White Christmas

Happy New Year to everyone who still find their way to this blog from time to time. I haven't been the best blogger for the past couple of years and it seems more and more like I blog only about what I did months ago rather than right now. I have thought about ending my time as a blogger, but truth of the matter is that it's probably one of the only things that still keeps me taking photographs - even though many of them never make their way to this platform - and it's nice with so many photos to peruse when I feel like taking a walk down memory lane sometimes. So I'll continue for a while and see what time brings.

We had a lovely Christmas in Denmark and were so lucky to have a local white Christmas this year. The snow fell perfectly timed on the 22nd and 23rd. When I woke up on the 25th it was all gone. Vincent and I went for a walk on the 24th while Fleur was sleeping and the food was on the stove. It's been some years since we last walked in the snowy forest and it was nice to feel the crisp fresh air and have a bit of exercise before all the food.

Normally we don't really celebrate New Years eve, I find that the change between years is often overrated and these parties always end up disappointing. But this year we got a spontaneous and quite random dinner invitation and had the chance to spend the evening among brand new people without any expectations and ended up having such a nice evening with good food, champagne, talks, games and fireworks. It was a great entrance to this new year, that I hope will bring as many wonderful memories as the previous one. I wish for better health for our family in the wintertime, and already I look forward to spring.

Happy New Year.

A bit of Julehygge

The majority of December was spend being sick. In fact I think at least one person in our household has been sick every day of this month. Still I managed to sneak in a bit of Christmas hygge in those tiny windows of well being.

This year, I decided to try and bake spekulatius cookies and the first batch turned out really well. As always I made lussebullar for Lucia. Christmas and my urge to bake are somehow closely connected and this year I had a little helper by my side. (Wonder if she was trying to draw Santa on the table)

The Tale of an Acorn

Back when we could still wear short sleeved t-shirts outside, we spend some afternoons gathering acorns nearby.

I read that it's possible to make acorn flour and thought, why not? It's been a while since I indulged a completely unnecessary experiment.

When I say we spend a couple afternoons, it was because I made the rookie mistake of picking the green acorns instead of the brown. After we spend some hours de-shelling the acorns we gathered that day, we found out that we needed to use the brown ones and had to with a couple off weeks before we went back.

Acorns need to go through quite a long process before you can actually eat them. They contain a lot of tannin, and I am sure you could get a mean stomach ache, if you ate them unprocessed. First they need to boil, then you need to dry them (I did this in the oven), and to make flour you obviously need to mill the dried acorn pieces (or as I did: use a very good food processor). After all this work, we ended up with around 250 g of flour, which doesn't sound of much, but it was enough to make a couple of batches of acorn cookie during the fall. I used a normal short bread recipe and replaced half the normal flour with our the acorn flour.

I was wondering if the taste would be worth all the work, and even though it is not the best cookie I've ever had in my life, it was really unlike anything I ever tried - not at all bad, but very sweet. So I won't reject that I would go through the same laboursome process when next years fall when the ground once again will fill up with acorn en masse.

Zucchini

As part of our balcony garden, we also planted zucchini this year. It was not really because of the zucchini itself, if so we would have been terribly disappointed as we only managed to harvest one zucchini throughout the season. But we planted them so we could get to eat the tasty zucchini flowers because they are hard to come by here in Berlin, even at the farmers market.

And we had many flowers during June and July and they were as decorative as they were delicious. I love them filled with a ricotta mix, dipped in batter, and deep fried. It is a great summer dish. They certainly brightened up both our balcony and our dinner table this summer and perhaps they will be part of the seeds in next years balcony pot mixture.

Our balcony pots are looking rather sad right now that fall has really taken over, but there is still the occasional flower. Today we put some chestnuts in the soil so if we are lucky one of them will sprout sometime during the next couple of months.

Brunch in Friedrichshain

After multiple failed attempt to meet up - first one kid sick then the other - Tina and I finally managed to meet for brunch with the small ones an early Saturday morning. We went to Happy Baristas in Friedrikshain where we had a great french toast and coffee and babychinoes for the kids. Afterwards we went to a playground nearby and enjoyed the sun and sand before it got to warm outside.

Bernau

A couple of weeks back, we went to Bernau for a couple of hours. Vincent had to go there to fix something at the exhibition he has there at the moment and Fleur and I decided to tack along.

It was sunday, but the city was buzzing with life as they had a yearly Hussitenfest. There was food, stalls and merchants everywhere and it was another great summer day.