Continuing the German theme....

....Trader Joe's (a local California grocery store chain) is currently carrying bratwurst from Nürnberg:

Romantische, eh?

Our dinner on Sunday was SO good!



Now you know what's in our freezer! (package upon package of bratwurst!)

Oktoberfest 2011

So my friend who took a family photo of us in all our tracht sent me an email this morning.  Without further ado, here's the Schwarm family:

Lulu's chowing down on a pretzel and refused to wear her schertzen (sp?) but you get the general idea.

Chestnut Squash

Gropius planted a French heirloom squash variety in the garden this summer and we cooked our first meal with it earlier this week.  It's called potimarron--a contraction of "pumpkin" and "chestnut" in French.  I can't say that I detected a strong chestnut flavor, but it was tasty nonetheless!



We've also been harvesting the volunteer butternut squash that came up in our compost--so far we have 3-4 squashes! Not bad considering our initial investment of $0.

To let the flavor of the squash shine through, we decided to make a squash risotto.

Everything's better with chocolate.

A meeting with one of my senior colleagues over my tenure file ran late yesterday afternoon, so I didn't get to Merryhill in time to get Lulu to her dance class.  I felt really guilty, even though I was rationalizing it to myself in the car on the drive from campus (one missed dance class versus an unemployed mother is kind of a no-brainer).

So, when I picked her up and she said she wanted pink ice cream, I thought perhaps I could make her day with a strawberry shake at McDonald's on the way home.  When we walked in though, Lulu wanted a chocolate chip cookie once she saw them on display by the cash register.  So I bought a cookie for her and a mango-pineapple fruit smoothie for me...which also became Lulu's.

She wanted to "sit at the table, Mama!"  So, I let her pick which table and we had a nice mother-daughter moment before heading home.

My personal favorite of the bunch.
Mickey D's really needs this for an ad campaign, don't you think?

Broccoli Rabe Pizza

We had some broccoli rabe in the fridge from earlier in the week and decided that we'd make pizza with it. I found a recipe from Sunset magazine that used dough and toppings from Pizzeria Delfina in San Francisco.  If you haven't eaten at Pizzeria Delfina, my friend, you are MISSING OUT!  It's delicious!

Here are a few photos of the end result:

The bacon wasn't in the original recipe, but it sounded tasty and we had some.

Besides, who can resist bacon??  Not us!

Random cheeses and bacon scones

I woke up this morning with the taste of these on my tongue.  My good friends in Fargo, Andy and Miriam, had sent me some cheddar cheese and bacon scones from Zingerman's (in Ann Arbor) for my birthday last year and the taste has haunted me since.

So, I decided to try to bake my own.  I did find this recipe on the King Arthur website and blog and used it as my base recipe.  I used their basic proportions, substituted my Cuisinart for the zip-loc bag method, and added in fresh thyme and Dijon whole-grain mustard along with the bacon and cheese.  I didn't have cheddar cheese, so I decided to use up the random scraps of cheese from our cheese drawer in the fridge.  I think there's a little cheddar in there, but probably a bit of Wensleydale and Emmentaler, too.  I did cut back on the bacon (we didn't have a pound of it lying around) in part because Lulu kept eating from my mise en place.  Clearly, I need to work with my sous chef!

A short 22 minutes later, this is what came out of the oven:

Combine the scone with a cup of coffee and a glass of orange juice and you've got a delicious start to a Sunday morning!