German Unity Day

My son and I in front of the Brandenburg Gate

Germany is one of our favorite countries. I've been fortunate to visit there a few times and I simply like it more and more with each trip. Most of the time I've spent there has been in the former East Germany, which still has many remnants of its former communist days, such as the East Side Gallery of the Berlin Wall or Karl-Marx-Allee in Berlin. One of many favorite memories was simply standing next to Checkpoint Charlie as it lightly rained, watching the cars drive by without any need to stop or show their papers, all while the tourists snapped pictures. Needless to say, it seems that a united Germany is better than a divided one, and so we want to share in the celebration with all Germans of the 20th anniversary of their unity.

Sadly, German cuisine is hard for us to really work with here in the Middle East. There's a lot of pork involved, which is unavailable to us here, and due to our son's allergies we can't do much with dairy or eggs. There were several new things I wanted to try, but we ended up making currywurst like we always do.

Our Currywurst

Currywurst is a very popular and very tasty street food, largely available in Berlin. The concept is simple, take some sausage (a very nice all-beef hot dog would work in our case), smother it in curry ketchup, then sprinkle it with curry powder, finally eat it with bread on the side, and possibly french fries or vegetables. Usually to make the curry ketchup I'll mix some curry powder, paprika, and chili powder in white vinegar, then mix that with Heinz ketchup. It usually turns okay, though maybe a little grainy. I was excited to find this recipe for homemade curry ketchup. Maybe the whole thing needed more salt, but it was quite bland. It might also be because I'm not the biggest fan of apple cider vinegar. I opted to call the experiment a bust and just use regular ketchup and sprinkle curry powder on top. It may not be exactly like what I ate in Berlin, but it was still a very good guilty pleasure.

Congratulations on twenty years of unity, Germany. Here's to many more!