BootsnAll Travel Network
Add this blog to: MyYahoo, Google, Bloglines, RSS


Articles Tagged ‘food’

More articles about ‘food’
« Previous Page — « Previous Entries
Next Entries » — Next Page »
« Home

Katja’s Potato Soup

Sunday, May 17th, 2009

by Rachael, who will have made this again within a week
Berlin, Germany

Tomorrow our hosts will cook for us, and we’ll like it so much we’ll record the recipe with a view to making it again and again and again…..even though it seems most Germans buy their potatoes in boxes – one box for mashed potato, another box for fried potatoes, yet another for potato dumplings (OK, so we very nearly bought those ones! They did look good!!)

5kg potatoes
7 carrots
4 onions
yellow pepper
   Chop all and boil until cooked. Whizz.

1 1/2 pottles sour cream (that must be about 300g all up)
Add all the following in quantities that suit your taste:
dollop of mustard
vegetable stock
beef stock
marjoram
parsley
lemon juice
peas
chopped up sausage (Wiener is Katja’s favourite)
   Heat and serve

Thanks girls for letting us stay with you – I bet you had no idea you’d end up cooking a meal for fourteen the day you agreed to let us park outside your apartment! Thanks for letting us stay…and stay….and stay…when the process dragged on and on and on. We really appreciate you giving Grandpa and Co a bed while the rest of us carried our toothbrushes down the street to the Womo each evening. Your beautiful creative apartment was a great place to transition to living out of our more cramped quarters, The Bear Cave. And thanks for the real coffee 😉

(today Rob spent half the day picking up Womo Number Two, I spent half the day fighting with the internet trying to find places to dump our waste water when we actually hit the road……not much to write home about really)

Posted in food, postcard: Germany, postcard: Rhein Road Trip, transport | No Comments »

tourists in berlin

Friday, May 15th, 2009

by Rach
Berlin, Germany

Finally! We got to see some of The Sights, some of the things Berlin is famous for.
With careful planning we were able to make full use of the rule which states you can hop on and off the trains as many times as you like in two hours so long as you travel in one direction. And so, at my parents’ suggestion, we detoured to the Hauptbahnhof on the way to Alexanderplatz, where we had some business to attend to. What a Grand Central Station! It’s all glass….everywhere. And there are trains coming in at the top and more trains three stories below. Apparently there’s also a huge mall inside, but, being in a hurry, we didn’t stray from the S-bahn platform we alighted onto. That was enough to impress. Plus, we were still marvelling at our previous stop – Friedrichstrasse – that station was bigger than our main station at home, and we knew there was an even bigger one coming. Yes, most impressive.

Another hop and a skip took us to Checkpoint Charlie. Totally touristified. There were guards standing in front of the house, who let you pose with them – for a fee. There was a visa stamping station, where you could have your passport stamped – for another fee. There were gypsies asking if you speak English or German and then thrusting a sign into your face declaring how hungry they were and asking for money. There were big informative posterboards telling the story. There were double-decker tourist busses dawdling past giving the passengers a twenty-second view along the street and groups of tourists looking at what their guides tell them to look at on the ground. But I don’t mind *touristy* – now I can *see* where all those hostage exchanges in the war novels I devoured in my youth took place.

Next stop: Potsdamer Platz. There were almost as many tourists there, just as many busses, even more gypsies and another visa stamping station. We couldn’t quite work out what the fuss was all about – it was a square surrounded by fairly conventional, even boring, buildings. It will be remembered by us as the place we watched a crow swoop down and grab a sparrow, fly off to a nearby lamppost and eat it. Oh, and get visas – the friendly guard gave us eight *gratis* just because there were so many children in one family! He must have known how disappointed the kids were that we were not prepared to pay $5 each just for a stamp!

Our ticket time was used up by now and we walked up to the Brandenburger Tor…taking in the Holocaust Memorial on the way. Unlike any other memorial we have seen, it is a series of rows of concrete boxes of varying heights, ranging from very low to higher than a person. Almost maze-like, it called for a game of hide-n-seek, which was allowed on the condition that it be a quiet respectful game.

