Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!!

I hope you all had a great New Year's Eve and woke up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed on this New Year's Day!

Gramma has been here for a visit and yesterday we made a German delicacy called Rouladen (mmmmm). Cause Someone had a bearthday... (not Gramma).

So... rouladen are notoriously difficult to make but... in August we tried them for Grampa's bearthday and used the slow-cooker... so we are doing that again.

First you need rouladen... the meat... mmmm....

Then some finely sliced onions (we used the mandolin thingie).

Then you unroll the rouladen and give them a gentle beating... We don't have a meat hammer so we just used the flat end of our big carving fork.

There... a nice pile of beat-up rouladen slabs.

Gramma is dicing some bacon - usually she just puts the slices in the rouladen as is but Someone doesn't like that...

So dicing it is! Gramma looks beary intent...

There we go... now we are ready to make them.

Smear them with mustard.

Add the diced bacon and the sliced onions...

Then you start rolling them up...

Like this. Some people wrap them with string, but we just used toothpicks.

Then you dust them lightly with flour....

Now the worst part... the browning!

 This is a beary messy job.... so I will stand back.

And we're off!! We had so many we had to do it in two batches and it goes quickly and is stressful sooo...

Voila... browned rouladen in the slow cooker on a bed of carrots and celery, with 4 cups of water sluiced through the frying pan and added to the slow cooker. Now that cooks on low for 5-6 hours.

Leaving a beary messy pan to clean up.

OK... now we are going to have the rouladen with Knoedel... potato dumplings. These are super easy to make cause they come in little mesh cooking baggies...

And we're having red cabbage from our garden. Yummm!!!

Gramma and Grampa!! They look hungry!

Alrightee... so we fished out the rouladen, sieved the broth and made gravy which we put back in the slow cooker with the rouladen to keep everything warm.

 Voila... soooo good!!