I was thrilled when I found out we were moving to Berlin last fall—going back to the country I had idolized during my family’s stint living here in the late 90s sounded incredible. But there were a few key things I was sad to leave behind in New York: my great friends, our new apartment, some of our favorite haunts, and, of course, the food book club I had started earlier in the year.

Luckily for me, Berlin has its own food-focused group of readers, thanks to the incredible Dialogue Books. Founded by British expat Sharmaine Lovegrove, Dialogue is an online literary space and a brick-and-mortar English-language book shop. Unfortunately I missed the February meeting last week, due to my scatterbrained scheduling, but I did manage to read the book, Calvin Trillin’s Eating with the Pilgrims and Other Pieces.

Trillin sets a pretty high standard when it comes to food writing—he’s been documenting travel and culinary adventure for the New Yorker since 1963—so it’s kind of surprising I hadn’t managed to read any of his books yet. Saying I was eager to dig into this one is putting it lightly, and it helps that it’s an easy read. A collection of essays, Eating with the Pilgrims is full of Trillin’s witty and thoughtful commentary on food. The title essay lays out his well-reasoned argument for changing the central dish of Thanksgiving to spaghetti carbonara (including a funny explanation of how Native American’s brought the Italian staple to that first pilgrim meal); while “The Magic Bagel” is a great investigative search for a long lost NYC bagel delight. The 12 essays cover regional specialities, historical insights, and Trillin’s musing on America’s appetite. It’s a great book for anyone looking for a quick, witty bite to read.

And although I was a little bummed to miss the book club and opportunity to talk about Trillin’s funny prose, I’m all the more excited to read, and attend the meeting for next month’s pick.

My January trip to California may have been for work, but I was also able to spend a few rare days with my best friend Jessica while I was on the West Coast. As Chef de Cuisine of Los Gatos’ Manresa, Jes has an even busier schedule then me, so I felt lucky to catch her days off. But she stays busy even in her freetime, often foraging and helping out at the restaurant’s farm, Love Apple Farms. When she asked if I’d like to go looking for chanterelles and citrus, I jumped at the opportunity.

Which brought me, Jes, and a few of the friendly ladies from the Manresa kitchen to the Santa Cruz mountains looking for mushrooms. It had just rained, and the group was hopeful for a great catch. A bit naively, I expected a field full of mushrooms to greet me, ready for whatever enthusiastic picker was interested. Instead we climbed around the country side, using long sticks to search the ground beneath the trees.  I turned over a dried-out chanterelle, but didn’t find anything edible. The girls declared it a dud day in the end, but they still managed to fill up a container with mushrooms in a variety of shapes and sizes. The experience makes it very clear why mushrooms can be so expensive—it’s hard work to find them!

After our mushroom foraging, we went back up the hill to Gene Lester’s incredible citrus grove. He grows an amazing variety of citrus (with nearly 500 trees!) including Mexican limes, Indio Mandarinquats, and Variegated Eureka Lemons. I walked around and tasted as many as I could: bright tangy kumquats, sweet nectarines, and bitter Meyer lemons. The majority (what I didn’t eat) went back to Manresa to be turned into jam, zest, mustards, sorbets, and more for their upcoming annual citrus dinner.

Just thinking about this day brings the citrus scent into my mind, a memory I always associate to my days living in California. Citrus season will soon come to an end, so if you live somewhere warm enough to find them growing locally, pick a few and think of me!

Wow, I can’t believe it’s the middle of February—time is just flying by! We are in the midst of a transatlantic move, but my busy life is also thanks to the month I recently spent back in the U.S. I left a very rainy Berlin in early January, taking nine flights in less then four weeks(!) to jet back and forth from the East and West coasts.

The trip started in San Francisco, where I met some of the city’s top chefs with StarChefs.com‘s Editor in Chief Antoinette Bruno. Then it was back home for a few relaxing days in Virginia with my mom and dad, enjoying the East coast and their company. In early February, TH met me in Brooklyn for a quick visit to some of our favorite haunts. And then we both travelled to San Francisco to see family and friends, celebrate birthdays, enjoy California’s nature with hikes and drives along the coast, and cook plenty of great meals.

I love our life in Berlin, but it was really nice to be back in California, where everything is a little bit sunnier and the produce can’t be beat. It doesn’t hurt that Antoinette and I had some incredible meals during our tasting trip. We both eagerly awaited our visit to Benu, where Chef Corey Lee and Sommelier Bobby Conroy treated us to a very special night. It was also so wonderful meet the talented Pastry Chef Yigit Pura, who has to be one of the happiest and most positive chefs I know. We got to stop by one of my favorite places, the Ferry Building farmer’s market, and we attended the 20th Annual Women Chefs & Restauranteurs conference. It was an action-packed two weeks and such a source of inspiration.

