Kjøttkaker med Brunsaus

I know I said I was taking a break – but here is one more post for the year!

Monday marked the holiday of Winter Solstice or Yule as it was known to the Germanic peoples in pre-Christian times. The word Yule or Jul is still used in Nordic countries to describe the Holiday or Christmas season – which also coincides with the 12 Days of Christmas. Yuletide is a melding of the secular and religious celebrations of the season. Originally Yule was a Solstice celebration of the coming of the sun after the longest night and has been celebrated for likely as long as humans have been around to live through the longest night of the year and rejoice the longer days ahead.

I enjoy celebrating the Solstices and Equinoxes throughout the year. It helps me stay connected to the natural world and appreciate the natural cycles that could have meant life and death to our early ancestors if they were unprepared. In turn, these celebrations help me think about being more prepared in my own life by canning and preserving foods and enjoying a more seasonal bounty. Winter Solstice is a time to celebrate the bright and joyous times in our lives and give thanks for days filled with more light and less harsh times.

I get very inspired to cook Norwegian foods this time of year. When I lived in Norway I really enjoyed all the special foods that were served and enjoyed during the Christmas season. Of course in my family we have own own traditional foods that we enjoy during this season too. So when I came back to the US, I decided that I would celebrate the Winter Solstice by feasting on Nordic cuisine, that way I could enjoy all of the food traditions that I love this time of year. Usually I make Gløgg and Rommegrøt however, I already made versions of them this year for my birthday party that you can read about on a guest post I contributed to Outside Oslo . So I wanted to make something different.

Pinnekjøtt is a dish that was served during the Christmas I lived in Norway. It is a preserved and roasted mutton rib dish. The mutton is generally cured in brine or sea salt and served on Christmas eve with boiled potatoes and Akvavit or Akevitt – a distilled potato or grain liquor that is typically flavored with caraway seeds. Pinnekjøtt means “stick meat” in Norwegian because traditionally a layer of twigs from a birch tree is placed in the bottom of the saucepan instead of a metal steamer.

Since I have no access to Pinnekjøtt, and did not plan for making it, I decided to make some Norwegian spiced meatballs – or Kjøttkaker med Brunsaus – meat-cakes with brown sauce for our Solstice dinner. Kjøttkaker are very common in Norway and every family has their own “in house” version. I made the gravy using turkey stock from our Thanksgiving bird, although a gravy made from beef is traditional. I also served it with roasted potatoes and carrots (why have boiled if you can have roasted? Even if it is not the traditional Norwegian way) and sauerkraut.

This is a quick but festive meal – and I enjoyed every bite, reliving many wonderful times spent in Norway.

For dessert we had Yule log cookies. The cookies are fragrant with rum and nutmeg, and the perfect crunchiness, while the icing made with brown butter is truly heavenly. We decorated them with some toasted coconut and cocoa powder to make them look more like logs. (Recipes under the cut)…

Speaking of cookies, don’t forget to make some treats for the furry creatures in your life. We just made some for Pepino and Cipollina today! For some healthy ones, try these Holiday Cookies for Pets .

Happy Solstice and Happy Holidays to everyone! Thanks for reading this blog! Wishing everyone health, happiness and love this New Year!

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(I just love my new pear apron from The Cupcake Provocateur. They are sponsoring an awesome Foodie Blogroll giveaway next month! So be sure to stay tuned for details about that!!!)

This year I challenged myself with some new cooking goals. Along with this blog I have grown, not only in culinary skills, but also in discovering the kind of life that I want to live – one in which I begin to produce more of my own food. Blogging has definitely changed me. Last year, I challenged myself to make our own bread and ice cream. Now that these have been easily assimilated into our lifestyle, I decided to add some more things. This year, as I have become more serious about it, I wanted to challenge myself to begin learning some skills that I will be utilizing even more when we finally have our a place in Vermont, and room for a big garden (and some goats and sheep) to go with it! Things are moving forward in that department! We are really looking forward to starting a new life up there and having a nice big kitchen and herb garden, and later expanding to animals. My eventual goal is to produce the majority of our food ourselves (with some food coming from our very rich local agricultural community) and raise sheep and goats so that I can make artisan cheese. But everyone has to start somewhere. So my challenge this year was to start making cultured dairy products, like yogurt, soft cheeses, kefir, buttermilk and creme fraiche that are easy to do in any kitchen. I started with the yogurt and cheese last week. This week, I am moving on to kefir.

Another challenge was to start preserving, so that I could stop buying condiments and canned goods at the grocery store. I started by switching from canned beans to dry beans and utilizing the soaking method in Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats. I also started adventures in preserving by making some jam earlier this year, during the height of blueberry season. But with summer coming to an end, I really wanted to make some pickles and pickled banana peppers or peperoncino rings. These two condiments we regularly enjoy – on salads, sandwiches, burgers and more. These were both important challenges, as both store bought varieties are chock full of dyes, corn syrups and MSG. I have been buying Bubbies pickles for the past 6 months or so, but at $8 a jar, it was getting out of control.

So I found pickle cucumbers at the farmers market a few weeks ago and bought several pounds to make refrigerator pickles. I used the recipe out of my Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving.

It was really fun and quite easy. I got 4 ½ 1 quart jars. Each jar costing probably around $1. A great savings from buying Bubbies! Plus they tasted better (you know how homemade stuff always tastes better than even the best store-bought brands!). Something I will definitely be doing again. Although I would like to try some other varieties, especially naturally fermented pickles.

