Project

I thought I could give it a number, this project, but what? Where did I start and were there other numbers? Or give it a name?  OK, let's give it a name: New Step Stool. But maybe it's confusing because there were lots of stools - for the little kids, for friends and neighbors, even for us.

Our favorite stools were the ones for the grands, mostly used to reach the sink in the bathroom.  Here's the one for Hayden. That was a great one, for sure - FSU colors, all the sports.

My kitchen stool is about the same height and when I was taller, that was enough to comfortably reach the pans hanging from the ceiling.  The motif was copied from a porcelain pitcher we bought on vacation on the Baltic Sea.  Fun cat!

But I got older and I got shorter.  A lot!! So now my stool is not high enough.  

Werner? Do you need a project?  

Of course he does. We looked at all kinds of stools on the internet. Some were really crude, some were really sophisticated, but we found one that was OK for us in terms of looks and skill level required and tools that one would need. We don't exactly have a fully-equipped workshop in our little house.

There was a piece of wood that had been in the attic when we moved in. Lord knows how old it is. Or what it is.  But it is dark and pretty.  So, steps.  Werner made drawings and took measurements and made an appointment with the home improvement store to buy the stuff he needed. (In these pandemic times, we still have to make appointments in most shops to go in and shop.)

Early frame work.

Positioning the steps.

First coat of paint.

And before you know it, it's done!

The steps are a lovely dark and the dowels that hold them in place are a nice contrast.  Stable!  High enough!  And a pleasing addition to our little house.  

Thanks Werner!

Spanikopita

otherwise known as spinach pie, Greek style.  If I didn't have such a wretched memory (or if I practiced using my memory) I would remember the name of the woman who was the mother of one of Lee's classmates at Maclay.  We were there, a group of four, to plan some fund-raising event, and she asked, How about a snack?  There were these little treats in the freezer; she popped them in the hot oven and we ate them and I was smitten.

Spinach, cheeses, egg, onion, herbs all wrapped up in butter (or olive oil) slathered phyllo.  Heavenly.

I got the recipe, I made it - a lot of times.  Everyone who's ever been served it loves it and I've shared the recipe so many times.

So, tonight. What's for dinner?  OMG, who knows, I am tired of cooking!!  But there's a bit of frozen spinach, a bit of leftover phyllo, assorted cheeses and such and who cares what the recipe says about this and that and the other.  Just put it together. 

It's pretty and it is oh so tasty, and who needs a recipe any more?

Spring, Sort of

Today is the first full day of spring. SPRING!!  Sunshine! Daffodils!  In the USofA, they have sprung forward with the clock.  Here in Germany, the "spring forward" will be on the last Sunday in March. 

So the calendar says spring, but it is still pretty cool.  Like freezing! My "spring" outfit today included a fleece pullover, a fleece shirt and a down-filled jacket, scarf, gloves, and rosy cheeks.

A few weeks ago it climbed to 60° for a couple of days and folks went wild.  But that was very short-lived and now we're back to "normal."

Patience.

We do have crocuses and the little early daffodils and snowdrops.  And of course, ramps (Bärlauch).

I am my mother's child. Offer me something for free and I'll likely take it. Foraging is a lot of fun and gets us out of the house.  Even when it's sooo cold!  So, off to the park and free food.

There are a few places nearby that are actually a bit hilly, and so it is by the river.  The trees are quite bare still, though some shrubs are starting to leaf out.  And all the green on the ground?  That's mostly Bärlauch.

It was poking up during the brief warm spell, so I thought it would be really big now, but I guess the cold kept it from growing very fast.  But it didn't take long to pick enough for several pots of pesto and soup and sauce for pasta.

Before heading back home, we took a bit more exercise and walked around the park.  Someone decorated LOL!

Gray with low clouds. It'll be a few more weeks before the sun will reliably shine.

We walked along the river and then through the woods and then back to the car while visions of hot chocolate danced in my head.

We unloaded our booty

and then drank our reward. 

New Veggie

Bremen is not a big town - around 600,000 or so - but we spend most of our time in our part of town, Vegesack, which has maybe 35,000 inhabitants. So we're small, but incredibly diverse, with folks from at least 50 countries in our area.  

We do most of our shopping for fresh veggies at the outdoor market, but there are some "specialty" shops that cater to these diverse populations, too.  I'd say they mostly fall into either African, eastern Mediterranean or Arabic categories.  Nearby there's a shop run by a Lebanese family, and we go there pretty often.

