Cozy Living

Japanese Okonomiyaki in Germany

Eleven years ago, I moved to Germany to find a little adventure, learn a new language, and generally escape my burnt-out college days. I lived in a beautiful little college town with old German architecture, and it brought me just the life I needed at the time. My best friend in Germany was another exchange student, originally from Japan. She and I kept each other company and traveled together, but my very best memories of my dear Naoko-san are of us cooking together in the room she lived in on an old cobblestone village street. We ate okonomiyaki, a japanese cabbage pancake of sorts, and we laughed and talked about friends and family and God and Germany and hopes and dreams together. 

Today my CSA basket had a head of cabbage in it, and I immediately knew I wanted to make Naoko's okonomiyaki with it. My house is empty today, with the boys off at Grandma's for a day of fun and indulgence. On these quiet days, I like to work on my to-do list first thing in the morning so I can spend the rest of the day reading, journaling, praying, puttering and eating anything I want to anytime I want to.

Today that meant eating a nostalgic dinner at 4:30 while watching the food network. And everything else was silent. Aaahhh.

I know that eleven years has probably skewed my thinking about how a proper japanese girl makes okonomiyaki, but here's what I did today. If you search your favorite recipe site for okonomiyaki, there are tons of wonderful recipes which use a variety of vegetables along with bacon and other yummy things. I didn't have any bacon, but that's okay, because what I was really after tonight was the memory of Naoko-san's cozy room above Frau Buesse's home, of her fork pressing down the okonomiyaki as it cooked, of us laughing and drinking orange juice and eating Ja! brand cookies from Minimal. I'm sure there are other wonderful ways to make it, but this is how we made it back then and how I made it tonight.

Naoko-san's Okonomiyaki

1/2 head of shredded green cabbage

3 eggs, beaten

1 c. water

1 1/2-2 c. flour

soy sauce

vegetable oil for frying

salt and pepper

mayonnaise (yes, really. I hate mayo, but I have to have it with my okonomiyaki. try it.)

Heat the vegetable oil in a frying pan on medium high heat. Combine the eggs, water and enough flour to make it like pancake batter in a bowl. Add a tablespoon or so of soy sauce. Mix well. Add the cabbage and coat well. The batter should coat the cabbage completely.

Spoon the mixture into the hot oil like one large pancake (I suppose you could do several small ones.) Make sure to smash it down with a spatula so that it's not too thick. (flat enough that the inside batter cooks before the outside batter burns!) Sprinkle with salt and pepper. Flip. Finish cooking then enjoy with a dollop of mayonnaise and some more soy sauce.

Naoko and I changing trains when our train home from Paris broke, and atop a tower on Ruegen Island in northern Germany. (Yes, I'm naturally blonde. The auburn that is admired by so many (ha!) near and far is, sadly, only from a bottle.)

What food brings up a memory for you?

Two Ways Not to Make Caramel Apples

Beautiful, aren't they?  Gorgeous...and inedible.  Oh, yes, I now know not one, but two different ways not to make caramel apples.

This is my first autumn of trying to be a domestic-ish supermom in the food department.  We're eating seasonally, cooking more from scratch, making pumpkin cakes, baking bread, eating apples and onions just like Almanzo Wilder, so of course we should try making caramel apples, right?

Attempt #1: Melting caramel candies.  Easy enough: unwrap and heat.  Started in a double boiler on the stove, but when it was taking too long, I tossed it into the microwave, and voila! Perfectly melted, sticking so nice and evenly, just the right tackiness to hold onto the various things we were rolling them in...I was formulating my blog post in my head about how I'd found the most wonderful easy way of making gorgeous caramel apples and how I really am the next Martha Stewart.  

Beautiful. Crunch. What? Could that be my tooth cracking from the rock-hardness of this beautiful confection?  I think it might be. The boys LOVED making these, but their poor little teeth couldn't even bite through the caramel, it was so hard.  I, on the other hand, persevered, as I do so love that perfect combination of crisp apple and sweet caramel.  Alas, the teeth do need to be used for other things on future dates, so even I had to give up.

What to do? Well, seeing as I can't bring myself to waste perfectly good fruit, and the rock hard caramel came chipping easily off, I thought I'd give it another go and do it right this time.  I quickly removed the offending caramel from the apples, and this time I'd cook it over the stove.  

Attempt #2: Found a super easy recipe on familyfun.com with just brown sugar, butter and water.  Now, in their defense, I didn't really measure exactly because my brown sugar was all in one big rock hard clump and all attempts to microwave it back to life had failed.  Please tell me I'm not the only one. So I guesstimated.  And failed.  These poor apples were subjected to yet another attempt to cover them, with this try not sticking in the slightest, but quickly sliding off the smooth apple skins and resting on the wax paper in a pool below. 

I do hope you did not visit today looking for a caramel apple recipe, because I do not have one.  Do you?

Pumpkin Love in Pseudo-Summer

Our October Summer has cooled down by about ten degrees, and the evenings are getting cool.  I am still wearing long sleeves and pants, in hopes that the weather might cooperate, then finding myself changing into a tank top when I find out that all I'm really getting out of it is sweaty.  But as I mentioned before, that doesn't mean I'm not going to celebrate Fall!

I LOVE decorating inside my house for Autumn.  I am lucky enough to host our Thanksgiving dinner each year, so I feel like the decorating is all worthwhile, knowing that lots of people will appreciate it along with me.  We also do a lot of entertaining for church, and I like knowing that the atmosphere here is festive and fallish, even when the outside world is not.  So here are some glimpses around my fall house right now.  Nighttime candlelit pictures would be so much better, but these will have to do for now.  Our dining room table is above, which I set for Thanksgiving about a week or two beforehand, just so I can enjoy the sparkling of the glasses for a little longer!  I'll be sure to post a picture when the time comes.

...and a closeup of my favorite decorating element...these little stones come in every color.  Ikea usually has a few colors at a time, or you can get them at other decorative stores sometimes, too. I use them all the time in decorating.  Just sprinkle a few around the edge of your display and it seems to finish it off just right.

And aren't these little turkey salt and pepper shakers wonderful?  I need to ask my mom where I got them.  She remembers these things.

My mantle, which is pretty much the same as usual, plus a few pumpkins and a fall quilt I made years ago but have nowhere really to hang right now.  Mr. Turkey here has a wife, but she's currently indisposed...Tyler has adopted her and she might be hidden under a bed somewhere, just calling for her Tom to come save her.  Poor little turkey. 

Our kitchen island (oh, I'm just still thrilled that I chose wood, even months after our remodel finished!  Even better that my dad and my uncle and I made the island together.) now decorated with an easy to move fall arrangement, including some flower shaped napkin rings. I love using odd things in my arrangements.  Pomegranate from the farmer's market today, inspired by Selena.

And what would fall be without some kind of pumpkin cake?  I  cheated  did the smart thing and used good old Trader Joe's Pumpkin bread and muffin mix, because I knew I wanted to make these adorable little pumpkin cakes.  

They're made with miniature bundt cake pans, and you can put one on top of the other to make a real pumpkin shape, or just leave it as half a pumpkin.  Drizzle orange frosting over and finish with a tootsie roll that you soften in the microwave and twist and stick in the top with a toothpick, or if you just don't have the time to make a special trip out for tootsie rolls, you can pipe a little thickened frosting in green on the top for stems.  We host our church's Young Families Fellowship every other Friday, and I love having an excuse to a) clean the bathrooms and b) make fun desserts like these.  But seeing as I have 30 people arriving in less than three hours, I better scoot.  Today I told you about the turkey Tyler adopted, tomorrow I'll tell you about the creature who's adopted him.  See you.