Donaueschingen, Germany Trip by Ruth Paget

Donaueschingen, Germany Trip by Ruth Paget 

I first read about the German Black Forest town of Donaueschingen, the source of the Danube River, in Marina Polvay’s cookbook All Along the Danube: Recipes from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria (Hippocrene Press – 357 pages). 

When I moved to Stuttgart, Germany with my husband Laurent for five years, we lived close to the Black Forest and made Donaueschingen one of our first trips. We drove through the Black Forest with its gingerbread architecture towns and shops selling cuckoo clocks and beer steins and ended up with those items before returning to the United States. 

On our walk to the source of the Danube River once in Donaueschingen, we passed churches and apartment buildings painted in pastel colors like Venice that would shine in the snowy winters here and constantly remind inhabitants of their connection to water. 

The two streams that come together as the source of the Danube River are the Brege and Brigach. They are encircled in a fountain with an Art Nouveau metal railing. People toss Euro coins in the fountain. I wondered if they ended up downriver in Budapest, Hungary or it the German civic authorities gathered them up for fountain maintenance. 

There are many pack terrace cafés in town that no doubt serve dishes made with mushrooms from the Black Forest like trout in mushroom-butter sauce. 

I treated our time in Germany as one long cooking course, so we returned home where I had a salad waiting that I made from Marina Polvay’s All Along the Danube. The rough outline for the salad I made follows. (I noted the page with the exact recipe.) 

Mushroom-Potato Salad (p.16) 

-slice mushrooms and marinate in vinegar and oil dressing 

-toss mushrooms with slices of boiled potatoes 

-garnish with slices of green pepper and capers 

This salad served at room temperature is especially good with a chilled Pilsner beer on a cool Fall day. 

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Suburban Detroit French Terrine $ Hack by Ruth Paget

Suburban Detroit French Terrine $ Hack by Ruth Paget 

My Polish babysitter epitomized the Detroit credo of “If I can make a car, I can cook.” 

I learned about Polish admiration for French food from my Polish babysitter in Troy, Michigan as a child. She made homemade French pork and liver terrines and duck terrines and had me eat them with her for lunches and dinners. 

The French eat terrine slices with either bakery-baked, long baguette bread or round, crusty loaves of country bread they make at home. The Polish babysitter, who knew how to bake, mostly made country bread. 

She also made her own sweet gherkin pickles to go with the terrine, which the French always eat with terrine. 

Finally, she filled half the plate with torn and chilled Boston bibb lettuce and homemade blue cheese dressing made with Maytag blue cheese from Iowa, which is the equivalent of the great blue cheeses of Europe: 

-Roquefort (France) 

-Cabrales (Spain) 

-Gorgonzola (Italy) 

(I think we need tasting competitions to decide who has the best blue cheese.) 

The French consider terrine a waste-not dish, because it is made from the odds and ends of butchering meat. A 1.5-quart terrine mold yields 15 slices or 2 slices for 2 people over 7 days with 1 slice leftover to share. My Polish babysitter viewed terrine as delicious, nutritious, and economical and so did I. 

My babysitter drank a sweet white wine with the pork and liver terrine from Michigan’s Warner Winery. She made sure to tell me that the great Hungarian sweet white wine Tokaj was the best match with terrine, but Warner worked for everyday, because Tokaj was expensive. 

The Polish babysitter gave me apple cider to go with my terrine lunch. (Apples grow in abundance in Michigan. Johnny Appleseed is a children’s book everyone in the state reads.) 

I thought of these lovely childhood lunches when I purchased Pâté, Confit, Rillette: Recipes from the Craft of Charcuterie by Brian Polcyn and Michael Ruhlman. This 250-page recipe book has recipes that cover meat, poultry, fish, and vegetables. 

I prefer terrines to confit and rillettes, because it is easier to measure slices for portion control. However, spreadable rillettes are easier to make. You can measure out preserved pieces of delicious duck confit, but pieces tend to be irregular, which makes it hard to count calories. 

Several dishes I thought would be make use of rural resources include: 

-chicken and wild mushroom terrine 

-cauliflower, pea, and red pepper mousse en terrine 

-portobello and red pepper terrine 

-two-potato terrine 

-cauliflower mousse 

-onion confit 

-fennel confit 

-chanterelle and garlic confit rillettes 

These terrines might sell well at a place like Costco, if they are not too expensive as they can be made into a week’s worth of food. 

