An Australian Fantasy

Hi, just to avoid any confusion, this post is not by your usual hosts, but by Silke & Søren of former ossobuco fame. We’ve been invited to participate as regular guest-writers – and thus we’ll actualize ourselves with this Australian inspired creation.

Randomly being in possession of both kiwi and kangaroo invites creativity and dreams of Australia and what is better in the dull and gray of Danish Yuletide  than enjoying a bit of indirect sun from the other side of the world. So after a little inspirational usage of the internet we decided to do kangaroo steaks with fried raw potatoes, carrots and parsil root and a sweet & sour kiwi sauce of own design. This is a quite typical approach for me as I usually improvise over several recipes or none at all instead of following dictate.

The sauce

Making a cold kiwi sauce is as simple as processing the ingredients, mixing them and letting them rest for a while. We make it sour with the juice of one lemon and white vinegar. We make it sweet with sugar and of course the kiwies.  For seasoning we’ve used finely chopped garlic (2 cloves) , piri-piri chilli (one, with seeds removed) and a bit of finely chopped ginger.

First remove the skin from the kiwis

Cut them into small pieces and crush them with a fork (or use a blender if you want a finer sauce)

Then just add the seasonings

and it’s done

A sauce like this, especially if blended to a creamier texture is perfect for dipping grilled meat or grilled fish in if you want to spice your barbecue up a bit. It’s worth noting that the kiwi serves as an excellent base for a range of varied seasonings, it’s discrete acidity and sweet fruitiness counteracts the extremes of many hot ingredients allowing their aroma to shine through. E.g. I would usually never put a whole piri-piri in a small dish like this, but here the kiwi counteracts it and the sauce doesn’t burn in the slightest.

The vegetables

To offset the really intense sauce we need something salty and simple, so we fried some raw potatoes, a couple of carrots and a parsil root with lots of high quality sea salt. A recent obsession of mine is to make homogenic shaped pieces of vegetable, so we cut the three ingredients in similar shaped cubes and chopped som rosemary for seasoning.

We fried it in a mix of olive oil and butter (3 to 4 milimeters of oil) – which have the advantage of tasting like butter while being able to reach the higher cooking temperature of olive oil without getting burned.

While the vegetables fried we prepared the kangaroo.

The Kangaroo Steaks

We wanted to be able to taste the finer nuances of the kangaroo meat, so instead of marinating it or seasoning it we just salted it and fried it in olive oil. First 30 seconds at high temperature on each side. Then four minutes on medium per side. After it had finished frying we let it rest for an additional four minutes.

The Happy Conclusion

We combined the ingredients and served them with a bottle of Banrock Station Colombard Chardonnay, a surprisingly decent Australian white wine considering the low price (about 40 kr or 8 american dollars) and the twist-off cap. It stood its ground just fine against the meat which turned out to be nearly perfect – a little pink in the middle and with a nice clean taste reminiscent of veal and game. The sauce was delicious and a glimmer of freshness in a season otherwise dominated by heavy fatty tastes. The vegetables was crunchy outside and creamy inside due to the salt, but was a little too salt perhaps. We can dearly recommend you try this, especially the kangaroo meat and kiwi sauce.  It should be noted that kangaroo isn’t any more expensive than cheap beef (at least not in Denmark) and have a superior tenderness and taste, we got ours in the remarkable Danish supermarket Irma.

We hope you’d enjoy our post, and appreciate this delightful blog our hostess and host have made.

Best regards

Silke and Søren

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Raw…

According to legend the barbarian tartans were so busy riding their horses, burning stuff down and killing people, that they had no time for proper cooking. So, they placed raw meat under their saddles. The friction created between the horse and saddle would tender the meat, so that when the day’s riding were done, so was the food.

That doesn’t sound nice, does it?

A lot of things has happened since those glorious days, and tonight we had tartar the “modern” way:

Buy tartar (high quality minced beef) at a real butcher or a supermarket that you trust. Raw meat can be dangerous, after all.

Use a good knife to turn the tartar into patties.

(As we are Danes we put everything on rugbrød – you don’t have to do that, but it helps!)

Chop some pickled beets and red onions. Put it on the patties.

