1st German meal

Time came to start trying the German foods I brought over. I started by boiling potatoes and then started to make a sauce for it, just your traditional brown sauce in principle but I put some onions and quite a lot of mushrooms in there, I thought I was overdoing it with the mushrooms but it was actually really good. Then I went on to fry the first bit of the German foods, Cowgirl steaks they were called, I think. Really tasty, good texture and just the right amount of spices. I fried up the rest of the mushrooms to make company for them.

My friend wanted the broccoli boiled, and that's simple enough, so I put it boiling and fried up the "tofu pizza", as odd as it sounded. Two slices of spiced tofu, they were pretty good also but didn't really resemble pizza in any way. I decorated that with the Plamil egg-free mayonnaise. Best dinner I've had in a while, and there's tons of the German foods left. :-)

Bonn, Germany

Well, I was lucky enough to get to attend a conference in Bonn, Germany just now. Bonn was the capital of West Germany during the split time, but it's a relatively small and quiet city. A wonderful place to just walk around. It's also along the river Rhine, there are boat cruises on the river (we went on one on the Poseidon, there was practically nothing for a vegan to eat) and the scenes were lovely. It's also great fun to walk along the riverside, in the evening lots of people gather there, put in camp fires or have small or big parties, live music, or just play around in whatever way they might feel like.

As for food, German supermarkets are packed with meat alternatives, especially fake sausages, since the Germans like to eat sausages. I quite like the hemp sausage, I already had tried them in Finland but they are German and much more common (and cheaper) over there. As for restaurants, that's a more difficult thing. There are usually some vegetarian dishes in the restaurants in Bonn, but not a lot, and they're generally not vegan. Of course there are falafel places all over the city, so you can have a quick vegan meal with that. And then there's one restaurant that's a buffet where you pay by the weight of the plate, I think it was completely vegetarian and they had marked the vegan things with a green dot. I think about 75% of foods were vegan. The place is called Cassius Garten and is located on Maximilianstraße, very close to the main railway station. Well, practically everything in Bonn seemed to be pretty close to the main railway station. They even have a web page.

On my way back I visited Frankfurt very briefly, just for a few hours. I asked the tourist information for vegetarian restaurants near the main railway station, but apparently there are none. I don't know how far they count "in der Nähe" though, so if you have more time in Frankfurt you can probably find such places. As for me I went off to an Indian restaurant near the station then, they did perfectly fine vegan food also. Strangely it seemed the neighbourhood around Frankfurt Hbf was filled with sex shops, one right next to the other. It's also a much bigger city and doesn't have the charm of Bonn.

Brownies... or something

I saw a raw brownie recipe a few days ago in Dreamy's blog, and having nothing else to eat I decided I might give it a try. So, I went through the ingredient listing. "Do I have walnuts? No. Dates? No. Carob? No. But hey, I have water!" Thus reassured it was possible due to having one of the required ingredients, I set out to look for alternatives for the few missing pieces. :-)

I had some of the dried, salted beans (I think they're broad beans) that they sell in shops in China, not nearly the suggested 1.5 dl to replace the walnuts in the recipe, but they still were a starting point. Then I added some pistachios, didn't have a lot of those either but at least some. And raisins to replace the dates. So on to the grinding and it looked pretty good already. I even had cocoa powder which should replace the carob quite nicely, and that and the actual correct ingredient, water, made a lovely mixture. Of course I never measure anything when cooking, that's just me, and this time I think there might have been too much water for it never really dried down but had to be eaten with a spoon. Actually after being in the fridge for a while the taste as well as the looks reminded me of mämmi. Anyway, it was quite tasty, so thanks for the recipe that I so carefully followed, heheh. :-P