Food hits and misses

Maybe it's because I'm pregnant, but I have been taking it really personally when a recipe just does not work out.

Tears and temper tantrums, people.

Tears because I've ruined, RUINED, a meal.  Temper tantrums because, dammit, the DB is going to eat what I've served and STOP COMPLAINING because I'M PREGNANT you ASS, MAKE YOUR OWN FOOD IF THIS IS NOT UP TO PAR!!

Last night I made pancakes (part of living in another country that totally obsesses about traditions means that you tend to suddenly develop a passion for your own and Shrove Tuesday is Pancake Tuesday, Episcopalians and Anglicans will totally back me up here).  The pancakes were FINE.  It's just... well, it's not MY fault that maple syrup comes in such little jars here.  And can only be purchased at certain stores.  When they happen to have it in stock.  And that we also ran out of jam.  But you know what?  HONEY works pretty damn good.  And it's also not my fault if you are not completely stuffed after eating four plate sized pancakes because that's a damn lot of pancakes y'all.  And that we ran out of orange juice because I've developed a NEED for more vitamin C.  But, HEY ISN'T IT GREAT THAT YOU CAN TOTALLY MICROWAVE RISOTTO!!??  And 11 year old Late Harvest Chardonnay isn't THAT crazy of a pairing.  Sorry that we were out of Champagne.

Okay, it wasn't my best meal ever.  It was also NOT the worst.

Previously, in the Archaeogoddess kitchen, were several weeks of When-will-I-find-a-good-chicken-masala-recipe-and-stop-trying-to-killing-us-all.

First there was All Recipes' Chicken Tikka Masala with over 1,200 reviews and 4 1/2 stars - almost 26,000 people have saved this recipe!!  So of course I'm going to make it and slavishly stick to the recipe - it's obviously Just That Good.  Note to self (and everyone else) - READ THE REVIEWS FIRST!  Because they will tell you, right off the bat, to leave out ALL THE SALT.  This recipe calls for 4 teaspoons of salt in the marinade and 3 teaspoons of salt in the sauce itself.  Even if you reduce the salt by a bit IT STILL COMES OUT WICKED SALTY.  In fact, it's diarrhea-inducing salty.  So no more than 1/4 tsp in the marinade and 1/4 tsp in the sauce!!  When we're braver we'll try this one again.  Without the salt.

Then there was a Chicken Masala recipe that I'm not going to link to.  But know this: if a masala recipe has ONLY curry and turmeric as spices then it is NOT A MASALA.  It's a CURRY and a damn bland one at that.  Perfect for Danish palates (the DB insisted it wasn't bad) but simply horrible if you've, you know, ever actually eaten Indian food at an Indian restaurant and expect your food to taste of something other than yellow.  I flat out refused to eat the leftovers of this one.

So it was with great relief when I made a FANTASTIC meal the other night.  Sauteed mushrooms, bacon and lentils - OH MY!  This recipe was still good even though I brilliantly forgot to buy lemons and had to use the fake lemon juice I keep in the fridge for emergencies and instant-buttermilk-making.  I also made a few adjustments of my own.

• I fry up bacon bits by cutting the bacon into chuncks and THEN frying it, this sometimes results in bacon clumps rather than bits, but you know what, I'm okay with that
• I dumped the bacon clumps and the rendered fat and everything into the lentils before serving
• I mixed the parsley into the lentils before serving (oh and it wasn't flat leaf parsley... I can't get FLAT leaf parsley right now, so EXCUSE ME recipe tyrants!)
• I minced the garlic and then left it in because who the hell removes GARLIC from a dish??  Hell, next time I may add MORE garlic
• I served the mix over a bed of mixed greens and then drizzled olive oil and a few drops of lemon juice over the whole shebang and it was AWESOME
• I served this with a side of cornbread as one reviewer suggested and that was a FANTASTIC pairing for some strange reason

Reheating the left overs was a snap - just dump it in a pan and re-fry it for a bit.  Or turn the heat down low and put a lid on it.  You should probably not do what I did which was to put a lid on it and turn the heat to HIGH because "oh, that'll make it heat up faster" but even slightly, uh, burnt, it STILL tasted really good.

I had gobs of mushrooms left over, because, well, I did, okay?  And so I whipped up a Jamie Oliver mushroom risotto.  I have a real love-hate relationship with Mr. Oliver.  On one hand, he turns out a great dish and is all about getting people to eat better.  On the other hand, I do NOT live somewhere with a weekly farmers market with veggies from around the world, nor do I live near a fish mongers, nor does my local butcher know anything about the weird cuts of meat you, Essex boy, are constantly suggesting.  So it is NOT in fact, much cheaper to eat the Hipster Oliver Way because I don't live in LONDON, nor am I Upper Middle Class, so I's po' and in order to make your fine food, J.O., I have become the Queen of Substitutions.

• Grød ris instead of that fancy Aborio stuff, they are both short grained rices with a hefty price difference
• used button mushrooms - sorry dude, but that's what I had, judge me and I'll give you a hair cut with my vegetable peeler
• dried thyme and fresh curly leaf parsley CAUSE THAT'S HOW I ROLL
• still forgetting to buy lemons... used bottled lemon juice... now out of lemon juice AND HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO MAKE BISCUITS NOW??

And you know what?  It still tasted good.  And when the DB microwaved it last night to fluff out his pancake-for-dinner meal, he enjoyed it!  HA!  *fist pump*

Trainspotting and tebirker

First of all, I just want to say Thanks to all the readers out there!  You guys rock.  Give yourselves a big ol' hug for me!  Go on, no one's watching.  Unless you are reading this at work, in which case, tell your boss you were just trying to get that itch on your back.  Pesky itch.

So a couple days ago I had one of those mornings where you think you may have ended up in a montage of some badly written comedy.  First of all, right after I rinsed the shampoo out of my hair, I reached down, grabbed the body soap, poured a big ol' handful into the palm of my hand and slapped it onto my head.  There was that moment of "wait, this motion feels mighty familiar!"  Followed by "damn it, that was the SOAP!"  I used my head to lather up the soap and wash myself.  It's a rather expensive soap and I was not about to waste the suds.  Then, while making my breakfast I put the peanut butter in the fridge and the butter in the cupboard.  (What do you mean, you don't eat peanut butter and nutella sandwiches for breakfast?  Yogurt is for yeast infections!)  The good news is that it's pretty cold in my house, so when I discovered my error a little while later, nothing had happened to the butter.  My brain was so out of it I ended up making myself a cup of coffee to compensate.

Big fat aside: I gave up coffee for the pregnancy because I drank A LOT of coffee.  I would drink until my heart fluttered and my hands shook.  I'd stop drinking it after three or so in the afternoon, because then I couldn't sleep at night, but, yeah, a lot of coffee.  It took three days to get through the withdrawal.  Worst three days of my life.  Migraines like you couldn't believe.  I could barely eat.  And since I was new to this whole pregnancy thing, I didn't take a single pain killer or drink a watered down cup of coffee to ease my pain.  It was cold turkey baby.  Ever seen "Trainspotting"?  If I could have opened my eyes, I bet I would have seen a baby crawling across the ceiling.  It was horrible.

But on the up side, now if I need to jolt myself back into alertness, it only takes a small cup of weak coffee.  Or a soda.  Oooh, I let myself have a Sprite-like soda the other day and it was like POW! ZING!    And a small coffee - it's amazing!  And probably safer than me walking into a semi because I just didn't see it.  But I'm still only drinking coffee when I absolutely have to, most of the time it's green tea or hot chocolate.

So now that I was ridiculously clean and had saved the butter and was oh-my-god-I'm-AWAKE alert, it was time to finally make the tebirker.

Tebirker - croissants that aren't quite croissants.  Danes eat them for breakfast with butter and jam, or just butter, or nothing - the food fascists are probably freaking out right now "jam?  She ate them with JAM!? Revoke her residency!"  I got the recipe from Atherosclerosis, a fellow Californian and a total foodie.

