Ljubljana, Slovenia

I just put some pictures from Ljubljana up on my flickr page...

HERE

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s Rumtopf…

Rumtopf?

What is a Rumtopf?

Well in this case a Rumtopf is the name of the ceramic jar that contains the stuff. Sometimes this stuff is referred to as “Officer’s Jam” or “Bachelor’s Liqueur”. Actually I had been, rather ignorantly, calling the stuff Rumtopf. It was not until I received a proper Rumtopf from a woman at work that I truly understood.

Confused yet?

Well just set back fer a spell, and lemme do some ‘splainin’…

A friend of mine had told me about Rumtopf, and I made an attempt to create one without knowing what I was doing or even what it was supposed to be called. Something I actually do quite often, believe it or not. He had told me that (some) German people kept a jar under their sink (or in a nearby cupboard or something). Into this jar would go whatever fruit that was in the kitchen at the time and was past its prime. The fruit would be covered in rum, and was left until needed. Once in a while the person would spoon out some fruit and put it onto a desert of some sort. Once in a while the person would pour him or herself a little glass of the liquid (booze).

This would just go on throughout the year. One would add some fruit when they had it, or add some more rum when it was needed. Sounds like a good idea, and it is simple enough. Hell, lots of time I have fruit laying around that is on verge of going bad, so I tried it. And it worked out pretty well. I added apples, peaches, dates, kumquats, grapes, even some walnuts (shelled of course). Every once in a while, I would grab the jar from the liquor cabinet and spoon some of the goods onto some vanilla ice cream. And damn was it good!

I decided that I was going to start a new one this year, and instead of rum I would use … well … Bourbon, of course. Wild Turkey to be specific. I used an old pasta jar that I had, and started adding fruit to it. It wasn’t until later that another friend told me that you are not supposed use apples. It turns out that apples are specified as something to NOT use.

Oh well, it was fine with apples last year and I’ve already added them. Oh, to hell with it! I’m not going to throw out this grand experiment just because of some apples.

So I was looking in one of my books about preserving food, and I saw the Rumtopf listed under preservation with alcohol. According to this book, you were supposed to add and equal weight of sugar each time you added the fruit. So add a pound of strawberries AND a pound of sugar and put enough rum to cover it, then when you add a pound of cherries you are supposed to add ANOTHER pound of sugar and rum to cover it.

Holy crap that’s a lot of sugar! I hadn’t added any sugar last year and it was good. So this year I added a bit of sugar each time I added fruit, but nothing near what they were calling for.

One day when a few of us were traveling back to the office from a review meeting, and I mentioned something about my Rumtopf. Although I knew by now that it was just the name of the jar, I was still referring to the stuff as Rumtopf. A German woman colleague was in the car, and she said that she had a couple of Rumtopfs and would bring one into work and give it to me. “Great” I said, ‘Thanks!”

Well she was out of the office for a couple of weeks, and I had forgotten about her offer. Then one day this shows up on my desk…



“Holy shit! Are you sure you want to give this away? Thank you so much!”

And there are even directions on the back…



If you can’t read German, it basically tells you to put the fruit into it as they come into season, add an equal amount of sugar, and cover with rum. It also tells you not to add certain fruits, and yes apple is one of them. Well, your not supposed to stir the fruit mixture, so there is not going to be any transfer of fruit from my old pasta jar into this new beauty. It’s also too late in the season to start a proper one, since a bunch of the fruits are already out of season.

So next year will be the inaugural season of my proper ceramic Rumtopf (without apples).

This year my second attempt will have to do…



And my buddy Tim is seriously covetous of my new Rumtopf!

A quick update…

Tallinn, Estonia is a nice little town. Actually it’s not so little by Estonia standards, but still…



There may be a lot more to the town than I was able to see in the day that I was there, but I mostly wandered around the Old Town area. I didn’t get a chance to go to the Baltic Sea and dunk a toe, or watch the ferries coming from and going to Finland. I think it’s only about an hour or so by ferry, so it’s really pretty close.



The people were very nice, and for the most part spoke English. I was with two other guys the first night, and wandered around solo a little bit the next morning before my flight back to Germany. It was a fun trip, and I wish I had stayed in Tallinn for at least one more day…





… but I had to get home and make some Kimchi (since my supply was running dangerously low)…

Last weekend I was a pickling fool (and not just pickling my liver either!). I put up a double batch of Kimchi. Well, it was only my third attempt, and each time prior I had just made one head of cabbage. So doubling the batch is not really as extreme as it sounds.

So I salted two quartered heads of Napa cabbage. Here’s a little hint… if you have a lot of vegetables to cut up, don’t soak your cabbage in the sink. I had to keep running to the bathroom to wash my knife and cutting board in the tub.



Then I cut up a bunch of vegetables, mixed them with some rice flour, water, little bitty shrimps, fish sauce, and a bunch of red pepper.



I then smeared a bit of this hell broth between each leaf of cabbage, rolled them up and placed them into a bucket.



I decided to put what I had remaining of the previous batch on top of this one. I thought it would help to kick off the fermentation. Now it's kind of a sour mash Kimchi.



I had to go to the farmers market to get the cabbage and other Kimchi makings. While there I saw a lot of other little vegetable that were just crying out for some pickling. So I picked up some small cucumbers, some small zucchinis, a couple of little yellow squashes, some radishes, some onions, and some fresh garlic. I mixed a couple of gallons of a 5% brine solution, with some other spices, and put everything up in these purty lil’ pickle crocks…



I also added in some grape leaves that I absconded with from the vineyard across the road. The tannins in the grape leaves are supposed to help the pickles stay crunchy.

I sampled the Kimchi Thursday evening, and some of the pickles today. While neither is a sour as I would like them to be, they are both pretty damn good. I’m gnawing on a pickled cuc’ and drinking a dunkel hefeweizen as a write this. In other words both were a success.

Tomorrow I’m flying to Kosovo for a week, and will spend next weekend in Ljubljana, Slovenia on the way back. Why Slovenia you ask? Well that’s where we were scheduled to change planes, and I’ve never been there. So I get to add two more countries to my list next week.