Parsifal, Pretzels and Pumpkins

Well, the Deutsche Oper Berlin has started its 2012-2013 run of Parsifal, and I went to see it last Thursday: really terrific!  Act II felt a bit over-the-top with, for instance, the sorcerer-king Klingsor slaughtering an erring knight in a ritual reminiscent of a Mesoamerican heart-extraction sacrifice (and yes, he "ate" the "heart"), but Wagner is a very sturdy framework that can stand a lot of intepretation piled on it. I had never previously heard unamplified (to the best of my knowledge and belief) soloists singing over, er, with a Wagner orchestra and was amazed at how well the soloists' voices came through most of the time. The choral singing was also fantastic: there's nothing like hearing a German libretto sung by German singers. It was a real revelation of what living in a major European city can mean performing-arts-wise, and I've resolved from now on to attend a concert or opera performance at least once per week, and preferably twice in December when the Christmas music gets going! (Die Zauberflöte next Friday; I have one of the cheap seats for that one, so we'll see if there's any noticeable difference in the acoustics of the hall, although maybe there's not really a common baseline for the listening experience across Wagner and Mozart.)

I had forgotten what a marathon Parsifal is, though: the overture began at a few minutes after 5 and the curtain didn't come down after the last bows until about 10:15. There were a couple of half-hour intermissions in there, but that's still a pretty big lump of music and a long wait till dinner.  Fortunately, the Kantine or snack bar of the opera house, like many many cafes and vendor carts and other food establishments in Berlin, sells the classic Berliner lye-dipped (!) Brezeln or "Philadelphia-style" soft pretzels for a couple of euros apiece. (I hear that the Berliner Philharmonie serves them with butter but I haven't checked them out yet.) It looks a little weird to the American eye to see elegantly dressed opera-goers chowing down on a soft pretzel, but don't knock it till you've tried it: that's what got me through Acts II and III without absolutely starving!

In other news, here's a jack-o-lantern (or "Halloween-Kürbis") that I carved for a hostess gift (accompanied by a few tea lights and the roasted pumpkin seeds; roasting at about 125 degrees Celsius for about an hour seems to crisp them up nicely). I had to be a bit creative about illuminating it with the desk lamp for a reasonably effective photograph (although it makes the pumpkin look bright pink, which it isn't!), since using actual candles in the offices or residences is strongly deprecated. (Other people have had a few incidents with unattended cookery setting off the fire alarms.  No serious damage, thankfully, but the fire department charges an arm and a leg just for showing up in response to an alarm, so the administration would rather we didn't invite them so often.)

Schlüsselkäfer says, "Take me, take me!  I glow in the dark too!" We've been over this already, Schlüsselkäfer: you're too dim to show up well on camera if there's little or no ambient light.

Oh, all right:

Schlüsselkäfer says, "Woooooooo-woooooo!  Wooooooooo!" Shut up, Schlüsselkäfer.

Happy Halloween to all!

Mushroom Sampler Lunch

Here's the selection of fresh mushrooms I used for Wednesday's mushroom lunch party:

And here's the best I can do on reconstructing the varieties, though I'll have to check some of them when I go back to the market (this has something of the mycological mystery and discovery of actually hunting edible mushrooms, without any of the danger and anxiety because I already ate all of them and I'm fine).  Clockwise from bottom left:

1. Package of Kulturchampignons or ordinary cultivated white mushrooms, more or less as a control for mushroom flavors. 
2. I thought these were Steinpilze but the stem looks wrong.  
3. Orangey-brown Pfifferlinge (Eierschwammen) or chanterelles.
4. A clump of deep-cupped Limonenseitlinge, golden oyster mushrooms.
5. One honking big Kräuterseitling or king oyster mushroom.
6. Creamy white something-or-others, can't figure these out at all.
7. Bitty little Samthaube or black poplar mushroom (never even heard of these).
8. Fan-like caps of the Austernseitlinge, oyster mushrooms.
9. One white Weiss Buchenpilz (Buna-Shimeji?), at least I think that's what it is (where did the rest go, I wonder?).

Anyway, we had #5 and #8 oven-roasted with oil and garlic, #1 and #9 as baked mushroom caps stuffed with a mash of lentils, potatoes, onions and mushroom stems, #2, #3 and #7 sauteed and then baked in a cheese quiche (carefully arranged in rings so that each piece had some of each kind of mushroom in it), and #4 and #6 just sauteed in a little butter and salt, and they were all very tasty.  Also some breads and cheeses and tomatoes and a carrot salad and some grapes for dessert.  I'll be eating leftovers for a while, but I'm not complaining!

Photo Album

Here are a few photographs that have been kicking around for a while but haven't rated a post of their own.

1. From the Berlin Marathon a couple of weeks ago, where my bike route to the Sunday stitch'n'bitch coincided with the marathon route in a number of places (and I took two hours figuring out how to get through the city without riding through the last of the straggling runners on what should be their personal streets for the day).  The loyal crowd is still watching for runners at Potsdamer Platz:

A race volunteer walks through the tidewrack of discarded water cups on the Clayallee:

2. A weekend seminar on the history of perspective and optics sharpened my eye for weird optical effects like this Light Bulb Tree produced by a reflection on my window:

3. This is the season for all the local mushrooms, and the farmer's market has some amazing displays.  I'm having a mushroom sampler lunch later this week and will try to post the details.

