Food & Thoughts

  For obvious reasons, it would be silly to cook fennel for people who don't appreciate it, which is just about 2/3 of my household. I, on the other hand LOVE fennel - so I had to find someone to cook this dish for. Luckily, I had a much cherished and also fairly new friend come over, who happened to also love fennel.  Let's just say we gobbled up the two bulbs I made between us - it was THAT good. Dressing could definitely be used elsewhere, too. Easy to make, too. 

  Oh my God, soooo good! The recipe header reads: Calling all olive heads... Well, you had me at hello! Exactly the right amount of brine-y - salty - spicy - hot one could wish for, with the ricotta salata giving a little respite from the heat. I guess it really depends on your chili paste what heat you get - and of course also on your heat preference - but I might dial the amount back to half a tablespoon, because if I am not to adapt to my liking, why take notes at all?  Used self imported Rancho Gordo Ayocote Blanco Beans , which were outstanding. The poached egg on top made it a full meal. Definitely a do-again. 

  Every once in a while, my dad-in-law stumbles upon an offer of red meat he cannot resist. That sometimes result in a somewhat spontaneous (as in: planned within a week or so) dinner - they bring the meat, we provide the BBQ and some sides. Couldn't let the opportunity of trying yet another one of Justines recipes pass me by. I leafed through the book, suddenly realizing that the majority of her salad recipes are made of cooked or baked vegetables, and somehow hit my autumn/winter spot, more than the summer equivalent. I am definitely on team 'cooked salads' AND team 'a salad can be a meal' - but a lot of the recipes suddenly seemed well - wintry. Which might not be entirely fair, because there are Tempura-fried Asparagus with Buttermilk Dressing, A Garden Salad to Make You Love Garden Salads and Basil Cucumbers with Slightly Sweet Peanuts also available - but on certain days, I have to take the people I feed into account as well, and I wasn't sure any of those...

Back in 2013, I started a post with the above title. I also wrote the next four paragraphs: 'You know what I miss? I miss this place. I miss writing. I miss cooking. I miss pouring over cookbooks, having them lying next to my bed when I fall asleep at night. I don't know why I stopped. Wait, maybe that's not the whole truth. There are just so many reasons I did stop - child, school, home life, oh, and a brand new interest in knitting - that coming back became hard. And also, food blogging became a chore, not what it started out being: an adventure, a sharing of dreams and posibilities and ideas. It became a popularity contest. I don't know if it still is, because frankly, I don't read food blogs very much these days. But that's probably good, for me, if I want to bring it back to basics. Writing about food, about what I do in the kitchen, and about what happens in my life, and how what happens in the kitchen reflects that. I miss being happy in the kitchen...

It's not a complicated thing: basically olive oil, hot, fennel seeds and chili flakes until fragrant, sage leaves fried until crispy, add eggs, douse in the oil. It's just good. Flavours BIG and BOLD. I enjoyed it.

Lavede efter Chad Robertsons opskrift, bare en halv portion - og det skal man passe på med, for fik puttet for meget salt i, og kæmpede så med at pille de (heldigvis!) store saltkrystaller ud igen, mens jeg vendte dejen. Brugte: Primært Gærda + 20 g. Rugpaul, cirka - 100 g. i alt. Begge flød fint. Halv/halv valset (Bornholms Valsemølle) og stenkværnet Skærtoft Skærtoft grov hvede Og så, ja... 17 g. salt. Fra sammenrør til formet ca. 5 timer. Kunne nok godt have hævet lidt mere inden shaping, men jeg skulle nå på vagt. Fik tre timer på køkkenbordet, inden den så røg på køl. Så ganske fin ud morgenen efter, kl 845, hvor den blev bagt af. Ovn opvarmet til 275, skruede ned til 250 + kraftig damp - men efter 2-3 minutter blev jeg en kylling, og skruede ned til 220. Derfor 20 min. i alt med kraftig damp, og så op på 250 i 5-6 minutter til farve. DOMMEN: Lidt tættere i krummen end de sidste par stykker, og skorpen lidt tynd. Jeg skal nok prøve at følge instruktionen - egentlig...

It's June, it's summer, it's HOT! Can't have the oven on for too long, so brownies, layered with ice cream from the lovely,  Foodbeam ? Hear hear! Only I never got so far as to do the cookie sandwiches - I just ate my cookies alongside banana ice cream from ParadIS . It was lovely! METHOD: This is a cookie, but unlike most cookies I make, there's no creaming of butter and sugar. Instead, you go the standard brownie route: melt chocolate and butter together, beat eggs and sugar, mix the two and add flour mixture. The batter ends up somewhat stiffer than a regular brownie batter, but only by a whisker. INGREDIENTS: These cookies use brown sugar - that's new, only my standard recipe has a mix of brown sugar and regular sugar. There's a - in comparison - tiny bit of sugar (30 grams), but that is more than made up for by the amount of chocolate - 200 grams. I used Valrhona Guanaja 70%. chocolate:egg:sugar ratio: Standard (January): 110:2:300 Meyer...

