Once upon a time, there were three little pigs.  They lived with their mother, and they were all so very happy.  One day, their mother announced, “This house is getting too crowded for all of us.  The three little pigs simply must move out.  They need to go off and build their own little houses.”

So that’s just what the three little pigs did.  They kissed their mother goodbye and went out to find a place of their own.  The first little pig said, “I will make my house out of straw.”

The other pigs laughed and laughed.  ”Who’s ever heard of a house built out of straw?” the squealed.  Apparently those other pigs did not know what they were talking about because many of us might gladly live in this straw house that’s under construction:

Modern straw houses have become a hit across the United States.

Using straw in construction is nothing new.  It’s been around since pre-history around the world.  But the unique approach of construction like with this house, built by Andrew Morrison, dates back to the early 20th century in the midwestern United States where straw abounds.

When farmers harvest their grain for consumption, they’re left with the stock – the straw.  It’s the waste product essentially.  Except thankfully, we’ve been finding gobs of uses for it for years and years.  Straw is bundled and used for a multitude of uses like animal bedding and cover for gardens and now – more and more houses.

Straw bales are at least 18 inches thick, making a pretty hefty wall.  Hefty and warm!  The insulation values are R-30 to R-35, so you can be sure your heating bill won’t be through the roof each winter.  Some people might argue, “Well yeah!  Of course it has a high R-value.  It’s 18 inches thick.  Give me 18 inches of insulation, and I’ll have a tight house.”  They’d be completely right.  But the thing is… The Straw Is Already Here.

One thing I especially love would be all the built-in shelves or seats in front of windows.  The curves toward the doorways are beautiful, too, aren’t they?

So maybe the first of the infamous Three Little Pigs wasn’t as foolish as we all always thought.

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Have a suggestion for a unique home you’d like to visit for our weekly series?  We’ve visited so many interesting places from a Modern Tipi House to a House in a Cave.  Now won’t you share where you’d like to go next?  Or would you be content staying in a Straw Bale House of your own one day?

(Happily shared with Hooked on Houses.  Images from Flickr)

One of my favorite things to do at the organic grocery stores is pick up out something new from the shelves and bring it home.  My second favorite is making everyone at dinner try it with me.

My experimentation doesn’t take place in regular grocery stores.  I think it’s the idea of exotic foods being gourmet if they come from organic grocery stores.  If I were to get experimental in a regular grocery store, I’m almost afraid of what I might grab.  Pickled pigs feet?  Veggie spread cheese slices that aren’t real cheese… or real food?

I’m a firm believer of trying new things at mealtime.  It’s how we’ve become lovers of kale in our soup, countless German products, and most recently – mascarpone cheese.  Have you ever tried this stuff?  Oh my.  We’re eating it by the tub.  Books call marscapone an Italian cream cheese, and I like the sound of that.  I could raise my arm at the table and shout in a booming, cheerful voice, “Martinia!  (You know – ‘Martin’ gone Italian.)  Martinia!  Fetcha me-a the marscapone!”

He’d probably respond in a dry voice, “It’s already next to you, Katie.”

And he’d be right.  Chances are we would already have a bit of mascarpone on the table.

To me, mascarpone tastes like a tangier cream cheese.  It’s really smooth and not too sweet.  You won’t mind getting a little on your fingers now and then.  In fact, you might even try to get some on your fingers.

What about finding it outside of the US?  Or Italy for that matter?  Well I know mascarpone is sold in German grocery stores.  We were looking for it in 2007… in the produce isle.  Clearly we had no idea what we were looking for when we left Martin’s grandmother’s house to get the groceries.  If only we could have known that sweet piece of heaven could be useful for so many wonderful foods.

…wonderful foods like these breadsticks.  Adapted from the book, How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, these breadsticks are delicious dipped in mascarpone cheese.  They’re also good by themselves, dunked in marinara sauce, or baked with a little seasoning.  We’ve swapped for different types of flour like rye, wheat flour, and chickpea, making the dough half all-purpose.  They aren’t quite as fluffy and flavorful, so consider sticking to all-purpose white flour your first time around.

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Breadsticks

1 1/2 c all-purpose flour
1 tsp instant yeast
sprinkle of sugar
1 tsp salt
2/3 c warm water
2 tbl extra virgin olive oil
cornmeal for rolling (optional)
kosher salt for sprinkling (optional)
sesame seeds for sprinkling (optional)

1. Combine dry ingredients in a food processor and pulse briefly.  If you don’t have a food processor, you can easily make this dough in a bowl.  It just takes a bit more work.

