Meal 52: Ecuador

Ecuador is kind of on the small side — a bit larger than the UK, a bit smaller than Nevada — but its borders contain three distinct zones: seaside, Andes, and Amazon. Hence, there's quite a lot of variety in the foods available. (There's also Galápagos way out in the Pacific, but we're not eating any of their rare wildlife.)

Some of the major themes are shared with its Andean neighbors: abundant potatoes, warming foods, and the ubiquitous Inca Kola, which tastes like bubble gum and packs a caffeinated punch. (Spike it with Pisco like we did!) I was surprised to see a lot of annatto, aka achiote, a seed that gushes a saffron-like orange hue when heated in oil. Pretty much everything we had was that color.

Our guests were Kelly, Sarah-Doe, Jon (who just flew in from California and came straight from the airport), Tennessee, Jen, and Kathryn, who's half-Ecuadorian and helped with the menu and prep!

Ceviche de pescado | Fish ceviche | Recipe

Ceviche is surely the most famous seafood dish of South America, and the Ecuadorian version does it great justice. I especially like it because of just how lime-y it is: you first "cook" the fish in one batch of fresh lime juice, then rinse it off and make a second marinade with yet more. That makes it so the marinade has a good but not overpowering fishy flavor. But the craziest part of the Ecuadorian ceviche is that it is commonly eaten with...popcorn! It sounds crazy but makes total sense: the dry puffs with their slightly sweet and nutty flavor provide the perfect foil for the wet, tangy, and fishy flavor of the ceviche.

As far as making the ceviche itself, it's extremely important to start with the freshest fish possible. So I went to Sunset Park's Chinatown and got a live tilapia and a live striped bass. Even though they came to four pounds at the store, once I filleted them (thanks, Knife Skills 201 class!), I had only a pound of flesh left even though the recipe calls for two. I kept going with the full recipe and am glad I did: while it wasn't exactly overflowing with fish, there were plenty of tasty morsels amongst the other bits. (For what it's worth, I couldn't tell the difference between bites of the two fish so you might as well go with the cheaper one.) And, of course, the popcorn helped it all go farther! A single recipe with half the fish provided enough for an appetizer for 8.

Aji criollo | Rustic hot salsa | Recipe

The recipe calls this a hot sauce but it's really more like a Mexican salsa — it doesn't have tomatoes or limes, just chilies, scallions, and cilantro, but it is veggie-rich and is more to be scooped on than applied in dabs.

Locro de papa | Potato and cheese soup | Recipe

I love spices, the way that complex combinations of flavors build together and take over your senses. But sometimes it's just better to cook simply and carefully, letting the inherent characters of the ingredients shine through. This soup, made of little more than onions, potatoes, cheese, cilantro, and a splash of milk is a wonderful reminder of the value and delight of basic ingredients. Though I gotta say the zip and zing from the aji goes well too!

Llapingachos con salsa de maní | Potato-cheese fritters with peanut sauce | Recipe

 

This recipe has almost the same ingredients as above — pretty much the only addition is peanuts for the sauce — but it's amazing what a different dish it turns out to be. Now, I way overcomplicated this one, by using a food strainer attachment for the Kitchen-Aid (score from raiding my parents' basement over Thanksgiving! I also got a meat grinder and a shredder!!) to rice the potatoes, but wow the texture turned out all lovely and fluffy. Note that you want your batter cold and your griddle very hot and sufficiently oiled to make sure the crispy part stays on the potato rather than the griddle.

Not kidding that when I asked Kathryn what to serve with these, she suggested potatoes. (Yes, she knows that's funny.) Also, apparently in her family they just call these tortillas. I did fry up a few chorizos for the meat-eaters, which were surprisingly tasty. (Got them at La Vaquita on 5th Ave in Sunset Park, for the curious.)