As for the banana peppers, in the last few months I haven’t been able to find a single brand to purchase, and we have really missed them. We tried growing the peppers ourselves with preserving in mind, but our plant only produced a few peppers. With all the rain this summer, so many Florida gardens just got soaked and moldy.

This weekend I went to a new farmers market near my mom’s and I bought almost 2 lbs of banana peppers (also known as Hungarian waxed peppers) for about $3. I could not wait to get home and pickle them! I had some help in the kitchen from our little dog Peperoncino (that is how much we love these peppers), who goes by the more pronounceable name of “Pepino” these days. Again, it took very little effort to do this, and I ended up with 4 1-quart jars, saving me a whole lot of money too!

I am really excited to continue learning more about canning and preserving and making it a natural part of our lives, just like bread has become. I am enjoying seeing the ratio in the refrigerator from store bought regulars like cheese, pickles, yogurt, kefir and condiments being slowly switched to homemade varieties! Soon I will begin canning seasoned beans, soups and condiments like ketchup and BBQ sauce. It is a wonderful warm and fuzzy feeling to get back to basics and provide the best quality food for myself and my family that I can.

If you have a blog, how has blogging changed you?

Hi Everyone. I have some really exciting news to report! We are getting ready to launch a new month of fabulous Foodie Blogroll random giveaways in February, sponsored by Cedar’s Mediterranean Foods, Inc. It will be called “Mediterranean Monday’s Foodie Box Giveaway”.
Inside will be packed with samples of their newest products and a Cedar’s T-shirt!

If you don’t know about Cedar’s, here is some info to get your mouth watering and your stomach rejoicing. Cedar’s is one of the nationally leading manufacturers of Mediterranean Foods, and some of their products recently won 2008 American Masters of Taste Gold Medals for the best tasting in America. These foods include hommus, tzatziki, and pita chips. The people at Cedar’s believe strongly in the Mediterranean Diet and are working with other companies, like The Mediterranean Food Alliance and Oldways to try to teach consumers about the health benefits of eating a diet filled with fruits, vegetables and healthy fats. All things we love here at The Leftover Queen. I was very honored and excited to find out that The Leftover Queen blog was mentioned in an interview of Nicki Heverling, the Program Manager at MFA as a source to find information on eating the Mediterranean way.

Speaking of good fortune, yesterday I was the lucky recipient of one of these Mediterranean food boxes – because you know, I want to sample this great food too – and I can tell you right now that you do not want to miss your chance to be eligible for this giveaway. Inside my Mediterranean box of goodies was pita chips, 2 varieties of hummus, 2 varieties of tzatziki, spinach dip and a very cool t-shirt. Yum yum yum. So you all can guess what we had for dinner, right?…I thought so – a lovely meze/antipasti of all this great stuff. Everything was delicious. Roberto’s favorite was the pita chips and spinach dip and I loved the tzatziki the best – especially the roasted red pepper flavor, which I have never seen before. The baked pita chips are super crisp and the dips all had great flavor.

Also on this plate of food is some delicious chorizo (back left corner of picture) that I received as a gift from my good friend Nuria who blogs Spanish Recipes all the way from Spain! She was kind enough to award me and a few other with this tasty treat by way of saying thanks for bringing extra traffic to her blog this past year. I would have thought just a thank you email would have been enough. But if you know Nuria, you know she goes out of her way to be thoughtful and generous. So thank you Nuria! It was delicious and tender. We loved every bite and we can’t wait to enjoy the rest.

Well, we wanted to involve the whole family in this treat, so we let Pepino lick the plastic seal over the Cedar’s hummus. I am not sure which he preferred, as he was too busy licking to tell me

So, if you are not an active member of The Foodie Blogroll(meaning you are not displaying a new personalized Foodie Blogroll widget), please go sign up today !

We will be featuring 4 giveaways like this – one per week during the month of February and you really don’t want to miss out!

I have seen lots of awesome Holiday Cookies popping up all over the Blogosphere. My friend Judy and a few of my other great blogging buddies are doing the 12 Days of Cookies and I am getting really inspired to start baking. My mom and I always bake Holiday Cookies together (see here and here for last year’s cookie series) and we are heading down to see her the week of Christmas, so we will do our cookie baking then.

As you all know Roberto and I got a puppy a few months ago, Peperoncino (- but we call him Pepino because we found most people have trouble pronouncing “Peperoncino”). Pepino has been going to Puppy School and the trainers had a big holiday party for all the dogs in all their classes at a dog park over the weekend . So since I can never go to a party empty handed, I decided that I wanted to make some holiday treats for them all to enjoy at the party. I had this recipe for pet treats that came with a cute dog bone cookie cutter, so I decided to make them, and add some peanut butter to the mix since that is Pepino’s favorite flavor. Also making my own treats makes me feel better about what I am giving them. I am not just about healthy eating for humans! The dough was great to work with and it made about 70 treats!!!! Sadly I couldn’t find the cookie cutter, so Roberto put his artist hat on and devised a way to make the shapes.

Somehow Pepino knew these treats were for him, because the whole time we were making them, he was right at our feet in the kitchen sitting on his “magic carpet” – the carpet that when he sits on it, gets him treats. It was so cute!

We had a great time at the party and Pepino had fun playing with friends. He shared his treats very nicely and asked for us to make them again soon. I am going to make the same recipe again, but instead of Peanut Butter I am going to use cheese. Our cat Nimue, loves cheese and it is the only “treat” she will eat. I am sure Pepino won’t mind!
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