Danish Cabbage Soup and Leftover Lamb

Saturday again, and once again we have things to do other than eat. It's sad that, as eating can be such a pleasure.

Anyway, brunch was a trio of hams, one from Spain, one from Italy, and one normal everyday ham. There is not much to choose from between the two specialty hams and I would guess you can interchange them. The taste differences are subtle.

Dinner we started with a Danish Cabbage Soup. This is actually surprisingly delicious! Also very easy to make.


For three people, slice a small onion, remove the core from about 400 gram of cabbage and slice the leaves very thinly. Melt a heaped tablespoon of butter and stir in about a teaspoon of soft brown sugar. Really, this is such a small amount of sugar it doesn't make any difference in anybody's life! Stir the sugar till it melts and caramelises a litte, which takes about two minutes. Stir the sliced onion and cabbage into the caramelised sugar and cook for about four minutes, till they're well-coated and starting to simmer, then pour in 400 ml of water or stock - I used chicken stock. Add a pinch of allspice, some salt and pepper to taste, cover it and let it simmer gently for about 35 or 40 minutes. Just before serving stir in about 75 ml of sour cream or decent yogurt, heat through and enjoy. It really was very nice!



Then we finished off the lamb from the other night, with some pumpkin and fennel. The vegetables were steamed very plainly, as the lamb fills your mouth with flavour. It was not as good as expected but perhaps we should have eaten the leftovers the very next day and not left them as long as I did.

Leftover salmon

Unless I vary from the usual egg and something, I guess there's no reason to write it down. I do need to make a better effort with lunch though.

Dinner today started with a simple salad of lettuce, tomato, onion and cashew. Probably a dressing of some kind, they're easy enough to make: one part vinegar, three parts oil, seasoning to taste. The trick comes in choosing nice vinegar and nice oil. Dressings are where extra virgin olive oils take pride of place: you ruin them when you cook them.

There was still leftover salmon, so I cooked some leeks until tender and combined the two, with a dash of cream to round out the flavour. Nothing exciting going on here at the moment.

Marinated pork

Breakfast and Lunch have long since been forgotten, but luckily photos remind me of dinner. It was a Thursday, so probably egg for breakfast, nuts and cheese for lunch. That nuts and cheese is very addictive.

Dinner was one of the sections from the gourmetten pack that we hadn't yet eaten: little morsels of marinated pork. I grilled them and served them with leftover sauerkraut and carrots. Sour cream just ... goes... with sauerkraut.

Steak, red cabbage and guacamole

Back to the usual breakfast. Egg. In this case and omelette with mushroom, cheese (recognise any leftovers?) and tomato.

Mid-morning I was hungry. I guess that's what comes from ditching the diet for a day. Rather than let my blood sugar plummet, I had slice of melon with yogurt and nuts.

Lunch was another slice of melon with 2 slices parma ham. Someone has to eat the stuff, it may as well be me. I also had some vegetable soup with slices of cheese instead of bread.

Dinner was a simple grilled steak with guacamole and a red cabbage and apple salad.



The salad was equal volumes of thinly sliced cabbage and peeled apples cut into julienne strips tossed in a dressing. Use any dressing you like. It doesn't keep well, so don't make too much.

Ditch the diet for a day

I need time off from this full time eating.

Breakfast. Well, seeing as I bought an entire melon to make two melon balls for the amuses, breakfast was leftover melon. A generous slice with yoghurt and two slices of Parma ham.

Then I gathered all the leftover bits of pieces from last night's Gourmetten. I softened the onion and fennel in a little oil, then added all the other vegetables plus the leftover chili in adobe, added water and let that simmer till I thought about it again. When I did, I tasted it, and it was a little hot with the chili. So I added the two turkey drumsticks and let it simmer some more until I thought about.

When we felt ready for lunch, I removed the drumsticks, took the meat off the bones, took off the soggy skin, chopped the meat and added it back into the soup. Everything looked a little thin, so I took half the soup, puréed it and added it back. Hey presto, instant body. For serving I stirred in the leftover sour cream and grated some cheese.

That was it I'm afraid. No salad. No 50 gram of something proteiny plus a side of veggies. Just soup.

Dinner was much the same. I took one complete set of meats, little marinated pork pieces, and grilled them. We had that with some sliced raw courgette (not carpaccioed, though I did add a little feta for the look) and a couple of cherry tomatoes. And we drank lots of wine.

I also took no metformin today, not at lunch nor before bedtime. (Too much wine!)

As I said, ditch the diet for a day.

