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*

When I grow up I'm going to eat cake for breakfast!

Actually, I do eat cake for breakfast.  But I always make sure I have a large piece or two of cheese as a side dish.

No, that is not a pregnancy thing, this is something that was agreed upon with my mother when my sister and I were younger - we could have a piece of cake for breakfast as long as we had something with calcium in it.  Or something.  So a piece of cheese and a glass of milk were somehow decided as enough "good" food to counteract the sugar we were happily stuffing into our little faces.  (Despite this, I've only had one cavity.)

I think the poor woman was just glad we'd eat something.  My sister and I were amazingly picky eaters and very difficult to get off to school.  We liked learning, but we hated that we needed to do it so early in the morning.

Anyway, I am now an adult so I *could* leave the cheese out.  But I love cheese and eat it with everything.  If it's not part of whatever I'm eating then I have it on the side.  Cheese is an especially good side "dish" when you are eating something very sweet.  Like pie.  Or, as in this case, cake.

The cake I made over the weekend was Carrot Cake.  I love carrot cake.  I do not understand why Danes insist on having layer cake (not what you are thinking people who do not live in DK, I'll explain later) for birthdays when there is carrot cake in the world.  My first wedding cake was carrot cake.  It was marvelously good.  For my second time at bat the altar I went with layer cake because 1) you are not going to get a good non-layer cake in DK and 2) always get the best cake you can have wherever you are.

(Number one is slightly incorrect, I've had some good homemade cakes from a few proper domestic goddesses who were Danish, so it can happen.  However, only one of them has made a wedding cake before and it was such a trial she swore she'd never do it again.  I don't blame her.)

So what is a Danish layer cake?  Well first you go to the store and buy these cheap thin sponge cakes, usually three come in a pack.  You also buy whipped cream in a spray can, strawberries and bananas (no matter what season it is - buy frozen if you must), butter and coco powder.

***If I ever have to make this cake, I am going to make it from scratch.  There is no call for the use of the nasty pre-made plasticky sponge rounds that they call "kage."  I understand that there are some childhood loves that defy reason as you age - like my deep and abiding love for Kraft Mac n' Cheese, despite it's horribleness - but honestly, this is a crime against nature.  (With any luck I will never have to make a layer cake from scratch.  Sponge cake is a nightmare.)***

You melt butter with some coco power to make a chocolate glaze.  Some sugar may be involved but I'm not always sure.  Cut up strawberries and bananas.  Now assemble thus: one round of sponge cake, pour a bit of chocolate glaze over it.  Layer of strawberries and bananas. Next round of sponge cake.  More chocolate glaze, fruit, and final layer of sponge cake.  More coco glaze.  Now use whipped cream to coat the side so you can't see the layers and for any decoration you may wish on the top.

Nine times out of ten it's as bland as boiled rice.  That last special time is probably when the cake has been made from scratch with fresh ingredients.  Then it's actually really good and you wonder why you keep getting stuck going to birthday parties with sub-standard layer cakes.  This is a mystery of the universe.  You will never receive the answer.  A word to the wise - do not ask your Danish host/hostess for cheese to eat along side your layer cake, they get weird about it.  But if you have layer cake sitting in your fridge, eat a slice of cheddar with it.  It will make it all so much better.

So back to my carrot cake with cream cheese frosting (see, sometimes you CAN put cheese on cake).  I had a variety of recipes to choose from and so I took a little from here and a little from there.  I am thrilled with the cake, but the frosting was WAY too sweet and I cut the sugar significantly.  I'll probably also up the amount of cream cheese because I like my cream cheese frosting to be, well, cream cheese frosting, duh.  But for your sake I give you the recipe as I made it.  Danish equivalents in parentheses.

Ingredients:

• 4 eggs
• 1 1/4 cups (300 ml) vegetable oil (rapsolie worked fine)
• 2 cups (475 ml) white sugar 
• 2 tsps (10 ml) vanilla extract
• 2 cups (475 ml) all purpose flour
• 2 tsps (10 ml) baking soda (bicarbonate or natron, I believe it is in Danish)
• 2 tsps (10 ml) baking powder
• 1/2 tsp (2.5 ml) salt
• 1 1/2 tsps (7.5 ml) ground cinnamon
• pinch of ground cloves
• pinch of nutmeg
• 1/2 tsp (2.5 ml) ground ginger
• 3 generous cups (700 to 900 ml is fine) of grated carrots
• 1 cup (250 ml) chopped pecans or walnuts if you wish

For frosting

• 1/2 cup (118 g) butter, softened
• 8 ounces (225 g) cream cheese, softened
• 2 cups (475 ml) powdered sugar* 
• 1 tsp (5 ml) vanilla extract
• 1 cup (250 ml) chopped pecans or walnuts if you wish

*Originally the recipe asked for 4 cups, I used 3.  I suggest you start with 1 cup (250 ml) and work your way up as needed.  Just so you know, Jamie Oliver's recipe uses one cup, which is why I make this suggestion.  Somewhere there is a middle ground.

Directions:

1. Preheat your oven to 350 F (175 C).  Grease and flour a 9x13 pan (22 cm x 33 cm? I don't know the measurements of pans in DK - I just go by looks, call me shallow, and my pan looked like a 9x13).
2. In a large bowl beat together eggs, oil, white sugar and 2 tsps (10 ml) vanilla extract.  Mix in flour. baking soda, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg and ginger.  Stir in carrots.  Fold in nuts if using.  Pour into prepared pan.
3. Bake in the preheated oven for 40 to 50 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean.*  Let cool in pan for 10 minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack and cool completely.**
4. To make frosting: In a medium bowl, combine butter, cream cheese, powdered sugar and 1 tsp (5 ml) of vanilla extract.  Beat until the mixture is smooth and creamy.  Frost the cooled cake.  Sprinkle with nuts if using.

*The more carrot you add, the more liquid the cake and thus the longer it will take to bake.  Mine took just over 50 minutes.  

**I lack wire racks and I don't have a plate big enough to hold a sheet cake.  I usually ignore this part of any recipe unless I'm making an American style layer cake and need to cut the cake in half to make 2 equal sized layers.  Because I don't have two pans of any shape that are the same size.

