Gränna

We asked the next-door neighbour, what would be a nice place to spend another road trip. He advised us to go to Gränna, the place where candy canes were supposedly invented by a poor widow, named Amalia Eriksson. It was a real cosy village with a main street with some nice touristic shops and bakeries and lots of those candy canes shops. At one of those bakeries, we enjoyed teatime with some kind of pastry I had never seen before (two oblong sugar-coated cookies with some cream in between).

N had a really huge meringue. It was about the size of her head. Of course, it was really sticky. She didn't finish it. I wouldn't either, having experienced the meringue-induced stickiness before on one of the holiday trips in France.

Mmmm, bakery-goodness.

Toast Skagen

The first two days of our stay in Sweden being quite rainy, we spent them indoors. Friday we went for a nice drive around the country and stopped in Ljungskile, somewhere on the south-west-coast of Sweden.

It had some kind of small vessel harbor, on the banks of a fjord. Next to it was a restaurant where we had lunch. N took the fish and chips, I took the Toast Skagen. My first real Scandinavian dish this holiday! Hurray.

I knew it from TV, when some Dutch chef (Rudolf) went to Stockholm to take on a Swedish chef (no, not from the Muppets) in a Toast Skagen contest. He even managed to win that by public vote. It is a shrimp salad on toast. The shrimp salad consists of shrimps (yeah really), red onion, dill, sour cream and mayonaise and is served with some red caviar. I knew I liked it, because after having seen the TV show I had made it myself and I liked it. I did find that the flavour enhances when it's left to stay for a day, so the onion gives off more flavour. However, in a restaurant where everything is prepared fresh, they can't do that naturally, so it had a less intense flavour but was still great.


N's fish was on the other hand quite tasteless. Luckily there was some yellowy sauce accompanying it which gave it some flavour.

Danmark

Our first place to spend the night was in Danmark, Herfølge (just for one night) in a Bed and Breakfast (without the Breakfast; I really think these places shouldn't be called B&B if they don't provide for breakfast, but N says I shouldn't whine about that). We went to the pizzeria and got ourselves a pizza and lasagna.

Since there wasn't any breakfast, we got our own the next morning, at the local bakery shop where we got three really great croissant-like rolls: one filled with nougat-creme, one with raspberry filling and white glazing and one with apple filling and green glazing.

Each one was extremely sweet (ooh, how I love that!), especially the one with the raspberry stuffing which I got.

Yes, a great way to start the second day on holiday!

Germany

On our way to G&A's wedding in Norway, we're taking a break and spending the two weeks leading to the wedding in various parts of Scandinavia. That's why I haven't posted anything for a while now.

I'm typing this while we're in Sweden (Alingsås), staying at the home of two Dutch friends who kindly let us stay here while they're in Holland for a while. Tomorrow we'll be heading for another place in Sweden where we probably won't have any internet available, so I'll post a lot of articles now at once.

Our first stop was in Germany, where we had a great lunch at a highway restaurant: Jaegerschnitzel I believe it was. For sides we could choose from fries or baked potatoes with bacon. N chose the fries and I chose the baked potatoes.

As I love schnitzel, especially with the Jaeger-sauce (Hunter's sauce) to accompany it, I was a very satisfied Kurger after the meal. N couldn't finish her own (it was too much) by herself, so I had the pleasure of finishing it together with her. Even more satisfied!

That was a great lunch to start a holiday with.

Burger King Transformers Sixpack

Today was that most glorious of days. Apparently, there's a new Transformer's movie out there. In honour of that event, the Dutch Burger King restaurants serve a limited period only special Transformers burger. Or, should I say, six burgers?

A sixpack is offered for 4,25 (a meal setting you back at 5,95). They're six mini-burgers, all joined together by their buns. Half of them are covered in cheese, an onion ring and some red sauce; the other half are covered in one or two jalapeno slices and more of that red sauce.

The fastfood-connaisseurs we pretend ourselves to be, A and me agreed to sample some today. Because of time constraints, we had agreed to meet at 11:45 AM. I only woke up at 11:00, so I skipped breakfast and had these things for breakfast.

