Munich Oktoberfest at Stammtisch in Seaside by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Munich Oktoberfest at Stammtisch in Seaside by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

I went to a beer tasting at my neighborhood Bavarian Restaurant in Seaside, California called Stammtisch in October 2000 to try my first beers from Munich, Germany.

My husband Laurent let me go alone to the private room, reserved-ticket affair to eat a Bavarian meal and do the tastings.   I am sure he was in another nearby restaurant with his buddies from work eating a similar meal and doing a beer tasting, too.

Seating place tags took the worry out of where I was going to sit.  I was seated at the end of a long table.

Soon an older man sat by me and told me he was studying culinary history now that he was retired.

Ruth Reichl had just published her food memoir, which I loved.  I wanted to record what I had learned about foreign cuisines for neighborhood history and for my family.  I liked eating out when I went on trips overseas and thought going to ethnic restaurants would be a good way to teach my daughter Florence, a graduate of Juilliard, about other cultures.

My dinner mate said his newest discovery was that boneless cuts of meat started to be sold in the U.S. during World War II.

Meat was deboned to make for lighter shipping according to my dinner mate and the trend caught on.  I love trivia like this and looked forward to picking this man’s brain all evening.

A couple joined us who did home beer brewing.  All three of them corrected me in German, which I had never studied.

The man on my right brought in his ten-month-old son to show him off to his buddies.  He told his son, “We’re all going camping soon!” as his wife scooped the baby up and went out of the dining room.

All of us discovered that we had all lived in Wisconsin at some point in our lives.  We made a Green Packers cheer and pounded our fists together in the crowded room.

Savory aromas wafted in from the kitchen making me very hungry, but the food took awhile to appear.  We had bread on the table, but I thought the goose fat set out to spread on the bread might be too rich and I did not want to be the goose girl.

I tried a hefe-weizen beer to start before the tasting actually started.  This is a wheat beer.  My dinner mates told me that “hefe” means “yeast” and that “weizen” means “wheat.”  The beer reminded me of piecrust with a little sugar added to it.

Ham hocks came out of the kitchen with a knife and fork sticking out of them.  Ham hocks are large.  I asked for a slice of pork roast with onion gravy, flour dumplings, and warm, shredded cabbage as my meal.

I thought of a sweet cookbook I read when I lived in Virginia as I ate called The Flour is Different: German Heritage Recipes and Traditions by Trudy Gilganast.

The author of this German cookbook related that she had to recreate the baking recipes of her homeland due to different wheat milling practices in our two countries.

The author of the book wrote that Germans like sweet and savory combinations.  I could tell from the book that Germans are awesome bakers.

I remembered as I ate a dumpling on my plate at Stammtisch that she said southern Germans make their dumplings from flour and those in the northern German are made from potatoes.

A German beer importer was our tasting master for the evening.  The first beer we tasted was Spaten Premium.  The importer told us that Spaten was the first beer to be tapped at the first Oktoberfest in 1397.

He continued by saying that Spaten still holds this honor at Oktoberfest.  Once it has been tapped, it receives a 21-gun salute.

“Then, we all drink like fish!” he said.

I duly noted that Spaten Premium is the number-one selling beer in Germany.  It is considered a light beer with an alcohol percentage above 4%, so it is considered a malt liquor in the U.S.

The importer went on to say that Spaten Premium is a lager beer.

It is not aged and is ready for consumption for four to five weeks.

“What does “lager” mean?” I asked.

“To lay down,” one of my dinner mates said.  I took this information in with a sip of the premium beer without really understanding what that meant at the time.

A quick glance in Michael Jackson’s Beer Companion informed me that brewers make lagers with cool temperature-fermenting yeasts, which allows the beer to mature at freezing point.  That is a pretty technical explanation for a clean-tasting wallop of beer.

Our next beer was a Spaten Pilsen.  The importer said Pilsen is a town in the Czech Republic.  When golden, clear Pilsens were developed in 1842, other beers were cloudy.

The importer took this time to point out that hops used in the beer-making give beer its flavor.

The importer said the Czechs had hit upon the ability to control malting temperatures, which gave the beer its golden color.

The Germans knew a good idea when they saw one and copied the style.  This beer is supposed to be lighter in alcohol content than other beers, but its bitter bite made me grimace.

My dinner mate said hops gave the beer its bitter taste.  I drank the Dinkel-Aker Pilsen made in Stuttgart, Germany and liked it.  I drank it when I lived there five years as well.

