Using Cloth Diapers

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When I was pregnant, I was determined to use cotton diapers at home. I couldn’t really tell you why I wanted to go cloth, but I think it had a lot to do with my growing environmental consciousness at the time.

I wasn’t a complete tree hugger though. I compromised a bit by using disposables when we went out and at bedtime, and made sure that they were the eco-friendly sort in which 60 percent of it fully decomposed. A pack of 30 diapers were on average 2 euros more expensive than the non-biodegradable sort, but because they eased my guilty conscience, they were worth it.

I bought a used set of 10 cotton diapers, and bought about 12 more. Diaper liners made solid waste disposal easy. Since they were biodegradable and flushable, they were easy to dispose in the toilet. A kitchen towel folded in half would do in a pinch, as I discovered during a trip to the US.  Soiled diapers went immediately in an IKEA Garbage can, and I had enough diapers that I only did diaper laundry once a week. I soaked them in wash soda overnight in the can, wrung them out, flushed the water into the toilet, and washed with soap nuts.

Since safetey pins scared me, I used a Snappi Diaper Fastener. What was problematic for me was finding the right waterproof diaper covers. Those made in the Philippines were not sturdy enough to withstand the tougher laundry cycles of German washing machines. Fuzzibunz were great, but expensive. I would definitely invest in similar covers and inserts if I ever have a second kid.

I was surprised at myself for being so adamant about it, and actually following through before my son expressed to me at his seventh month that he did not want to wear cloth diapers by pointedly removing them every time I put them on him. He was fully potty trained by the time he was 2 and a half, and was dry during the nights two months after that. His early (for Western standards) potty training could have resulted from a combination of the cloth diapering and the reward/motivation-based system that I used, as was suggested to me by a friend’s mom.

Reflecting on my parenting style, I’ve discovered that my grandmothers had a huge influence on my mothering. Both my grandmothers were ahead of their time since I never called them Grandma, but “Mommy” on my mother’s side, and “Nanay” on my father’s side. Both grew up in the provinces during the war, both experienced poverty and hardship.

It was no surprise to me to discover that my paternal grandmother thought nothing of nursing a baby openly in a jeepneý, after reprimanding my cousin for using a nursing cover-up. She is a very natural, maternal sort, and no-nonsense. She is a very neat person, and hates it when things go to waste.

My maternal grandmother was very much into herbs and fruits and nature. She had a green thumb, and we always had fruit trees in our yard. She also liked to cook, and had a taste for the finer things in life, and learned how to make fantastic meals from simple ingredients from her.

Although I started using disposables exclusively by his 8th month, it didn’t mean that his cloth diapers were no longer used. They made for excellent burp cloths, emergency blankets, sun shade, picnic blanket. They don’t get much milage from me now, and I am still reluctant to re-purpose them as rags. Who knows? I might need them again in a year or two.

Easy Pasta and Pear Salad

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Living in a household where half of the one-and-a-half would have noodles with tomato sauce every day if he had his way means that I have to deal with a lot of leftover pasta. Thankfully, unlike rice and potatoes, you don’t need to re-heat or cook pasta to make it palatable.

I have always had good results using Nigella Lawson’s Mortadella Pasta Salad, but I didn’t have any Mortadella. Scrounging up stuff in the kitchen, I was able to whip up something just as good based on Nigella’s recipe, using leftovers and the Italian parsley growing on my balcony.

For a single serving, use 150 g cold, leftover fusilli pasta.

The dressing: 2 Tablespoons good-quality extra-virgin olive oil for salads, 1/4 teaspoon Himalayan salt or Maddon salt (if using sea salt or table salt, add more. I agree now that sea salt just isn’t as salty),  1/2 teaspoon of Dijon mustard (I confess, however, that I always have Gaumenfreude’s wild garlic infused mustard in stock. I swear by their stuff. Buy local!), a spritz of lemon.

To fill your pasta,  cut a slice of ham into squares, half a pear, diced into chunks, 2 tablespoons of Parmesan cheese flakes (easily done with a potato peeler), 1/2 Tablespoon finely chopped parsley, either the curly or flat Italian variety, and pepper to taste.

Mix the ingredients of the dressing in a bowl, and scramble it with a fork. Add the noodles and all of the ingredients, then toss. Adjust the taste with salt and pepper according to your liking.

It is the perfect light lunch. The saltiness of the salad is balanced well by the sweetness of the pear, and rounded by the olive oil. Great for potluck parties. Guten Appetit!

Garden Worries

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weather

 

It’s 8 days before the official start of summer, and it’s so cold that I feel that it’s end of February. It’s snowing in the Alps! In May! This time last year I was eating my first strawberries!

I am used to the unpredictability of Germany’s climate, but this winter had been so long, I’m starting to ask myself is it really over?