Decorate with capers and top the dish off with a beautiful yellow raw egg yolk.

Done!

(We are aware of the hazards of eating raw meat and egg. So should you be. Look it up before you prepare, serve or eat this dish. Not that we really want to talk you out of it, but we wouldn’t like to be sued by your relatives)

Biscotti Nutty

As you may have noticed christmas is approaching. That means that you have to give away presents and probably serve guests. You are in a constant rush, though, as the holiday-stress sets in. Your bank account looks like Central Europe in ´45 and all you really want is to sit down and have a nice cup of coffee…

Fear not! We’re here to help you!

The small wonders that Americans call Biscotti is the answers to many problems. They are fairly cheap if you make them yourself, and it doesn’t take much time to do so. they are very versatile, in that you can add pretty much anything to the base recipe and end up with a good result – this makes them even cheaper. When they are done you can store them for a very long time – more than two months if they are kept in an “air-tight” container. They where actually invented for this very purpose, in a time with no refrigiators and long sea journeys. Keep a jug of these and you’ll always be ready for unexpected company. Wrap them up with some good coffee beans and a small bottle of vin santo or moscatell and you have a christmas present for your aunt!

the base dough is made like this:

400 g of white flour mixed with 10 g of baking powder.
Add 200 g of cane sugar and mix it.
Add whatever ingredients and spices you like.
Add a enough eggs (4 should do it) to make the other ingredients stick together – the dough is very sticky!

Separate the dough into several long slabs, about 7 cm wide and as long as the baking plate. Put them a preheated oven at 185 degrees (celsius) for 25 minutes.
Take out the plate and let the slabs (and the oven) cool down a bit. Cut the slabs into biscotti with a sharp knife.

Put the biscotti back on the plate and back into the oven for another half hour at 120 degrees. If you have the time just turn off the oven when you are done, and leave the biscotti there for the night.

As it is christmas I used traditional (Danish) christmas spices:

Orange peel from 2 oranges, finely chopped. The easiest way to scrape off the peel, without also getting the bitter material right beneath it is with a peeling knife. Forget about the grater.

Hazelnuts, about 120 g, chopped.

Apricot. Bought dryed and then chopped, about 100 g

and finally

The seed of two vanilla pods.

They are really good! Enjoy

Shrimp Symphony

Shrimps are one of our favorite ingredients, and they can be used for so many things. Thai food, salads, wok, starters, in bread, fried, deep fried, even as a spice in dressings. Bubba from Forrest Gump might be a bit backwards, but he knows his shrimps!

The two main ways of serving shrimp in Denmark is on bread or in a so-called shrimp cocktail, both are very kitch. The shrimp cocktail became a must-have at every family party in the 80′s  (and thereby it was eventually doomed to a life in run-down restaurants for the culturally challenged). The bread version – the “rejemad” – is very simple. A load of shrimp on a piece of white bread, with lettuce, dill, mayonnaise and a twist of lemon. It is an institution of Danish “smørrebrød” – a concept known since the 1880′s, and closely tied to the world-known amusement park Tivoli, from which it has spread all over Scandinavia. In other words: we are dealing with retro food and culinary crown jewels.

We struck this large ore of shrimp when while excavating the freezer, and challenged each other. Mette made the cocktails and I made the open sandwiches. The shrips are “standard” shrimps – that is deshelled, boiled and frozen. They are caught around Greenland. Both dishes are normally considered either starters or very light lunch.

Let’s start with the cocktails:

Sauté 200 g of mushrooms in butter and add a like amount of shrimp, when the water has evaporated. Take is off the heat and add lemon juice and salt while it cools down. Cut lettuce finely – enough to fill the bottom of a cocktail glass. The dressing consists of  mayonnaise spiced with tomato purée, tabasco sauce, paprika, worcestershire sauce and a lot of dill. The amounts used depend highly on personal taste. When the shrimps and mushrooms has cooled off a bit, mix it with the dressin and put it in the fridge until it is as cold as the fridge itself.

Arrange it on top of the salad, and decorate with more dill and lemon slices.