Here's how the tebirker are supposed to look (photo nabbed from Atherosclerosis's tebirker post):

And this is what mine looked like (note, I am NOT a food photographer):

They tasted good.  I mean, that's the main thing, right?  Were they worth the effort to make? (The rolling!  The never ending rolling!)  Eeeeehhhh, that was A LOT of effort... and they make them up at the bakery with marzipan in the middle... I really like marzipan.  I mean I *really* like marzipan.  I probably could make mine with marzipan... *sobs* Don't make me roll any more tebirker!  Rolling things with yeast is a [insert explicative of your choice].  They get all elasticky.  You roll and it shrinks!  Shrinks!  When I worked at that pizza restaurant we had a rolly thingy to roll the pizza dough.  If I was going to make tebirker again, I would demand my husband buy one of these things.  I roll enough pizza dough by hand in this house.  I am not going to roll out tebirker too.  Pie crust is SO EASY compared to this.  You roll pie crust out and it STAYS PUT.

[Explicative explicative] tebirker.

Positive side to this experiment, the DB said, "oh, so now when someone asks you what kind of bread you would like for breakfast, you can say tebirker."

Dude, wait, what?

He hates rundstykker, he knows I'm not a fan of rundstykker (buns with hard outside and soft inside, the crust tends to cut my gums, some people love them, but I am not a fan - give me regular old soft buns or biscuits PLEASE, but rundstykker are What One Eats for Breakfast In Denmark), he knows my love of pastry and yet NEVER MENTIONED THIS BEFORE??

Yeah, so positive: I now know what to ask for.  Negative: apparently this has been an option for some time and I'm only just now hearing about it.

He then went on to say that I'm only supposed to ask for one tebirke, because to eat many tebriker is to be bad.  Or not so much bad as we-will-look-at-you-with-condemnation-in-our-eyes-and-tell-you-it's-un-danish.  He added "blah blah blah you shouldn't ask for tebirker and the pastry you really love, the spandauer, because then it's really bad blah blah blah."

Spandauer (or what we call in the US, a danish):

"WHAT!?" I hollered (pregnancy hormones now in full outrage - how dare some mealy mouth Danes stand between me and breakfasty goodness!), and it was a good "what," I rolled my H (thanks Danish, I can now roll just about every letter of the alphabet in the back of my throat), gave the A a good "aaaaaaaahhhhhhhh" and ended the T at a shriek.

I think my husband added "but of course I'll let you eat whatever you want, I'm just warning you what others will say" but it was hard to hear him over the steam whistle that was going off in my ears.

Food Tyranny!

I remember commenting once to my mother when we were at a restaurant and either my sister or my brother was busy smashing all of the food on their plate into one big pile of mush, that they would then happily eat, that this was "gross."  My mother gave me that look that mother's get, that "we may not spank in this house any more missy, but I'd be willing to make an exception this once" and said "if [sibling in question] likes to eat [his/her] food that way, then there is no reason to make rude comments about it, now is there."  You have to remember that we kids were a group of picky eaters - us eating (especially if it was even remotely healthy) was always more valued than the manner in which we ate it.

That's the rule in the AG/DB household too.  So I will make sure my guests have access to yogurt and museli and cornflakes if they really want to pass up Sunday English Brunch (every Sunday I fry bacon, eggs, and tomatoes, boil up some baked beans and toast, er, toast).  But if we are having a "Danish" breakfast (you'll see why it gets the quotes in a moment) expect it to be heavy on the danishes and light on the crispy buns - but the crispy buns are all for you, my dears.  Eat up.

Who's a Domestic Goddess?

Yeah, I'm a Domestic Goddess!

Nigella can totally bite my increasingly padded butt.

Goddesses produce miracles and I have not ever seen one miracle come out of that woman's kitchen.  Unless you call someone else prepping all your food and putting it into little glass bowls so that you can easily grab and dump in "2 teaspoons of extra fancy spice only available at the corner Asian shop that everyone has because they obviously live in a large cosmopolitan city with a thriving immigrant community and that I didn't even have to go get because I have a producer and minions to do these things for me" a miracle.  I do not.

Try making a miracle without a production company, woman!

Did Jesus ring his agent to bring wine to that wedding in Cana?  Nope.  'Cause then it wouldn't have been a miracle, right?  I mean, back in the day when someone showed up with a keg of beer at your house it wasn't a miracle, it was "knowing who to call at 3 in the morning."  Unless of course you don't know the guy and he says something like "I found this keg and I figured you'd like it and the companionship of my 5 underwear model friends."  Then it's an act of God.  But it still isn't you preforming the miracle.

Domestic Goddesses make rolling pins out of wine bottles.  They decide that if they want to have battered deep-fried onion rings and they don't have a deep fryer then by-golly there will be deep frying in a frying pan with less than a centimeter of oil in the bottom BECAUSE THAT'S WHAT YOU'VE GOT.  Domestic Goddesses look at a recipe where 50% of the items are things that can't be gotten where they live and then find alternatives and substitutions and BLOODY MAKE DUE.  Domestic Goddesses  make Greek yogurt by using coffee filters (this actually makes my husband a Domestic Goddess, but I'm sure he won't mind).  Domestic Goddesses have flattened chicken with cans of un-marinated artichoke hearts and then made up a marinade for the artichokes because half of the brilliant dishes that come out of their kitchens begin with a can in the hand and "I've got an idea!"

I'm pretty sure I've said all this before.  But I think it needs saying again.  Lest we forget and all that.

The next time you find yourself standing in front of a stove, exhausted, brushing hair out of your eyes and possibly mixing some ingredient or two into your hair, but still cooking, goddamnit, because ya'll gotta eat - that is the freakin' miracle.

And that makes YOU a Domestic Goddess too!

The Tale of the Mad Baker and the Bad Cat

This story ends happily.  No one dies.  There are cookies.  Find nihilism and philosophical musing elsewhere today.

You were warned.

Once upon a time the Archaeogoddess was happily into her second trimester of pregnancy.  A time known by THEM to be a time full of vim and vigor.  And she decided when waking up on Saturday that the day would end with cookies.  And a pie.

Because why bake 6 dozen cookies if you can bake 6 dozen cookies and an apple pie with a crust topping?

She'd never baked an apple pie with a crust topping, being simply lousy with pastry and lacking a rolling pin.  But how could that possibly dent the enthusiasm?

First there was shopping.  Along with cookies and pie, our heroine decided to make double baked potatoes and saltimbocca pollo.

It all began with brilliant precision timing.  Potatoes in the oven, cookie dough mixed and popped in the fridge, chicken breasts butterflied, flattened, seasoned, topped with parma ham, rolled up and tied with string... and then it started to fall apart.

The potatoes resisted efforts to be baked.

The saltimbocca required much more butter than previously anticipated.  There was just not quite enough butter for pie dough.  But that's okay.  Instead of peeling apples, the Archaeogoddess was poking potatoes with a fork every 20 minutes for another hour.

Finally the potatoes were done and the cookies could be started.  Enter a Bad Cat.

Ever try to bake cookies with an inquisitive cat?  A cat who has two singed whiskers because he got too close to a heat source?  A cat who often leaps before he looks, resulting in falling into toilets, landing in sinks full of water, going head first into a potted plant that was on the counter, and who, while diving into a paper bag, slammed himself into a wall?  Okay, he's not just inquisitive, he's also a little special.

The Bad Cat would not stop trying to get onto the counter where she was rolling cookie balls, the table where she was cooling cookies, and the oven where she was baking.

So the Bad Cat had to be removed from the kitchen.  This meant that the Archaeogoddess was now trapped in the kitchen while the sounds of a displeased Bad Cat and his little paws emerged from under the door.  At least the cookies were safe from his hairball butt, but alas they were not safe from the greedy tummy of the Archaeogoddess.  Despite the recipe distinctly saying "makes 6 dozen cookies" only slightly more than 5 dozen made it into the cookie jars.

