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).

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

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.

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.

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!

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!