Christmas in Deutschland

Here are a few pictures from Christmas at our house. Our decorating (and cleaning) was jump-started a week and a half before Christmas when we invited our friend Susanne's parents over for supper, as they were visiting from Denmark. (We stayed with them when we visited Denmark back in August.) We decided to make them Acadian food, both because it was a novelty, and because we thought it would be appealing to northern European meat-and-potatoes sensibilities. And so we proceded to grate a whole lot of potatoes to make râpé. I should mention that Jeremi did the bulk of the work here, and I only took over for the last dozen potatoes or so.

And here's the finished product, being brought to the living room to serve. It was delicious, and provided us with leftovers for the next week. (It really was a lot of potatoes, and a whole roast of pork for the meat inside.)
Here we are, getting seated at the table, after eating too much homemade chicken liver pâté as an appetizer.

For dessert we had poutines à trou, biscuit dough dumplings filled with apples, raisins, and cranberries, with a brown sugar syrup poured on top after baking.
Mmm... Behind you can see our woefully-undecorated Christmas tree - don't worry, the rest of the ornaments were soon to follow.
The next Christmas-related festivity was my group Christmas party at work. For this each of us brought in two gifts which cost less than €2,50, and then we randomly chose two presents to open. I brought in a little Christmas cactus, and this little stocking, which I knit with some scraps of very fine sock wool. I'm sorry the picture is so terrible. (The pen is there to show scale.)


And then the weekend before Christmas, while we were busy decorating and stocking up on way too much food, there was a night with a heavy ice fog. Jeremi took this picture out our kitchen window, into the courtyard behind our building.
That weekend we also had a special breakfast with the last red peppers from the plants on our balcony. These were the last peppers that didn't get a chance to grow so big, but they still tasted lovely. And we were eating home-grown peppers in late December! (We did bring the plants in when the frosts started in late November, but still!)
For Christmas Eve we had the most ridiculously indulgent meal - cheese fondue, using baguette, steamed brocolli, apple, gherkins, cocktail onions, and sausage to dip. What made it more than usually decadent was that about an hour after finishing the first pot (yes, it was just the two of us), we made up another batch, and finished that one too. Don't you just love the holidays? (This picture also shows a bunch of ribbon stars that we later strung on a thread and used as a garland on our tree, along with threaded popcorn and cranberries and dried orange slices.)
Me on Christmas morning, getting ready to open my stocking (which is an actual knee sock).

And Jeremi with his...And the cat, evilly hoarding the pile of presents...
But really, the cat had no need to covet our presents, as she got the biggest gift of all, this giant cat condo. Yes, we're crazy cat people. For the record, when we were at the store and I was looking at the smaller, cheaper one, it was Jeremi who pointed out that we really never buy her anything except for the occasional bag of food and litter, and she really doesn't have a perch where she can climb up to in the apartment, and she might really like it...


Yes, in the picture above, she does still have her back feet on the ground, and she's only standing up so that she can get at her food dish, which we've cruelly located to the cat condo in an attempt to get her used to it. (And that's a catnip-filled mouse in the little box.) She is actually getting quite used to it now, though she's still a bit nervous about the two uppermost levels. We've since relocated the whole thing to a corner next to the window, so it's not taking up the whole room.And then, it was time for Christmas dinner. We opted to make something "German" this year, and so we roasted our first goose. We used the new German cookbook that we received as a gift from Chris and Karen for the stuffing, which consisted of saurkraut, onions, grated potatoes, wine, and caraway seeds. We also added some beifuß, a herb which is traditionally used here with fatty roasts like duck or goose. In English it's called mugwort, and it's not really eaten much, but does have some medicinal properties (like stimulating uterine contractions?!?). Perhaps this is why the word brings up thoughts of witches' cauldrons and Harry Potter.
The meat was quite good, and dark and flavourful like roast beef.


For supper I wanted it to look nice, so we tidied up the living room (okay, it was mostly Jeremi, as I was finishing up in the kitchen), so we could lay out the whole spread: from bottom, spätzle, beets and brussel sprouts, cranberry sauce, gravy, goose on a bed of stuffing, and a plate of Christmas cookies (pecan snowballs made with ground hazelnuts instead of pecans, which are hard to find here, jam thumbprints made with crushed walnuts instead of pecans, and cornflake cookies, with a bit of chili.)
And here we had the table nicely set for two, next to the Christmas tree...
...and with heaping plates full of food.

It was just lovely. The next day, Jeremi made his family's version of meat pie, called pâté, with beef, pork, and potatoes, in a buiscuit dough crust. The steam vents on top read J+J with a little heart. (His work, not mine, but the cheesiness is understandable seeing as we got engaged the day before.) Before Christmas we'd also made my family's version of meat pie, a tourtière made with ground pork, mashed potato, onion, sage, thyme, and cloves, cooked with celery. They both came out quite well, but we only got a picture of this one.

And with the pâté we had a vegetable that we've never seen in Canada, but is quite common here in the winter - Schwarzwurfel (literally, black root), which apparently is known in English as black salsify, or scorzonera. When cut it released a sticky white sap, which can almost be seen in the photo. We boiled it for about 25 minutes, and then removed the peel, and mashed it as one would parsnip or turnip. It was quite tasty!