About Us
Some of you are probably wondering what on earth “Heimweh“ is. The rest of you aren't wondering because you didn't read the tag line below Roasted Hamster: Keeping Heimweh at Bay. “Heimweh“ is German for homesickness. This blog is about things we make because of Heimweh and it is also about our experiences with “Fernweh“ (literally, “far sickness“, less-literally but more comprehensibly, it is the need to see that which is far away or the existence of a travel bug).
We are Michael and Rachel Rade and we both suffer from homesickness of one sort of another and we both love to travel and our hobbies all seem to be somehow food related.
Michael was born near Lübeck, Germany (that is in northern Germany near Hamburg). He grew up in a decidedly non-foodie family. His mother didn't particularly like to cook, though she does enjoy making jam. The consequence of this is that, when he moved to Berlin, a city that boasts many good restaurants, he went a little crazy. He traveled extensively for his job until he left it in 2012 to move to the USA with his wife. He started to experience “Heimweh“ particularly in regards to baked goods even before moving. The consequence of this is care-packages of desperately desired food stuffs from his parents and an increase in Rachel's skills in baking bread and his grandma's cakes. The consequence of his “Fernweh“ is that both his and Rachel's skills have also expanded in the areas of cooking foods from several regions of Asia, every country in Europe, and not a bit of the Levant.
Michael's food-related hobbies include:
- Traveling (specifically, he spends hours on-line in advance planning at which restaurants to eat)
- Butchering meat
- Cooking large pieces of meat
- Grilling
- Making charcuterie
- Mixing cocktails
- Researching ingredients
- Trying to eat at every Asian restaurant in the San Francisco Bay Area - the ones that score over a 3.5 on Yelp, at least
- Recreating his favorite meals from said restaurants in the kitchen
Rachel was born in Ohio. In contrast to Michael, her earliest memories of her great-grandmother making apple-sauce and/or cookies; of her mother cooking, baking, gardening, and canning; and of her Pop Pop creating extravagant meals for the extended family. Rachel grew up helping her mother can her own tomato sauce from tomatoes fresh from their garden - incidentally, picking tomatoes in July heat and humidity in Ohio is no joke! She was cooking dinner unsupervised from a young age, as well as being the resident cookie baker. Sadly, she has still not mastered her mother's techniques when it comes to decorating cakes, though she is quite good at baking them. She cannot remember a time when she didn't love being in the kitchen. She moved to Germany in 2009 and experienced food “Heimweh“ in a great way. Even in Ohio, there aren't many of the world's foods that you can't get either through cooking or eating out. Add to that the years of traveling she had done before that for her job and you can sympathize with the lack of food from Latin America in Germany (okay, there was one “Mexican“ restaurant in Bonn but she has never forgiven it for providing salsa that consisted of ketchup mixed with some bell peppers. The rest of the options were equally depressing). She set out to learn to cook it. Now that she has moved back to the USA with Michael, she finds that she still has “Heimweh“ but this time for European food and baked goods so, again, she turned to the internet and cookbooks to stave it off.
Rachel's food-related hobbies include:
- Traveling (she likes to wander into every specialty food retailer in every country she visits)
- Baking
- Canning
- Researching ingredients
- Slow-cooking (this does not refer to the use of a crock-pot which, for whatever reason, we don't own but to cooking food that takes a lot of time)
- Amassing a selection of cookbooks from her favorite authors and regions of the world for food (which includes most of them)
- Making sauces
- Entertaining
- Visiting as many farmer's markets, farm stands, and small food purveyors as possible
We hope that you'll enjoy the read and find some interesting bits that make you smile, give you some ideas for traveling or cooking or change your perspective on things. Please get in touch if you have any comments or questions. Happy Reading!