4. Shopping at the Idee craft store in Charlottenburg, where I said my first real totally voluntary non-trivial German sentence:  "Gibt es Häkelgarn mehr fein als zwanzig?" which means more or less "Do you have crochet thread finer than #20 weight?" As it happened, unfortunately they did not, but at least the saleslady understood me perfectly!  (It might have helped that I was holding a ball of #20 crochet thread at the time.)

Anyway, Schlüsselkäfer thought this sign on the wall of the jewelry-making section was hilarious and insisted on my photographing it.  (It just means "jewelry" in German, you dumb bug.)

5. And finally, in the TK Maxx store (that's TJ's German cousin, I guess) next to the Idee, they actually sold saucepans!

Flat Round Brownies

My phone charger got fried recently (these airport shop travel voltage converters are not very impressive), so I haven't been able to take or upload any pictures for a bit. I bought a proper European-plug charger today, though, and while I'm getting my phone back in action, here's a record of my recent attempt to make traditional American brownies to pass around during my colloquium talk at the Institute on Tuesday.

The recipe is more or less the one from Rosie's All-Butter Fresh-Cream Sugar-Packed Baking Book, with strategic modifications as noted:

Step 1.   Improvise a double boiler by putting a couple inches of water in a saucepan and setting a similarly-sized saucepan on top of it. Melt a 200-gram block of semisweet baking chocolate and about 200 grams of butter (or whatever's left in a 250-gram butter block after you take out a few tablespoons now and then for sauteing onions and potatoes for dinner or dropping a butter blob in the lentils) in the "double boiler" over simmering water.

Step 2.  While the chocolate-butter mixture melts and then cools somewhat, beat up eggs in the mixing bowl with a big German whisk that is inconveniently heavy and makes your arm tired. These German eco-eggs look a bit smaller than our usual Grade A Large (nice deep yolk color, though), so use four of them and beat well.

Step 3.  Find the one piece of graduated volume measuring equipment in the kitchen, a plastic jar marked with 1/4, 1/2, 3/4 levels that looks like about one cup. Open the bag of Kristallzucker which fortunately is more or less the same as regular granulated sugar, put a "cup"  in with the eggs and beat till very frothy and thick.

Step 4.  Pour the chocolate-butter mixture in a thin stream (so as not to curdle the eggs if the melted stuff's still hot) into the egg-sugar mixture, beating all the time.

Step 5.  Preheat the oven to 175 degrees C, which you can tell even doing the conversion in your head because there's no pencil and paper in the little kitchen is very nearly 350 degrees F, so good enough. In the meantime, open the little bottle of "Arome Vanille", WHICH IS CLEAR AND SYRUPY AND MILDLY VANILLA-ISH INSTEAD OF BEING NORMAL BROWN ALCOHOL-BASED STRONG VANILLA EXTRACT FOR PETE'S SAKE GERMAN PEOPLE WHAT THE HELL IS THIS. Pour some good glops of it into the batter anyway until you think you can smell and taste a difference. (Next time try getting a real vanilla bean and letting it sit in the batter.) Add a pinch of salt.

Step 6.   Open up the bag of Weizenmehl number 405, which more by good luck than good management turns out to be standard German low-gluten white flour which is pretty much exactly what you want for dessert baking. Carefully mix about a "cup" of it into the batter, and if you had an 8x8" brownie pan this or a bit more would make about the right consistency for baking brownies, but since all you have is a couple of baking sheets (oh, and you should have greased those with the butter paper back at the beginning), you need something that's more of a drop-cookie consistency. Somewhere between 2 and 3 "cups" will be about right. If you don't recognize a drop-cookie batter when you see one then try dropping a spoonful on a plate from time to time, and add flour until the dropped batter keeps a roughly circular shape and isn't runny enough to spread out very thin.

Step 7.   Drop teaspoonfuls of batter on the greased baking sheets and bake the sheets one at a time (although now that you think of it, even though there's only one baking rack in the oven, the sheets do slide right into slots in the oven sides so you could have baked two sheets at once) for about 15-20 minutes until crackly-surfaced, no longer shiny, and somewhat springy when poked. Remove from baking sheets and cool on paper towels on table because there are no cooling racks. The cooling cookies develop a weird eczema-like condition where a very fine grayish layer of the top surface flakes off (different composition in the chocolate?), but it tastes fine and won't show in the finished product. These definitely are more like flat round cakey brownies than like standard chocolate drop cookies, though.

Step 8.   While successive trays of cookies are baking and cooling, melt the other 200-gram block of semisweet chocolate in the "double boiler" and mix it up well with the remnants of the chocolate-butter mixture. Scoop up some of the melted chocolate in a big spoon and twirl a cooled cookie upside-down in the spoon to coat its top with chocolate. Set aside for final cooling and letting the melted chocolate topping harden. Repeat for all the cookies.

Optional step (not recommended).   While letting the melted chocolate topping sit in the "double boiler", fail to notice that the two saucepans have got wedged together and that the cooling water in the bottom pot is causing a vacuum seal to form between them, thus causing you to be unable to separate them for washing when the cookies are all done. Pulling, twisting, reheating on the stove and putting cold water in the top pan, shaking, squirting dish soap into the join for lubrication, and banging the pots on the metal sink are all equally unsuccessful. When the bottom pot has its handle wrenched off and both are severely dented but still inextricably conjoined, give up and hide them in your room and resolve to go buy a couple new saucepans to replace them. The Karstadt, Saturn, Woolworth, Depot, and similar housewares or department stores as well as the Kaiser's supermarket all carry individual frying pans but don't seem to have any individual saucepans. You will probably have to make the trek out to Ikea in Tempelhof.


Everybody did seem to like the cookies, though.