Day Six-Middle Atlantic coast

 Hey everybody, Every time  I want to write "everybody" or "everyone" I forget an "e" and I write "evrybody", that's weird. But back to the main theme, today we are in the Mid-Atlantic which includes the states New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Delaware and the District of Columbia.  The capital of the USA, Washington D.C. (District of Coumbia) is in the Mid-Atlantic. Washington D.C. doesn't belong to any of the states because it's the capital. It's named after the first president of America, George Washington.  Washington D.C. is the seat of the government and the White House, where President Obama, the first African-American president of the US, lives during his term (as have almost all his predecessors), seen in the picture on the left.  Next to the White House is the Washington Monument, the biggest obelisk of the world. It's built on top of a hill,  and in a big water basin (reflecting pool) on the hill you can see its mirror image. The Washigton Monument was put in on the fourth of July in 1848 and was designed by Robert Mill. Robert Mill had won the designer challenge for the Washigton Monument, but in his proposal there was, around the obelisk, a columned hall with statues of George Washington and other heroes of the War of Independence. But there wasn´t enough money to build it, so they just buildt the obelisk. Because of a stone from Pope Pius IX and the ensuing fight about it , they interupted  the building activity in 1858. A few years after the civil war (1879 ),  they resumed building it and ended in 1884 . So you see, the Washigton Monument has a looong history. That, and because it interested me, I told you about it. As you can see America makes big things, sometimes taking a long time and with many interruptions, but in the end it´s perfect.  Á propos  perfect, on this day I made Spaghetti with dried tomatoes. My mum's birthday was on this day and she had three recipes and could choose one of them and she chose this one. But they don´t eat just Spaghetti there, of course. the Mid-Atlantic enjoys the most different cultures since the 17th century. The Dutch brought wafles and pan cakes, the Norwegian fish recipes and the Italian pizza and pasta.  But that isn´t even everything. In NY, for example, is a China Town and it has chinese cuisine.  There is also a Little Italy......the cuisine of Pennsylvania has influences from the German speaking minority, they eat there many vegetables, soups, stews, and meat dishes.  New Jersey is known for its vegetables, and above all of course the famous Jersey tomatoes.    

Spaghetti with dried tomatoes and parmesian

 
But for a birthday you always have to make a cake. Well my mum made brownies for her friends in her office and for our family, so I made peanut ice cream, because it goes perfectly with brownies. It was a weird taste but I liked the ice cream.

brownies and in the background peanut ice cream

Day Five-The Midwest

Hey everybody,

Al Capone

Chicago by night

Today is the fifth day of cooking through America, and I'll tell you about the Midwest. The Midwest includes the states of Ohio, Michigan, Minnesota, Iowa and Missouri. There doesn't seem to be a universal division of the country into regions, so you might find another arrangement of the Midwest and the other regions on other sites. Chicago, Illinois, is the third largest city in the US after New York and Los Angeles, and some believe it to be culturally and commercially the most meaningful metropolis in the Midwest. The food has influences from Northern Europe and Scandinavia, and when you visit Michigan you might feel as if you were in Holland because celery and tulip fields are quite common. The names Zelland or Harlem are a testimonial of the settlers. I think you may have heard of Chicago's major gangster boss Al Capone, who was responsible for a daily production of 80,000 l of moonshine during the prohibition.

beefsteak with corn and potatoes

Today I cooked two things, but the first can we only eat tomorrow because it's not ready yet. The first thing was peanut butter ice-cream, but it's still in the freezer. The second was beefsteak with baked potatoes and corn-on-the-cob.  Well it should have been corn-on-the-cob, but my mum couldn't find them anywhere so I used corn from the jar and put it in the sauce. But everything tasted pretty good anyway, nearly everything does if I may say so, maybe my family wasn't of the same opinion, but they're all polite anyway and have been supportive of my cooking. I didn't really like the steaks, they were rather tough, but the rest was great.

Day Four-The South

Hey everybody,

slaves  harvesting cotton

Guess what, it's me again.Today is my fourth day of cooking through America and we are in the South.When I speak of the South,  I mean the states Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Mississippi and Alabama. The South has strong influences in its food from the days of slavery in the 18th century.Soul food, cajun food, tex-mex cuisine and the creole cuisine are specifics of the South cuisine. For everyone who does not know what soul food or anything of this is , here is a little explanation for you: soul food is the name for the traditional cuisine of the African-American in America, especially in the South. Because the food for the slaves was of bad quality in the time of slavery, they made  it with much sugar and oil to advance the taste.Often they use spices like cayenne pepper, nutmeg, pimento, cinnamon and thyme. Canjun food is the cuisine of the french immigrants in the South. Typical ingredients include shrimps, oysters, and strange things like alligators and frog legs are eaten too. Tex mex food is a composition off  Texan and Mexican food, often very hot and spicy. The creole cuisine is similar with the cajun cuisine, but the creole cuisine is more oriented in the classic french style of cooking.
(I tried to copy the code of the video in my blog but it did not work, so I ll just put the link of the video in here : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DK_s60YclE)
For everyone who has seen the video I put in, when I see this,  I want to be there and eat everything. It looks so good, a little bit unhealthy maybe because of the immense amounts of oil but, yummy and when I saw this cake everything was forgotten..

plantage pancake

red rice with chorizos

Maybe you want to know what I cooked. Even if you don't want to know it,  I will tell you. In the afternoon I made plantage pancakes with much sugar. And for dinner I made red rice, rice with tomatoes and chorizos, a very delicate kind of sausage. I wouldn´t recommend the pancakes I made because they had so many eggs inside that they just tasted like eggs, and I couldn't taste the sugar inside them!! Of course I put much sugar on them but there HAS to be sugar inside!

Day Three-Mountain states

Hey everybody,
It's me again. Today we are in the Mountain states and I cooked salmon with lime sauce, a special recipe found in this high country even though the salmon and limes did not originate here.

Natural Bridges National Monument

The Great Plains

The Mountain states are Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and Nevada. The Rocky Mountains are a range that stretches through America and into Canada. The Rocky Mountain states have very famous historical sites, like the many National Parks in nearly every state, and the Natural Bridges National Monument in Utah or the Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming.

Mount Rushmore Monument

This reminds me of one of the most famous monuments, Mount Rushmore National Memorial in South Dakota, which of course is not one of the mountain states, but it is where the four American presidents  George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln (from left to right) are carved in stone.  This monument was begun in 1930 by John Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum.  Maybe you know it from movies like "Mars Attacks!", or "Head of State", not that I know these movies, I just read that they remove the heads of the 4 presidents in "Mars Attack!" and put alien heads in their place. That sounds just strange and stupid,  I mean imagine if you were an alien, why would you go to earth to put some alien heads in stone??? They must have better things to do, like killing people like they do in many alien movies.

I´m sorry, I just had to say that, but back to the main theme, I was writing about the Mountain states and the food there. In the Mountain states venison and elk are often eaten. I cooked fish because it's forbidden here to go hunting in the woods, and besides I don't want to hunt, sorry everyone maybe another time. Also very popular are salmon and trout.

This time when I cooked nothing bad happened like on "Day Two" with the doughnuts, and it tasted really good.  The only bad thing was that we had three salmon filets, one for each person, and I ate a half in the beginning, and later when I wanted the other half my father had already eaten it, and I only had mashed potatoes with sauce which was soooo good, -yummy- and no fish.

On the right of the plate is some salad I made and on the left mashed potatoes.

Day Two -Southwest

Hey everyone,
It's me again. Today I'll show you the Southwest and a very common dish, "chili con carne" , and something you can find everywhere in the USA, even in Germany it's common, the doughnut.

The Southwest includes the 3 (red framed) states Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico and has a lot of Mexican influences in the food and way of life, which you can see in many Mexican dishes with beans, the staple food in Texas. The Southwest has the most popular cuisine of America with its chilis, salsas, tortillas, tacos and juicy steaks...I'd better stop with these delicious sounding meals or I'll start getting hungry and dinner time is over...

