Currywurst museum - taking the sausage?

(Picture from Spiegel online)

Berlin has a new currywurst museum. Why does all the best stuff open once you've left? I loved the month I lived in Berlin but I have to admit to only having one decent currywurst whilst there and never during my 3 years in the Rhurgebiet. For those of you unaware of this German delicacy, currywurst (or curried sausage) is essentially a chopped sausage with tomato ketchup and curry powder (German standard curry powder, so not hot atall.) I always preferred a good standard bratwurst im broetchen (sausage in a breadroll), especially when the bratwurst is 3 times the length of the bun, making the whole thing comedic.

I know about currywurst from reading The Invention of Curried Sausage by Uwe Timm. It's a nice novella and Lena Brueker's tale of wartime romance and survival is a touching way to introduce the birth of Berlin's culinary masterpiece. Plus any book based on the invention of fast food snack has a certain uniqueness anyway.

The question remains however, why don't we have a Fish and Chips museum? I appreciate fish-and-chip's rise to fame is not quite so linked to post-war development and east/west clashes in a symbolic city, but there has to be some information worthy of an exhibition. The kids could play on the chip-frying simulator or giant map depicting mushy pea trends across the UK, whilst the adults consider the display on changing portion size and listen through vinegar bottle shaped headphones to interviews on the environmental impact of banning newspapers as wrapping. I'll write to the national lottery for funding shall I?

The great gummi mystery - more adventures in baking

A girl can only take too much chocolate brownie, so instead of continuing the brownie experiments, I decided to try with orange cake. The ringbearer was not so pleased, he considers fruit based cakes to be 'girly and healthy'. How a cake consisting of almonds, sugar, eggs and oranges could be called 'healthy' is beyond me. One way almondy heart attack if you ask me. So everyone knows chocolate and oranges go, so I thought I'd add some minstrels (crispy shell possibly adding texture, or protection from chocolate oozing) and some gummy bears (because they're fruit flavoured too).

Stage 1. Orange and almond cake preparation. Having started on the task of grating 3 oranges, I was forced to put on a very feminine apron. This combined with my fashionable T-shirt/dress leggings combo, gave me the appearance of a medieval baker (or chorus member in the Pied Piper). Under such feudal conditions it seemed fruitless to complain about how the oranges were turning my hands well...orange.

Stage 2. Folding issues. My recipe required the eqq whites to be folded into the main mixture or almonds, eggs and sugar. How was I to add the minstrels? Would the weight of the minstrels somehow interfere with my gentle folding of the egg whites? Would all the air be lost? Could minstrels act as nucleation sites for air loss? (unlikely, I know)

Stage 3. I opted to gently insert the sweeties into the cake, with absolute minimum of stirring. Minstrels in one small sector. Gummi bears in another right next to the minstrels.

Stage 4. Baking and removal of the cake. Cake was then pierced numerous times with a kebab stick and the orangey syrup poured over. The piercing was very soothing in a machine-gunning-a-cake fashion, I might recommend it as a stress handling technique.
Stage 5. Serve

And so the mystery began. As you can see the minstrels were easy to find, although they added little to the cake eating experience, not being rich enough next to the oozy-almondy-cakieness. (Dark chocolate may be the answer). However, the gummi bears were never found. Never. They weren't where they were placed - can gummi bears swim in cake mix?. We couldn't taste them or see them (and they were pretty obviously green and red). We searched every mouthful of the cake for a gummy bear and came up with nothing. What happened? Did the gummi bears evaporate? Did they get abducted by aliens? Were they rescued from the oven by Haribo the super-gummi? Did they become one with the cake? - so great was their love for all things orange? A complete mystery so suggestions on a postcard please.

Next time, either minstrels brownies (Booooring) or mars bar strudel.

[Edited for my bad typing and grammar - pretty sure I didn't catch all of it either :( ]

Nude penguins and fetish foxes

I love silly season. I also adore penguins and am therefore very concerned about poor little Ralph the penguin, who lost all his feathers and has to wear a little wetsuit to stop him getting sunburn. Fortunately all his penguin friends are still letting him join in the penguin games.

Of course over in Germany the Sommerloch, is also bustling with animal antics. The wild boars, instead of attacking churches or breaking in to hardware stores are partying on the autobahn, a fox has developed a footwear fetish ( If he was in Berlin he could attend specialist sex parties for that) and hedgehogs are becoming some sort of rescue statistic in Nord Rhine-Westphalia. Why the police are required to deal with hedgehogs is a mystery. The boars I will grant are scary porkers in desperate need of a harshly written ASBO.

Moon - keeping it retro on the dark side of

Last night I saw Duncan Jones's film Moon. Set on -you guessed it- the moon, it follows single astronaut Sam (Sam Rockwell[1]) as he finishes up his 3 year contract drilling for Helium and prepares to head home. Of course nothing is quite as it seems and soon Sam is faced with the sort of booming questions that echo across thousands of sci-fi tomes. Who or what is he? Sam is accompanied by GERTY, the as-standard talking robot who earns the audience's instant mistrust by being the same race as HAL, but the film remains for the most part a one-actor film. Moon was clearly cheap to make (by Hollywood standards) and the bouncing models and limited set nicely reflect the 70s thinking-man's sci-fi such as Silent Running or Dark Star the film attempts to emulate.

Whilst Moon doesn't really have twists, you can easily spoil the plot by knowing too much about it. Unfortunately, I had sussed out the situation about 30 minutes before Sam began to get close to it and felt a little cheated. Have I read or seen too much Sci-Fi? I suspect that a gentle exposition was more in tone with the film's slow pace and implication that time was dripping past and subsequently I wasn't meant to be surprised. I loved the retro set, the inherent claustrophobia it brought and the crumpled mess of marker pens, duvet suits and post-its that was Sam's 'home'. I was also very impressed by the decidedly Amstrad looking GERTY, who managed some fine acting with nothing but emote icons.