At home, when I was reading Michael Jackson’s Beer Companion, I discovered that malt is grains of barley, wheat, oats, or rye.  We tried Spaten Oktoberfest, which was in a blue bottle and tasted sweet.

Erdinger was our next beer, which you have to pour in a tilted glass so the foam head does not spill over the glass.

Then, we tried a Kostrikisser.  I often drank this beer in Germany when we would go bowling with Philly Sandwiches on base in Stuttgart, Germany.

Everyone laughed that I only drank about 1/2 of the glasses that were served to me.

“That’s because I am about ½ your body size,” I said.

“My husband is coming to pick me up, and I don’t want to crawl out of here,” I remarked.

The importer laughed and gave me some Oktoberfest glasses for my husband and me.

I smiled when I found out I would be going to live in Stuttgart, Germany, which is close to the Land of the Wittelsbach in Bavaria, Germany for five years.  That was another exchange student type adventure for me.

I have always thought Stammtisch, which means owner’s friends table in German, could make a lot of money by holding Oktoberfest dinners.  

This celebration in Germany is held over several weeks.  Families celebrate Oktoberfest by buying Oktoberfest beer at the store for the festival and making a festive meal at home.  (If you set up a reservation app for the restaurant, you might be able to sell out Oktoberfest dinners in advance.)

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

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Introducing Greek Culture to Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Introducing Greek Cuisine and Culture to Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget 

Thanks to Detroit’s large Greek population, I learned about Greek culture beginning at the age of 9.

My mother and I would go to Greektown with my high school buddy on the weekends and order Greek village salads that had no lettuce – that is an authentic village salad.

The village salads in Greektown had ringlets of green, yellow, and red peppers; black, salty olives; tomato quarters; ringlets of purple onion; and feta cheese.  We ate this salad with thick slices of Greek bread. 

Greeks allow soaking up salad of dressing with a piece of bread; it is not considered bad etiquette in a restaurant as it is in France.  The Greeks use red wine vinegar, olive oil, and rigani – an herb like oregano in their salad dressing.  I think it is the purple onion, feta cheese, and rigani trio that make it taste so good.

Next, we would have pastitio (Greek pasta with ground lamb, tomatoes, and béchamel sauce), moussaka (eggplant casserole with béchamel sauce and melted grated cheese), spanakopita (spinach and onion with melted feta cheese baked in a buttered phyllo dough), and cheese (Greek halumi cheese) phyllo pies.  Of course, I ate a big piece of baklava for dessert.  I could eat like this, because I walked all the time.

In the sixth grade, my social studies project was all about Greece and the products the US could export to Greece to earn money (cars and sewage systems) and what the US could import from Greece (olives and cruise packages to the Greek Isles).

When I was in high school, I wrote about the Byzantine Empire of Greece for National History when I was at Cass Technical High School.

In a nutshell this is what I concluded in my paper, the Byzantine Empire survived for so long, because food was organized and distributed in an organized manner.

My paper placed in the top five for the Detroit Metropolitan Area, but I considered myself the winner when my peers were asking me to read it over and over at lunch in Greektown.

When I went to college at the University of Chicago, my roommate was a Greek-American, who lived in the Chicago suburbs.  In addition to my coursework at UChicago, I would go to go to my Greek roommate’s house on the weekends.   I ate Greek lemon chicken there and melamakarona cookies (butter cookies dunked with grated walnuts on top) while I drew Japanese characters over and over.

I did other Greek activities with my roommate.  I went dancing at Maids of Athena and Sons of Pericles parties at the height of Michael Jackson’s and Prince’s fame.

My roommate’s mother also ran dances for immigrants from her village in Crete.  I learned traditional Greek dances with the Greek yia-yias (grandmothers).

I went to Easter masses at the Greek Orthodox Church and the midnight dinner after that.  During spring break, I went to Greek Independence Day and was able to talk with Greek-American writer Harry Mark Petrakis about writing.  He told me to just keep writing to develop my storytelling skills.

Other “Things Greek” I have done include going to a Greek icon exhibit at the Detroit Institute of the Arts.  Icons are painted using strict outline forms.  Variation can only happen with subtle color changes, but that is it.  Also, each side of an icon’s face is either the good eye or the “evil” eye.

I studied Byzantine manuscript illumination, my senior year of college at UChicago.  Byzantine manuscripts are small and frenzied images in text.  They contain a lot of Biblical code language that is not always in the text.

When I went home to Detroit for Christmas vacation from the UChicago one year, I went to see a performance of Oedipus Rex performed in ancient Greek on a round stage.  I read the play before I went in English and like the chanting and minimal movements that convey what is happening.