If Checkpoint Charlie was totally touristified, there is no description for The Brandenburg Gate. In addition to all the Charlie attractions, here there was a huge variety of street theatre with each performer passing round a hat, horses and carts to take you for a ride, actually all manner of things to take you riding in or on….and all attracting a handsome fee. Even the Berlin Bear, who came and posed himself next to us asked for a tip!

 

Round the corner was the Reichstag, a FREE attraction – I’m sure the kids would have enjoyed climbing up into the glass dome, but everyone was cold (spring here means hot tshirt weather on Sunday and get-your-thermals-out-on-Friday…and tomorrow we’ll wake to rain dripping on the Bear Cave roof), and so I just raced off for a photo, because I was the only one wearing thermals and hence not freezing.

 

I caught up with the rest as they walked up the street towards the train station – other days we’d have done the hour long walk to get home, today we took the train. Besides, we couldn’t just stop at a noodle stall on the way back for dinner – we are well and truly back to cooking for ourselves and not even considering eating out.  So we had to get home to turn the bockwurst into curry!

Posted in food, history, learning, postcard: Germany, recreation, transport, weather | 3 Comments »

when in rome……

Thursday, May 14th, 2009
by Mama Berlin, Germany Underneath the overhead train track in the middle of four lanes of traffic, there is almost always a queue of people. Apparently there has been since the 1920s when this little place opened. It has kept serving, ... [Continue reading this entry]

Posted in food, postcard: Germany, tradition | No Comments »

Introducing The Bear Cave

Tuesday, May 12th, 2009
by the housewife Berlin, Germany For most of us our first look at our new home for the next six months or so came in the middle of the city at twilight. Nervously inching along the road shared by trams, trucks, ... [Continue reading this entry]

Posted in food, housing, postcard: Germany, toilet, transport | 6 Comments »

market rates

Saturday, May 9th, 2009
by the main shopper Berlin, Germany A far cry from the watch-where-you-step wet markets and touristy colourful night markets of Asia, are the markets of Berlin. We sampled our second today, will be returning to the first again tomorrow, yet another on ... [Continue reading this entry]

Posted in craft, food, money, numbers, postcard: Germany | 2 Comments »

project intentional community

Friday, May 8th, 2009
by a community-minded spirit Berlin, Germany We have stayed in a few intentional communities (and more are coming up in the future) – everything from a group of friends living together “half family half commune” to the website-toting mission-statemented Permanent ... [Continue reading this entry]

Posted in food, housing, justice, learning, money, postcard: Estonia, postcard: Germany, postcard: Mongolia | 1 Comment »

yawn

Wednesday, May 6th, 2009
by Rach Berlin, Germany more of the same ol’ same ol’ For a start, Berlin is just like Auckland – showers interspersed with heavy downpours. Grey clouds all day. We’d forgotten about rain (and how nice it was to do so!) We ate black ... [Continue reading this entry]

Posted in book, children, food, grandpa's stories, history, learning, parenting, postcard: Germany, recreation, transport | 3 Comments »

simply welcoming

Monday, April 27th, 2009
by Rach Tallinn, Estonia

We’re in a community house. Breakfast is shared with a red-hat-wearing dreadlock-bearded Santa Claus’s helper. This Finnish man actually went to school with Santa Claus. We certainly didn’t have any inkling we’d ... [Continue reading this entry]

Posted in book, children, craft, food, health, history, housing, intergenerationalism, justice, learning, money, postcard: Estonia, recreation, tradition, transport | 2 Comments »

I wanna be a real tourist

Friday, April 24th, 2009
by Rachael St Petersburg, Russia The day is almost half over by the time we wake, organise hostel payment, make plans, research onward bus tickets and find breakfast. That’s what happens when you arrive at midnight the night before! It’s well and ... [Continue reading this entry]

Posted in children, food, history, postcard: Russia, transport | No Comments »

Trans-Salami Express

Friday, April 17th, 2009
by the lady who wants to learn to make sausage one day Train 5 Dharkan (night 1), Mongolia to the Ruskie border We haven’t even made it to the Russian border, in fact, we’ve only just boarded the train at Darkhan, ... [Continue reading this entry]

Posted in food, postcard: Mongolia, postcard: Russia, transport, weather | 1 Comment »

« Previous Page — « Previous Entries
Next Entries » — Next Page »