“My second favorite household chore is ironing. My first being hitting my head on the top bunk bed until I faint.”
Erma Bombeck

Happy Easter!! Sorry things have been a bit slow here on PAB. It’s been a trying past few days, with new and unwelcome terms like ‘CPU throttling‘ denting my otherwise settled life.  H E L P !! Blogging brought new technical insights for me, things I could do well without, especially throttling and WP plug-ins that mess up the database!! I am eternally grateful to my wonderful designer Katie, who is ever willing to help! Sometimes, I feel like I need a 24 X 7 helpline with all this technical mess!As I continue to struggle with technical glitches, of course life isn’t going full throttle otherwise as we try to bring up the teens, sometimes unsuccessful even though our intentions are good. As the teen says … w h a t e v a h !!  For times like this, this dessert was comforting, like a ray of sunshine on an otherwise bleak day, a splash of colour to lift the spirits!Ever since I discovered making curd cheese or QUARK at home,  food has never been the same again. Soft cheeses like ricotta, mascarpone, quark, cottage cheese are easily made at home, and at a fraction of the cost. I did a post a while ago on making soft cheese at home. The one  I tend to make most often is quark as I love how versatile it is. It’s also very simple to make, and offers great pairing with fruit. I used it to make a Quark Cheesecake with Fresh Cherry Pie Filling , and in these no bake Cherry & Matcha Cheesecake Pots here. This no bake  Strawberry and Quark Cheesecake {eggless} is a great one for summer too. I use quark O F T E N as you see above, and in May 2010 I ‘met‘ Magdalena over this Finish Chai Spice Pulla. On her blog I found a Polish cheesecake recipe, that used a Polish curd cheese, twaróg, and this was what I wanted to make - Kraków Style Cheesecake. My fascination with soft curd cheese continued; I had found a new one to obsess about, and I had found a sweet new food blogger! This is the other rewarding outcome of experimenting with quark & food blogging – ‘food talk‘. It’s wholly satisfying to blog about something I loved to make, and ever more exhilirating to make contact with another food blogger who is large hearted and equally enamoured by the ingredient! We continued to discuss culinary traditions and then one day she sent me a recipe she grew up with as quark is readily available in Germany. My mother would make it once a week and we never grew tired of it, she said.

I’ll share a little background that she sent me: When my mother had finished highschool in Germany, she went on to a school to learn more about housework, including cooking. That’s back in the day, so it does not exist anymore. She had this cookbook that explained every recipe in detail, from the simplest puddings to the most complicated meals. This is where this recipe comes from. My mother has never been a happy cook, so-to-say, but this recipe and roast chicken is definitely something that made all of us happy. That’s what she would make. My grandmother lived on the first floor as this was the house she also grew up in. So, she would cook the rest of the time and I would watch her happily work away in the kitchen. This is all in the small city of Mönchengladbach-Rheydt, right between Düsseldorf and the Dutch borderline, hometown of Joseph Pilates (the Pilates fitness guru). My mom still lives in the same house and when she came to visit us last year here in the US, I had just made Quarkauflauf. She very much enjoyed the leftovers and loves that I now make it for my family … as a special treat every now and then.

It’s been just under a year she sent the recipe to me, and then one day I had fresh quark and wanted to bake with it, and this Quarkauflauf was just the thing . Quark offers a relatively inexpensive and lower calorie option to cream cheese and there’s nothing like  making cheese freshwhen you need it! The original recipe uses cream of wheat, an ingredient not available here, so I googled and the closest I came to was semolina. It worked!!This is a lovely casserole, like a firm cheesecake. “My girls love taking it to school for lunch … it’s like having cheese cake for lunch Can it get any better than that?”, Magdalena said, and suggests that it can be eaten hot/warm as well. I wasn’t sure mine was set, so I chilled it for a couple of hours before slicing it. It was nicely set, so will be great warm too. I used seasonal strawberries softened over low heat with brown sugar and balsamic vinegar {some of which I used in Barbara’s Eggless Old fashioned Layered Chocolate Cake}.