So this week, there was Malve, mallow. What?  I know it as a garden flower (you know, Marsh Mallow!)

I often have it in our little space in the summer.  It's easy to grow, undemanding, makes lots of pretty flowers.  But eat it?

Well, you can, but the eating variety has more modest blossoms and a different leaf.

I knew none of this when I saw the bunches of mallow at the shop, so I asked the guy at the counter how to fix it up.  I was not at all surprised when he told me had absolutely no idea! He said they'd bought it for their Syrian customers who seemed to like it. Well, we know some Syrians (and then there is the interwebs), so I bought it.  For €1.50 it was a modest risk.

Our dear Eilaf said, We love it!  Sauté it, add some onion, salt and pepper, that's enough!  The interwebs had lots of other suggestions with either chicken or lamb, with lots of interesting spices - cinnamon, coriander, bay leaf, garlic - so we considered it all and modified.  We roasted our bit of chicken with all the spices, sautéed the greens with onion and a big bunch of cilantro (fresh coriander), The side was Lebanese rice (spaghetti or linguine cooked till brown in oil then boiled with the rice with a good teaspoon of ground coriander).

We eat like royalty, as Werner has often said. He's right. The greens were deeply green in color and taste, slightly bitter with a hint of sweet, somewhere between turnip greens and spinach and oh so tasty. Are we surprised that this veggie is packed with all kinds of wonderful vitamins and minerals? Not at all.

Next time I see malve at the shop, I'll buy it.  

Pfannkuchen...

...translated literally is pancake.  We like pancakes and have all kinds around here - American (fluffy and light), French crêpes (flat and tasty or savory), and German (heavy on the eggs and dense). Yesterday I made a Tarte Tatin since we had a guest for tea, and there were a couple of leftover already peeled apples, so a larger variety in-the-oven German pancake sounded about right.

Search Pfannkuchen-Apfel-Ofen and the first thing up is a recipe from Aldi.  Why not?  It was pretty straight forward and certainly was a heavy-on-the-eggs variety - four eggs!  And the recipe said one serving, but I found that  a bit misleading.  What it really meant was a huge pancake that filled one pan and served at least 6.

Frankly, it looked a lot more like cake than pancake, but it tasted a lot more like pancake.  It finished baking while we did a little workout, and then enjoyed our treat.  I don't think I'll need to put together anything for Kaffee und Kuchen this afternoon....

 

Baby Quilt

Quilting is still a rather new thing for me. Both of my grandmothers quilted out of necessity. Lee and Michelle now have quilts that my maternal grandmother made completely by hand.  No one is going to put them in a museum, but they are a bit of family history where there is little tangible history to give to the following generations in my family.

 

I have made one quilt for myself. (I'll use the present perfect so I can imagine that I haven't made the last quilt for myself) I bought the fabric when Hunter was an infant and it took a few years before it was done.  And of course there was the quilt for Hannah on her high school graduation.  Well, maybe I have done a bit of quilting.

Anyway, here in the latest.  Peggy will have a grandchild very soon and the babe should have a gift and anything homemade is welcome. So, here it is.  A scrappy quilt.  Little pieces left over from this and that. It's colorful and playful and personal.  I am quite sure that Felina will love using it for her new baby.

One of the most wonderful things in the world is to touch (and smell) a new baby.  I hope I will be able to do that before too very long, but I think, sadly, it will be a while.  Oh, Corona!

2021

We all love beginnings, but I wonder if we all love them a bit more this year.  Good riddance to 2020 and so many hopes pinned on 2021. Here's to a better year for us all.

Our year started like many in the last few years, and it brings a bit of comfort -- a walk in Meyenburg, a small village nearby.  We can walk thorough bit s of the town and the farmland, enjoy the cobbled streets and the  muddy paths.  On New Year's Day, there are always lots of folks walking and they all say "Moin"  or "Frohes Neues" and there are lots of smiles.  Oh, newness!

It was a bit wet and a bit gray and a bit warm. There have been years with snow and/or sunshine, but not this year.  Kind of middling - mostly dry, a bit of rain at the end, not warm but not really cold, mostly gray with hints of blue.

For me, it was the first long foray on foot after weeks of literally lying around helping my eye heal.  We took it slow and easy.

