Dinner. Such a simple word and yet … wait a moment. I can hear the missus thinking “stop wasting electrons and get to the point”. And she would be right. I tend to write loads of half sentences and not get to the point. Very much like this one. So here it is: Abendbrot.
Breakfast, lunch and dinner
So let’s start again. Abendbrot. If you actually try to translate that into English or Mandarin, you get “dinner”. Likewise Mittagbrot is lunch, but there is no Morgenbrot (missus is raising her eyebrow at me) as that’s just simply Continental breakfast, where apparently they just call it “breakfast” on the continent…
When I was growing up in Taiwan then New Zealand, we did not usually have bread as a meal other than for breakfast. Sure, you can totally have sandwiches (and boy did I have a lot of sandwiches) and it’s mostly for lunch. But before we start, we have to make a topic change, wind back and talk about ourselves.
You might have read it already in the “About Us” page that we are a patchwork, multi-culture family. To summarise, I was born in Taiwan, immigrated to New Zealand when I was 15. @danielaberlin is German was conned to and moved to the UK out of her love for me over 10 years ago. I won’t bore you with the details but I’ll summarise it for you here (in a not very child-friendly manner): “UK bread is shit. That’s not bread. That’s toast”.
Yep. You heard it right.
Image by azerbaijan_stockers on Freepik
Truth be told, she is not wrong there. One can’t really make a meal out of the “bread” without eating 13,552 slices and have a carb bloat out. European bread is usually much denser and often comes with seeds.
But of course, it doesn’t just end there.
A totally different level
Now I’ve equipped you with the understanding of what “bread” means in our family, we can talk about everything else that happens when we have bread as a meal.
You can now start to see how Abendbrot can be a complete meal and it keeps everyone full. As a matter of fact there is generally a cheer from both the teen and toddler every time we say we are going to have bread as a meal. You can be as simple as you want by having just ham, cheese and some salads or as elaborate as you can by putting out a complete spread plus different condiments. I had Zwiebelschmalz for the first time in my life when the above picture was taken and it blew my mind (for the uninitiated, it’s onion lard). Come to think of it perhaps I should not have eaten half a tub…
But of course, you don’t always have to. Often we just have some ham and cheese, slice some reddish and tomatoes and have some salad leaves on the table along with some hearty, heavy bread (I am really into rye bread these days). I personally love piping hot leftover gravy with bread… yum.
What are your favourite bread toppings? Is there anything that you think we should try on our next bread meal? Please leave us a comment below.
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