Those who know me a bit closer in real life know that I don't have the world's most resilient teeth. And this, together with, um, a slight reluctance to have my teeth drilled into has made me turn to dental floss.

To relieve my brain, today I give you not much text, not much nothing, but this link to a very, very fitting picture.

And I promise a more substantial post for tomorrow.

The snow has been all gone here for a few days now, and the temperatures are high enough to go out without a jacket on the warmer days. Most of all, the garden shows spring growth, and we are totally curious to see what perennials and what flower bulbs our predecessors have left us.

I planted a few tulip bulbs in December, just after we moved in here, and there are some more plants coming out now that were left in from before. Crocuses and snowdrops grow on the side lawn (not many of them, though), but mostly, the stretches of flower beds that surround the path to the house and the front lawn are empty. Which means that we will be doing some planting this year - some plants for the eyes with nice leaves and nice blossoms; some plants for the nose, with good scent; some plants for the palate, to use as herbs or as herbal teas; some for the bees and bumble-bees to feed, and some plants that I just fancy having in the garden, like mandrake and madder. And we hope to get the garden set up with plants hardy enough to prosper year after year, and enough of the growth to keep the weeds down and the beds nice...

After a short while without snow in the week before last, the white cover returned and now is still outside. We are in the fingers of another cold spell, and I'm becoming so, so tired of all the snow and the winteryness. Yes, it is sunny outside, but I want to see green! Flowers growing! Spring blossoms! I want to be able to sit outside and breathe in spring air - it is March, after all...

Sigh. Well, nothing we can do except wait and hope for proper spring weather soon.

Instead of something nice and solidly medieval, here's something nice and fun, found on Neil Gaiman's blog:

Poppy seeds have a long history - there have been finds of poppy seeds from Germany dating back to about 4600-3800 BC. While opium, also derived from the poppy plant, was used only for medicinal reasons in Europe during the Middle Ages, poppy was listed in about every compendium of plants for food and medicinal use - the Capitulare Karls des Großen, the plans for the garden of St. Gallen, and so on. Poppy seed oil was not only used for food purposes, but also for mixing paints, since it dries up. (All after Körber-Grohne, Nutzpflanzen in Deutschland).

And why do I write all this? Because some years ago, we became acquainted with the family recipe of a good friend of ours - a poppy seed cake. And what a poppy seed cake! It combines all good things - poppy seeds, freshly ground and heated up with milk to release all the flavours; yeast dough; streusel topping and finally an icing of lemon juice and sugar. This cake is heavenly, and the recipe I have is just too good not to share. So here you go - a typical German-style family recipe:

Mohnrolle mit Streusel (Poppy seed cake roll with streusel)

For the dough:
Ingredients: 500 g flour, 30 g yeast, 1/5 litre milk, 60 g butter, 60 g sugar, 1 pinch of salt.
Instructions: Make yeast dough from this.

Poppy seed filling:
Ingredients: 500 g ground poppy seeds, about 1/2 l milk, about 3 tblspoons semolina, 2-4 eggs, a little bitter almond aroma, ample sugar.
Instructions: Cook a thin soup from milk and semolina, put in poppy seeds. Stir well and let it cool. When cool: mix in eggs, sugar and aroma until mass is spreadable. Sugar to very sweet taste because poppy is slightly bitter in taste. Amounts needed may vary; add in only 2 eggs at first to keep the filling from getting too liquid. Should it be too stiff, add boiling milk.

Streusel:
Ingredients: 200 g flour, 125 g butter, 125 g sugar
Instructions: Mix flour and sugar; knead in butter (cut into pieces) until streusel result.

Icing:
Ingredients: 250 g icing sugar, lemon juice
Instructions: Mix until spreadable.

How to make the cake: Roll out dough until thin. Spread poppy seed filling on it and roll cake into a roll. Place on baking sheet. Moisten roll with cold water and place streusel on top. Bake 50-60 min. at 190-200° C. When cool, ice the cake.