My Tatsoi (pechay) is doing well. Last year’s experience and research showed that Tatsoi does well in temperate regions, and can be planted well into autumn. What I want to know is what this means for this year’s strawberry harvest. But I guess this means that the strawberry fields will not be open to the public this year.

Copper Pot

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Is it wrong to feel disappointed at such an expensive gift? I had my heart set on a Le Creuset pot, and had asked for one. Instead I was given a 12-Liter copper pot.

I know that copper’s conductive properties are legendary, and it sure looks pretty. But we are a household of 1 1/2, and the other half, if he had his way, would eat spaghetti with tomato sauce every day. And copper’s heat-retaining properties are most in properly utilized if I cooked on gas. I use an electric stove.

Thanks to Sarah, I don’t feel so disappointed anymore, however the dilemma is what to cook in it? Please remember that copper is a reactive metal, so nothing with apples, tomatoes, or anything remotely acidic.

My Japanese Week-end

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Miso soup, Agedashi Tofu with radiccio & white raddish, and sushi rice with Salmon sashimi

I just love, love Japanese food! I’ve been a Japanophile since my cosplaying days, when my obsession with anime pulled me out of a funk (aka as depression) during my early 20s.

I would not really want to live in Japan, but it does seem like a nice place to visit, and I love its food! It’s so sad to realize that people only think of sushi when they think of Japanese food, but it is sooo much more than that! If I had a million dollars, I would go to Japan and eat at Jiro’s restaurant from the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi, the only 3-star Michelin sushi restaurant in the world. Eating 12 pieces of sushi for 300 euros isn’t exactly a bang for your buck deal, but it’s about the experience, baby! Then try everything my hosts would put in front of me.

I’ve been cooking Japanese for some time now, but when the urge really hits me, I always cook a four-course meal for me and a few other people and put up a Japanese-themed night.

Thursday last week. I was determined to cook Japanese since I’ve been jonesing for Tempura a few weeks now. That Japanese restaurants in Erfurt don’t serve Tempura even that one owned and operated by a Japanese person, boggles the mind.

One of the people invited was a friend who had spent two years in Japan working as an English teacher. I was so interested to watch her and hear how Japanese food is cooked and eaten in Japan.

We had: Miso soup, salad made with julienned zucchini, smoked salmon bits, red caviar and mayo, Zucchini and Mango Sushi, Agedashi Tofu, Salmon Teriyaki, Shrimp and Eggplant tempura, Sushi Rice, and white wine to facilitate girl talk.

On Mother’s day, my friend and I went to EGA Park, where they were having Japanese Appreciation Day. Tea ceremonies, Taiko Drums, Bonsai plants, a Tokyo Shock Boys-type show, and geisha-inspired make-up made up for the weather, which couldn’t make up its mind whether it wanted to rain. The free banana chocolate sushi roll was not so bad, either. Germans trying to be Japanese is a funny thing to behold.

With that, Japanese week-end was over. It certainly won’t be the last!

Sauce Hollandaise ala Julia Child

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I have tried many sauce hollandaise recipes, but Julia Child’s is the only one that gets me the same results and the same consistency every single time. I tell you, go grab her cookbook. The damned thing is foolproof, I tell you.

You would need:

A 225 or 250 g block of butter, the yolks of 3 eggs, salt and white pepper (preferably freshly ground), 1 Tbsp. cold water, 1 Tbsp. lemon juice. A wire whisk. If you are doing this for the first time, I recommend a tub (palanggana) of cold water big enough for your saucepan to fit into be on standby.

Slice the butter into 1/4-3/4, or into 50 g/200 g halves. Set aside the 50 g butter, and cut the 200 g butter into smaller squares. Melt them over low heat either in a cup in the microwave or in a saucepan. Set this aside. Separate the eggs. You can freeze the whites for later use.

In the inner saucepan of a bain marie or a small saucepan, beat the egg yolks until they become thick and sticky. Add the water, lemon juice, and salt, then beat about 30 seconds more.

Cut a square from the 1/4 part of the cold butter, about a tablespoon of butter. Place it in the yolk mixture. Place the saucepan over very low heat (in bain marie: over barely simmering water, 75°-80° C). whisk the egg yolks until it turns into a cream. At the slightest sign that the yolks are starting to curdle, immerse the bottom of the pan in the tub of cold water, mixing the whole time, and re-place over heat once the pan is cold enough. If the mixture is thick enough that you can see the bottom of the pan between whisks, and sticks to the wires of the whisk, then remove from the heat and place another tablespoon of the cold butter in the yolk mix to halt the cooking process.

Using a spoon, ladle the melted butter into the sauce with your left hand, slowly letting it trickle into the mixture.(DO NOT dump it in by the tablespoon! You need to coax the yolks to absorb the oil!) Simultaneously whisk the sauce with your right hand. When the sauce thickens into a heavy cream, you can pour in the butter a bit more rapidly. Do not add the buttermilk at the bottom. Season with salt and pepper to your taste. I like adding cayenne pepper in my sauce to give it an extra kick, and use the buttermilk the next day in my pancake batter.

