Snoverkill: Snowed In, Day 6

It's now Thursday and due to another snow storm making its way through our area yesterday, I am still off of work! The baking continues, with a cranberry-nut bread now under my belt as well as my favorite German dumplings: Hefeklöße!

 

Just pretend you don't see the chips on our crappy Target plates.

"Hefe" means yeast and "Klöße" are dumplings. Every time I would visit our relatives in Germany, I would ask my godmother to make these for me. Therefore, I would only get to eat them once a year - sometimes, once every few years. But now that I am becoming much more confident in creating yeast doughs, I figured that it was finally time to give making Hefeklöße a shot...and I was successful! Woo hoo!

They are most often served with sweet sauces - here the dumpling is shown with a strawberry sauce (frozen strawberries, heavy cream, sugar) and a vanilla sauce (a packet from the German store mixed with milk and sugar). But they can also be served in a savory fashion. For dinner, we each had one of the leftover dumplings with the last of the beef stew that Eric made this past weekend - yummy!

Putting the 'Farmer' Back in Frau Farmer

It seems like a funny thing to do when there's three feet of snow on the ground, but on Tuesday I spent the bulk of my day researching websites to buy our vegetable and herb seeds from. I ended up purchasing it all from Heirloom Seeds.

Item:1 - Qty:1, RED BURGUNDY ONION (Hamburger Onion)
Item:2 - Qty:1, CALIFORNIA WONDER PEPPER
Item:3 - Qty:1, CALABRESE BROCCOLI - CERTIFIED ORGANIC
Item:4 - Qty:1, ROMA TOMATO - CERTIFIED ORGANIC
Item:5 - Qty:1, MARKETMORE 76 CUCUMBER - CERTIFIED ORGANIC
Item:6 - Qty:1, BASIL, SWEET - CERTIFIED ORGANIC
Item:7 - Qty:1, DILL - CERTIFIED ORGANIC
Item:8 - Qty:1, OREGANO, GREEK - CERTIFIED ORGANIC
Item:9 - Qty:1, PARSLEY, ITALIAN - CERTIFIED ORGANIC
Item:10 - Qty:1, THYME, ENGLISH - CERTIFIED ORGANIC
Item:11 - Qty:1, CORIANDER / CILANTRO - CERTIFIED ORGANIC
Item:12 - Qty:2, COTTAGE GARDEN MIX  (A wildflower mix that we're going to sprinkle all around the back yard - I can't wait to see how this turns out!)
Item:13 - Qty:1, WINTER BLOOMSDALE SPINACH - CERTIFIED ORGANIC
Item:14 - Qty:1, YELLOW SWEET SPANISH ONION

We're going to have WAY more seed than we have room for so we're going to share it with a friend of mine who is going to start her very first garden this year!

Now the only other items we need are garlic (which won't be planted until late in the fall), strawberries (which I plan to grow in a pot on our deck), and sweet potatoes.

I had been wondering why it was hard to find sweet potatoes in online seed catalogs and then I found out that they're not grown from seed! We are going to grow our own sweet potato slips from organic sweet potatoes that we're going to buy from the farmers market or Whole Foods. This should be an interesting project...Stay tuned to find out how that goes!