Mjx

I went down to the water, where there are quite a few elderflower bushes growing, to see whether there were any elderflowers left. It's been a bit overcast today. I needed 40 to 50 flower-heads, or, according to the one recipe that gave weights for everything, half a kilo. Eventually, found some bushes that still had flowers that were reachable, if I didn’t mind pawing through nettles and thistles. I’d dressed accordingly, and forged ahead. I foraged further, and eventually managed to get 50 flower-heads, although some were a bit small. Fortunately for me, when I scrambled out of the shrubbery and onto the main road, my hair full of twigs, the various passers-by didn’t give me a second look; the bag of flowers I was clutching told the entire story. The next job was to pick all the florets off the main stems, since the stems supposedly make the concentrate bitter. My haul weighed 320 g, and took about an hour to pick through: I really love the way elderflowers look, I find them incredibly frothy and festive, the way excellent champagne would look if it was a flower. I used 2 L water, 500 g sugar (half the traditionally called-for amount for this amount of water and flower-heads), the zest and juice of 3 limes (I find their flavour more interesting than lemons’), about a tablespoon of citric acid (the scale died on me while I was weighing it), and a pinch of salt. I boiled the water, dissolved the sugar and salt in it, then added the flowers, and the lime juice and zest: It’s supposed to steep for 3 to 4 days, but I can’t find any explanation of why so long; the flowers go into nearly-boiling water, and they’re both fresh and very small (no more than 0.5 cm across, and many are smaller), so a long steep seems unnecessary. I’ve decided to taste it tomorrow morning, and if I like where it is, I’m going to filter, regardless of precedent. At this point, I realized that I needed to get going with dinner, and since there wasn’t much time, I went with larb:

Thanks! And I know what you mean: I watch people eating solid breakfasts at the crack of dawn, and cannot figure it out. Even in Europe

Today’s plan was to collect elderflowers and make elderflower drink concentrate, one of the very traditional Danish things I like most. I noticed some great shrubs a couple of weeks back, and figured this would be the perfect week to do it. However, a friend has just informed me that I’m kind of late to the party, and most of the elderflowers are finished, and he did his... a couple of weeks back. Erm. Well, I’m going to take a look, anyway. Right after breakfast. Two takes on breakfast: My boyfriend's preferred chocolate/sugar bombs: and cold pheasant and rucola with balsamic vinegar: Part of the reason I usually skip breakfast, or have something that is not traditionally regarded as breakfast, is that I handle most starches fairly poorly, so many of the conventional Western breakfast choices don’t make for the greatest start to my day. Fortunately, the alternatives are fairly attractive (and they can out-do my boyfriend's breakfast in the 'You can't be serious factor', by several orders of magnitude, e.g. a Ritter Sport).

Thanks! The pasta dish was improvised (I improvise a lot of the time), but it's the sort of thing that doesn't really need a recipe. I saw these (frozen) pheasant breasts in the supermarket, and thought they’d be a nice element in the pasta and bean dish I had in mind; the porcini came into the equation when I realized that I did not have a litre of stock in the refrigerator as I thought, in fact, I had none! There are quite a few recipes I use fairly often, but I usually make some changes to them. Pheasant (and various other frozen game) is usually available at this particular supermarket chain, and I'm fairly certain that it’s a by-product of canned hunting. You have to watch out for shot when you're eating it, or you can do really expensive things to your teeth. Also, my boyfriend's father hunts (of course, that’s seasonal), and right now there is some venison, some wild duck, and (I think) a pheasant in our freezer. Fresh game in shops is really expensive (so is rabbit, when it come to that). My Danish is best described as ‘entertaining’; it’s relatively fluent, but patchy and unreliable, and I still make some epic mistakes. I grew up bilingual, but we left Italy when I was young, and I haven’t spent any lengthy blocks of time there since, so my Italian is not as strong as it was, making English my strongest language. There are a lot of security cameras in Denmark! In this instance, a few security cameras are probably the most cost-effective option for minimizing theft, almost certainly cheaper than hiring someone to stand there (even minimum wage is high, here), and the odds of anyone stealing a bunch of vegetables aren't that significant. Plus, there is a bench nearby, which is usually occupied by at least one eagle-eyed resident from the senior housing centre next door, which is a sort of deterrent to anyone wanting to stroll in and nick some strawberries. I especially like lovage with game, chicken, and mushrooms, and usually include it when I make stock from these. Sometimes, I add the leaves to the mix when I'm deglazing a pan for a sauce. I find it works nicely with thyme, rosemary, bay leaf, cinnamon, cloves, and juniper berries (not all together!). Lovage is one of my favourite herbs, and I'm currently in luck: there are a couple of extremely vigorous plants of it right outside the kitchen window, so I've been using it with a pretty free hand. Thanks! We had the cherry tomatoes you see in the corner, and that was it. I've been tending towards very compact, simplified meals since we've been staying with my boyfriend's parents, usually just a main dish and a (usually raw) vegetable. The Danish bread chocolate (the square-ish sheet on my boyfriend's bread) is plain/dark chcolate, and it's also available in a milk chocolate version that I've never tried. the Dutch bread chocolate (the things that look like cake decorations, on my bread) is both kinds: the ones on the left side of the bread are plin, the ones on the right are milk (the difference in these is mostly textura, though).

