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Thursday, November 17

Let's eat Potatoes and Meat

Last night's dinner was Shrimp Curry that’s really Shrimp Masala. We had an attempt at shrimp curry few weeks ago and that wasn’t successful, actually let’s just call it a failure. So I had to try it again and this time around, it was a huge hit.

But this post isn’t about my cooking. It’s about the German food/cooking.

What we notice regularly is the obsession with potatoes. We know Germans enjoy pork and sauerkraut but they also relish their potatoes. There are potato salads, potato dumplings (Knödel), pancakes and fries. Oh the Germans love fries. When we go to a German restaurant often we see neighboring tables eating French Fries with their meals. Grown adults ordering French Fries. Hopefully after this I won’t be on the French Fry Federation’s hit list because I love French Fries too, not with bratwursts and sauerbraten.

And then the love of potatoes goes beyond that. We’ve had meals come with Knödel and roasted potatoes. So it’s a main meal with a side of potatoes and another side of potatoes.

This isn’t reflective of the German eating habits, it’s mostly how our food consumption has evolved after moving here. Prior to the move we consumed meat 4 times a week, sometimes more and sometimes less. Here we’re finding ourselves eating meat twice a week or less. Although Germans love their pork and eat it very regularly; we, on the other hand, now have a bigger preference for vegetarian meals. The meat we buy is from poultry farmers that have a chicken(Hähnchen), turkey(Pute or Putenfleisch), goose(Gans) and duck(Ente) farm. And our butcher (Metzgerei) has fresh pork, beef and some lamb products. The meat is more expensive here than in the US. I believe the higher costs are reflective of the land that the animals graze on and their feed. (And of course the dollar to euro conversion also makes a difference.) So we’ve accepted our meat comes from a good place and consume less of it.

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