New Year's Dinner

Since my whole host family has been sick all christmas break, I offered to make dinner on New Years Eve. Traditionally I have always had meat fondue with a side of salad, fries, and bernaise sauce on New Year's eve, and usually spend it with my best friend, and our families, but as I'm celebrating New Year's in Utah this year I wanted to try something new. So I ended up making steak with hasselback potatoes and baked carrots with a bernaise sauce. 
For dessert I made the same thing as we traditionally get in Denmark. A fruit salad with a cream made from whipped cream mixed with some kind of eggnog cream made from pasteurized egg yolks and sugar. In Danish we call it råcreme.

Ingredients for the dinner:
6 steaks of beef
1 lb of potatoes
6 carrots
Knorr's bernaise sauce (the best and probably only store bought sauce I would ever make)

Directions:
Slice the potatoes and place on a baking sheet. Pour a little melted butter over the potatoes and sprinkle with salt. Bake in oven for about an hour at 350 F. Bake the sliced carrots with the potatoes for the last 15-20 minutes. 
Broil the steaks in a pan for no more than 4-5 minutes on each side and season with salt and pepper. 
Prepare the bernaise sauce from instruction on the package. 

Fruit Salad

Ingredients:
Apples
Cuties/mandarins
Pear
Pineapple
Grapes + ekstra for decoration
Chocolate chips or other kind of chopped dark chocolate.
(You can use any kind of fruit you want. This is just what I used)

1/2 cup heavy whipping cream
2 pasteurized egg yolks
1 tbsp sugar

Directions:
Cut the fruit and leave out some of the grapes for decoration. 
Start out by mixing egg yolks and sugar in a mixer. When it has a thick consistency and is almost white it is ready. In a separate bowl whip cream. Mix the two things together and stir in the fruit. decorate with chocolate and grapes.

Bon appetite, and have a great 2014 everybody! 

Risalamande

Risalamande is a very traditional Danish Christmas Desert, where you have the leftover rice pudding and mix it with sugar, vanilla, whipped cream and chopped almonds. 
With this dessert there is a game that we always play in Denmark. You have to find the one whole almond which is hidden in the bowl, and if you find it, you get to get the almond present, which is typically a marzipan pig or some kind of chocolate.

Ingredients:
about 6 cups Leftover rice pudding 
25 g peeled chopped almonds
1 1/2 dl heavy whipping cream
3 tbsp sugar
Vanilla sugar

One whole almond
Cherry sauce

Directions:
Peel and chop (guide to peeling almonds) almonds in a food processor. Whip cream with sugar and vanilla. Mix into the rice pudding and hide the whole almond. Serve with cherry sauce.

Happy hunting!

Christmas Eve Dinner

This year I wanted to cook dinner for my host family on Christmas Eve, and they loved the traditional Danish dinner i made, even though some of the ingredients were kind of hard to get!

Pork Roast / Flæskesteg

Ingredients:
Pork roast w/ the skin (we had to buy the skin separate) 
Salt and pepper
beyleafs

Directions:
Place roast on a baking tray and cut the skin. Rub with salt and pepper and put bay leafs in between the cracklings. Bake in oven at 350 degrees F for about 3 hours. Make sure the cracklings are completely crispy. You may need to remove them and bake then at 450 degrees F until they are completely crisp.

Browned Potatoes / Brunede Kartofler

Ingredients:
1 can small potatoes
1/2 cup sugar
1 tbsp butter

Directions:
Melt sugar and butter on a pan, and broil potatoes in the caramel mixture until golden brown.

Red Cabbage / Rødkål

Ingredients: 
1 red cabbage head
1 tbsp apple cider vinegar
2 tsp cinnamon
1 tbsp honey

Directions:
Cut the cabbage in strips and boil in a pot with apple cider vinegar, cinnamon, and honey for about 45 minutes. 

Baked Apples w/ Lingonberry Jam

Ingredients:
4 apples
Lingonberry Jam (from IKEA)

Directions:
Peel the apples and remove the core and bake for 30 minutes at 350 degrees F. Fill up the hole from the core with jam. 

 Serve the roast, browned potatoes, cabbage, and apples with boiled potatoes and gravy.

Little Christmas Eve

In Denmark we celebrate christmas on the 24th, and we always get this really delicious dessert called Risalamande. In order to make this dessert you need some rice pudding leftovers, so we traditionally always get rice pudding on the 23rd. 


Rice Pudding / Risengrød

Ingredients: 1 1/4 cup water
1 cup rice (short or medium grain) grødris
4 1/2 cup milk
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp vanilla

Topping

Butter
Cinnamon
Sugar

Directions:
Place water and rice in a medium cooking pot, cover with a lid and simmer for 2 minutes. Add milk, salt and vanilla sugar and simmer over low heat for 40-45 minutes. Stir often to make sure the milk does not burn, especially the last 30 minutes. Place pudding in the oven at 200 degrees F for about an hour till it's at the desired consistency. 

Mix sugar and cinnamon together according to your taste. Serve the Risengrød warm, sprinkled with sugar/cinnamon mixture and place a dollop of butter in the center, letting the butter melt.

Marzipan Chocolates

So in Denmark we have this traditional treat called Konfekt. It's basically just marzipan that you prepare in any way you would like with different nuts, chocolate, dried fruit, or just different colors and shapes. Anything you would like!
This year my host sister, Bridgette and her friend, helped make some different figures with different colored marzipan. I made different kinds of marzipan dipped in chocolate with nuts and other stuff.

Almond squares

Ingredients:

Marzipan cutted in squares

Semi-sweet chocolate chips

Almonds

Directions:

Start with boiling the almonds. Put in a pot with boiling water, and boil for about 5 mins till the skin is wrinkling. Cool down in cold water and peel the almonds.

Melt chocolate in microwave and dip the marzipan in the chocolate and put an almond on the top. Freeze in fridge until the chocolate is set, and store in fridge.

Cereal chocolates

Ingredients: Any kind of flakes that you would like. Bran-flakes, Corn-flakes etc.
Semi-sweet chocolate chips
Raisins or cranberries

Directions: Melt the chocolate in microwave and mix all ingredients together, and fill in small paper moulds or silicone moulds as here. Freeze in fridge until chocolate is set, and store in fridge.

Pebbernødder

At christmas time we have like a million different kind of traditional cookies and treats in Denmark, and these tiny cookies are definitely some of my favorites. We have made them every year since I can remember, so this year I wanted to make them for my host family here in Utah. I got some quality help form my good friend Nakai!
To be honest we have never really had a traditional family recipe as many probably do, and every year they tend to turn out really hard and not very good, but this year I found a really amazing recipe, and now I've already shared it with my whole family, and thought I would share it with you guys too!

Ingredients:
80 g butter
225 g sugar
1 egg
1 dl heavy cream
250 g flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp cardamom
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp ginger
1/2 tsp pebber
orange zest (optional)

Directions:
Combine all the wet ingredients in a bowl. In a separate bowl combine all the dry ingredients and combine. 
Roll out into long "sausages" and cut in slices about 1/2 inch long (1 cm) and place on a cooking sheet. Bake in oven for 12-20 minutes at 350 degrees F.