Middle Eastern Cooking

You'd think that since I spent five months in the desert eating food from the Syrian restaurant down the road, I'd be hankering for Chinese or Mexican or something and would shy away from Middle Eastern for awhile.  But that ain't the way this stomach rolls.  No-siree-Bob.  My stomach was all "BACON!" for a week and then it was back to "where's the Fattoush?"  So every now and then I whip out the old Middle East Cookbook the Dane got waaaaay back in the day and throw something together.  Usually a lentil soup, because no one does lentils like Semitic speaking peoples.  One of the other great things about lentil soup is that it is cheap and versatile.  Okay, that's two things.  But if you have lentils and an onion, you have soup.  If you have more stuff, you can fancy it up.  Me, I had a bunch of lemons in the house the other day.  I whipped up this soup and then made lemon bars for desert.  This house is free of scurvy, but we may all end up with cavities.

In this recipe, the lentils called for are dried red lentils.  They are little tiny red beans and they rock.  No soaking, no precooking, chuck 'em in boiling water and an hour later: SOUP!  You find them in Denmark as røde linser and when they show up in Netto at 10 kr a bag, I stock up.  They never go bad as long as you keep them dry.  You can find them at the other major chains in DK, often in the organic aisle.  You could probably get away with using brown lentils/grønne linser.  Lord knows I'll use any damn beans I can get my hands on.

Ingredients:
1 1/2 cups red lentils
6 cups meat or chicken stock or water
1 medium-sized onion, grated or really finely chopped because my grater was dirty
1 tsp ground cumin (spiskummen in Denmark)
salt
freshly ground black pepper
1 tbsp lemon juice (aprox. half of a lemon, keep the other half for making lemon wedges to serve along side)

For topping:
2 large onions
1/4 cup olive oil
1-2 cloves of garlic, finely chopped.

Directions:
1. Rinse your lentils.
2. Bring stock or water to a boil in a large pot.  Add lentils and onion.  Return to a slow boil, cover and simmer over low heat for 45-60 minutes.  Do not stir during cooking.
2b. While the soup is cooking, prepare the topping.  First halve the peeled onions lengthwise and slice thinly to make semi-circles.  Heat the olive oil in a pan and fry the onions over medium heat until golden brown.  I basically caramelized the buggers because I got side-tracked while baking lemon bars, and it turned out fantastic.  Add the garlic and cook a minute longer.
3. At the end of an hour, the lentils and onion will be very soft, but if you want a finer soup, use a blender.
4. Add cumin and salt and pepper to taste.  I didn't need to add any salt because I used bouillon cubes.  If a thinner soup is desired, add water to achieve desired consistency.  Stir in lemon juice and heat gently until bubbling.
5. Serve in deep bowls with the onion topping, called ta'leya.  Have lemon wedges and olive oil on hand in case someone like me wants a bit more citric acid and oil in their diet.  Also, a nice loaf of French or Italian bread, heated up in a 425 F/220 C oven for 10 minutes wouldn't be culturally appropriate, but would be damn tasty.


This particular recipe supposedly came from Egypt, but you'll find a gazillion of lentil soup recipes throughout the region and everyone's mother-in-law insists hers is the best.

Strawberry Shortcake

Oh, it rocked, my dessert!  I am ever so pleased.  I have no idea why I haven't made this before, especially for the in-laws, who I am always trying to impress with my cooking skills AND force them to experience my culture.  Heh heh heh.

But I'm not completely culturally insensitive to my Danish palates (not to be confused with Danish pallets or palettes).  I altered the recipe somewhat, mostly by decreasing the sugar.  Also I substituted creme fraiche for sour cream, because I can't get sour creme in Denmark, but it's practically the same thing.  I'll give you the recipe as it is offered in my Better Homes and Garden's cookbook with my changes in italics.

While you can absolutely make strawberry shortcake with pound cake or angel food cake, I love biscuits.  Therefore this recipe begins with making some biscuits...

Ingredients

• 1 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour
• 1/4 cup of sugar in this case, I did use 1/4 cup of sugar because it's for baking the biscuits
• 1 tsp. baking powder
• 1/4 tsp. baking soda (called "natron" in Danish)
• 1/4 tsp. salt
• 1/3 cup of cold butter (aprox. 75 g.)
• 1 egg, lightly beaten
• 1/2 cup dairy sour cream or 1/2 creme fraiche (I used 9% and it may have affected the dough which was a little wet, but it tasted lovely)
• 2 tbsp. milk
• 5 cups sliced strawberries I measured 5 cups of strawberries before I sliced them and had enough
• 3 tbsp. sugar or 1-2 tbsp because I had fewer strawberries and they were pretty sweet on their own
• sweetened whipped cream made my own by whipping 1 cup heavy cream (piskede fløde in DK), 1 heaping tbsp of powdered sugar and 1/2 tsp vanilla extract

Directions
1.  Preheat the oven to 400 F/200C.  In a small bowl, slice strawberries and sprinkle desired amount of sugar over them; set aside.  Lightly grease a baking sheet (or use baking paper); set aside.  In a medium bowl stir together flour, the 1/4 cup of sugar, the baking powder, baking soda, and salt.  Using a pastry blender, cut in butter until mixture resembles coarse crumbs.  In a small bowl combine egg, sour cream, and milk.  Add to flour mixture; stir with a fork just until moistened.
2.  Drop dough into 8 mounds onto prepared baking sheet.  Bake in the preheated oven for 12 to 15 minutes or until golden.  Transfer to a wire rack and let cool.

Mine came out a little flat, I think this may be because the dough was very wet, possibly because I used a low fat creme fraiche.
3.  Meanwhile, in a large bowl combine 4 cups of the strawberries and 3 tbsps sugar unless you did this already.  Using a potato masher or an egg beater because you don't have a potato masher, mash berries slightly; set aside.  Make sweetened whipped cream.  To serve, halve shortcakes; fill with strawberries and sweetened whipped cream.  Top with remaining sliced strawberries or not because this makes no sense.

YUM!

