Christmas tradition

Do not mess with tradition. Do not try to change anything. The punishment will be severe if you do.

(K did try to do variations over the years but it was not popular)

This is it:

Rødkål (Red cabbage)

For optimal result start at least one day in advance.

1 head of red cabbage sliced thinly (easy if you have a food processor)

Duck fat (or butter)

1 glass of red wine

a good squint of balsamico (a couple of spoonfuls)

zest of one orange

juice of the orange

1 spoonful caraway

5 whole allspice

10 whole black pepper seeds

1 glass of lingonberry preserve (tyttebær)

a small glass of apple vinegar

sugar (a couple of spoonfuls or three+)

salt

Sauté the cabbage in the fat. Add wine and balsamico and let it reduce. Add the remaining ingredients. 

It is hard to say exactly how much sugar you need. It is up to your taste and the sweetness of the preserve.

Let it simmer for at least a couple of hours and taste. You may want to add more vinegar, salt or sugar.

And let it simmer again. 

Cool down and heat the next day. Repeat. Before serving add a bit of sauce and fat from the duck.

Risalamande (6 people)

rice porridge (risengrød):

130 gr short rice 

1 liter of skim milk

1 vanilla pod

75 gr sugar

1 squint of salt

Scrape out the vanilla from the pod and put vanilla and pod with all the other ingredients into a pot with lid that is ovenproof. Heat slowly while stirring. Careful – it burns easily. When boiling put in the oven at 150° C for 1 1/2 hour. Cool. This should be done one day in advance.

Skin 160 gr almonds. Chop coarsely. Remember to leave at least one whole for the almond present!!! (mandelgave)

Whip 4 dl of cream.

Mix all. Serve with cherry sauce. (1 glass of danish and 1 italian amareno cherrys mixed and heated)

Christmas duck (slow cooked)

4-5 people

1 big organic duck

1/2 an apple (belle de boskop) (spicy apple) per person

6 macerated prunes per person

salt and pepper

a bit of thyme

Thoroughly rub the duck with salt and pepper, in and out.

Fill with the apples, prunes and thyme and close with meat pins.
Put in oven at 130°C on a rack.
Fill about 1 l of water in a baking pan below.
Breast down for 4 hours, turn, breast up for the last 2 hours.

If not dark grill shortly at 270°C. (Watch all the time).

Remember to save the fat. It is delicious and can be used for many purposes, for instance confit or just on a slice of toasted pumpernickel with salt.

Duck sauce/gravy

Cook the giblets and tip of wings with an onion, a couple of carrots and other root crops, thyme, pepper, etc. for a base for the sauce.

Brown the ingredients, add some red wine, reduce, add water to cover, boil, skim and let simmer for 2 hours. Remove all meat but mash some of the vegetables into the sauce to make it thick.

Salt, pepper, a bit of the sauce from the baking pan. Perhaps a drop of cream, a bit of balsamico – and that should do it.

Serve with white and sugar-browned potatoes.

Brown potatoes:
Cook small potatoes until still firm (a bit undercooked)
Cool – peal.

Heat up sugar on an pan, sloooowly. When melted and browning, add butter.
Add potatoes and leave until they are nicely covered in caramel.
When serving, remember that the risalamande is the desert and should be served last.
Next year perhaps we will try this method from Politiken

Curry – great kongo style

During this month – the month of christmas – we have been trying to bring down the intake of calories in various ways and with various luck. It is hard work – temptations are numerous and hard to resist. Today we want spice and heat instead of animal fat. We can't quite agree on the origin of this curry. It is neither really north African nor eastern but we finally agree on great kongo curry.

Curry

1 spoonful cumin

1 spoonful coriander seed

black pepper

all burned on a hot pan

mortared with turmeric, chili, lemon zest, 2 cm ginger

350 gr cubed beef

3 carrots of various color

1 onion

1 bell pepper

1 fennel

1 leak

1 can of chick peas

1 can of tomatoes

4 cloves of garlic

1 green chili + 1 pepporoncini

Brown meat and vegetables, add curry and salt.
Found a bottle with some left over white wine (what, really???!!) and put in a small glassful of that.
Perhaps not authentic but good.
Then the tomatoes, a bit of soy, a squint of syrup.
lid on and low heat for about an hour.

After about 45 minutes the basmati rice were started – cooked with cardamom and at the same time the chick peas were put in the curry.

For once we could not finish it all. There was plenty left over. Enough for two and a half meals for K over the next days. And no calorie drawbacks. 9/10

With this we tried a very good Vacqueras, Dauvergne Ranvier 2009, which was rich in fruit, but already well balanced 9/10 and it was even quite good with the curry. so that was another 9/10

Leftovers – mmmmm

After a christmas lunch potatoes and duck was left over in abundance. And so it is time for an all time classic; biksemad (Hash).