Dinner was penne and cannellini, with pheasant, porcini, lovage, and thyme: I'd love to say the lighting is meant to be atmospheric, but I just forgot to turn on the light.

Do you eat much fish? I remember from Sweden a long time ago that rodspette is very nice. Actually, as I was walking away from where the fish guy wasn't, I realized I wouldn't have got anything, anyway: fish is currently proscribed, because my boyfriend's father hates the smell of it cooking!

Eventually, I had some breakfast. This bread chocolate is not so good. Not very chocolaty, although I kind of like the texture. Crunchy. That’s honey under the chocolate, in case anyone was starting to believe I eat healthily. No butter, because I don’t like my butter in combination with anything else (on bread, that is). Then, I went out shopping. I saw this sign (‘The fish man is here today’), and thought I’d get some fish (or at least nice shots of fish). However, the sign was deceptive, since there wasn’t any indication of anyone selling fish. No idea what that was about. At my next stop, there is a sign that says, ‘New potatoes, vegetables, strawberries, peas’, outside a small, unmanned hut where you can get produce, and pay by putting your money in a tin just inside the door, sort of on the honour system. Apart from the two or three security cameras (out of frame). New potatoes, strawberries, and green peas are the Danish summer produce trifecta, and I thought some peas would be nice. Except, there were no peas. Under the dark cloth are potatoes (the dark cloth keeps them from sprouting): I thought about getting some strawberries, but decided against it, since I had more shopping to do, and didn’t want them to get smashed. Next, I pushed on to Føtex, the higher-end chain of a major Danish supermarket conglomerate. Here, there were peas, although I only got a few, since they were on the large side, and those can tend to be a bit stony: They have a small selection of organic (‘øko’) produce, where I was hoping to find some EU garlic (I didn’t, but at least it didn’t come as a surprise). Towards the back they have wine and beer: The aisles are curvy, which may or may not serve a specific function, but I like the effect: I mentioned that the selection of herbs and spices is a bit restricted, and this is pretty much it (the light is not too good here): There is a fair amount of duplication among the herbs and spices: Santa Maria (dark-blue labelled items) is about the most widely distributed brand, Budget is Føtex's budget store brand (Princip is their high-end one), and the herbs in tins are by Urtekram, a specialty/organic brand (I like the tins, since they protect the contents from light). One thing that always surprises me about US supermarkets is the vast number of breakfast cereal offerings; here, they occupy just one side of a short aisle. Muesli and various types of oats are popular, and Kellogg and Quaker brand sugar crappies make up the rest of the selections: There’s a small section of gluten-free items, and some organic ones (others found in the various other sections, too): The dairy section is fairly substantial. Naturally, I forgot to take a picture of the unusually wide variety of cultured milk products, something quite usual here (in the US, there are quite a few brands, but usually not that much variety; here it’s the opposite). I'm planning more interesting shopping tomorrow/Wednesday. And now, I need to figure out dinner.

Precisely. It's great stuff. I had another kind today, as an experiment, and can't say I was thrilled.

I have no idea. I think putting margarine or butter under prosciutto or bresaola is barbaric, but I'm not eating it, so I try to remain calm. In Denmark, a major selling point for margarine is that it spreads nicely, and doesn't tear your bread. But when I've kept the butter on the counter, so it's nice and spreadable, he's said 'No thanks', and still reached for the margarine. I guess he's just used to the flavour. Is the book dedicated to baking with spelt flour? I've always treated it precisely the same way as plain wheat flour, although I'll if a recipe calls for cake flour, I'll cut it with a bit of rice flour, since the protein content is pretty high. I don't know that Gabriele Bonci is that much of a celebrity outside of Rome or Italy. In any event, his pizza is great, and according to knowledgeable expat writer and Roman food guru Katie Parla, the book is worthy. Weinoo, that's why I put celebrity in quotes, but since mjx has a connection to Italy, I thought she might know who he was. Sorry i wasn't clear though. I am not convinced by some of his weird pizza topping combinations, but that's just me. For example, licorice on pizza sounds vile to me. I do however like a lot of what he writes about the process. (and some other yummy combinations. ) Like I said, only my humble opinion. Still love his pizza. Can't wait for his bakery. (p.s. he's on national TV in Italy every week so may be at least somewhat famous outside rome. ) Mjx, Not at all dedicated to the flour. but he recommends it a lot. I am dying to try it and you've just convinced me further. Your bread looked wonderful. Ha! I don't feel so out of the loop for being unfamiliar with him, now. And if he's putting licorice on pizza... I don't know. I love both pizza and licorice, but it would take some serious threats to make me eat them together.

The article seems to kind of miss the point that should raise the most concern, which is that the important argument in favour of organic production is that (done properly) it reduces damage to the environment. Research on whether or not organic food is healthier for individual human beings is not at all conclusive, but there's no question that, since the biosphere is effectively a closed system, it has a limited capacity to absorb the various byproducts of food production. You overload the soil and water with certain substances, and things get unhealthy for everyone, regardless of what they're eating. Yet the article addresses this only briefly, half a dozen lines buried in the middle the article, discussing the (unsuccessful) atttempt to have the herbicide ammonium nonanoate added to the accepted organic list. Compared to other herbicides, ammonium nonanoate is pretty mild stuff, but when you okay one herbicide, you open the door to more aggressive ones (weeds tend to become resistant to herbicides; this is both aggravated by, and a cause of overspraying) that are more problematic, in terms of environmental impact: it becomes harder to say No. The possibility of a future in which crops that have been sprayed with, say, Roundup, being able to bear the 'organic' label is not an unreasonable concern, and who knows? it may be discovered that Roundup is fine for humans, after all. But it plays hell with the environment (in Denmark, for example, they're finding lots of it in ground water, and frog numbers are declining). Since we're kind of stuck on this planet, it'd be a good idea to try to make it as healthy a place to live as possible; loosening organic standards doesn't seem like an ideal step in that direction.

Add me to the 'it depends on too many factors to be an answerable question' crowd (e.g. I don't even consider a thick-crust 'pizza' to be pizza, but something derived from pizza).

Is the book dedicated to baking with spelt flour? I've always treated it precisely the same way as plain wheat flour, although I'll if a recipe calls for cake flour, I'll cut it with a bit of rice flour, since the protein content is pretty high.

I too am intrigued by this Nope. Or at least, not that I know of. I got the fennel seed (and a few other Penzeys items) in NYC, at the stand they had in Grand Central, to be exact, and I was not thrilled to discover that they're now gone. Especially since amazon doesn't seem to carry them, either (they show up in a search, but when you get to the page, it shows a brand called Ajika). A lot of herbs and spices are difficult or impossible to find here, and the quality isn't always what I'm looking for, so I tend to pick them up when I travel (on the other hand, things like vanilla bean and licorice powder are easily found in standard supermarkets, and that makes me pretty happy).

Most weekday mornings run along similar grooves. Usually, my boyfriend brings a packed lunch to work; these often show a certain amount of cultural cross-pollination: The use of margarine, the bread chocolate, and the leverpostej (liver paste) are traditionally Danish, and the bresaola and the Parmigiano (that block was brought back from our last trip to Florence, in March) bring Italy to the table. Normally, he has some sort of cold cereal for breakfast, but we ran out of milk, so today it is pretty much the same as his lunch: As I mentioned, I’m not much of an early breakfaster, so for now I just had coffee. However, there are newly ripe red currants in the garden, and some Dutch bread chocolate to be sampled, so, about elevenish, I'll be making sure those don't go to waste.

Dante complained bitterly of the salt-containing bread he had to eat when he was in exile! Growing up, I heard various explanations for the lack of salt in Tuscan bread, but they seem to have gone in one ear and out the other; to me, it was ordinary bread, and the only reason I gave it any thought was because my parents insisted on only having the whole grain version, while I coveted the white bread. For me, the lack of salt emphasizes the wheaty fragrance, and it never strikes me as bland, perhaps partly because, like most Italians, I very seldom ate it straight. Usually, it was topped with something very intensely savoury (e.g. prosciutto, liver paste), for which it makes a perfect foil. On other occasions it appears in things (e.g. ribollita, panzanella), but again, these are so savoury that a saltless bread seems just perfect. ETA: Curious, I looked to see what the Italian wikipedia entry had to say about the absence of salt in Tuscan bread, and it does in fact note that Tuscan food is very flavourful, hence a neutral bread that throws these flavours into relief (it also includes a link to the Dante quotation bemoaning the anguish of having to eat other bread).