The kitchen sink recipe I think I may have perfected

So I've had this "Oven Frittata" recipe in my files for some time. The first time I made it, it was a disaster. The wonky oven might have had something to do with it. The second time I made it, earlier this week, we were definitely closer to the truth. Last night, I whipped it up again and I think I finally got it all worked out. I even tried to figure out the proportions so that I could write it down and post it for you all. And myself. If I don't write it down I'll never remember.

This may become a common recipe in my portfolio. It was easy and very good.

Serves only the two of us. But we tend to just pile it on our plates and forget the side dishes. After all, all the possible side dishes just went into the dish.

Ingredients
1/2 tsp olive oil (for greasing a baking dish)
2 cups (500 ml, not grams, use a measuring cup) macaroni or other shaped pasta
1 or 2 leeks or a bunch of spring onion, chopped I suppose you could use some other onion... or none at all.... but I really suggest getting a leek just for this recipe, it's a LOVELY addition.
4 cups of frozen vegetables any combination of veg is good, corn and peas for example, or wok mix, which is what I had in my freezer last night
1 red pepper optional, especially if you go with wok mix
3 eggs
200 ml milk (just under a cup) Can you tell that I have a strange mixture of measuring devices in my kitchen?
1 tbsp HEAPING of fresh thyme OR 1 tsp HEAPING of dried thyme possibly even a bit more, I get a good pile in my palm and chuck it in
2 cups or 200 g of shredded cheese the recipe says chedder, but you know what, mozzerella is also very nice
2 tbsp grated parmesan ran out of this, didn't notice a problem
salt and pepper to taste although, you will be adding it to raw egg, so you can't REALLY taste and check, so maybe about 1/4 tsp salt and 1/8 pepper... go with your gut

Instructions
1. Preheat oven to 190 C (375 F). Grease a baking dish with olive oil. Check and make sure that the dish can hold 8 cups or 2 liters of liquid first. It sucks when you use too small of a dish and then run around the kitchen trying to find another pan. Not that that's EVER happened to me. Pshaw!
2. Cook pasta in boiling salted water for 8 minutes. Add all the veg and cook an additional 2-3 minutes. Drain and tip everything into the baking dish and mix well.
3. Beat together eggs, milk, thyme, salt and pepper. Add most of the cheese. Pour into the dish and mix gently. Scatter the rest of the cheese on top. The liquid mixture should come almost up to, but not over the top layer of pasta and veg. If it doesn't, you may need to whip up another bit of egg and milk and thyme. I am lazy so I don't, I've had almost an inch of pasta and veg showing and it's still okay to eat. A little crispy, but still okay.
4. Bake for 35-40 minutes. Cool for a few minutes. Serve with salad. Unless you live in Denmark where there is no salad, in which case you serve with whatever you want or nothing at all.

Simple Rogan Josh for the curry impaired

Right, I made this earlier in the week and it worked out... sorta. Gotta get me some cardamom. Needs the cardamom. Now here's the kicker - you don't actually need cardamom seeds, which is good because lord knows where I'd get those. I have not found any here in Denmark, but I may not be going to the right places. I'm going to bring some back from Israel, but I'm not going there until June and I'm not waiting that long to make this again. So here's the cheat: 10 pods of cardamom = 1 1/2 tsp ground cardamom. So all I have to do is find GROUND CARDAMOM, which I think might be easier, and try this recipe again.

Apart from being a little bland (lack of cardamom), it came out pretty darned good.

I nabbed the recipe from BBC, and I think I even linked to it in a previous post, but I'm going to give you the recipe here with my alterations.

Ingredients
6 garlic cloves
1 large onion, roughly chopped
thumb sized piece of ginger, peeled and roughtly chopped
1 tsp ground cinnamon
2 tsp ground cumin
2 tsp ground coriander
1 tbsp paprika
1 tsp chilli powder
1 tsp salt
1 tbsp tomato puree
4 tbsp vegetable oil
1 kg lamb or beef
8-10 cardamom pods lightly crushed OR 1 1/2 tsp ground cardamom
1 can or bottle of beer (300 ml/10 oz)

Instructions
1. Using a food processor, blender, or immersion blender, puree the garlic, onion, ginger, all the ground spices (including the ground cardamom if you are using it instead of the pods, but NOT the pods if you are using pods), salt and tomato puree. I used an immersion blender in a glass and it worked fine, after a fashion. If you have none of these things, you can still make this by shredding the onion and ginger, and mincing the garlic, that's what I did the first time I made it and it worked out okay.
2. Heat the oil in a large pot and add the meat and the cardamom pods, if you are using the pods. Fry it all up so the meat is brown. Stir in the spicy paste and cook for about 5 minutes, stir frequently and turn on the fan. Whew that's spicy stuff!
3. Add the beer and bring to a simmer. Cover with a lid and cook for about 1 to 1 1/4 hours, stirring occasionally. Let the dish sit for 5 minutes before serving. Serve over rice. Make naan if you can. I can't... or at least... I haven't yet. There's that whole let it sit and rise for an hour that I just can't remember to plan for.

My attempts to buy lamb at the butcher didn't work so well. It cost too much. If I'd wanted a sheep head or a sheep leg, it would have been cheap, but I wanted a kilo of nice muscle. Tsk. So I went with beef, which is much cheaper. I bought a huge lump of it and cut it down myself. I need to get my fancy knives out of storage, de-tendon-ing the beef was rather difficult with my tiny little knife. I imagined I was a caveman trying to scrape meat with an obsidian blade. Grunting a lot helped with the tricky bits. This has probably grossed out the vegetarians by now. Sorry about that. But I do love the smell and feel of raw meat.

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.

Spanish Rice

So the most important recipe you can learn when making "American" food in a foreign country is how to make salsa. The stuff in the jars is just gross. So you learn to cut up tomatoes and onions and garlic and jalapeños and cilantro/coriander and away you go. Until you discover that you need to put salsa into something in order to bake it. But then you don't want to use your fresh salsa, because it isn't the right concistancy. You need the jar stuff. Only if you live in a foreign country you may not have access to it OR it may be so freakin' expensive you can't quite figure buying 4 bottles of the stuff for a recipe. (You need crap loads of the stuff for the Nacho Chicken Casserole.) Wadda ya gonna do??

