Oktoberfest Celebration Meal with Friends

When I think about Oktoberfest, I think more about beer than food. We had friends over for an Oktoberfest meal recently. The beer I had was not worth a mention here, but oh my the food was great. Gail researched traditional Oktoberfest foods, we practiced the ones we weren't familiar with and made a feast of rich German dishes.

For an appetizer we made pretzels and a cheese dip loaded with butter, garlic and caraway seeds called obatzda. The pretzels were firm and chewy, but didn't hold enough cheese in each bite, which was probably okay because I would have eaten large amounts of that cheese if the pretzels had held it. Gail made some extra pretzels with cinnamon on them that were perfect as a light breakfast.

For dinner we made whiskey roast chicken, steckerlfisch, bratwurst, spaetzel with mushrooms, potato pancakes, tomatoes, and sauteed green beans with tomatoes. The vegetables were from Gail's garden. There probably aren't any legitimate Oktoberfest vegetables. We used trout for the steckerlfisch, and it was really amazing. I'm glad we practiced it once before. The first time it came out over-cooked, but this time worked out perfectly.

I made an apple strudel for dessert using the recipe from the Joy of Cooking. It was an awful lot of work, but it came out very well. The recipe says that an expert can stretch out the dough to a square yard. I was able to get about half of that, and can't imagine how it would be possible to get it that thin.