  For the month of May, I'd decided to try a cakey brownie. I should probably let you know - and I guess I already have - that I much prefer my brownies fudgy, rather than cakey. But you know - science. Perhaps I was missing out, not ever trying out the cakey ones? If anyone should know about chocolate (and hence, brownies) it oughta be The Scharffen Berger people. So I grabbed the cookbook I have from them, and found the aptly named: cakey brownie. They have other kinds, too, but this what was I needed. Here we go: METHOD:  The method in this cake involved doing a meringue to start - whipping egg whites with sugar, luckily nothing with thermometers and sugar syrup! I let the trusty KA do the job, and it was no problemo. The recipe did call for the meringue to be whipped until the sugar dissolved, and while it was whicking away, I started thinking whether my sugar ever dissolves?? Not just using this method, but Im pretty sure there's always a little grit to it... I al...

Unsweetened chocolate. Oh, the woe is me. Unsweetened chocolate was the key ingredient in this months brownie , coming to you from Deb, over at Smitten Kitchen . Not easy to come by around these parts, let me tell you. Back when I started this project, I asked one of my friends going to New York if he would get me some, but even in the City of Dreams, he didn't find it. Well, he didn't find the Sharffen-Berger kind I wanted. Luckily, I had some at home, from a trip I did many, many moons ago - but it was long-past-it's-best-before-date. Not one to be deterred, I used it anyways - which may be an explanation for my less than impressive results. (yes, that was a spoiler right there...) METHOD You melt chocolate and butter, then whisk in sugar, then eggs. Similar to my standard recipe, but the batter became almost fudge-caramel like - long and dense, somehow. And you could tell there was a LOT of sugar in there, with it almost crystallizing. INGREDIENTS: chocolat...

The first month of spring, and time for something new. For me, and The Year of Brownies, that meant really getting out of the comfort zone, in the form of adding something not chocolate to my brownies. Enter the walnut. I've had bad experiences with nuts. There's nothing that can ruin a cake, bread or salad like a stale nut, and for a long time, I was the type of person that bought stockpiles of nuts, only to have them go rancid at the back of the drawer. And a bad nut will most certainly mess up the taste experience, so perhaps what I've not liked about nuts in my brownies was not so much the texture, but the (off) taste. Given time, I've learned to keep my nuts in rotation, and now buy them when I need them, so they're fresh and sweet. There seems to be a trend towards me posting at the very end of the month, but I promise, these were baked on March 31st (hence the back-dating of the post). Nothing like a deadline, eh? METHOD: Slightly different from m...

February is my birthday month, so of course, we had to have brownies for my birthday. Choosing this particular recipe for this month made a lot of sense - in it's original listing, it makes 40 brownies and uses 750 grams of chocolate! No way was I going to find myself with that much cake around ALONE. I scaled the numbers back to 8/15 (original recipe calls for 15 eggs, hence the weird conversion), and even so, we had PLENTY of cake - even some for the fridge for a couple of days later. For some reason, they state in the recipe that the cake will keep for 2-3 weeks in the fridge. Yeah, not around here. METHOD Procedure-wise, this recipe has you melt chocolate and butter and add that to whisked together eggs and sugar. This is slightly different from my standard method, were the sugar is dissolved with chocolate/butter, and the eggs then added afterwards. INGREDIENTS The chocolate:egg;sugar ratio in my standard recipe is 110:2:300. The Meyer recipe h...

Like I said, I already have a brownie recipe I find pretty perfect. It has no add-ons, save for extra chocolate, when I feel like it, it comes together in no time, and I almost always have all the ingredients at the ready. Come to think of it, this recipe may have been one of the first brownies I ever made. The book that it comes from is one that I bought back when I lived with my still-boyfriend in London, back in 2000. It's called The Little Red Barn Baking Book  and is written by Adriana Rabinovich, who - I just found out - has a gluten-free-centered blog called Gluten-free Cooking for Kids . Back in the days, her company (also named The Little Red Barn) sold brownies, cookies etc. to Starbucks, Fortnum & Mason's and Selfridges to name a few, and she decided to share her recipes in this here book. aIt was a little unassuming number, but the amount of recipes I wanted to make - banana bread! cinnamon buns! Devil's food cake! Snickerdoodles! -  as I paged through it...

I miss it here. And you know? There's only one way of changing that. Getting back to it. This morning, while putting together a brownie for coffee guests coming over later, it hit me: I need a project. No better time for starting one than when the year has just turned. I think I have a pretty good recipe for brownies. At least I have one I always make -  I've made others, but have somehow always returned to this one. But is it really the best? I like squidgy and gooey more than cakey brownies. I like plain, unadorned brownies - no nuts, berries, add-ons - just chocolate, please. But perhaps I'm in the wrong? Thing is, I don't know. I need to find out. So prepare for a 2016 with a Baker's Dozen of Brownies - one for each month. My list is as follows: January: My go-to - Little Red Barn Baking Book's Brownies February: Claus Meyer's Brownies (from Meyers Bageri) March: Nigella Lawson's Birthday Brownies (from How to be a Domestic Goddess) A...

Our son, Charlie, is 5 years old. He loves playing with Lego, running, climbing, digging in the dirt, watching cartoons, fixing stuff with his Dad, eating ice cream and dancing with his Mom in the kitchen. He says 'please' and 'thank you' and almost never wipes his hands on his pants. He looks gorgeous with a chocolate moustache and his little hands are always warm. He has lovely and cute friends, and they play like there's no tomorrow. I try to show him the world, to teach him everything I can. But I think that sometimes, he's the one teaching me.  I recently had a week from Hell. Something about me finishing up at the place I'm currently at, and looking for a new job, thinking I got a position that then turned out to be a dud, and me going into a drama-queen-existential-tantrum, thinking the world would never come back together again. (Okay, I was post two nightshift and only had three hours of sleep. Reason has tight accomodations under those c...

My Dad used to boil me eggs. Back when I was little, and I was with him on the weekends, we'd usually have soft boiled eggs in the morning. Two per person. I'd rush to eat my first one before him, so that I could turn it upside down and pretend to serve him his first egg. He'd play along and give it a proper bash to peel it, and lo and behold, the empty shell would fall in on itself. Ah, the silly little joys! I remember how hard it was to peel that egg. It was too hot, and my little fingers got burned, and the shells cut like little sharp blades. I'm not entirely sure, but I actually think my Dad always peeled them, until that whole ritual stopped - not consciously, but because, life. I became a teenager and got a boyfriend. My Dad married my Bonus-Mom and little brothers and sisters entered our lives and had to have their eggs peeled. For a lot of years, I didn't eat many soft boiled eggs. M doesn't like them and if he was having scrambled eggs, it felt ...

Bread. Last week. It happens, every once in a while. Last week, I also had pizza made with pre-made crust, and at least one take-out meal.  I'm far, far away from the food blogging scene, but I miss it here. I miss writing about food, and reading about food. I miss cooking. Dancing in the kitchen with ingredients. It's not like we don't cook no more, it's more like I don't take photos of it.  But perhaps now is as good a time as ever to get back to it. It's been two years, almost. Perhaps I should just do it, as they say. I will. I'll press 'publish', just like that. Here you go!

I have eleven (11!) tomato plants on my balcony. There are white ones, yellow ones, green and red ones, pink, orange and even black ones. Some are big, some are small, some are the shape of dates, some are very round and others very long. Two of them are striped. A couple of them I grew from seed, but I couldn't help myself when we went on our yearly visit to Gartneri Toftegaard , so some of them came into this home as wee little baby-plants. They've grown, they're producing like crazy (as in big bowlfuls, everyday) and I love it. I loved that I've nursed them all through spring and summer, trimmed the little side shots and the crazy leaves, schlepped water from downstairs so they could have their drinks, fed them, talked to them, moved them around so the sun wasn't too harsh on their delicate leaves or so that they didn't drown in the August downpours. Tomatoes are like gold. But they are not the only thing growing in this house. When I got pregnant, I prom...

I wish I had more time. I wish I had more inspiration. I wish that instead of a feeling of helplessness when stumbling upon a new foodblog, I was sure of my own voice in this weird, interactive community. That I felt like I had a place, that what I did was - is - something unique. There are days when I do, and then there are days where I feel like it doesn't matter one bit, because how is what I do different from what all the others do? And if it isn't different, why bother? I wish I didn't feel like I had to make an excuse everytime I actually do put up a post. I wish it didn't bother me so much to have to type out recipes. This is a food blog - it kind of goes with the concept. I wish I didn't feel like I'm sometimes holding on to something that's already dead. But in my mind, I'm still writing up posts and I'm still taking pictures. Granted, there are a lot more baby photos taking up space on my memory card these days, but every now and agai...

Walnut breads How many bread bibles is it legal for one woman to own? Considering that I am an avid baker, who takespride in baking most of the bread we consume in this wee household, I take it there's still a limit. Two of the ones I have are even NAMED The Bread Bible, but are by different authors. One book I have two editions of, because, well... I didn't realize they were the same. Yet, even so, I managed to acquire one more of those babies - Meyers Bageri . It's Danish, it's gorgeous and I strongly recommend it. Light rye bread Every time I buy a bread book (or even a regular cookbook) I feel like it's more or less the same recipes that are in there. Obviously, it doesn't stop me from buying them. But there's your everyday wheat-type bread, a couple sourdoughs, some dark bread and then they end with a couple of yeasted cakes. Of course, they're not exactly the same in all the books, but they're cut from the same fabric. Often, I just end up u...