2. Once dry ingredients are combined, add half of the water while machine is running.  Continue to add water a bit at a time until the flour mixture becomes damp and slowly rolls itself into a ball.

3. Pour olive oil in a bowl, spread it around, and place the ball of dough in the center.  Cover bowl with plastic and let sit for an hour in a warm place.  Then put in the fridge over night.

4. The next day, preheat the oven to 400 degrees F (205 degrees C).  Split the dough into two pieces.  Roll one out to 1/4″ thick, and cut breadsticks.  (A pizza cutter works especially well)  You’ll want to make your cuts 1/4″ to 1/2″ thick.  The thinner they are, the more fun they are to eat because they’ll have a nice little crunch.

5.  Grease a baking sheet with olive oil, sprinkle on cornmeal, and add breadsticks about 1/4″ apart.  They won’t rise any measurable amount, so yo don’t have to worry about them sticking together.

6.  Brush breadsticks with olive oil and sprinkle on kosher salt and sesame seeds as desired.  Bake until crisp, about 12 to 18 minutes.  Cool and serve with mascarpone.  Breadsticks last five days when stores in an airtight container.

Optional: Add herbs to the flour mixture in Step 1 such as rosemary or thyme or grated Parmesan cheese.

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“Martinia, the breadsticks!  Pass ‘em a to me!”  And when he does:  ”Danke.”  I love these things.

(Oh – and here’s a basic recipe for a mascarpone substitute if you can’t find it.)

Happy baking.  And a happy weekend, everybody!

Oh the joy of being able to cook and bake again!  I think I cannot resist tying on the apron strings any longer.  I think it’s something about the approach of fall.  The crisp air, the taste of apples, farmers markets pulling out sliced pumpkin… it’s true love at our house.  Does autumn do this to you?  Do you get this overwhelming sense to nest?

You and I had so much fun crashing weddings from around the world that I started thinking, “What comes next?”  For my family, every day ends in a meal together.  Eating with family and friends becomes this incredible experience where we get to share our lives and grow together.

We get to know one another over food.  Sometimes it’s for a meal.  Other times, it’s homemade cakes when friends come over or late night snacks with visiting relatives.

So many of you have requested more recipes on Making This Home.  That’s why tomorrow I’m so happy to begin our newest series of yummy treats.  Of course, every one of these recipes will be vegetarian.  They’ll also be compatible with ingredients I can find in both Germany and the United States, so hopefully you can all work with them and adapt to what you have available.

But what’s a recipe without a piece of history?  I don’t mean history like the story of German Chocolate Cake necessarily (even though you might love to know that German Chocolate Cake has nothing at all to do with Germany).  I mean stories from the table – stories that have changed my perspective on food and might change yours, too.  They’re stories about passion for food – like the day I was so sure Martin would be the most popular guy at work here in Germany last year when he brought chocolate chip cookies, only to find that nobody would eat them because someone purchased traditional German pastries.  So I ended up eating way too many cookies.  That’s the kind of story I’m talking about.  That’s the kind of writing I most love because I like thinking about people and our senses and the way we speak and respond to life.

I’m most excited about this project because it’s completely seasonal.  The grocery store where we shop works directly with farmers to provide our produce.  So if things aren’t in season, I probably won’t be able to readily find them.  So no strawberry pie around here for a while.  (drats)

So what do you think?  If you’re thinking, “Katie, you should be sharing a recipe Right Now,” perhaps I can tie you over.  Here is the list of recipes on Making This Home thus far:

Homemade Graham Crackers

Homemade Marshmallows

Refrigerator Iced Tea

Outdoor Ice Cream

Roasted Applesauce

German Christmas Cookies

American Chocolate Chip Cookies

To kick things off, won’t you take a moment to share a food story with all of us?  With the school season starting off all over the world, let’s start with the basics.  What’s your favorite sack lunch sandwich?  Are you still a pb&j kinda gal?  Or maybe you’re all about the baked tofu (maybe that’s just me?) or turkey or salami.  Whatever it is, please spill.  Lunch time comes a little faster around here than we’re used to from a summer in the US, you know.

When we returned to Germany last week, I had a pretty good idea of what to expect.  Yet after describing my culture shock upon returning to the United States after living abroad and witnessing the culture shock of our German friends in the US, I started watching how the German lifestyle might seem incredibly foreign to an expat.

Please note that these points are based on my own experiences and where I have spent large amounts of time in Germany.

