Monday 12 December 2011

A Christmassy Dinner


Today is such a depressing day. It's midday and it's not even light yet. It's storming outside and salt water is hitting the windows, so we can hardly see the outside. So I am going to cheer myself up and make Christmas food. We have a lot of traditional dishes that we make and eat for Christmas in Norway, and some of them I make myself. I start with the things that I can freeze, and today I am making meatballs of pork and sour cabbage. We still have some kale in the garden. Red Italian kale. I put the seeds down in January, so they have taken 11 months to grow (they probably have three crops in the same time in Italy!), and I will try to make red sour cabbage of them. I think they will be good for it, as sour cabbage has to cook for a long time, and I seem to remember kale needs to be cooked long also. If it turns out well, then we will have veggies from our own garden on Christmas Eve, and if not, I make sour cabbage from white cabbage as one is supposed to - another day.

Pork Meat Balls - Medisterkaker

I will make a huge portion today, but if I make these meat patties for dinner one day for 4-5 people, then I will use 1/2 kg (1 pound) meat, so below I give you the recipe for a portion like that. If you make a bigger portion, just multiply all ingredients but salt. Use 1/2 teaspoon, make a test patty and taste before you add more.

You need:
1/2 kg (1 pound) minced pork
1/2 teaspoon of salt
1 finely chopped onion (about 4 table spoons chopped)
1 heaped tablespoon of potato starch (you can use maizenna or other types of starch instead)
1/2 teaspoon ground allspice
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves (I never put cloves in unless it's Christmas)
a lot of pepper
dried parsley (or fresh if you have and like to chop), optional, but I like the little green spots it leaves in the patties
2 deciliters (1 cup) of water, or a little bit more or less depending on the dough
butter and oil to fry

Put the meat and the salt in a bowl, or either mix it with a mixer or do it with your (just washed) hands. You do this to make the mince meat more elastic, and after a while you will see that if you pull it apart, it will not crumble so much and be more stretchable. Add all the other ingredients and half the water and stir again. Test the dough with a spoon. You want it formable, but still a bit soft (softer than both Italian and Swedish meatballs). Heat 2 tablespoons of butter and two of oil in a pan (yes, I know it will be a butter on lard, but it's Christmas and I do it for flavour, and I will let them drain off later). Get a glass of water with a tablespoon in it. Take the spoon out of the water, moist the palm of the other hand, take out a piece of meat from the bowl, and with the wet hand and the spoon, form patties, that you put in the frying pan till you have filled it. Tap them a bit with a knife or the spoon on top for them not to swell up (this works on burgers also, by the way). Fry them dark brown on both sides, before you put them over on a kitchen paper to soak up the excess fat. Continue till you have fried them all. And if you want to make a brown sauce, save the grease that is left in the pan in a little bowl, fill the pan with water and let it cook up while you scrape the bottom of it. Save this water also.

Brown sauce
If you want to learn Scandinavian cooking, this sauce is the Bolognaise of the North, you will find it all over with different flavours added, whether it's for the Swedish meatballs or for the Danish roast pork or reindeer meat - you will get brown sauce. And here is how you make it:
You need:
3 tablespoons of the grease you have saved from cooking the meat, and if it's not enough add butter, or if you start from scratch, butter
2 tablespoons of wheat flour
1/2 liter (2 cups) Fond, or water from cooked vegetables, but in this case the water from the frying pan
Dijon mustard
Wine, vinegar, red currant juice, raspberry juice...(one or two - not all of them)
Bullion powder/cube
Melt the fat in a saucepan with the flower, keep stirring till the flower turns light brown and gives out a really nice smell. Then add the liquid a little at the time, while stirring. Let it boil between each time you add more water and a bullion cube to flavour. When you are happy with it, taste it off with a teaspoon of Dijon mustard and then the "sour" of your choice. For the pork patties for Christmas, I always add Port wine, so if you have it....Then taste it off with a bit of Worcester sauce, Marmite, Vegimite, soy sauce... it's all up to your taste buds.
And at this point you put the meat patties in the sauce and let them stay there and simmer on very low heat till eating time. And if you have made them in advance, and take them straight from the freezer, you can pour them directly in the sauce. With this we serve sour cabbage, boiled potatoes(practically to crumbles, but still well damped off - we like our potatoes floury!) and lingonberry jam (if you get brown sauce, you can for the most part also count on the lingonberries if you are north of Skagerak).

Sour Cabbage - Surkål
We eat surkål with pork all the time, and since they have found out that plants in the cabbage family are really good for us, and this is a really good dish, both as side dish or as a dish in itself (I will get to that later), not to mention superb in leftover-mixes. It takes some hours of cooking time to make this, so make a big portion if you can. It freezes very well.
You need:
1 white cabbage about 1 kg (2 pounds), cut first in 2-3 cm (1 inch) wedges and then across so you get thin strips (or about 1 cm wide). Fill the bottom of a pot with about 1 liter (4 cups) water. Add about 1/3 of the cut cabbage, then add 1 tablespoon of bullion powder, 2 tablespoons of caraway seeds and one tablespoon of sugar, then another layer of cabbage, spices again, and then the same a third time. Add about 1 dl (1/2 cup) of 7% vinegar. Put a lid on and let i boil for 2-3 hours - or longer. The longer it boils the better it tastes. Good thing is, that thanks to the caraway seeds, it actually makes the house smell very nice while it cooks. Check that the water doesn't cook out here and there, but except for that, no need to bother too much about it in the mean time. When the cabbage is cooked, add a tablespoon of the cooking fat left over from the frying of the meat patties, or butter or other fat, just to make it shiny and add a bit a heaviness to it. Taste off before you eat, you might want a bit more vinegar, a bit more sugar or a bit more salt.
And then you just need the lingonberries, which can easily be substituted by cranberries, black- or red currant jelly or even grape jelly. But if you are desperate for the real thing, and I hate to say this: They do sell it in IKEA!

Sour Red Kale

I had a basket full of kale, from which I chopped all the woody stems, but kept the ones that I could easily cut through. Then I sliced the kale and put it in layers with sugar, caraway seeds and salt. To keep the color I also added a handful of chopped pickled red beets, and juice from the pickled beets which I substituted for vinegar. I let it cook for about half an hour before I decided it was finished. It shrunk in size when being cooked, but it looks fantastic, a bit like Holly with red berries, and very Christmassy. I will use it to decorate the Christmas food with on Christmas Eve.

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