Christmas! Theory, cooking and exhibitions. Sweets allover. And what the Christmas story might have to do with the healing of stomach pain

Between the fourth Advent and Christmas Eve, the calendar has a period of grace, to easy the psychological transition to the festival and his holidays. The normal work thins itself, that is, it becomes less and loses its seriousness. Such in our case, the reporting about current exhibitions in the southern region. Actually, its always worth taking a look at the Augburger Maximilian Museum, pretty, modern, historical - with special exhibitions on the theme of Augsburg and Augsburg anywhere and everywhere in the world. Während vor einiger Zeit noch das Zarensilber Augsburgische Prachtentfaltung zur Schau stellte, lockt jetzt die winzige, bunt bewimpelte Ausstellung „Der friedliche Drache“ über die Textilkunst und -tradition des Königreichs Bhutan in die Josefinenstraße. While some time before the Czar silver pointed out Augsburgian splendor to review, now the tiny exhibition "The peaceful dragon" about the textile arts and traditions of the Kingdom of Bhutan attracts in colorful pennants to visit its rooms in the Josefinenstraße in Augsburg's inner city.

Who likes colorful ribbons at his wrist and bears interest at carpets and the art of weaving, can yield around here with great amusement. Furthermore, large-scale photographs and decorative objects give a frightening example of the overload of traditions, coupled over centuries, and always renewed especially to establish identity for the small, poor and rural population. The Bhutanian tradition of folk-weaving and knitting was almost ecstatic overstaged Augsburgian with a lot of opening ceremonies where the royal family of Bhutan personally presented the textile art of its state. They wore of course costumes combining silk and weaving, not just carpet like weaving art, resistent against time and use for decades. The Queen of the constitutional monarchy seems just to be interested in the textile art of their country and displays various traditional holiday costumes on some exhibition photographs as a model. A matching Store in the Maxmuseum provides appropriate accessories, which perfectly suited as Christmas or New Year's gift, affinity for Asian folkart presupposed.

Who is interested in esoteric might get pleasure on the role of turquoise stone, that is used for jewelry in Bhutan, where people believe in its healing power. Turquoise jewelry as such is not surprising - Turquoise decorations are known in Europe for years – has is always been from Bhutan? The Armbändchen colorful woven carpets, bags and scarves however let strongly remember the culture of the South American highlands, particularly the Andes of Peru. The strange accordance has any determinable origines? We do not find a lot of information about materials and the making of colors for the weaving works in Bhutan's mountain villages. The objects in the exhibition are within a few historical observations presented and staged. With the opening ceremonies, characteriazed by the visit of the royal family, the essential traits of the presentation have already gone. So more a kind of personal event? The royal family quasi personally attracted by Augsburg or even personally invited by the local „textile traditions“?

The grey-scaled huge formated acryls of Kotek remind of icy fractales of plants in the H2's refrigeratorian atmosphere near Ahlt's and Peer's Alpian heights. One presentation before, contextualized with Plessi's volcanic stones and summer time reminiscences of the plains, its Indians and big trips, Kotek easier alluded to sex and the forest. The acryl's strategy, is, of course, the blow up of (photographed) biomorphic materials into strange objects.

Hopefully not a political gesture - almost a hint that by simplifying the long form of government to monarchic dictatorship economic and cultural progress can enforce, to allow, then after some years of hardship, a more democratic c(city) government "on the long reins".... , Oh, *lords of the years* don't let yourself be such providently observed... der neue Augsburger Knecht Rupprecht, mit Gesellen, Reisigpeitsche und prall gefülltem Säckel, hat durch die jüngsten Openings zumindest deutlich gemacht, welches Programm nun die Augsburger Kunstsammlungen und Museen vor der Umwandlung in Umkleidekabinen für Boxer, Reiter, Schwertkämpfer und Ballerinen schützen kann: Einladen, einladen, einladen. The new Knecht Rupprecht, with journeymen, sticks and whip filled, bulging coffers, has at least made clear by recent openings what program can protect now the Augsburgian art collections and museums against the conversion into dressing rooms for boxers, equestrians, sword fighters: Invite, invite, invite.