Dinner; rice with chicken sausage, shrimp, and duck, with baby greens on the side: The raw sausage was kind of off-putting, but cooked, it was delicious, and definitely brought something to the dish.

Hm, well, this is actually being kind of fun (I was pretty nervous about this). Yes, that's 100% spelt, a 2:3 combination of sifted and semi-sifted flours, and only the top gets oiled. A starter would be great if I knew I could always count on giving the bread a long enough rising time, but that's just not an option. What usually happens is one minute, there's about half a loaf, and suddenly, there's no bread, so I need to put together a loaf that doesn't demand more than a couple of hours, start to finish. I'm curious, which celebrity baker is big on spelt?

I have hopes of the Wednesday/Saturday market I cooked the duck breast for breakfast, and about half was left over, so that's going into tonight's dinner. The seawead was mostly for crunch; it's surprsingly neutral-flavoured. I was looking at the duck and peas, and thought 'Needs something', so I reached for the jar of seaweed. I get the impression that a long time ago, various seaweeds species were eaten in Denmark (pretty much as they were by a lot of coastal cultures), but no one does it anymore. No one I've asked really seems to know!

It all looks lovely, but please tell me about the oyster pebbles. They look like macarons with..?

Today makes for a quiet start, because my boyfriend went to Sensation Amsterdam with a friend of ours, and won’t be back until late this evening. When I’m on my own, I tend to wait until about 11.00 or so before having breakfast (and don’t usually eat lunch). Today’s breakfast, peas, duck breast, and arame: As usual, this was followed by a lot coffee, which I drink absentmindedly while I work (I’m self-employed, so if I’m at home, I don’t do ‘days off’, unless I have no work at the moment). I bake bread about twice a week, usually spelt or spelt and rye, which began when I optimistically hoped that I tolerated spelt better than wheat. My boyfriend (now the principal bread eater) discovered that he actually preferred spelt bread, so I never switched back to ordinary wheat flour. Since we're clean out of bread, baking is on today's agenda. Most of the time I use a reworked version of The Best Recipe’s sandwich bread recipe (since most of it ends up as sandwiches). I scrapped the sugar, since neither of us likes sweet bread, and either use no fat, or olive oil instead of melted butter (this is due to unrelenting sloth on my part). My basic recipe is 500g/17.6 oz. flour, a cup and half/355 ml of water, 3–5 g/0.1–0.18 oz salt, and 10g/0.35 oz fresh yeast. After proofing the yeast, I just mix everything together and let it sit about 20 minutes (a sort-of autolyse, but with all the ingredients), to give the flour time to absorb water, then use a hand mixer until the consistency feels right. This gives me a very loose dough: Once it’s risen, I transfer it to a loaf pan, oil the surface, and let it rise again. I slash the top with scissors, bake it for 20 minutes with a pan of water, then about half an hour longer (I really need to keep an eye on this oven, since it tends to have weird heat spikes than can char things in just a few minutes) with the convection on. This is the quick-and-dirty version: often, I have to fit bread-baking around a tight work schedule, so this is pretty stripped down. When there’s time, I extend one or both rises, but even when that doesn’t happen, I’m surprised by how well it comes out, so I’m quite grateful to The Best Recipe for this one. A bit of contortionism made it possible for me to get this shot of the cabinets (although the angle kind of makes it look like the shelves are melting):

It feels a bit strange to say 'Welcome to Denmark!', since I'm not Danish, did not grow up here, and find Danish food culture (my boyfriend, who is Danish, began laughing when I told him about wanting to reconsider traditional Danish food this week) kind of elusive. However, this is where I'm blogging from, so... welcome to Denmark! I'm afraid that first teaser image threw people off track, although Kerry was right, it's a rape-seed field in bloom, the dominant note in the Danish landscape in late spring. I took the picture while sitting on the pillion; just leaned a bit to the side, so I could see around my boyfriend's helmet, and took the shot (that's his hand you see). The second image is the Roosevelt Island Tramway station on the Roosevelt Island side: I was born in New York City (making me a third generation American/New Yorker), although my parents moved to Italy when I was a baby. I grew up in Florence, and the Tempio Maggiore is one of my favourite buildings; we often walked around its garden, on the way to a nearby park. Growing up in Florence had a major effect on my food preferences, the way I shop and prepare food, and the way I feel about food (having American parents who became vegetarian and inclined to health foods affected the way I think about food). Next image: My boyfriend gave me Modernist Cuisine for my birthday! I've only had it for a month, and I'm still in the 'Oooooh, look...' phase (although the 'Holy crap, how do I afford even the smallest pieces of necessary equipment?!' phase has begun). That's essentially my entire collection of cook books, there. I also have a stack of Cook's Illustrated, and some small books on Tuscan and Florentine cooking, but that's pretty much it. I have a really strong aversion to things that just take up space, so I don't get a cook book unless I'm quite certain I'll really use it. The globule on the plate is one of the more successful 'spheres' from my first effort at spherification. Mostly I got a lot of weird looking slime, but it was fun, anyway, and I learned a something. I'm thinking of giving this another go, this week. The last image is from Grenen, up in Skagen, which it is the northernmost point of Denmark. Virtually every one of the people standing in the water got someone to photograph them standing approximately where the guy nearest the horizon is, then went home to show their friends and family, and explain that they were standing in two bodies of water at the same time: the Skagerrak to the north, and the Kattegat to the south (the turbulent area is where the two bodies of water meet). The two seasons in Skagen are 'inhospitable', and 'packed to the rafters with tourists'. Where I am is a good way south of here, on the east coast. My cooking tends to have Tuscan roots (simple, lean) overlaid by a thick slab of experimental geekery (currently curtailed because the kitchen I'm using is not my own), and adapted to accommodate local ingredients/conditions, sudden whims, and a complex array of food sensitivities and preferences (mine and my boyfriend's). So that's the background. To fill in a bit more about where I am, Denmark runs to cool, wet summers, which means that things like home grown tomatoes are still off in the future. Our plants haven't even set flowers, yet (we did start them a bit late): We also have a couple of chili plants. One seems to be going all out with blossoms and is setting fruit, the other has not a one, which may be entirely normal. The kitchen situation here is a little unusual. We're temporarily staying with my boyfriend's parents, since we sold our flat, but are still hunting for a suitable replacement. Here's their kitchen: I try not to take over the kitchen, so I plan around what and when my boyfriend's parents use it. Also, I mostly use my boyfriend's parents pots, pans, and utensils, since our own kitchen is mostly in boxes, apart from the little bit I've unpacked (there just isn't room to unpack much, and packing and repacking gets old really fast). I tried to take some shots of the inside of the cabinets where I store the things I did unpack, then realized that I wasn't able to get more than about a half metre back from them, and couldn't get a clear shot (there's the also thing with needing a flashlight to see things in there). This setup presents a few challenges, so most of what I cook these days is not particularly ambitious. To be honest, I've let myself fall into a rut, which I'm planning on hauling myself out of, this week. You can probably count on at least one spectacular culinary disaster (if that doesn't happen, I will happily share my images of the apple pie fiasco of this past New Year's Eve <<<shudder>>>). If you have questions or suggestions, fire away!

Manicures are wonderful, but only if you are dead certain the place you go to has extremely effective hygiene practices; the risk of contracting a fungal infection is very real (and an even greater issue if your hands are more vulnerable than most people's to begin with). Even places that honestly try to follow proper protocols may not necessarily effectively do. If you have any doubts, you're best off getting together with a friend, and giving each other manicures. Nail polish can cut both ways: it might protect the outer surfaces of the nails a little, but will hold in moisture, and that's probably not great, under the circumstances For whatever it's worth, when I've had jobs that involved an unusual amount of hand-washing, I've usually reached for plain petrolatum (Vaseline); the important thing is to use very small amounts, adding a tiny bit more, if necessary. I always apply it to the back of one hand, rubbing the two backs together, then make a special point of really working it well in around the entire edge of each nail, and finishing by rubbing the palms very lightly over the backs of the hand (the amount picked up is so small, the palms don't feel greasy). I do this fairly often, every few washes. I love Corn Huskers, but it simply can't replace the normal skin oils that are stripped away by constant, vigorous washing.

Adding to the starch sandwich madness, I have to mention my personal favourite, pita stuffed with falafel and chips (fries/pommes frites, that is, not crisps). No dressing, no leaves, just the starch, the whole starch, and nothing but the starch. But I can't say I feel guilty about eating this, or any other food, as such (and I'm capable of feeling guilty about virtually anything, including binning a decrepit oven mitt that has seen long service).

Okay: Just to extract the main point, what is the modernist cooking tip we're talking about, here? Because I have to admit the only tip I've extracted is 'avoid About.com', but... I already knew that

It's getting harder and harder to find chinotto soda... in Italy, dammit.