Who Let This Bitch in the Kitchen?

If any of you who are reading this are my friends from University of Maryland, you know that my roommates and I love our kitchen adventures.

For example:

We usually become such ridiculous fools while creating our culinary masterpieces that we’ve come up with the phrase “Who let this bitch in the kitchen?”  By the end of the semester, it was a common greeting for each other.

During my first few weeks in Germany, I was hardly a bitch in the kitchen.  I was more of a tired/frazzled/hungover idiot in the kitchen that all I could handle making was baked potatoes.  Woof.

All that started to turn around this week, however, when I had some friends over for family dinner.  We were all craving Italian food, so I whipped this out

Spaghetti with pesto and caprese salad.  Yes, the pesto was jarred, but the caprese salad was good.  Just cherry tomatoes, bocconcini, olive oil, balsamic, a ton of basil, lots of sea salt, lots of garlic pepper.  It was my first time really cooking again.  No recipe, just using my senses to make the most delicious food as possible.

Then, yesterday, THIS happened

This, my friends, is Milchreis.  I came across it in the grocery stores here, but the Mensa makes some BOMB Milchreis.  It’s kind of like Rice Pudding, but 203981209430948 times better.  It’s warm, it’s sweet, it’s comforting, it’s filling, and it’s dirt cheap to make.  So I decided to make it yesterday after braving the bone-rattling Berlin cold for an excursion the program planned for us.

I picked up dry Milchreis grains and some milk at the grocery store, dumped it in a pot, brought it to a boil, and then let it simmer until I thought it looked good (~30 minutes?).  I ended up having to add extra milk a few time throughout the cooking process because I would get hangry (hungry to the point of anger, for those of you who don’t know) and impatient and turn up the heat, but that would only make the milk evaporate instead of gently thickening with the rice.  Low and slow is MAD ANNOYING (still angry), but so worth it.  Especially when you top your creation with cinnamon sugar and applesauce.  My friend who is just as infatuated with Milchreis came over to try it with her two friends who are visiting, and they ended up eating the rest of the batch out of the saucepan.  I also ended up making it again, four hours later, for dinner.  Heck, it’s probably going to be my dinner tonight.

Sorry baked potatoes, but we’re on a break.  The Bitch is back.

Lunch at KaDeWe

This, my friends, is the most expensive lunch I have ever bought.  I cringe when I think of the exact number, but let’s just say that my lunch from the Mensa, or student cafeteria, cost about %15 of what this meal was.

Tired of eating Mensa (cafeteria) food and the baked potatoes I live off of at the apartment, my friend and I ventured to Charlottenburg to go to the KaDeWe, Berlin’s (if not Europe’s) fanciest department store for a pinkies-out, swanky lunch.

For the record, this lunch was fresh kiwi, parsley, honey, and orange juice, salad with microgreens, a cabbage slaw with kumquats and fennel, cabbage, melon, tomatoes with mozzarella, olives, peppers, and a veggie croquette that I topped with balsamic vinegar and walnut oil.  The soup was an “exotiches Fisches suppe”.

We enjoyed our lunch with views that looked out over the whole city

You could spend an entire day shopping in this expensive megalith, but we decided to poke around the food section.  I’m about to hit you with some serious food porn, but the pictures really don’t do it justice.

Just a small section of the American section of the food department. Maple syrup, El Paso taco kits, Crisco, Betty Crocker, Snapple, Reese's, and much more covered the walls. I'm just happy to know I have somewhere to get my Pop Tart fix 😉