vailian

This is my favorite cow pic, I took it in northern Germany after a particularly tedious concert of contemporary music, and it reminds me of what I want to do for at least a week, now that I am officially on vacation. It has been a rough and stressful last couple of weeks, but did my last day of work yesterday, with an open air concert... it rained but our early hopes that the show would be cancelled were dashed when we saw a sea of umbrellas in the audience.
Today I had my students recital, with "American Grill Party!" afterwards, and now (at 11:30 pm) the last of the group has gone home. Those Germans seem to love American food. I made (wait for it!) hamburgers, and served a garlic and yoghurt dip with taco chips and celery and carrot sticks. Dessert was homemade cheesecake (they have nothing like it here). It is always amazing to me how exotic these things are in Germany.
There are so many splendid food blogs out there, often with exact (and exacting) recipes and mouth-watering photographs. I didn't take any pictures (there was just too much going on that I had to oversee), but here, for those gourmets out there who want to know just how I do it:
Hamburgers: Find some beef (here they like to mix it with pig, a practice that I find tasteless), mix it up with a chopped onion or 2, throw in an egg or 2 cause otherwise the burgers fall through the slats in the grill.
Put them on a charcoal grill. But first light the charcoal, scream a lot because the coals don't catch, when they do catch, fan furiously with a filthy dustpan. When the burgers are on the grill, curse because some are cooking and the others are not because the charcoal is only buring on one end. Besides, the grill is completely rusty because I haven't used it for 2 years and it has been sitting out in the rain since the last American Grill. Worry that the police are going to come and bust me because grilling is illegal. (true!) But don't fan more with said filthy dustpan because the hamburgers will fill with nasty grit and ashes.
Serve with tomatoes, sliced, and onions.

chip dip: buy tub of intensely fatty yoghurt at the Turkish grocery, and mix it with Miree brand fresh herb cheese, whatever that is called in America.

Cheesecake: throw in all the Philadelphia you can find (yes, that is what they call cream cheese here) with some eggs, make a crust with some generic cookie crumbs (the best I have found are Brandt Hobbits), bake until it starts to set, pour Schmand over it and scald in the oven again, put in the fridge and hope no one finds it until the guests come.