be more adapt at that kind of cooking.

The book is also full of kind words of wisdom that only can come from grandmothers. On fashion: “Have an outfit for cooking, preferable a fantastic one.” Health advice: “There’s no sickness that can’t be healed by food.” On cooking: “Measuring all this is a bad idea, you have to feel it.” It’s really hard to look at a picture of these sweet women and not smile, not feel warm inside, as if these lovely ladies are your grandmothers. Clearly, as I mentioned, I am smitten. Perhaps because I never really had a chance to cook with my own grandmothers.

Although quite simple, this is a touching book and documentary, both of which I thoroughly recommend, (you can easily stream the film at home), especially if you’ve been as intrigued as I have about the historical and culinary aspects of our life in Berlin.

All winter I listened to Germans (and fellow expats) lament about the weather, complaining about the never ending cold. While I was certainly put off by their negativity about my new home (having weathered a Chicago winter, Berlin’s winter was nothing), I was just as eager as the masses for Spargel season to arrive. I remember eating asparagus soup here as a child and although asparagus is a similarly popular courier of spring in the U.S., there is something very German about the verdant vegetable. Germany even crowns a Spargelkönigin or Asparagus Queen!

The warm weather finally broke last week and with it came asparagus! I happily bought a few bundles to share with our April house guests (including the German preferred white variety). While Spargelsuppe is the dish of my childhood memories, the warm sunny weather called for something cool and refreshing. I’ve been on a tahani dressing kick lately, so I started with that; the earthy, sesame paste offers the creaminess of a mayo-based vinegerette with the added bonus of omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids. For crunch I used Runkelrübe, which we’ve been getting from our CSA, and I’ve discovered to be sugar beet. Although this tuber looks like a giant red beet, the flesh is white and has a crunchy sweet texture, similar to jicama. Yellow beet or jicama would be a fine substitution if you can’t find sugar beet. All together it’s a lovely, simple, fresh salad and one I have a feeling with become a regular on our table throughout the rest of spargel season (which I just found out ends quite specifically on June 24th, the feast of St. John the Baptist and the date the Germans decide the harvest has lasted long enough).

Tahini Dressing
Serving: 1 cup
1 shallot, minced
3 tablespoons tahini
4 tablespoons olive oil
7 tablespoons apple cider vinegar
1 tablespoon water
Salt
Freshly cracked black pepper

In a medium-sized bowl, whisk together the shallot, tahini, olive oil, vinegar, and water until mixture is smooth. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Asparagus-Beet Salad with Tahini Dressing
Serving: 4 people
1 bunch asparagus, stems trimmed
1/2 sugar beet, julienned
2 tablespoons Tahini Dressing

Bring a medium pot of salted water to a boil. Blanch the asparagus, cooking for about 8 minutes until tender. Shock in ice water and drain. Slice on a bias to 1/2-inch pieces.

In a medium-sized bowl, combine the asparagus, beets and dressing. Toss to combine and enjoy.

Although you can find them all over the city, I searched out the best, deeply fried with bright cherry or deep plum filling. I’m still dreaming about the crispy doughnuts from Bäckerei & Konditori W. Balzer, one of my top places in the city so far for German baked goods of any kind. Their pretzel shaped doughnuts were just plain fun and the pfannkuchen were incredible, light and airy, not too sweet, and deep golden brown . For the rest of my favorite finds and more pfannkuchen information, check out my piece for Serious Eats.

I had to make some caramel sauce last week for my latest How-To on Snooth Eats, and I immediately wanted to pair it with some of the apples I received from my first CSA pick-up here in Berlin (more on that to come!). Wilde Gärtnerei harvested these apples last fall, keeping them in a cool storeroom to help feed their community all winter. The apples are surprisingly still crisp enough to eat raw, but I wanted to bake.

I ended up playing with a favorite banana bread recipe, subbing in caramel sauce for most of the sugar and using grated apple instead of the mashed banana. The result, a rich, moist cake, was phenomenal—I can’t wait to make it again. The caramel gives a slightly bittersweet undertone, the apples create a moist crumb, and walnuts are always a nice crunch. I forgot to add cinnamon into the batter, so I sprinkled a line down the center with some brown sugar for the perfect crust.