First, I ordered the sixpack and a separate coke to go with it. Turned out, at 6,20 that cost more than a meal. So I changed my order to a meal.

Having these for breakfast turned out to be a bad idea. I now know I shouldn't have fastfood for breakfast, or anything with jalapenos in it, for that matter.

The pack measures 17x11,5 cm or 6,5"x4,5". The buns aren't separated, but can be easily broken off.

However, it turned out, a single patty covered two buns. One of them the onion ring part, the other the jalapeno part.

Even though we are usually capable of stowing away EAM (Endless Amounts of Meat), we humiliatingly had to admit being quite stuffed after eating just two. Just two! Like, we're only worthy of a Happy Meal nowadays.

So, while A still pondered on whether to eat another set of burgers, I decided to play tough and just eat more. Bad idea. Having finished the third burger, my stomach was protesting already. But I just had to finish the fourth one. For those of you who have seen the Monty Python move "The Meaning of Life" and recognize that scene where a very fat man eats everything that's available from the menu, and eventually explodes - well, that's what I was afraid of, would happen. And they were just a measly four little burgers!


Of course, A couldn't stay behind. In the end, we both took the remaining two little burgers and fries with us home. The placemat covering the tray had a picture of a cutout-crown on it, which, the printing said, was meant for the Whopper. But, because the sixpack had beaten us, I crowned it.

We are not worthy, I guess.

Now, while typing this, I get a craving for the remains of the burger and the fries. Let's see whether I can still explode...

Barbecue

I know what you're thinking. "What, spareribs? Again?!". As usual, there was some sort of celebratory event, that justifies eating this.

M, one of N's friends, came over all the way from Brabant. We wondered what we would have for dinner, and a BBQ seemed like a nice idea, even though we'll be having another BBQ tomorrow at J&L's.

The spareribs were bought pre-marinated and pre-grilled, so they only had to be heated basically. Tasted quite nice.

These were some curry-marinated chicken breast strip skewers. Quite okay, but a little dry. Went well with BBQ-sauce.

These were some cubes of old cheese, wrapped in baconstrips. Simple and nice!

To go with the meats, I had prepared some couscous salad, welded in vegetable stock, mixed with orange and grapefruit parts. Also, I had made grilled pepper strips, marinated in garlic. Then, I made cucumber pickle and tzatziki, using soy yoghurt (not gross at all) and tzatziki mix my parents brought with them from their holiday in Greece. Finally, I made some satay sauce, using soy milk, peanut butter, chili sauce and soy sauce. Traditionally, in Holland, we have sliced baguette with it and a variety of other sauces. I picked Heinz's barbecue-sauce and herbed butter for the baguette.

Now, this gun-shaped device is so cool! It's not 007's latest gadget, or the newest G.I. Joe toy gun. Well, the writing gives it away of course. It's a BBQ fan! You squeeze the red trigger-like thing and the fan starts blowing through its metal nozzle. Pointing it at the charcoal, you direct a jet of oxygen straight into the hot spot. It works great. Saves you waving a piece of paper to supply an undirected amount of oxygen in the charcoal's direction.

There were a lot of leftovers, mainly sides. We'll take them with us to the BBQ @ J&L's.

Dinner at E's

I wouldn't want this to become a new blogging-habit, but this post will be another one without a picture. Again, because I didn't take one.

I had dinner at E's. He prepared a nice spinach quiche for L and me. It was great, (because) it had a lot of garlic in it too. He feared my food-criticism wouldn't make his quiche stand my tastebud-test, and that I would comment about it on this blog. I assured him that I don't blog about bad food usually (well, except for that quinoa).

Not blogging about it would make it seem like I didn't like the quiche however. So, I wrote a post about it. That's also the reason there aren't any pictures. You see? It all makes sense once I start explaining things.

So, thank you, E, for the nice quiche!

Spareribs

After having been trying to arrange a dinner for half a year with the guys from our student's tenement, we finally got together last saturday. And it was great! A&K came over from Amsterdam especially.

We had dinner at Mr. Mofongo's. Because we were a large party (10), we couldn't dine a la carte. We had to choose (all 10 of us) from either menu 'Giraffe' or menu 'Zebra', which in the end only seemed to differ in the main courses. We had agreed to take the Giraffe menu.

