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  • Berliner Pfannkuchen Fail

    Berliner Pfannkuchen Fail

    What a busy month it has been. You know how I love keeping it real around here, so even when I mess up pretty good, I want to share it with you. Well, it’s another Food of the World party, and I have once again come out with a product not looking so great. I know everything I did wrong too, so hopefully with a little more time and practice, I can come back and turn this Fail into a Win.

    With that wonderful introduction I give you Berliner Pfannkuchen or simply put donuts.

    I had actually been  planning on making some Shoko Schnecke, but I felt I didn’t have enough time to make them. So then I started doing a little research and found that cheesecake is popular in Germany, but they make it with a product called quark. 
    Quark is similar to cottage cheese and ricotta, but different enough, I didn’t feel I could exchange it.  So I crossed off quark cheesecake temporarily (I will be coming back to it!), and kept doing a little research. That’s when the Berliner Pfannkuchen caught my eye, and I thought, sure, I can do that. When really I should have backed away at the mention of frying them. 
    If you want to try and make some Berliner’s I would use the recipe found on Germanfoods.org and do what I didn’t do and follow the recipe precisely. Here is what I did wrong, so you don’t do it. 
    • read the recipe carefully. When it says lukewarm milk, don’t add lukewarm water (where was my head?!) Don’t try and safe yourself by then adding more cold milk. 
    • Even if you read a couple different recipes, and one mentioned using vanilla sugar…don’t do it. Stick with the one recipe. 
    • Never use powdered eggs. They are a very poor replacement in any baked goods…this is not my first attempt, and I should have known. 
    I will tell you however, that even though my Pfannkuchen don’t look like Pfannkuchen, the kids thought they were pretty great. Especially when they discovered that I had also filled some with Nutella, and some with my Polish Plum Butter (the only non failed Food of the World Party to date).

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    Do you have any Germanic recipes to share? We’d love to see them linked up below. Or just browse around to some other better recipes. 
    Thank you Simple Living and Eating for Hosting this each month and helping me branch out to new cuisines.  

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  • Pork Curry Steamed Buns

    Pork Curry Steamed Buns

    It looks like I may have a lot of “Fails” with this Food of the World party, but we sure are having fun learning about different countries and their cuisine. This month Diane had us visiting Malaysia. See how we made Pork Curry Steamed Buns, and grab some recipes to make your own.

     
     
    Malaysian cuisine has melded with many of its neighboring countries, to create its own unique flavors on Asian dishes. While doing my research I came across Rasa Malaysia. the #9 Food Blogger in the world! That is pretty impressive and makes me surprised I hadn’t come across her before. Bee, the owner is from Malaysia, but now based out of California. She shares traditional Asian dishes, that are simple to make, and some with a more Westernized twist. 
     
    I browsed the Malaysian section on her site and had a hard time choosing something. After looking at recipes forever Mark leaned over, and said: “Try those steamed buns!”  Yeah, that sounds good…except steaming bread sounds tricky. Mark recalled our trip to Japan though, where we had a pork filled steamed bun that he just loved – and so did everyone else because the line to get one was huge!
     
     
    Mark got pretty excited about trying these out, that he jumped up and started cooking up a couple different pork curries. Of course, he didn’t write anything down, so I have no recipe for you – but head over to All Recipes and search curry. There’s a lot of good ones on there. So while he did that, I followed Rasa Malaysia’s recipe for Sweet Potato Mantou (or Steamed Buns).
     
    I was a little nervous, when it took a long time to rise, but crossed my fingers they would still turn out. My verdict – these are better baked than steamed unless you have the right equipment. Bee’s recipe has you put the buns on baking or steaming paper sheets. I didn’t have either, and didn’t think they would matter – they do!  By not using these, the bottoms of our buns were still very doughy. 
     
    Eventually, I gave in, and just baked the last of them. Ah-maze-ing!  Oh, and I also used Bread Flour because I couldn’t find Bao Flour (I found steamed bun mix at our Asian Market, but not Bao flour).  That could have been the reason for the extra long rise time, but I really don’t know. 
     

    I think the sweet potato addition to the dough, really was wonderful, but they worked better in the oven. So if you want to make these, but also want to avoid steaming them, I baked mine for 10 minutes in a 350 oven.

    Do you have a favorite recipe from Malaysia? Share it in the comments!


