Oh, those Germans

The SO and I just returned from our vacation to Europe, and we're currently unpacking our overstuffed suitcases. Seriously, we brought back a lot of stuff (we were within a kilogram or so of our weight limit for the flight), and a lot of that was stuff from the grocery store -- tomato paste in a tube (great invention!), cans of vegan mushroom pate, ridiculously cheap and tasty fizzy vitamin tablets, German christmas cookies, etc. My SO understandably misses a lot of food items that you can't get in North America, and even though I've never lived in Germany there are already some things that I'm pretty addicted to as well.

While I love browsing through German grocery store for new things to try, I also like going for the amusement factor. There's some wacky stuff in there. Exhibit one: jars of pickled white asparagus. I don't know quite why I find this so weird, but I really do. Every time I see this stuff, it still strikes me as Star Trek alien food and I wonder why it is that someone would actually want to buy/eat this. Pickled albino alien tentacles!

Another thing that I find amusing about German grocery stores is that they have a lot of beverages that you wouldn't find in North America, and a lot of drinks in general. We went to one "drink store," which was an entire store for juices, water and beer. Some of them are familiar -- I find tomato juice quite tasty, and I'd be willing to try vegetable juice and beet juice, but sauerkraut juice? Who buys that?

Here's the water section of the drink store. Yep, that whole big warehouse space is entirely devoted to different kinds of water! There are several dozen different brands of water here, from different springs and with different degrees of fizziness.

I'm a big fan of fizzy water, but even I can't imagine a need for this many different kinds of fizzy water. The SO suggested that we have a water tasting, and we picked five different brands to try. The green bottle is a "medicinal" water that is supposed to help with digestion and comes with instructions on recommended usage. They do all taste different, but not in any strongly identifiable way. I thought that I'd be able to pick out the ones with high sulfur contents, for example, but they don't really taste like sulfur.

Finally, it's funny but a little horrifying to see what other countries think of your own food culture. It happened to be "American week" at one of the grocery stores that we were at, and the special foods section was stocked with products like these:

I'm guessing the "hamburger sauce" is some sort of blend of ketchup and mayo? Every single "American Way" product was pretty terrifying, and I'm sure that at least some Germans are just as weirded out by those marshmallows as I am at pickled asparagus.

Fun with kitchen gadgets

I look like I'm having fun, don't I ? And I was having even more fun eating the delicious noodles that came out of this funky looking contraption that my SO brought back with him from Germany. In case you haven't guessed, this is a spaetzle maker. When my SO lived in Berlin there was this delicious spaetzle place right down the street from his apartment where you could get these noodles with cheese and onions, sort of like a German mac and cheese. As soon as I was confident that I could pronounce "kaese" and "spaetzle" well enough to be understood, I went to that shop as many times as I could without risking total cheese overload. For around 4 euros, you could get a tiny salad and a giant plate of fresh, cheesy noodles covered in sauteed onions. Delish.

I wasn't at all confident that we'd be able to reproduce that noodle goodness here at home, because spaetzle making seems to be something that there's a lot of lore and mysticism about -- no one will tell you how much water to add to the recipe, for example, so you just have to guess at when you've made the dough thin enough that you can actually get it through the press but not so runny that you just end up with sad little disintegrating blobs on the other side. Somehow, magically, we managed to produce noodles on the first try. It was fantastic watching those long strings of dough hit the water and become delicious lumpy noodles! I had fresh ones for dinner with some cheese, onions and mushrooms on top (my SO tells me that my addition of mushrooms is decidedly NOT Swabian. Whatever, it was really tasty). The next day I made the leftovers with more onions and cheese in a pan so that the noodles got a little crispy and the cheese got nice and melty.

In addition to how surprisingly easy this was to make, I was also surprised at how not nutritionally terrifying the recipe was, for the dough at least. I thought I was going to discover that I'd actually been eating four eggs in a serving with a little pinch of flour to bind them together. For this batch I only used two eggs and a cup of flour, which sounds pretty reasonable to me for two meals (at least until you start dumping loads of cheese and onions in, but so be it. I'm no stranger to loads of cheese and onions). Do you think the Germans just like to keep us thinking that this stuff is terrible for you and impossible to make anyway so that they can have all the noodles themselves? Your secret is out, Germans!