Archaeogoddess's Instant Fake Salsa for Cooking
don't eat this with chips, it's not a proper salsa, really
1 can stewed or chopped or diced or whatever tomatoes
2 tsp chili pepper (flakes or powder if that's what you got)
3/4 tsp oregano
1/2 tsp garlic salt
1 tsp cumin
*optional: add a diced green bell pepper and onion if it's not already in the recipe you're using this cheat for

MIX

Now you are ready to make

Spanish Rice
2 tbsp oil
1 onion
1 1/2 cups uncooked rice
2 cups chicken broth (or 2 cups water and correct amount of bouillon)
1 cup salsa or one recipe of instant fake salsa for cooking

Instructions
1. In a pot, heat oil, cook onion until soft.
2. Add rice and brown or not, because parboilled rice doesn't like to brown and brown rice is well, kinda brown already so it's hard to figure. For what it's worth, I dump in the rice, swirl it around until it has absorbed the oil and is mixed with the onion.
3. Add broth and salsa. Bring to a boil and simmer, covered, for 20 minutes.

By the by, I love this reheated the next day with a fried egg and some jalapeños. Because I OBVIOUSLY do not get enough acid in my stomach from stress already.

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.

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.

Ask and ye shall receive a recipe!

This recipe has been adapted from "The Cuisine of California" by D. Worthington. Just so you know.

I'm going to give you the recipe as I've modified it because frankly there is not enough sauce otherwise. I mix things up by using both metric and American measurements because I can. Or "have to" is probably more accurate.

Chicken with Mustard-Tarragon Sauce
Serves 4-6 (is SAYS, but in this house it serves only 2)
Serve with steamed rice and some sautéed veggies. Oh, and a white wine.
Time to make, including prep: aprox. 1.5 hrs. (That's me including the time it takes me to get the ingredients out of their cupboards before I even start thinking about cutting stuff up.) Cooking time: 30 - 40 minutes.

Ingredients:
3 tbsp butter (divided: 2 tbsp, 1 tbsp)
2 tbsp oil (divided: 1 tbsp, 1 tbsp)
500-750 g chicken breast fillets, boneless and skinless (you can do this recipe with the breasts whole or chopped, I go with cubed because I usually pour the whole thing over rice and I hate to use cutlery while eating) (As I think about it, I have no idea how much chicken I normally use because I buy one package and chop it up. The original recipe calls for 3 whole breasts, halved... but I'm not really sure what they mean by "whole breasts".)
2 shallots, finely chopped
1/2 cup of white wine (a little more will probably not kill you)
1 cup chicken stock (I use one cup of water and half a bullion cube, because that's how I roll)
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 cup whipping cream (or all 250 ml of your carton)
3 tablespoons of mustard (dijon, whole grain, the meatier the mustard the better)
1 tbsp fresh tarragon OR 1 tsp dried tarragon
1 tsp finely chopped fresh thyme OR 1/2 tsp dried thyme
1/2 tsp salt
pepper to taste

Now what?
1) You need a large skillet. (I have also used a pot because my skillet is a bit small and tonight I'm going to use my dutch oven because I'm doubling the recipe.) Heat 2 tbsp of butter and 1 tbsp of oil in the skillet and saute your chicken over medium heat until golden brown. Remove the cooked chicken to a separate plate and cover to keep warm.
2) Add the rest of the butter and oil and when hot, add the shallots until softened. Add wine, stock and garlic and bring to a boil. Reduce. (If you want to make a mustard-tarragon glaze, you'll need to reduce until there is only 1/2 a cup of liquid and then you should only use 3/4 cup of whipping cream, but to make a sauce I usually don't reduce all that much. Or at all, come to think of it.)
3) Whisk in the cream and mustard and bring to a boil. When it's slightly thickened toss in the tarragon, thyme, salt and pepper and whisk well. Taste and adjust the amounts as needed. (I usually throw in more mustard. I REALLY LIKE mustard. And sometimes I'll add another dash of wine.)
4) Pop the chicken back in the pan and go on and pour all the chicken juices that have collected on that plate back in too. Cook for about 5 more minutes if you've cubed your chicken (because it should have cooked completely during the sautéing process and now all you need to do is warm it up) and possibly longer if you have not. No uncooked chicken here please! (If you are sautéing veg, now is the time to throw them in the hot butter or oil.)

"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.

Pasta

I love certain pasta shapes. Like macaroni. You can put ANYTHING on macaroni and it will taste amazing. I understand that pasta is pasta... but why make different shapes if it was all the same? Pasta may be pasta no matter what the shape, but it tastes different, I swear!

I am insistent on this matter: macaroni tastes better than spaghetti.

Maybe that's because I always put cream or cheese based sauces on macaroni. I prefer cream and cheese based sauces to tomato or pesto. And the doctors wonder why I have high cholesterol. Ha!

Anyway, the Danish Boy came home for dinner 4 hours ahead of schedule and I hadn't come up with any clever dinner plans that involved loads of frozen vegetables. When this happens (the part where I don't have dinner plans, not neccessarily involving frozen vegetables) we have pasta and pesto. Specifically spaghetti and pesto. We have a small fist-full of regular spaghetti and a small fist-full of whole grain spaghetti (which I am not so fond of in spaghetti form, macaroni form... oh yes, bring on the whole grain!) - I thought to combine the two to make enough pasta for two. The DB did not like this idea. He wanted to make the macaroni and have macaroni and pesto for dinner. He was tired and hungry and therefore rather cranky. Not that he'll ever admit it, however.

Somehow, despite my feelings that you can stick anything on macaroni and it will taste good... I really didn't want pesto. We eat it so often I felt that this would be a tragic waste of good pasta. So I had about a minute to come up with an alternative sauce plan. I had a can of tomatoes (eh), half a cup of cream that was soon to go bad, some white wine, plenty of onions and garlic... a plan formed. One that did NOT involve the tomatoes.

I made a white wine-cream sauce. It would have been PHENOMENAL had I managed to defrost bacon in 30 seconds, but sometimes you just have to feed your spouse before they go postal.