  • Polish Plum Butter

    Polish Plum Butter

    Polish Plum Butter
     
    We headed to Nana and Opah’s house this weekend, and the first thing I noticed when we walked in was the abundance of plums. They were everywhere. Buckets, bowls – you could hardly see their table due to the plums. Throughout the weekend, my mom had neighbors stop by, and she’d send them back home with a bucket. By the time we left Sunday, there was one bowl left, so we took a bag full with us.  What to do with all these plums? My mom mentioned seeing a recipe for plum cake so I started looking into that when I came across Polish Plum Butter or Powidla Sliwkowe. 
     
    After my peach honey, I knew I needed to try polish plum butter. What I love about this recipe, is it uses very few ingredients…as in exactly 2 ingredients. That’s it. Plums and Sugar.  There are some recipes I came across that use a few more, but really you don’t have to, the plum becomes extremely sweet when cooked down, and thickens itself very nicely as well. 
     
    Polish Plum Butter
     
    As I started chopping up my plums, I realized this would make a nice substitution to the plum sauce I use when making Plum Pork. Can you guess what I’m making for dinner tonight? Mmmhmm. 
     
    At one point I wished I had an immersion blender, but made do with my regular blender. It just means I’ve got a few more dishes in the sink (which by the way is having plumbing issues…blah).  I hope you enjoy this as much as I am. You can use it on bread, meat, or as the Polish like it, in Hunters Stew. 
    Polish Plum Butter or Powidla Sliwkowe
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    Ingredients
    1. 2 lbs plums, any variety
    2. 1/4 cup vanilla sugar
    Instructions
    1. Slice and pit plums.
    2. Place the sliced plums in a medium to large pot, and heat over medium/low heat for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally.
    3. Add the sugar and continue heating for another 30 minutes.
    4. Keep an eye on it, and stir frequently to keep it from sticking and burning to the bottom of the pan.
    5. Remove from heat and blend to make a more smooth butter.
    6. Place plum butter back in pan and heat for another 20-30 minutes, stirring frequently.
    7. Once the “butter” sticks to the spoon, it’s ready to either can or freeze.
    Notes
    1. You can skip the blending, but you’ll have good sized chunks of the plum peel. I prefer mine a little more smooth.
    2. I used my 8 oz Ball Freezer cups, and filled three, then put a small gravy pitcher in the fridge for immediate use.
    Home Maid Simple https://www.homemaidsimple.com/
     

     
    This post is part of Simple Living and Eating’s Food of the World Party. Browse different dishes from Poland on the linky below. Next month we’re visiting Malaysia!
     
    May also be linked up  to these FUN PARTIES!
     

     
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  • Gazpacho

    Gazpacho

    I am really excited to be joining Diane at Simple Living and Eating for her new Food of the World party.  For almost 2 years now Diane has helped me co-host our Foodie Friday party (still going strong), so when she told me about this Food of the World idea, I was thrilled. Instead of weekly, it will be a monthly party where we visit the cuisine of a different country. To kick off we’re heading to Spain.

    My first thoughts of Spain are – Bull Fighting, and Rice. Turns out I really don’t know a whole lot about this country. So I hit the Internet, and started doing some searching. After browsing a number of articles about different Spanish foods, I realized they eat a lot of fish. I knew with my families picky tastes I couldn’t serve them fish. At least not without easing into it. So I went with something less fishy, but still very Spanish – Gazpacho.

    Artwork by Mark’s Dad

    So Gazpacho – a tomato based cold soup. I knew I was pushing our limits with both tomatoes and cold soup, but was pretty sure it was going to go over better than fish. Sadly, because personally I love fish! Back to Gazpacho. After doing a lot of research into Gazpacho, all you really need is a lot of tomatoes, and them some extra vegetables to throw in as well.

    Unfortunately for my family, the soup did not turn out very edible. Luckily for you, I’m not going to share my recipe with you, but I am going to direct you to some very good looking Gazpacho recipes. I think if I would have stuck to one of them, instead of trying to mesh it all together and make my own, we probably would have enjoyed it. The big problem we had, was there was too much onion in it, and I didn’t add very much either. It was all we could taste though. Surprisingly the kids didn’t actually complain, and enjoyed dipping some bread in it – they shouted for joy though when Mark walked in the door with some pizza.

    I used these recipes to put together my Gazpacho.

    Gazpacho at Mama’s Gotta Bake

    Gazpacho at Add A Pinch

    Gazpacho at The Pioneer Woman