Next: The open sandwiches…

This is even easier. You don’t have to cook anything, and if I wasn’t such a nerd it would have taken me five minutes to make them! I tried to make a sort of asparagus-foam to soften everything up a bit, but I wasn’t really happy about it. I found out a few things, though. First: One clove of garlic is enough to dominate if it is fresh – use with care! Second: Noilly Prat is perfect for steaming asparagus – they compliment each other perfectly! Third: If at first you don’t succeed… Keep sweating in the kitchen. I’ll try this again. It didn’t go all too well, but it was by no means bad. I’ll post the recipe when it is perfected

The standard rejemad contains shrimps (surprised?), butter, fresh lettuce, fresh tomatoes, dill (as deco) and mayonnaise. The only thing I changed was the mayonnaise. I toasted the bread, but freshbaked bread is even better.

The trials of french nougat, part 1

The original plan:

Make a load of french nougat for christmas. Actually it seemed pretty simple, and it was! Too simple. So it went wrong. We used a recipe from a book called “Grandmothers Recipes”, and holy hell, is that an annoying book! It didn’t say anything about temperatures – which is the absolute crucial point of making nougat (and everything else containing heated syrup!).

We followed the recipe anyway. We started by stirring up some sugar, honey and a bit of water. We put it on the stove…

…and boiled it for an hour.

While the syrup was boiling we chopped an assortment of roasted nuts and maraschino cherries.

That done, we whipped some egg whites into a very stiff foam. Still blindly following the recipe, we went on mixing the warm syrup into the foam and added the nuts and berries. According to the obviously senile grandmother this should do the trick. All we had to do was to pour out the sticky mixture on a piece of baking paper, wait until the next day, and we would have french nougat!

What went wrong:

According to the (proper) cooking book – our beloved “Reader’s Digest Complete Guide to Cookery” – which we only consulted after we had failed, there exists no less than 5 progressive stages of melted sugar, each one starting at extremely precise temperatures. Each “level” will create a sugar mass perfect for various sweets. Stage 1 will make good jelly, stage 2 will make fondants on so on and so forth… What granny had forgot to mention was, that we should go for stage 4. We ended up with a creamy fudge-like substance – very delicious but utterly useluss as french nougat!

What to do with 750 grams of failure?

Well, we went into uncharted territory! We have no idea if this will work, but of course we’ll keep you posted We scraped grannys would-be-nougat into a bowl, added 150 g of chokolate chunks and whipped the whole thing together.

We then whipped half a liter of cream, and folded it into the nougat-substance a little at a time, to keep it nice and “fluffy”. We poured this concoction into an ordinary cake tin, stuffed it into our freeser, and if we are lucky, we’ll have a nice christmas parfait tomorrow! As promised, we’ll keep you posted.

Our friend Nikolai

We’ve had a few days of hiatus – but have no fear: We spend them eating, drinking and seeking inspiration for blog posts to come. One of the things we did, was to visit our best friends. They served a fantastic ossobuco, and we were supposed to bring dessert. As ossobuco is a very heavy meal, we didn’t bring cake or something similar. We brought this strange thing called Nikolaschka:
Nikolaschka is not exactly a dessert, and not really a cocktail, but something in between. It doesn’t fill your stomach, but it goes great with good coffee and petit four. It also does great by itself.
The Nikolaschka originated – I believe – somewhere in Eastern Europe or Russia. I’ve found the recipe mentioned in an article about the Hungarian version of brandy, called Palinka, but it doesn’t say if the recipe itself is Hungarian.
Anyway, it’s a very simple thing to make, and the ritualistic procedure of consumation is kind of fun too!
Start by slicing a lemon, and remove the peel from the individual slices.
Pour cognac (or other kind of brandy – I prefer cognac) into a snifter glass. We used shooters (see picture) out of necessity, and it worked, but it looks better with a snifter.
Put the lemon slice on top of the glass, and decorate with ground coffee and powdered sugar.

Serve the drinks, and when everybody is ready, put the entire lemon slice in the mouth, chew on it a few times, and drink the cognac.

The taste will explode in your mouth. A ferosious mixture of sour and sweet, bound together by the burnt taste of brandy and coffee. Really a unique experience.
Later – perhaps tonight – we will post about how our christmas schnapps is settling, and how we took a failed experiment and tried to turn it into a success.