Private financiers, sponsors and collectors, take their advantage in the opportunity of solidarity to produce themselves sociable in the premises of culture and arts. The change of government is almost immediately visible, almost issued, as if the makers of sound transport ships - „german high class workmanship“ - has been send to fashionable jolly dinkies with questionable fitness moved offshore. After all, it is already at the end of January that at the Neue Galerie - after a very enjoyable and Christmas-fitting interlude with the collection Greisinger ( "Cafe Drexl") – continues with the female artist Kotek, whose works already exists in the H2's collection.

The Schaezlerpalais will surprise its visitors with "discoveries" (note the subtle difference between the anticipated title "Masterpieces") from its own stocks of the 19. century art. In addition, a series of "treasure pieces", in which will be presented individual objects from the museum collections and a series called "antiques in the evening" each Tuesday at 18.00 clock (06.00 pm) in the Roman Museum: column tombs, animal figurines, tableware ... The event is perhaps in need of the occasional visit by Agent Provocateur to emancipate from the thematically - evil words - paleontological obligation to cultural theory reflected freestyle.... No information can be found in the quarter program to the "sound hall" events in H2, hopefully because of the unpredictability of events with professional musicians and not because this romantic allusion to Donaueschingen would not continue .... (About Modern Music in Augsburg soon in ARTS-On.)

The importance of historical studies, that entrap the view from the simple description of the item to a look at its context, is perhaps around Christmas just around in a special way, when "we", the few Protestants, believers or unbelievers, on the fourth Advent Sunday read the Luke's Evangelium in the commonly favored „standardized translation“ - as adults instead of child-reading under the caring guidance of performers - and how one would expect, strictly horrified.

SuperRTL has apparently - as the editorial headquarters in North Rhine-Westphalia let expect - journalists in the editorial, whose formation of such traditions and interests is such that they are occasionally bearing the same feeling of unwellness if they heed the own formation. The horrific two-piece series of the Fourth Advent, "Jesus of Nazareth", a compilation of mediocre American Research - took up in any case the obtruding question: How could this biographical reports of a rhetorically aggressive miracle healer justify a state religion? But instead of really exploring the highly obvious issue of medical competence of Jesus the report hawks only superficial knowledge of hygienics and health care in the Jerusalem of Jesus's time. Especially hygienic deficiencies and the "psychosomatic" assumptions of the High Middle Ages (from so much later time) are reprojected into the antique period. The theory of a placebo effect along with a rhetoric of physical proximity is used as an explanation for the "miracle cures", obviously overstreched. Even rudimentary historical knowledge proposes to catch a glance about the medical situation and knowledge beyond the walls of Kumran, Jericho and Jerusalem, for example, the medical or quasi-medical practize the Greeks and the egyptian Pharaohs had in use. Knowledge and skills - including the medical - and origin have a common reason and source too holy and too high to be explained to anybody – this is the essential characteristic of the mythical story of the Gospels.

Contemporary research should be feel obliged to get especially those legendary aspects out of it. But this would not give reason to new myths, an effect that gives research usually the impression of usefulness - such as a revival of the authority of faith as a medical treatment, as the report on SuperRTL seems likely intended.

The degeneration of medical knowledge to the level of "primitive" cultures believing in miracles instead of scientific explanation, is reflected in the Asklepios cult, of which the film reported. The Greek earth godness with figures in snakes or lizards is mentioned in Homer, Hesiod, Pindar and Euripides. However, the greek authors let him die through a flash of Zeus, while on the island of Crete he was admired as a miracle healer who brought Glaucus, the son of King Minos, back to life. The island of Crete was was the commercial center of the Mediterranean in ancient times, who had taken over the complete regional trade for the Egyptians. Thus, the traces of this tradition are relatively easy to understand. But if at least Asklepios appears along the relations with Egypt in Nazareth, one wonders how the rest of the Egyptian's knowledge could disappear completely - especially on botany and the medical ingedients of plants, so the difficult pharmaceutical knowledge, opposed to the visually comprehensible surgical. Instead of concentrating on religion in the temple school, Jesus (resp. The possible historical model for the Gospels) has properly read through medical literature from the Greek-Egyptian role stocks that survived. Likewise, it is quite possible that he was not craftsman from a simple fishing village but was formerly act traveler or something like this, who noted the Greek-Egyptian knowledge from the time in these advanced civilizations locally. In any case the gospel makes clear that he delivered no statements about his medicine, but mystified himself with the help of it.

