The Ex Expat

23 May 2013

Yesterday, the husband requested haggis pizza for dinner, a recipe that has quickly become a favourite in our household. Background to this is that we tend to bulk buy tins of haggis when we’re in Scotland, which then languish away in our larder, and while the Grant’s stuff isn’t too bad, it’s no where near as nice as, say, a fresh Macsween’s  - but it works really well as a pizza topping! 

There’s not really much of a recipe to go with it. We use a gluten free pizza base from our local health food store, which you mix yourself and just add water and some olive oil. Once you have made the dough, roll it out on to a baking sheet and spread a tube of tomato puree on top with the back of a spoon. Sprinkle over aprox. 200g of grated cheese (we’re really lazy and tend to buy a bag of ready grated “pizza cheese”). Then heat up the tinned haggis in the microwave for 5 minutes, spread on top of your pizza, and bake in the oven according to instructions (ours was 20 minutes at 225°C). 

And enjoy! Turns out the boy is a big fan of haggis too. Good wee Scottish lad - in the mornings he asks for porridge :) By the way, we did have big bowls of salad to go with the pizza, which balanced out the lack of vegetables a bit. 

7 May 2013

Never mind the endless varieties of cheese and cold meats you can get here in Germany for your sandwiches, sometimes only good old beans on toast will do. Unfortunately, they’re not easy to come by unless you want to pay out a fortune in the foreign food section at the department store down town.

Thank goodness for our local discounter supermarket and it’s themed weeks. You can imagine the baked beans binge buying that goes on in our household when the British Week comes about. Happy faces all round :-)

18 April 2013

One of my favourite things about living in Germany, is the Spargel Saison every Spring, where the whole country goes mad about white asparagus (I wrote about it in more length last year). 

So I was really happy to see this advertisement on the way to work the other day:

You can find some tips on how to cook the perfect Spargel in my previous post. Yum yum.

7 March 2013

You can take the girl out of Scotland, but you can’t take Scotland out of the girl. I admit to liking a bit of continental breakfast now and then, be it a bowl of muesli or an open cheese sandwich, but I couldn’t live without my beloved porridge. You can’t get porridge oats here in Berlin, so I mix regular oats with oatmeal to get a more creamy consistency (I use 2 tablespoons oats and 1 tablespoon oatmeal).

Edinburgh has the most fabulous of food stalls at the Farmer’s Market - a porridge bar! My favourites were the cranachan, which was raspberries and cream with toasted oats, and just plain old whisky and honey. That got me thinking about creating my own porridge bar menu here in Berlin, and here’s four different toppings I came up with:

A handful or two of fresh blueberries and a generous drizzle of maple syrup.

Half a sliced banana and a handful of chopped walnuts.

Half a chopped pear and a generous sprinkling of ground cinnamon.

A splash of cream and shavings of your favourite chocolate (I used up some milk chocolate here that was waiting to be eaten^^)

2 March 2013

The past week in snapshots according to my iPhone: 

Beautiful sunset on the flight back from Edinburgh.

Had to take the boy to work with me one day - thank goodness for the digital babysitter!

Trying out some new recipes from all the UK magazines I bought on my Edinburgh trip. 

Graffiti love message in Berlin Kreuzberg.

Learning how to make a Viking beard.

First signs of Spring at last!