Gourmetten

Breakfasts don't really change all that much here. Usually I settle for an egg until I can't face them anymore. And themes recur. Yesterday was ham and mushrooms. Today was scrambled egg, ham and mushrooms. Surprise.

Lunch? Who knows? Who cares? I was probably too busy thinking about dinner.

The Dutch have a custom called Gourmetten. I've never really understood how this works, but I bought myself a Gourmetten Set, which is basically a Raclette Grill. Mine is kinda nice because it has a stone grill and a little ridged teflon thing.

While I was wandering around the shop looking for ideas for a nice New Year's Even dinner I spotted a tray of Gourmetten meats which had no sausages or crumbed things on it. It was in a box, so I picked it up and was trying to figure out what was in it, when a man came up, rattled off the contents, and stuck a 35% off sticker on it. Well, that decided that, then.



As you can see, it's a selection of mostly pork with various marinades, little hamburgers cut into quarters, and some plain beef.

Being new to all of this, I wasn't entirely sure what to do, but I also prepared a plate of vegetables to cook on my toy.



In separate bowls I also had little servings of sauerkraut and broccoli.


I had an idea one needed sauces, so I made my simple cream sauce. (Yes, I know the diet says AVOID cream due to cholesterol, but it doesn't say NO cream, and in any case I'll worry about cream once my body starts producing less cholesterol than my food provides. Body fat is the biggest source of cholesterol!)

Anyway, to make the sauce, pour plain whipping cream into a pot and cook it over a low heat until it reduces to half. I guess you could add salt and pepper, or any flavouring you like, but believe me, there's nothing wrong with a simple cream sauce.

I grated some mature Gouda, and crumbled some roquefort into a small bowl.I chopped up some chillis in adobo (thanks MK for bringing them all the way from the States!), some garlic and some olives.

The way we handled this was we cooked the veg on the stone grill, and the meat on the teflon grill, then we combined them in the little raclette dishes, covered them in toppings and put them under the grill to brown.




Well, there were just two of us and the set is for eight, so we had four raclette pans each at any time. I think we're supposed to get by with one. So having done this now, I think a better way would be to have a salad or two ready, a tray of vegetables and toppings, the meat/fish/chicken, and bread for those not on a starch-free diet. Cook the meat on the grill while you whip up a delicious little vegetable accompaniment in your (single) raclette dish at the same time. I'll try it sometime and let you know.

The diet says to eat only three meals a day, but we have a New Year tradition that needs to be observed. We see the Old Year out with a little dessert (an ender) just before midnight. In this case, it was a simple baked apple with cream, but very delicious. We open the champagne, and then just after midnight we have a little starter. In this case it was a trio of amuses that I made myself.

We have an amuse spoon with salmon and sour cream; a lollipop with a cherry tomato cut in half and sandwiched around a filling of brie and a little glass with serrano ham and a ball of melon.

Happy new year!

Moroccan lamb

You may have noticed that I've got as bored with my photos as I get with my food and have tried new ways of cropping them. They look so nice when they're large and full screen on my computer, and sort of ... sad... when they're shrunk to a manageable size.
So here's an exciting crop of today's breakfast, ham and mushrooms.

Lunch was the main meal of the day. Paul was starving because the smell of the stew cooking all morning and had been titivating his taste buds.
We finished off the broccoli soup. There was enough to fill the amuse glasses. More like 50 ml each than 500 gram, but it's still a soup course.


Salad. Umm, how about a tomato, feta and olive salad. It's a shared tomato, but it's still a salad!


Then we had the Moroccan Lamb Stew from the Epicurious website. I left out the honey, mainly because I was too lazy to fetch it from the pantry. I don't think 1 tablespoon of honey across a kilogram of meat is going to affect anybody's diet too adversely. I served it with chinese cabbage stir-fried with finely-chopped fresh ginger and garlic. A poor substitute for couscous I know, but needs must...

The lamb was nice. I really like the flavour of the orange coming through. I think it will be stunning tomorrow, after an overnight infusion. I made a full recipe, so there will be plenty of opportunity to test the theory.


Supper was leftovers, in the form of a salmon mousse. This is really easy to make! i took the leftover roast salmon and leftover smoked salmon, and mashed them to a creamy paste in the food processor. You can use just roast salmon, or just smoked salmon, or if you don't have any leftovers, open a can of salmon. What the heck! Then add salt and pepper to taste, and a spoon or so of sour cream, yoghurt or ordinary cream. Voila! Delicious.

Of course, this is fabulous with thinly sliced bread, currently verboten. I used thinly sliced fennel, which is kinda tasteless but crunchy. I guess you could use any firm leaf as well, such as raw Belgian Endive or Little Gem lettuce.