Monday, September 1, 2008

If it weren't for ham, beef, chicken, pork...

For dinner tonight we had Cherman food: German green beans, German cucumber salad, tomatoes, and brats. I took artistic license with the traditional cucumber ingredients by using 10-year-old balsamic vinegar (which we bought at A Southern Season on our last trip to NC) instead of cider vinegar, which gave the cukes a lovely sweetness. Spinach/mozzerella/chicken brats replaced the Schmidt's variety, too, so dinner wasn't truly Grandma Kirsch and Grandma Bene Cherman style, but it was delicious anyway.

The wonderful aromas of vinegar, onion, bacon, green beans, and cukes got us talking about GK and Grandma Bene and how delighted both were with Dad/Larry's praise of their German cooking, which led to more conversation about family gatherings in the past.

I
f you are a Potts, Grimmius, or Dellon with a direct line to Reps and Kirsch holidays when you were kids, you know the famous line from Grandma Bene, "If it weren't for meat I could be a vegetarian." So this evening after remarking on the yummy vegetables, Dad/Larry/Grampa quoted Grandma Bene, forcing me to to reply that most vegetarians eat their green beens without bacon. Anyway, the best part about the delicious dinner tonight was that the tomatoes, green beans, and cukes were picked by Grandpa Charlie's hands, and grown in his garden in the same soil as vegetables prepared by GK and Grandma Bene all the way back to my childhood. It doesn't get better than that! Thanks, C. Reps.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

You guys would not believe how good the food was! Awesome. The chicken avocado brats were kind of trendy, but the rest was genuine Cherman.

Anonymous said...

Sounds delicious!

Anonymous said...

Your Cherman dinner sounds delicious! Wish I lived nearby! Upon your recommendation on this blog, I'm now reading The Green
Glass Sea
by Ellen Klages. I agree that it's a novel well worth reading. While it's geared toward ages 9-11, it has broad appeal. Another excellent book set in the WWII Era is Graham Salisbury's Under the Blood-Red Sun, which focuses on the friendship between a Japanese-American boy and his American and Latino friends living in Honolulu at the time of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Like The Green Glass Sea, this book is a winner of the Scott O'Dell Award for historical fiction. The intended age group is approximately 11-13.