With spareribs being our favorite already when still living in our flats, six of us took the spareribs. And they were great! The meat had been slightly marinated and was oh so tender. It came with two different dipping sauces and great fries. Apparently, there was some side salad as well. Needless to say, that salad went by unnoticed - why waste precious stomach space with greens when you can have spareribs?

They even were that great, that N & V both had their spare ribs doggybagged.
Being priced at 16,75, they were slightly more expensive than our two other favorite spareribs-restaurants, but with both quality and quantity being very sufficient I think that price was more than justified.

Pancakes without milk

About a few weeks ago I discovered I might be intolerant for lactose. This is a big problem, because I LOVE cheese and dairy products. Fortunately Kurger loves cooking and he is always trying to make new things, so this no-usage-of -milk-thing was just another challenge.

Yesterday I really wanted to eat pancakes. But since they are made of flour, eggs and lots of milk, I had to think of something else to make it with. Kurger told me to add soy milk instead of cow milk. Since soy milk has the tendency to fall apart when heated, I thought that it wouldn't work at all. But because I had no other option, I tried it.

And what happened? It worked! The pancakes turned out a bit sweeter than normal, but they were great anyway. Loved them! (and Kurger as well, which is a surprise, because he usually doesn't like my cooking at all).

First BBQ of the year

OMGWTFBBQ!

Yes, yesterday's BBQ was Kurger Bing's First Barbecue Of The Year and, no, I didn't take any pictures. Because, I forgot. It was nice though; we got some self-caught salmon/trout from brother T and put it on the BBQ. Put some potatoes, french baguette, herbed butter and cucumber salad with it.

From the remains, N made a nice salmon salad with just some mayonaise and pickles.

Soy Lasagna

Because of her throat infection, N had difficulty swallowing food. So for today, she wanted lasagna, because that would be easy to swallow. Having done groceries shopping with a different menu plan in mind last saturday, I actually hadn't ingredients at hand to make my traditional lasagna. So, I came up with the improvised stuff I'll describe below.

No store-bought pasta sheets in the cupboard. Darn. That would mean that I had to make my own pasta. The agony :'(. So, to start with, I took 200 grams of pasta flour (tipo 00), two eggs and some salt. Clutched the eggs in the pile of flour and gradually stirred in more and more of the flour to form some dough.

Well, that doesn't look too bad for someone who doesn't like making dough. The kneading wasn't actually that hard, because the dough basically wasn't too sticky. I let it rest for over an hour in a plastic bag in the fridge, while making the tomato sauce.

I fried some onion, carrot and zucchini along with a laurel leaf. My traditional recipe requires leeks and leaves out zucchini and carrot.

Added a tin of tomato chunks and half a liter of tomato passata. Then some fresh basil leaves and freshly ground salt and pepper, and three teaspoons of sugar. In hindsight, I might have left the sugar out because of the bechamel sauce.

Instead of browning the ground meat first in a skillet, I crumbled it straight into the boiling sauce. Normally, there should be a tin of corned beef included also. I let it cook for an hour.

Rolled out the pastry and cut it in half.

Mangled it through the pasta machine to get some nice long sheets of pasta.

Cut it into pieces which I thought would fit the tiny oven dish, cooked it for two minutes and let it drain off on a teacloth.

Cooking some pasta sheets in water with an added beef stock cube.

Next, I set out to make my very first bechamel sauce using soy milk instead of regular milk, because of N's trying out to avoid dairy products, while waiting for her lactose tolerance test. I was afraid it might winnow, but it behaved very well, just like regular milk. Consistency turned out to be the same.

There you have it. The first layer of tomato sauce and bechamel sauce.

Stuffed the dish to its max and sprinkled some grated parmesan cheese on top (hard cheeses apparently lack lactose, so this should be safe).

And there you have it! My very first improvised lasagna with soy, made from scratch.

I didn't like it that much. The soy milk was too sweet compared to regular milk, and the bolognese sauce didn't come near my regular bolognese sauce. N liked it though, so she was happy. Today, she took the leftovers with her for lunch while trying to work for a few hours despite being sick.