1. Cars are small; drivers are fast. Everyone is zipping around and racing from street light to street light.  You’d think it’s a mad dash to the finish line when you first watch Germans driving.  You can’t help feeling tense and maybe a little crowded in the tiny cars.  Then you see something that never happens in the US.  Someone turns on a blinker to switch lanes, and the next person in the new lane lets the person right in.  Every time!

Everyone is incredibly alert.  They can’t make right turns on red lights, so they don’t cut off pedestrians.  In fact, I’d walk across the busiest streets of Berlin over and over before I’d even risk crossing the street in front of a WalMart in the US suburbs once.

I’ve driven several times throughout Germany.  It is more exhausting than learning to fly an airplane because not only is everyone paying attention, they also expect that you are, too.  I’m used to hanging my arm out the window, listening to the radio, and watching people on cell phones weave around their really wide lane in the US.  Oh no.  Here, you’re truly inches away from the parked cars on your right and the moving cars on your left.

When the light turns green, Germans expect you to go.  I mean GO.  People will politely tap their horns to remind you to pay attention to the light.  But when someone (ie someone like me) kills the engine because she’s not used to driving a diesel moving van with a stick shift, no one honks.  They just wait.  I feel like people get impatient if you aren’t paying attention, and they’re kind when you have a problem.

2.  Bikes zip in and out of traffic. I haven’t seen so many bikes anywhere else in Germany as I do in Berlin.  At least 200,000 people commute by bike every day.  Because drivers pay such good attention to what everyone is doing, I feel safer on my bike in Germany than in a little car in the US sometimes.  I’m not saying a biker shouldn’t pay attention to turning cars.  But have you ever felt safe in a bike lane, trying to go straight, when the cars’ turning lane is to your left?  The cars stop and wait for the bikers to pass.

3.  You need a euro coin to get a shopping cart. You can’t just grab a cart and go.  I love this idea.  When they’re done shopping, everyone puts away their carts so they can get their money back.  No carts clogging the parking spots or denting parked cars like in the US.

4.  Grocery clerks won’t provide you with bags. You have to bring your own grocery bags or prepare to pay up to a buck for each one.

5.  Don’t expect said clerks to bag your groceries. That’s your job.  There have been days when I can hardly keep up with clerks.  I’m unloading the cart, loading my bike basket and shopping bags, and trying to pay all at once.  When I’m not fast enough, it’s my own loss.  Clerks will actually start piling the next person’s purchases right on top of mine!  The clerks aren’t being rude; it’s what they’re told to do.  A friend told us that grocery clerks are evaluated by the amount of purchases they ring up in an hour.

6. Prepare to recycle everything and be scolded by your neighbors when you mess up. I wrote a guide to recycling in Germany earlier this year where Martin and I counted ten (!!) different piles that we must sort our trash.  As for being corrected by your neighbors… they’re not trying to be rude.  I would say that in order to create an orderly society, Germans feel it is necessary to help one another – by correcting mistakes – to make things flow better.  It’s tough to be corrected all the time, even though it makes sense, though.  Imagine living in a place the size of the State of Montana and having 100 times as many people.  A common sense of order makes sense, doesn’t it?

7.  Everyone speaks English. I might as well just tell you this now.  Germans will pretend they don’t know English, so I must say, for being surrounded by people who don’t know English, they sure do laugh at the EXACT same time my American friends and I do when we’re swapping stories and cracking jokes at restaurants.  And why does it get so quiet and people lean toward me when I answer the phone on the subway (in English, of course) before I meet up with someone?

I love this about Germans – they’re so wonderfully humble!  Even if they aren’t fluent in English, they can recognize English and might know a few words.

8.  German is tough to learn in Germany. One of the most incredible things about living in Germany is learning the language and communicating in a totally new way.  I’ve become a huge advocate of learning in a country surrounded by native speakers – you learn to sound more like them and have to practice even when you don’t want to.  The challenge comes from #7 where I mentioned that most people know English.  Naturally, a German would rather practice English with you than speak German.  Likewise, I’d rather practice German with them.  So learning German can get a little tough sometimes for English speakers.  It becomes a battle of he-said-she-said until you finish doing business together.

Want to know my trick?  When I’m speaking to someone and she hears me struggling to express myself, she’ll immediately switch to English.  I tip my head, wrinkle my forehead, and just look at her like, “What are you saying?”  Yep.  You guessed it – I actually have to pretend that I don’t know English so I can practice applying my German.