The sauce is so thick it seems like mayo. This can only serve 3 people, so you can extend it with stiff-beaten egg whites, the water from the boiled asparagus, and garnished with tarragon or chervil.

Spargelzeit!

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Another reason why I love spring is because of asparagus season. Asparagus is sold in Germany is from end of April until beginning of June, and stands selling them pop up everywhere, next to the stands selling strawberries.

They are white because the Germans like their asparagus like that.They grow underground, in a raised bed so they never see sunlight, and thus do not develop chlorophyll. The downside is that white asparagus has to be peeled because they develop a tough outer skin. They are so ubiquitous that Germans think white asparagus is “normal”!

I don’t mind the funky-smelling afterpee because I can’t get enough of the stuff. Boiled in salted water, paired with ham, boiled salted potatoes and sauce hollandaise, it is something that makes me look forward to springtime.

I always make sauce hollandaise myself. The sauce makes the meal very calorie and fat-intense, thank goodness I only have one season to indulge. This meal, coupled with the seasons first strawberries, really announces that spring has indeed sprung.

Dandelion Salad

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Now that spring has sprung, dandelions and daisies are making a wonderful comeback! Did you know that they are edible? Neither did I until I read the Hunger Games. In the book, Katniss the protagonist was on the verge of starvation when she saw a dandelion which gave her back the confidence to care for her family by scavenging for edible wild herbs and vegetables and by hunting. She made dandelion salad that day.

This piqued my interest and decided to try it out by picking a few dandelions from our backyard. Î fried some bacon bits, added some home-made croutons, blanched the dandelions shortly in hot water to get the bitterness out, dressed it in olive oil, pepper, and salt.

It was very pretty to look at, as you could see from the photo. But how did it taste like?. Uhmm…let’s say it was an interesting experience. Blanching didn’t completely remove the bitterness, and I was only able to counteract it by chewing the salad with bacon bits. The leaves are really tough. And I swear it stayed in the pit of my stomach for a day. Oh, and did you know that dandelion is also a diuretic?

My conclusion is:  I think that dandelion leaves are better suited for cooking than for a salad.  Why bother with dandelion salad when rocket (aka rucola) also grows wild in Germany? Katniss  must have been really desperate to have eaten dandelion salad.

Easy-Peasy Leche Flan

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Now that asparagus season is coming up, which means that I whip up a batch of Sauce Hollandaise every time I make them, also means that I have to be creative with what to do with egg parts that are left behind.

Egg whites are not a problem. They can be frozen or chilled, and are in fact all the better for it, since cold egg whites are faster to whip than those in room temp.

But what to do with egg yolks? You can turn them in to flan, known in the Philippines as Leche Flan, which was introduced to the Philippines by the Sapnish by way of Mexico. Filipino flan uses only egg yolks. As a child, I was fascinated at the ceremony of making this dish. Making the caramel, straining the egg yolks, rubbing dayap (lime) rind, then steaming them seemed so complicated, I never thought that I’d get them right. And duck eggs! Purists always argue that duck eggs make the best flan. It is rich enough to give you a coronary.

Nigella Lawson’s Nigella Express saved me from all that trouble by giving me a flan recipe that is so easy, preparation time is 10 minutes, excluding the 45 minute cooking time.

zuckerrubensirupAnother time-saving product for me is Zuckerrübensirup, or syrup made out of sugar beets, also available in Australia as golden syrup. This saves me from making the caramel top of the flan, which I keep on burning anyway!

The recipe comes from Nigella Lawson, and instead of a traditional llanera, I use a round aluminum cake pan 8 inches in diameter. The recipe below is enough to fill the pan.

 

The flan requires: 1 340 g can evaporated milk (known in Germany, strangely enough, as Kondensmilch. I use one with 10% fat, which is the fat content of evap milk in the Philippines), 1 397g can of sweetened condensed milk, 3 eggs, and 2 teaspoons vanilla extract.

Put enough of the golden syrup to completely line the bottom of the cake form. Add all of the ingredients of the flan in a bowl and whisk until well incorporated. Pour into cake tin.

Now there are two ways to cook the flan, both of them involve steaming. In Nigella’s recipe,  the cake tin should be placed in a bigger pan filled with freshly-boiled water, then place in a pre-heated oven, baking it in 170°C for 45 minutes.

I’m lazy by nature. I figured out that my cake tin fits snugly in my biggest cooking pot. Even if I have a double boiler, I have never used it for the recipe. I just half-fill the pot with water, place the cake form over it, then cover the form with the pot’s lid. Forty-five minutes later, I have flan! Always test the readiness of the flan by inserting a toothpick in it. If it comes out clean, then you know it’s done.

This flan is always a welcome pot-luck gift at Filipino parties. So every time I am invited to one, I always bring flan. Who has to know that it  also has egg whites in it?