Graduation / Good-bye Amsterdam Night

Today, I show these pictures with great pride! Thank you Sarah for providing them for me!

We baked those cakes together, don't they look gorgeous!! and believe me they were delicious!
Sarah, the gorgeous girl in the picture, learned the skills of chocolate, she made that astonishing chocolate mousse you see on the back! My dear Sarah, you learned so fast and with so an enthusiasm that makes me believe I am a great teacher! thank you, I love you.
The rest of the cakes are a German Clementine Cheese Cake, my luxurious Lemon Pie and the mouth watering Nutella Torte, a recipe from my dear friend Emma. Emma, I am passing a legacy on ...

After long 6 months of growing as a team and coming to know each other, learning few little things here and there ... I was ready to "graduate" my girls from "the small teachings" of life, hehehe well at least I thought, little idea did I have that we were just about to start our real journey as students ....



Here I am, that was during my second pregnancy, I enjoyed to be pregnant, it gave me a wonderful excuse to indulge myself in such goodies!

But we didn't only eat and bake, we also learned other little things, like creating face mask from scratch. We had fun hiding in a room to mix up a bunch of creams and vitamins we could gather around from the things we already had in our kitchens ... sorry, no pictures!

One of the things that I learned during this time was that not everybody is ready to learn. I was confronted often with the question, am I wasting my time in people that anyways want to do things their own ways??. First impressions can be wrong, I have to say that I experienced the saying "the first ones will be the last, and the last ones will be the first" to be very true. How wonderful it is to invest myself in someone with a teachable attitude! There can be thousands of extra miles to walk through but they can be walked with great joy if the companion is a humble heart
At this evening we were the cooks, the bakers, the one who did the shopping, decorated and set the whole thing up, worked the menu through, talked and entertained the guests and cleaned up! It was graduation night, we worked as a team and we had a wonderful time! It was all part of learning and growing ... oh I forgot to mention we had a meal for around 100 people ... hehehe

And after all, when we were done, we enjoyed another piece of cake!
In this last picture, you can see my husband, my dear friend Corina and our Freiburger friend Katrin.
Thank you guys! you all did a wonderful job.

Eggplant Parmesan

One of the things that God told me to do some years ago, was to train some girls I was working with, to teach them how to stand on their own when the "big day" comes to their lives. I must be honest, I was clueless about where to start or what would be "the significant thing" to emphasize. I started where I was, which was the fairest thing to do for us all, hehehe. We began at the kitchen. In Venezuela, we have a saying "love starts in the belly", which pretty much says that a woman should know how to cook!. My dear girls, with the exception of one, had really not much of an idea of how to provide or prepare for the "heavy duty" of running a home, arranging meals and actually making them.
We started with simple "projects", mainly baking, which I LOVE!. To my surprise, the girls began to be really interested and got excited to learn more and more. Teaching and learning can be fun!
In the above picture, we were at my kitchen in Amsterdam, nothing fancy!, that was pretty much it, a couple of pots, a blender, little space but lots of creativity!
We were making a vegetarian meal, eggplants, it is delicious! and of course, I was working on the dessert, a lemon pie!
To the amusement of many of you I will post my first secret recipe ever! Things are changing or there must be something wrong in the state of Denmark! hihihihihi

Eggplant Parmesan
3 Long Eggplants
1 Red Pepper (paprika) chopped in small pieces
1 small onion finely chopped
1 cup of fresh tomato juice (wash a couple of tomatoes and blend them)
60 gr Parmesan cheese (I always use more, but that is just me)
150 gr mozzarella cheese
salt and pepper
oil or butter

Cut the eggplants in halves, as you can see in the picture above, they look like little boats. With a spoon try to take the inside of the eggplant carefully, making sure not to crave too deeply. Chop the inside of the eggplant in small pieces. Bring the chopped eggplant together in a sauce pan with the oil or butter, the onions, a little bit of salt and pepper. Stir it up a bit and then add the fresh tomato juice. Eggplants are packed with water so it might become really watery at some point of time, leave it to dry a bit but stirring regularly so it doesn't burn, then add the mozzarella cheese and keep on stirring until it is well melted. Remove from the fire and fill this mixture into the eggplant boats, cover with the Parmesan cheese and broil it just a bit in the oven, remember that the filling is already cooked so the idea of broiling is to get the Parmesan cheese melted and form a nice softy crust on top, but remember that the boat also has to cook, so leave it in the oven as long as you think the eggplant boat needs to fully cook and be soft to eat. You can serve it with rice and a nice glass of white wine. Enjoy!