Pizza and philosophy…

”Life is like a sewer! What you get out of it depends on what you put into it”

- Tom Lehrer

The same holds true for cooking in general and pizza in particular. Pizza is one of the most varied meals you can prepare – I’ve seen anything from exotic meats like kebab and squid to even more exotic fruits and vegetables like bananas on pizzas. Yesterday we both worked late, but I arrived home an hour before Mette, and had to come up with an easy dinner, that wouldn’t take half the night to cook. Pizza seemed like the best solution.

The introductional quotation describes the most important rule of pizza: If you load the pizza with bad stuff, don’t expect the final meal to be any better.

The only real dogma of pizza-making is the tomato sauce. I usually make my own, and for this one I tried something new. Chanterelles! They didn’t really do much for the all-over flavor of the sauce, but they did a lot for the texture – in other words: use finely chopped white or brown mushrooms instead, to keep the costs down.

Fry the mushrooms (100-150 g), with a single – but large – clove of garlic (squashed) and about a teaspoon of powdered white pepper. When the mushrooms has released all the water they contain and it has evaporated, add two tablespoons of red vine vinegar and three tablespoons of red wine. Remember: never use a bad vine for cooking. You should not use vine you would not also serve for guests.
Let the sauce simmer until it is reduced to an oily substance, and the mushrooms has halved in size. Then add a can of skinned chopped tomatoes and a handful of marinated black olives (remove the stones). You let the sauce reduce itself a second time, until about 1/3 of it has evaporated, and you’re all done. You will not need to salt it because of the olives.

When you are in a hurry its no shame to cheat a bit here and there, so I bought a pre-made dough. It saved me a lot of time, that I used to prepare the topping, while the sauce looked after itself on the stove.

If you want an Italian style pizza, there is one more important rule for you: Less is more! Don’t try to stack as much topping onto your pizza as possible. It can actually ruin the dough and make the pizza all soft and moist.

Roll out the dough – home-made or pre-made.

The first thing is the tomato sauce. A thin layer all over the pizza. Leave about half a cm around the edges. Fill out the ”blank spaces” with chopped spinach.

Then spread out the meat and cheese. I used a good dried ham and half a roll of goat milk cheese.

The end result: Delicious dinner for two! It took about half an hour to make.

Slapstick and black wine

Saturday was pure luxury. We went to one of the oldest and most respected food-institutions of Copenhagen, if not the entire country. Conditori La Glace was founded in 1870, and has provided fantastic cakes and petit four to sweet-toothed customers for 6 generations. Many of the recipes used at La Glace were made by the original founder Nicolaus Henningsen in his learning years in Flensburg, and most of the interior deco hasn’t changed since the 1920′s. A wonderful “time capsule” indeed, historically correct, right down to the coffee. If you want americano, wiener melange or other “exotic” variants, you have to go elsewhere. La Glace serves good clean ordinary coffee, in small silverware pots, a concept unchanged since the opening of the place.

La Glace serves a variety of traditional Danish, German and French pastries, but its claim to fame is the layered cakes. These monstrous creations are famous all over the North, and the secret recipes are coveted by chefs and amateurs alike. With good reason.

The layered cakes aren’t exactly layered. They consist mainly of whipped cream, and other “crèmes” mixed with natural flavors – so for most people not familiar with this kind of cake, it would seem like the “custard pie”: the prefered ranged weapon of black and white slapstick comedy.

Schjönning had the Karen Blixen cake – many of the trademark cakes are named after famous Danes. The Author Blixen lived in (what was considered) the dark Africa most of her grown life, and the cake is stuffed with the tastes of the mysterious continent. Cold coffee-soufflé and chocolate-truffle with roasted hazel nuts, stacked on a chokolate-bread bottom. This is heavy stuff, and it is impossible to eat more than one slice. All the ingredients are contained within the same taste “category” – sweet in a earth-like way – and they do a good job working together.

(Foto taken from La Glace’s homepage)

 

Mette had the H.C. Andersen cake – a modern cake invented a few years ago at the 200th anniversery of the great authors birth. The cake is fresh and “light” (well, compared to other cakes at La Glace). The main layer consists of cold lemon soufflé, balancing on a thick raspberry crème with star anise. It’s topped with white chokolate to honor H.C. Andersen’s beautiful paper artwork (scherenschnitte).