1 onion or more
5 organic sausages
the meat of two legs from confit de canard
and cooked potatoes

all browned thoroughly in duck fat

Fried egg
Pickled red beets
Worcestershire sauce
Even ketchup is allowed

Rugbrød (pumpernickel)

Almost any kind of leftover meat can be used. Sausages are not a necessity.

Not one of the light-dishes but soooo gooood. 8/10

Bistro Nord

Living in Elsinore (Helsingør) as T does means that there are not that many options for dining out (if you are T, that is). One place has delivered gourmet food consistently despite change of owners. Today this is Bistro Nord. Earlier the restaurant on Strandvejen in Ålsgårde was managed by the famous Danish chef, Jan Hurtigkarl who has since opened another very good restaurant, Mielcke og Hurtigkarl in Frederiksberg (Copenhagen). T has on more than one occasion visited the restaurant under its former owner, but hasn't tried out the new one. It has received splendid reviews and so we set out to test it.

We are placed on what was once the porch, but is now covered by a roof, but still maintaining the great view towards Sweden with the sea of Kattegat to separate us. On this evening it has turned dark a long time ago, but a nearly full moon shines icily over the sea and though attempts to take photos of the scene fail it still is quite beautiful. It has to be said that, even though it is covered it is still rather cold to sit on the porch, which they of course know at Bistro Nord, so they have put a blanket on the backs of the chairs.

We have pre-ordered a 4-course menu which includes a glass of champagne for an aperitif. The waitress, who we find to be extremely pleasant and knowledgable during the evening, has no difficulty persuading us to have a small starter with the champagne. We also suspect that the waitress is in fact also one of the two general managers, but that does not affect our opinion that we got excellent service this evening. K has two oysters – one from Bretagne and one from Limfjorden (Denmark). They are both served fresh with a little bit of tomato/vinegar/tabasco sauce on the side. It was a nice touch to try them next to one another and patriotic as we are, we found the Danish oyster to be the better one (in fact it was also much bigger than its French counterpart).

T had caviar on citruscreme and crisp flakes of Jerusalem artichoke. The caviar was in fact a combination of both caviar and salmon roe, but still quite nice. Maybe the citruscreme was a bit too dominant, but still quite good.

First course was Sig roe (Sorry no known English name for that fish, but the nice waitress told us that it was a fish related to cod and that it lived primarily south of Fyn). This was served on a blinis with a dill mayo, croutons and Vesterhavsost (which, of course, is a favourite of both K and T). Very good.

Oftentimes we choose to go with the wine menu that a restaurant like this suggests. We trust them to come with good suggestions and also this is a way to broaden our horizon and taste something other than what we would choose ourselves. Today, however, we think that the wine list looks good. It is not that extensive, but what they have looks good and furthermore, it seems to us as if the markup is not too big. The thing with buying wine at restaurants in Denmark is that you can easily pay 3 times the retail price fore a bottle of wine. That is rather tiresome. On the other hand it means that when we dine abroad we often find the wines quite affordable. We do revise that point of view when we return home and add up the sums spent on wine. We ask the waitress to suggest something and we select a bottle of Beaune 1er Cru “Clos de La Feguine” 2006 from Jacques Prieur and for later a bottle of Chateau la Nerthe 2007 Chateauneuf-du-Pape. Just to give an idea about prices we later check up and find that the Beaune, which we pay 615 DKK for can be bought in retail in Denmark for 368 DKK, which of course makes the mark-up much better than what is the norm in Denmark. Of course Danish prices are in themselves much higher than the rest of the world with the possible exception of Norway and Sweden.

Well, back to the dinner. Next we have fried scallops with spinach and cauliflower and browned butter. Again, this was very good and we did not regret our wine selection.

The main course was filet of beef with caramelized celery, Brussels sprouts and truffles from Gotland. This is delicious and, naturally, cooked perfectly. The  Chateau la Nerthe goes well along with the beef and is s great drink now. Rich in fruit and the tannins are smooth.

We are not quite ready for dessert and so ask for a plate of cheese. This was probably a mistake. The plate contained an assortment of Danish cheeses, høost, vesterhavsost and Blå Kornblomst. All good cheeses that we would, and indeed have served ourselves on occasion. The problem was in the variety. The first two are dry cow milk cheeses and would perhaps go well with a glass of dry white wine or sherry, whereas the the latter, blue cheese would be better with a glass of sweet (dessert) wine. That problem could of course be remedied and indeed our excellent waitress came with a glass of Eiswein. Unfortunately, the damage had been done and we were not quite content. T has come to the conclusion that he does not enjoy a cheese plate with very different cheeses. The correct way to eat them, is  in order of strenth of taste. But when served like this, T would have preferred one type of cheese with one glass of wine. The blue cheese is very rich and thereby the contrast between cheeses become to strong.

