Creamy DUCK noodle soup

In the spirit of not letting good food go to waste, I usually cook a soup whenever I make a whole chicken. This past weekend we made a whole Duck - and figured that Duck noodle soup was in order. I've made it before, but this was the first time I made it creamy. And boy was it delish!

I covered the remaining Duck with water and let it simmer for several hours along with a few bay leaves, some thyme, and one onion cut into quarters. Along the way I skimmed the top for fat and other stuff.

After that you sift the 'buillion' and (this part isn't for the faint of heart) you make sure to pick any remaining meat of the bones and remove any small pieces of bone or skin. Preferably you then let it cool a bit so you can skim of any remaining fat from the top.

Strain it back into your bit ole pot and add 3 sliced carrots and 3 sliced onions (if you have things like cellery this is also good, but this was more of a leftover dish for us...).

Add pasta or noodles, a sprinkle of oregano, a sprinkle of thyme, and some 1 % milk.

Just before serving, stir in leftover Sour Cream (I had about 1/2 cup).

'Stop Spild af Mad'

Over the past year or so a campaign to 'stop wasting food' has taken hold of Denmark - and me! I guess I really caught onto the idea when I heard how much food we waste without even really knowing it. I mean, how often do you throw out a little leftover rice, a brown banana, or maybe some old milk? Even though I thought I was pretty good about it, once I started paying attention to how much food goes in the trash, I was a little shocked. And that's just from my own kitchen. When you hear about supermarkets and restaurants, my mind is completely blown....

Anyway, I guess I just wanted to write a little bit about it because it's something that's been on my mind lately. 'stop wasting food' is also a good way to save money on food - because you really try to use everything - thereby saving money. When you're on a fairly tight budget, you try to save any place you can. I know I do. 

One way I've been trying to stop wasting food is to make sure:

• I save leftovers and eat them for lunch or try to make a second dish out of the leftovers
• Make sure I use the entire bag/(whatever it is) of something. 

The last part is the biggest challenge. It sometiems requires a little bit of thought and planning to make sure you use the entire head of cabbage (for example) when you bought it to make coleslaw-.... you still have to find something to make with the other half of the cabbage. 

Anyway - this topic will come up again soon!

More food

This is a good place to save recipes ;) And to share one of my 'empty the refrigerator' dishes

Thai ruskumsnusk

Thai chicken ala Christine

3 carrots (julienne)

3 red peppers (julienne)

2 onions (1/8s)

3 stalks celleri

One small chilli

1 lb Chicken cut into wok pieces

Marinade:

White wine

Red wine vinegar

Soy sauce

2 clove garlic

For the Sauce:

Sour Cream or Milk
Tomato paste one can

Coconut milk one can

Paprika

Ginger (fresh or ground)

Pepper and lemon pepper

Tabasco

Soya sauce

Mortens Aften

We never celebrated 'Mortens Aften' growing up, but for some reason we decided to do so this year. So for my first Mortens Aften ever we invited to friends over to dinner. 

I am lucky enough to have a boy who actually likes to cook and experiment in the kitchen some times, so him and his buddy C started in the kitchen at about 4 PM to clean and prepare the duck. Even though they were supposed to cooking, I am mildly obsessive and also like to cook, so I couldn't help myself from hanging around the kitchen 'helping' them out. Either way, Little Dude was still napping, which allowed me to spend some quality time hanging out with the boys. I took over the gravy making because that way I can get it exactly the way I like it! ;) 

We ended up with a full christmas dinner of duck stuffed with apples and prunes, delicious gravy, browned sweet potatoes, regular potatoes, red cabbage, and waldorf salad. We are definately doing this again next year!

I also had a glass of white wine and half of a christmas beer (blålys) - and ended up with a nice hangover sunday morning???!?

Tuesday Morning

As usual, I have quite a day ahead of me...

It started out with fresh coffee and chocolate milk.... Breakfast of champions (accompanied by toast and jam)


Then, I prepared another round of dough for the fridge...