These cakes are the epitome of layered cakes, as a European tradition. When we make cakes ourselves, this is our goal!

 

As mentioned above, La Glace doesn’t offer the battery of coffee variants that more modern cafés have. So we, thought we would make some interesting coffee oursleves

Schjönning normally buys a local Danish brand called Peter Larsen Kaffe – they have a very good lightly roasted organic coffee. Providence brought him into a supermarket that had a great special offer on Ethiopian Zege coffee though, and so he bought what normally would have been the most expensive beans in his life. This is coffee with a history. It is grown on small islands in Lake Tana, by christian monks, in an altitude of 1800 meters (the higher the altitude, the denser the coffee). Ethiopia is the mother land of coffee – it has been known there since the 7th century, and the Zege is pure Arabica – the oldest and finest sort, and the only one that can grow at high altitudes at all. Only 1000 half-pound bags of this was shipped to Denmark (the third largest coffee consumer in the world), and we have one of them.

The first commandment of coffee-making is to grind your beans at home. The flavor keeps longer, and the coffee tastes fresher and a bit more chocolate-like. Always keep your beans in a closed jar in the fridge – it will keep the flavor even longer. We normally use an electric grinder, but for coffee of this quality we chose the old-fashioned hand-driven coffee mill (it’s a classic from around 1920). The (very) slow grinding preserves much more of the ethereal oils, making the end result smoother and rounder.

 

Pack an Italian moka pot with the grinded coffee (B) and water (A) and put it on the stove – moderate heat. The finished product will arrive at (C).

It is essential that the coffee doesn’t boil in the pot (C) – it will ruin most of the flavors. When the coffee starts to pour into the compartment (it looks like a lazy volcano)…

… turn off the heat, but keep the pot on the hot plate. When the compartment is full, take the pot off the heat, with the lid closed. Arrange a nice plate with cookies, nuts, fruit or whatever, pour the moka and enjoy

The result is a very black, thich and rich drink, with connotations of cocoa and (believe it or not) dark rum. By the way, did you know that the original word for coffee in arabic – qahhwat al-bun  – means “Wine of the bean”?

STEAK!!!

While we were making the leek-rolls yesterday we heard the old Dr. Demento classic “Cows with guns” a couple of times. So… Today we had steak!

And you can’t say steak without saying sauce bearnaise, so we threw our innocent selves into the fray of the 5 great french sauces – namely the Hollandaise, the “mother sauce” (french: “mère”) of bearnaise. As some of you probably know, true Bearnaise is also as a kitchen nightmare due to the sauce’s ability to separate just, when you think you are home free, but we went an had a go anyway:

According to one of our favorite cookery books “Reader’s Digest Complete Guide to Cookery” ( “Den klassiske køkkenskole” in Danish) the recipe for the perfect sauce bearnaise is as follows:

175g butter

3 tbsp white wine vinegar

3 tbsp dry white wine

10 crushed peppercorn

3 finely chopped shallots

1 tbsp chopped fresh tarragon

3 egg yolks

salt and cayenne

1 tbsp chopped fresh parsley

You melt the butter, a nice large piece, and let it cool. Remember to remove the foam:

Boil the vinegar, wine, peppercorns, shallots and tarragon until it is reduced to about 1tbsp.

Add 1 tbsp cold water to help cool the concentrate.  Add the egg yolks and then salt and cayenne to taste.  Then you whip like mad while you warm the sauce very carefuly  until the sauce is light and “airy”.

And now comes the tricky part: Take the sauce off the heat and pour in the warm butter very gently while still whipping like mad. Don’t use the whey at the bottom of the pot! The result should be that the sauce starts to thicken.Then you strain the sauce…

… add the parsley and it’s all done.

Sounds very easy, doesn’t it

French people must have 3 hands or more, but luckily about two danes can do the same.

And so, our very first real sauce Bearnaise was made, just in time to  become the best possible companion to the biggest rare steaks, that have enteret our kitchen.. ever…