We come to the dessert, which is "Buckthorn and white chocolate", which is a an ice cream made with the berries from buckthorn bush. It is quite good  and we have the aforementioned glass of Eiswein with it.

After a cup of espresso we are ready to leave. Despite being the first to come we are almost the last to leave. It has been a great dinner and is a commendable restaurant, when you are in the north of Zealand (Sjælland). K, the city girl, does not on this occasion talk about as the "outskirts of Denmark" (Udkantsdanmark)  All in all 8,5/10

Lamb and eggplant

T coming back from Paris is definitely worth celebrating which we do again tonight. First a little crostini with tuna, tomatoes, garlic and herbs – actually an attempt to recreate something that T had seen in Paris, but somehow it turned out italian instead.

For secondo lamb (culotte – upper thigh), marinated in olive oil, lemon, garlic and rosemary, roasted in the oven on top of eggplant, bell pepper, onion, fennel and more lemon. First the diced vegetables went in the oven at 190° for about 30 minutes, then the lamb was put on top and got another 30 minutes.

By now – if you have read through just a few of these pages – it should be obvious that K has a thing for lemon. And on this occasion she may have gone a bit overboard. Some mouthfuls were a bit on the bitter side (from the white part of the zest). But all'n'all it turned out good. 8/10
With it we had a bottle of Chateau La Gardine 2006 Chateauneuf-du-Pape, which was a good idea. Maybe not Chateayneuf at its best, but still good glass of wine 7,5/10 and together 8/10

Burning love

K has been having a tooth ache for some time now. It is quite painful and has taken far too long. This day it is one of the bad days and K states that she can only eat liquid food. MK is excited about the the prospect of having soup, but when we reach the supermarket we somehow look at other possibilities. Mashed potatoes seems like a feasible compromise and so we set out to determine what to eat with mashed potatoes and here T gets his will. Being a male he suggests Brændende kærlighed (Burning Love) – a strange Danish dish that contains bacon. And so it is agreed (well, not quite, but T is steadfast and agrees all by himself).

The recipe is quite simple for 4 persons:

1,5 kg of potatoes
800 g of red onions
300 g of organic bacon

The potatoes are peeled and cut into smaller pieces to make them cook quicker.

The bacon is cut into pieces (something like 5*5*20mm) and fried on a pan The onions are cut into slices and fried on the bacon pan – but after discarding most of the excess fat. Fry at a lower temperature so that they are not burned but long enough that they become soft and caramelized.
Boil the potatoes in unsalted water for about 15 minutes until very tender. Mash with butter and a bit of the potato water. Finally add salt and pepper. If you salt the water or add salt early in the mashing procedure, the mash will get an undesired gluey texture. The goal is to get a fluffy snow-like mash. Serve bacon and onions on top of the mash (or if you dare, mix them all together), serve with red beats or other pickled vegtable and use Worcestershire sauce or even ketchup, if you have to. Despite the initial skepticism this was hugely successful and all was eaten. Even M, who is not fond of bacon had to have a second helping. Of course this was not good for the wasteline, but that will not be a great surprise to anyone. 7/10 We had a bottle of Cotes du Rhône 2009 from Domaine Charvin 8/10, who we visited in September and it was really good and could stand up to the bacon and onions. 8/10

Christmas cookies

Today we join MK and her class for a session of baking Christmas cookies. MK has decided in advance that we will make Vaniljekranse (Vanilla cookies) and so we set out to make the dough from home. As it later turns out, this is actually a mistake, as the situation called for it to be made on location so that the children may do everything from start to finish. That should not have come as a surprise. Anyway, here is how we made the dough:

• 400 g flour
• 300 g sugar
• 300 g butter
• 1 egg
• 50 g of almond flour (almonds blended by the splendid Bamix blender)
• the contents of one stalk of vanilla.

Mix the sugar and the vanilla in order to spread the vanilla evenly then mix flour, egg and cold butter into the mix and crumble into a texture a like grated parmesan. Set aside for a couple of hours in a cold place.

Ideally these cookies are supposed to be well-formed and therefore pressed out of a pastry bag or a mincer, but we did not have such fine tools, so we had to make do with manually crafted Vaniljekranse.

We are quite happy with the result and as it later turns out, the cookies are even better once they have cooled down a bit. They become more crisp which suits them well. The taste is great - warm or not, but the Price brothers would have told us in advance with all that butter.
Nevertheless, we don't make it to the prize table as others are voted in front of our vanilla cookies. Oh, boy.