I was also able to visit with my best friend Jessica during my California trip, and she took me on an adventure to a citrus farm in Santa Cruz. I’ll share some citrus photos next week but for now here are a few pictures from my incredible meals in San Francisco.

Pastries by Pastry Chef Yigit Pura from Tout Sweet

Trout, Dungeness Crab, Fennel, Pistou, Couscous, Saffron, and Vanilla from Chef Mark Liberman of AQ

McEvoy Ranch Organic Olio Nuovo Poached Chicken, Grains, and Cabbage from Chefs Evan and Sarah Rich Rich Table

Sweetbreads, Asian Pear, Brussel Sprouts, Black Truffle, and Chestnut-Celery Root Velouté from Chef Jason Fox of Commonwealth

My sister, TH, and I headed south to Garmisch-Partenkirchen over the Christmas holidays for a few days in the German alps. It is a beautiful area and it was wonderful to enjoy the charms of a small Bavarian town. Getting there included a 10-hour train ride from Berlin through the countryside, so I packed a batch of delicious granola bars to snack on. A combination of oats, nuts, seeds, peanut butter, and dried fruit, these bars are full of flavor and energy. They’re definitely a new favorite snack—great for on the go or after a long day.

Garmisch provided just the relaxing getaway we were looking for. We stayed in the quaint, family run Gästehaus Sissi, where we enjoyed big German-style breakfasts each morning before catching a train up the mountain to the country’s highest peak, the Zugspitze. The town itself is full of picturesque Bavarian-style homes covered in elaborate paintings, and the holiday decorations and jovial Christmas market really helped set the mood. Our Christmas meals were full of local specialities, including a giant roasted pig knuckle with potato dumplings and kaiserschmarrn, a traditional sweet pancake, for dessert.

After a few days of skiing and snowboarding over the gorgeous, snowy alps, we headed back to Berlin via an overnight stay with our friend Charlotte and her family in Erlangen, a small town outside of Nürnberg. It was so special to see a real German household decorated for the holidays and enjoy an incredible feast with her delightful family. We also visited Nürnberg and Bamberg, enjoying our fill of Nürnberg’s tiny bratwurst and delicious leberkäse sandwichs in Bamburg, as well as the cities’s charming architecture and sites. It’s great to be back in Berlin, but it was a truly special trip, full of wonderful friends, food, and fun.

Granola Bars, adapted from Serious Eats
Servings: 16 bars
1 cup agave syrup or honey
⅔ cup chunky natural peanut butter
2⅔ cups muesli with flax and sunflower seeds, or rolled oats
1 cup whole wheat flour
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
½ cup golden raisins
½ cup dried goji berries
½ cup chopped almonds

Preheat the oven to 350°Farenheit/176 °Celsius. Lightly grease a 9 x 13 inch baking pan. In a medium bowl, combine the syrup and peanut butter until well mixed. In a separate bowl, mix together the remaining ingredients. Add the peanut butter-syrup mixture into the dry ingredients and combine. Lightly grease your hands and press the mixture  into the pan, flattening into a uniform sheet. Bake until golden brown, around 25 minutes. Cool for 15 minutes, remove from the pan, and cut into bars. Cool completely and store in an airtight container for up to 1 week.

A three hour bus ride took us to Hamburg last weekend for a visit with our good friend Charlotte.  Although Hamburg is often described  as generally rainy and wet, we had a clear sunny day to walk around this beautiful city. We explored the Venetian arcade and Rathaus area, had lunch in Sternschanze at Bulleri, and enjoyed the festivities at the world’s sexiest Christmas market in Hamburg’s red light district. We also quickly became fans of Franzbrötchen, a flattened cinnamon roll, that I strongly suggest you try if you find yourself in town. Here are a few of my favorite pictures from the trip.

My holiday season isn’t complete without baking several batches of cookies to share with loved ones. Although I’m away from my family this year, I was lucky enough to see both my Mom and Dad, and TH’s parents, in the month before I left the US. My mother and I baked up a storm, working through four different cookie recipes in order to send out some early holiday cheer.

It was fun to try some new recipes with her; the gingersnaps were delicious, a less sweet cranberry-orange cookie would be excellent for crackers, and the raspberry-walnut swirls were very pretty. But just like every year, my favorite was the rugelach. In part, it’s because we’ve been making these cookies since I was a kid. We aren’t Jewish—my mother originally found the recipe in an international cookbook—but the traditional Hanukah cookies have become my quintessential holiday cookie. And it’s hard not to love the flaky, buttery dough, wrapped around whatever delicious filling you choose.

