Dear Foodies,

A little help please?

Please, please, please? I am desperate.

I need a recipe for Lebkuchen! Christmas of 2001 I passed in Strasbourg. The capital of all things Christmas in my opinion; street fares selling anything a Christmas goer could need, along with steaming vats of mulled wine to keep you warm as you mingle among the wears. And from every boulangerie, the smell of Lebkuchen, German gingerbread.

The problem is not so much finding a recipe, as finding the right recipe. Any Christmas buff can tell you gingerbread is a very loose kind of term, it covers everything from the cardboard crunchiness of store-bought gingerbread cookies, to the grandma-style molasses laden sticky bread, to the thick cake-like walls of the age old gingerbread house. Unfortunately for me, these are most certainly not what I am looking for in Lebkuchen.

I have blindly been searching for pain d'épices , the French version, and however delicious (see my recipe here). It is just not the same. I gained a little ground with some good luck in my travels, meeting up with a French girl at the tea plantation in Corrientes, I begged for a little help, and attempted to describe what I was looking for.
"Pain d'épices , you know! It comes in round disks, like big cookies only with the texture of a cake and covered with a glaze, either sugar or chocolate, please tell me you have had them?!"
she looked perplexed for a moment, and I began to think these dream bars were out of my reach,
"Oui, what you want is Lebkuchen, that is the German name, should should have a bit more luck searching under that name."So I searched. At least I found a few pictures:

WANTED! LEBKUCHEN!

(This picture has been shamelessly stollen from here)

(and from here)

The recipe results have been less than helpful, the best I can find are the thin crispy cookies (here is a picture).

I will never give up the search but I know when it is time to call in reinforcements. So please. Help a girl get her cookies! All help is most supremely appreciated.

First Almost Sweater

So my first sweater isn´t exactly a sweater. So what.


Here it is! The Anthropologie-inspired Capelet From Peony Knits (its a free pattern, if you want to know). I used the left over yarn from the poncho which worked out well. I added a lot more rows to the bottom, maybe my boobs are just to big or the needles I used were different, or my gage was somehow off. I donno. But it looks fine in the end :)




It took quite a bit of needle improvising, and a little help from the online videos from Knittinghelp.com, (for the 2-needle-circular knitting I used on the ribbing for the sleeves) and a rather long afternoon in the park (my dog didn't seem to mind too much).

Argentine Road Trip Review

After 8 months, I say it was about time for around trip around the province in which I live: Corrientes. In my white pickup we set off towards the north for a long weekend trip to get to know the sights. First stop, Las Marias. A tea plantation started in the 1920´s which produce a whole line of Yerba Mates and Teas, though where we went it was limited to just mate and assam tea (the base of most black British teas). This plantation is its own little city, nature reserve, and production base, they even have there own school. It is also the largest producer of Yerba Mate on the planet, according to their website, and that is nothing to scoff at.

On the plantation the original owners home still remains in tact for visitors to see. Built in the 1920´s and now part of the taragui tea and mate logo.

Mate plants (in the 1st picture) can only be used for harvest for about 50 years, and the branches are cut by hand before being shredded, dried and packed. The plants are grown in an indoor and then outdoor green house until they are the correct size to be planted. Our tour guide brought us over in a truck to take a look.

The plants directly in front of the camera are assam tea, those to the right, with the rounded leaves will grow up to produce yerba mate.

We were even lucky enough to find an assam tea plant in bloom.

We couldn´t take pictures of the packaging on our tour, which was a shame it was amazing to see how much of the process was still so man-power intensive. But nonetheless I did snap a picture of the mate drying before it is sent over to be packaged for sale.

As I said before, Las Marias is also a nature reserve, and is full of different kinds of birds, alligators, carpinchos, and much more. If you have never heard of a carpincho you are about to find out. It is a small pig sized animal covered in brown fur, people here tend to eat them and turn their skin into one of the softest most beautiful leathers around. But they are, in my opinion, an awful lot like a giant over-grown hamster.

For a larger picture you can click on this link, if my photo-taking skills still leave a bit much to the imagination. And here is a picture of the alpargatas (typical shoes from argentina made of cloth or leather) I bought made of carpincho leather, in a town called Mercedes on the way back, they are oober soft and oh so comfortable.

We went Yapeyu, the town where San Martin (the liberator of a large chunk of South America from the Spanish) was born (if you need a little history on who San Martin is, click here) I won't fill up a cooking site with photos, but here is one lovely mosaic of him on the side of a church in the town.

And if you get a little hungry with all of this history just follow the sign for a side-splitting all you can eat BBQ.

And no road trip would be complete without the "lets pretend I am a photographer and artistic" shot.