Miracle healers were known for his time and "customary". This allows to guess that he presented his efforts not only with placebo effects and rhetoric, but was more convincing because of other effects. Since the narration covers precisely this aspect and tends to reduce the figure actually on their habitual suprising effects in language and action, the text can be read as well as an attempt to popularize and to generalize and simultaneously to exaggerate to unattainable heights. To succeed with this, - and simply to follow such a strategy, otherwise presupposes a disguised knowledge at least of rhetorics - but not exclusive: Just think of the report about touching leprose infected – this prompts the hypothesis that he had knowledge of something like sulfonamide, that have even in our contemporary medicine been detected while unconsciously used – as mold fungus (mildew) on saddles produced to cure the horses' skin injuries (comp. http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibiotika)

Jesus would, however, be an example of a "doctor", whose advertising purposes within a primitive society let it seem useful to him to hide his knowledge behind ideas of something unreachable and to adjust it such to external circumstances - unlike, for example Hippocrates, who sought accountability like most of the Greek thinkers (first argument is that they wrote their books by themselves). Unlike the doctors and pharmacists of Asian rulers and the Egyptian pharaohs, he wasn't active quasi exclusively for a small elite circle with this knowledge but just for all. One wonders strictly whether he as a general practitioner was not perhaps even in need of fees from at least some of the treated patients, and this increased his *advertising* ? That would be not too bad, and also the self-presentation is perhaps as horrific less due to him than to those who in retrospect instrumentalized his person and behaviour.

The fishermen from Capernaum were probably hardly enthusiastic of talks about the effect of bactericide ointments, as demonstrated by the mummification of corpses and perhaps under the use of mildews. They were such ungenuous that they could not even came up with the idea, occasionally to vary the timing of the exit on the lake, so the adjustment of the fish to the usual times of the capture could no longer be an obstacle. This advice can in the Gospel be sold as a miracle !

Dead beat: miracle stories about fishing.

Jesus's religious disputes against the "scribes" of which he perhaps actually feared a demystification of his healing practices, and the crucifixion story - incidentally, he does not wear his cross by himself and is convicted because of a confusion in Luke's Evengelium - allows the Gospel, to sink the entire story into Religion like the yeast into flour. Within what then was perhaps healing arts and medical knowledge, became fixed to arbitrariness (of God Church and Fatherland) for centuries. With the "female sages" such healing art was negatively connoted as witch craft and sexual abuse and persecuted for centuries from the end of the medieval ages on. At the same time surgical medicine revived as accepted knowledge, nevertheless as well only with difficulties and by the liberating force of effective opportunities to popularize, as the printing methods of Gutenberg as the basis of books and popular scriptures - for example, the books about the Humans Anatomy by Versalius. But even in the 20th century the real discoverer of Penicillium glaucum, Ernest Duchesne, was suppressed because his studies were made outside of the regular institutions. He not even got an honorary doctorate, not to think about a real title he had claimed with his scientific studies about the penicillium glaucum as a doctoral thesis. And really only in the 19th, more exact, in the 20th century, along with the scientific discovery of antibiotics and anesthetics, which let our modern culture differ such fundamentally to primitive ones with authority, schamanism and strongly pending states of natural healing knowledge, however well they are set on their individual circumstances. But these „re-discoveries“ came late – at least like we know from official discourses – and the Gospel, especially the profiling of Jesus – it perhaps the model for all later strategies of knowledge substitution and suppression with and through authority. Santa Claus invented by Coca-Cola, the Gospel a dezivilisation, christmas a merry disaster.