I call this: Archaeogoddess's Amazingly Fast Emergency Pasta Sauce. It's based on some other white wine-cream sauces I know.

Ingredients:
1 small onion, chopped finely
1 fat garlic clove, chopped finely
1 healthy tablespoon of olive oil
1/4 cup of white wine
1/4 cup of chicken broth (or in my case 1/4 cup of water and a small bit of bouillon cube - love the bouillon cube)
1/2 cup of cream

400 g of uncooked pasta - which is probably almost 4 cups but I'm not sure, I actually made 500g and then just saved some unsauced pasta for lunch today.

Directions:
1) In a nice wide frying pan, saute onion and garlic in olive oil until onion begins to soften, do not burn the garlic. If you think you may accidently burn the garlic, start the onion and after a minute add the garlic.
2) Add wine and broth. Boil and reduce to about half the volume. Approximately. This does not take very long if you are using a frying pan. If you are using a saucepan because you think sauce=saucepan, I don't know what to tell you. I have never made a successful sauce from scratch in saucepan. Instant sauces, yes. Sauces that require reduction? Nope.
3) Turn down the heat and add the cream. It'll probably boil no matter what you do, but it didn't seem to do anything negative to the taste, so don't worry about it if it boils, because you want a hot sauce, but make sure you keep stirring because you don't want it to burn.
4) Season with salt and pepper.
5) Pour over drained pasta, mix to coat, serve. Yum.

The trick is to get the sauce to pasta ratio correct. Too much pasta is urk, not enough is liable to make you mad you didn't save some sauce.

Reheating non-sauced pasta is easy. Boil water. Throw cooked pasta into water. When the water returns to a boil, the pasta is reheated. And it isn't rubbery or gross at all! Genius.

Then, if you are a mad sauce queen, like me, you have left-over hollandaise sauce in the 'fridge and have been wondering if you should just eat it with a spoon. Never fear, pasta with hollandaise sauce is tasty tasty stuff. If you have some sort of flavored salt to crust over it, the better.

Did I mention that for a person who is 5'8" and weighs 130 lbs, I have crazy high cholesterol?

(Okay, if you are actually worried about my cholesterol, don't be. When I tested high a few years ago I was able to bring it down by cutting out ranch dressing and whole-fat milk and I stopped putting cheese on everything. Here in Denmark I have no access to ranch dressing, I am not drinking that much milk, and only low-fat, I eat a lot less cheese and I eat a lot more muesli and yogurt and whole-grain rye breads. I am pretty sure I am exaggerating the level of my cholesterol.)

I do miss deep fried cheese sticks with ranch dressing dip, though. I get to eat that fantastic artery clogging concoction about once, maybe twice a year when I go to the Blue Fig in Amman, Jordan (anyone out there in Amman or going to Amman, I tell you, the Blue Fig, order the appetizer plate. Oh, merciful heavens!). I won't be going to Jordan this year, it looks like. Sigh. No cheese sticks for me.

No, I am not going to learn how to make them. That would be like giving a heroin addict his very own poppy field.

Some really good days!!

After the lethargy and depression that was Thursday afternoon, Thursday night turned out to be just right.  Once that pitiful excuse for the sun set (at 4:30, mind you) and then once my brain decided that it could in fact agree with the light to time ratio (dark before 8 pm is just WRONG), I found myself typing feverishly.  

And what I wrote was good.

This is important.  I can write a lot of words - I'm a fairly competent typist and can hammer the keys at an acceptable speed, but I cannot guarantee quality to go with the quantity.  More than once I have caught myself writing the same sentence again and again with slight variations in vocabulary to make a paragraph.  Then I read over it and proclaim "this sucks!" and I start again.  I have days where I have re-written the same paragraph again and again.  Thankfully, Thursday ended up not being one of those days.

My husband then returned from his "internship retreat" where all the journalist interns from his year were rounded up and babbled at for a day and a half.  He had the rest of Friday off and that meant that he was in the office doing his thing and keeping me from doing mine.  

Fortunately, I had planned for this.  I was determined to try to make pumpkin pie and Friday was a very good day for it.  No one else was around and I could make as big a mess as I wanted.  Which I did, because making a pumpkin pie from scratch is a messy affair.

How "from scratch" was it?

I started with a light blue pumpkin and a bag of flour.  That's how "from scratch" it was.  I had to boil and mash the pumpkin before I could even begin to make the pie filling.  I also had to make the pie crust.

The pumpkin I used is the one on the left.  That's a Queensland blue pumpkin.  Note the amazingly thick rind and flesh of that pumpkin.  Do you know how hard it is to cut through all that?  This is why you do not make jack-o-lanterns out of any old type of pumpkin nor do you use jack-o-lantern pumpkins to make pies.  This is important to know since you need to make a lot of pumpkin mash to make your pie filling from scratch.  You want to buy a pumpkin with this amount of orange fleshy bits.  My 4 pound pumpkin yielded 6 cups of pumpkin mash.  A regular old sugar pumpkin weighing 4 pounds will only give you 1.5 cups.  You need 2 cups of mash to make a pie.

Full disclosure: I had no idea if I bought the right kind of pumpkin when I picked this one up.  I just knew I didn't want to buy the jack-o-lantern or decorative pumpkin.  This one said "good for soups and baking" on the label.  

It took me a good half hour to hack this one into chunks to be boiled.  Then I had to remove the rind.  Then I had to mash it.

Meanwhile, I am always being told by cooking shows and cook books that there is no excuse for not making your own pie crust and that they are SO EASY.  They are wrong.  It is only easy to make pie crust if you have a Kitchen Aid Artisan Mixer with a pastry attachment (aka flat beater).  Blessed be, I do have one of these.  Honestly, this machine has changed my life.  Anyway, you can make pie crusts without this machine, but it is not easy.  It involves cutting butter into flour and then adding small bits of water at a time, mixing but not over mixing the dough etc etc etc.

So, I had made my pumpkin mash and my pie crust, it was then a walk in the park to assemble the rest of the pie.  I think I made my crust a bit thick (i.e. I didn't roll it out thin enough) because not all of the pie filling fit into my pie.  Oh well.  Into the oven it went.

