So you think…?

We’ll be serving that roasted goose on a bed of Rotkohl, which is the red, sweet, spicy version of Sauerkraut that many people have never had the pleasure of tasting–yet. Rotkohl is fabulous stuff. We’re making a double version of Frl. Nadia’s recipe:

• 1 red cabbage. cored and shredded fine
• 1 T honey
• 1 C red wine vinegar
• 2 T butter
• 2 shallots, peeled and minced
• 3 medium tart apples, cored, peeled, chunked (or a glob of applesauce
• 1 bay leaf
• pepper, salt
• 1 medium yellow onion, peeled, and studded with 6 whole cloves
• 2 T red currant jelly

Mix the honey, vinegar, salt, and toss with cabbage. Let sit for an hour while the salt draws the juices out of the cabbage.
Melt the butter and saute shallots until translucent. Add apples and cook until softened, or skip that and substitute the half jar of applesauce you still have leftover from Hannukah latkes. Add cabbage, bay leaf, pepper, and 1 C cold water. Cooking tip: when recipes call for a can or jar of something and later call for a bunch of liquid, use that liquid to rinse the can or jar. Place the clove-studded onion in the middle of things, turn down to the lowest flame, cover, and allow to simmer for an hour until the cabbage is soft and yummy. Stir in jelly, remove onion and bay leaves, and remove to the refrigerator until the big day. Warm and serve as a bed under goose.

Save the clove-studded onion to stuff into the goose along with everything else.

Gløgg is a Norwegian mulled wine. We make a gigantic 5 gallon cauldron of it, and we invite people to bring cheap red wine to dump into the cauldron. No, really–cheap. Two Buck Chuck is too good. You want the box of Franzia or Almaden. This is your opportunity to get rid of the weird odds and ends that you have acquired in the red wine corner of your closet that you’re afraid to drink.

What makes it good, despite the dreadful plonk that is its base, is that you start by whacking up a whole fresh pineapple, zesting and juicing 2 oranges, and dumping this into a huge pot with several cups of mixed raisins and slivered or food-processored almonds. Also grate 2-4″ inches of fresh ginger, crush 20 whole cardamom pods, 12 whole cloves, 4 cinnamon sticks. For raisins this year, we’re using probably 3C of dead old white raisins and 3C more of basic raisins, another C or two of craisins (dried cranberries), and whatever other crap you might feel like adding. Cover with cheap red wine (the classic recipe calls for burgundy), bring to a boil, cover, turn off heat, and let sit around until the day of the party.

On the day of the party, you’ll dump in slugs of the following along with a lot more wine into the largest pot you have–we use a 5 gallon Revereware brewpot. It’s a bit of a juggling act, really; you want to kind of pace yourself on the extra ingredients to make them come out even with the wine that gets added. We usually get the pot up to about the 2/3 full point with our own wine and the following, and then we add the wine that arrives with guests and selected additional slugs of the following as we go. Ultimately it all adds up to about: 10 liters or more of red wine, 1-1/2 C akevit, 1-1/2 C sugar, 2 bottles of port, 2 bottles of sweet vermouth. All of these should be the cheapest plonk you can find.

This recipe is named for three people: the legendary but anonymous “professor” of classic Norse gløgg recipes, Ruth Sylte who gave me a version of it/, and I, who multiplied it a bazillion times to soak 50+ guests.

Bring to the meekest of boils, then turn down the flame to the lowest possible setting to keep the gløgg warm but not burn off the alcohol. Put your entire mug collection out on the counter and invite your guests to choose a mug that they will remember is theirs. Provide a ladle and encourage people to get some chunky bits, too. Gløgg is first a drink and then a marinated-fruity-almondy snack.

On Wednesday we baked pretzels. I’ve made homemade pretzels before, so you wouldn’t think this would be particularly challenging, but I managed to make it really complicated somehow.