9.  Doors open backwards. I’m telling you this because I cannot even begin to tell you how often Martin and I look like dopes, yanking doors when we should be pushing and vice versa.  The US has building fire codes that require most businesses to have doors that open outward.  That way, if there’s a fire in a crowded bank and everyone is pushing to get out, you don’t have to fight the crowd just to pull the doors open.  But for some reason, doors to shops in Germany always seem to open in.  You’d probably never notice this problem until you’ve fully embarrassed yourself in front of half of the people who share the same apartment building as you because, over and over, you keep hitting your head on the door because it doesn’t open the way you’re used to.  Not that I’ve done that several times or anything…

Any culture shock you’ve run into on your travels around Europe?  How about as a European going to places that, say, don’t require a deposit to borrow a shopping cart.  What’s that like?

(Images from the Turkish Market yesterday)

You won’t see us turning away good food at this house… unless that good flavor comes from the nasty little chemical compound called monosodium glutamate (MSG). This scary little food additive can be found in a lot of prepackaged foods, fried foods, and meats. Chain restaurants, locally owned restaurants, fast food, slow family restaurants – a lot of ‘em have this little additive.

You and I chose foods based on taste. MSG’s main function is to enhance the taste of food, so we naturally turn to food products with more MSG. The United States Food & Drug Administration says that MSG is okay in our food at this point, but a lot of scientists disagree.

Every time Martin and I move, I start thinking about our diet.  It shifts slightly each time as our meals match what’s readily available.  You can probably bet there wasn’t an organic Sri Lanka restaurant back where I was learning to fly in the US, and I don’t think we’ll be finding fresh raspberries on the side of the road in Berlin.  Those changes are easy to recognize; it’s the chemical adjustments that have me thinking – you know, stuff like MSG.

So what’s the big deal?

MSG tears open your taste buds to heighten the flavor of food. If you eat a lot of MSG in your meal, your mouth will feel kind of funny afterward. Martin would describe it as raw feeling. For me, it’s kind of waxy. I feel like a dog trying to lick peanut butter off the roof of my mouth. Try eating a bunch of jerky or a shrimp basket at your favorite restaurant, and you’ll see what we mean when you walk out the door.

Some scientists believe MSG is one of the biggest causes of obesity in the US, and others worry about how it over-stimulates our brains.  A lot of people get headaches after eating Chinese food in the US. It’s because of MSG.  I’ve read about how it increases chances of cancer, asthma, and Alzheimer’s. I suppose the argument could be that everything that we do or eat influences these diseases. MSG is something we can feel, which is rare, and it doesn’t feel natural at all… which is reason enough for our house and maybe yours to try and steer clear.  Here’s how:

There are a lot of arguments about MSG. I even caught a commercial for MSG-free soup while I was watching TV with my grandma in the US.  The easiest way to avoid MSG at home is to:

We ask.  A lot of waitresses will have no idea what MSG is, so ask about preservatives in the food.  At our house, the easiest way we’ve found to avoid MSG is to avoid fried food.

We don’t know the answers, but I just thought I’d pass on one of the little chemicals we dodge like the plague at our house in our efforts to simplify our diet and our lives.

How does dinner roll at your house?  Are you reading labels and watching out for MSG or other additives?  Got ingredients you nix from your shopping cart?  You know we’re hungry to hear!

(Data from Healthy Choices; image from Boston)

Happy Monday everyone.  Are you ready to return to our visits to small spaces and unique homes?  I sure am.  Being back in our 450 square foot apartment, I’m so inspired by this simple hotel in Ile de Ré, France.  I ran into it late the other night on Ill Seen, Ill Said when I was wide awake with jetlag.  Would you like to come take a stroll through this hotel with me?

It’s always refreshing to find a space that is decorated very simply – no clutter, no extras.  It takes such great restraint to keep a simple home or hotel.  That in itself is a decorating challenge.  Just take a look at how relaxing and beautiful Hotel Le Senechal is inside.

Isn’t the exposed brick beautiful?  I think it would be such a relaxing place to return to after a day of touring – fresh cheeses, bread, and wine in hand, of course.

We could sit in these chairs and talk about all the beautiful sites in Ile de Ré.  Maybe even throw in a few French words along the way.

What do you like about this hotel?  Could you find yourself incorporating elements like these into your home?  Would you gladly chisel away all the plaster if you had beautiful brickwork beneath it?  So beautiful!

(Images from Hotel Le Senechal)