[Before I get to the beets.. Still in the midst of getting the coding for the not-so-public stuff in order, it's taking longer than I thought. In the shuffling for some archived code, I found a vector I had worked on a year ago and figured it was now or never. It's been bouncing on the header left and right for the last hour but I think it will stay put. If you don't see it, it's embedded in some java.]

This post and hopefully posts to come will document an earnest effort to liberate my eating habits. I will always have a place in my belly for Hamburger Helper, Stoffer’s and Chef Boyardee and their paper weight meals. A part of me still holds on to the wishful thinking that such garbage food isn’t all that bad. We live, don’t we? We save time, don’t we? We save money, don’t we?

Well, I’m not so sure these days and this is why I’ve got red beets in my kitchen.

So beets. so random, you say. Never once did I pay attention to them. They were never in our refrigerator and a canned beet was suspect. I wonder what my dad thinks of them. He always has some strange and intriguing explanation for waging the blech-food finger. My favorite: “Cilantro tastes like dish water!” he’d proclaim. The only beet I saw for a long time was at a Pizza Hut salad bar, cold and previously canned, it would stain my sunflower seed covered, cottage cheese a brilliant pink.

Tom Robbins wrote that the beet is a serious vegetable. I haven’t finished the book yet but I already disagree. After watching A’s 3 year old nephew paint himself a wide clown smile with a plateful of beets, it’s clear the beet is laughably simple and sweet.

1 kilogram of organic beets costs 1.88€. Trim the ends and put them in boiling water with a little bit of vinegar to preserve the color. Cooking them whole will preserve the flavor but large ones will take about 1 hour to cook in a traditional pot. I used a pressure cooker for 20 minutes on the highest ring setting and they came out fabulous. Afterwards I put the beets in a bowl of cold water, while I rubbed the skin off with my fingers. It comes off easily and I didn’t notice any finger staining during the process.

There is tons of information on the health benefits of red beets brimming on the net but now that I have these health gems, what to do with them? Besides boil them and tossing them onto a salad, I’m starving for better beet eating ideas. Any suggestions?

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Last week we headed back to Vinschgau for more mountain biking adventures. We managed to work up an appetite and the above photo collage provides a few highlights. We tried to be better prepared and bought the regional food guide, Genießen in Südtirol: Gastronomieführer Vinschgau. It helped a bit especially for discovering the hidden Biergarten nestled in the woods in Latsch and scoring a sweet bowl of fresh picked strawberries in Martell.

The opening hours of most restaurants are a lot of times hit and miss for crazies like us who spend hours pedaling up a mountain just for the thrill to speed downhill in 20 minutes. Often times we arrived in town around 3pm to discover kitchens were closed until dinner. Lunch sometimes included a heaping bowl of gelato. Since I’m not a big souvenir collector bought the cookbook, Südtiroler Leibgerichte by Hanna Perwanger, hopefully this Oma’s mad cooking skills will rub off on me.

And we so dined…

Gasthaus Krone
Jausenstation Bierkeller
Pension Gasthof Zufritt

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At our last Asian Cooking Olympics party. I made lumpia to represent my pacific islander side. Since our group consists of a large number of vegetarians I had to make a deviation to the typical fried variant and explore a meat-less version.

In the past I’ve used tofu or a vegetable meal to make the fried version but I’ve been disappointed every time with the result. It’s going to be vegetarian–it should be fresh. That’s when I discovered the Sariwa version. There isn’t an exact science to it. The filling can be what your heart desires. The critical thing to make it Filipino should be some use of patis and the wrappers should be authentic.

If you want fried lumpia then you can get away with using the store-bought Chinese wrappers but to eat them fresh you must use a Filipino lumpia wrapper. I can’t find them in any of the dozen Asian stores in Munich so I made them from scratch. Crazy, I know. But so worth it. I tried out several recipes, pouring the batter into the pan and all of them turned out to be too thick, pancake like–this is a no go.

The trick, surprisingly, is a paint brush. I image the numerous recipes on the web will do but the technique you have to really get down. Here’s the one I used and will use in the future:

This simple recipe makes about 28 pieces:

250 ml of flour
1 egg white
300 ml water

Mix all the ingredients until very smooth. You may have to adjust this mixture with more water after you experiment with it.

Heat a non-stick pan to about medium heat. BRUSH a light mixture onto the pan. A thinner mixture works best if you brush one layer quickly in varying brush strokes in sections at a time and then add a second coating. When the dough starts to come away from the pan, lift the wrapper out carefully and flip it over. Don’t over cook it or it will be too crispy. It will take a will of experimentation but you’ll find a method to works best.

TIP: The wrapper will NOT lift off the pan easily if the mixture is not fully cooked.

Adapted from Babyc at kitakitz

Food that sounds unpleasant when translated from German to English, case two:

Translation
Magenbrot, directly translates to, “Stomach bread”. When I asked the bubbly carni-man at the Oktoberfest what it was, he explained that Magenbrot is very ‘healthy’. I found this amusing considering we were standing among dangling sweets and all the goodies found in Candyland. He went on to say that the herbs used in Magenbrot are good for the stomach, he even motioned with his hand over his belly the soothing effect it must have.

What is it?
English speakers would call it gingerbread. The herbs are a combination of cloves, cinnamon, star anise, and mace spice (the outside covering of a nutmeg seed). Magenbrot may be flavored with candied orange or lemon peel and hazelnut, sweeten with honey or sugar and cocoa powder gives it its dark color. Surprising there isn’t any extra fat added (except from milk). Think of Magenbrot as a deriviative to Lebkuchen. Similar to or may also go by: Honigkuchen, Pfefferkuchen, Gewürzkuchen, or Kräuterbrot.*

My thoughts
Could it be sweetbread? No. Does it have a casing? No. Leave it to German speakers to be so literal. Why not call it Bauchbrot (belly bread), then I could have avoided the internal organ imagery. Magenbrot is actually edible, who knew? I would eat more if it had sentimental value. It’s softer than I imagined, thick gingerbread bites with a sweet glaze. I can attest that it is perfect for settling your stomach after a few mugs of Glühwein. After a few pieces you can go back to drinking and not feeling your cold feet. Although Magenbrot after the second piece, is far too sweet for me, still, as they say, ’tis the season.

Where to get Magenbrot
Some Supermarkets stock up with Lebkuchen products in October. I’ve seen bags of Magenbrot at the Oktoberfest and you’ll hit the money pot at Advent/Christmas time. The Christmas markets are just lines of kitsch stands without Magenbrot and Lebkuchen. They sell in bags of 200g and 500 g, the 200 g bag sells for 2 Euro at Christkindmarkt in Munich. There are recipes galore (in German) on the internet. They probably taste better too!

What do you think of Magenbrot?

*Even better, Magenbrot is also a punk rock band from Hamburg

related posts: case one: LeberKäseSemmel

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