Of the entire process, this was the bit that had me the most concerned.  The oven isn't exactly stable - in many respects.  I tried the old medieval approach.  This is where you fire up the oven as hot as you can get it, then turn it down after you put the food in.  The heat from the oven, originally too hot, will slowly dissipate, but cook your food while it does so.  This way you don't have one heat source burning your food on one end while the other side stays raw.

This actually worked!  And while I was testing the pie for done-ness, I pulled the tray too far out and the whole thing came crashing down.  The pie stayed intact.  So did the door to the oven, strangely enough.  This was proof to me that my baking was done.

The pie sat while we had dinner and then afterwards we whipped up some whipped cream (because whipped cream does not come ready made around here) and dug in.

It was fan-f#cking-tastic.  I haven't had pumpkin pie in donkey's years, so you might suggest that my palate was fooled.  But I'd have to disagree.  Perfect consistency.  Perfect amount of spices.  Naturally sweet (no sugar used in any part of this recipe).  Oh, lordy, it was perfect.

I sang and danced in my chair.  And overate.  Oh well.

The other root vegetable

I made some fantastic food last night. We had enough money that I could buy chicken and with my discovery of rasp (bagged bread crumbs) I could make proper fried chicken and sage pan gravy. Yummmmmmm!

Normally you eat this with mashed potatoes. But I have eaten A LOT of potatoes lately and there are other root vegetables out there that can be mashed and eaten.

One of them I've had in very fancy restaurants and I really really like. Celeriac. Or celery root for those who are normal people and not obsessed with root vegetables. I don't recall seeing it in the US, although I'm sure you can get it there. It looks like the brain of a vegetable man. Not exactly a shape to inspire confidence. It also has a very special taste that is not quite completely unlike celery. It does but it doesn't. I really can't be more specific than that.

It is absolutely the best vegetable to have mashed as a side dish for fried chicken with sage pan gravy. Sage pan gravy is the normal gravy that you make after frying chicken in a pan, but with a 3/4 tsp of crushed dried sage added to the flour. If you never knew what to do with the sage you bought to go with your parsley, rosemary, and thyme, now you do.

I didn't make the perfect celeriac mash. It was lumpy and watery. And still tasted so good it brought tears to my eyes. And I told my partner in life that I was the best damn cook in 5 time zones. He didn't argue. Too busy eating.

So here's what I did to make a less than perfect celeriac mash. Hopefully some day I will figure out how to do it a bit better, for aesthetic reasons, if nothing else.

MASHED CELERIAC RECIPE
A pound of celeriac per person is probably correct, as long as you know you all like celeriac. A normal sized head will feed two.
1) Put a pot of water on to boil. You want the water boiling when you throw in the celeriac. Salt the water if you like.
2) Peel the celeriac. You cannot do this with a vegetable peeler. You are going to have to take unbecoming slices with a large knife to remove the very bumpy skin from the celeriac. This is why you need a pound per person, after you peel celeriac there is not a pound per person left. Dirt will probably be everywhere. So rinse the cutting board, the knife and the celeriac.
3) Cut into 1 inch sized pieces. Or whatever size you want. Smaller means it boils through faster, but too small means it will disintegrate when you strain the water out.
4) Boil for 10 minutes or so. Just like you do with potatoes.
5) Drain. Possibly even wait a while. I think I didn't give it enough time to drain - celeriac is less starchy and more watery than potatoes. Celeriac needs it's drain time.
6) Mash with some olive oil. If you are have made gravy, do not add salt to your mash. If you ask your husband to do the mashing, he may at this point complain that it's bland. Tell him to suck it.
7) Serve with a salty gravy. Oh lord have mercy on my taste buds!!

Arti chokes two for a dollar at Safeway...

I am not going to write out the joke that goes with that punch line. If you haven't heard someone telling that joke, you don't have the right kind of friends.

But I would like to talk for a moment about the beautiful artichoke and how it is so much easier to cook and eat than I ever imagined.

Yeah, yeah, laugh, but how to cook and eat an artichoke is not knowledge you are born with and if your family is not the artichoke eating breed, you may never learn.

My ex actually taught me some useful things and how to EAT artichokes was one of them.

He wasn't so good with the making of the 'choke, but at least I learned how to eat the darned things.

So a few days ago I saw some artichokes in the store and had what can only be described as an acute craving. Visions of artichokes danced in my head and I found myself drooling. I bought two and brought them home. An offering to the strange little god that lives in my stomach. Demanding little god he is.

You wonder why the god that lives in my stomach is male? Um, this little god sits around all day and wants food. No cooking, no cleaning, just eating. And creating vast amounts of air that results in the prodigious burping ability of yours truly. Does that sound like a female god? I didn't think so.

ANYWAY, I brought home two artichokes and then had to figure out how to cook them. This begins with chopping off the top of the 'choke, which seems useless, except that it allows
1) the artichokes to fit into the pot
2) the steam to weasel its way into the heart of the artichoke

So cut off the top of the stupid thing. You aren't eating the top anyway. You eat the bottom of the leaves. So cut, CUT! About an inch off the top is enough. This is aided by a sharp knife. I had one once and it was lovely, but living in a communal space means my wonderful knifes are packed for safe keeping and I'm using the knives we all use. My next goal is to learn how to sharpen knives without hurting myself. I admit it... I'm terrified of accidentally slicing open my wrist.

The top is now off of the artichoke. There is in the instructions to remove any tough leaves that still have the pointy bit or thorn still attached. This instruction I think meant to remove the thorn, not so much the leaf and my attempt to remove a few leaves from the artichoke ended in... well, not so much failure, as a complete lack of artichoke improvement. So I'd say, ignore this step, other than to snip off any thorns that might poke you. There may be no thorns. Don't worry yourself if you don't see any. And for god's sake, do not waste your time cutting the tops off of all the individual leaves. This has NO practical application other than making things look tidy. You don't eat the pointy ends remember?