Empanada de queso | Cheese and scallion empanada | Recipe

 

We've had some odd ingredients in our Nosh desserts — cornstarch pudding for Afghanistan, lard in the Chilean pastry, even that sweetened and chilled kidney bean soup for Dominican Republic — but it took until the E's to have onions! These empanadas, for which Kathryn channeled her grandmother to roll, stuff, and deep-fry, are filled mostly with cheese but with just enough scallion to give that fresh sharpness. The rustic dusting of granulated sugar leaves no doubt that this is a dessert, and the hot, crispy dough sure contributed to the feeling, but that scallion, well, it's a touch of daring genius.

Canelazo | Spiced, spiked punch | Recipe

What a tasty, and therefore dangerous, number! Nothing more than a few spices and juices, it's really simple to make (though of course I overcomplicated things a bit with fresh-squeezing the orange juice), and so warming and tasty. Very luckily I was able to find Ecuadorian aguardiente. Unlike its anise-flavored and better-known Colombian cousin, it tastes pure as a rich, unfiltered sugarcane, kind of the brown-sugar sibling of cachaça. And it is definitely much more smooth and agreeable than the over-the-top website of its manufacturer.

This meal was also the start of a new tradition, streaming radio from the country! JC Radio La Bruja from Quito had quite the Saturday night mix going.

Next meal takes us back to the Middle East, with Egypt!

Meal 51: Dominican Republic

Another Thanksgiving weekend, another nosh in San Francisco!  To go with the gorgeous weather, the calendar aligned on Dominican Republic, the second-largest country of the Caribbean. While the Bay Area is no stranger to foods from Spanish-speaking lands, there's few Caribbeans around, so these dishes made for something more of a novelty here than they would have been in Dominican-immigrant-heavy New York.

Thanks to the kind folks at Hattery, I had a big kitchen to discover the intriguing Dominican way of cooking, which was just, well, different. I used a grand total of one onion with none of that going into the stew, scrubbed every cube of meat with lime halves, and boiled rice at full hilt rather than gently simmering. And that's not even mentioning the oddness of a dessert built around kidney beans.

Around the table are Jon, Bryan, Alley, Suj, Drew, Greg, Emily, Shilpi, and my mom and dad! It was great to catch up with three friends in town from Portland, and of course to share the joy with my parents, cousin, and future cousin-in-law.

Sancocho de siete carnes | Seven-meat stew | Recipe

Can you even name seven meats? Well, it's kinda cheating since there are actually four types of pork (cubes, ribs, ham hocks, and longaniza sausage), plus beef, chicken, and goat. This is a truly rustic stew, with little more than meats plus some whole chunks of vegetables. The trick is putting in the longer-cooking items first, and gradually building up the pot, and getting a good longaniza since that's where the spices will come from.

The result was a really satisfying stew, with tender and flavorful chunks of meat and a sauce worth spooning on top of everything. Given the fun textures of the different root vegetables, it's worth making the effort to find them, especially the true yam, which isn't the same as a sweet potato. If you make this recipe, just be sure to give yourself plenty of prep time, it takes longer than you think to scrub each and every piece of meat! Or if you don't, at least take away the lesson to cut whole ears of corn into rounds, it's a fun addition and much more dramatic than tossing in individual kernels.

Guandules con coco | Pigeon peas in coconut milk | Recipe

Pigeon peas don't seem like much more than pale little lumps when dry, but once cooked they exhibit a rich caramel color and an unexpected smoky taste. They're often served in rice, much like rice and beans, but there's more you can do. This vegetarian preparation uses coconut milk and squash to give a more tropical feel. I'm kicking myself for neglecting to eat the final version, but reports are that even the carnivores thought this was a good dish.

Arroz blanco | White rice | Recipe

The goal with Dominican rice is to get concón, layers of crispiness mixed in with loose, fluffy kernels. Well, I got the loose and fluffy part all right, but nothing approaching crispy. Maybe I didn't let the oil sear the bottom of the pot long enough, or maybe that huge pot was just too big to deal with. Anyway, the rice was plenty fine, and served valiantly to sop up the sauce.