By Ruth Paget, author Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Detroit (Michigan) Bake Sale $ Hacks by Ruth Paget

Detroit (Michigan) Bake Sale $ Hacks by Ruth Paget 

When I was elected president of the National Honor Society in inner-city Detroit (Michigan) for the 1981 – 1982 school year, Detroit was in a recession, which felt like a depression with auto plant closures due to the “invasion” of small, fuel-efficient Japanese cars that cut into sales of the American auto industry. 

I think what clinched my election was my experience in running profitable bake sales to fund a freshman year trip to China for myself and 21 other young people from Detroit. I knew how to make hot cocoa in 10-gallon coffee makers and inexpensively make muffins and cupcakes from scratch. 

I also said in my election speech that it was ok for working moms to purchase cupcakes and donate them to the bake sale. NHS members could also get community service hours working at the bake sale. The strategy was to price everything at 50 cents and make it easy to give change for singles, fives, tens, and twenties. 

Each class in my high school had 900 students plus about 200 teachers. If you arrived at school early and set up everything, you had an audience of 3,800 people to sell to. 

The bake sales sold out all hot cocoa and cupcakes. A bake sale could garner $400 to $450. The school security guards escorted me to the school treasurer’s office for money counting and deposit. 

The National Honor Society used funds we raised to help charitable organizations in Detroit, who approached the principal and club sponsor via a written petition that was presented to the club for approval by vote. 

I am still proud that in a recession Cass Tech High School was able to help UNICEF pay for a rainwater collection tank to be used in a school in Africa (Gela Jar Project). I wanted the club to have an international project and asked UNICEF to petition the school for project funding. 

The true secret of bake sales I learned in high school was to make a quick, easy, and accurate transfer of goods. I have used this lesson for everything from cupcake sales to National Endowment for the Humanities grants. 

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Detroit (Michigan) Muffins Food $ Hack by Ruth Paget

Detroit (Michigan) Muffins Food $ Hack by Ruth Paget 

One of the reasons I wanted to live in downtown Detroit, Michigan in high school was the city’s proximity to Windsor (Ontario), Canada. 

I loved Detroit for being able to take a half hour bus ride through the tunnel under the Detroit River to Windsor, a small English town with river front gardens and many French restaurants and tearooms. 

All along Oulette Street, Windsor’s main thoroughfare, you can find china shops selling Spode and Wedgewood, Baccarat crystal stores, and Christofle silverware shops. You can also find made-to-order fur coat stores reflecting Detroit and Canada’s rugged winters. 

Bucolic English culture has many lovers in industrial Detroit. I was one of them. My family heritage is mostly English and Scottish, and I wanted to be a trim English woman with everyday tea dinners complete with tea biscuits and Red Rose tea, which I brought home as souvenirs. 

I knew from grocery shopping with my mother that tea cakes and muffins do not cost much to make and went through a cookbook (Joy of Cooking) for recipes. I made English tea suppers to save money, so my mother and I could go out to Detroit’s Greektown, Lelli’s Italian Restaurant, Carl’s Chop House, and/or Syros around the corner from our apartment building on Gratiot Avenue on the weekend. 

I would make two dozen muffins on the weekend using eggs and sour cream for protein and calcium I reasoned. I used cayenne pepper to flavor them one week and dill on the other. I ate 4 or 5 muffins each day along with slices of cheddar cheese. I also made fresh fruit salad with bananas, oranges, apples, kiwis, tea-soaked raisins, and orange juice to go with plain yogurt. I felt vitamins coursing through my veins eating this meal and ready to do calculus homework after an hour of skating at Hartt Plaza on the icy riverfront.

I tried to maintain a 2,000 to 2,500 calorie diet in high school, so I could be thin like Vogue models. I walked a mile each way to school and was rarely sick. The muffins fed me and kept me strong. 

I think muffins are inexpensive to make still and might help stretch food budgets. 

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Silent Auction $ Hacks by Ruth Paget

Silent Auctions $ Hack by Ruth Paget 

I have attended and worked at silent auctions since I was a teenager in Detroit, Michigan. Silent auctions are well attended for the good deals you can get on donated merchandise and gift certificates for services. 

Silent auctions are also famous for waiting to pay for your items for an hour or two with volunteer staff working. 

I finally had the opportunity to organize all the gathered bid sheets one year at a library silent auction and dinner and became an evil dictator. I took the winning bid sheets and put the winners’ names in alphabetical order and stapled all the multiple winners’ names together with their items, so they would not have to make multiple trips to the cashier. 

This sorting took 15 minutes to do with help from a colleague who assured people they would get their winning bids delivered to them. 

