Jan bought me a recipe book for Christmas entitiled “German Cooking Today”. No, not a hint 😉 but I kept asking him about traditional German foods other than the ones from this region and he didn’t know any, hence the book.
I’ve never really done much real German cooking, despite living here for 6 years! The couple of times we’ve had homemade Spätzle Jan did the cooking and for Maultaschen we just buy ready made ones and heat them up. Jan made them once with some friends (before we were together) and apparantly it takes ages!
Since we had some baguette left over from the weekend, which had gone pretty stale, I decided it was the perfect opportunity to make Semmelknödel (bread dumplings) using the recipe in my book. I won’t post the recipe here for copyright reasons, but here is someone else’s: http://cookingweekends.blogspot.de/2011/04/semmel-knodel-german-bread-dumplings.html It’s similar to mine, but I had to beat the eggs before adding them to the rest of the mixture.
It took me forever to make the Knödel plus the side dish of pumpkin in a garlicky-tomato sauce (I suspect with practice it will be quicker), but they didn’t fall apart and ended up looking as they were supposed to. They’re pretty filling, and I couldn’t manage to finish all of mine, so Jan ate the last one. I’m taking that as a compliment 😀
Confuzzledom 
Those Knoedel look PERFECT!!!
I like them, but I would actually prefer Kaesespaetzle which is one of my favorite dishes 😉
Thank you 🙂
Käsespätzle are gooood, but wouldn’t have helped with using up the baguette 😉
I’m very impressed! what did you do for the pumpkin – that sounds tasty too!
I just fried some garlic and onion in olive oil, stuck in the chopped up bits of pumpkin and fried til they were starting to go soft then added a tin of chooped tomatoes, a splash of red wine and some salt, pepper and “Italian herbs” (basically the same thing that’s sold as mixed herbs in the UK). Really easy actually!
Mmmm, maybe that can be ‘thing to try’ next week! all about the easy stuff right now while I battle reports!