Jugo de tamarindo | Tamarind juice | Recipe

No photo, but imagine a pitcher full of brown liquid and you're set. This recipe is for if you've thought ahead. If you're like me, and you're starting from whole tamarind pods, first peel them (don't need to be obsessive over getting every last bit of peel), cover with water at about six times the volume of the nuts, bring to boil, and simmer for 15 minutes. Place a chinois or strainer over a bowl, dump the pot into the strainer, and use a wooden spoon to press the pulp onto the edges until the pulp is all squeezed through and into the bowl and only the seeds remain which you then throw out. Mix sugar into the still-warm juice, chill, enjoy the distinctive tang. For a really good time, make a cavarindo: half tamarind juice, half cava. (Watch out, it'll foam up like a root beer float!)

Habichuelas con dulce | Sweet bean soup | Recipe

A chilled soup made of pureed kidney beans and chunks of sweet potato doesn't exactly sound like dessert, but we were all pleasantly surprised by how tasty this inventive dish is. With evaporated and coconut milks, it's got a nice but not excessive milky richness, and the spices make it feel vaguely Christmasy. If you're adventurous, it's worth trying!

Ponche de ron | Egg nog | Recipe

One of the few scenes from the Jetsons I remember is the Christmas special, in which Rosie the Robot creates egg nog by mixing one egg and one "nog." Well, two decades later, I've finally made it — or, at least, the Dominican version — and while I can affirm that egg nog indeed has eggs, the "nog" part of it is a bit more complicated, in this case three types of milk plus sugar and spices, all cooked over a bain marie. But gosh it was tasty, not unctuous like the stuff in a carton, but really smooth sippin', and just the right density to warmly embrace the rum and make you forget you've eaten too much and shouldn't put any more in your belly.

So that does it for the D's! Next weekend we head due south to Ecuador. Thanks again to the kind folks at the Hattery for opening their space to us!

Meal 50: Dominica

Dominica is a tiny little island country, in the middle of that north-south string of Caribbean islands. You'd be forgiven for thinking it's the Spanish-speaking half of Hispaniola, but no, that's the Dominican Republic. They both use the adjective Dominican; to assert that you mean this beautiful, actively volcanic, lush-in-parts island, place the stress on the third syllable, domiNIcan.

The national Dominican dish is the so-called Mountain Chicken, which is actually a species of giant frog, so tasty and easy to catch that it's now critically endangered. Since expensive, farmed, previously-frozen frog legs didn't seem like they'd cut it. Plus, this was a hastily cobbled-together brunch in the aftermath of Sandy, and that just seemed out of place. So, regular chicken it was!

We're glad to have gotten a full table together on short notice for this rare daytime meal: Wei, Natalie, Diana, Gino, Bettina, Marshall, and Jeremy. (That's Emmylou in the front!) In acknowledgment of our good fortune, and as a bit of a preview for Thanksgiving in a few weeks, we went around the table discussing what we were thankful for in the aftermath of the storm. Turns out there's a lot that's right, everything from community to far-flung family to our hard-working civil servants.

Banana-mango bread | Recipe

Fortunately, with an emphasis on fruits and sweet flavors, Dominica's cuisine is quite amenable to brunching. This rich bread, kept moist by banana and mango, and enriched with plenty of walnuts, raisins, and brown sugar, made for a great start. (I can also say from experience that it stays really tasty several days later!)

Caribbean reef chicken | Recipes: Chicken, Mango chutney

Where the "reef" in the name comes from, I do not know, but I don't much care because it's quite tasty. A sauce of rum, sugar, citrus juices and spices makes for a tangy and sweet marinade. Just when all the juices from the chicken start to run out from the baking, then you slather it with a generous helping of mango chutney.

Oh, the chutney! Have you ever made it before? It sure lent a heady smell to the house, with this vinegar-based slurry of under-ripe mangoes, lots of sugar, and generous helpings of spices cooking down for hours, but the result was well worth it. Spicy but not too much so, tangy but not overwhelmingly, it's a really great condiment to go with grilled meats and the like. (Note that the recipe makes for about four to five cups of chutney, which is a lot, so either reduce it or plan to give a bunch away.)