First, a disclaimer. In the real world, you should make pretzels approximately 20 seconds before you plan to serve them. Within a few days, they’re excellent, but warm right out of the oven, they’re frigging awesome. However, smørgåsbord day is always a frenzied chaotic storm of last-minute preparations–putting out decorations, arranging foods on the table, and preparing the foods that must be served absolutely fresh. Notably the Norwegian meatballs are a reliable source of at least 90 minutes of tension; if they don’t set off the smoke alarm and alert the ADT monitoring office, they at least make a giant mess, and after that you have to gather your wits somehow to gather the drippings, make beef broth, make roux, not scald yourself, and get a gravy together, all while last-minute RSVPers are calling to say they’re coming or not and bringing someone else or not.

Another comment on RSVPing: yes, it’s good to RSVP, especially when asked, and more especially when nagged about it in a blog like mine, but what’s the point of RSVPing the day of? No extra shopping, cooking, cleaning, or dish-purchasing will be done on the day of. Just show up and give your hosts an extra-enthusiastic kiss, please. When you call the day of, you’re likely to get frenzied freakazoids who are worried that if the conversation lasts one more sentence, meatball burning, roux scalding, or gløgg boiling will occur. Or whatever it is that your hosts are doing (we realize that although smørgåsbords are the best possible party, many people throw parties that lack a smørgåsbord theme). At any rate, the company of your pleasure is very much desired, and please come even if you haven’t RSVPed (unless it’s a dinner party and there’s a chance of exactly the wrong number of something-or-others being prepared), but don’t call. We’re busy. They’re busy. All hosts are busy the day of, or else they have a lot of hired help and professional caterers and the party won’t be any fun anyway.

Okay, I guess that wasn’t a comment, it was a rant. What do you expect? This is a blog!

Now let’s discuss those pretzels. The wonderful German cuisine for Americans cookbook that V got me for Christmas, Spoonfuls of Germany by Nadia Hassani, Hippocrene: New York, 2004 (which can be purchased here) is a nice collection of recipes, and the commentary and diagrams are nice, but it has some problems. First, the index lists only the translated names of foods, so if you want to make Knödel, you’ll have to figure out whether that’s filed under potatoes, dumplings, globs, blobs, starchy units, or whatever. Good luck. We haven’t actually found them yet. Another problem is that it wasn’t proofread very well, so for example, their recipe for spätzle calls for “soda water,” without specifying whether that means seltzer water/club soda or water with baking soda dissolved in it. She also is weak on the principles of baking, so if you’ve never baked and have her cookbook, just go ahead and follow her directions and you’ll probably get lucky, but if you are an experienced baker, please substitute your own knowledge where needed and consider her recipes to be serving suggestions.

About those spätzle: we were planning to make a double batch of them tonight, but we ran into our wonderful friends Noel and Ayse at our other wonderful friends’ David and Arlene’s befana tonight, and Noel promised to make Rotkohl and Spätzle. I explained that I’d already made a massive batch of Rotkohl (see later post), so he’s making a quadruple batch of Spätzle and we’re not, so it doesn’t matter that we don’t know whether to use baking soda or seltzer. (Vielen Dank, Noel!)

So anyway, Frl. Nadia’s pretzel recipe is hella confusing. She calls for 1 oz of fresh (cake) yeast, or 2 (1/4 oz) envelopes of active dry yeast. We have the little jar of Fleischmann’s, which says 2-1/4 tsp equals one package active, or RapidRise Yeast (1/4 oz) = 1 cake fresh yeast. So how the hell much of this shit are we supposed to use?! Well, whatever–but be sure to dissolve it in water that’s around 110 degrees F, and don’t trust V’s senses of this. Add salt. She calls for 1 tsp, which seems wrong, and I’m sextupling, see below, so it’s a healthy slug of salt in my version.