The appartment is not well suited for wine storage and so we make a round trip to the secondary storage to place some boxes of wine that we will have to wait some years for us to taste. This means that it is a late dinner and this calls for something quick. T suggests pasta alla trapanese, which makes MK unhappy because she wants pesto. Nevertheless - T is a ruthless father and Trapanese it is. Here is how it goes

• 500 g of ripe tomatoes cut in cubes (and not de-seeded)
• a large handful of chopped basil
• 50 g of peeled almonds (again)
• one large portion of grated parmesan
• olive oil
• 3 cloves of garlic

Mix all the ingredients in a bowl and toss the rigatoni (500 g) when cooked al dente. With it, we had a bottle of Monte Bruna 2006 Barbea d'Asti. Everything was 8,3/10

MK concluded that in the future she would only eat pesto with almonds!

Paris

A business trip to Paris provides T with an excellent opportunity for culinary exploits. T, a long time fan of the Italian cuisine, is gradually warming to France – both the wine and food. It does not mean that he did not like it before, just that he had not paid enough attention. Not surprisingly there are many positive experiences waiting for T (and some not so positives ones, too).
The trip provided four occasions for French dining.
Day 1: Auberge Nicolas Flamel
This is a small place at Rue de Montmorency. T has the Menu Degustation which means
Foie Gras on fruited bread - one piece fried and one piece au naturel. Quite nice.
St Jacques (Fried Scallops)
Monkfish
7-hour Lamb
Creme Brulée
The Menu Degustation was good, but time has erased the memory somewhat.
The plan was to have a bottle of white wine and a bottle of red with the meal, so we ordered a bottle of Mont-Redon 2008 Chateauneuf-du-Pape. It was very nice and crisp, but somehow it dried up before the monkfish arrived and so we had to have a bottle of Meursault (T does not recall which one, but it was a favorite in the company). For the Lamb we had a bottle of Chateau Marquis d'Alesme 2005.
Day 2: Le Grand B
With a prominent location on Boulevard des Italiens this place might be what we have otherwise categorized as a tourist trap. The nature of the dinner did nothing to change that prejudice, but it has to be said that serving dinner for 42 people of course is challenging.

Day 3: Chez l'Ami Jean
This little gem is situated in a part of Paris that seemed a bit deserted on the evening. Most of buildings near Rue Malar seemed to be office buildings and it was therefore a bit of a surprise to enter a very crowded small room that buzzed with activity and atmosphere. The staff was extremely busy but still provided good service and in particular humour. They were quick to point out that they were basque, which of course was no surprise as it was announced at the front: "Basque Specialtees"
It was decided that we went for the big 8 course dinner (Le Carte Blanche) in which the chef selected what to serve. T was not really opposed to this. We asked the waiter for recommendations to go with the courses as we did not have a clue as to what we were going to have. They suggested white wine to start and later red wine! Good recommendation, thought T and looked into the wine list.
We started with a bottle of Champagne from Drappier made on Pinot Noir (blanc) and with this we had some slices of iberian ham.

The first course was a parmesan soup served with croutons and chives (and T also thinks there was a little ventreche in there). With  this we had started a bottle of 2004 Vire Clesse which was recommended and well so.

Next up was a terrine of beef (jellied beef, we were told). There were raisins in the terrine, which was surprising, but worked well. It was served with a basil coulis. We had somewhere along the way run out of Vire Clesse and turned to a 2009 Meursault La Barre.

The next course was fresh St Jacques clams served in their their shells and then baked lightly. It was sprinkled with chives and small croutons.
Then it was time for the meat courses and we shifted to a bottle of Coteaux de Languedoc. It was good, but T did not get to see the details properly.
We started with a braised hare on an emulsion of mushrooms and small pieces of turnip.
After this we had a piece of wood pigeon on a base of cresson. It was cooked perfectly in T's opinion and he had so far only had had bad experiences with pigeon. This one was red, but not raw inside.
Finally we had three desserts served together:

Ris au lait with roasted and candied almonds, sablér with pear and a lemon shot. With this we had glass of dessert wine from Jurancon.
Altogether this was an excellent evening.
Day 4: Hippopotamus
The Charles de Gaulle airport does not offer many options when it comes to dinner (maybe it does in some of the other terminals): Either McDonalds or Hippopotamus. Naturally we chose the latter. T did not want to end his foie gras streak early and so had a bloc de foie gras and an Entrecote.
For an airport restaurant this was actually OK and of course drinking a bottle of 2004 Cote Rotîe from Guigal helped a lot.
It is actually quite dangerous for T to go dining in France, because the bottles normally cost the same as he has to pay for them in Denmark... in the retail store.