This is non-verbal communication.  Non-verbal communication is not the same in all countries, but I understood what was happening in ancient Greek theatre.

Later in life, when I lived in France, we took a vacation to Greece for two weeks.  We hiked up to the Acropolis from the Plaka in Athens.  We visited the Parthenon and the Erechthyion with its caryatids of female figures holding up the roof of their temple – Hestia’s Temple?

From Athens, my husband and I went to Crete and visited the entire island.  The highlights of our time there were visits to the ruins of Heraklion and the Archaeological Museum that depict Minoan Culture with its dancers leaping over charging bulls, goddesses wielding snakes, and symmetrically designed necklaces.

In California, my husband Laurent and I took our daughter Florence to Epsilon Restaurant a few times in downtown Monterey, but mostly we do our Greek outing at the Greek Festival in downtown Monterey on the Wharf.  We buy food, participate in the Greek dances, and pretend we are on a cruise in the Greek Isles in the Pacific Northwest.

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

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Attending the Nutcracker Ballet in San Jose (California) with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Attending the Nutcracker Ballet in San Jose (California) with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

The first time I saw the Nutcracker was with my elementary school class in Detroit, Michigan.

We went to see the Nutcracker at the Fisher Theatre by General Motors Headquarters in midtown Detroit.  All the girls in our class had bows in our hair, lacy dresses, and wore black patent leather shoes.  All the boys had vests on under their suits. 

Thanks to the auto industry, most of our families were –middle-middle class- in Detroit, but we were still considered disadvantaged.  Many of our parents made our clothes, so we could appear a lot richer than we were, but the GM head honchos knew better.  They made sure we participated in the cultural wealth of the auto industry as well as the kids in the suburbs as best they could.

We all liked the Nutcracker and tried to recreate the music in the Nutcracker and the ballet steps in the waiting area of the restaurant where we were going to eat – Lelli’s Banquet Room.

We knew we were spoiled.  Lelli’s was where all of Detroit’s Italian families ate.  We had been taking etiquette lessons and were going to get a light Italian lunch after the theatre.

This outing was a sit-down lunch not a buffet.  The waiters wore crisply ironed, white shirts with black bowties and black pants and shoes.

We ate a bowl of minestrone with Parmesan cheese that the waiters spooned over our bowls of soup.  They told us how nicely dressed up we were.

After that, we had 3-cheese lasagna, a salad with ranch dressing (Italians know American kids do not like oil and vinegar dressing), and sautéed peppers.

For dessert, we had spumoni ice cream with whipped cream.  This ice cream is a mix of pistachio, cherry, and vanilla ice cream with a maraschino cherry in it.  We had lemonade to drink.  We were happy, little smiling clams.

When I married my husband Laurent, we went to all sorts of performances of live dance, because we could walk to the theatre from our apartment in Marina City in Chicago.  We often received discounts by buying at the last minute, which we could do, because we lived downtown.

When the Bolshoi Ballet came to Chicago, I waited in line to pay full-price for tickets.  They performed the Nutcracker.  That performance made me feel like a little kid again even though I worked at a “Big City” audit and consulting firm.

The last time I saw the Nutcracker was with my daughter Florence in San Jose, California.  I drove up to San Jose in Silicon Valley from Monterey, California. 

Very few women drive in testosterone-pumping Silicon Valley, but I had made it through the freeways in testosterone-pumping Norfolk, Virginia to get to the Naval Shipyards, so the men on the road just passed me and smiled that I was in the slow lane with a child aboard.

We attended the show in San Jose as part of Florence’s Big Sur Charter School class trip.  Florence and I had seats on the main floor.

After the show, I took Florence out for Mexican food, so I drove around San Jose until I found a Mexican restaurant.

The place we went to had a mariachi band that made us feel like we had taken a trip to Baja.

Florence and I had the same meal, which started with chicken noodle soup with lots of chicken meat chunks, carrots, and pasta in it.  Then, we had cheese enchiladas with salsa verde, refried beans, Spanish rice, lettuce, and California black olives on the side.  For dessert, we had a thick, creamy flan (full of calcium for strong bones) and horchata (cinnamon-rice drink).

When I lived in Germany, my daughter Florence bought my husband Laurent and me a 3-foot Nutcracker doll to go with the snow weighing down the pine tree branches outside our terrace window.

It was a sign that we had all grown up happy and laughing.

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

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Sampling Salvadoran Food with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Sampling Salvadoran Food with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

One day when I driving my daughter Florence home her charter Waldorf School in Pacific Grove, California, I noticed that the Migeuleño Restaurant on Broadway Avenue (doubly listed as Obama Way) had a Salvadoran Restaurant on it.

