Cooking and Baking

Eating out is quite expensive in Germany, or Europe, or if you come from Taiwan basically everywhere. For a family of three you have to pay at least 15 Euro, and that is if you go to a very simple Italian restaurant or a small Greek/Turkish diner.  The only cheaper options are the sausage stalls or fast food chains (if you can take advantage of some special offers, otherwise a menu also costs around 5 or 6 Euros).  So unless you have a really high paying job you have to cook and bake yourself quite often. Which sometimes can be very time consuming if you are used to the Taiwanese style of eating - as opposed to the German style. While Taiwanese traditionally enjoy warm meals for lunch and dinner (and often even for breakfast), the German diet consists of a lot of bread. Even for dinner traditional German families have bread with some cheese, cold cuts, perhaps some cold veggies (tomatoes, gherkins). Though I grew up in Germany I only got really aware of this curiosity when I was roughly a teenager. Because with my father being Taiwanese and (fortunately) not willing to have bread for dinner, I (as well as my siblings) grew up with warm meals for lunch and dinner. So i took that as normal, and only later as a teenager when I visited friends and also had dinner with them I found out that they had bread for dinner.
But coming back to the present - since it is financially not feasible to have dinner in a restaurant every day, and we also don't want to eat bread all the time we have been trying out a lot of different dishes - cooking and baking. My latest achievement  - burritos which were not too bad, but the rushed picture I took before we ate them, didn't turn out that nice. So no pictures from my burritos (which included self made tortillas). But here are some other examples.

蛋餅 - with self made skin

 

 "Pizza Bread" based on my sister's secret receipe

Fruit cake

 

Cheese cake

Black Forest Cake 黑森林蛋糕

The REAL black forest cakes comes really with a lot of cherries

And here some examples of my wife's creations

At the end a couple anecdotes of Taiwanese encountering German eating habits.
My father had just arrived in Germany as a student, when his class was invited for dinner by their professor. When my father saw all the different kinds of bread, sausages, cheese etc. saw, he thought: "nice appetizer, but I better don't eat too much, otherwise I won't be able to enjoy the real food." After a while the "appetizers" were removed, but - the "real" food wouldn't come. At that point it began to dawn on my father that he had just missed his dinner.
The other anecdote is a quote of one of my father's Taiwanese friends and classmates in Germany. Uncle Luo (羅伯伯) as I call him told me later that he thought upon his arrival in Germany: "How can I survive here - the weather is cold, and the food is cold as well."

Finally We Have a Shower Cabin

I wrote about our shower without a shower cabin some time ago.  And finally we installed a shower cabin - ourselves. Because when I asked in a store how much it would cost if they would install the shower cabin for us, the shocking reply was: "180 Euro".

So after our son had analyzed the needed material

 and had checked out the different shower cabins

we decided to order a shower cabin online and install it ourselves. It took us only about an hour and we didn't even break anything. And this is the result:

It doesn't look too bad and it even works.

Merry Christmas

I saw  the first messengers of X-mas in some supermarkets