Category: Food

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Saturday/ the Christmas market 🎄

Hey, on this winter solstice day I made it to the Christmas market at Römerberg. It was cold and raining, though, and I did not stay very long.
(It did seem that the inclement weather increased the glühwein sales volumes!)

Pictures:
Entrance hall to Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof (main train station). There was a strong of police presence at the station. Hauptbahnhof station looked a little more ragged and rundown from the last time I saw it— especially the floors leading to the U4 & U5 subway lines’ platforms.
Poster for Messe Frankfurt (exhibition center) close by Hauptbahnhof station.
It’s two stops on the U5 subway line (turquoise train car) from Hauptbahnhof station to Römer/ Dom station to where the Christmas market is.  The U5 is getting a 2.7 km (1.7 mi) extension that will open in 2027.
Last picture: the S9 regional train (red train car) arriving to take me back from Hauptbahnhof station to Flughafen (airport) station where my hotel is, a 14-minute ride.

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Friday/ beers at Chuck’s 🍻

Happy Friday.
The five amigos got together at Chuck’s Hop Shop in Central District for a beer and a bite to eat from the food truck outside.

I’m in line inside to procure a beverage from the 50 or so listed on the screens by the counter. The non-alcohol Bitburger pilsner they had last time was not listed tonight, and I got the ‘Ladd & Lass : *Fresh Hop* West Coast IPA’ instead, even though it has 6.5% alc/vol.
It was Friday night after all, so why not have a *real* beer? 
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Tuesday/ Oktoberfest has started 🍻

Even at Oktoberfest— arguably the world’s most famous ode to alcohol— alcohol-free beer is on the menu. All but two of the 18 large tents at the festival offer the drink through the celebration’s 16 days.
The sober drink will cost drinkers the same as an alcoholic beer- between 13.60 and 15.30 euros ($15.12 and $17.01) for a 1-liter mug (33 fluid ounces) – but save them from a hangover.
– Stefanie Dazio writing for The Associated Press

Oktoberfest started on Saturday in Munich, Bavaria’s capital.

Here come the beers!
Seven of those giant 1-liter mugs in each hand, if I count them correctly.
[Photo by Karl-Josef Hildenbrand/dpa, from Süddeutsche Zeitung online]
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Friday/ a widget in my beer 🍻

Happy Friday.
I cracked open one of my Guinness beers tonight.
I knew, more or less, what the little ball inside my can of Guinness beer was for, but thought I’d ask Chat GPT anyway. 

Hmm .. ChatGPT Is very enthusiastic about the widget (‘a brilliant solution’), making me suspect that it had lifted this answer in its entirety from the Guinness website.
That’s all right, though— at least I learned that the little ball is called a ‘widget’, and that it has nitrogen in.
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Thursday/ a beer run 🍻

Lately, I have had a hard time finding my favorite non-alcoholic beer in stores (Beck’s from Germany).
Below are three other beers I am trying out, now.

Here’s my quick take on each of these:
Guinness 0 A non-alcoholic beer striving for the iconic taste of Guinness Draught, rich and creamy with a velvety finish. It’s not ‘as good’ as the ‘real’ Guinness Draft, but I can get used to it.
Fremont Non-alcoholic IPA From Fremont Brewery here in Seattle. Florals with orange and lemon followed by some guava, grassy, honey and other sweet aromatics. Gentle sweetness and lightly bitter in light body. (Description from their website). I like it.
Stella Artois Liberté The non-alcoholic version of Stella. Water, barley malt, cane sugar, natural flavors and hops. The closest as a replacement for Beck’s non-alcoholic.
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Sunday/ positron beer ⚗️

A positron is the antiparticle of an electron.
It has all the properties of an electron except for the polarity of the electrical charge, which is positive. Therefore, a positron can simply be considered an electron having positive unit electrical charge.
– sciencedirect.com

I left home this afternoon with an empty and dirty car, and returned with a clean car— with beer in the trunk ☺️.
( I stopped at Brown Bear Car Wash and the Total Wine store in Magnolia ).

These is a plethora of beers and wines on the shelves at Total Wine. Here are some of my favorite beer labels.

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Wednesday/ here’s the beer 🍻

Happy Wednesday.
Four amigos played a little pickleball late this morning, and afterwards we went for a beer and a bite in Columbia City.