... I'm already looking forward to fresh bread tomorrow morning. (This time I only made a half-portion of this recipe.)

Now, getting ready to go grocery shopping as well as take care of some vacation money/tax issues. Also, I need to vacuum after a small spice cabinet accident last night.....

Good food, Good Grub, Good God, Let's eat!

Just to keep going on the food-kick, I thought I would review the Dinner we made on friday night for our company...

We had a busy weekend of cooking and preparations....

putting away groceries....

... since we had a couples dinner friday evening and a big Brunch Saturday morning.

 

For Friday, this is how our menu ended up looking... 

 

Appetite teaser:
Bruschetta on toasted baguette

• 2 Ripe tomatoes finely chopped, one onion, finely chopped, fresh basil finely chopped, 2 cloves of pressed garlic, 1 tbsp of EVOO.

 

Main Course:
Filled Turkey Breast - free from the imagination (according to recipe for pork tenderloin from boys family)

• Make a stuffing with sundried tomatoes, fresh basil, fresh parsley, feta cheese, 1 onion, 3 cloves of garlic, and finely chopped mushrooms (about 200gr). Mix together in a small food processor.
• Stuff the Turkey Breast and wrap the entire thing with bacon, or prosciutto.
• Bake however long the packaging requires. Our Turkey was about 1050 gr, which means it called for about 70 minutes.
• If you like a good gravy, add a carrot and an onion (chopped into large pieces) to the pan, along with about a cup or two of broth and a bay leaf. After cooking, bring all of this to a boil in a pan with a bit of milk/cream and perhaps a bit of white wine.

Baked new small potatoes

• Scrubbed and baked whole in oven with salt and pepper for appr. 45 minutes.

Salad with Pears, Prosciutto, and Gorgonzola (a salad I learned from my aunt - I believe it is from the Danish recipe book Suveraene Salater?)

• Chop a blend of lettuce, chop a tomato, finely cut an onion into very thing slices (a red onion works well)
• 2 Pears - cut into quarters to take out the pit, and very finely dice the pear.
• Mix all of these ingredients in a bowl

• Fry prosciotto on pan until brown and crispy

• Chop the bacon finely after frying, but do not mix with salad until immediately before serving. 
• I prepare bowls with pine nuts, sunflower seeds, and gorgonzola, since not everybody likes all the extra topping on their salad.
• Drizzle with a bit of the following dressing: oil, white vine vinegar, honey, lemon juice, salt+ pepper (all to taste)

Desert was homemade ice cream, courtesy of boy. One liter of chocolate marzipan, one liter of Daim. Yum yum yum.

Baking - and not babies

Baking breads has become one of my weekly activities lately. I find it cozy and fun, 'hyggeligt.' Plus, there is the added bonus that baking your own bread saves alot of money while at the same time just tasting sooooo much better.

Normally I bake normal "grovboller" - whole wheat rolls and sandwich/sub rolls. I then felt inspired to try out a recipe that stands for 24 hours in the fridge. The upside to this recipe is that it doesn't require any kneading. Sometimes I find kneading thereapeutic - you know, really giving the dough a hard time, tossing it and hitting and so on. Other times - not so much. It just leaves a messy counter, messy hands, stickiness everywhere. And no one, no one, likes being sticky



I don't remember where I found this specific recipe, but alot of similar recipes exist on different sites and blogs around the internets.

1.5 l lukewarm/cold water
50 g yeast/gær
a large pinch of salt
appr. 2 tbs oil
appr. 2 tbs honey
ALOT of flour (about 2000 gram). I used a blend of (apr.) half normal, a bunch of oats, 1/4 whole wheat (rugmel), 1/4 (groft speltmel). You can really use any blend or combination.
Optional: 1 cup of seeds/nuts (I used a 5-corn blend, or you can use sesame, sunflower, etc.)

this was the second bowl....