Growing up we always used a combination of cinnamon and toasted walnuts for our filling, but for our latest version my mother and I chose a delicious fig jam. The jam caramelizes slightly in the oven, making a sweet, slightly sticky filling that is beautiful inside the tender dough. Topped with a sprinkle of powdered sugar, they are my perfect Christmas treat.

Rugelach
Servings: 4 dozen cookies
1 cup butter, cubed
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 egg yolk
¾ cup sour cream
Powdered sugar
½ cup jelly 

In a medium-sized bowl, cut the butter into the flour using a pastry cutter or two forks until coarse crumbs form. In a separate bowl, whisk the egg yolk and sour cream together, then add into the flour mixture. Mix until just blended. Divide into three portions, flatten each into 1-inch disks, wrap in plastic wrap, and refrigerate for at least 3 hours or up to 3 days.

Preheat the oven to 375°F. Remove one portion of dough from the refrigerator and let it warm for several minutes. Dust the dough lightly with powdered sugar and roll out between two pieces of parchment paper or non-stick baking mats into a 1/8-inch thick circle. Spread the jelly in a thin layer over the surface of the dough. Use a pizza cutter to slice the dough into 16 wedges, and roll the wedges up, starting at the wider end. Transfer to a lined baking sheet and bake for 15 minutes. Meanwhile, prepare the remaining dough. When cookies are lightly browned, remove from oven and cool on wire racks. Dust with powdered sugar to finish.

Through the rose tinted glasses of my childhood, Christmas in Germany seemed like the best thing on earth. A place where the cobblestones and medieval towns of fairy tales met with a month of pure festivity as snowy nights filled with rich hot chocolate, roasted chestnuts, and as many candied nuts as we could eat.

I find myself back in Germany at the start of the holiday season, and I can say with full confidence that my attraction to this country’s celebration was more than childhood memories romanticized. Christmas in Germany is something special. Take for instance yesterday, December 6th, the special holiday of Nikolaus Tag. Children all over Germany clean their shoes the night before, putting them outside the door (as I did growing up). The next morning, the shoes are filled to the brim with chocolates, oranges, and little trinkets—special Christmas treats to start the holidays. The advent calendar here is treated with reverence, from the candle-decked holiday wreath inside churches to the candy-filled paper version sold at every grocery store. And from the first weekend in December, the Christmas markets light up city’s both small and large; more then 50 markets have taken over Berlin’s squares and boulevards, not as a tourist attraction but something thoroughly and completely enjoyed by the locals. Giant trees, nativities, pyramids, and nutcrackers can be found everywhere.

Walk through the carnival-like Alexanderplatz market during a weekday and you’ll see business men enjoying champignon for lunch while Berlin’s mothers entertain their children on mini ferris wheels and roller coasters. At the more beautiful but just as crowded Gendarmenmarkt, cloaked entry guards help lend a historical flair, while artisans offer handmade goods. Nearby our new home in the Prenz Lauerberg neighborhood, the Kulturbrauerei market is a very locals affair. It’s small size is outweighed by authentic flavor, with a Scandanavian/Saint Lucia theme offering food and drink from Finland, Sweden, and Norway.

With endless options for food—pommes, bratwurst, fluffy latkes with lox, stewed green kale with ham, fluffy pizza with bacon and cream sauce, plus the sweet crêpes, waffles, candied nuts, and roasted chestnuts—we could go to a market every night and never get tired. And no matter how cold it gets, there is always a glass of warm gluhwein or hot chocolate to drink. Germany is beautiful in the summer and fall, but I am so lucky to have come now, my favorite time of all.

*Some exciting holiday news to share, I’ve been nominated for FriendsEAT.com’s 2012 Best Food Blogger in the Recipe category. Please vote for my page by clicking the “love” button here http://friendseat.com/lavitacucinare*

The past few weeks have been whirlwind, as our new life has us figuring out the ins and outs of Berlin culture and eating plenty of delicious food at the Christkindlmarkts, including rich bratwurst, Belgium-style waffles, and spiced Glühwein. With the first snow this weekend, it was nice to stay home, relax, and enjoy a simple, comforting meal. Homemade pasta with garlic oil and parsley hit the spot.

Making pasta isn’t something everyone does, but I think it should be, even if just every once in awhile. It may be a little more work than the packaged stuff, but the technique is fairly easy and the result—light and silky—is so worth it. If you use Italian ’00′ flour, a very fine ground, your pasta will be even silkier and more authentic, but all-purpose flour works just fine. Simply combine the eggs and flour into a rough dough, knead until smooth, rest, and roll out very thin. Cut the dough into noodles, cook in salted, boiling water, and voilà, homemade pasta!

