Dinner party!

In celebration of having such a great host, I decided to prepare dinner! Here is the menu:

Delicious beer!
Penne Pasta with Schinken
Cream of wild mushroom soup
Tasty french bread!

for some reason our camera was malfunctioning and almost all the pictures from the night are horribly blurry! Here is one of Jess enjoying a bowl of Cream of wild mushroom soup! This was made by soaking 100g of wild mushrooms that we got at the Viktualienmarkt in boiling water for 45 minutes(turn off the heat when you add the mushrooms.) Then I prepared a roux with butter and flour. I cooked 500g of fresh brown mushrooms in the roux along with a tablespoon of fresh thyme until the mushrooms had given off their juices. I added the stock I made with the wild mushrooms and finely diced the now reconstituted wild mushrooms and added it back into the soup. Simmer for 30 minutes just to allow the flavors to meld together, season with salt and pepper. Just before serving I add whipping cream to thicken and make the soup more creamy. Don't bring the sauce back up to a boil once you add the cream or you risk one of two things, the cream will break and you will have oil floating all over the top of the pot or you will form a skin on the surface of the soup.

Schinken is basically German ham, It's a hot smoked ham that is cut razor thin and packaged a lot like prosciutto. We made a pretty basic pasta dish consisting of a can of whole tomatoes, garlic, onion, basil, fresh tomatoes, and eggplant. The sauce was simmering and at the last minute I added the Schinken so that the smokiness would remain in the meat and not permeate the sauce too much. Sorry there aren't any pictures, just think of a big bowl of penne pasta with little shreds of prosciutto in it.

Here is a great beer we had with dinner. I have had it before in the states but we learned a little more about it at the table. All the beers that end in TOR (Optimator, Salvator, etc) were specialty beers made by the monks for times of fasting. For religious reasons they couldn't eat anything during this time, but could only drink. So what do you want to drink during a fast, they strongest, heaviest, more stick to the ribs beer you could make, and thus were born this style of beer which always ends in a -TOR. I think this particular beer is about 9.8% and dark thick and heavy.
We had heard that a friend may be coming over later in the evening, so we figured that we should make some extra. We cooked 500g of Mushrooms and 1kg of pasta. Boy were we lucky we had. By the end of the evening we had a small party going on! And as all great parties do, this one ended up in the bathtub.

This was part of an artistic photoshoot organized by another one of the guests that me and Jess snuck up behind and photographed as well. In the end Stella's two friends from high school came and brought another guest. I guess my mom always taught me right, there is no excuse for not having enough food so I always prepare 2-3x more then I really aught to(plus I love leftovers). In the end we had plenty of food to feed the 6 of us and there were even some leftovers for Joerg(who was off playing with his band in Switzerland for the night.)


Stella has a bike that Jeorg fixed up for her that is exactly this color. So she named the bike Milka!
-NOM!

Bavarian Cuisine a La Munchen

Our first night in Munich(Munchen to the natives) we stayed with Stella and Joerg a wonderful native Munchen couple we met through Couchsurfing.org. I mentioned that I hadn't had any true Bavarian food since I have been in Germany(Deutschland to the natives.) So they took us out to a fabulous dinner at Fraunhofer restaurant.


Jess had a roasted pork shoulder with bread dumplings that was dripping in a velvety fantastic gravy. She thought the meat was a little dry but when you keep it well dunked in the pan sauce it turned into a fabulous luxurious meal. The bread dumpling was moist, and very flavorful. It had lot of herb and spices with just enough egg to hold it together. Dunked into the gravy it had me wanting to switch plates with her.

I had the wiener schnitzel(Weiner art) I was told this means it's a Vienna style weiner schnitzel, which means instead of the usual well softened peice of veal instead they used pork cutlets well breaded and pan fried. They were very well done with a little bit of lemon squeezed on top. When I was a kid my mom would make this style of wiener schnitzel and I would eat it dipped into blue cheese dressing.(for some reason they didn't serve blue cheese dressing here)* It had a really fabulous potato salad on the side. Perfectly cooked potatoes with still just a tiny bit of bite like al dente pasta, lathered in a creamy vinegary dressing. I was very well pleased.

I wish I had the chutzpah to take a picture of the meal that Stella had. She ordered pigs lung with bread dumplings. LUNG! The last great adventure for me! I have eaten pretty much every part of the animal, I love stomach, intestines, kidneys, liver, heart, skin, marrow, pig ears, feet, etc etc etc. but I have never heard of anyone making lungs, the membranous almost plastic-like organ into something edible! Her dish looked like finely chopped liver in a very thick soup. I was instantly jealous and ashamed of my silly weiner schnitzel, I could have ordered lung if I had only known German(Deutsch to the natives)

The way it's prepared leaves the final result quite sour but incredibly moist, and soft almost the texture of well prepared liver. The taste isn't organ-y at all but rather sour and a smooth texture that pairs well with the bread dumplings. I don't know a single other culture that has made the lungs into something edible. Simply amazing.

If I go back to Bavaria I am having the lung... And maybe some mark dumplings(Marrow dumpling) I couldn't find any while I was there, and that just sounds too amazing to pass up.


*For one it's not very traditional, and for two, I would have been too embarrassed to ask, let alone eat it that way