Completely forgot to mention food in the bits-and-pieces post, but that was plenty long already and the food deserves a post of its own anyway (yum, German food!) Now I need tags rather than categories, because this is the third post about the Kirchentag and they’re all in different places.

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Is plomeek soup made with

• a chunk of plomeek, like pumpkin soup?
• a plomeek, like cauliflower soup?
• a bunch of plomeeks, like carrot soup?
• a bunch of plomeek, like sorrel soup?
• a couple of plomeeks, like onion soup?
• a pound of plomeeks, like lentil soup?
• a pound of plomeek, like spinach soup?

[ETA:

• some different plomeek, like fish soup?
• some different plomeeks, like vegetable soup?
• ingredients prepared in the plomeek style, like julienne soup?
• something in it that looks like (a/the) plomeek, like alphabet soup?

Or even (though I don’t think so) made in honour of someone called Plomeek, like Jenny Lind soup?]

Googling doesn’t give much information, except that the plomeek soup on the set of one particular episode of Star Trek was actually chicken soup. Which is soup made from, or with, particular parts of a chicken, except in Korea where it’s soup with a chicken in it (like vermicelli soup).

Look what we found in the organic supermarket flour:

Linseed, with a side order of sunflower seeds. A girl found the first few and alerted me, so I could sift the flour before making fruit and nut prosphora willy-nilly. I didn’t tell the supermarket —in order not to cause them to recall it and waste a lot of good food— but apparently someone else did because the shelf is now ominously empty. In New Zealand, according to my friend who lives there, it would have been marked down with a warning.

Autumn seems the perfect time for English cooking. Last Sunday my other half made perfect roast beef, this Sunday I made a pork pie.

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I promise I’ll stop spamming now…

But this was too strange to pass up, especially at 50 cents. It tasted like energy drink, so I let someone else drink it.

Today in the supermarket I overheard a young man, in his early twenties by the look of him, saying to his friends “I ate an apple the other day, for the first time in my life”.

I can imagine that people can grow to twenty without eating specific foods: growing up in a vegetarian family, for instance, and never tasting meat until adulthood if at all. Or growing up Jewish or Muslim and never trying pork. And many a friend of our daughters has had her first taste of Indonesian food, home-baked bread, artichokes, venison, squid, seitan, pizza made from scratch rather than being bought frozen, or even watermelon —all things we don’t think particularly exotic or outrageous— in our house. But apples! I buy them practically by the bushel (do apples come in bushels?) because the girls can go through a kilo in one single day.

Aren’t apples a childhood staple? Didn’t he ever get apple sauce with a children’s menu when he was small? Or did he, until now, only know bottled apple sauce and vaguely realise that apples are what it’s made of, as most people know bread is made from flour but don’t know what to do when faced with actual flour?

Unfortunately I didn’t catch what he thought of the apple. I hope he liked it.

Earlier this week I made Joy the Baker’s easy cinnamon roll muffins. I should have been alerted when she said

As much as I love the little devils (and I hate to say this) I hate to bake them. The problem is not the sweet yeast dough or the rolling or the slicing. I simply have no patience for the waiting that is required of me during the proofing, rolling, slicing and proofing again process. I realize this is totally unreasonable, but it’s just the truth.

I rarely mind waiting for bread dough, in fact only when I realise at 10 pm that there’s no bread in the house for the girls to take to school the following morning. But I was intrigued —I bake a lot of different cupcake-like objects, after all— so I tried.

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After the Omnivore’s Hundred, Very Good Taste is at it again. I score a whopping 32, due to having spent two Christmases in England (one with a family who did all the traditional things, one with friends) and being in an international Orthodox parish, which takes care of all of Eastern Europe.

Here’s what to do:

1. Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.
2. Bold all the items you’ve tasted.
3. Place an asterisk after all the items you’ve cooked/prepared.
4. Optional: Cross out anything you never want to try, or add an exclamation mark after anything your really want to try.

You’re also welcome to post a link to your version of the list at www.verygoodtaste.co.uk.

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A friend of ours moved to Germany, just across the border. He can still come to church and sing in the choir: there are people in the parish who live in the Netherlands but are farther away.

His house has an orchard. Last year he had a glut of plums and brought bags full to choir practice to give to whoever wanted them (and I had a lot of yummy plum jam!) and this year it was apples.

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