I had always thought Migueleño was a Mexican Restaurant.  I did some research on the food and saw that the cuisine is very different from Mexican food.

I called my editor at the Monterey County Weekly (Circulation: 100, 000) and asked if I could do a review of Migueleño with its new-to-Monterey cuisine.  The editor said this sounded like a fun article and assigned me to do the following article.   I took Florence along with me and Laurent to Migueleño:

Hold the Fire: Papusas and Fried Yucca are just two Salvadoran Treats at Migueleño

The map of El Salvador pointed on the outside wall of the Migueleño Restaurant on Broadway Avenue in Seaside, California made visions of tamales decked out in banana leaves swim before my eyes.

The fact that most people are unfamiliar with Salvadoran cuisine probably explains why Migueleño serves Mexican and Salvadoran food along with 11 different seafood entrées in order to keep the business going for 18 years.

I picked up some new vocabulary words as I ordered two Salvadoran meals – papusas, chicken tamales, fried yucca with chicharron, and fried plantains.

The pudgy papusa was four inches wide.  This round, tortilla-like confection was stuffed with a mixture of ground beef, corn, and cheese much like a grilled cheese sandwich, except much tastier.

The papusa came with its own mild, cheese dipping sauce.

The chicken tamale was wider and much lighter than its typical Mexican cousin.  A generous dose of rendered lard no doubt accounts for this lightness just like it does in the best flaky piecrusts.  What really struck me was how moist it was, including the chicken breast meat.

Most tamales are a little dry in restaurants, because they are frozen in large quantities and make them steamed to order.

This sweet-tasting papusa almost had a corn-pudding consistency.   Migueleño serves nice side dishes such as vinegary, cabbage and carrot coleslaw that has a hint of chili bit to it.

Migueleño’s refried bean, which do not fill half the plate, taste of pork, which I like.  I suspect the cooks used some pork bits along with good rendered lard in these beans.  I have eaten refried beans without getting fat for years.

Since my dining companions had opted for Mexican food, I started my second Salvadoran dish of fried yucca and chicharron.  I must admit that I had no idea of what yucca was when I bit into my first deep-fried morsel.

It reminded me of very light, slightly sour potatoes.  I squirted some lemon juice on the rest of the yucca.  It tasted even better that way along with some salt.

On top of the yucca pieces was a mound of chicharrom, the savory remains of deep-fried pork rinds.  The rich chicharron-fried yucca combination was balanced out by another generous helping of tangy coleslaw.

I wonder if yucca and pork is the equivalent of fish ‘n’ chips in El Salvador.  It certainly merits undivided attention – eat it on your second trip to Migueleño.

The beverage list offered a few items to discover as well.  Negra Modelo from El Salvador was advertised, but my husband Laurent tried another amber beer brewed in El Salvador called Regeia.

Neither of us expected to see a 32-ounce bottle on the table.  Described as smooth lager on the label, Regeia reminded me of a thirst-quenching Budweiser.  It tasted great with the yucca and chicharron.

I tried fried plantains for dessert along with a generous helping of sour cream.  The brown exteriors revealed yellow, tangy interiors tasting like green, verging on yellow bananas.

Palm oil must have given the plantains the fried-in-batter taste that felt even more decadent when I dipped them in sour cream.

Florence said the carne asada she ordered tasted too much of lime, but I liked that taste with the charred steak.  Migueleño marinates carne asada in lime juice with salt and pepper before grilling it, so the citrus flavor melds with the charred meat.

American families and Salvadorans filled the restaurant’s tables and bar.  Each glass-topped table had a vase with fresh flowers in it and under the glass was a lace-trimmed cloth touting “Best Beach in Central America – El Cuco, located on the Pacific Ocean.”

El Salvador’s third largest city, San Miguel, is home to this beach.  The residents call themselves “Migueleños.”

It was fun to try tropical cuisine without having to get on a plane.

End of Article

Migueleño’s in Seaside, California is still open.  It is on Broadway Avenue (Obama Way).  The street has been torn up for two years, but it is worth the wandering around to get to the restaurant.

There is another Salvadoran Restaurant on Del Monte Avenue in Marina, California called El Salavadoreño Pupuseria.  I have not been there yet, but obviously Salvadoran food is gaining in popularity.

Products for making Salvadoran food at home can be purchased at El Rancho in Marina, Mi Tierra in Seaside, and Mi Pueblo in Seaside.

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

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