Vegan Strawberry Muffins

I just can't stop it. I had to bake muffins again. But since strawberries are nearing their season's end I thought it might be a good idea to try them in muffins before they are gone.

I found an interesting vegan recipe on http://www.eatmedelicious.com/ (http://www.eatmedelicious.com/2009/06/strawberry-lemon-sunflower-seed-muffins.html).

I hadn't left any paper muffin cups so I used bamboo cups instead.

We haven't tried them yet, but they sure look delicious:

Leek & Butter bean Gratin

I thought I should share a nice and quick recipe by which you can use up any stale bread you have in your kitchen. The original is from the BBC Good Food webpage (http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/8090/leek-butter-bean-and-chorizo-gratin) but since it used chorizo I veganized it and it was still perfectly yummie. I used left-over baguette and drizzled some olive oil on top, but otherwise followed the recipe (well, I doubled the amount of beans and of course skipped the sausage part). It looks a bit colourless but it's simplicity and time effectiveness compensates for everything :) and next time I could add some more colourful ingredients like red bell pepper or the like.

Music Installation with Shaolin Monks in London

Should you be in London and are interested in Chinese culture and/or contemporary musical art have a look at this show. It's kinda weird but very interesting.

And now some archaeology from our stay in Switzerland

I know, I know, you all waited desparately for some pics about the archaeology we saw. After all I couldn't be really satisfied by some replicas in a hotel room now, could I?

So here they are, wonderful sites, artefacts, and museums.


The Laténium in Neuchâtel is a very modern and didactically well presented museum. With many replicas and play-around-thingies it is not a museum I am normally looking forward to visit, but it was absolutely worth seeing. The best object was the little venus figurine from the Upper Palaeolithic site of Monruz. It is made of black jet and only 1.6 cm high with a hole drilled in, so it was maybe used as a pendant.

We didn't see a megalithic tomb, however the megalithic alignement in Clendy, Yverdons-les-Bains was impressive, too:

Bone pendants, typical for the late Cortaillod (Middle Neolithic) culture, found in a lacustrine village near Yverdon-les-Bains:

And a Middle Neolithic pot:

An Iron Age wooden idol:

Gallo-Roman boats in the Musée d'Yverdon et Région:

Antrhopomorphic menhir from Bevaix in the Laténium museum:

Post-modern installation in the ice-age section of the Laténium:

The Palaeolithic section of the Laténium (where you can find the Monruz venus):

Nice poster with an antique motif:

And the lake dweller song:

True emancipation in the age of the lake dwellers, men are weaving, women are doing...yeah what exactly are they doing??

Switzerland apart from our hotel

The old tower of Neuchâtel castle, high above the town:

Inside the cathedral:

Downtown Yverdon:

Modern Art:

And to get you into the right mood for the things to come, the (rough) location of the Cortaillod type-site, the lake shore in Petit-Cortaillod:

Switzerland

Time flies indeed. All along I wanted to post a couple of pictures from our stay in Switzerland, but well, you know ...

Now I quickly put some up, so you can see that we really had a beautiful, albite short weekend at Lake Neuchâtel. First of all our hotel, the Palafitte near Neuchâtel, was really great. It is built as a pile dwelling, but we had a pavillion on the shore which left some money to eat lovely crêpes and galettes.

The interior was impressive, a spacious bathroom,


a working area, big LCD TV, and an addictive espresso machine.


Best of all, to my greatest surprise, they had a case with replicas from archaeological finds. Now how cool is this? Can an archaeologist have a nicer lookout while making their espresso? I guess not.


I don't have a photo of the lake view terrace (no it has nothing to do with the eponymous movie) and I wished I could have spent more time just sitting in the sun, reading the odd potboiler. But well, maybe some other time....

Mom-alone-at-home-food

Today is Mom-alone-at-home-day. I didn't want to cook, but I was hungry, so I boiled some pasta, threw wild rocket, spring onions, a teaspoon full of cashew butter and two teaspoons full of chili paste together. Turned out a bit hot, but for a 10-min-meal you can't complain.

Speyer and the Vikings - again

I decided to go and see the Viking exhibition in Speyer one last time. Since you can't take any photos I wanted to burn an image of the most beautiful pieces into my mind. So we arrived at a cloudy day. Here is a glimspe of the cathedral's towers through the trees.



Just across the cathedral's square is the Historical Museum of Speyer.

Well, I can't show you Viking age artefacts, but we also went into the general exhibiton and here I finally could bring my camera to good use.

Here is a nice piece of a pot from the La Hoguette group. This group is interesting because it too used pointed-based vessels so uncommon for the Linear Band Keramik (LBK) culture and they formed the Western frontier to the incoming LBK. It was under a megalithic grave that they found this type of pottery for the first time. It also has very early dates (at least as old as LBK or older) and a lithic tradition that is clearly local and mesolithic. That's why I love this culture group. They used crushed bones as temper for their pottery and that's why I don't love 'em too much. Interestingly there was pottery from a megalithic grave in England with bone tempered pottery, too.




a whole pot would have looked similar to this one:

Lüning et al. 1998

The dots represent sites with finds from the La Hoguette group; The shadowd areas are the LBK culture and the Cardial group, respectively.

http://www.archaeologie.bl.ch/Pages/Museum/auston/auston_2_2.jpg

Ok I, I get the message, you are slightly bored by my 'very interesting' artefacts, so I just quickly show you some very beautiful items.