This beer truck was parked across the street.
Some office workers are making it a long weekend, with the Fourth of July holiday falling on a Thursday this year.

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Friday/ a mystical lion 🦁

Happy Friday.
Break open a cold one: a beer, a cocktail, an orange juice, a lemonade.

My beer from Jamjuree Thai restaurant tonight. The golden mystical lion on the Singha beer label was inspired by one of the four great lions in Thai literature. The lion is the the king of the legendary Himmapan Forest.
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Sunday/ Coquimbe, Chile 🇨🇱

We arrived at the port city of Coquimbo this morning.
Our excursion today was a bus ride along the shoreline into the neighboring town of La Serena, followed by a drive inland to the commune of Vicuña (pop. 25,000).

The Monumental Lighthouse of La Serena (Faro Monumental de La Serena) is located on the beach at the Avenida del Mar of La Serena. It was built between 1950 and 1951 at the request of President Gabriel González Videla.
The beautiful, parched landscape and cactuses, as seen from our bus on Route 41 on the way to Vicuña.
Lush green vineyards in the Elqui Valley.
We stopped by a pisco distillery on the way to Vicuña . Here is my sample of pisco sour, made from distilled muscatel grapes and lemon juice. Pisco is the national drink of Peru, but a version of it is made in Chile as well.
Here is the municipal theater house in Vicuña.
We were one of four buses full of cruise ship tourists had lunch at this restaurant. We had an empanada appetizer, followed by a large steak with rice and tomato salad, and papaya for dessert. Oh, and they served pisco and original Coca-Cola for drinks.
Back in Coquimbo, for our final stop at a little tourist market next to this church.
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Sunday/ a jaunt to U-district 🚇

Sunday is a good day to make a run up to U-district to check out the used book-stores and music stores (yes, they still sell CDs there).

I never did make it to the city of Xi’an (capital of Shaanxi Province in central China) when I was working there, to see the terracotta warriors.
Here is the cool window display, though, of Taste of Xi’an on University Way. One of their signature dishes is called paomo: a broth that we used is slow cooked with lamb, beef bones and whole chicken more than 10 hours every day.
Supreme, purveyor of New York-style pizza, also on University Way.
(New York–style pizza is pizza made with a characteristically large hand-tossed thin crust, often sold in wide slices to go).
A cosmetics store with Japanese brands, and a burger joint across the street.
University Way is in decent shape without too much damage, but man! some of the street blocks have back alleys that look downright awful (trash and graffiti).
The Varsity Theatre is in the same block that sits on the light rail U-district station.
Right behind it, the construction of a new 13-story office block with retail space is underway.
Not a pretty sight. This trashed entrance and empty space in a prime location, on the corner of 45th Street and University Way. It used to have a Bartell drug store inside. Evidently the Bartell store could not make enough profit even after being taken over by Rite Aid Corporation .. but I wonder how much effort Rite Aid really put in to keep the store afloat.
Here’s the northbound train at U-district station. Just a minute later the southbound train on the opposite track arrived and took me back to Capitol Hill.
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Thursday/ beskuit 🍪

I don’t always drink beer but when I do, I prefer Dos Equis
– From the Dow Equis beer commercial (and meme for it)

I don’t always bake, but when I do, I bake beskuit*
*’Rusks’ in English— made from dough, broken or cut into chunks or slices after baking, and then slowly dried in an oven.

I was tired of buying expensive biscotti at the store (for my coffee in the morning), and so I baked a batch of South African beskuit.

My ingredients for the dough: self-raising flour, buttermilk, a little whole milk, sugar (not too much), canola oil (instead of butter), eggs, a little baking powder and salt, and bran flakes (for a little fiber).
The dough is baked at 350 °F for one hour, taken out, cut up in chunks and put back in for 5-6 hours at 250 °F (with the oven door left open by a crack) to dry the pieces out.
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Monday/ at the roastery ☕️

Here’s the scene at the Starbucks Reserve Roastery on Pike street.
We didn’t get to see the roasted coffee beans spill from the roasting barrel into the giant cooling pan, but the place was packed with tourists and locals (a guy wearing a shirt with an Amazon Web Services logo on, for example).

Coffees from Sumatra, Malawi and Viet Nam were being brewed, and we picked Malawi. (My friends that are visiting Seattle, are from South Africa).

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Tuesday/ ramen 🍜

Here is a ramen dinner that we had.  The broth & noodles are garnished with shredded salad and spices.  The other toppings are pork, nori (seaweed) and menma (fermented bamboo shoot).

*A Japanese noodle dish made by serving Chinese-style wheat noodles in a broth with several toppings. I believe it is fair to say it is Japanese comfort food.

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Saturday/ eat mostly plants 🥦

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
– Advice that journalist and activist Michael Pollin offers in his 2008 book ‘In Defense Of Food’.

I tried the black bean vegetarian burger at Capitol Hill Elysian Brewing tonight.
It was tasty and light—and I will definitely order it again.
The beer is a Superfuzz Blood Orange Pale Ale, 5.6% ABV.
The green salad I had with it had slices of watermelon radish in: great to look at, and great to eat.

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Friday/ have a beer 🍺

Happy Friday.
It’s Memorial Day weekend, the unofficial start of summer here in the US.
It’s also the end of Seattle Beer Week, and The Seattle Times reports that Seattle is a city full of beer snobs.
Cheers!

Some 56% of Seattle beer drinkers do not drink any of the major top ten brands (top ten among Seattle beer drinkers) regularly. So they steer clear of Coors Light, Bud Light, Corona Extra and all that jazz.
Bring on the likes of Georgetown’s Bodhizafa American IPA and Space Dust IPA by Elysian Brewing Company. Life is too short for big-box diluted beer.
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Saturday/ at the Kaufhaus 🧸

You talk like Marlene Dietrich
And you dance like Zizi Jeanmaire
Your clothes are all made by Balmain
And there’s diamonds and pearls in your hair, yes, there are ..
– From ‘Where Do You Go To My Lovely’ by Peter Sarstedt (1969)

It was crowded on the streets and in the stores today.
As Easter weekend goes, Friday was a Sunday (and German stores close on Sundays), today is Saturday, with tomorrow Sunday— and Monday another Sunday.
The highlight of my day was to rub shoulders with Berlin’s upper crust at KaDeWe.
KaDeWe is Kaufhaus Des Westens, ‘Department Store of the West’, second in size only to Harrods in London.

The eateries on the top floor include an oyster bar— and I’m sure I would have found caviar if I looked for it.

Businessman Adolf Jandorf opened this store in 1907. The KaDeWe abbreviation was used from the start. With over 60,000 square meters (650,000 sq ft) of retail space and more than 380,000 articles available, KaDeWe is the second-largest department store in Europe, after Harrods in London. It attracts 40,000 to 50,000 visitors every day. [Information from Wikipedia]
The escalators in the middle of the store.
Balmain is French fashion designer Pierre Balmain: founder of leading post-war fashion house Balmain. (He died in Paris in 1982). Marie-Claire in Peter Sarstedt’s famous 1969 song wore clothes that were ‘all made by Balmain’.
These shirts and jackets go for oh, $900 or $1,000 apiece. Kind of safe to say that I will never wear these, but who’s to say? Maybe I will— after I had won the Powerball or Mega Millions lottery.
These beautiful long-eared rabbits are very plush and very, very soft to the touch. Maybe I should have gotten one.
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Sunday/ ‘no need to despair’ 🍺

My favorite African beer Windhoek Light⁠— a 2% alcohol beer from Namibia Breweries⁠— is not available in stores. Its production has been temporarily discontinued.

Says the Namibia Breweries website: ‘Consumers looking for a substitute need not despair, as NBL will continue to offer its other low- and non-alcoholic beverage products‘.

Windhoek Draft beer (4% alc. by volume) from Namibia Breweries is the closest substitute to Windhoek Light.
The brewery was founded in 1920 when Carl List and Hermann Ohlthaver acquired four small breweries with financial difficulties. The breweries were merged under the name South West Breweries Limited (SWB).
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Thursday/ ready to braai 🔥🥩

Summer is winding down⁠— officially over, of course⁠— here in South Africa, but the grocery stores still have their ‘Ready to Braai’ displays up. Any time of year is good for a braai*.

*braai
transitive verb
South African for grilling— especially meat, boerewors (sausage), and also  veggies and tomato-and-cheese sandwiches.
noun
The South African equivalent of an American barbecue.