Seasoned fig flats | Green banana fritters | Recipe

In this part of the world, a "fig" is an unripe banana. Like green plantains, green bananas are treated more like potatoes than fruit. For this dish, you peel the green bananas (which requires a knife to score the peel first, otherwise you're ripping off little bits of skin all over the place), boil them, mash them, and then add in the other ingredients. I was really surprised to be able to find the "seasoning peppers" at the Latino market I went to in Sunset Park; also known as "ajicitos," these look a whole lot like the ultra-spicy habaneros or almost-as-hot Scotch bonnets, but have a lot less spice and a lot more flavor.

Anyway, these little fritters were fine, not terribly flavorful but pleasant enough for breakfast. Maybe if I'd used real Goya seasoning, what with its MSG, rather than throwing in a few spices like cumin and coriander, it mighta been tastier.

Sorrel drink | Recipe

Avid readers will know we've enjoyed this sort of drink before, but why should that stop us? It's delightfully simple to make, just boil dried hibiscus/sorrel flowers with water, ginger, and spices, let cool, strain, add sugar, and enjoy the tangy, spiced, sweet flavor of Christmas in a glass. Yum!

The meal made for a nice opportunity to unplug from the Sandy craziness for a little while, enjoy the sunshine streaming through the window (it was cold out!), and enjoy the carefre sounds of calypso music.

We're off for a few weeks, our next meal is in San Francisco the weekend following Thanksgiving for Dominican Republic — and we'll be done with the D's!

Meal 49: Djibouti

Last week was Eid al-Adha, the Feast of the Sacrifice. To commemorate the moment when Abraham was prepared to sacrifice his son Isaac at God's command, Muslims sacrifice an animal and turn it into dinner. In Djibouti, this would almost certainly be a goat, so that's what we ate! Now, not too many people have heard of Djibouti, barely the size of the NYC metro area. During the Opening Ceremony of the Olympics a few months ago, all Matt Lauer could say about it was, "There are some countries whose name makes you smile." Squeezed into the intersection of Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia, and across the Red Sea from Yemen, it's an invention of colonialism from when the French wanted a secure place to guard passage to the Suez Canal, and it remains host to French and US soldiers.

As far as the food, Djibouti shares with its neighbors a penchant for injera, the spongy crêpe-like flatbread made from a flour called teff, though the use of rice is a nod to influence from nearby Arab lands. Despite its seaside location, meat seems to be preferred. And it's all eaten by hand from communal platters. I should point out that there's not a whole lot of info on Djiboutian cuisine online in English or even French, so this meal is the best I could do based on what I could find!

We had a fun crowd for the dinner: Sarah, our neighbors Amanda and Henry, Sarah-Doe, Zhenya, Raven, Dan, and Claire! Ed (remember him from Armenia?) showed up a bit later.

Cabri farci, façon afar | Stuffed goat, Afar style | Roasting (scroll to #11), rice stuffing (minus lamb), video

 The Afar are one of the two main ethnic groups of Djibouti, and the more nomadic of the two. Apparently their famed form of hospitality is to stuff a goat with rice and spices, and roast it over a fire.

Goat in chunks is fairly easy to come by in NYC, but finding a more whole version during Eid al-Adha proved a challenge. After some calling around, Fertile Crescent came through. I emerged from the subway at Atlantic and Flatbush staring down the new and utterly strangely post-apocalyptic Barclays Center; 30 seconds later I was trying to get the attention of a butcher arguing in Arabic with a customer. We ended up deciding that a whole 30-pound goat would be excessive, so I got him to trim off the legs and I walked home with the midsection.

With little indication of how to prepare the rice, other than watching a video that advises oil and spices, I adapted a more standard meat-and-rice recipe, hoping that the generous apportionment of tomatoes and onions, plus drippings from the meat, would provide enough moisture to cook the short grain Egyptian rice I picked up.

