More Germany: the Turkish market

A few years ago, I spoke about supermarket shopping in Germany, and mentioned that as a vegetarian, I did a lot of shopping at the two Turkish markets in the tiny town of B. While I was there last week, I took a photo of the only one still existing in B:

Now is such a great time to shop in DE as all the local produce is available, such as tomatoes from DE (rather than Holland!).

Above is the fruit side, and here is the vegetable section:

It was very warm in my corner of Germany last week, it felt more like Spain, so the umbrellas were all up to protect the produce from the sun.

Back from a week in Germany

I had a chance to travel to Germany this week for work. It's been announced that Benevolent company J will be moving from the Tiny town of B, so I brought along my camera this week, to capture some images of where I spent so many years.

First though, the trip out of Stansted (STN). I had heard that Airberlin is pulling out of Stansted and expanding at Gatwick. They have already cut down the Dusseldorf route from 3 times a day to 2, and now the only direct cities from STN are DUS, Stuttgart and Muenster Osnabruck. Back in the day when I first arrived, AB occupied 4 or 5 of these counters with a customer service team on-site and automated check-in machines.

Now, they've moved around the corner where they only have 2 counters that are only staffed when their infrequent flights are running and no automated machines or customer service. Of course, I can always switch to German Wings to Cologne, but Company J has a corporate deal with Airberlin; as well I prefer them anyway so I hope they do not disappear completely from STN as it's my closest airport to my corner of Essex.

In case you're wondering where else you can go from STN, here's a photo I took while waiting for the AB counter to open:

Unfortunately, there are no flights to the US, although they've broken into the Asia with budget airline Air Asia. However, from late October, Air Asia as well pulls out from STN and relocates to Gatwick.

Opening the pickled peppers

A while back, in October, I was awash with peppers and decided to jar them up. As the peppers are starting to appear on my plants this year, I'm reminded to eat them to clear out the jars. So how did it go?

Certainly looks ok...no major loss of colour:

Looks ok here too, smells ok:

On taste though, a little too heavy on the vinegar. So they preserved really well, better than Old El Paso version here in the UK that retails for 1.24 GBP a jar, but I need to use them in cooking, so on pizzas, in tomato sauces, etc. where the vinegar will burn off, rather than raw and in a salad. In the past weeks I've been through 4 jars already.

So last year was a learning year, this year will be better. :-)

From the garden this week

With guests coming next weekend, I'm trying to get organized.
Being 4 stories up from the ground, I'd love to know where these fellows originally came from...

And the way they eat my chilli pepper plants, if I could find someone who would eat them, I'd happily hand them over....

The American flag across the street

I mentioned a few posts back, about the construction across the street. I had to zoom today when i spotted the American flag bandana being sported today:

I wonder if he could ever imagine that an American would be taking his photo in this corner of Essex. ;-)

From the rooftop garden - tomatoes

I'm rather pleased with my tomatoes this year, perhaps because it was so hot here and not so rainy, they've done well. Today's high: 28 C/82 F!