Scowl, Nu?

Living in Germany, one would expect to find at least a few small shops which carry some basic Asian food and sauces. What one would not necessarily expect is a huge grocery store-sized Asian supermarket carrying everything from black bean sauces and chili oil to Mexican food. Yes, Mexican food! Amidst all the Thai curry pastes, the Japanese noodles, the Indian spices and the Chinese vegetables, we were ecstatic to find the exact brand of canned chipotle peppers that we used to buy from the Mexican shop in Munich. Not only that, they also had corn husks for tamales, tortillas, refried beans, and hot sauces. Needless to say, we were overjoyed at this discovery, as we cook a lot of Mexican and Latin American dishes.

Heng Long offers an extensive selection of all types of Asian food products including a large frozen food section and fresh produce. Many varieties of sauces, curry pastes, rice, noodles, cooking wine, sweets and teas fill the seemingly endless rows of neatly-stocked shelves. In addition, they carry a nice selection of teapots, bowls, sake sets, rice cookers, bamboo steamers and restaurant supplies such as food warmers, chopsticks and “to-go” containers.

All in all, an excellent store with a selection that should please any fan of Asian (or Mexican!) cooking.

EC card accepted, but only for purchases totaling €20 or more.

Heng Long. U-Bahn Neumarkt. Ramen and Sake and Chipotle, Oh My!

Sorry for the performance problems, folks… trying to work a small PHP bug out…

EDIT – Found the problem – Blogdex was down and it forced the page loads to wait for it to timeout. The Blogdex links are down now and everything is back to normal. Sorry for the inconvenience

Ebertplatz has a soupbar!

A few days ago, Souperium opened on Neusserstraße next to the Ebertplatz U-Bahn. Being a general fan of soups and stews, I decided to bring some home for lunch…

Located next to the Chicken Farm (kebap house), Souperium looks more like something you would expect in San Francisco than Germany – stylish logo, modern color scheme – overall, very impressive. But enough about the cafe, on to the food!

Today, they had a selection of five soups: Carrot-Ginger, Gulasch, Chili con Carne, Greek Bean soup, and another one which I can’t remember at this time. They also had sandwiches (today’s was a triple-decker ham and cheese) and salads. What immediately got me was the price: a big soup to go was only 2 Euros. Sandwiches and salads were 1.50. Two gulasches and a sandwich didn’t even set me back six euros.

The goulasch was very, very good. Richly flavored and meaty – with a nice tomato flavor. The sandwich was also very good – a perfect compliment to the soup. They even threw in some sliced baguette and spoons into the bag (getting plastic silverware in Germany is not extremely common). All in all, an excellent place for a takeaway lunch!

Souperium’s soups are all made in-house and they will always have one soup with meat or fish, one exotic or spicy soup, and one vegan or vegetarian soup. Their Persian Yoghurt soup is the next one on my list to try.

Souperium. U-Ebertplatz. Mmm, mmm good.

There are certain weaknesses Janet and I share. One of the most expensive ones revolves around scotch. See, we love scotch – there is nothing like a good single malt in the evening to help you wind down from a long day, or to warm you up from a cold afternoon walk. It is, as alcoholic beverages go, perfect.

But our weakness is that as our tastes evolve, we always want better scotches – and a variety of them. I mean, an 18 year old Highland Park fits most occasions, but what about when you want something with a little more oak character… or something with a stronger kick, or a nice mellowness that only comes from age. Just like people keep a variety of wine at their house, we keep a variety of scotch at the house.

At our peak, we probably had 8 or 9 open bottles, more than most bars. Some were special occasion scotches (a 26 year old Glen Albyn, a Glenrothes from my birthday year) but the rest were all there so we had the right variety to compliment our mood. Finally, we decided that we needed to cut the stock down to the essentials and have been slowly working our way through the reserves over the past few months.

However, last night we were shocked to realize that we finally did it. Aside from the special occasion scotches, we had gone through our reserves and were finally ready to buy another bottle. I had read in the latest issue of Whisky magazine that the new Talisker 18 year old, which was just relased in November, was getting amazing reviews, and sits at the top of the Island malts. This sounded promising, but unlike most of our standard scotches, this one was in limited distribution and we would need to find a good whisky shop in order to find it.

So, one quick search on the internet and we found Weinhandlung Schwarzer near the main train station, and a phone call confirmed that they had the elusive Talisker 18. As the clock struck noon, we jumped on the subway and headed out to check the store out.

Even though it looks small, the shop opened up into a large room with a fantastic selection of scotch, wine, other whiskys, absinthe and brandys. The prices were very good on the normal scotches we drink, and the woman running the shop was friendly, knowledgable and even recognized me as the person who called earlier asking about the Talisker.

We will sample the scotch tonight, but regardless of how we like the Talisker, we will certianly make this our normal scotch store in Cologne.

Schwarzer. U-Bahn DOM/Hauptbahnhof. Full of scotchy goodness!

The pinnacle of the Karneval festivities in Cologne is the Rosenmontag parade. Not knowing what to expect other than: it was long (6 hours and still going strong), it would be crowded (over 1 million people downtown) and that it involved people throwing candy (this is surprisingly true) and everyone would be in costume (or at least in a funny hat) we headed down around lunch time to try and see the parade.

Coming out of the Dom/Hbf U-Bahn station was the first challenge – the crowd was so large that it pushed to the top of the stairwell that led down into the subway. We were able to get a spot that could almost see the floats that were about to start coming by. After an hour of waiting for the parade (it started a few kilometers away at 10:49am (aka 11 minutes before 11)), we decided to push through the crowds in search of beer and something to nosh on. Janet figured that if we could make it through the outer shell of people, the inside plaza would probably be empty.

She was right. After making it through the drunken horde, we found beer stands, reibekuchen (potato pancake) stands, sausage stands and enough space to get some air and try to fing a vantage point where we could watch the crowds and the parade.

We stayed for a few hours, watching costumes and floats go by, leaving to come home a little before 3pm. It’s 5:30 and we are still watching the parade on television. After a week of celebration and a day’s worth of parade, I have to wonder if it is just too much of a good thing… or is it just too much?

The crowds from Roncalliplatz, near the main Cathedral.

Those Energizer bunnies just keep going… and going… and going… to the beer

People as seen from the Platform near the Alter Markt

… and your faithful editors, the Cat and the Dragon

This evening, our search for a really good Thai restaurant in Germany finally paid off with Utayan Thai.

The food, well, it was pretty darned good – surpassing anywhere we had gone in Munich. We started with Tom-Kha Goong (coconut soup with prawns) and pork sate (with the best peanut sauce and cucumber salad we have had in ages). Janet had the Gaeng-gari Gai (yellow curry with chicken and vegetables) that was truly out of this world, though I tend to prefer spicier curries. I had the Panang Beef – and the curry was flavorful, spicy and perfect… plus the chopped peanuts just really made the dish. Both of the main dishes were quite large, certainly worth the price.

Four beers, a bottle of water and all of this ran 54 Euros with tip.

Utayan Thai. U-Poststraße. Who doesn’t like a nice Thai?