The
24th of September was not only Election Day in Germany. It was also,
after a very foggy start, a beautiful sunny day. I had returned from my
September holiday with O.K. (you have seen almost all the pictures from
our time in Zurich and hikes in the Black Forest) the day before and was
now using the weekend at home for catching up with things like washing,
ironing and other householdy stuff.
My sister suggested a walk, and walk we did!
We
drove a short distance to a place we knew very well, and walked from
there. Two years ago in November, we walked there, too, and it was a
beautiful sunny day then as well. You can see the pictures and compare
them to this year's pictures, if you like; click here and here
for the 2015 posts. As autumn had been doing its work on the landscape
for several more weeks back then, there were a lot more colours than
this time - but it was still a beautiful walk, still very green at the end of September.
Near this wall we put our coats on the ground and had a picnic - courtesy of my sister, who had prepared sandwiches for both of us, which was a most welcome and lovely surprise.
Eventually, we made our way back through the woods, trying out different paths from before, until we reached the parking lot again. It was early afternoon, still plenty of time to go voting.
The rest of that Sunday I spent quietly at home, getting ready for the last week of September and then October - this year, a very busy time for me work-wise. And now, a glimpse at the calendar tells me that in only 3 weeks' time, our Christmas Market will open! Work is still very busy (and will remain so until at least the end of January), but I am looking forward to all my pre-Christmas activities already.
And of course, right now I am looking forward to spending another weekend at O.K.'s - I'm off to catch the train in about 2 1/2 hours.
Maybe you have reached the post-Halloween stage where you do not wish to see another pumpkin for the next 11 months; if that is the case, do not read any further but skip this post entirely :-)
But maybe you are like me and either do not "do" Halloween, or you do, but still like pumpkins for food.
In that case, I have a recipe for you that O.K. and I very much liked a few weeks ago. It was fun to make and made for a really good meal, and - like all good recipes - can be adapted to what you prefer or have at home.
You need
- two pumpkins of the sort "Sweet Dumpling"
- minced meat and everything else to make a thick sauce Bolognese
- some grated cheese
- a hot oven
- enough time
Start by making a sauce bolognese. If you are vegetarian or do not have/want minced meat, you can make any other kind of sauce. What is important for this dish is to have something that is thick enough to work as a filling for the pumpkins.
While your Bolognese (or any other sauce) is simmering away, prepare the dumplings by cutting off the tops and hollowing them out. Not too much - you really want all that goodness inside. The seeds etc. should come out easily.
Oh, and do not forget to turn the oven on, so that it can pre-heat while you are busy with the pumpkins.
Once the sauce is ready, fill the pumpkins with as much as will go in. You may press down a bit; the pumpkin is firm enough to hold it.
Put the covers on top and stick the whole thing into the oven, which by now should be hot enough.
After about an hour, take the dish out and the lids off the pumpkins. They should look more or less like this:
Grate some cheese on top, leave the lids off and put everything back into the oven for another 10-15 minutes, until the cheese melts.
It should more or less look like this when you cut the pumpkins in half:
It may not look like a huge portion, but believe me - we were full with one half each! Of course you can eat with this whatever you feel like; salad, bread, or simply nothing (as we did).
The sweet dumpling has a very nice aroma, a bit like a mix of potato, sweet potato and chestnut. It can handle hot stuff very well, so don't be shy on the spices. You can eat it "as is"; no need to peel it.
It was our first time eating this type of pumpkin; the orange Hokkaido is very common here in shops and supermarkets, but we'd not had Sweet Dumplings before. But we liked this so much that I guess it wasn't the last time, either!
Every now and then, I remember how much I actually like Mark Twain. Most people know his name in connection with books that have become classics: Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. They were the ones I associated with Mark Twain (i.e. Samuel Clemens) all during my childhood and youth, and only much later (in my forties, really) did I learn more about Twain and his work.
Sometimes you come across questions such as "Which person (from past, present or future) would you like to have dinner with?". Mark Twain would definitely be on my guest list!