Moreover, her recipe makes 10 pretzels, which is almost enough for one person. We have invited almost 200 people, and probably 60-80 will show up. So we needed a sextuple recipe, and if we cut the pretzels, we might run out before half the guests have arrived. So if you don’t know how much yeast to use in the first place, and you need to make a sextuple recipe, and you sextuple the liquid but for some reason after immensely complicated algebra you only triple the yeast, and in metric at that (don’t ask), it all gets rather confusing. Meanwhile, if you’ve ever known Jane, you are likely to substitute whole wheat flour for at least half of the white flour in the recipe. This, however, changes the moisture requirements of a recipe. Note that in managing your moisture supplies, which are a sextuple batch of warm water and a I-don’t-know-uple of yeast.

Fire up Kitchen-Aid mixer! Put the yeasty mess in the bowl. Gradually add flours–to each 1-1/3 cup of yeasty mess, add about 3 C of whole wheat flour and 2 C unbleached white flour. Mix until it comes off the sides of the bowl yada yada yada. Knead. Cover with a moist towel and let rise 2 hours.

Go off and catch up on blogging step 6. Come back and dissolve 6 tsp baking soda in a big ass pot of hot water, bring to a boil. Get your oven preheating to 425 F. Briefly knead a whunk of the dough, roll into snakes about 1/2″ in diameter, and pull off 12″ snakes to make each pretzel. Make a loop, twist twice, flip upside-down, and fold the ends over, pinch, and plop onto a greased cookie sheet. Get a dozen or so ready on the sheet, cover with the moistened cloth, and move on to the next sheet. At some point, get V involved in the snakerating, and start this process, which should be familiar to those who have made bagels: drop the pretzels several at a time into the water to boil for 20-30 seconds or until they float, then fish out with a leaky ladle (Barbara Tropp’s name for the Chinese net spoon; Nadia calls for a slotted spoon–once again, whatever). Plop back on the greased sheet. When you finish up a sheet, sprinkle the pretzels with kosher salt.

If you’ve been ranted at about cooking by me before, you know that I believe kosher salt is a necessity in any kitchen. Uniodized sea salts are optional, kosher is mandatory, and iodized table salt gets the Barbara Tropp skull-and-crossbones treatment.

Slide into the oven and bake 25 minutes or until brown and crisp. Serve at once. Or store in Tupperware and serve on Sunday. If you do serve at once, butter’s a nice touch.

The baking began at Jane’s place in Sausalito. On Monday night Jane prepared
the pepparkakor dough, recipe courtesy of our friend Nilos:

GAMMALDAGS PEPPARKAKOR

sifted flour 3 1/2 c.
ginger 1 1/2 t.
cinnamon 1 1/2 t.
cloves 1 t.
cardamom* 1/4 t.
butter 1/2 c.
sugar 3/4 c.
egg 1
molasses 3/4 c.
orange zest 2 t.

Sift together flour and spices and set aside. Cream butter till fluffy, adding sugar gradually. Beat in egg, molasses and orange zest. Add dry ingredients and mix well. Chill covered overnight (will hold more than a week of wrapped airtight). Roll out 1/8″ thick on well-floured board, cut out and bake on greased cookie sheets at 375°F for 8 – 10 minutes. Store airtight. They get better as they age.

Great recipe – tasty and easy to make. The dough does not contain too much butter (relatively speaking), and so does not stick to the floured cloth rolling-out urface. Enjoyable to make these.

Tuesday night, Jane baked the pepparkakor and made the Zimsterne, recipe courtesy of Beate:

ZIMSTERNE (Cinnamon Stars)

4 egg whites
2 tsp lemon juice
300 g caster sugar (powdered sugar)
1 tbsp cinnamon
375-400 g ground almonds

Preheat oven to 130°C.Beat egg whites with lemon juice until very stiff. Gradually add sugar and beat until firm (so that it could be cut with a knife) and glossy.Take away and set aside a little more than half a cup of this mixture for the topping. Mix cinnamon and almonds into the rest of the egg white mixture. Make sure it is not too sticky and not too dry. Add more almonds if too sticky.Sprinkle the worktop with flour, some sugar and some ground almonds. Spread a small amount of the mixture on the work surface and roll out to a thickness of about ¼ inch. Cut little stars with a cookie cutter and place on a baking tray.
Spread the egg white mixture set aside earlier on top of the stars.Bake stars for about 45 minutes, leaving the oven door slightly open (the icing
has to stay white).

