Avocados for breakfast?

I thought I would start out this post with a few recipe ideas that have been developing in my kitchen over the last few weeks.

Toasted bread with hummus and sliced avocados, topped with cottage cheese, toasted sunflower seeds, salt and pepper.

This is actually surprisingly good for breakfast. It really gets you through the morning. You can toast a bunch of sunflower seeds all at once and just keep them in a jar on the counter. They taste good on almost everything.
In a similar vein...

Toasted bread with peanut butter and alfalfa sprouts.

The sprouts give it a bit of crispy freshness that makes you feel like you're eating something really gourmet- and they look cool.

Avocado, cherry tomato, mozzarella salad topped with Malene's salad dressing (equal parts mustard and honey, finely chopped garlic and onion, and 3 parts olive oil to 1 part balsamic vinegar) and toasted sunflower seeds.

This goes really well with something really hearty, like the potato soup I made the other day which was Ok but not fantastic. Any good potato soup recipes out there?

So this is what has been going on in the kitchen of my little apartment for the last several weeks. I have also taken the time to really enjoy the -how can I put it- 'diversity' of grocery shopping options here in the vicinity. There are a couple what we would call "normal" grocery stores, with lots of selection, but usually quite expensive. Then there are all of the discount groceries, which just put boxes of stuff out on the shelves and you have to do your best to sort out where anything is (it was this kind of grocery store where I couldn't even find salt when I first came to Germany, which led to my infamous rice, cucumber, garlic salt soup). Then there are all of the turkish and arabic markets which put out all of their vegetables outside, which gives it a farmers market feeling, even though they are the same vegetables as you would get anywhere else. They know all of the prices by heart; there are no receipts and very little plastic packaging (there is nothing like picking out your own herbs from a big bunch with your bare hands).  All of this shopping is, of course, on a bicycle, so your shopping list has to take into consideration how much will fit in the backpack and how much weight you are willing to truck around.

With all of its intricacies, grocery shopping can be quite a fine art. You could also say, with the same reasoning, that it was a pain. There is no going to one place, finding the things you need, putting them in the trunk and going home, and I used to find that very irritating. I've found, though, that if you take the time to really look around and compare the prices of avocados, you get to see a vivid cross-section of Hamburgers- even if you do have to look for an hour for the only hummus in the city that comes in a small can written only in arabic.

German word of the day

"Salz" [z ahl tss] - salt