I am in Munich-based designer who loves to cook – that‘s the simple version.
For more about the what, why, who and how, just keep reading.
German food is amazing!
And it’s not all Bavarian. If people think of Germany, they mostly think of people wearing Dirndls or Lederhosen, heavy meals and beer. Of course, Bavaria is great but it is just one of 16 states — each with its own culture and amazing dishes, which I will hopefully soon be able to show you a variety of. I admit that I also wear a Dirndl – but only once a year for Oktoberfest!
Germans do know how to cook!
When I visited friends in the mountains some time ago, I cooked dinner for everyone as a thank you. At some point during dinner our host winked at some other friends of their’s, an Italian couple, saying: »You never thought a German would cook better than you, he?« This surprised me. It obviously had never occurred to me that someone would think Germans can’t cook. This way I want to prove everybody wrong.
Germany is worth a visit!
When you have lived abroad you start appreciating were you come from. I grew up in one of the most beautiful places in Germany. My hometown Constance is located right on one of Europe’s biggest lakes, Lake Constance, in the very south of Germany. The lake is also shared by Switzerland and Austria and has Liechtenstein, Italy and France right on its door step. Although I always found it amazingly beautiful, I could not wait to leave home after university to live in London which, at the time, I thought I would never leave again. But then I met my husband and moved to Munich. We visit my parents as often as we can and often spend our holidays there. I will surely introduce you to some amazing spots around »my lake« at some point.
I love cooking. And I love sharing
Cooking for others is my way to express affection. A few years back my husband and I did a fasting cure which involved one week with no food at all. Oh boy! With the whole of my heart I can say that this was one of the most depressing weeks of my life. The constant rumbling in my stomach wasn’t so bad but I dearly missed the chopping of the ingredients, the colours, the smell, the taste, the time my husband and I sat together over dinner to talk about our days. For the first time I comprehended what cooking played in my life.
Cooking has always been a standard thing in my family
And I guess this is what took me so long to understand its special role. As soon as I could hold a peeler and knife my mum gave me little tasks to do in the kitchen like peeling carrots and chopping onions. I also encourage my children to peel, chop and mix and they love helping me – if they are not busy playing. It is a bit like not remembering how you learnt to walk. Peeling and chopping to me is as normal as brushing my teeth. I actually prefer the peeling, it is some sort of meditation. And there was a lot of peeling and chopping to do at home as my mum cooked for us every day. My parents had a bicycle shop in the historic centre of my hometown. My dad always came home for lunch so the whole family would gather around the table for a delicious hot meal and a chat. If my brother and I had a class in the afternoon we would just cycle back to school.
There was also a time in my life when food was my biggest enemy
I was a gymnast until I started having serious back problems around the age of 16 or so. I was not a great gymnast, a few national competitions, but I was still good enough to train regularly at a gymnastics centre an hour’s drive from my hometown, sometimes more than 30 hours per week during school holidays. I don’t want to go into too much detail but this resulted in an unhealthy habit of counting calories and skipping breakfast as we were weighed before training and I didn’t want to be told off for being too heavy. When I stopped training every day but kept eating what were normal portions to me, I gained weight. As I was also a ski racer, this wasn’t an entirely bad thing, but I just didn’t feel like the person I am. It took me until my mid 20s to get back to normal eating habits and a healthy approach to what and when to eat.
Healthy eating is an important point
I cook as healthy as possible by using less sugar, avoiding wheat and trying to sneak in veggies and fruit into our children’s diet where possible etc. My husband has problems with gluten or at least FODMAPS, we are not 100% sure, due to (probably) leaky gut syndrome and I could fill a whole book with our experiences but that is a different story. With my full schedule it might be easier in many ways to just provide bread with cold cuts, ready meals or to pull something out of the freezer – but unfortunately less healthy and yummy. So instead of cooking less I now do it even more and also write about it. Full stop.
This blog is dedicated to the women in my family. Let me introduce them to you:
My granny Maria
grew up in a small mountain town in Bohemia. She and her sister, Irma, graduated from a home economics school. My granddad and his brothers all were beer brewers educated in Weihenstephan, Bavaria, now and then one of the finest places for brewing and food technology. My granny’s family ran the local brewery and bakery and I guess in that respect, I do have a stereotypical German background. When my grannies — which was what we called all three sisters — stayed with us during the summer months they would turn everything in my parents’ garden into the most delicious cakes, jams and pickles. We had apples, pears, all kind of berries, cherries, peaches and quinces. A lot of the trees don’t carry much fruit nowadays but the quince tree has been in its twighlight years for ages now – my quince jam recipe to come soon! I have fond memories of the whole family picking fruit in the garden and raking leaves – the latter being slightly less enjoyable though. At peak times at least four women from three generations were working hard in the kitchen so we could all enjoy the taste of summer during winter time. The kitchen has always been my favourite room in the house: it was always warm and smelled delicious. I often sat on the floor leaning against the cupboard watching a roast or so sizzling in the oven.
My former flatmate Fiona
helped me discover my love for cooking for larger groups, which I had been too shy to do, and introduced me to English cuisine, which is amazing. Yes, you read right: the food in London was some of the best I have ever had! And this was not because of restaurants with foreign cuisine but because of places with excellent traditional English food, my favourite ones being the Eagle and the Medcalf in Clerkenwell and the Duke of Cambridge, an organic gastro pub in Angel. Parts of the English cuisine are quite similar to the German one – sorry English readers. But much more complex in taste – sorry German readers! While in Germany the usage of garlic was frowned upon for a long time, English cuisine was influenced quite early on by spices brought back from all parts of the world. You can tell that England once was a great seafaring nation by the fact that dishes like Kedgeree and chutneys have been part of the English culture since the 14th century. At some point I would love show you some of my favourite recipes and places in this blog.
