Another German dish that I like is Schweinebraten or German roast pork. I don't eat this dish very often, and to be true I had also never made Schweinebraten myself till today. It turned out it's not very hard at all to make.

I looked up the recipe from Die echte deutsche Küche (The real German Cooking) cooking book given by my mother-in-law, but I added a few more ingredients to my liking.

Ingredients

• 600 gr pork shoulder
• 1 onion, sliced
• 2 tsp paprika powder
• 1 tsp garlic powder
• 2 tbs chicken stock powder
  
• Salt and pepper
  
• 1.5 cup white wine (or beer)
  
• 1 tbs plum mousse (optional)

What to do

• Rub the pork all over with paprika powder, chicken stock powder, garlic powder, salt, pepper and plum mousse.
• Place the onion slices at the bottom of the roasting pan.
  
• Add 1.5 cup white wine.
• Place the pork on top of the onion slices.
• Cover pan with foil and roast the pork for 1.5 hours.
• The gravy: Remove the roasted pork after 1 hour. Strain the pan juices from the roasting pan. Add stock, pepper, sugar and white wine to taste. I used Saucenbinder to thicken the gravy - Saucenbinder is like flour, so if you don't have it, just mix a bit of flour with water then pour it in the gravy.
  

Slice the roast pork and serve with anything that you like, e.g. potato dumplings, green beans, Sauerkraut, etc. You can also eat Schweinebraten slices with bread or rolls for breakfast. Very yummy!

I just would like to post some pictures of the Weihnachtsmarkt (Christmas Market) in Wiesbaden. Christmas markets are one of the things I like most about Christmas in Germany, they always look so festive and merry, even though I have to say I almost never buy anything there. The foods and products they sell in Christmas markets tend to be more expensive than they're supposed to be. But I guess people still go there anyway to enjoy the Christmasy atmosphere.

Merry-go-round! (This pic is from a Weihnachtsmarkt in Frankfurt taken last year)


Christmas markets are usually always packed with people....


and more people...


You will often find booths selling sweets...


Christmas decorations...



more Christmas decorations...



and of course Lebkuchen or gingerbreads!


And what is Christmas without a nice Christmas dinner? German Roast Duck, that is for me :)!



And loads of chocolate...?? Thanks my lovely mother-in-law, who still loves to bestow us - me, my husband and my brother-in-law with bags of sweets even though we're not children anymore...


Look at our Christmas sweet-platters from 2007!!

MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR, EVERYONE!

Last week my husband's grand uncle turned 90. I decided to make him a birthday cake - just a small cute cake, because I didn't have time to make something bigger and magnificent. To be true, I was also not in the mood of cooking, baking nor creating things - I was just too tired and stressed out by my work... I am glad that Christmas is coming, so I can have a quiet time at home for some time :).

I don't know my husband's grand uncle so well. I only know he's a real family man, still fit even though he's almost a century old and he has a small garden at the back of his house...

So, I decided to make a hamster family in a 'forest'. The hamsters look more like a cross between a fat teddy bear and a fat mouse ;-). The cake was a normal choc-chip butter cake covered with dark chocolate.

After I visited Veny's blog I got this huge craving for a plate of fried rice noodles - Kwetiaw goreng in Indonesian or Char Kway Teow in Malaysian. But as I have mentioned in my previous post ages ago, it's very hard to find fresh rice noodles here. It's been months since I last saw fresh rice noodles in the local Asian grocery stores... That's why I decided to make my own rice noodles, even though I knew it would be quite time-consuming. The recipe itself is quite simple - just rice flour, tapioca flour, water, oil and salt. You can adjust the rice flour/tapioca flour ratio to reach your ideal rice noodle texture - if you want your noodles more chewy, then add more tapioca flour and less rice flour, or if you want you noodles more ricey than chewy, then add more rice flour and less tapioca flour. I like mine in between - not too chewy, but also not too ricey.

Ingredients

• 2.5 cups rice flour
• 1.5 cups tapioca flour/cornstarch
• 7 cups water
• 2 tbs oil
• a dash of salt
• baking pan

What to do

• Mix all ingredients
• Grease baking pan with oil then place it in a steamer. Pour batter into pan (about 1-2 mm thick).
• Cover and steam for 5 minutes.
• Remove the rice sheet. Allow to cool. Roll the sheet as you roll chee cheong fun and then cut to desired width.
  
• Repeat the steaming process for the remaining batter.

I used the rice noodles to make char kway teow, the famous rice-noodle dish from Malaysia. Very tasty, even though I lacked bean sprouts and my rice noodles were quite fat...

Looks rather oily, I know! I used duck oil instead of pork oil.