Dinner was fabulous.  The Bad Cat pouted and finally left in a huff to get his own dinner at his real home.

Sunday rolled around and once again supplied with more butter, although she forgot the ice cream, the Archaeogoddess began to make her pie.  The small problem of "no rolling pin" became a pressing issue.  The Bad Cat was no help finding an accommodating wine bottle (empty, in the recycling bin) nor in cleaning off the label.  He happily slept on the rocking chair as she attempted to removed the sticky bits with fingernail polish remover (fail) and window cleaner (fail) and when she finally accomplished her task with waterproof eye makeup remover.  But the minute she began to roll out the dough, there he was at her feet meowing and pawing at her legs.  He was again banned from the kitchen.

The pie was amazing.  And there was enough left over dough to make an apple turnover, despite the Archaeogoddess first attempting to eat the dough as it was.

Raw pie crust is not nearly so tasty as raw cookie dough.

That night, having eaten a bit too much sugar for her own good, the Archaeogoddess was sitting on the couch watching old Dr. Who episodes on her computer.  Suddenly the largest spider she's seen outside of the Middle East scuttled across the floor.  Without shrieking (which would wake her husband), she vaulted over the end of the couch and dived through the door to the office.  She then ran through her office, the dinning room and the kitchen (totally expecting to step on or run into another spider) to grab the heaviest glass she could find.  Then it was back to the living room to climb over another couch to sneak up behind the spider and carefully set the glass down over the spider.  It was now trapped in front of the TV.  And the adrenaline rush meant that the Archaeogoddess was not going to be sleeping for a very long time.  Fair enough, the spider had to be watched.  What if it pushed over the glass?  What if it made a break for it?

The hours ticked by.

Then the Archaeogoddess's husband, the Danish Boy, came down to see what had happened to his wife.  Half asleep, he carefully removed the spider and dropped it off outside.  After first swearing he couldn't possibly go back to bed, he did.  While he agreed it was a REALLY BIG SPIDER, it was not exciting enough to keep him up.  The Archaeogoddess was too scared to google spiders in Denmark.  She watched another Dr. Who.

The Bad Cat was absent during the proceedings.

Monday, having only gotten to bed at 6 in the morning, the Archaeogoddess was having a pajama day, complete with Bad Cat and apple turnover.  A knock at the door startled both heroine and cat, who was enjoying a belly rub, having been denied apple turnover yet again.  At the door was the Bad Cat's owner, who proposed the following:

How would the Archaeogoddess like to adopt the Bad Cat?

Absolutely!  What Joy!  

She went back inside and that night they opened up the can of cat food that had been languishing since they'd promised to not feed him anymore.  Suddenly the Bad Cat became the Much More Polite and Calm Cat.  The way to a man's heart is though his stomach - this is true for all species.

Today the Archaeogoddess and the Danish Boy went and bought proper quality cat food for a castrated cat over a year old.  The Archaeogoddess may be stuffing herself with cookies and pie, but someone in this house will be eating correctly.

Disastrophy in the kitchen... a delayed reaction

I am not a fruit person.  I prefer jelly to jam, I need my juice to come without pulp, and apart from apples, I think fruit looks best in paintings not on my plate.

That being said, I am fully aware that I need to eat my fruit and that putting jelly on your toast does not count towards the several servings you are supposed to have every day.

So I also eat an apple every day.

Yeah, I am the very picture of health.

It's berry season in Denmark.  Or so I read on everyone else's blogs.  Everyone else living somewhere where there are berries.  I'm sure my husband will read this (I show up in Google Alerts - he gets it in his mailbox, I suppose it saves him from having me bookmarked, but where's the romance?) and point out that there are berry bushes all over the island and I'll have to point out that I mean tame berry bushes that don't have thorns and bugs and things.  ANYWAY you'd be expect there to be fresh berries in the supermarkets, right?  Right?

I live on a tiny island at the ass end of nowhere.  It's a lovely island, but not known for it's variety in produce.  Any berries, I imagine, end up on Copenhagen.  

So I acquired frozen raspberries (and by "acquired" I mean I told my husband to go to Netto and not come back without them, he's very good at procuring vittels) so that I could make Red-Gooseberry Clafoutis, but with raspberries.  I used the recipe from Eating In Denmark unfortunately I followed the recipe exactly except for the bit where it says "put all the remaining ingredients into the food processor and blitz" because I don't have a food processor.  I just popped it all in the mixer.  I mean, they both mix stuff right?  Same same!  This turned out to be a major error.

It turns out why food processors and mixers are not the same thing.  Same same but DIFFERENT.

There is a reason you mix the liquids first and then add the dry mix in most recipes where you use a mixer.  Because in a mixer the dry mix will stick to the bottom of the bowl and not become mixed into the batter and you will not discover this until after you pour it into the pan.  You will then have a very terrible mess on your hands because you will at this time also discover that this recipe makes waaaaay too much batter and now you have a pie without enough flour and a pie with too much flour.  Oh, and not enough fruit because I took 12 oz. of fruit to be a weight and dumped them all into one pie pan and not a volume, which I think, in fact, it was supposed to be.  Damn.

So I used the rest of some strawberry jam that I had lying around as the fruit for the second pie.  There were strawberry chunks in it, okay?  It's called thinking outside the box.  Only, because I was in a rush I didn't put it in the pan and heat it up first and this turns out to be important, I think, because while the berries floated in the first pie, the jam stayed at the bottom in the second.

Despite all this the second pie was the better of the two.  But neither were what I wanted.  I wanted something a bit between flan and cheesecake, with a custardy taste.  This did not seem to quite be it.

The final judgment is only evidenced this week - the clafoutis are molding in the refrigerator.  They may have been edible, but that doesn't mean we actually wanted to eat them.

Was it the recipe?  Incorrect assembly of parts?  Or that clafoutis is just not my thing?

I'm going with the third and I think I'll keep my fruit in pies from now on.  And if I want a flan/cheesecake with a custardy taste I'll make flan, cheesecake, or custard... but without any fruit.

Disaster Crepes...

The problem with having a run of good fortune in the kitchen is that the longer you go without completely and utterly screwing up a meal the more disappointed your food critic spouse is when it all goes ass-end up.

I was still riding high on the risotto I'd whipped up out of random things found in my kitchen (a favorite risotto recipe of mine, by the way) and then managed to pull off a great stew of cheap ingredients and a liberal application of Tabasco sauce.  Who's the kitchen goddess?  Oh, I do believe I am the kitchen goddess!

But pride cometh before the fall...

Which is a stupid saying.  Who the hell has pride after they fall?  I mean, generally speaking, falling on my face does not instill me with a sense of pride.  Way to point out the obvious, you stupid idiom!  It's like "it's always in the last place you look."  Of course it's in the last place you look!  When you find it, you stop bloody looking, don't you?  Even if you found whatever you were looking for in the first place you looked, it would still be the last place you looked, now wouldn't it?

I can see you are highly elucidated by my ingenious logic.

Although I am not sure if a person can be elucidated.

Anyway.

Since there was left-over stew I was thinking, "Ah ha!  I can make this meal go even further by having dumplings on less stew, thus stretching the stew for two extra nights instead of just one!"

Small problem.  Stew is magic.  No matter how much liquid you think you have when you put the stew into a tupperware container, there is less when you reheat it.  Secondly, dumplings act like a lid on reheating stew, making the stew hotter under the dumplings than you may realize.  Thirdly, once you start cooking your dumplings in your stew, you can't stir your stew.

You see where this is leading.  I burned the reheated stew.  And it turns out that my husband is less than impressed with dumplings.  Biscuits, yes, he digs biscuits.  But his dismay was apparent as he pushed the dumpling around his bowl with his spoon, tapping it from time to time as if wishing it to magically become a potato, the majority of which were now cemented to the bottom of the pot by a mortar of burnt beans and dissolved carrot.  Next time, he asked, could we just have the stew as it is?  It was just fine that way, he said.