Now here is the important part - you *can* boil the artichoke, but this involves having a large pot filled with boiling water. If you want to make more than one artichoke at a time, unless you have a huge pot, this is a problem. And even if you do have a large pot, well, I HATE washing large pots, so I'll go to great lengths to avoid using them. So don't boil the things, steam 'em. Steaming veg is the best way to go. You lose far fewer vitamins this way. Also, you can pile the veg pretty high and the steam will get everywhere.

Steam them for 25-30 minutes.

Did you know you can flavor the steam? Maybe this is why people like to boil artichokes, they think this is the only way to spice them up a bit. But it's not true. Add lemon juice, garlic, a bay leaf, whatever tickles your fancy to the water. The steam will carry that flavor into the 'choke.

Various recipes will then ask you to pull off a leaf to see if it's done, because if it's done, the leaf will pull of easily. This is a good reason you shouldn't be pruning your artichoke too much, you'll end up pulling off leaves to check for doneness and you'll end up with no 'choke! Okay, probably not.

I love to dip in mayonnaise and since I had purchased some the other day for another recipe, I indulged in a bit of mayonnaise gluttony. Possibly too much, my stomach god was a bit put out by the cholesterol.

If you don't know how to eat an artichoke, I refer you to the following web-site with pictures: Simply Recipes.

When I'm not eating exotic (to me) vegetables, I am contemplating the meal I am going to prepare next week. No, not Thanksgiving, we don't have that in Denmark and even if we did, I can not particularly afford the amount of food I'd need to cook to put on a proper spread. A friend is coming over for dinner. I don't usually have to cook for friends or family and certainly not on the limited budget I currently have. It will be interesting to see what I can come up with.

Time for a shockingly good recipe

I may be unable to purchase a new computer - for once it's not lack of funds, but a working credit card, sigh - but I can still make a really really good soup.

I nabbed a five star recipe for Acorn Squash Soup off one of my favorite cooking sites, and because it wanted food items I didn't have and it skipped a few steps I think are necessary to make the soup, I had to wing it at times. But since this is one of the best soups I've had in a while... which isn't really that long, I eat a lot of good soups... anyway, I thought I'd share my version.

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Winter Squash Soup
Ingredients
1 butternut squash
1 small onion, chopped
1 stick of celery, chopped
2 tbsp butter or margarine
2 tbsp all-purpose flour
1 tsp chicken bouillon cube ground up
1/2 tsp dill
1/4 tsp curry powder
dash cayenne pepper (according to your taste)
2 cups chicken broth/prepared bouillon
1 1/2 cup of light cream (12 oz if you must)
salt and pepper to taste - easy on the salt
bacon bits for the top (best if you chop and fry some bacon yourself)

Directions
1. Preheat oven to 350 F. Remove stem from squash and chop in half lengthwise. Remove seeds. Place both halves cut side down in a baking dish that has about a cup of water in the bottom (to keep your squash from adhering to the pan). Bake the squash for 45 minutes or until soft. Remove from the oven and let cool slightly. Scoop the squash from the skin and set aside.
2. In a medium sized pot, saute the onion and celery in the butter. Add the flour, bouillon, dill, curry and cayenne. Stir until blended. Add the broth and cream. Bring to a boil. Cook and stir for two minutes. Add the squash.
3. Blend by any means necessary. If you have an immersion blender, now is the time to use it. Be wary of the large chunks of squash that tend to shoot around the pot. You can also use a blender, processing in batches, if you must.
4. Heat the soup through. Now add salt and pepper to taste. Remember, there may be bacon in your future, so easy on the salt.
5. Serve, garnish with bacon.

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If you aren't cool with curry... well, I'm sorry for your loss. You could probably have this without curry. I don't know why you'd want to, but you probably could.

The Danish Boy pointed out that this would have made a great sauce and I have to say, he's probably right. If I used half and half in order to make it thicker, skipped the bacon, but added some cooked chicken in step 4, I could probably serve this over rice for a nice hearty meal. I might see if I can swap out the squash for potatoes, which are cheaper and I can quickly boil up instead of bake, cutting down the prep time for this meal considerably.

Cup of creamy goodness picked in our own backyard!

Okay, that title is misleading - but this post will end with a recipe for the best kick-ass cream of mushroom soup EVER! Cause, I don't know if you know, but cream of mushroom soup is actually tasty when it's not out of a can. Canned cream of mushroom soup should be banned. It's only worth making bad casseroles and no one should have to eat bad casseroles!

I was not passionate about cream of mushroom soup until last night. But last night I had a taste-bud epiphany and I must now spread the word.

But first a digression - All the windows on one side of the apartment, which includes my bedroom and my office are being replaced. Yesterday the old windows were ripped out and new ones nailed in. This means no heat on all day yesterday. Now the new windows are all open so that the carpenter can easily pack insulation around them. So, still no heat. I haven't felt my nose, fingers or toes for the last 36 hours. God I hope tonight I can turn on the heat and not feel the icy draft that is common to Denmark in the fall.

Denmark in the fall, often gorgeous, but freakin' chilly.

Back to the soup. In order to get to last nights feast of flavor I have to go back two days, to when the Danish Boy was assigned a story by his editor. "I want a story about picking mushrooms!" the editor cried. And for whatever reason, the DB was chosen to write, what he calls "a puff piece." I say it is a great chance to try to write a gonzo-journalist story. l I even offered to write it for him. I was really exited by the idea, as you can see.

So yesterday, my boy gets a chance to write a story that would be relevant for the next day's paper, but because his newspaper is trying this new approach, called the "planned newspaper," his editor refused to let him off the hook and so the DB headed off into the woods to pick mushrooms with a nature guide, instead of writing up a story about the latest Gallup poll on the voting youth of Denmark.