My greatest problem with Moon is that whilst it is a beautifully shot, well acted, much needed antithesis to recent blockbuster sci-fi films such as Transformers, I can't bring myself to like it. I never liked Silent Running or it's ilk. Deep thinking Sci-fi books have annoyed me more than interested me for years and I have always wanted to fire photons whenever Star Trek brought up a philisophical episode. This somewhat dulled my enjoyement of Moon, I had a real sense of 'seen it before - got anything new to say/do?'. If you don't have such strong feelings about Sci-fi pondering, go and see Moon. Even if you do, go and see some fine film-making . Just don't think too hard about the antagonist's motives they, unlike the big philosophical questions posed by the film really don't stand up to lengthy consideration.

[1] I met a lovely man called Rockwell Flint once. Possibly the most awesome name EVER.

Penguin papers

(Picture from Spiegel online)

When you see a man with penguins, what do you do? Call the police obviously. Only in Germany would someone be carrying the necessary papers for their penguins, whilst frolicking in a lake. Mostly I am delighted that one can take penguins out for R&R. When I'm a billionaire and can afford my Penguin wonderland, I shall take my penguins on many lovely trips to cooling lakes. And they'll be much better behaved than disgusterous jumpy dogs.

Wicked - Girl power in Oz

Taking place mostly before Dorothy skipped across Oz, Wicked is the tale of the wicked witch of the west and her one-time friend Glinda-the good. You really should have heard about it, there are long running productions all over the world. And last Saturday as part of an extra special birthday treat I went to see it in London. I really enjoyed myself, it offers everything you expect from a west end musical, slick choreography, great performances, good laughs, expensive interval sweets, hum-along songs and lots of magic. The Oz magic even begins before the curtain goes up (and the incredibly sweet giant dragon begins to fume) as the underwater themed Apollo Victoria theatre is bathed in green light.

I have no knowledge of the book (the Oz series or the prequel the musical is based on) but I really enjoyed the change of perspective that Wicked provided. I was terrified the first time Glinda sang (No-one mourns the wicked), so high and squeaky was she that I couldn't distinguish the words. Fortunately all later songs were sung at a more comprehend able pitch and were generally awesome. The easily recognisable quotes from the Wizard of Oz that were included in the musical, really made me giggle. Glinda's comedic character makes it easy for her to steal most scenes, but I was rooting for Elphelba, which is a testament as to how she is written and performed.

Oz is apparently well known to be something of a pro-women novel and it follows through in 'Wicked'. How often are musicals written about the relationship between 2 women, with the love story in firm second place? It was no accident that all the best numbers were between the two witches rather than the love-interest(s) or the wizard. Whilst I appreciate that the film and musical never really cross , I felt that the end melting sequence was a bit of a let down. Played in silhouette on a quickly drawn across curtain, the scene seemed like a high school worthy dodge and not worthy of an otherwise very resourceful set design. But this is a small quibble, I loved the rest of the musical. Sure it only has a few numbers that really stick in the brain but the fact that I tried to sing 'defying gravity' for the rest of the evening after hearing it only once is quite a credit (And I'm really bad with music). I was also utterly dejected that I couldn't take the dragon home.

Indietracks - A brownie pack holiday with real ale and amps

Indietracks is a small indie-pop festival held at the Midland railway museum. It pricked my interest thanks to it's unusual combination of steam trains and indie-pop ( although it has been postulated that the link is related to either a fascination with usable 'vintage' or real ale) and exhibiting some bands at the bargain price of £35. It is undoubtedly the first festival I have attended where I arrived by antique train, spent breaks in bands chatting to a lovely volunteer about his model railway 'My granddaughter goes to Glastonbury, she says it isn't like this' or bopped away in an engine shed. Indietracks is mercifully noncommercial (home-made is something of a theme) and not only are the sandwiches, buns and real ale (courtesy of the local CAMRA society) reasonably priced, they taste good too. Indietracks is the place for the vintage dress clad, broadsheet reading music nerd. It was possibly the only festival I have attended where children and pushchairs seemed appropriate, safe and welcome (I loved the baby ear defenders, I want some). The workshop featured jewelery making from Tatty Devine and talks on 'how not to run a music label' as well as bunting making and corsage construction. All vital indicators of the humble, twee, home-made nature of the event.



There were 3 stages, outside, the engine shed and the tiny tin railway church. Hair bow, ballet pump wearing indie fans trotted happily between the three, waiting to hear many bands who were suitably obscure. Such is the intimacy of indietracks you often found yourself corsage making sitting next to bands who had just finished playing, however this was also an indication of the lack of 'big name' bands. The names that drew us to Saturday were Emmy the great and Camera Obscura, perennials of Radio 6. Emmy the Great, following an apparently nightmarish journey gave a performance that was functional but added nothing to her recorded work. Camera Obscura were surprisingly upbeat, endearingly apologizing for one slow depressing number, as they had expected people to be sitting and chilling on the grass rather than standing and bouncing. Surprises to us were the impressive enthusiasm of Cats on Fire, and Sucrette who proved to be bubble sweet and managed to make music that sounded like it belonged on a Miss Kitty video game, pleasant summer listening. An honorable mention is deserved for Butcher Boy who utilised everything from cello to an accordion, whilst entertaining their small band of faithful fans. The Lovely Eggs also managed a strange mix between comedy, loud punky music and twee musings about fruit, cowboys and dinosaurs in the church stage. I'm not sure they have much to offer other than novelty - but they were like the entire festival, warm, unique and reminiscent of an indie band searching for a big break at a girl guide sing-a-long.