A lided container (early bell beaker culture) from Ludwigshafen-Mundenheim:

The famous golden hat from Schifferstadt:

An Iron Age bangle from Rodenbach (460-400 BCE) :

Wine harvesting with Bacchus, a scene from a Jupiter column from Roman Speyer:

And a bottle of Roman wine, vintage AD 325:

On our way back to the car park, I saw a playground with a brilliant - no, not a merry-go-round but a giant ant. A superb method to avoid insectiphobia in children:

And what for dinner? A caramelised onion and lentil wellington from uk-tv food (http://uktv.co.uk/food/recipe/aid/516620). Good to prepare and then just pushed into the oven. In 20 min dinner was on the table together with new savoy cabbage and carrot veggies and a wild rocket salad. Yeah, I know, the photo doesn't look very nice. I took when it was still on the baking sheet fresh from the oven. But believe me it was really really tasty.

The merry month of May or the dreaded asparagus time of the year

My friends probably know, I'm not a friend of asparagus even less white asparagus that is so common in Germany.

But well, M is a big fan and once in a while I have to give in and cook pancakes with white asparagus and sauce hollandaise. While white asparagus is nasty in itself, in combination with a fatty and eggy sauce it is nearly unbearable. However, on my way to veganism, I choose to not only replace the pancakes with oatmilk pancakes but also try a vegan hollandaise. I used a recipe from vegetarian times (http://www.vegetariantimes.com), a well-known American journal for vegetarian lifestyle and made some adjustments to give it the taste my usual hollandaise would have.

I didn't tell M and he loved it. He said 'mhhh your sauce is really great today' and swished the pot clean with a last bit of a pancake. Well, see, it works without animal (dead or tortured) involvement.

And here is a photo of completely vegan 'pancakes with white asparagus and sauce hollandaise':

I am just wondering whether I let my unknowing spouse die in ignorance or whether I should tell him that he ate (and liked!) something very healthy today.

Baking Frenzy

There is probably something I miss in life, since lately I calm down my agitated melancholia by going into the kitchen und yanking out muffin and cake tins. Well no matter what the deeper meaning behind this outlandish behaviour is, P and C are obviously enjoying it or rather the result thereof, like blueberry muffins

or banana bread.

Unfortunately there was no time to get the camera ready. It was gone too fast. R.I.P. banana bread.

I guess I will try to make a lemon bund cake tomorrow.

Forgetfulness is good for creativity

Today, I came home late from my Japanese class. On my way home I was pondering what my spouse, who was also late because of a fitness class, would have for dinner today. Did he go to the uni cafeteria? Did he stop over at the Chinese fast food shop? Or will he buy Döner from our village's only Döner fast food? And then it hit me! I promised to unfreeze the leftover quiche I made him a couple of weeks ago and heat it up till he would arrive. A glance at my watch: 20 min left till he comes home. Oh my god, why am I so unmindful und forgetting things all the time. It was not because he doesn't deserve me cooking for him, although being true, this is a completely different chapter.

Well, there is a positive side to everything in life. So I made one of my ingenious scrap-together-everything-from-the-fridge-apart-from-the-mouldy-thingies recipes.

And here it is: pasta with walnut chilli:

It was darn good. I chopped some onions and fried them. Usually I add soy chilli, but of course, I didn't have any at home, so I used chopped walnuts and fried them, too. Tomato passata, corn kernels, peas, fresh spinach leaves, and some spices and voilà, a perfect chili. I thought it much better than with soy chilli, so walnuts will be my favourite meat substitute in chilli from now on.

My first vegan cookies and some more Rome pictures

We tried to locate some bear's garlic today, but the spot we went to years ago didn't yield any of it. Everything changed so much. We found lots of wild violets, wood anemone, and wild carrots, but the bear's garlic stayed alusive. So we went home slightly frustrated and I spontaneously decided to make vegan cookies. And here they are, cinnamon-and-chocolate-chip-cookies:

M didn't like them too much because they weren't sweet enough, but I thought they were pretty good, soft and chewy on the inside and just sweet enough without being too sugary.

But I wanted to show you some more photos from Rome. Let me show you some photos from the forum and palatine hill.

A spinx on the palatine hill:

The museo palatino hosts a very nice exhibiton on the Iron Age past of the Palatine Hill (roughly the 9th century BC). Here is the cremation urn which was found under the house of Livia. It contained the cremated remains of a ca. 20 years old woman with miniature grave goods. Have a look at the lid, which is shaped like the roof of a house:

There were also fantastically preserved wall paintings from the 1st century AD. They are from the domus transitoria, which was Nero's palace at the time being:

This is from the same time period, but I don't remember whether it is also from Nero's palace:

Here, Apollo and Hercules are quarreling about who will keep the Delphian tripod; this wall relief is from the Augustian period (well, I can tell you this much: Zeus had a stop to their quarreling and the tripod remained in Delphi):

And the latest fashion in hats:

The palace of Domitian:

And a fountain in the backyard of Domitian's palace:

And a look at the forum: