Two tasty dinners, and one flop

I made a couple of yummy dinners lately. This weekend I wanted to make a pea soup. However, instead of split peas I used green lentils. And in place of ham hocks, I used what's called røget bacon - its like a slab of bacon with the pig skin on it (I cut the skin part off).



Then last night I made salmon with sauteed spinach and mushrooms, and quinoa. The quinoa is red because I added Sazon to it. I love love love Sazon, but I recently googled its ingredients and wouldn't you know, MSG is #1 on the list. I'm going to use what I have, but then once its gone, I'm going to try to find a non-MSG substitute.

I've also taken to steaming the salmon in a covered pan with just a bit of water. Even though the outside doesn't get crisp, the salmon stays moist inside - and if I have to choose one or the other, I'll choose moist.


A recent food flop was apple and onion relish. I'd seen something similar on TV with onion, cabbage, and pears/apples. The recipe I got off the web was just sauteed onion and apples, with vinegar, sugar, and spices. Maybe a *good* one of these recipes would work as a condiment (an actual relish).


What I really want to try to make is a cheesecake. They don't sell them pre-made here, and cheesecake is one dessert that I'll always eat. I have the ingredients and a recipe selected. But I need to keep the baked cake in the refrigerator overnight, so I need to wait until I have space to do that.

My regular size fridge is going to be SUCH a luxury when we get back to the states.

Not Quite a Danish Kitchen

We've had some good meals lately. Now that leeks are in season, one of our new favorite side dishes is sauteed leeks and mushroom. I like to serve it lukewarm on the side of a salad, and its great.


On the weekend I made a stoup of sorts - ground beef, carrots, leeks, celery, potatoes, and a can of beans-ish things from Germany called linsen mit gron - for which I can't find a translation. All I know is that they were tiny & yummy.


We also tried out the store bought corn tortillas. They were a nice and tasty change to the flour one we always we have...but still not outstanding. So Rich crafted me a tortilla press that I'll probably be trying out this coming weekend.




My mommy salad for playgroup turned out to be - arugula, fennel, oranges, green apple, dried cranberries, and sunflower seeds with red wine vinegar. The oranges paired well with the fennel, and overall the fruit balanced the spiciness of the arugula.

Other than that, I'm slowly working my way through the VP debate. A little bit every day or two. Rich and I trying to watch Top Design - but its just not that good. The catch line (in a manly voice from a woman) - "we just can't live with your design". Paaaalease. She is no Heidi or Padma for sure.

Coffee and Fish (that doesn't sound good)

After dropping Pete off at school yesterday I rode on over to the mall. I decided it would be worth the trip since 1) I really needed some dishwasher salt, 2) it wouldn't be that crazy busy at 9 am on a Thursday morning, and 3) I wanted a hot latte. I really really miss Caribou Coffee. I miss seeing one each time I turn into a slightly busy intersection, I even miss the ones that don't have a drive thru. I miss a bunch of these sorts of conveniences - like Jiffy Lube and rotisserie chicken.

Here is dinner from the other night. I called it whatever-they-have-at-the-store-and-whatever-is-in-the-cupboard. And that night I discovered one new thing (for me at least) - dried cranberries and Parmesan go GREAT together.

I think I'm in love with the salmon here. And that's probably a good thing, because I also think we are going to have to stop eating pork here - at least the hog-lot kind. In MN we got our pork (what I liked to call "happy pig") from the Barrett farm. Grandpa got just enough pigs for those who wanted meat, and he had them live outside, with the cows, having a short but good life. So, I felt relatively guilt free when eating them.

Here it seems the hog-lot problem is just as bad as at home. Maybe even worse since, after the US, Denmark is the second largest pork producer in the world. For a country the size of maybe Michigan, I don't think that's a thing to aspire to. And even this morning, the Danish teacher was telling us that a large chicken farm in Svendborg (30 miles away) has to kill all of its birds due to bird flu (not the really bad bird flu, but something that could morf into the bad one).

So, we are going to try to drastically reduce our pork consumption, which is a bummer for two reasons. The first being that Peter lives of bacon, and more recently pork chops. For a kid with a limited diet, we need to feed him whatever he'll eat. Second, I recently came to a solution for my moral dilemma with eating pig (since they are supposed to be like three-year-old children, who wants to eat a child, plus have you ever looked at their eyes...they have people eyes). Anyway....I decided that if I passed out in a pig pen, they would eat me. So, why not eat them.

Dinner last night was salmon, some yummy green beans, and bean salad on couscous.