Then it came to lacing the darn thing up. Apparently they use wire, and so did I, which mostly worked. I employed a staple gun to help graft a flap of skin to the wide opening at the end of the ribcage, and surprisingly it mostly held. On went a quick rub of oil and salt, and in went the rice! Then I built a wood-and-charcoal fire (with hyperlocal kindling scavenged from the back yard!) and let it burn down for about an hour. Using the technique I learned from the Cuban pork shoulder, I pushed the coals to the side (and added the innovation of foil above the coals that had fallen in the center) to allow for indirect heat, and on went the goat! I moved it only twice in two hours for fear of losing too much rice.

The result was a surprising success. Seven pounds of goat midsection doesn't offer much meat, but the meager helpings are really tasty without being too rich, and definitely enhanced by the smoke. Speaking of, while the rice was a bit on the al dente side, it did have a marvelous campfire flavor.

Injera | Sourdough teff pancakes | Recipe: Original, simplified version below

With 194 meals to make it through, rarely do I test a recipe before the dinner. But having never made injera and having seen so many different recipes, I did a trial run a few weeks back. The spontaneously fermented one — mix up ingredients, let wild yeasts land, then cook — was too sticky and tasted suspiciously and unpleasantly of cheese. But this one, using a known sourdough starter and with all sorts of "they don't actually use it" stuff like self-rising flour, turned out amazingly, and I chose it. Many people on the surprisingly long and controversy-ridden string of comments claimed that though the technique is non-traditional, the results replicate the on-the-ground experience, and I guess that's what I'm going for!

I'm so grateful for that recipe but I find it long and hard to follow, so I pared it down and added a bit of my experience in my version of the recipe which is at the end of this post. Simply put, if you have a hankering for injera and can get your hands on teff (Bob's Red Mill makes it and many Whole Foods Markets sell it) and a good starter, I can't imagine a better result. Tangy and nutty, moist and spongy but with a good tooth, so easy to tear off a piece for grabbing a bite of food, this is just really tasty stuff. It just takes a while to make them one pancake at a time!

Lentilles djiboutiens | Lentils with chili and spices | Recipe

My authenticity-dar is kind of spinning with this recipe — no native name given, doesn't specify the type of lentils, etc. — but you know what, it turned out to be really, really good. I used red lentils (which turn yellow when you cook 'em) and I'm glad I did, because it turned out nice and soft in a way that I'm not sure black/green lentils could have. Despite the high proportion of chilies, it wasn't too spicy.

If you make this, note that instead of draining the lentils, saving the water, and then putting it all back together, I just started sauteeing the onions and chilies in a separate pan, added them to the par-cooked lentils, threw in a bit more water, and cooked from there. Simpler and you can't argue with the tasty results!

Yetakelt W'et | Spiced vegetable stew | Recipe

This dish of assorted veggies was totally okay, but really nothing spectacular. Maybe veggie dishes are just not a big thing in Djibouti, or maybe this recipe's just a dud. Stick to the lentils and meat!

The conversation turned to the approaching storm — which has passed by the time I write this, thankful to have power and internet and glad the only inconvenience is a lack of subway service — and transitioned into an outside party!

We were going to do the next meal, Dominica, up in Boston, but given the post-Sandy mess of things, we'll be doing it from home.

And without further ado, the recipe: Injera, adapted from Burakaeyae

2 cups teff starter

2 cups teff

3 cups self-rising flour (store-bought, or make your own: 3 cups all-purpose flour plus 4 teaspoons baking powder and 1 teaspoon salt)

Night before: Best done in big glass bowl. Mix starter and 2 cups of teff. Knead it a bunch, like 10 minutes. Will be really dry. Then add luke-warm water, 1/4 cup at a time, thoroughly mixing each time. Mix until it's watery. Test: dip hand in batter, should slip off quickly only leaving a thin residue. Let rest overnight.