Mix everything together with a wooden spoon in a LARGE bowl. The dough is wet and still mixable when you put it in the fridge.

Cover, and leave in fridge for 8-24 hours.

(After 2 hours in the fridge my 5L bowl was overflowing, so either use a REALLY big bowl, or split it into 2 bowls. OR, alternatively, make a smaller portion)

Place Wax paper on a baking sheet, and use two spoons to shape out rolls on the baking sheet. It takes a little practice to get them nice and round, but try dipping the spoons into a glass of water between each roll.

Let stand while oven preheats. Bake at 200c about 20 minutes (depending on size of rolls and quality of oven)

As you can see, the last ones ended up prettier than the first few.

I decided to make the second bowl into a loaf of bread in our new pan.
The loaf needed about 45 minutes in the oven.

After baking

We eat alot of this type of bread, either as a supplement to lunch, as a snack, or for breakfast. So I like to bake really big portions and stock the freezer. The nice thing about this recipe though, is that you could potentially mix the dough at night, place in fridge at night, and bake fresh in the morning. I haven't tried it yet personally, but I've been told that the dough can last several days in the fridge. So, if you are really energetic, you could make a big portion of dough and bake new bread every morning, just for what you need that specific day.

The boy commented "It looks like real bread!"
Thanks honey.

P.S. As with all bread, it freezes well if frozen soon after baking. Defrost in oven or on counter.

Advice needed

This weekend we are having company over x2. First a friend of the boys, plus her boyfriend, are coming to dinner friday night. So it is kind of a couples night-diner.

Saturday morning the boy's brother and family are visiting for brunch.

So what to serve?

At first I was thinking different Tapas for friday night, but since I don't know them that well I also don't know if they will appreciate it - not to mention that it will require alot of time and prep. I am honestly blank for ideas - I am feeling uninspired. I don't want to just serve a roast/steak/good meat with potatoes and bernaise sauce - I want it to be more exciting than that. HELP?

For saturday morning we are making a good, old American brunch. I don't need as much help with that one, but suggestions and recipes are welcome. So far, we are thinking of:
pancakes with syrup, scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage, baked beans, biscuits, baked tomatoes, fruit (melon and grapes), fresh pressed juice, coffee/tea.

Rhubarb cake

Lately I've been on a mission to clean out the freezer. Don't get me wrong, I am a huge fan of a well-stocked freezer (perhaps a post on how much I love my freezer in the future?). Recently though we/I realized that we had alot of random stuff in there and that we were running out of space.

So I decided to clean it out just a little bit.

These rhubarbs are leftover from this past summer and originate from the beachhouse where my grandparents have spent summers for the past 40 years!

I used a recipe from here , except I didn't make it vegan.

hot food, hot drinks, hot hot hot hot

We now have a microwave!

It's the little things in life...!

CRAVE!

One of the most well known pregnancy 'symptoms' are the odd cravings. It is one of two main questions:

1. Have you been feeling sick, have you had morning sickness?
2. Have you had any odd cravings?

"Cravings"
I wouldn't describe them so much as cravings so much as things that just taste really good these days. They are all food items that I already like/love, but that I just REALLY like now.

Avocado
I always loved avocado. Apparently my mom ate alot of them when she was pregnant with me. I like to eat them plain, I like to eat them in salad, I like to eat them on toast, I like to eat them as a part of a tomato sandwich - it's just plain delicious.

Cheese - especially stinky cheese and blue cheese
Cheese really isn't the worth craving to have since it counts as part of my dairy/calcium requirements, but I'm technically not really supposed to eat unpasteurized cheese and moldy cheeses. Sometimes I cheat and do so anyway - it's the one thing I do that I'm not really supposed to - and I am perfectly okay with it.

Rice, potatoes, bread - starch?
This may have to do with the "plain food" thing that some people talk about - that they only want to eat plain pasta or toast with butter. I haven't had any problems with spices and flavor, but starches are especially delicious these days.