Digression - what the heck is a "planned newspaper"? I mean, that's why they call it the NEWS, fercryinoutloud! You can't plan the news. Or, if you could, could you also give me tomorrow night's stock figures? Honestly, once I get done straightening out the danish political system (psst, everyone who hates the current government, instead of voting for 5 different parties, thus splitting the vote and ensuring that the government will not ever change, could you all just pick ONE FREAKING PARTY TO BACK! And hey, Social Democrats, stop pushing a nanny state solution during your campaigns. No one wants a nanny state, which is why Venstre keeps winning. And Venstre, dump the goddamned Danskfolkparty - they suck and anyone is better than that poor excuse for the KKK.) I'm going to have a go at the newspapers. First on my list, no more "planned newspapers" because that's just dumb. Second, stop laying off journalists and trying to compete with the free papers. The free papers are going to collapse soon, the economy cannot afford it. Nyavisen died, so will the others. Lowering yourself to their tabloid standards is tarnishing your reputation. Gah!

Anyway, the DB goes mushroom picking. He learned what mushrooms you can eat and how they are often in symbiotic accord with certain species of trees and all kinds of other things. He was bored stiff. The DB loves nature. He likes to walk through it and look at it. It's me who points to things and says "what's that!" Or "oh, look at the raccoon tracks! You can tell that their 'coons because of the little thumb print here!" I really should have been the person on that hike and the person writing that story. Damn and tarnation.

So after an hour in the woods (which, incidentally, are all over Aarhus, carefully cultivated and well kept) he brought back a bag of mushrooms. "Here" he says, "I slayed dinner."

Yup, my hero returns from the hunt. Only later would he admit that the guide had picked them. But during that time did I question his ability to pick edible mushrooms? No I did not. I accepted those mushrooms as dinner and up I cooked 'em.

Of course how I could cook them was another story. They were a little weird looking. Not your button mushroom, that's for sure. The DB suggested that I saute them up and serve them that way. Pshaw! I can do better than that. And I did.

So I now present the most awesome of Cream of Mushroom Soups (brought to you by Allrecipes.com).

Digression - all of my measuring cups and things are still packed. I highly doubt the accuracy of the IKEA silverware as measuring spoons. Also, I didn't have enough mushrooms. Actually, although I did use everything listed in the ingredients, I sort of played with the amounts. Okay, so the soup I made may not be exactly what I was supposed to be making. I'll put my changes in italics in the right hand side of this table that I spent hours writing the code for. Hey, I learned something new - html code sucks ass.

Cream of Mushroom Soup	Archaeogoddess Style
5 cups sliced mushrooms - any type	4 cupsish wild mushrooms, I have no idea what type
1 1/2 cups chicken broth	2 cups or 500 ml, because that's what one cube of bouillon makes
1/2 cup chopped onion	A handful of chopped onion, because it looked like it was probably 1/2 cup
1/8 tsp dried thyme	That's a crying shame, I poured some in my palm and then added another dash or two or more. Hey, I like thyme
3tbsp butter	Totally put in 50g or so, which is more than 3 tbsp, but I like butter
3 tbsp flour	I put three soup spoons of flour in, which were not leveled or in any way properly measured
1/4 tsp salt	Or perhaps more, I used my palm to measure and I'm not good at that at all
1/4 tsp pepper	About the same amount as the salt
1 cup half and half	Used whipping cream. And probably more than a cup, since 1 cup is 235 ml but I used the whole carton - which is 250 ml
1 tbsp sherry	Ha! A soup spoon and a lot more. I like sherry.

1) In a large pot cook mushrooms, onions, thyme and broth until tender - 10-15 minutes. So easy!
2) Puree, it's okay to leave some chunks. Oh thank god for my immersion blender! But there wasn't really enough soup to use it easily, so I had to sort of turn the pot at an angle... that's okay, I am totally doubling the recipe for next time.
3) In a smaller pot, melt butter and whisk in flour until smooth. Add salt, pepper and half and half. Mix thoroughly and add mixture to soup. The recipe writer originally wanted you to do this in a big bowl and add the mushroom mix to the cream, but that's just dumb and uses too many pots.
4) Bring soup to a boil, cook until thickened. About 30 seconds if you use whipping cream. Add sherry. Season to taste. And eat that bad boy while it's hot! So freakin' good!

It's my party and I'll cook if I want to!

So, apart from the fact that we're flat broke and so eating out is NOT an option and despite the fact that I desperately needed to use the yeast cake that was in the fridge (how gross does the term "yeast cake" sound? really gross? yeah, me too) I actually did really want to cook my own birthday dinner.

I like coking for an appreciative audience and I like the instant gratification I get from eating the results (provided that they taste good).

I sort of didn't start early enough... but by the time dinner was served (9pm) I'd been on my feet cooking, shopping, cooking, cleaning, and more cooking... for over 9 hours.

What all did I make?

1) Pine-nut Olive Oil Bread: fantastically good, very labor intensive. It came from my Californian cuisine cookbook, which, although it turns out great meals after a fashion, I am not sure if it was particularly designed to be used by normal not-professionally-trained people. The part that had me howling was the "knead in your mixer, using the bread hook, for 8 minutes." My KitchenAid mixer has not yet arrived and I don't know if my Danish Boy ordered it with a bread hook, but I happen to know that my current hand-held mixer does NOT have a low setting (it's settings start at "beat" and end with "dervish") nor the proper attachments. This was a hand made bread. Which means it did NOT get whirled around the bowl for 8 minutes.
2) Tomato-Shiitake Mushroom Bisque: this is a fantastic soup. Really really really good. I do not generally like tomatoes and I am only just warming up the other foreign mushrooms (I'll do button and portobello, no problem, I'm working up to the others) but this is an amazing soup and crazy easy to make, in my humble opinion. (I did just wrestle with the bread, brain surgery would probably have felt easy.)
3) Asian Noodle Salad: and not just any asian noodle salad, but the one on Pioneer Woman's blog. It, uh, makes a lot of salad if you follow it. Cabbage heads are VERY big in Denmark.
4) Apple Dumplings with homemade carmel sauce: I really wish the other food had not been so damn good and that I had not made so damn much of it and that I hadn't, therefore, eaten so damn much of it, because this is my new most favorite desert EVER! I made carmel sauce!! Whoot!

So everything was all ready at the same time, because I had to cool the bread first, so that was out of the oven hours before dinner, and well, you can make a salad earlier in the day and so really the only thing that was cooking was the soup... but that's not the point. I was able to field a three course meal with home-made bread!

It is probably the most cooking I've ever done in a day.