As you can see, it's quite... non-elaborate, and thus always reminds me of medieval recipes - "hey, anyone knows how to make this or that, so there's no need to describe it". However, here are some add-ins from me to make it a little less non-elaborate. (If you don't know how to make yeast dough, I will not describe it here. Go find out - it's totally worthwhile to acquire "make yeast dough" as a basic cooking skill!)

Ground poppy seeds are best used fresh. You can use a poppy seed grinder, which will process absolutely nothing but poppy seeds, or buy freshly ground poppy seeds - though that can prove a bit difficult.
I use about 360-400 g of sugar for the filling, and usually only 2 eggs. The icing will take the freshly pressed juice of one to two lemons.
Roll out the dough really thin; to transfer the roll to a baking sheet, roll out on a clean tea towel, spread filling on it, roll by lifting one side of the tea towel and carry the roll to the sheet on the towel, there to let it roll off. Handle very carefully, or it will burst. When spreading the filling, don't spread it all the way, but concentrate on the side where you will start rolling and leave the opposite end free - the filling will spread more while rolling.
Baking in our oven takes about 50 min at 170° C in our fan oven.

This cake is a fair bit of work - grinding the poppy, preparing all the different bits - but is totally worth it. And I will now go and have a piece of the little that is still left from the weekend...

Yesterday evening, after the Most Patient Man On Earth was back home from work, he casually told me that he had ordered a new hardcover book from our mutual favourite author.

I tried not to flinch - we had been ordering our English books from Amazon, like I wrote yesterday. And a new book from C.J. Cherryh - the first volume of the next trilogy she writes - that is something to rejoice about, after all!
I asked him what publishing house the book is from... and he says "oh, I don't know - I think it's Daw (it is, by the way, and Daw belongs to the penguin.com group)... and I didn't order it from Amazon."

The Most Patient Man had not only read my blog, he had also clicked on some links, and then read some more, and clicked some more, and (via a comment from a lady in France) found an on-line bookseller based in the UK, with free shipping wherever they ship, worldwide. So the link above? Will not lead you to the Amazon site, but to www.bookdepository.co.uk. For me, that means getting used to a new online bookshop structure. They may not be as large as The River Shop (yet), and they might not have as huge a selection as The River Shop, but they will be seeing my (our) money for English-language books now. And my links, with the little traffic that might bring (since while I am utterly happy about the two new followers this blog got during the last few days... realistically thinking, this is a teeny-tiny blog with really not so many readers). And thus hopefully you (as you follow my links) and maybe your money, too...

In a recent comment, I found a link to academia.edu, which seems to be something like Facebook for academics (with listing of papers). Another social platform, just what the Internet needs! Did any of you know about that platform before? Am I the only one who was in the darkness?

To blog in earnest about that, I think it is a brilliant idea to have some sort of academical network like that - you can list books and papers you have read, maybe discuss them with colleagues, follow other people's work, and so on. Just like Facebook is a brilliant idea, keeping track of old colleagues and friends, instant chatting to just drop a word or two, and so on. And like Xing and LinkedIn are brilliant ideas, building a network of business acquaintances and partners, getting recommendations and seeing who trusts whom in business things, and so on. And like Ravelry, where you can connect with knitters you know and new folks, see who knits what, find new pattern ideas, message around, hang out in groups and so on. But is having so many different network platforms still a brilliant idea?

The problem of all this, as I see it: There's too many of them platforms. And each and every platform presence of a person means you need to dedicate time and energy to your place in that network, keeping your status and your information up-to-date, keeping track of your network connections, dropping a comment here and an answer there. And more and more I get the feeling that all those social networks are a good idea, but a great big honking single one would be an even better idea - because the idea of each of these networking sites is to collect everybody into the site and database, and every single platform wants as many people as possible, but my time is limited, and my energy that I am willing to devote daily to my presence on the Net is limited too. And that is exactly why I am blogging, but not going online to check Facebook or Xing or LinkedIn or whatever often: because this blog is my main bit of internet presence, and all the other groups and networks have to take the back seat. With this blog, what I write is there to read for everybody with Internet access and sufficient knowledge of English, and there is no need to be in any of the social network sites - and no need to know in which of these many sites I can be found...