"Things I don't like"
Some people describe certain foods that made them gag throughout their pregnancy. This kind of changes for me from day to day. Sometimes I just really don't feel like eating chicken, or I start eating a salad and suddenly don't really like the tomatoes. The next day I have no problems with tomatoes nor with the chicken.

Sushi
Even though I love Sushi, the thought of sushi has made me somewht queesy lately. I'm not supposed to eat raw fish anyway, so I guess it's a good thing that I'm not craving sushi.

And on mondays we eat fish....

(Except sometimes it happens on wednesdays instead)

In an effort to improve our diets, palates, and overall health, we have incorporated "fiskemandag" or "fishy monday." On mondays, we eat fish!

This week was a pretty simple, all in one dish in the oven.

Potatoes peeled and diced. Carrots peeled and diced. Squah diced. Onion quartered. Garlic cut into medium pieces. Lemon pepper, salt, and a tablespoon of oil mixed with veggies.

Bake in oven about 20 minutes

Place fish on top, sprinkle with salt, squeeze a lime over fish and vegetables. Bake for another 25 minutes.

(the times are of course dependant on the thickness of the fish and the size of the vegetables)

We had it with hollandaise sauce because we are just sauce lovers. We also contemplated making a mustard-dijon sauce, which I think would also have fit well with this dish. Or you could make a dressing of some sort woth sour cream, garlic, and parsley. The options are endless!

What Up

Thought I'd stop by blogland to let you know that I have nothing new to report.

Today the boy comes home from being away skiing for the past 9 days, and I am being an excellent girlfriend and getting lunch ready for him. Also, this week will be the last week in the "dormroom," so the packing will soon commence, as will the cleaning. And the throwing out of all the useless junk I've collected over the last year-and-a-half.

P.S. The jetlag has not yet been conquered. It's just hard when you don't have classes or work to get you up in the morning and when you suffer from insomnia that keeps you awake from about 2 AM to 4 AM every night.

P.P.S. Textbooks are mad expensive. Ugh.

Potato Soup and Jetlag

Back to real life, back to updating my life(style?) blog (yeah, I wish this blog had a theme).

Life has been pretty quiet and simple this week. I finally turned in my internship report this week, so now I am going to work beating this jetlag issue. Yes, it's true, I am still suffering from jetlag as well as a little "stomach bug" that has me feeling a little, well, under the weather at times. I pretty much spent the weekend + monday just sleeping, eating, and writing whenever I could. Therefore, I have now turned to tackling jetlag.

Today, I did not succeed, as I woke up with a massive headache that had me feeling sick and staying in bed until mid-day. Not conducive to getting into a normal sleep rhythm. It doesn't help that I've had problems actually falling asleep as well as waking up pretty steadily at around 3 AM every night.

Anyway, enough whining. After spending the morning in bed I spent the afternoon with my friend C and home-baked muffins, yummy yummy (not made by me but made by C)This was followed by a very exciting trip to the grocery store before returning home to make delicious delicious soup for dinner: kartoffel porre suppe. - which I believe is translated into potato soup with leeks and carrots.

Let me let you in on my little trick for this soup, since I don't have pictures to share: I start out by browning and crisping bacon pieces in the bottom of a big pot. I then spoon the bacon out onto a plate covered with a paper towel. I use the remaining bacon grease and bacon flavor to saute the onions before adding the rest of my ingredients. I feel like it gives the soup a little extra kick. Plus the bacon bits taste really good on top.(see list of ingredients to follow)

That's all for that quarter folks!


Potato soup
bacon bits,
butter
two leeks
pound of potatoes
3 carrots

water 2 cups?
milk 2 cups?
salt
pepper
a tiny bit of chili powder
2 chicken broth tablets (or, if you are an overachieve you make your own chicken or vegetable stock but I'm just not that awesome - today)

Cinnamon theme!

In Denmark, there are a alot of fun traditions for birthdays and anniversaries that are quite different from in the US.