I noted the tables where the winners were seated and gave these to volunteers to deliver with the message that they could pay any time. 

The result: All items claimed and paid for at dinner end with no line. 

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Chattanooga, Tennessee Battlefield Trip by Ruth Paget

Chattanooga, Tennessee National Battlefield Trip by Ruth Paget 

One of the most interesting trips I have taken from Atlanta, Georgia is north to Chattanooga, Tennessee (1 ½ hours north barring traffic jams). My husband Laurent and I set out early for Chickamauga, Georgia and Chattanooga, Georgia battlefields one sweltering hot summer. 

The Confederacy won the battle at Chickamauga first, but put the Union in position on Lookout Mountain in Tennessee to win the battle that set up the Atlanta Campaign to gain the railroad artery of the South. At the Battlefield Parkway exit in Georgia, we exited and drove through the Chickamauga Battlefield. The Chickamauga National Battlefield Park is about ¼ mile along Battlefield Parkway to the left, but we kept on driving to Fort Oglethorpe named after the founder of the Georgia colony. 

At Fort Oglethorpe, we turned right towards the north and drove about 9 miles into Chattanooga. When the Confederates won Chickamauga in September of 1863, they thought they had routed the Union. However, in November 1863, the Union began battle again and prevailed. 

The visitor center in Chattanooga notes that there are three different battle sites by Lookout Mountain above and around Chattanooga: 

-Battle of Orchard Knob 

-Battle of Lookout Mountain 

-Battle of Missionary Ridge 

The Lookout Mountain Battlefield sits above the Tennessee River, which meanders around the South. It is 652 miles long. The River starts at Knoxville, Tennessee and flows south and west through northern Alabama and parts of northern Mississippi. The Tennessee River empties at Paducah, Kentucky into the Ohio River just a few miles upstream from the Mississippi River. Obviously, in addition to the railroad, the Tennessee River could also move men, weapons, and supplies to both Confederate and Union forces. 

The visitor center exhibit at Chattanooga, Tennessee notes that both sides tried to starve each other during these battles, but the Union was in a worse situation in their mountain location. 

According to www.battlefields.org , the Union had the following to eat: 

-4 cakes of hard bread 

-a quarter pound of pork 

Those were the rations for 3 days 

Even with those rations, the Union won the Battle of Chattanooga and took control of the city, railroad, and the Tennessee River at Chattanooga and began their advance from mountainous Tennessee to hilly Atlanta, Georgia. 

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Eastern European Food $ Hacks by Ruth Paget

Eastern Europe Food $ Hacks by Ruth Paget 

Lesley Chamberlain writes about delicious, nutritious, and economical food in her cookbook The Food and Cooking of Eastern Europe (468 pages – University of Nebraska Press). The centuries’ old recipes she preserves have lasted longer than the nations she describes such as Yugoslavia.

The following recipes are especially economical and have sustained Eastern Europe through kingdoms, empires, and dictatorships to modern-day democracies: 

-Serbian Salad (The modern country of Serbia was part of the former Yugoslavia) 

Ingredients: 

-green peppers 

-green tomatoes 

-red tomatoes 

-cucumbers 

-onions 

-white or red cabbage 

-sugar 

-vinegar 

-olive oil 

-seasonings 

For this recipe, you chop and boil the vegetables with the seasonings and let it cool for 4 or 5 days in a cool place to blend flavors. Bread and fruit make this a nice picnic lunch using this pickled salad. 

-Warsaw Salad from Poland 

Ingredients: 

-haricot beans (white or Navy beans) 

-lemon juice 

-mustard 

-pepper 

-boiled eggs 

-1 apple 

-cucumbers 

-onion 

-sour cream  

To make this dish very economical, you soak beans overnight and boil them the next day. Using canned beans saves lots of time, but shop around for the best prices. Sour cream is a dressing here.

-Autumn Potato Salad from the Czech Republic (a recipe from the former Czechoslovakia) 

Ingredients: 

-potatoes 

-onions 

-green pepper 

-tomatoes 

-sour apples 

-cucumber 

-mayonnaise 

-lemon juice 

-2 hard boiled eggs 

Apples are highly nutritious and inexpensive. They stretch this recipe to serve more people and provide a nice contrast to the potatoes as well. 

The recipes in The Food and Cooking of Eastern Europe by Lesley Chamberlain provide delicious, nutritious, and relatively inexpensive dishes that can be easily recreated in the United States to save money, retrieve one’s heritage, or make best use of ingredients at hand. 

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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