Conversions:
http://www.onlineconversion.com/temperature.htm130 degree Celsius = 266 degree Fahrenheit
http://www.gourmetsleuth.com/cookingconversions.asp?Action=find300 grams = 2.5 cups unsifted powdered sugar375 – 400 grams = 2.6 to 2.75 cups whole almonds

This was a baking experience!! Not your average cookie dough! This recipe is not for the baking novice . . . . but what a tasty result! The cookies is very much like one recipe for the traditional Scandinavian “kransekake” – ground almonds, powdered sugar and egg white – no butter or flour. (Stay tuned for the kransekake blog this weekend.) For the Zimsterne, be sure to set aside enough of the egg white/lemon mixture for spreading on the cookies later! I didn’t set aside quite enough, so there are a few “naked” zimsterne in my cookie tin. 🙂

Also be sure you have plenty of extra ground almonds on hand to add if the dough is too sticky. These cookies bake longer than your average American cookie, and at a lower heat, so as to keep the white meringue topping white. And a word to the wise, or to the temper-tantrum-prone, keep a tasty cocktail handy to keep your mood mellow when the dough sticks too much or when frosting the cookies with meringue or when things don’t turn out exactly as you’d thought they would . . . . 😉 Because this was the first time I’d made this cookie, I used my good friend “google” to look up some other recipes for the same cookie and found the following words of warning to begin one of the other recipes, “These are extremely difficult to make, but if you make them, they are heavenly.” Took a sip of my cocktail and ploughed ahead!

Wednesday was the easy baking day – just one batch of Spritz cookies. Though you find a recipe for spritz in any Scandinavian cookbook, I found a recipe for “German Spritz,” so chose to make that one. It’s virtually identical to the Scandinavian recipes.

GERMAN SPRITZ

1 c. butter
2/3 c. sugar
3 egg yolks
1 tsp. vanilla or almond extract (I used vanilla)
2 1/2 c. flour (actually, 2 c. was plenty)

Cream butter and sugar. Add egg yolks and vanilla. Mix well. Stir in flour.
Fill spritz cookie press, press, decorate. Bake at 400°F for 7 minutes.

Baking blogs to follow in next few days – krumkake, kransekake, pumpernickel
bread, and braided cardamom bread. 🙂 Yum!

Graved laks (aka gravlaks) is ridiculously easy, but few people seem to realize this, so it always gets big oohs and ahhs at the smørgåsbord. The keys are to buy really good salmon (wild, of course) and start at least 5 days in advance. We make a two-fillet batch for the smørgåsbord. Fresh salmon (like any fish) should be firm and not smell fishy. Farmed salmon is evil, both nutritionally and environmentally, so even though it’s a lot more expensive, always hold out for wild salmon.

To start, roast a bunch of anise seeds in a pan, then add 4 parts salt to 3 parts sugar and stir. You need enough of this stuff to cover both sides of both fillets. For two fillets, I used about 2 C of stuff.

Rinse and pat dry the fillets. Feel along the bone-line to find any pin bones needing to be removed, grab hold with a small, sprung needle-nosed pliers, and yank out. This is the way the pros do it, and it’s much easier and tidier than any other method. Be sure to wash, dry, and oil the pliers when you’re done.

Next, cover the fleshy sides of both fillets with the stuff, then cover again with chopped fresh dill. The idea of graved laks is that the stuff is going to suck out the water from the fish as a way of preserving it. Stick the fleshy sides together and then use whatever you have left to cover the skin sides. Use the discarded dill stems to make a rack in the bottom of a pan, plop the fishes on top, cover with plastic wrap, and put them in the fridge. Weight the salmon down by piling whatever stuff you had to move out of the way in the refrigerator on top of the fish; this helps press out the juices.