My mum
who not only inspired me by cooking the most amazing meals for us every single day but also for the fact that she is the smartest woman I know. She was a programmer in the 60s and showed me to be open for new things and that I can achieve everything I dream of – despite being a woman!
My great aunt Lilo – short for »Liselotte«
lived with her family in a castle on an island of Lake Constance. She was the cook of Duke Lennart Bernadotte, the former heir to the Swedish throne who had married a commoner and therefore lost his privileges. My great uncle was the duke’s valet and chauffeur. I was allowed to copy Lilo’s hand-written cookery book with the recipes of the Swedish Royal family, which the Bernadottes requested for private meals and big feasts. My auntie would only let me have the recipes after promising to never publish them. So, sorry folks, these recipes are for family use only. I might be able to negotiate one recipe which is my dad’s favourite cake so will keep you posted. After working as a cook had become too hard, Lilo and her daughter opened a shop with beautiful table and silver ware in the centre of Constance. So a lot of my plates and dishes come from their shop or their personal collection.
Two more sources of inspirations need to be mentioned here:
My Costa Rican family
My husband is half Costa Rican and grew up there. Whenever the yearning for our warm-hearted family and friends, sunshine, beach and jungle becomes too big, we cook Latin American-inspired food. Costa Rica isn’t around the corner from us so unfortunately we cannot go as often as we would like to. But as soon as we go I will let you know and will introduce you to yummy recipes and beautiful places as well. We are so lucky that our families live in some of the most beautiful places on the planet – so stay tuned. Oh and by the way: my father-in-law is a coffee roaster in Tarrazú, yum!
Translated into English, my name means Viola Journey. And yep, that’s me. Always on the move. If not physically in terms of running around juggling work and kids, doing sports or travelling, then mentally. I never stand still and neither does my mind.
I absolutely love my job. Don’t get me wrong. I am a graphic designer specialised in branding and I adore every topic that comes with it: art, architecture, photography, language, people, psychology, history and music. I decided to become a graphic designer instead of a journalist the day we were connected to cable: after endless months of roadworks in our street we finally had MTV! Yay! I stood in front of the telly completely gobsmacked. Those music clips! And those animated bumpers in between them! What an epiphany – a completely new world had opened up to me.
I studied design, lived and worked in London, Barcelona and Munich. Everything was in a flow, I was in a flow.
And then I had children. The boys are now four and seven years old. I love them to bits although they are often hard work (very hard work). But more than anything they inspire me and have completely changed my outlook on life, purely for that I will always be grateful. And to my husband: thank you my love for giving the boys to me – best present ever! They made me realise that my job mainly involves implementing goals and communicating messages of others to their particular audience. Of course I truly enjoy doing this but I have come to realise how important it is to, at the same time, reflect a bit more and express my very own »stuff« to ultimately maintain my sanity in a f****** overwhelming world.
Pretty much at the same time I found out that I am an HSP – a highly sensitive person. Knowing about this is a small thing for mankind but a giant thing for me. I’ll try to keep the explanation short and simple (although I feel I could write a whole book about it). In all of us, the brain is continually receiving all kinds of information from its surroundings, but only the most relevant information is processed to become conscious. HSPs however have a much lower perceptual threshold, meaning that they process information cognitively deeper more intensely and in more detail. It is a bit like a computer being fed with too much information. At some point the RAM is full and information can only be processed slowly. For that reason I never make important decisions or do critical work in the evening but first thing in the morning instead.
The following things are typical for us HSPs (I got this from German Wikipedia): a rich fantasy and vivid dreams, a very complex and intuitive way of thinking, looking at things from unusual angles while keeping the bigger picture in mind, a lot of enthusiasm and many interests, a high level of individual responsibility and a desire for independence, an exceptional long-term memory, a fine psychosocial perception for emotions and moods of others but unfortunately being easily influenced by those. HSPs are usually very altruistic with a strong sense of justice and responsibility based on a stable value system, harmony seeking whilst highly diligent, intense perception of art and music but also taste, smell and temperature, being inspirational and motivating to others but overly self-critical and perfectionistic to themselves. Now you know.
This sounds somehow great and even fun – which it would be if we lived in a world where being different is considered a good thing. But it is not. My reality was more like: This doesn’t taste odd, eat up your food. This isn’t Siberia, you don’t need your coat. You can smell what’s for lunch when you are outside the house? That’s not possible. You talk like a waterfall, stop giving too much detail. Don’t take everything to heart, you need to harden up. Can you not be more like normal people, please?
This makes you mistrust your own perception so that at some point you believe others more than yourself. The fact we HSPs perceive differently makes us also behave differently, the standard measurements of judgement that people have do not work for us. For this reason, we are often completely misunderstood. And double unfortunately, being understood is the most important thing to an HSPs. Hello catch 22! It took a very long time, effort, many books and countless conversations with family and friends to re-establish my trust in my own ability and intuition.
The good news is, the older you get the less you care about others and the more you know what is good for you: I now start my day really early (at 5.30 a.m.) although I am an absolute owl. I write morning pages and meditate before I wake up everybody else because it helps me through my day. I also try to fit sports into my daily routine because it energises my body and calms my mind. And instead of hiding and trying to be someone else to please others, I am more aware of my feelings and just express them the way I want. This is why I started this blog as my playground. Welcome to it.
A short notice on that: I write everything by hand because this way my head and my words feel more connected to the topic. I write in black ink with a pen I’ve been using since school. After my initial writing I use the dictating function of my phone and edit my work on the computer. All photography and handlettering was done by me. I am curious as to where this all will take me …
Viola Reise