Adventures in German cooking

So John came home and brought some Karttofel nudeln (I hope I'm spelling this right--it translates as "potato noodles")--I don't know why, but I suppose he decided to do some adventurous shopping while at the local grocery store.

Karttofel nudeln is not that different from gnocchi, which are small potato dumplings--same size, same taste. It may even be the same thing, except the German version is a bit longer.

Of course, I had no idea of how to cook it in a real German way. I could have cooked it like I would have served gnocchi, but that didn't seem right, because, after all, it was Karttoffel nudeln, not gnocchi, and I really have not yet really tried cooking something really German yet.

Not that I did that today, really. So far, all the recipes I've searched for online regarding the Karttofel nudeln have been about how to make the dumplings, not how to prepare them with other food. I will need to make a further search, but there was not much time for me to do that today, so I decided to do a bit of decipherin'.

I don't know much German, but it's enough alike to English that I can make out a few words and it looked like you could fix them any which way--boiled, fried, whatever--mostly fried, it looked like, because that was what was on the package's picture. I decided fried was the more German way, because I have found that they seem to be very fond of fried potatoes.

In fact, when John and I were eating out while we were at the City Hotel in Geilenkirchen, we found that a huge number of menu items featured French fries. Maybe even a majority. I'm not talking about in a fast-food restaurant, I mean in very nice restaurants. Chateaubriand...with French fries. A lovely marinated and broiled halibut with a light dill cream sauce, presented just so on the plate...and French fries. In addition, deep fryers seem to be a very popular item in the appliance stores, and the pictures on those deep fryer boxes show French fries.

So, fried. But not deep fried, because I am not really into deep fried stuff. Since the picture showed the nudeln browning in a frying pan, I thought, hey, how about sauteed? If bulk quantities at grocery stores indicates staples, I'd think onions would be one of them. I have not yet seen onions sold in single quantities--they come in packages of at least three or four. Therefore, there must be onions along with them.

What else? Wurst--sausages. I happened to have a package of sausages. So, that goes into the pan. Probably don't need any salt--the sausages probably had plenty. Butter probably would be appropriate, but I thought I'd go leaner and use olive oil. Like I said, not totally German.

So, I sauteed some onion in olive oil until transparent, tossed in the nudeln, and fried them enough so that they had a somewhat crisp surface. Tossed in the sliced sausages, cooked them lightly brown on the edges, turned off the heat, and dusted some ground black pepper over it all.

Then I looked at the result in the pan and realized...this is breakfast, not dinner. What I had there was--fried potatoes, after all--would taste like hash browns with sausage and onions.

Hmm. Well, I'm okay with serving breakfast at dinner, so what the heck, I'll go all the way. Instead of a salad, as I'd usually prepare for dinner, I thought I'd go the breakfast way, and prepare fruit instead. The nudeln package mentioned applesauce...well, I didn't have any, although I had fresh apples. So, I'd cook those, too.

Unfortunately, I can't use the oven (the former tenants seemed to have made off with the oven racks, so they are on order) to broil apple slices as I'd prefer, so I made use of the microwave. Cored and sliced three Pink Lady apples (they have a marvelous variety of apples here in Germany), laid them out in a small casserole dish, sprinkled cinnamon and raw sugar on them, and microwaved them for a good 5 minutes, mixed them up a bit, then microwaved for another 3 minutes.

John took a taste and agreed, yes, this was breakfast at dinner, and all it needed was a fried egg over-easy. Done!

So what I figure I ended up with was...well, breakfast with German Karttofel nudlen, American style.

Next time, I'll really find a German recipe to try. :-D