Next morning: Should see three layers with liquid in middle. Stir. Save one or two cups for next time if you plan to make again. Blend this starter mix, either 1 cup at a time in the blender, or with an immersion blender. Blend until you only feel a very small amount of grit. Pour this into a large pot or other big vessel.

In your now-empty glass bowl, put the self-rising flour. Add warm water, mixing by hand until soupy. Blend again, should take less time than the teff.

Scrape the flour batter into the teff batter. Mix thoroughly with your hand. If it doesn't pass the thin-residue test, add a bit more water until it does. Cover with a lid and let rise, longer the better. Then put in fridge for at least 45 minutes.

Before dinner: Give yourself plenty of time, it can take at least a half hour to make them all. They don't need to be hot so you can do it in advance.

Heat up a pan; non-stick will make your life easier, something with low edges like a crepe pan is best. Get it really good and hot, sprinkle on a bit of salt, then pour some batter on. Quickly tilt around to fill the diameter of the pan; it may take a few tries to get the right amount so it's not too thin or too thick. Cover with a lid to get it to steam a bit.

Once it crisps a bit on the edge, use something wide like a super-wide spatula or a flat baking sheet to remove. (If it's non-stick you might be lucky and able to just slide it off). Let cool for a bit on a clean cloth napkin or towel or cooling rack while you make the next injera, then move onto a plate for keeping. You need to let each injera cool on its own for a bit before putting on the pile to prevent sticking.

Sprinkle on a bit more salt every time, not only is this good for flavor but apparently it helps make the bubbles.

Photos by Laura Hadden, who's looking forward to no more puns on this country's name.

Meal 48: Denmark

Danish cuisine doesn't exactly have a high reputation, among gastronomes nor dietitians, so I had pretty low expectations for the meal. While Denmark famously produces a whole lot of dairy and pork, it has a historical reputation for sending the best stuff abroad and keeping the remainder to feed the populace. Well, I am happy to report that so long as bold, rich flavors are welcome, Danish food is actually pretty good! For this meal I tried to evoke the spirit, if not the reality, of the smørrebrød — literally, butter-bread, the open-faced sandwiches on rye that are the most distinctive and lovely part of the cuisine. While a really good host might have made them for the guests, we set bread, butter, and toppings on the table, and let folks just have at it.

We were pleased to welcome a whole bunch of first-time Noshers! Raven's the only one who'd been before; we were thrilled to welcome Jeremy, Lars (a real half-Dane!), Dada, Julie, Bijou (another half-Dane!), Jess, and Allison (a fellow countries-of-the-world food-schticker at 26dishes!).

Rugbrød | Sourdough whole rye bread | Recipe

My initial research a few weeks back made it clear that a fresh, dense-but-moist, whole-grain sourdough rye is a core component of Danish cuisine. I found several recipes in searching, but none really struck the intersection of seeming like something someone in Denmark would actually make, and speaking the sort of baking language I understand.

So what luck when I did the search again — specifying "rye chops" because I had the cut grains on hand — and found this marvelous recipe that just happened to be posted a day or two prior! If you already have a sourdough starter, it's no big deal, you just have to plan several days in advance so you can take part of your starter and feed it with rye, and then spend the required day and a half of rising and refrigerating, 2.5 hour bake, and another 24 hour rest before slicing.

The bread is just great. Rich, malty flavor with a very strong backbone of that hearty rye flavor, but what's most wonderful is the surprisingly light crumb and moistness you just don't expect from 100% rye. The only recommendation I can add to the recipe is to remove the bread from the pans before it cools too much; I made the mistake of cooling in the pan, and of the three loaves I made, only the one with corrugated sides released. The other two taste great but are no good for slicing.

Akvavit | Spiced spirits

Akvavit, from the Latin aqua vitae or "water of life," is an infusion of spices into vodka. I guess I could have bought some at the store, but what's the fun in that? Cobbling together indications from several sites, and ignoring suggestions to start with just a few spices, I threw in about a dozen, including cinnamon, coriander, caraway seeds, cardamom, cloves, anise, star anise, and dried lemon peel. I should have left it for a few weeks but only started a few days before the meal, so to give things a head start I toasted the herbs to release the oils, and also gave the bottle a shake every time I walked by the kitchen.