Two words: Justifiable Homicide.

I really could have used the moral support of my beloved here.  Not the cranky person who sat himself down to dinner after standing in the dinning room doorway for several seconds loudly sniffing the air.  Yes, Dear, I Burned Dinner.  Don't Make Me Get Your Slippers And Shove Them Up Your Butt.  How About THANK YOU OH MY DARLING GODDESS FOR PREPARING THIS MEAL FOR ME ON LESS THAN 5 DKK THUS LETTING ME BUY MORE RUGBRØD FOR MY LUNCH TOMORROW?!  If You Don't Appreciate Dinner, There Is Always Toast.

This morning, keen to provide a fine repast, I decided to make crepes.  I've had success with crepes in the past here. But in that post I did mention my problem with the melted butter.  I *know* I had a problem with the melted butter.  It clumps when you pour it into cold milk.  I tried mixing the batter in a different order today and it was even less successful than all of my previous attempts.  And when you use your last two eggs to make the batter, do-overs are NOT an option.  WHY DID I NOT LISTEN TO MYSELF?  "Next time I think I'll use oil" I wrote on my blog.  "USE OIL" I had scrawled in large letters across the recipe.  But I haven't tested the batter with oil.  What if it tasted weird?  Oh, it wasn't that difficult to make with melted butter, was it?  Of course not!  So I have to spend a few more minutes mixing it...  FU, AG.  FU.

On the plus side, they were edible.  None fell on the floor.  But worth the tears, the anguish, and the sore arms from beating clumpy batter?  Worth the burnt fingers as I tried to flatten out the folded and bunched up crepe piled in a small discarded heap in the pan?  Worth my husband coming in and saying, maybe he should make some toast?  No.  Nothing is worth that.  Nor was the 7-10 I would get if I beaned my boy on the head with the skillet.  Or so I kept repeating as I flipped another lumpy crepe.

"Did you make Dessert Crepes or Dinner Crepes?" people always ask.  As if the sudden realization that I made the wrong recipe at the wrong time of day would somehow explain why hot melted butter would congeal into small cold butter lumps when poured from a hot pan into a cold batter as chemistry would dictate, rather than seamlessly blending into the mix.

I made neither this morning.  I made Disaster Crepes.  And as a service to mankind I will refrain from passing on the recipe until I finally make a successful Damn Crepe.

Summer finally makes an appearance

I have got to buy an outdoor thermometer, because this is silly.

*This* being the state of affairs where I am wearing shorts, but then I see on the interwebs that it's something like 27 C which is something like 80 F and that's all well and good except that at NO time in my life have I ever thought that 80 F was shorts weather.  Therefore, it must not be 80, it must be slightly warmer.

Notice I keep saying "warm"?  That's because I may be wearing shorts, but it sure as hell isn't hot.  Yesterday might have pushed "hot" but only because I was wearing too many clothes.  Once I changed into shorts then it was perfect.

If I have somehow accidently acclimated to Danish weather, someone kidnap me and mail me somewhere really hot.  And deserty.  And full of antiquities.  Or at least pool boys and Mai Tais.

But I do believe that I can now say with certainty that summer has finally arrived in Denmark.

It will probably only last a week.

Typically, the grill isn't here, it's in Århus.   We tried using a disposable grill we had lying around.  Did you know they go bad?  Two years in a box in a dank basement and you just can't get the charcoal to burn.

Okay, the dank bit probably didn't help either.

In other news, because it's summer, my Danish class will hold a summer party... only we can't call it a party because we have Jehovah's Witnesses and they don't party.  So it's a sommerhygge.

Totally off-topic spat of hilarity - the link above leads to a wikipedia entry where it describes Jehovah's Witnesses as being "a millenarian restorationist Christian denomination" and I was, like, "wait, I don't remember there being anything about hats!" And then I caught my mistake.  But that led me to thinking, "wait that's a brilliant idea - hats!  If JW's start wearing hats, I can tell them apart from Mormons!" 


So a sommerhygge... we'll all be bringing some food from our homelands.  There will be dishes from the Philippines, Germany, Honduras, and Burma.  And of course, the US.  


This is where I had quite the pickle.  Because I wanted to make something that:  

1. was American but did not conform to the fat-American stereotypes - i.e. nothing fried or meaty or full of fat or loaded with sugar
2. was good to eat at 10 in the morning - i.e. nothing really heavy
3. was something people would want to eat
4. could use local produce (y'all might be shocked, but the cornerstone of Californian cuisine is that it is made of local, in-season produce so there *pbth*)
5. all of the ingredients could be purchased at Netto (cheap chain of grocery stores), because that's what I've got (if you'd like me to cook with specialty cheeses or meats, you'll have to bring them with you)
6. and something you probably will not get anywhere outside of the states

The first thing I pondered was apple pie.  Because the saying does go "as American as apple pie" and you can cut the sugar WAY back and go more savory - but apple pies are rather large and more of an autumnal dish than summer.  Then there was some free association...


apple pie - too sweet - maybe savory - or even tart - ooh good pun - tart - apple tart - fruit tart - berry tart - strawberry tart!! - strawberry shortcake...


Wait... strawberry shortcake.  


Now obviously Strawberry Shortcake may be heavy on the fat and sugar if you let it.  But it fulfills the other requirements (even though shortcake is basically the same as a scone and strawberries are found everywhere, the earliest Strawberry Shortcake recipe is found in an American cookbook and it tends to be more of an American dessert) and I can adjust the sugar levels very easily to make sure it doesn't get out of hand.  Best of all, it's now Strawberry season here in Denmark and you are required by law to eat your weight in strawberries and the only way Danes eat strawberries is with cream and sugar.  In a bowl.


It's alright, but dude, there are so many other things you can do with strawberries.


I hear they are good with balsamic vinegar.


Anyway, does not Strawberry Shortcake sound like The Summer Dessert or what?  The husband thought so and is now requesting I make a trial run tonight to see if it works.  Well, if you are going to force me to make and eat desserts...


I'll let you know how it turns out.

Sometimes I even amaze myself!

It's really not that hard to impress me.  I find lots of things that normal people take for granted absolutely AMAZING!  

Then again, I find lots of things that people think amazing completely normal.

My life, for example.  Totally normal.

People who go to work, the same job, day after day, who go home at night and leave the job in the office?  People who save up money for vacations and go to concerts and know where they'll be in three days, three weeks, three years??

WEIRD!!

Anyway...

See this?  This is amazing!  This is me being wicked impressed at myself.  

I flipped that crepe.  That and about 10 others.  Not a single one ended up on the floor.  This is the second time that I've flipped crepes.  Second time in my life.  How did I learn?  I uh, saw it on TV.  Oh and a read a description in a book.  And once I saw someone do it... well, I kinda saw it.  I wasn't really paying attention at the time.

Anyway.  Then I just tried it, figuring "what was the worst that could happen?  Breakfast ends up on the floor and I scramble some eggs and I have a great blog post."  And then I was suddenly able to flip crepes!

Only if I try to show someone, like, say, my husband, it doesn't go so well.  Thankfully he's not home this weekend.  The kitchen floor remained as clean as it was before I started making breakfast.

By the way, don't eat off my floor.  Not this week.  "Clean" is sort of relative in this house.

I had a bit of trouble the last time with the melted butter you are supposed to use in the "dough" and when I tried it again today it is still a problem, so I think I'll swap it out for vegetable oil.

But baring the bit with the butter, it was fantastic.

This post has no soul

I really ought to be posting Stories From the Field, like about the time the camel spider ran through my tent and I was trying to be all quiet about hunting and killing it and then my tent mate from the other side of the partition wall was all "Ah HA! Got you!  Oh shit." And it turned out that she was chasing the same camel spider around her side of the tent and didn't want to alarm me and so was being quiet about it.  Only she was chasing it wearing nothing but her knickers and with bare feet, so she'd whacked it with a slipper that she picked up and that didn't work so she'd put one sandal on it and was holding it down with her hand and thus was now stuck in a Very Compromising Position with a possibly Very Angry Camel Spider under a Not So Substantial Sandal.

It was like Schrödingers Cat and the world was held for a brief moment at the crotch of the Trousers of Time.

I came over with a not-a-proper-hand-ax, or some fancy geology term for a small hand ax that is completely useless for archaeology which is why the museum authority bought so many of them for us, and gave the flat spider a good further flattening.  Just in case.  Because you know how in horror movies when the baddie comes back from the apparent dead?  SPIDERS DO THAT!  Then I carried it's corpse into the desert.  Or the courtyard because it fell off and I wasn't going to pick it up again because I had the post spider heebee-geebees.  And because bending over the pick up a dead spider is EXACTLY when they turn zombie on you and bite your face off.

So that's what this post should have been about.  But instead I was distracted because I'm back to living in a caravan, trying to connect to people who may or may not be in Denmark and my breakfast bun with cheese and jam tastes of onions because I tried to save half an onion last week before going to Spain and now everything in the small 'fridge tastes vaguely of onion.  On one hand, yay, I have half an onion that I can use, on the other hand, I don't need that onion now because the onion flavor is already in everything.

[Expletive deleted] Rice!!

Boy is it hard to get back in the cooking saddle. I'd been enjoying not cooking for a month and then suddenly here I am, nothing to do but try to smash 3 chapters of dissertation into one, shorter, streamlined chapter, research iconography of elite art in the 2nd-3rd centuries, see if there is a class distinction between Roman cults (anyone? anyone?), find two German articles I *know* I've translated, translate some other stupid German encyclopedia entries that will only vex, write an intelligent chapter on some Roman coins, and cook. Seriously, I have OODLES of time on my hands. Look, I'm blogging!!

Whipped up a darned good curry last night, having discovered at some point in the past that one can use one's immersion blender as a food processor, even without the special "food processor" attachment. Just remember to wrap plastic wrap around the top of the bowl, 'cause that stuff flies and stings if you get it in your eyes.

And because I am SO used to making rice, I didn't need to look at the package, I just dumped 6 dl rice into 4 dl of boiling water.

Result: not quite cooked rice.

It's 4 dl of rice to 6 dl boiling water.

Oh.... darn! Darnation! Tarnation! Consternation! Antimatterization!!

Undercooked rice is chewy. And not in a good way. The curry helped. It was a little wetter than it should have been. But if the rice had been properly cooked it would have been a brilliant meal. As it was, three stars for effort.

Want to know another brilliant idea that has been less than stellar in it's realization? Changing my name. Last name. Couldn't do it when I got married because I needed a CPR number to officially change my name. And now I do. Sooooo, my passport is expiring and therefore so is my visa. I think to myself, hey, clever idea this, lets do all that paperwork NOW, seeing how you only have to leave the country again in... less than three weeks.

Yeah, I'm a flippin' genius. Husband thinks so too. Full of pride for his brilliant wife.

Anyway, you know in America, when we get married, that little piece of paper is all we need to show to change our names? (If you didn't, now you do.) Not so in Denmark. I have to fill out forms and bring 440 kr to some biddy in a church office down the road, a church mind you that I was NOT married in and do not pay taxes for and apart from one evening sneaking in to see what it looked like have never been to... Hold it, I've lost my train of thought.

Okay... blah blah blah... and take these papers there along with my money... and see if she'll let me change my name so that I can take another piece of paper and send it to the Embassy so that they can finish my passport with correct name.

And with a kick ass photo, by the way. Ought to be, I paid a fortune for it, just to make sure it was done right and I didn't have to have a discussion about it. American passport photos are different from Danish ones making life a bit more difficult when trying to find someone who can do it without making a huge issue out of it. I'm sorry, I don't make the rules. Please don't trim the photo for me. You gotta step closer, I need to be bigger that that. No, it must be in color. No, I have to face forward. No I am NOT tucking my hair behind my ears, it's a stupid thing to ask people to do, honestly, EARS? And, yes, I am going to gently smile with no teeth because this is not a mug shot, people, I have not broken any laws that you know of.

Have you seen the new American passports? Blah! Lame-o! And they feel cheap. My freedom was paid for with the blood of patriots and that guy who stood up too fast to ask his general "is it over?" I expect a little more of my official documentation. Some gravitas. And better lamination.

If you happen to be wondering why on god's green earth am I changing my name... well, I've googled myself and did you know I am also an OB/GYN, a photographer, a softball player, and married to a bald guy named Ryan? I've become an Episcopal deacon too... but that might conflict with the Ugandan mission I am on for the Mormon's. Makes sense I am a Mormon, seeing how my other husband Ed is with me in Africa. Wonder where I left Ryan?

When I google my soon to be new name... I discover I'm already mentioned in my own grandfather's obituary. Odd. Way to go Mom and Dad!

But other than that, there isn't anyone by that name. I'll be unique!!

There were other considerations, my heritage, my utter lack of publications, my evolving views of feminism, blah blah blah. But being the only person on the world wide web with my name was pretty much the kicker.

Tonight, when you are NOT BURNING YOUR RICE because you have now LEARNED FROM MY ERRORS, google yourself and see who else you are.

It's WAAAAY too much fun.

If I keep this up - I'll hit 200 posts in NO TIME!

Having figured out how to upload images from the camera to my computer and then to the blog, I now have some catch up work to do. Namely give you pictures of things in my life.

Like my exploded kitchen.





Yeah, it may look fairly tidy to YOU - but when I walk in all I see is everything I own WAVING AT ME!!

But this, my friends, is the Archaeogoddess Culinary Institute for American Cooking in Denmark. Sans doors.

And for tonight's glorious feast!

I'm going American.

'Cause I just spent $10 for a jar of Jif and $15 on a six pack of A&W Root Beer. I'm eyeing the $12 box of Bisquik.

I have to calculate the cost, because if I don't, I'll just keep buying stuff because it's there. I probably didn't NEED to buy the peanut butter, I can get Jif in Israel, so it's not like my whole life has gone Jif-less. But sometimes a girl really needs a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and I just can't bring myself to do that with gourmet peanut butter (which pound for pound might actually be cheaper than the Jif, but leave me my delusions, kthnx).

Anyway, the root beer was a real treat. I have vanilla ice cream in the fridge. I have tall fill-me-up-with-root-beer-floaty-goodness glasses. And a balcony.

Yessir-ee-bob, I'll be sticky and sunburned by tomorrow night, mark my words!

Anyway... about tonight's glorious feast. It involves NEITHER root beer or peanut butter. Because I'm perverse like that. It will be oven-baked hot wings (or thighs because they have wingless chickens here in Denmark) (unless somewhere there are people wondering why all they ever get in the supermarket is wings and no thighs) with french-fries and home-made blue cheese dressing.

Because the only downside to having to make all your own American food is discovering that most of it is better when you make it yourself. Ranch and blue cheese are two of those things. Except Jensen's Bøfhuset (or something like that) - which makes a MEAN ranch and if you ever see it in the store, buy and and mail it to me. They used to sell it in my store, but then they stopped. I think I licked the last bottle clean. It's the best stuff to put on raw carrots, no lie. I have no idea what it tastes like on salad, it never gets that far. And I don't care what you say, blue cheese dressing is NOT just ranch with blue cheese and "hvidløg" is not ranch. Nor is "creme fraise dressing". Nope. Not ranch. And even if they WERE ranch, I am NOT dumping blue cheese into them to make some half-assed blue cheese dip. Alas, I don't particularly care for the American brand of salad dressings they're selling in the supermarket. I'll just keep making my own ranch and my own blue cheese.

Returning to tonights dinner. I am going to try to take pictures of the process. I took pictures of some other stuff too, like my exploded kitchen, my office pre-move, some random cooking shots and a really great graffito (singular of graffiti). All I need is to find the damned camera cables. Figure out how to get them onto the computer... and then I'll slap them up here. But the biggest challenge is already complete: I took photos. Hurrah for me!

Nacho Chicken Casserole

Right, I CANNOT figure out how to post backwards. So you'll just have to bear with me and scroll down and maybe even read backwards. If someone could tell me how to drag and drop posts in a different order, I'd be much obliged.

Anyway, last recipe for the moment... only if you are reading this in order it's the FIRST recipe...

Gad, it's like a time warp thing here!

Nacho Chicken Casserole
5 cups slightly crushed tortilla chips - DIVIDED: 3 cups and 2 cups
4 cups cubed cooked chicken (aprox. 500 g or maybe a bit more... or maybe about three chicken breast fillets - seriously your guess is as good as mine)
2 16-oz jars salsa (which is 2 x 500 g!! So use 2x the salsa for cooking recipe found in the Spanish Rice post)
1 10 oz package frozen whole kernel corn (315 g) and I have no idea what that becomes in cups. I dump a little over half a 500 g bag in. Or maybe a can of corn, drained, if that's what you've got.
1/2 cup sour cream or creme fraiche (125 ml)
2 tbsp all-purpose flour (30 ml)
1 cup (4 oz or 125 g) cheese, like mozzarella or if you live in America and have access to these wonderful things, Monterey Jack with jalapeño peppers, drool -THIS IS THE TOPPING!

Instructions
*cook the chicken if you are like me and don't mess about with pre-cooked chicken or have enough left over chicken to make four cups*
1. Lightly grease a rectangular baking dish. One of those 9x12 or whatever, the normal sized rectangular baking dishes. Place 3 cups of the tortilla chips in the bottom of the dish. In a large bowl combine COOKED chicken, salsa, corn, sour cream, and flour BUT NOT THE CHEESE!! Pour over the tortilla chips.
2. Bake UNCOVERED, in a 350 F (180 C) oven for 25 minutes. Sprinkle with the remaining 2 cups of tortilla chips and the cheese. Bake, uncovered, for 5 to 10 more minutes until the cheese is all melty and gooey goodness.

What I'm Eating This Week

So I did my shopping and apart from a few things I still need to get I have food for a week. The tricky bit is finding some cheap lamb, but I think I'll swing by the halal butcher and see what I can do.

I was going to do this in a nice planned out menu way and then realized that I don't know if I'm going to have leftovers tonight or not, so screw planning.

During this week, including last night I'm going to have:
Nacho Chicken Casserole and Spanish Rice (last night's chow), Hot and Sour Cabbage Soup, Simple Lamb Rogan Josh, and Oven Frittata. All of those will provide some left-overs and if all else fails I'll whip up a French Onion Soup.

I have all these recipes written out on scraps of paper, except the Rogan Josh, which I got from BBC, LINK.

Googling resulted in NOT finding where I got these recipes. I certainly didn't assemble them all at once, let me tell you. Some of them have several different colors of pen, suggesting that I have been up to no good. So I'll post some recipes for you above or below or something.

What to do?

What to do when your husband comes to you and says "look, we've paid the mortgage, and some of the bills, but we got nothing until pay day in two weeks time, and we need to shop for food."

First, overriding despair. It means we really really need the guy coming on Tuesday or Wednesday to rent our apartment for the amount we've asked without us having to do more than the basics to get it ready. But that means moving, leaving our lovely apartment and finding something small and cheap. This will probably not be Gellerup, because we can't get into a two room apartment and we can't afford a three room and a single room is just too freakin' small. I don't know where we'd go. Maybe we'll get lucky and come up for a two room in the next month. But I was getting used to the idea of roommates again, roommates on our own terms.

But then the challenge. I like having a budget for food. It makes me creative in a way I don't normally have to be. Call me nuts, but I like a challenge from time to time. Yeah, a BETTER challenge would be to NOT have to figure out how many meals I can make out of a head of cabbage, but something along the lines of "we need to visit 5 European capitals in 6 days - GO"... but you do what you gotta do with what you've got.

Thankfully I have collected enough recipes that I can sit down and sift through them, figuring out which ones I have most of the food for and what I can make without buying more than one or two items. I'm glad I stocked up on chicken last month. Also I'm glad that Netto is open the first sunday of the month until 5. We ate up all the spaghetti last night.

Right carpe diem... or better yet, carpe cabbage!

My not so secret crush

I have the most awful crush on Jamie Oliver. I may have mentioned it in the past. I may have mentioned that my husband is rather jealous of this and gleefully pointed out that in his most recent pictures, Jamie looks a bit fat. He's such a girl, my husband. I love him so.

Anyway, I mentioned on this blog that I was making some fancy food for husband's birthday and while I've already posted the chicken recipe (which reminds me, I need to get the left over chicken out of the freezer if I want dinner tonight) I also tried a new carrot recipe from Jamie Oliver and I wanted to tell you that it's ONLY THE BEST DAMN CARROT RECIPE EVAH!

So I'm going to give it to you. I do hope Mr. Oliver doesn't mind. Did I mention it was the BEST DAMN CARROT RECIPE EVAH?!?!

Jamie Oliver's Sticky Saucepan Carrots
aka BEST DAMN CARROT RECIPE EVAH!
Ingredients (Dear Mr. Oliver, this serves nowhere near 4... too damn good)
1 3/4 lb carrots peeled, cut into 2 inch lengths, ...ish. (1 kg - like I'm going to sweat the conversion and like you were going to remove carrots from the 1 kg bag anyway, and I don't know, the length of your thumb or something.)
butter
a few bay leaves
salt and pepper

Instructions
1. Stand the carrots up in a pan on their heads. (Or butts, depending on how you feel the carrot universe is organized.) Try to get a pot that fits the carrots so they are all standing/sitting snugly and not laying down. Lazy carrots don't deserve this recipe.
2. Stick a knob or two or however much you feel is necessary on the top of the carrots. Seriously, Jamie told me to use "a large knob." I don't know what this is, so I went with aprox. 3 "almost" tablespoons in different sections of the pot. (Okay, okay, I took what I felt to be a large knob and cut it into three chunks, I only eyeballed the size after I'd thrown 'em in.)
3. Poke a few bay leaves between the carrots. Having made three knobs of butter I opted for 3 bay leaves. I was feeling the symmetry. Yes, I am psychotic, why do you ask?
4. Add enough water to come halfway up the carrots. Bring to a boil, cover, and turn down the heat. Simmer for about 20 minutes.
5. Take the lid off and let the liquid reduce until there isn't any left. (You might have to turn the heat up again.) This will take about half an hour. Seriously. Jamie said so and at first I didn't believe him because there was so much liquid. I doubted him for the first 15 minutes and then suddenly the pot hit the tipping point and the water just beamed itself out.
6. Let the carrots sizzle gently in the butter for about 5 minutes until the bottoms of the carrots are sticky-brown. Serve.

Optional step:
7. Swear that you will never make carrots in any other way ever again.

How do you feel about violently lilac colored soup?

Because if you aren't down with it, I suggest using green cabbage rather than red cabbage in the recipe below.

As per usual, there are days when I just can't be bothered to plan far in advance what we'll have for dinner. I then call and beg my husband to come up with something. Most of the time he comes through. He buys frozen pizza. Or he makes pasta with pesto. Sometimes the thought of having pasta with pesto will bestir me to great lengths of invention in order to provide myself with ANYTHING other than pasta with pesto.

Last night, after I told him with no uncertain words that I will not be dining on pasta and pesto and that I deserved something a bit nicer than that, seeing how I'd done cleaned the stairwell and given myself an allergy attack because of it. Somehow this still morphed into *me* making Hot and Sour Cabbage Soup... probably because my husband noticed that the half a head of cabbage was beginning to grow a beautiful cabbage flower from it's butt. And then he ran out the door to buy buns. We never have buns or yogurt, we always seem to be "just out". I'm convinced there is an evil gnome living in my home who eats yogurt on buns when I'm at Danish class.

Anyway, I discovered that it will take an hour to boil the soup, let alone all the other bits that have to go into it. And it was already 9 o'clock. I didn't want to wait THAT long for dinner. I tried to reach the Danish Boy while he was still at the store, but he'd gone and left his phone on silent, the bugger.

So, to the internet I turned. Somewhere there must be a faster food that I can prepare.

Bless Allrecipes.com - they have an ingredients search feature and after plugging some random stuff into it, a recipe came out the other side. I modified it a bit, because I had more stuff that I wanted to get rid of, but it turned out to be a damn tasty soup. It's also crazy cheap if you happen to have loads of left over cream and half a head of cabbage growing in your 'fridge.

Archaeogoddess's Creamy Cabbage Soup
Ingredients
2 cups chicken broth (1/2 liter water and a cube of chicken bouillon)
1 onion, diced
4-6 cups of thinly sliced cabbage (that's half a head of red cabbage in Denmark, which are larger than *my* head) (DON'T USE RED CABBAGE IF YOU CAN'T HANDLE PURPLE SOUP, USE GREEN or WHITE or whatever other colors cabbage come in)
1 carrot, diced
2 sticks of celery, cut like you normally cut celery... you know what I mean (this is optional, I had celery that I needed to use up)
1/4 cup butter (60g)
3 tbsp flour
2 cups milk
1 cup whipping cream (OR 2 cups light cream and 1 cup milk, which is what the recipe originally called for, but I had a lot of milk and a good 250 ml of whipping cream left over from husband's birthday "lagkage")
no more than 2 cups of your husband's pork lunch meat (Okay, the recipe calls for 2 cups of cooked ham... but I didn't have any and if aforementioned husband doesn't answer the phone, aforesaid husband will just have to do without his lunch meat)
1 1/2 tsp salt OR salt to taste (since the amount of salt in your bouillon and packaged ham will vary)
1/4 tsp pepper OR to taste
1/2 tsp thyme
chopped fresh parsley as a garnish (also really good if you totally forget the part where it says "garnish" and instead toss the lot in as you are seasoning)

Instructions
1) Simmer veg in the broth for 20 minutes. NOTE: there will be way more veg than liquid when you first put it on the stove. That's okay, just stir it from time to time during the first 5-10 minutes and the liquid will come out of the veg and you'll be fine.
2) In a fairly large saucepan, melt the butter. Stir in the flour. Don't bother trying to make a roux, this is not one of those kinds of soup. If you have no idea what a roux is, don't worry, it's not important at this time.
3) In your hot flour and butter mess, pour the milk and cream. Cook and stir until it thickens a bit.
4) Pour this creamy mess into your veggie mixture (it might smell a bit odd, boiled cabbage and celery will do that, it's okay, you just have to trust me). Add ham, salt, pepper, and thyme. Heat thought. (Uh, that's kind of a stupid thing to say, seeing as how everything is already hot, but what you're doing is getting the tastes to infuse and interact, so make a big show of stirring and tasting for me, okay?) Garnish with parsley.

I took a picture of this violently lilac colored soup, but without the cables I can't get the photo on the computer. I tried. I held the camera close to the computer and asked the file to jump, but I guess it's scared of heights.

"A lot of food for a lot of people" means food for myself and my husband for only two days

Seriously, if a recipe says "serves 4," chances are we will have no leftovers. I'm thinking that people who decide how many servings there are belive that this is a complete breakfast:

That's my husband's first breakfast, mind you.

You'd think we'd be fat, from the huge amounts of food that we eat. Where does it go? I think I may have the same kind of hole in my stomach as my dryer. Stuff goes in and VANISHES without a trace!

Anyway, I'm constantly on the look out for good recipes so we don't get stuck eating the same stuff again and again. I also try to be seasonal, because trying to buy food out of season here is bad. Bad for the environment (trucks driving produce thousands of miles), bad for your health (in order to get them to last that long, they are often frankenfruit and chemical-veg), and bad for the wallet (so 'spensive!). By now, late winter pre-spring, the veg section is pretty poor pickins and I'm so desperate for fresh something that I'm buying bell peppers and I don't care where they're from!! I may be carroted out, you see, because I've been eating carrots for months.

But during this time of year I have one advantage over the Danes. I can mash potatoes. The concept of mashed potatoes seems to be lacking, at least among my in-laws. They boil or they bake them. And by bake them I do not mean in the sensible normal way, in their jacket, but by peeling and then finely slicing them most of the way through and then baking them until they are hard little hockey pucks. I HATE that way of making potatoes. Why do you do that?!? Now, to be fair, my step-mother-in-law must have made mashed potatoes at least once because she taught my husband how to mash them with a beater with some olive oil. Coming from the land of meat and potatoes, this makes me cry. Look, Denmark, just back away from the potatoes okay? Great googely moogely.

Mashed potatoes are GREAT late in the season, when your potatoes are say, not looking their best. Peel, boil, mash with butter, sour cream, hot milk, and/or cream. Brilliant!

So I had some left over sour cream from when I made tarts. (This is how I figure out what we'll have for dinner, I see something in the fridge and say, oh I should use that up! I then design a whole dinner around that one item.) And when I saw this recipe on-line, I HAD to try it. Potato and Corn Mash is quite possibly the yummiest mashed potatoes EVAH! You should probably have a lot of salt and pepper on hand and do lots of tasting, it took quite a lot to bring it up to my salt needs, but then there is a lot of mashed potatoes in this recipe. I had to use the beater, which means NONE of my corn mashed... I will get a potato masher... this is ridiculous. A beater is fast and easy on the arm, but ridiculous all the same. And I chucked in a knob of butter and all the rest of my sour cream and beat it into a soft and fluffy pile. I am not sure how much sour cream it was. More than half of the small tub of Thise Creme Fraise or whatever it's called.

What was amusing was that Kay (the author of the recipe) thought that this was enough potatoes for "a lot of people." She must have served this with eight other dishes, because my husband and I polished off most of the bowl... either that or the two of us is just a lot of people.

We didn't just have the potatoes! I'm weird and sometimes very lazy, but not THAT lazy or THAT weird, thank you very much. I also whipped out Cajun Meatloaf which I'm not sure if it is particularly cajun... or maybe it is? How would I know? The only time I've been below the Mason-Dixon line was for a conference in Atlanta. I've also been to San Antonio, but that doesn't seem Southern or Cajun, but rather Crazy Western. But Pastor Ryan (recipe author) says it is and who am I to argue with a tattooed priest?

So nevermind the correctness or incorrectness of the title, this is DAMN fine meatloaf. I've never had such good meatloaf before in my life. Moist, flavorful (and not in a ketchup kind of way), and completely unlike "fake rabbit" which is what they call meatloaf in Denmark. The recipe I linked to, however, DOES make a HUGE meatloaf. At least in a Danish oven, which is abnormally small. It was more of a meatslab and the amount of fat that dripped out of it (well, I'm poor, I'm not buying the best ground beef at this point, especially if I'm still trying to get organic, free-range cow, I can't afford to also get low fat) means that when I make it again (and OH YOU BET I WILL!) I am going to put it in/on the deep cooking tray.

Hint to people living in Denmark - use "rasp" for the bread crumbs. "Rasp" means "bread crumbs" and as long as you don't get the sweetened ones, you'll be alright. Some of you will already know this, but I only just learned after trying to cook here for FIVE FREAKIN' YEARS. I've been all makin' my own bread crumbs . My mom used to do this for our meatloaf (I love the woman, but our family recipe for meatloaf is just awful) and we'd end up with soggy chunks of bread in the middle of the loaf. *Shudder* No wonder I didn't try this recipe right away.

It's also kinda labor intensive. I need a bigger mixing bowl, for starters. And I had piles of chopped veg in different areas of my kitchen awating cooking. Note to self: do not add oil and heat pan until you see how much freakin' veg you have! Then you don't have to grab a pot and pour hot oil from a hot pan to a cold pot!!

But my god, what a good meal! My dear Dane was ecstatic. And although the meatslab wasn't entirely cooked in the time it said (probably because it was fatter than it should have been in order to fit on my cooking tray) we cut the ends off and worked our way towards the middle, which stayed in the oven, cooking. By the time dinner was over and we were full, the bit of loaf left was perfectly cooked and ready for leftovers.

How much leftovers did we have? I mean, the meatloaf is 3 lbs of meat, not to mention all the vegetables that go into it and I mashed 3 lbs of potatoes with more veg added - that's a lot of food right?

Well, it's a good thing I made 8 servings of soup on Monday, because we'll need the extra (probably only a bowlful for each of us) to fill out tonight's leftover dinner. We ate 2/3 of the loaf and 2/3 of the potatoes. I also have two leftover tarts that I can reheat and a box of ice cream. Really, it isn't any wonder that we never have any money. We're eating it all!

I'm very glad these were tasty recipes, because I tried some money-saving recipes from the FoodNetwork and they were SO BLAND and horrible. Danish Boy tried to be nice about it. But I told him I was never making them again. UGH! So far I haven't had a single good recipe from them. Sigh. But I've always had a successful meal from The Pioneer Woman Cooks.

That sounds like a shameless plug, doesn't it? But dude - free recipes on-line!! And they're good!! I just want to spread the joy.

And the choir sang with voices angelic...

I was visited by a wonderful man on Friday. An angel? A saint? A fairy-godmother? I never quite caught his name, but it was probably Lars. When in doubt with a Danish man's name, your best guess is Lars. Followed by Thomas.

For such a short round man, he bounced into my apartment with a light, quick step. He filled the air with professionalism and humility that I found both shocking and refreshing. He wasn't what I was expecting at all. His work bag was tidy, he smiled and made eye contact. He listened to me. He didn't, not once, wave his hand in a dismissing manner while I was explaining my problem or when I peeked to see how he was coming along.

And he fixed my oven.

His English was not so good, my piss-poor Danish was stretched to the limit, but he seemed to understand what I was telling him about the stove top. First he discovered that even though I had carefully followed the schematic my husband had drawn, two of the wires were reversed. Note to self: do not let tired husband draw schematics ever again. Other note to self: get both of us tested for dyslexia. Further note to self: never ever try to dismantle a bomb. Then I had to explain that the oven wasn't working from before I mangled the reinstallation. He checked, told me "Det er FFFTHHHHPTH." "Du rigtig? Kan du... er.... POOF!?" I asked. "Jeg kan ikke køber ny... um nu, so jeg skal har POOF... um.... please." Danish doesn't have a word for please. You have to say it in a polite verb form. I don't know these verbs yet. It's something like "I pray that you pass the butter."

Anyway, the following translation of above conversation is not a direct translation, but what was supposed to be said if we were, say, speaking the same language. Sort of a "what was understood to be said even though it wasn't":
Lars: It is completely and totally broken.
AG: Seriously? Can you fix it? I can't buy an new one now, so I really need it to be fixed, please.

He smiled. He said he could. And he did. He had the part in his van. Normally when someone comes to fix something, even if you have told them "the knob on my radiator that regulates the temperature has fallen off" they come out, look at it, say "well, the handle on your radiator that regulates the temperature has fallen off" and then tell you that they need to order the part and come back, in say a week, to fix it. They will then bring the wrong part or will not have the right tools. And you will sit in your cold room and cry. Or come up with a crazy plan to warm up the room using your halogen work light.

This isn't what happened Friday. Friday my oven was fixed and I made tarts. Wonderful, fully cooked top and bottom, tarts.

Lars, my fat little oven fairy, I love you!

A kitchen disaster THAT I DIDN'T DO!

So we got the old floor ripped up in the kitchen, meaning that the stove-top oven and the refrigerator had to be moved into one of the spare rooms for a few days. No worries. But for some reason the oven is wired into the wall, instead of just plugged in. We discovered this goes for the washer and dryer a while back, so we did what we do, we draw a schematic and de-wire the oven. I like schematics. They remind me of lego instructions and wonderful days sitting on the floor of my room piecing spaceships together one brick at a time.

Anywhat, we couldn't put the oven back right away after we returned because we needed to let the floor cure. Finally it's time. Only my husband is tired. Cranky tired.

He has three stages of tired: silly, butt-head, cranky. Cranky is horrible. There aren't words to really describe it. He just becomes this impossible person. Everything you do is wrong, slow, and obviously designed to make HIS life a living hell. Later, after he's had sleep, he'll apologize, but when he's in the throws of crankiness, I just keep my head down, do my thing and practice my zen face.

We maneuver the oven into position, he squats behind it with the screwdriver. I try to hand him the schematic. "I know what I'm doing" he snaps, "go get ready to make dinner or something." As much as I would like to whack him over the head with a frying pan, I'd then have to drag his sorry butt to the trash, and I'm just too tired to do that. So I fill a pot with water, I chop an onion, I mince three cloves of garlic. We're going to have pasta casserole ... tada, I've done all I can do until the stove is ready.

Husband finishes and flips the fuse.



Okay, there was no flash of light. There also wasn't any smoke. But that didn't keep me from leaping about two feet in the air. I check the oven and peek over to look at the wires as my DH stomps his way back to the kitchen. He's installed the wires in a mirror reversal of the schematic. Now he has to swear and stomp around the kitchen and yell about the injustice of the world blah blah blah... and my nerves are now officially shot. Zen is right out.

I kicked him out of the way, told him to mince the garlic some more, and sat down to do it myself. Since I'm the one who always does the lights and other electrical jobs around the house anyway, you'd think that I would have done the oven myself. I should have. But cranky mccrank forgets that the only reason I keep him around is to get stuff off the high shelves and warm my feet, not DIY.

The big bang blew out half of the hot plates on the stove top. We have since opened up the back of the oven looking for more fuses, but there's nada. We have to call someone in and possibly buy a new stove/oven. But, trying to regain my zen, I pointed out to my bundle of cranky, I can still make dinner.

Since he's now at a loss as to what to do, I give him small simple tasks. I have to remind him to slow down because he's careening into walls and has hit his head on shelves and things and frankly his frantic behavior is STRESSING ME OUT! Trying to regain the zen. Breathing slowly, I add basil. He tries to rearrange the kitchenware. Breathing harder. He rearranges the dishes. I will now spend the next three days unable to find my damn coffee mug. When he approaches me with the small mismatched bowls, I stop him. "WHAT are you doing with THOSE?" "I'm putting them away." "They go BACK on the SHELF." "But they don't match the other plates, why can't they go under the counter in the back?" "Because I USE THEM EVERY DAY TO MAKE YOU DINNER." Mise en place does not make sense to cranky husbands. Cranky husbands would do well to remember to not upset the hand that makes you food, never mind what you think is aesthetically logical.

My attention is diverted only for a few minutes when I realize that I've not seen nor heard my DH in a few minutes. This is worrisome. Not because I think he's dead, or sitting down and resting, but because it means that he's up to something. Yup. He's decided to move the refrigerator back. So he's taken everything out and is removing the shelves. Guess who has to help him move the damn thing? Guess who is also trying to prepare dinner? I help him move the 'fridge, zen gone, enter frustrated wife. Lots of grumbling. You want cranky? Oh, I can give you cranky. Think you're in a snit? Oh, no, I will show you a snit. I have to stop at one moment to remove the casserole from the oven seconds before it goes from done to burnt. "Dinner's ready" I say, "let's put everything back in quickly so we can eat." Nope, he has to clean the refrigerator first.

AIEEEEEEEE!!

This is why zen masters are always monks. There is no way you can be married and keep your zen.