For the next several days, every 12 hours you need to drain off the juice, turn the pair of fillets over, and put back in the refrigerator. The pictures (above) are after the first 24 hours; notice all the salmon juice in the pan!

Next we drove back to Oakland and visited Nordic House, where we picked up a frozen lutefisk, several kinds of gjetost, our house cheese and cat’s namesake, some rullepolse, several varieties of syld (herring), and whatnot.

Gjetost is a sweet brown cheese made from cow and/or goat milk and whey that is simmered for hours to carmelize out the sugars, and then it is made into cheese; the carmelized sugars stay sweet rather than getting digested and made tart by the little microbial friend. The cat is a sweet brown Snowshoe Siamese with beautiful, Nordic blue eyes. Here are the cheese and the cat. They chose not to pose together.

Finally, a trip to Andronico’s for less exotic groceries. Many hundred dollars later, we returned home and got to work. Well, actually V went to Dunsmuir (Scottish dance) practice, and I got to work much later on.

Yesterday Victoria and I took a roadtrip to Dittmer’s, the fabulous German butcher that Katja recommended down in Mountain View. Katja was right–this is the place to stock up on German meats and miscellany. After cruising the shelves for kraut, almond paste, and so on, we bellied up to the meat bar and started discussing our plans with Mark, Dittmer’s son. Dittmer is seventy-something and on his vacation cruising somewhere.

Mark could not have been kinder nor more helpful. We asked for a goose, and he asked how we planned to roast it. Stuffed with onions and apples, of course! He suggested that no matter what, you start by lining your whole oven with foil. I think that’s a good idea, because as anyone who’s ever roasted a goose knows, they throw off more oil than you can possibly imagine. From a 12 lb. goose like we bought, you will typically get 15-16 lbs of oil, it seems. Okay, maybe 5 lbs. Or better yet, he suggested, we could roast it on the Weber grill. Great idea! We’re doing it! He also suggested using dried apples, because they’d soak up more of the oil, and later when we were picking out Würste, he suggested grating a bit of the paprika wurst into the stuffing, just to bring out that smokey flavor a bit more.

We then got several pounds of Nürnberger Bratwurst, their specialty, and several more pounds of cocktail-sized Frankfurters. (Later in our visit, he brought us a couple tastes right out of the smoker, and they’re outstanding. Probably twenty pounds of them wouldn’t have been enough.) These we’ll boil (probably in beer) and serve on a bed of Sauerkraut. For party purposes, we’ll probably chop them into generous-bite-sized hunks. We also got a hard, twice-smoked Paprikawurst, which is more of a thin-slices from the cheese and crackers area kind of sausage.

We asked his recommendations for a couple patés, and he proceeded to make us generous tastes of the Paté au canard (which also has lots of pork in it). It was yummy, so we got a hunk of that, and for contrast he recommended the coarser Paté Maison, which is also pork but with a completely different kind of spicing. While he was wrapping those, he suggested that for a party it can be fun to get a whole Braunschweig Leberwurst, cut it into three chunks, big, medium, and small, roll each in a ball, and make a little snowman. For a hat, he suggested a hunk of the Paprikawurst and a few slices of a broader salami, which he then sawed off for us.

Since our smørgåsbord features Norwegian and German food, he also mentioned that he has the standing rib pork roast in the traditional Norwegian cut, so we also bought one of those and several more pounds of various Bratwürste for our own use later on. (There’s only so much meat our guests will want to eat, or at least that’s what we’re telling ourselves.)

We’ve invited Mark to the party and hope that he can make it, because I’m sure people will have questions about the amazing meats that I won’t be able to answer.

Once the menu is sketched (it can and likely will change somewhat over the coming week), we figure out the shoping list. We always get lots of stuff at Nordic House as well as Costco and your basic grocery store (Albertson’s or Andronico’s), but this year we had to figure out where to get our German stuff. Victoria used The Google (as our only President calls it) to figure out some options, but we didn’t get any clear-cut answers, so we decided to take it to a higher authority: Katja, my German-born friend and colleague in the localization industry, who lives in San Jose.

