When I traveled to Germany last year I had the opportunity to sample a lot of cuisine that was new to me.  While in Heilbronn I went to a small wine festival and had a slice of something called zwiebel kuchen, which basically translates to onion cake.  It wasn’t a cake so much as it was a quiche (I can’t image children wanting this for dessert, or better yet on their birthday!), with egg playing a major role.  Tasty but pretty egg-y (it was from a food stand at a festival, after all).

I decided I wanted to lighten it up, take out the egg and replace it with more vegetables.  Doing a little research I came across a French dish called Pissaladière, which is more of a pie or pizza, rather than a cake.  This sucker sports olives and anchovies, however, which are not Edwin-Approved (to be fair, I don’t think I’ve ever had anchovies, but I try to stay vegetarian when I can).  I played arround a little trying to add some sweetness (I was thinking cake, after all) with red bell pepper and a teensy bit of sugar and then threw in some tomato for kicks.

The result?  Pretty rockin’ if you ask me! I would have preferred the filling a bit thicker, so next time I’ll cut back on the tomato juice (updated in the recipe below). Other than that, the only note is that this is a bit of a time intensive task, so clear some space out.

I’m so excited about this comment that I had to pull it out of the post and paste it here. A DC reader and friend of mine, Maggy, just commented on Edwin’s post from last week – “Do Organics Taste Better.” Maggy says,

“This is my favorite conversation to have in general. I think it’s not so much the ‘organic’ as the way it’s grown and also, especially with fruits and vegetables, the variety. Both Clark and I come from families where the same tomato (and potato, and everything else) plants have been passed down from house to house and family to family, and because they’re bred to taste good, rather than to pack well in a box or to stay ripe-looking for two weeks, they taste much more incredible and different, even as sauces.

You can see the same thing with meat, too. Heather knows I’m into the beef thing, but a few years in the past we had identical cuts from beef raised on Clark’s farm and beef from the grocery store; we did blind taste tests and everyone could tell the difference.
The whole subject fascinates me, especially since we’ve started a garden and we have tried raising different varieties of the same thing (i.e. sweet corn).

Oh, and on the eggs…it’s not that they are organic, it’s what they eat. One of my dad’s employees has four daughters who, as a 4H project, separated their chickens and fed them different things to see how the yolk colors were affected…the darker yolks came from higher-protein diets.”

Maggy’s fiance and his family own a cattle farm. Boxwood Farm is currently accepting orders for winter beef delivery – check it out!

A few days ago MSN posted a photo essay titled “What The world eats,” showing all the food eaten by families from various countries.  My first reaction to this was “wow, that’s a lot of food!” but then living the life of a bachelor I’d never really given that much thought to what your standard nuclear family consumes.  I was also struck by the variation between families such as all the processed foods in the United States photo compared to a complete lack in Ecuador’s.

United States: The Revis Family

What do you guys think?  Be sure to check out the “Wealth and health in 10 countries” spreadsheet on the bottom as well.  Also, that’s a lot of soda, Mexico!

Ecuador: The Ayme Family

(via Becoming Minimalist)