There is a long tradition for calling the 30^th birthday of an unmarried person the “pepper birthday” or “pepper bachelor/oldmaid.” You do all kinds of things with pepper and also give them pepper as a gift.

A newer tradition is that of calling the 25^th birthday the cinnamon birthday. This is a much newer tradition, probably thought up by young Danes who just wanted to have some extra fun and an extra excuse for a big party.

Boy recently turned 25 (aka old). So of course, I couldn’t let the opportunity pass to 'give him cinnamon' - Christine Style!

Cinnamon is really messy and stinky though, so I don’t really like the idea of throwing cinnamon around and making a mess with it. This is actually what alot of people do - they throw it around, put it in stuff that explodes - lots of grossness. Also, since I am younger, I don’t want to get the cinnamon back 10 times worse than I gave it.

So instead, I decided to bake and make foods with cinnamon. Lucky you, I'm sharing my recipes and pictures....

Homemade 'mater Soup

Dinner tonight

The theme of the meal was “emptying our fridge before weekend trip”. So, what to do with a bunch of tomatoes and some leftover milk?

• 5 overripe tomatoes
• One small onion
• One carrot
• Tomato paste (small can)
• Chicken stock-cube
• Water
• Milk
• Salt, pepper

Dice onion and carrot, simmer with olive oil. Add tomato paste and tomatoes. Add water and chicken stock with some milk. Season to taste.

Technically you are supposed to blend the soup, but if you don’t have a blender (like me), you can cheat by running the soup through a colander to get al the chunks out of the soup. Although – and this is is probably forbidden in “real cooking world” – I kind of like the chunks in the soup.

Excuse the bad photo - taken with cameraphone - with wierd colors apparently.
Tastes much better than it looks!

 

I’m not good with measurements, as I just added water and milk to taste and texture. But this makes a pretty big portion- I’d say it could feed 4 if you eat it with fresh bread (or even better: grilled cheese sandwiches) or with noodles. It tastes delicious, it’s easy, it’s cheap, and it’s healthy. Coupled with some fresh bread and it made an absolutely delish dinner!

P.S. also good with garlic bread!

on a more positive note...

10 Things I luurve

1. Pretty Little Liars, it’s like a teenage dream. Deliciously, wonderfully, bad and amazing,
2. Bright pink fuzzy socks “hyggesokker”
3. Looking up interesting recipes online and drooling because of the potential deliciousness.
4. Baking loads and loads of cookies. Then being asked for the recipe by people at work.
5. Waking up to the smell of freshly brewed coffee
6. Wearing warm gloves for the first time of the winter season
7. Playing with other peoples babies, (in a non-creepy way) yet still appreciating that I can hand them back when they cry or poop or otherwise become messy or annoying.
8. Looking at apartments I can’t afford. Then decorating them in my mind with things I can’t afford.
9. These earrings from Georg Jensen:

10. Feeling productive and satisfied at the end of a long day.

10 Things I strongly dislike

1. Pressing the snooze button. More than twice. Always a bad idea.
2. Waking up late in the morning; hurriedly getting ready for work, then making it to the end of my street before realizing that I forgot to put on real shoes.What am I wearing, you might ask? H2O indoor flip flops and bright pink fuzzy socks, would be the answer.
3. Forgetting to take cookies out of the oven and thereby burning an entire pan of pineapple almond cookies.
4. Finding a great sale for essential kitchen items and making a stop by Bilka (Target equivalent) after work, only to realize those essential items are sold out.
5. Buying stuff I don't really need at Bilka just because it is there and “it’s such a great deal.”
6. Missing the bus by 3 minutes and walking home from Bilka with heavy bags.
7. Not knowing what to buy as a birthday present for my wonderful boy-toy
8. When my boy-toys winter coat and cell phone get stolen at the gym. Why can’t people leave stuff alone if it doesn’t belong to them?
9. That it is cold and dark outside when I wake up in the morning….
10. …. And knowing that soon it will also be dark by the time I leave work