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 