Home

Today's post is all about Home - what does it mean to you - me - or others around you....

I asked No1 Son (almost 8) what 'home' was - "that's easy, it's England.  No wait a minute - it's Germany 'cos that's where you were born".  So that's nice and easy then - home is where you were born.

But is it so?  We're preparing for a trip home.... oops back to the UK.  Is it going home?  Well that all depends on what you mean by home.... and indeed it's a tricky and delicate topic for expats - actually, probably anybody who's moved away from their parents and where they grew up - but is that just me assuming a definition of 'home'.......

So where to begin?  Let's take a look at the OED defines it principally as "the place where one lives permanently, especially as a member of a family or household" so for us then that would suggest that 'home' is where we currently reside - given that we are with our families (immediate at any rate) and it's where we are permanently (we've no plans to go home back to the UK permanently any time soon.)


If the definition is so straightforward, why then do many expats - me included - often refer to 'going home' - meaning a trip back to the motherland?  We're planning our next trip - indeed, I'm off on Monday with the Kindling to visit various friends and relatives, and I often say  we're 'going home', I suppose it's the easiest way to describe it.  But equally, on our return trip, I won't say 'we're going back to Germany', but that we're 'going home'.  Is it possible to have more than one home?

Does how long you've been away make any difference to what you refer to as home?  We're fortunate in that at the moment we're not very itinerant - in that we've moved here to Germany but not gone anywhere else (yet.  We're reserving judgement on that one!) So we've been settled in one place now for four years and it very definitely feels like home.

There is of course the (very) trashy saying ...."home is where the heart is".... but what does that actually mean?  Is my heart left behind with my family in the UK, and my childhood home (not that I had one as we moved around lots as a services family) or is my heart here with my Husband and children?  

Too many questions - and definitely not enough wine.  But home... well as Paul Young said, it's wherever you lay your hat.....!  Is that not so - home is where you make it and what you make it.  As an expat, we may use the phrase 'going home' as a convenient descriptor, rather than launching into a full scale explanation - perhaps we should just say going on holiday?  Only, it's often far from that!


 

We're jamming!

This time last year I was over run with soft fruit from my garden: strawberries, raspberries, redcurrants and gooseberries all did really well.  SO well in fact that I was struggling with ideas of how to use them all up.  We had lots of jam, Rote Grutze - a sort of summer fruit compote - almost like the inside of a sumer pudding, and plenty in the freezer left over too.

Roll on 12 months, and the garden hasn't been so productive.  The raspberries are nowhere near ripe, the strawberries are going mouldy on the plant and the redcurrants not so prolific as last year so the 'bird toll' seems a lot dearer.  Still, spurred on by a post I read in Recipe Junkie's blog, I felt compelled to do something at least with what I could salvage.  So cue more jamming here yesterday.  I managed to pick about 600g of strawberries and redcurrants and then added 300ml of sour cherry juice I happened to have in the fridge to make the fruit up to a kilo.

Pureed fruit and sugar pre-cooking

I use Diamant Gelierzucker mixes as they're very easy to use and as they contain extra pectin you're guaranteed a well set jam!  Yesterday's was the 2:1 version - so that's 2 lots of fruit to 1 bag of sugar.  I pureed the fruit from the garden and then mixed in the sugar, heated and boiled for the requisite 4 minutes and decanted into jars - as simple as that!  For less than an hours' work from deciding to pick some fruit here's the result:

three and half jars of deep red jam!

I find that jamming here is a lot easier than in the UK.  During the soft fruit season, the gelling sugar mixes are easily available.  Last year there was a 'flavoured' on too - we had Elderflower and vanilla flavoured strawberry jam which was very fragrant!  You also tend to find in the supermarkets all the equipment on offer too - packs of jars (which don't cost the earth!), muslins, thermometers and so forth.  I think there is still much more of a tradition of using the fruits of the season and stocking the larder here than we have in the UK now, although there seems to be a bit of a comeback of these crafts due to the current fiscal climate. For me, well it's a therapeutic, thrifty exercise - I love to make things from scratch and I hate wasting anything from the garden - the pots also make great little gifts with a personal touch - a couple of them will certainly be coming back to the UK with me next week!

Cultural misunderstandings......saying what we mean and meaning what we say!

I'm very aware that my German skills are not what they ought to be - to be honest I've not done much to improve them and really do need to get something proper organised by way of classes or tutoring.  Once the Wee Girlie goes to Kindergarten in August, I will after eight years have some 'me time' and some free time which I can commit to something such as German lessons, regular exercise and so on.

I know I misunderstand a lot of things - quite often because I'm a sentence or 2 behind when others are speaking and I never quite catch up - whilst I will often ask people to repeat things or use a different word, I do sometimes get the wrong end of the stick.  If I'm in a social situation with a group of people - rather than a one on one conversation - I have no hope as I get too easily distracted by what's being said around me.

So perhaps I do what a lot of expats do an have looked to the expat and English speaking community for a social scene, and I've been very lucky in finding a good group of like minded ladies and we have a fairly full social diary!!  Whilst we are predominantly English speakers, we do hail from all over the place and even in our native language there is space for misunderstanding.

I want to share this chart with you as I think it demonstrates so well what I'm trying (badly) to say here - that what we mean when we say something isn't always apparent to the other party and even when you're speaking in your mother tongue, wires can still be crossed!

It has apparently been a complete eye-opener to some of my American friends that us Brits speak in such an oblique way but I have to say the translations here are spot on!  Have a read and let me know what you think.....

Teatime Treats

The baking bug has bitten me well and truly and following on from last week's fairy cake fest, this week we've been having something home baked as a treat at teatime.

The first concoction arose following a request for pancakes for tea from Son No2 - but as no-one else wanted them he didn't get them - but aha I had a brainwave and so quickly knocked up a batch of Scotch Pancakes for pudding - the Kindling had them warm with nutella on and we grown ups had them a more traditional cold with lashings of butter later on.

Thank you Good Housekeeping* for an easy, foolproof recipe which I'll share here:

125g SR Flour
2 tbsp sugar (would use less next time as they were quite sweet)
1 egg (beaten)
150ml milk.

• Mix all ingredients till smooth and consistency of thick cream.
• Heat greased frying pan/griddle and drop spoonfuls onto the pan
• Turn pancakes when bubbles rise to the surface
• Keep the cooked pancakes warm in a clean tea towel.

They didn't last long - so I was left with an empty biscuit tin to fill.... so yesterday's offering was dark chocolate covered flapjacks.  Very moreish - and perfect with a cup of coffee!

 So the trusty family recipe comes out - handwritten in an old book (aren't those always the best type of recipe?)

Well it's no top secret formula - so here you are:

225g Oats
150g SR Flour
100g Sugar
1/2 tsp Baking Powder
150g Butter
150g Golden Syrup


The method is super simple.

• Mix all dry ingredients together
• Melt butter and syrup - easiest in the microwave for a couple of minutes
• Combine oat mix and syrup mix - make sure they're well mixed and you've no dry patches.
• Press into a baking tin / make small rounds and flatten slightly on baking tray.
• Bake at 180c for about 15mins

I had some leftover dark chocolate so melted that and liberally coated the flapjacks once they'd cooled - scrummy!!

* The Good Housekeeping Cookery Book is one of my failsafe cookery books - always good for checking a recipe or method.