There are two more reviews of books he wrote on my blog; simply type "Mark Twain" in the search box at the top left corner of my blog, if you want to read them.
Back to "Those Extraordinary Twins": This was a typical Mark Twain story. Absurdly comical in places, but with a sad undercurrent, and of course absolutely NOT politically correct for the average reader in 2017.
The book is mentioned in this wikipedia entry here. From it (and also from the story's own foreword), we learn that it is a spin-off of another story, Pudd'nhead Wilson.
Wikipedia says that "Twain originally envisioned the characters of Luigi and Angelo Capello as conjoined twins, modeled after the late-19th century Italian conjoined twins Giovanni and Giacomo Tocci [real-life conjoined twins]. He planned for them to be the central characters of a novel to be titled Those Extraordinary Twins.
During the writing process, however, Twain realized that secondary
characters [...] were taking
a more central role in the story. More importantly, he found that the
serious tone of the story of Roxy and Tom clashed unpleasantly with the
light tone of the twins' story. As he explains in the introduction to
"Those Extraordinary Twins":
The defect turned out to be the one already spoken of – two stories
on one, a farce and a tragedy. So I pulled out the farce and left the
tragedy. This left the original team in, but only as mere names, not as
characters.
"Those Extraordinary Twins" was published in 1894. For me, it was (of course) a free ebook at Amazon's Kindle store. I enjoyed the rather short read as a good example of Twain's way to express complex themes, not forgetting his humour, but I must admit there were some bits I expect a modern reader may find offensive. Seen in the light of when it was written, and taken with a pinch of salt (as you should always do when reading Twain), it is well worth some of your time.
By late afternoon, we were back at the car. The weather was so beautiful and we knew we had to leave the next day, so we wanted to make the most of our time in this area while we could.
So after coffees at a charming wooden kiosk in the sunshine, we drove to Schluchsee, a town and lake. What a difference the wide open sky and smooth water surface made to where we had been all day, clambering up and down narrow paths between high rocks deep in the gorge!
We even rented a small boat and had a little cruise on the water - we were the last to get one that day (still talking about the 21st of September), as the man owning the boats was closing up for the evening.
This panorama picture is O.K.'s; I have his permission to use it:
Schluchsee (the lake) is a reservoir at roughly 3,000 ft (930 m) above sea level. There was a smaller glacier lake there until a dam was built between 1929 and 1932. You can find out some more facts about Schluchsee here on wikipedia.
I am going to do a "wrap up" post about our September holiday soon. For now, I haven't go the time - my suitcase wants packing, as I am going to spend the weekend and the first half of next week at O.K.'s (there are two public holidays in Germany next week!). Let me end this post with a picture from one of our hikes around Zurich; it looks rather Halloweenish, doesn't it? But those of you who have been reading my previous posts will know that it is nothing spooky at all :-)
And for a cosy Saturday afternoon, here are coffees and cakes for you!
Let's go back to our hike on the 21st of September. This post continues right where the next-to-last one ends. After the former mill, the path went round a bend and lead us to the last of the three gorges we wanted to walk in: Enge Schlucht. The name means "Narrow Gorge", and narrow it was!
Of all the hikes we had been doing, this last part was the most challenging, and after a while, we did not meet a single soul anymore, and did not wonder why - the path was very narrow, rather slippery, sometimes steep, and at times one really had to consider every single step. It slowed us down quite a bit from our usual pace, and even though I still took pictures, I really had to be careful and focused all the time and so fell back quite a bit behind O.K. The bits of the path you see in the pictures are the best bits - I did not dare to stop for pictures on the difficult stretches.
The woods grew more and more silent around us, the water became a mere trickle until it stopped altogether. You could only hear our steps crunching on the leaves and pebbles, or squelching in the mud.
The last 2 1/2 km felt "harder" than the entire hike of the day before! But it was great, and I enjoyed every moment of it.
When we finally reached the end of the gorge and came upwards "into the light", it was almost as if we'd won something!
We walked along the sunny country lane with hardly any cars coming along until we reached the parking lot again.
And the day was not yet over, as you will see in one of my next posts.