The Big Bend National Park

The Big Bend in Texas National Park is very famous, and has these     beautiful, red, strangely formed stones that look like giants had played with LEGOS or something. You can see it yourself here, I'm sorry that I can't put this video on my blog but here is the link:   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_KSWvnl8gk .  I would like to see this cactus (0:58 in the video) doesn't it look amazing? I want to have one in my room but it's too small, I think.


But my Southwestern cooking actually started yesterday when I made the dough for the doughnuts. And there I had a little faux pas.  First, I didn't read the recipe thoroughly enough and mixed 180ml milk and 60ml water, so I had instead 60ml milk and 180ml water, so READ THE RECIPE CAREFULLY!!! Then I tried to pour the water away and I put more milk inside, but it wasn't enough which I recognized the next day. Second,  when I had put the dough in a bowl amd closed it with the lid I had to wait a few hours so I watched TV. But suddenly it made a "bang" and the bowl was on the ground, I had forgotten the yeast that pushed up the lid of the bowl. Then I didn't close the lid and after some time the dough was all over the place ... look for yourself. I made a picture, it was funny actually because I had too much dough anyway...
In the night I put the bowl ouside so it couldn't happen again, and guess what it DID happen again ...Third, I had to put sooooo much flour in it because I wasn't able to work with it, it was too runny.

Doughnuts in the pan...

But apart from  that I hadn't had any problems. Okay, just a little one, I made so much dough that I had around 42 Doughnuts today and we were 5 people to eat it and we still have a box full of them, but I must say they taste very good and  guess what,  I'm eating one right now, yes at 12:00 a.m., but I'm on vacation right now, so it's okay.

.. and the finished ones.

After I made the doughnuts I made chili con carne. For everyone who doesn't know it, chilli con carne is a stew with beef, beans, corn and lots of chili. While I cooked it I had no accidents, which surprised me a lot and it was fast, less than two hours. I know it does not look that delicious but you can't picture it,  it is just unique and pictures don't do it justice. But it was very tasty and a little bit hot, but I think people in Texas eat it hotter. So I'm going to bed now because I need to sleep so that I can cook tomorrow,  good night everyone...

Day One-The West coast

Hey everyone,
Today was my first day of  "COOKING THROUGH AMERICA". I will cook from West to East to show you how America cooks in every region and tell a little bit about their history.
So my first meal is from the West coast, it's called "Californian pizza", pizza with mushrooms and onions. I know it doesn't sound very hard to cook, it actually wasn't, but I wanted to start with something easy and I can't cook a live lobster or something, because it is impossible to get that here in a little village.

Hawaii

But back to the historical part of the West coast . The West coast includes the 5 (red framed) states Washington, Oregon, California, Alaska and Hawaii,  but the last two states, Alaska and Hawaii, don't really belong to the West coast because they aren't connected directly to the other three.The West coast includes the famous Olympic National Park in Washington, the popular Hawaiian Islands, the Golden Gate Bridge in Californian,and  the Crater-Lake-Park in Oregon.  The West coast was populated in the end of the 19th century, it was the last part of the USA that was populated. The majority came to California because of the gold fever, which began at the end of the slavery, so there aren't many colored people, and southern California is populated by many Mexican people. The California cuisine is known as a combination of American, European, and Chinese food. Because of the moderate climate, fruits and vegetables grow very well. Hawaii has many exotic influences and is known for the frequent use of coconut.

Olympic National Park

Golden Gate Bridge

Crater-Lake-Park

So now you know a little bit about the history of the West coast, but I didn't say anything about how my pizza tasted. Are you interested to know how it tasted and what it looked like?? (I use the past tense because right now there is just a little piece left of the pizza. No, the dogs didn't eat it, thank God,  my family and I did).  Okay, I will show you what it looked like,  and can tell you that my pizza tasted very good and everyone liked it. The photos are just to show that I really did cook:

Before baking...

...after baking