Homemade Pasta
Servings: 2 portions
1½ cups all-purpose flour
2 eggs
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 cloves garlic, sliced thin
2 tablespoons chopped parsley
Salt
Freshly cracked black pepper

Place the flour in a bowl, make a depression in the center, and place the eggs in the well. Slowly mix the eggs into the flour until completely combined, then turn out onto a floured work surface. Knead for about 10 minutes, adding additional flour if necessary, until the dough is smooth. Leave dough to rest.

In a medium-sized sauté pan, heat the oil over low heat. Add the garlic and cook until the garlic begins to brown. Steep for 10 minutes, then remove garlic. Bring a medium pot of salted water up to a boil. Use a rolling pin or pasta sheeter to roll the dough to a very thin sheet. Cut into thin strips and lightly coat in flour to avoid sticking. Shake to remove as much flour as possible, place pasta in the boiling water, and cook for 10 minutes. Drain, toss in garlic oil and chopped parsley, and season with salt and pepper.

I’ve only been in Berlin for two weeks and we’ve already managed to do so much! In between sorting out the logistics of moving to a new country—including a rather exciting trip to the local government office for our Anmeldung oder Wohnung (or resident’s cards) and a rather not so exciting, lengthy trip to the customs post office to pick up the eight-50 pound boxes we shipped from the US—we’ve also made time for Christmas markets, shopping trips, and plenty of delicious German food. We’ve already had some wonderful guests and an American Thanksgiving with my sister and friends during their visit to Berlin last week. A German bank account, cell phones, language classes, and our visas are all also in the works. Whoo-hoo!

But in between all that, I’ve had a few moments of panic. It was wonderful celebrating the holiday last week with good friends, but I felt slightly guilty when I didn’t check everything off my to-do list. Although I planned to arrive in Berlin and first spend time in language school, I’ve wondered if instead I should be working to establish myself as a writer here. But these moments of hesitation pass, as I remember that the time has been short, and the longer we are here, the more comfortable we’ll become.

Just as acidity is important in balancing flavor, a little piece of mind can go a long way in balancing the moments when life has been turned upside down. I am trying to keep that idea of balance in mind, especially when I want everything to fall in place so quickly. Balance of my proposed goals and what is actually achievable in a day’s time. Balance between the things we need to do to get settled here and the things we want to do. Balance between my expectations and realities. It’s incredibly exciting to have found ourselves newly minted expats but without a healthy dose of balance, it doesn’t feel quite real.

Lemon juice is my go to seasoning element to add balance—a bright little kick of acid can really help even out a rich dish—and just imaging bright yellow lemons puts a smile on my face. There’s something about citrus—soothing under your eyes, fresh in your water, clean as a fragrance—that offers a balancing thought as well as balance in cuisine. And it isn’t just a subconscious effect; on top of its culinary prowess, lemon juice offers a number of health benefits and actually helps balance our body’s natural pH.  As we head into my third weekend in Berlin with plenty of plans, I’m thinking all about the balance in my life and how to keep my mental scale healthy and happy. A tall glass of cold water, with a nice slice of lemon is the way I think I’ll start.

Even though I find myself in Germany days before the most American of holidays, we’re still planning to cook a Thanksgiving meal this week. And thankfully my sister just happens to be in town, along with some of her best friends from New York, so we have some great company to celebrate with! Although I’m going to try and find a turkey to roast for TH, I’m also planning on including a few German recipes in the menu.

One dish that I’ve made for some of our best Thanksgiving meals is German red cabbage. It’s something that I’ve been eating, either out in German restaurants alongside a nice plate of bratwurst and potatoes, or this home version, since I was a child. A good dose of tangy apple cider vinegar mixes with brown sugar to create a tart, slightly sweet flavor, helping to cut through rich meat preparations (making it an excellent addition to the Thanksgiving table). And it’s simply made, just chop up onion, apple, and cabbage and let the dish cook while focusing on the more intricate elements of the meal.

German Red Cabbage
Servings: 4 quarts
2 tablespoons bacon fat
1 medium onion, skin removed and thinly sliced
2 medium red apples, cores removed and thinly sliced
1 medium head red cabbage
¼ cup brown sugar
¼ cup apple cider vinegar
¼ cup water
1¼ teaspoons salt

In a medium-sized, heavy-bottom pot, heat the bacon fat over medium heat. Add the onion and apple and cook 5 minutes until it just starts to sweat. Add the red cabbage, cover with sugar, vinegar, water, and salt, and cover. Reduce heat to low and cook for 45 minutes, stirring occasionally, until cabbage is soft.