Caramel, apples, walnuts, sounds pretty fall, huh? Well, it’s still pretty chilly here in Berlin, so this bread was a nice, comforting treat and a hit with our house guests. It’s delicious anytime of the year, but if you have better weather than Berlin and are already enjoying the sweet fruits of spring, save this recipe as a pick-me-up for a cloudy day.

Caramel-Apple Bread
Serving: 1 9×5 loaf pan, 8 to 10 slices

3 apples, peeled and grated
¼ cup brown butter, cool
¼ cup sugar
½ cup caramel sauce
2 eggs
1 teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
1½ cups all-purpose flour
½ cup toasted and chopped walnuts
Cinnamon and sugar for topping

Preheat an oven to 176°C/350°F.

In a mixing bowl, mash together the apples and brown butter. Mix in the sugar, caramel, and eggs until completely combined, then add in the baking soda and salt. Fold the flour in last. Grease a 9X5 loaf pan and pour the batter inside. Smooth top with the back of a spoon and sprinkle some cinnamon and sugar down the center.

Bake for 45 to 50 minutes, until the top is golden brown and a toothpick pressed into the center comes out clean. Cool for 15 minutes, then remove from pan and cool completely.

I’ve been meeting with a lot of people in Berlin, getting to know other journalists and food-focused friends-of-friends as I find my way here. A few weeks ago I had coffee with a photographer and videographer who spends his time working on documentaries and heading up an NGO focused on education outreach. When the topic turned to me, writing about new restaurants, decadent meals, and exciting ingredients seemed a little trivial, especially in context of the larger picture.

While I do feel that the stories of chefs, producers, food culture, and time-honored recipes are important, Raj Patel shows the other importance of food writing in his book Stuffed and Starved, the second I’ve read for Dialogue’s book club. Patel, a journalist, activist and academic, discusses the politics and economics of the global food system as well as its influences on sustainability, poverty, and communities at the root of food production.

Stuffed and Starved takes a hard look at the disparity in the food system in a clear and fluid way, helping to make the statistics and facts Patel presents digestible. I can’t say that this is an easy book to read, but I do think it is a great introduction to these very important topics and worth digging into.

I’ve become more and more aware of the effects of agriculture on the environment, and know the difference in taste between small farm produce and commodity crops. While these topics are covered in the book, I think the most eye opening is Patel’s explanation on the human cost of food production and the inequality in the food system. Whether it’s Ugandan farmers being paid pennies for coffee beans that earn mass conglomerates multitudes more; Mexico’s agricultural economy, which has suffered severely as a result of NAFTA and the importation of low cost, subsidized products; or a slew of farmer suicides everywhere from China to the U.S., Patel shows that the global food system can be extremely costly.

When thinking about these heavy topics, a first thought might be that changing shopping habits in order to support ethical and sustainable systems can be too costly. When searching the shelves of mega-grocery stores with their array of inexpensive, mass produced goods, organic and Fair Trade is always more expensive. But when you think about that added price going towards the people who produced the products, the choice seems like a no brainer. No one wants to work for less then they deserve, and yet people around the world do just that in order to produce food for our tables.

We were luckily enough to have Patel join in on our book club meeting (via Skype). He was extremely charismatic and deeply passionate about the topics, talking about these serious issues in a conversational way that drew you in. After his call, the group discussed the book, and our personal reactions to it, a little more in depth. It was so great to hear from the author firsthand, and to also speak with this group in Berlin—expats from all over the world and Germans—to see how this information sits on the mind. Although change is difficult, both in our personal choices and on the global level, understanding the who’s, what’s, and why’s of our food helps make those decisions all the more clear. For someone interested in looking at the serious affects of the global food system, I thoroughly recommend this book.

My first contribution are these delicious “Thin Mint” style cookies. It’s a recipe I started playing around with when I worked at Bastide in Los Angeles; the final course of our tasting menu was a sweet bite that we bagged and gave as a take-home treat. We made a variety of cookies and sweets, but these mint cookies were one of my favorite items.

The cookie is a slightly sweetened pate brisée, which gives a nice flaky bite. I add mint extract to both the cookie dough and chocolate covering, so they end up super infused with minty flavor. To make your own batch, check out the recipe and baking tips on Snooth Eats. I think they’d make a fabulous addition to Easter basket treats!