Today was a very important holiday – Austria’s celebration of independence after WWII. Though the war was over in 1945, Austria was occupied by the four Allied powers (Soviet Union, United States, Great Britain, and France) for ten years after. October 25, 1955 was the day that the last soldier left Austria, so October 26 marked the first day of Austrian sovereignty since 1938.
Traditionally, people tend to go on hikes or walks to promote fitness and good health, but since it was raining, guess what we decided to do? What else but spend the whole day in E & P’s kitchen making Gulasch, Striezel, and Topfentaschen! ;-)
P’s mother brought a whole bunch of ingredients so that we could make the traditional recipes. A (FIN) came as well. We were divided into two teams so that we could make the Gulasch and the Striezel at the same time. No competition, of course! ;-) (By the way, German nouns are capitalized, so I’ve kind of reached a conundrum – do I capitalize German words when using in an English sentence? Thoughts?)
It was so much fun to make everything from scratch. We even tried braiding the Striezel with six strands (pictures to come!), which we thought would be really complicated at first, but turned out to be very feasible with the help of YouTube. E & P also have a rolling pin that can customize the thickness of the dough you’re rolling – simply by snapping wheels on the end that raise the rolling pin a certain height off the counter. I think this just about made Tiny’s afternoon. J And needless to say, the end results of all three recipes were delicious!
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| Groups 1 and 2 begin! |
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| Onions!!! |
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| E kneads the dough |
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| Gulasch (right), dumplings (left) |
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| E & P in their NEW KITCHEN! |
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| P's mother consulting the recipe book. |
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| Auspicious beginnings...:-) |
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| Making snakes (A (FIN), Tiny, P's mother). |
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| The art of rolling. |
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| "Like...this long?" |
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| The marvellous customizable rolling pin! |
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| Topfentaschen. |
Regarding your question about capitalizing German words. Although there is no official rule, my research so far has shown that you should rather NOT capitalize German nouns. If you use words which are not in regular use in English such as “topfentascherl” (in contrast to more often used words such as zeitgeist, blitzkrieg or schadenfreude) they should be written in italic. (The HTML-Tag to make text italic in websites is <i>)
ReplyDeleteSome sources also state that you can capitalize German nouns especially if it could have another meaning when it’s written lowercase. In German capitalization can change the meaning of a phrase or sentence, which is one reason why despite its complexity it still exists. Some words exist as noun and verb where capitalization is a way to distinguish between them. (for example: “Die Spinnen” meaning the spiders vs. “Die spinnen” meaning they are crazy, or “Der gefangene Floh.” meaning The trapped flea. vs. “Der Gefangene floh.” meaning The prisoner fled. The second example can even be verified using Google-translate.)
By the way, the picture of A. cutting onions is awesome :)