Pumpkin Fennel and Coconut Soup

I love to cook and I do it without a recipe most of the time. And almost always it turns out well.

Today I made this awesome and easy pumpkin soup with fennel and coconut milk. 

So here is the recipe in case you’d like to try it one day.

Ingredients:

• 1 small pumpkin, 300g

• 1 medium bulb fennel, 200 – 250g

• 1 small onion

• 1 garlic clove

• 3-4 table spoons coconut milk

• Salt, Pepper, Nutmeg

• 500 - 750ml Vegetable Soup

• Coconut Oil

Finely slice the onion and the garlic. Cut the pumpkin in half and take out the seeds with a spoon. Put them in a strainer and rinse them off well. Dry them, heat up a pan with a little bit of coconut oil and fry the pumpkin seeds until dark brown. In the meantime cut the pumpkin and the fennel into cubes. Heat up 2 tablespoons of coconut oil into a pot and heat it up. Stir fry the onions, the pumpkin and the fennel until slightly brown, then put in the garlic for half a minute.Fill it up with soup until everything is well covered. Now let it simmer until everything is cooked soft.

Blend everything with a hand blender until creamy. Add the coconut milk and season to your liking.

Season the pumpkin seeds with salt and pepper and use them for decoration and as a snack besides the soup. 

If you don’t have coconut oil just use any oil you have. I always use either butter, olive or canola oil for cooking.

I often cut up fresh rosemary to fry it with the pumpkin seeds. You can use any herb you prefer, just make sure it doesn’t get burnt. Some herbs you might put in just before you take out the seeds. How do you know which herbs are going to burn more easily than others? By trial and error, I guess. Or google it.  

Worst not-joke ever!

source: wonkette.com

This must be a joke, because I am still waiting for the NOT! Donald Trump? Really??!! The guy who wants to build a wall to shield off Mexican immigrants?

This is going to be a post with a lot of question marks. Because I have a lot of questions that I don’t really know the answers to and I really don’t understand the results of this election.

Some say the American people did not really have good options, but I can tell you, you definitely could have chosen better. In my opinion Trump will not be the solution to, but the source of a lot of problems for the US if he really does what he promised during his campaign.

I often ask myself: ‘What’s wrong in this world? What’s wrong with some people?’ Are we really so afraid of the things to come that we vote leaders who want to build fences around countries and choose intolerance and ignorance over humanity? We have the same shift to the right here in Europe because a lot of people are afraid of … I don’t really know … of what they don’t know, of change or of the people that are coming to our country. But I think some are just plain stupid.

To be honest, I did not expect Donald Trump to win this election. How can you vote for a radical like he is?  

His agenda is quite clear:

• stop immigration by building his ‘great wall’ on the border to mexico 
• and let Mexico pay for it
•  stop immigration from Syria
•  fight terrorism by re-establishing torturing-techniques like waterboarding and worse
•  get rid of ObamaCare
•  and so on.

I am not an expert on politics, so I don’t really know how easy it will be for him to really enforce all of this. I just hope that the people in congress who did work against Obama will not blindly support Trump.

Lets see what happens and how it will affect the rest of the world.

I am looking forward to seeing Trumps ‘great’ America one day … NOT!

Birthday my yearly

From today on I am already closer to 40 than to 30, so I thought this might be a good time to start this blog. And you can never be too old or too cool for a blog, right? .... Right?! ... Ok, you can never be to old for a blog.

Ok, so be prepared, this first post is going to be all about the birthday boy and his presents and if you are not cool with that switch to facebook, instagram or pinterest or whatever you like more. But please come back and see if you find a post that you like in the future ;-)

This day already began with a nice wake-up call from my girlfriend Katrin, wishing me a happy birthday. After that she arranged my presents and birthday cake on our table and I had to wait until she lit the candle ... yes THE candle as in ONE candle ... in the dark livingroom. We get up quite early so at this time of the year it is still dark in the morning. And yes, I only got one candle, like people in their sixties do, because there is not enough space on the cake for so many candles. I wonder if anybody ever thought that the size of the cake might be the issue and not the number of candles.

The cake: Sardinian Fig Tarte

 So good!!! And the presents? You ask? Here is a picture.

This year I am going a little bit more sustainable with my presents. Well a little bit. I got two really nice green tees and a water thermometer from this beautiful old tee house named Schönbichler here in Vienna. You might have already guessed it, the tea is not local, it is from China and Japan. I already tried the Green Monkey tea from China and it is really lovely. It is very mild and has a subtle taste. Shower gel from KORRES. Organic of course.

If you look at the picture and think: What's with all that sausages and cheese and mustard?! And why is there a pan underneath all of that?!

I have to tell you that I love to cook and I love products from home. Oh, if you did not yet read the ME site above. I am from Vorarlberg the smallest Austrian province in the far West of the country. They have really good cheese and the grated cheese you see on the picture is for something called Kässpätzle. It is basically a whole bowl of teeny tiny dumplings with lots of cheese, butter and crispy onions on top of that. AWESOME!!! If you ever come to Vorarlberg you have to try it. You'll just love it. Well if you like cheese and you are not a vegan.

But more on local products, designs, crafts and other stuff in my following posts. I have also have to work on my birthday and that's what I will do now.

See ya.