Mmmm ... meat

While in Ingolstadt this past weekend we stayed at our friend Stefi's parents' house. They grilled up a large amount of meat on Saturday evening for dinner (which included sausages of course) then for the mid-day meal on Sunday Stefi's mom, Ludia (not sure if I'm spelling that right), made a Schweinebraten with Knödel. A Schweinebraten is baked pork and Knödel are extremely dense and sticky balls made out of potato or bread. They sit in your stomach like lead but it's impossible to stop eating them. Anyway, here are some pics of our meals from the weekend.

Here we are enjoying all the grilled meats on Saturday evening along with an awesome potato salad that I need to get the recipe for. Stefi's nephew Max is there as well, he was visiting his grandparents for the weekend:



Chrissy bought Stefi a dreamcatcher and Max decided it would make a good earring:



A little later that same night. There are 4-5 bottles of schnapps on the table, they are considered a digestif in Europe. And schnapps in Europe are not like schnapps in the US. European schnapps are distilled from different fruits and are high-proof liquor whereas US schnapps have a lot of sugar in them along with artificial (and sometimes natural) flavors.



Here's Martin relaxing on the back deck. Their house had two decks and nice landscaping and plants all over so it was quite relaxing to sit outside and just enjoy nature. See the woodpile, dad? That was only about a third of the amount of wood they had back there. And all the neighbors had huge woodpiles too. Which they had to order from somewhere because they're surrounded by farmland and no forest to be seen. It was almost more of a decoration than something they actually use there, woodpiles seemed to serve more as fences and decorative boundaries and were stacked creatively. Crazy.



Here's the awesome Schweinebraten. I'm not sure how she made it, what spices or concoction it baked in, but it had amazing flavor. We could smell it cooking in the oven all morning long and by noon it was like a race to the table so we could all finally eat it:



And the Knödel are the ball-shaped things in the bowl on the table:



Sorry I didn't get a close-up picture of them. I was in food coma.