A Flog (fall blog) :-)

My mom sent me a one-liner email a few days back – she must have been a little frustrated. Simple and to the point: „What’s happening with your blog?“ Which I interpreted to mean...“Julie, your blog writing has become almost non-existent lately, and when you bother to write something it’s kinda...uh...boring.“ Who knows what she actually meant, but meanwhile, during the course of the day, I started to at least consider what I could write about. Always the problem with blogging – you need to keep up regularly or you just lose it.

So I started to write this long, involved and nostalgic blog post about fall here in Munich. You know – typical clichés of rejoicing over brilliantly hued fall leaves, the smell of fireplaces being ignited for the first time in the year, the hearty soups that begin to appear on menus around the city, the cozy sweaters you can cuddle up in on the sofa. All well and good. But who really cares about my opinion? Even collected a couple fallish photos. See.



The beauty of a four-season fall - buckeye chestnuts everywhere (we have a couple trees right next to our apartment and they are very beautiful. I just wish they were edible chestnuts!), scarlet ivy flaming across building walls, baskets of every kind of pumpkin imaginable crowding the farmers' market stalls (although yes, I know those are just Hokkaidos. Shut up). Beautiful. Yawn.

On the other hand, I thought I might be able to craft a short kind of Ruth Reichl piece a la “Tender at the Bone” (a novel/biography with recipes – she’s a great writer and a great tweeter too - she does these sort of food haikus...that make you wish you were eating what she is eating at that moment.) Anyway, the idea was jot down a few little vignettes, each with a recipe. And I started. But along the way I realized that I wasn't inspired enough to really do a bunch. One would have to do. At least for now.

And really as I crunched my way through the fallen leaves on the way to work I realized that mostly I had been missing Sukkot - the Jewish harvest holiday. My parents (HI MOM, HI DAD! xoxoxox), used to make this beautiful party celebrating the holiday every year around this time. It's a relatively minor holiday in the Jewish calendar, but the way we used to celebrate it was far from minor. Just for background, in case you are interested, you can read a few words about Sukkot here. (Thank god for Wikipedia...) We lived in this house with sliding glass doors in the back and my dad would build the Sukkah (yes, you will need to read the Wikipedia article) directly next to these doors. Very practical. Because my parents would then proceed to invite 200 guests over for an afternoon and evening party to celebrate. All food would be served from this little three walled hut filled with our artwork and hanging fruits and leaves. (Come on, Mom, aren't you itching to make one of these for the boys next year? You even have the sliding doors still...) My dad would CRANK his favorite ABBA albums (yes, ABBA - I don't know why) and Israeli albums (ok, those make a little more sense), to the highest decible he could stand and my sisters and I would all go careening around the house screaming with excitement.


Rather than making things complicated around food, my parents had devised this brilliant plan: serve Israeli street food to everyone - FALAFEL. Really awesome stuff when smooshed into a pitta with humous and tahini and tabouli and eggplant and salad. When I was working in London in August, I must have gotten one of these at least once or twice a week for lunch. There was an Israeli place around the corner from our office that makes the best falafel I have had in years and years. Put tears in your eyes to eat one of their sandwiches.

Anyway, moving along.

We invited all the neighbors and the aunts and uncles that lived nearby, a bunch of our school friends - everyone was welcome. Mostly it was a pretty laid back party. My grandmother would come some years weeks in advance and bake cakes and cookies with my mom in preparation for the party. I remember having dozens of sweets to choose from...

But next to the falafel, running around with friends in the backyard, flying kites, playing with newspaper footballs, the thing I will never forget is a special sweet that I think I have not eaten since I was little. I couldn't remember exactly how it was said or spelled and it took me some time to find it a couple days back. The way I remembered it was "Tadelach." And that was what I looked for. But it turns out, it is actually spelled and called "Teiglach." Which is a Yiddish word (which I more or less understand now that I speak German) coming from a Schwabian word which is "Teigle." Which literally means "Little dough." Cute. Isn't that cute? Here in Bavaria, they would probably call this sweet "Teigchen." (Bavarian diminutive form: "chen" rather than "le" added to the end of the word.) Teiglach is a cookie that is boiled in honey with ginger and other spices. So if you can imagine it, my mom would have a huge vat on the stove filled with boiling honey and she would drop these cookies in there (filled with nuts/raisins) to boil for awhile. When it was all done and cool, we would be allowed to fish one of these cookies out of the gooey honey and eat it and lick our fingers clean of the gingery spicy honey afterwards. Pretty heavenly stuff. I never got my mom's recipe for them, but I started to poke around the web to see what I could find. And I found a recipe that seems like it could be pretty close to what I remember from my childhood. A bit different in how the honey syrup is handled at the end, but the rest seems pretty close.

So now waiting for the mother to appear with her recipe. I have plenty of time this weekend to experiment, even without a Sukkah to eat the teiglach in.