Things don't change much.  The mill still runs, the ducks still swim and quack. In this year of so much upheaval, that was particularly nice to see.

And at the end, we even got a bit of a sunset!  

Keep in mind, it was 4:00 in the afternoon.  But the days are getting longer, my eye is getting better, the vaccines are coming, and there's hope on the horizon.  

Here's to New.  

Because of the surgeries on my eye, I have not been on my bike since late October.  It is going to be a slog to get back into shape for the spring, but I will!  It's such a great way to be out and to move without feeling like you're working at it.  There's so much to see from a bike!

But I learned here that bikes are not just recreation, they are transportation, and it seems the pandemic has created an epidemic of bike building - bikes for transport!

There are so many bike shops here who build bikes for their customers.  Of course, you can get them at the supermarket, too, but that's not for folks who are serious about their bikes.  It seems that during this last year, the "Lastrad" or transport bike has seen a real boom!  You can carry a small refrigerator in on the bike or three kids!  

There are lots more cars than places to park them and bikes are often quicker and less stressful to use, not to mention healthier. We're a pretty "green" city, though there are others that are greener, but they estimate there are 2-3,000 of these bikes right now in Bremen.  Wow.  

IF I had little kids and IF I were younger, I'd consider that.  But I think I'll keep with my regular old bike.  

I just want to ride again.

Operational Changes

 Wow.  Weeks and weeks without an update. There have been lots of reasons.

Number One has to be corona.  It's been going on for months of course, but in the last few, the cocooning has been more intense.  We go nowhere except to market to market.  We so very rarely meet friends in person.  We do walk, though most often it is from home:  through the cemetery, around the small garden plots, down to the Manor House at Schönebeck, back home.

And my eye.  Oh, the eye.  It broke, the retina.  Imagine a stack of plates.  

Now imagine that in the middle the lines don't stay straight, but they make a sort of step and in the middle of the step, the image just goes away.  Weird, huh?  So, I called the doc who's been following this problem for a while and he said, Well, now it's time for the surgery.  

So surgery, scheduled and then delayed because of a cold (and who knows if it is a cold these days?) and then a couple of weeks of looking at your toes all the time and then finding out the surgery didn't work and then doing the surgery again, but different.  

Between the two surgeries, we did have a chance to take some walks, get outside, stretch our legs, breathe the fresh air.

Now it is mostly on the sofa or in the bed, 18-20 hours a day lying on my side, reading the news, listening to podcasts and books, randomly reading. 

I'm willing to do whatever to be sure I can see as well as possible for the rest of my time here on this earth.  Because I want to stitch and sew and do things with my hands.  I miss that a lot.

Here's to good eye health and healing. 

The Quiet before the Quiet

Starting tomorrow, we go into Lock Down Lite.  Schools and shops will be open, but museums, gyms, theaters, will all be closed for at least the next four weeks to try and bring COVID back under control till we find a vaccine or some other thing that keeps the monster in check. We've long given up our gym membership. Restaurant eating is out of the question. So it was really important to get out today and see a bit of the world, or what we could cover in a couple of hours on our bikes.

And the day started off so well!  Bright sunshine!  Blue skies!  But it didn't last and by the time we'd finished our usual late Sunday morning brunch, cleaned up and got organized, the sun was in hiding and the skies were gray.  Oh, well.  You can't let gray skies stop you. (And I'm still weighing getting up at 7am to enjoy a bit of sunshine vs. getting a bit more sleep.  Sleep usually wins.)

We put tea in the thermos, packed some of the apple cake I made yesterday, and headed to the Overbeck Museum. Current exhibit:  Benjamin Beßlick:  Cloud Show. There were several rooms of clouds, drawn in graphite on transparent paper.  At first it looked boring, colorless drawings hanging on neutral-colored walls, but it quickly became calming.

Next to many of the drawings was a quote from a contemporary German poet, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, from his collection A History of Clouds.  Here's a sample:

Their wanderings high up
are quiet and unexorable.
Nothing bothers them.
Probably they believe
in resurrection, thoughtlessly,
happy like me,
lying on my back and
watching them for a while.            (translated by Esther Kinsky)

Well, I am not sure I fully agree with the poet's assessment, but there were some interesting juxtapositions and my brain can always use a bit of jogging.

