Mia in Germany

about me

Musica laetitiae comes, medicina dolorum.

The above picture was taken at our best friend's 60th birthday party in front of his very old Dutch farmhouse. DH and me are the two people who share one seat...

Born and grown up in the Black Forest, I now live in north-western Germany, ten car-minutes from the Dutch border. My dad came from Romania and my mom, after having spent many years in Italy, was more Italian than German... They both used to cook either mediterranean or kind of south-east-European, so I'm not at all familiar with typical German cuisine but more with Italian, French, Greek, Romanian, Turkish and Oriental (such as Iranian, Egyptian, Moroccan, Syrian) food.
When I was diagnosed with celiac disease one year ago, I went searching the web for gluten free ideas. Although there are quite some good German sites, I ended up finding that the United States, Canada and Australia seem to be more advanced in research and practice concerning food intolerances and allergies such as gluten intolerance/celiac disease. Above that, American, Canadian and Australian cuisines are much more to my taste than most German ideas of cooking and baking gluten free, because they are used to a blend of nearly all cultures and cuisines. So I was absolutely exited to find Recipezaar with this exuberance of international recipes!
Thanks so much for all you wonderful people round here with all those great recipes! I never learnt so much about cooking before, and I became far more creative myself.
I love cooking and baking, trying new recipes and experimenting with different "materials" i.e. food.
Luckily I'm able to combine job and hobby; my DH, who did not want to continue working as a physician, started distributing nutritional supplements about 13 years ago. As we discovered that the number of people suffering from food allergies, nutrition-caused diseases such as diabetes, high blood pressure, obesity etc. increases, we now also teach people how to cook and eat healthily, according to their conditions.
I also discovered that most gluten free products in Germany are very expensive, not very tasty and contain much too much starch. So celiacs are in serious danger to become diabetic, too. Now I try to teach people ways to make their own gluten free products avoiding all this starch AND enjoing what they eat!
Update october 2009: Life tends to become more interesting every day. After being diagnosed with celiac and keeping a strict diet I still was miserable and got worse every day. Meanwhile I know I'm histamine sensitive, have a fructose malabsorption and casein intolerance, too - no wonder life was misery for me eating tons of fruit, vegetables and dairy... Now I have the daily challenge to either change meals into casein free, low fructose meals or cook two different meals for DH and me. You can't imagine how creative you get inventing substitutes for foods high in fructose or histamine or containing casein! The good thing is that the histamine intolerance got better after eliminating all dairy from my diet. Now I can eat small amounts of things high in histamine again if I don't mix together too many of them.

Maybe it's because I don't digest sugar properly why I never liked sweets. But as I know that most people are quite sugar addicted, let me assure you that if you avoid sweets for some time and subtitute them with other tasty things, or fruit if you can, you will find most sweets disgustingly sticky afterwards. I used to like 70 % chocolate, and once in a while had a strange coca cola craving. Now I can have some 85 % chocolate and didn't eat anything sweeter for about 8 months - when I tried a small morsel of 70 % chocolate I didn't like it any longer. Also I had a glass of coca cola light going out with friends one night, and I just couldn't bring it down because it was so terribly sweet.
Remember, sugar is a spice and should be used as such.

Most people would say that I'm way too stoic to be passionate about anything, but in fact I am passionate about music. Depending on my mood I'll listen to nearly everything from John Dowland up to Apocalyptica. But if I were allowed to feed my iPod with the music of only four composers / musicians, I'd choose Albinoni, Vivaldi, Mozart and Angelo Branduardi.

Concerning my ratings: Mostly I rate recipes which I did not have to convert too much so that I tried the original and liked it. If I rate recipes which I had to convert or cannot eat at all, I display the judgements of my guinea pigs...
Also I won't give less than three stars because I only choose recipes of which I'm sure they will work.

Pet peeves - people complaining about things which cannot be changed but dealt with. And people who do not understand that our body and our health are gifts which we should handle with care and gratefulness.

Favorite Foods:

Mostly everything you can find between France and Morocco... American in all variations from east coast to west... Many Indian, Chinese, Indonesian, Japanese and Thai dishes, too. Mexican AND - yes, British. Most Germans find the English cuisine horrible, but I simply love it!
I also love fresh fruit and all kinds of raw salads.
Well, evidently I like nearly everything... with one exception: very sweet things. I cut down sugar to about 1/2 or 2/3 in most recipes and my chocoholism is limited to 75-85 % chocolate. So if I post my own creations, you might have to increase the sweeteners to your taste
Update october 2009: The above listed things are what I used to like best. Now that most of it has become difficult or impossible, I decided to adapt my preferences to the necessities. So basically my favorite foods now are zucchini, chard, celeriac (which formerly I used to hate), cranberries, lime juice, turkey, beef, lamb, venison and fish, eggs, millet, rice, almonds, all kinds of seeds and vegetable oils. Sweet things have become even less sweet, and I only use rice syrup, stevia or some trehalose as sweeteners. Trehalose is a disaccharide formed by two glucose units instead of one glucose and one fructose unit. It's less sweet than sucrose but has great baking and freezing properties. As it's extremely expensive, I only use it when it's absolutely impossible to subtitute sucrose with rice syrup or stevia.

http://