So we need hormones to become lucky again, because in the 20th century the Nazi ideologies reversed even the little progress made before. Nevertheless, even today the accumulation of statistical data, for which the Nazi research posthumously is sometimes still praised (!), will be of no use for the (metaphorically) blind, who relies on authority and science as we want it to be (even if nonsense, comp. „p.m.“). Thus, what we have to think of the data, will be (or is in the usually worst case(s)) what summaries will tell us. The data mass's deficiency will be enlightened, when research starts to declare the unpossibility of scientific behaviour because of scientific knowledge's differentiation. So to be healthy or to feel better becomes a judgement in accordance to medical practize and its judgements and methods of healing - „Just try to feel good!“. Experimental animals are a good example of how animals are tortured and die to put knowledge into library books, which hardly will ever be read by a doctor – of course, exactly this is the problem- , because it is generally treated as sufficiently if a veterinarian is nice and looking good. By contrast, low-income earners can currently enrich their critical knowledge, like the people who go shopping in cheap shops like Kik and Cadi, which are known for quite bad working conditions but terrific prices. There are for instance Suhrkamp publications on the psychological consequences of Nazism, or the latest political book by Gregor Gysi for about one euro each, so fitting as a gift as well as self-reading. The about five headed "Elite" of the bourgeoisie in Augsburg, which can quickly lie down a Christmas thousands, instead buy historical city chronicles, gold-plated cups etc. at the Fugger's Christmas Bazaar in the Schaezlerpalais.

So what can help us, except as to behave like Marie Antoinette who once recommended, shortly before her head rolled into nirvana, to "eat cake"? A piece of cake, if joules are concerned, is better to estimate than thousand biscuits. That is why we, on the basis of primitive Aldi baking mixes for 99 cents, have created three adjustable Christmas cakes and have even eaten some sampling extracts. Since all three variants - a marzipan apple pie, a mousse au chocolat flavor and a walnut-praline pie with tangerines - are relatively successful, that is, are tasting well, as contral-tasting friends told us - we'll present our recipe here. They are naturally to high in joules, so do not eat more than a piece for breakfast, then carnitine and do some sports, and until (next) Christmas Eve no biscuits! Kekse haben wir dann gestern, am 23. Biscuits we baked yesterday, on the 23th of december. acken, versuchsweise mit küjnstlichem Zucker, entsprechend nicht sonderlich gelungen – auch mit viel zu viel Nuss....das Rezeopt also erst nach den notwendigen Nachkorrekturen. We baked on the 23th of december, and tentatively we used artificial sugar and quite a lot of nutflakes, accordingly the biscuits didn't really succeed. The recipe will thus follow only after the necessary corrections :)

Apple-marzipan cakes with ginger cream

To proceed read the description on the baking mix pack, it's wonderfully simple, a safe recipe says about this: Put baking mixture, butter, milk, eggs and cream together and mix it all up. Cool this pastry for two or three hours. Afterwards, fill it up into a round form and let it stay about 40 minutes in the oven with 180 degrees (celsius). Heat up the marzipan in hot water for about ten minutes, than cover the apples on top of the cake with it. Heat up the chacolat gelatine for ten minutes and use it as second cover, a kind of drip painting will develope. That's it. Our important variation and additive: the cake's base has to be prepared without apples ten minutes in the preheated oven, to let it develope airyness before the apples are burden on him. The pie's foundation can still be painted with maple syrup or the like before being coated with apples in virtually any quantity and of an apple kind with higher juice (sweet like Jonagold for example). Tremendous effort is worthwhile in preparing the the cream for this cake, because the proportion of marzipan is not too high, nor a perfect fit, and cream fits without converting anything in pure sugar (use artificial sugra for the cream - we have some recipes against cancer, too :)). So the cream is made with gingerbread spices, cinnamon, sugar and especially enriched with grated ginger. It can even stay a few days in the refrigerator without developing bad taste, because the spices emerge wonderfully along the days. Otherwise, in the freezer compartment, the cream becomes ice cream quite too fast, but nobody needs to point out that freshly warmed up apple pie and ice cream complement each other so well that even the comprehensive diet or just menu plan is quickly thrown on the pile...