In the next room, they'd put together paintings and drawings from the Overbecks, both Otto and Hermine, that had clouds as a prominent element.  We're quite familiar with their work, but this was an interesting contrast, too.

I have to say, I prefer the oil/colored representations of the clouds, but ... if I want calm, I'd have to choose Beßlick.  Is that what I need now?

Boy, art makes us hungry!  Jump on the bikes and head to the park and find a bench and break out the tea and cake!  (I hope I did not imply that we'd be actually biking for hours, just OUT and WITH bikes for a couple of hours.)

Knoops Park is just around the corner and we frequently bike through the park going from A to B or here to there, but far less often stop or wander.  But today, a stop on a bench and a nice look at the sky.

I think the artist would be challenged to highlight the contrast in the sky today.  Really, it is still pretty uniformly gray.  The view is pleasant, but no way are we lying on our backs and pondering the clouds.  It's way to wet on the ground for starters and not quite warm enough to be lolling.  But the tea is hot and the apple cake is just as good as it was yesterday. That's enough.

Our foray to the park wasn't random. or just a transition point.  There's some newly installed art there as well: steel sculptures.  Modern.  Stark.  Not sure what I think.

 I like the contrast of nature/not nature.  The sculptures are not stabiles á la Calder, but almost, since there may be only one point that melds one piece to another.  And WHAT is under the ground that keeps them upright!!?? These are v e r y heavy pieces. They almost remind me of trees, they almost remind me of  natural shapes, but not quite.  Nevertheless, I don't find them jarring.   

Even though the sky was pretty uniformly gray, you can see there's some nice color around.  We'll enjoy it while we can. By the time I get out again, the remaining colors will all be gone.

75 - and counting

Birthdays come and birthdays go and some are a bit more than others.  75.  Well, that's something.

This year, it's not much in terms of celebration.  First of course is Corona - can't get too many folks together.  And second - last week Werner got at cold, then I got a cold, then he had to be tested and so we couldn't be around anybody, so it was just us two.  

So we made a party for two.

It starts with breakfast. We do like to set the table. We'd decided on pancakes, and though Werner offered to do the cooking, pancakes are really my thing.

There was a little bit of a champagne candle left from some trip to the US, so we lit it. Cute. What's a birthday without a candle?

It was good.  Some leftovers of syrup and blueberries and the pancakes. 

There were phone calls during the day and it's always so nice to have a little conversation and get congratulations from family and friends. The standard German greetings include "best wishes for the coming year" because of course they want to wish the same for you next year, and the year after, and so on and on. That way you never go away. 

And to do that, we need a nap. 

And then a walk.  The weather was off-and-on but while we were out it was crispy sunny and bright.

And if it's birthday, it's cake.  Since we were supposed to have been in the Schwarzwald, we chose Schwarzwälderkirschtorte (Black Forrest Cherry Cake) and some cheesecake, and we shared, half and half.

And then more food.   Since a restaurant was out of the question, what with colds and Corona, we opted for home and seared venison filet, roasted carrots and Spätzle.  Can I say it was excellent? I am quite sure we'd not have had anything better out. 

So here's to me and here's to us and a lovely, though very quiet three-quarter century celebration. 

Next year maybe a party with everybody we know!!

Plum Tart

 There are these plums, Zwetschen, that ripen in late summer.  They're like prune plums, and they don't keep, so it you want to do something with these beauties, you have about four weeks.

I've already made two or three cakes, stewed some, eaten more than some just out of my hand. But I'd not yet done a tart, and I do love a tart.

Wouldn't you know it, the NYTimes featured a plum tart recipe that was simple and straightforward - pastry, plums, a bit of sugar and cinnamon.  Looked good on their page.

So I did it, but I noticed from the beginning that the plums were not the best - a bit too big, a bit dry, a bit bland, but I hoped the baking would intensify the flavor.

What a pitiful pie. This has to be the worst tart I have ever baked, both in flavor and looks!  Look at this thing!  The plums just seemed to shrivel up, they hardly made juice, and frankly, they didn't taste a whole lot better than when they were raw.  

Werner did some rescue work - took out the plums, mixed them with some stewed ones, broke up the pastry and put it in a separate container.  Later, we spooned the mixture over the broken pastry (really, butter cookies) and it was passable.  I'm going to try and keep the taste memory of the cake in my head until the plums come back again.