Germans + their bread

Germans are wonderful and have delicious bread. In fact, it has been said that Germans have the most types of bread of any one country. Delicious. 

They appropriately like to eat it -- a lot :) In fact, the American boyfriend of one of F's fellow students asked at one point, after having lived in Germany for a bit, "Could we eat something other than bread?" She was a bit surprised until she realized that yes, Germans can + do regularly eat bread for breakfast, then you eat something warm for lunch, and then you eat "Abendbrot", which literally means "evening bread". Yup. It's a thing. And, if you can't eat a warm meal for lunch, then you eat it for dinner, but then, guess what you will have eaten for lunch? Yup. Bread. Of course, with stuff on it, but still :)

We just had our yearly Easter Brunch in the local congregation. There was a large spread of breads + "spreads" :) among other things. Because we had helped organize it, we also ended up taking home lots of leftovers. Germans also have special layered boxes for storing coldcuts and cheese in the fridge. An efficient use of space! We bought one fairly early in our marriage :) Some of the spreads + 'toppings' we had bought on our own, but you can see -- quite a variety!

I have sometimes seen bread, pancakes + waffles as just the carrier of the delicious toppings! But here the bread is especially tasty, so it's a nice balance :)

Here's another Germanness: breakfast boards (Frühstücksbrettchen). What's that you ask? Well, very German, for one :) They are boards, typcially made of wood or plastic, upon which you eat breakfast. And because breakfast is typically bread, no problem! You can cut on it and eat from it! (We have some that we just use as small cutting boards -- also handy :) )

And that's another thing -- Germans often like to cut their rolls or bread up into smaller pieces -- but not at the beginning but rather often after you've already spread on one of the pieces. So, imagine you've spread jam on one half. Then you cut the bread at the boundary (how convenient that you eat on a cutting board!) Then you can eat that portion and spread the other part with something else. How endearing + adorable.

And how could I forget? An amusing little anecdote from F's father's childhood: the 5 children tended to argue over who got which Frühstücksbrett. Grandma, in desperation, decided to buy five identical boards to end the quarreling. But, like the persistent quarrelers that they were, they found a minor difference on one of them. One Frühstücksbrett had 1 more mushroom on it than all the others. So then everyone wanted that one. Ah well!