Saturday around dinner time, I rang her up and asked, “Who’s that German butcher you were telling me about?”

She chuckled and replied with certainty: “Dittmer’s!” She also provided sage advice about the menu, and we had a lovely chat, and then she wished us a good “slide” into the new year: “Einen guten Rutsch ins neue Jahr!”

So a trip to Dittmer’s and Nordic House is in the plans for Tuesday. (I think it should be Nordic Huset, but I suppose that might confuse their neighbors. We’ll try to get to Costco today, though, so we can get the giant hunks of salmon marinating for the graved laks. You only need three days for a good graved laks (aka gravlax), but I think a week is better.

At left is the shopping list so far. This year’s list is deceptively brief and manageable-looking, but that’s only because Jane is taking care of about a third of the stuff herself and has her own lists (which perhaps she’ll publish here shortly), and because we’re getting good at throwing smørgåsbords and have already been stocking up on a bunch of the basics. We also have probably forgotten a couple dozen things and will be making many a last-minute trip for forgotten items. Traditionally we end up borrowing obscure ingredients on Saturday from our next-door neighbors Jaryn and Pete, too. (Jaryn is the maker of the beloved deviled eggs; I have yet to try one because they’re always demolished early on. This year she hinted she might dress them up in little dirndl skirts.)

Next we figure out the schedule of events. Lots of the items need to marinate, stew, soak, or otherwise get started well in advance, so first we fill in the must-start-soons. Then we fill in the other menu items, saving Friday and Saturday for the most perishable and/or most complicated or hard to store items. At lower left is the time-line thus far. This is subject to a lot of change, and by the end of the week it’s unlikely to look anything like this. Perhaps we’ll post before and after photos of the timeline about a week from now.

Our final act of planning was to taste the German schnapps items. It’s become a tradition to serve one Norwegian akevit plus an akevit from the guest country. We asked Katja’s advice about what would be the German answer to akevit. She in turn asked some friends, and on their advice, we tracked down some Doornkaat (a German gin) and Gilka Kaiser Kümmel (a German caraway liquor bearing vague resemblance to Scandinavia’s akevit) at the Mountain View BevMo. We all thought the Doornkat gin was pretty harsh (Jane compared it to isopropyl alcohol and made ready to rub some on her arm in case any injections were imminent), but the Kümmel was interestingly sweet. A second sip of gin after tasting the Kümmel was quite pleasant, though, proving once again that taste is greatly dependent on context. We decided they’ll do! They’ll also both be better at the usual serving temperature, which is right out of the freezer.

&tLast night, Jane came over and we held our planning session. Naturally this requires cocktails (gin gimlets, in this case). While we’re at it, here’s a recipe for a better gimlet: pour a generous shot of Tanqueray or Bombay Dry gin per person into a shaker filled with crushed ice, squeeze in half a lime per person, and add a dashlet of Rose’s lime juice per person. Strain into martini glasses and serve. No pictures, sorry.

The goal is to plan a menu with a reasonable distribution of the four food groups: sweet, starchy, savory, and alcoholic. We also try to balance offerings from the “host” and “guest” countries. Norway has always been the host country, and after the first year we cycled through the other Scandinavian countries as guest countries. Having completed the cycle, we decided to make a brief excursion to Germany. We’re developing quite a collection of cookbooks, flags, and so on. After listing the obvious items (lutefisk, lefse, gløgg, gravedlaks, and flat breads), we start flipping through the cookbooks and picking out the rest of the menu.

If you want to be surprised by the offerings when you arrive, stop reading right now!

This is what we came up with:

The E’s and J’s indicate which household is taking primary responsibility for making the item, shopping for the ingredients, and so on, not in that order. It’s a little misleading, though, because many of the things marked “E” are prepared not by Victoria and me but by all three of us here at our house. Jane will be moving in for the weekend on Friday evening, and we’ll be doing a lot of cooking together.