Chocolate cake

The baking mix for the dough is quite alright, also works perfectly, just mix it all up :) but don't mix up the baking mixture for the foundation and for the refilllments. Our additive concerns especially the refillment. Of course, he addition of cinnamon spice and gingerbread goes without saying. The filling is, as in the baking mix and delivered with added cream, even made up with best bio-cream much too greasy, cheapness will lie on your tongue.

But the baking mix is too good to end and be remebered like this. Therefore, we recommend the conversion into a fantastic chocolate mousse, to get this cake into something both elegant and ecstatic. Take simple .... weakly deoiled cocoa of particularly noble nature, for example from a Health Food store (Mering Foods store offers a pack of 125 grams for only 1.78 euros, 100% organic, price and quality perfect!). The cocoa quality decides whether the transfiguration in mousse au choclate succeeds. NEVER use simple, bright and presugared cocoa powder, pupils like to drink, or at least are told to like - that would probably be worse than the flavor mix as given in the mixture. The noble, weakly deoiled cocoa power is to be poured in such a quantity in the filling mixture together with the recipe's recommended amount of cream or milk, that this pastry-cream gets a colour visually tending to real chocolate. The consistency will change a little. It should also be noted that intensity is at the highest level when mixed for a while, so the mousse is light and airy at last. The mousse is given in the cake in a dual-layer manner, where it will get more density again, but won't retransfigure into a hard piece of chocalate fat, like the mixture seems to intend. Needless to mention that even the cocoa filling with can be made up with some Merry Christmas – spices, like spices for gingerbread, cinnamon and cloves.

Finally, you shouldn't cover the cake, as proposed, with the cream filling (we've jused it for a second layer instead) but moisten it with dissolved candy and besiege it with cocoa powder then. Looks beautiful and tastes fantastic. The cakes will have some elegance, because its ingredients are not too varied or "colored", and will otherwise tastes extremely intense, because of the mousse's stand-alone flavor of refined chocolate.

Hazelnut praline mixture

Here we have experimented and conjured most extensively. Again the mixture is very good and very straightforward, though not, of course, fitting the higher demands of the anti-allergy or even grown organic cuisine. That does not make the low base of our cakes, but instead it bakes so easily and quickly and simplifies the purchasing of ingredients

We have, perhaps a bit surprisingly, enriched the filling for the pie with soja flakes.and raisins. Obviously we need some cocoa, again to improvet he quality of the fat in the filling. Instead of margarine we've used best bio-butter in all recipes (bisquits were done with margarine for liver cool down – cakes are to be eaten on sports day, goes without saying...) Instead of margarine, incidentally, in all cases only the best Biobutter! The raisins were previously filed in amaretto, a brandy glass as a whole landed in our filling. Prefered spices were again gingerbread spice, cinnamon, cloves, also aa special: tangerine juice!

Generally, we have converted the praline-nut cake into a kind of sap&juice-cake: As a special the soils were moisted with dissolved candy - the nearly caramelized candy, however close, but without cream (then butter toffees would have arisen, nice byproduct) – and again (ideally) almost tough and very, very thin with becoming cold. Put the candy into good and hot water, then cook this for so long until the "sugar water" is viscous - otherwise the soil becomes too moist and the cake falls apart. The soils should only be weeted at the the upper layer (!). (Nevertheless, it is no „Elite“-cake, as brand names are concerned :))

