Dinner

Tuncay knows the awesomest restaurants in DC. We knew the Ethiopian restaurant from a previous visit, and this time he took us to a Thai restaurant.



It was like being in Thailand, maybe even better. These first two pictures are the appetizers: chicken salad and cucumber soup.

Then another four dishes were served:



Beef salad.



Fish.



And pumpkin curry. I am missing a picture of the slow cooked pork. Each dish was simply awesome.



As a "filler" there was some Pad Thai, and for dessert sticky rice with mango.

Highly recommended: Thai X-ing in Washington DC.

Cooking with Ellen

We spent last Sunday hanging out at Hilvaria Studio's, not only taking (photos of) a Tai Chi lesson, but also preparing Sunday night's dinner with Ellen.

Afghan Foodz

Being in a larger city means the choice of a wide variety cuisines. We opted for Afghan food for dinner. We had three kinds of appetizers, one of them pictured above, and then shared three different entrees:



one dish with pumpkin, which was extraordinarily good, one with eggplant which was just good...



... and one with lamb, cinnamon, raisins and carrots which was outstanding.



A big city certainly has its advantages.

Healthy

After a healthy bike ride admiring the wild life of Saarland...

(what kind of strange ducks are these?)

(pigeon hole principle!)



... I ate no pork, but only veggies.

Abrupt End of Pasta Week

We were planning to do soup and pasta, but we ate too much bread with this pumpkin soup.

Curry

We took James' eggplant curry recipe and ran with it.

Risotto and Pasta

Not only is it moules season, it's also Kürbis season. Above, a variant of our usual risotto with squash: lemon zest and juice instead of pancetta. Almost feels like it is summer again!



We also ate the butternut squash with courgette in a pasta with orange juice (very good but somehow not pictured). In between we ate wonderfully juicy pieces of bacon in this pasta carbonara.

Pumpkin Risotto

As we only used half of the mystery ingredient earlier, we had plenty left over to make a risotto.

Finally... Mystery Food with Rice

Pasta and Veggies

Yum.

More Risotto and Strudel

Pumpkin Risotto

Also, we signed our lease today. We will move in a little more than two weeks from now.

Kurbis-risotto in Berlin

Not as good as at home.

Groceries

We are delighted to show you some of our groceries (grosseries?) and grocery opportunities now that we live in Europe.

Yesterday:



Rabbit! From the supermarket! And it was even packed and everything!



It was advertised as "lapin entier", and that was not false advertising either: on top we can see the little bugger's liver, we dug up the lungs and heart from its chest, and even its tongue was still present!



This was the result: Rabbit in a sauce of mustard and cacao from our new cookbook "Creole". To be honest, a little disappointing --- I think this dish may actually work much better with just mustard and taragon, and no cacao.



The potatoes on the side were great as usual.

Today:



Yes, no meat! Just a 244 pound pumpkin for only 329.73 euros!



I did not see how I could take this with me on my bike, so I settled for a rainbow trout instead. After firing up the barbecue, this was the result:



As a side dish, we made some couscous with eggplant, yellow bell pepper, hazelnuts and herbs and spices, which turned out really well as well.

Foodz from the Roadz

For our last day in Guanxi Province, we decided to put our rental car to good use, and drove from Yangshuo all the way to Pingan, and then back to Guilin. In Pingan we only had time for lunch and quick look around, which was fine because it was raining.



This is one a specialty of Pingan: Bamboo rice. The rice is roasted inside a bamboo container, as pictured in the previous post (second photo).



And one can also put fish in the bamboo container, instead of rice.



And these are wild leeks with egg.

Lunch two days earlier. Overture.



Our lunch was taken from these containers. Meet Beer Fish:



We will always remember you like this:



Yum-o!

We also had some pumpkin:



This concludes the better and more interesting foodz from our trip.

Ellen Eats

A lot! Here are some of the foodz Ellen enjoyed whilst visiting, and this is not an exhaustive list. I'll add a link to Ellen's blog as soon as she makes one (or two) posts about her visit here. Also still to come: Ellen and F take a cooking class and pictures of a visit to the Great Wall at Jiankou.



Duck at Guo Lin (we also had duck at Quanjude, but I did not take pictures there).





Rural little potz with foodz, also at Guo Lin.



Carnival foodz: pumpkin cakez, also Guo Lin.



And finally duck liver at Guo Lin.

Then with Amanda we went to our favorite Xinjiang restaurant.



These are Xinjiang "Dim Sum". (Anke is the one in the back of photo wearing the "Toet toet beng beng, Peppie en Kokkie"-shirt.



Lamb.



And more lamb ("toet toet beng beng!").



Also some vegetables (toons and walnuts).

Finally then, the lunch we had before we climbed the mountains towards the Great Wall: