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So, yeah, I decided to come up with my own yummy, vegetarian version. Today was the first test run with garlic (always good) and sundried tomatoes (also always good and one of Hubby’s faves; also, they kinda look like bacon). It went over really well! I don’t envy my colleagues, though, because I had no parsley to fight the garlic-stench…

The recipe is pretty easy. The only “hard” part about this dish is the technique – and for some, it might be hard to leave out the bacon. I hear it’s tasty and much-loved. Well, if you want, you can make it with bacon any day of the week. Just chuck it into a little less oil than this recipe says instead of the garlic and tomatoes, and you’re good to go. Heck, you could even simply ADD some bacon to the garlic and tomatoes. Go crazy, by all means! But if you want to do this the vegetarian way, just trust me and go with garlic and sundried tomatoes solo. It’s gooooood! And less caloric! And more yummy! If you’re me, that is. Because… I’ll just go ahead and say it: I’ve never liked bacon.

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Right. Moving on: the recipe. It’s reeeeeeally yummy, if I say so myself. Just as yummy as I remember it from my meat-eating days. Not as salty, though, which is also a good thing.

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What you’ll need:

1 pound of long pasta, such as spaghetti or fettucine

6 eggs

3/4 cup of parmiggiano reggiano, grated

4 cloves of garlic

8 sundried tomatoes

1 tbsp butter

2tbsp olive oil

salt and pepper

chopped parsley

And here’s what you do:

In a large pot, bring pasta water to a boil. Add plenty of salt – it should be “as salty as the mediterranean sea”.
Once the water is boiling, add the pasta and cook it until very al dente, about a minute less than it says on the package. Stir every once in a while to keep the pasta from sticking together and to the bottom of the pot.
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While the pasta is cooking, coarsely chop the garlic and sundried tomatoes. Heat the butter and olive oil in a large, heavy pot or pan over medium low heat (a dutch oven works well because it keeps in the heat, which will help with cooking the eggs).

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Crack the eggs into a bowl and whisk until combined. Add the parmesan cheese and stir it into the eggs. Season with pepper and just a little bit of salt (not too much – remember, the cheese is salty).
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About four minutes before the pasta is done, crank up the heat under the pot with the butter and olive oil in it and add the garlic and sundried tomatoes. You want them to impart all of their flavor into the hot oil and the garlic to get cooked. You’ll want the oil to be very hot when the pasta is cooked.
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And now you need to work fast:
Drain the pasta and immediately add it to the hot oil, garlic and tomatos. Stir vigorously to coat the pasta with the hot oil. Immediately after that, take the pot off the heat, add the egg mixture and stir even more vigorously, so the eggs get cooked by the hot pasta and oil but don’t become scrambled.
If you’ve worked fast enough, the eggs and cheese will turn into a creamy sauce and evenly cover the pasta. You can cover the pot with a lid and let it stand for a couple of minutes if you want to make sure, that the eggs are thoroughly cooked. But don’t put the pot back onto the heat or the lovely sauce will stick to the bottom and you’ll have made a frittata.

Enjoy with a sprinkle of chopped parsley (trust me on this – it will keep you from totally stinking up the place after this garlic-fest) and a little more salt, pepper and parmesan to taste.

Over the Easter weekend the whole nuclear family gathered and I had two days to observe her. She likes giving things to people and getting them back. It goes like this:

She picks up something and holds it out for you to see. But when you try to take it, she won’t let go. You have to say: “Would you please give this to me? Please?” before she actually gives it to you. And she repeats the “please” back to you. When you say “thank you” she repeats that as well. Of course, the next thing you do is give the item back to her, saying “there you are” (which is the same word as “please” in German) to which she usually replies with her version of “thank you”.

How cool is that? Can’t talk yet but she’s polite like a pro!

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On  a different note: She also imitates a certain animal. While other children may know what the dog says or how the cow goes, my niece knows what the hedgehog says! Unfortunately, that curling of the nose and snuffling and lip-pursing can’t be put down in writing… *dying of cuteness*

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Anyway, she started being shy with strangers a couple of months ago. While Hubby is a constant source of joy and wonder to her (she’s flirting with my man! Always has!), me, not so much… Since I’ve never really had a lot of contact with a lot of small people she wasn’t usually very thrilled with my carrying her awkwardly around. I guess she sensed my general insecurity with babies and didn’t like the feeling, since she herself hasn’t had the opportunity yet to build much confidence in her own ability to keep herself alive. Whenever I’d pick her up she’d start wailing pretty much right away and fling her little hands toward the next best grown-up nearby. Settling into safer arms, she’d stop crying and smile again.

So that crushed me a little bit.

I knew, rationally, it didn’t have anything to do with sympathy or lack thereof. But it made me question myself anyway. Would I stand a chance with children of my own, if they ever happened? Or would they prefer their more experienced (and obviously more attractive to babies) daddy over me because I’m generally insecure with kids? Rationally, I knew that those questions, too, were nonsense. But emotionally… whole different story!

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Then, one day, shortly after her first birthday, I went over to my brother’s to have dinner with the three of them and take my bro out to the movies. As I walked in the door, my sister-in-law and my niece were home alone, sitting a couple of meters away from the door on the floor. When my niece saw me, she took me in with that quizzical look of hers, then started to grin and gurgle, and actually scuttled toward me! She didn’t stay with me long because she had to go pick up another load of confidence from her mom, but she returned often and seemed generally comfortable in my presence. And it has stayed that way for a couple of weeks now. I can actually make her laugh, and she watches me all the time and grins when I look at her. What A Feeling!!

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Rationally, I know that she probably has overcome her shyness of strangers or maybe I’ve been over there often enough so she knows I’m harmless now, but emotionally, I’m partying inside.

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Easter is over, I do realize that. But I cannot blog about my making easter eggs myself before the fact, now can I? There you go.

The Saturday before Easter Sunday was spent in my tiny kitchen with the unfathomable carpet in it, spreading melted chocolate over half of my kitchen equipment as well as some dark chocolate, white chocolate lemon, and coconut easter eggs. The latter taste a lot like those Bounty (in the US: Mounds) candy bars, which is not bad at all.

I may or may not post a plethora of pictures of the easter eggs later but I will tell you that I am eating another one of those delicious coconut candies right from the fridge this very moment.

In the meantime, one may follow my chocolatey endeavors on Tasty Kitchen, where I got (and reviewed) two of the recipes and posted the third.

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Look!…

Lemon Truffle “Eggs”

Coconut Eggs (see my Review for the changes I made). Here is a picture of them still naked and awaiting their chocolate coats:

Chocolate Truffle Eggs (again, see my review; I also added honey which was hardly traceable in the finished candy)

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For this time of year, I think the dark chocolate truffles are a bit heavy, but the lemon truffles are really dreamy and so fluffy and light… Yum!

Anyway, this is tasty stuff and very easy to whip up. When I made the batch pictured here, I was going to “soften” the butter in the microwave and ended up liquefying it completely. Turns out the only thing hurt by this was my nuke-timer-setting-pride. And I’m sure she’ll be okay.

So anyway, here’s what you do if you want a change from all those herbs and garlic in your rad bread spread:

Get…

1 Onion
2 cloves Garlic, or more to taste
Fresh Basil – to taste
½ cups Tomato Paste, more to taste
4 sticks Butter, softened (NOT necessarily liquefied, but, you know, whatever floods your boot)
Salt And Pepper, to taste

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I know I am, as always, a couple of decades behind, having just now finished reading The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. But – oh! What a book! What a writer! What a poet!

I keep telling people how Rilke breaks my heart with his way of weaving the same words I use every day into beautiful, heartstrings-tugging works of art. But Margaret Atwood? I mean – is she even trying? Yes, the story is compellingly interesting. Yes, I wanted to know what was going to happen in this strange, yet eerily familiar world she had fabricated. But what really had me hooked were the words! The same type of words I use (okay, maybe not “palimpsest” [p.1] and the like, but I swear, it’s mostly everyday vocabulary), but combined SO gorgeously that I had to smile and gasp and marvel all the time at the sheer force of poetry chasing me to page after page.

My favorite quote about the handmaids having to live between the lines of society (or something like that) is lost somewhere in the book (*kicking myself for not writing it down when I had it right there before me*), so the last lines will have to do for now (here be no spoilers):

“As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our own day.

Applause.

Are there any questions?”

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Bookmark check: You need to search everyone for the individual spot in which they are unique [Man muß an jedem Menschen solange suchen bis man den individuellen Punkt findet wo er originell ist]. J. Paul

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Actually, wait – there’s more!

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You may have noticed that I specifically indicated the lack of milk in the above list of things that I could see. That’s because, usually, I like to scramble my eggs with a pinch of salt, a nice helping of freshly crushed black peppper, and a splash of milk before I fry them in a speck of butter. But not that day, oh no. That day, I fried in that usual speck of butter some eggs I had scrambled with the very usual pinch of salt, good helping of pepper, a couple of diced tomatoes and – sparkling wine which was actually left over from when I needed a cup or so for a risotto which was originally supposed to be prepared with a cup or so of white wine which I didn’t have and therefore substituted the sparkling stuff. Was also tasty.

But the EGGS! Oh. my. sweet – no – savoury. breakfast!

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Those eggs tasted just the tiniest, but nicely noticeable, bit of the sparkling wine, they were fluffy and silky, the tomatoes were floating in their luxuriously warm embrace just right… I was in heaven.

You know when you go to a fancy restaurant for a brunch of scrambled eggs, melon wrapped in prosciutto (which you leave for your meat-eating company to eat), cute little rolls, the most excuisite little jars of exotic jams, and everything accompanied by a glass of champagne? These scrambled eggs were all of that, folded into one – and stuffed into a toasted pita pocket. Glorious.

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End of story.

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No, really.

These two made me laugh out loud (yes, I actually lol’d):

…Baby seal walks into a club… what a tragedy…

and

…A guy walks into a bar. “OUCH!”…

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Another one on the puny site (*heehee*) reminded me of a joke my favorite ex-roomie tells a lot:

What do Budweiser and sex in a canoe have in common?

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They’re both f***ing close to water.

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This summerly, lighthearted, sanguine literary masterpiece was obviously B.H. – before Hubby. I can’t remember feeling that way since we’ve been together. I am happy to report that these days, I mostly cry about other people’s misery, preferrably people in movies or books. Hardly any romantic self-pity involved anymore. Growing up – check. About time, too!

I wonder… do dogs yap on about how doggy they are? Do butterflies feel inclined to tell all the world how they are butterflying around? And… do Grown-Ups even call themselves that?

Please hold the line while I *faint*.

For those out there who are not familiar with this magnum opus of a car, here’s what it looks like:

(click on image for source)

The funny thing about this picture (which I googled) is that my colleague’s car also has those dice dangling from the rear view mirror. I’m not entirely sure but maybe that’s a required original part? I don’t know.

All I know is this: Once you set foot and then butt in this car, you’re instantly californicated and it becomes virtually impossible not to be completely blown away. Also, it seems improbable to be in a bad mood in a car like that.

Don’t get me wrong here – I’m not a car nut or anything (I drive a Suzupel, for crying out loud – more on that at a later time), but this baby is just so perfect, I can hardly stand it.

The steering wheel is made of some sort of wood, all of the handles, and knobs, and switches are made of chrome, the gas cap is very much not conveniently located at the very back of the car (motor in the front) – and there are no safety belts! The first thing I did when I sat down in the surprisingly comfy black leather seat was reach for the belt – alas, to no avail! This is one of the very few actually dangerous things that are allowed in Germany: Having no safety belts in a vintage car if they’re not originally there. While everything else is strictly regulated here, the law has not dared to advance into this domain and ruin everything. I was actually very careful not to touch the car door when we were going around a bend, for fear of falling out, but even though it was painfully unusual for me not to be wearing a safety belt, it had a very liberated feel to it, adding to the whole Californication experience.

And the sound! You should hear the sound! There are a few hiccups when you turn the key in the ignition, and then there’s a roar, a short but full-bodied, dangerous roar before the engine finally settles into its rumbling growl.

Also, today being my first time actually sitting in one, I finally understood why a Mustang needs to be called a Mustang: It squirms and prances and skips and bounces, just like a wild horse.

Golly, gee, fellas, he’s so dreamy.