The sweeted soils are chilled until the wetted layer of soil is less permeable, the candy almost fixed (he must of course be applied such that no solid, impenetrable layer plate arises - that is, care not to use tto much candy). During the cooling phase, we have scraped the single, tiny pieces of about five tangerines in slave labor. Please do not use oranges, they will taste bitter and are much too crude for our projects. The scraped tangerine filling will build up an additional layer between the soil and the filling with flakes and raisins. If the melted candy has become good enough, is thus a virtual protection of the soil, it can likewise be used for the tangerine layer. Cool this again and let it harden slightly, then pile up the actual filling and close all with the second soil. Who has enough patience and skill at cutting the cake into layer soils, can and should make this game twice, that means, on fill up two soils, then put one on the other. The lid is also covered with dissolved candy and the nougat-chocolate glaze (ten minutes in hot water), finally decorated with cocoa powder all over. The completed layer cake shall taste Christmassy, not too sweet but sweet and fresh and fruity, with a taste of nut and raisins, nougat and tangerines. Of course, it will taste sweet, but more as an intensifier of the other ingredients and not sweet for its own sake. This is the reason not to use the more flavoured honey instead of candy. The cake should be a real alternative to the sometimes dry *Gugelhupf* or a ponderous and robust cake of winter fruits (just candied fruits, nuts, rosins a.s.o.) - both sometimes lack especially the candyness we need on cold winter days.

Who has enough chocolate around him/her now, can drink some made up coffee:

The coffee itself of course 100% Arabica and 100% Organic – it isn't any longer more expensive than supermarket's 33 % , just find the right stores - with one or two cloves enriched, as well, depending on preference of course, sweetened. The milk will get it alright: We put a a tablespoon of protein powder from the body building studio into the milk, one spoon for about 350 ml milk, ideally with chocolate flavor. Add about two cloves, cinnamon and gingerbread spices. All this is mixed to become foamy. The absolute will be a blot of our ginger cream on top ot the coffee-milk mixture.

Our favorite: Apple-marzipan with ginger cream and spiced coffee with milk.

Em. ... and now we'll quit the baking instead of eating...

Incidentally, another, quite strange tipp for fans of raisins: self-smoked salmon - not just fried or boiled salmon - tastes with bananas, apples, curry, raisins and powdered sugar! (Only pregnants? Far from it). This time, we'll come along without gingerbread spice and cocoa. But we'll drink a sugar-sweet fruit cocktail (Bellini) with our sweet smoked salmon. An idea, if the horseradish cream simply doesn't groove and you do not have Prosecco pure but just such a bright sweet cocktail. Goes without saying that we'll soon discuss fish with red wine .... foam stuffing ... with dates and juniper berries.

So well ... meat soup with vegetables or pure vegetable soups (leek - wheat - tomato combination is deemed suitable for cancer prevention, if at times our vegetables was sprayed, even if washed currently under way, can, according to the * fruit of the season rule *, be supplied with avocado instead of 'too much' cream [* too much cream * may be judged to be an oxymoron by men]... health food alligator pears, matured, cost 99 Cent the piece at time, - special offers are of course a kind of * season * -, as well as the dates, which entail everything the body needs, as was told on TV by recommended cooks. Although they taste well, we'll have cake tomorrow at breakfast or salmon with alligator pear and curd cheese...dill herbs ...anyway, the cookies - with extra protein powder from the gym (chocolate flavor), a little more flour, coffee powder and some vanillin sugar. Since sweetener instead of sugar (100g) is used, even joules are reduced. The remaining ingredients: 210 g butter and 280 grams of flour, 100 grams of grated hazelnuts. Spices: pinch of salt, teaspoon cinnamon, lemon peel, mark of two vanilla beans, fluid sugar at about seven spoons depends on its effects, very different from brand to brand). We have, as I said, added protein powders and supplements and at last formed the pastry in a flour - coffee - vanilla - powder mixture. Our recipe (author Karl Neef) said it should be baked about eight minutes in 190 degree celsius. We got along better with 140 degrees celsius and about 20 minutes. Worst, the bisquits ( „Kipferl“ in german) clump or become too slackly (then the protein powder or foil should be increased). A reason is perhaps the artificial sugar or margarine instead of butter? Well, all this can be elaborated next year ... Finally, don't forget to sprinkle your bisuqits with powdered sugar, now we go without saying anything more ans eat something (no, we'll do some sports now).

Reports, photos and real - life - discussion of recipes: Ulrike Ritter (Doctor Your)

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