Nobody claimed to love it, and to be fair it was a pretty heady combination of flavors, but I was pleased for what I think passes as a Scandinavian complement from Lars: "Well, this is better than many commercial versions!"

Frikadeller | Fried meatballs | Recipe

 Denmark creates a lot of dairy, but dairy cows aren't the best for eating. So what to do? Well, grind up the beef and fry it in butter! The recipe's evolved, and now you'll often see pork and/or veal either in place of or mixed in with the beef. The recipe that Allison provided calls for pork but I messed up and bought beef instead (probably remembering the history more than the recipe!) while at the Meat Hook. I then got pork, so it was a blend. And such a tasty one! As Allison says, "If pork is king in Denmark, butter is king." So, a royal dish indeed. And thanks to Jeremy for frying them all up!

Leverpostej | Liver pate | Recipe

Corinna, a colleague of mine, cautioned against setting up for sandwiches — not only would it take "a lot of preparation," but "you would have to make leverpostej." Tradition demands it! And since I don't pass up a good opportunity to bake with rye, well, I had to make this liver-based pâté.

Now, I can find palmnut sauce, green plantains, and homemade lard easily in New York. But who knew, in a city that loves its bacon and many other parts of the pig, that it would be so hard to find something as elemental as pork liver? After increasingly frantic calls on Friday to some of Manhattan and Brooklyn's best-regarded butchers, all of whom said "I could get it for you in a few days," I finally found a winner in the Meat Hook in Williamsburg, which also kindly ground both the liver and the fat for me. So note, if for some reason you want to make this dish, please call ahead to your butcher and make sure they're ready.

We didn't end up with any photos of the dish, which is just as well because it's roundly unattractive. But for those who enjoy pâté-like dishes, it's a treat to have one that's freshly made. One suggestion is to ignore the recipe's idea to serve warm; apparently it's most often served cold, which also makes it easier to slice.

Syltede rødbeder | Pickled beets | Recipe

I almost didn't make this, because the beets at the Fairway were shockingly soft. You want beets soft after cooking, not before. But while I was at the Meat Hook, the little produce area in the Brooklyn Kitchen half had these beautiful, local beets that I just couldn't ignore.

Now, a cooking secret for you. I don't know a reliable way to avoid getting stains when cooking. Even when I wear an apron, stuff seems to find its way onto my shirt. So when I'm working intensively with beets or pomegranate or the like, I just take my shirt off. Maybe it increases the risk of a burn on my stomach, but I know I won't stain the clothes! Anyway, so I boiled the beets, cooled them in an ice bath, slipped off the skins, and sliced them while still warm. I threw together a homemade pickling spice with bay leaves, mustard and coriander seeds, cloves, broken cinnamon stick, and probably a few other odds-and-ends I forget, and left it just overnight. Well, the flavors definitely melded, and the beets were very popular, both as a smørrebrød topping and also on their own.

Smør, Marinerede sild, Danablu | Butter, pickled herring, blue cheese

Much as I try to make things myself, sometimes you just gotta buy it. No way I was going to churn my own butter (though I've heard you can) or make my own blue cheese, and even though I tried to find fresh herring to pickle my own, I totally struck out and got some from Shelsky's down the road. Anyway, all of these were excellent smeared on the rye bread for some smørrebrød action.

Kold kartoffelsalat | Cold potato salad | Recipe

Be sure to use the freshest potatoes you can find, because there's not much seasoning in this salad so the potatoes are meant to shine. However, there is heavy cream and mayonnaise. Yum! I think I was more of a fan of the more vinegar-and-bacon direction of an Austrian potato salad, but I definitely see the value of this creamier kind.

Grønkal | Creamed kale | Recipe

Despite the name and appearance, there's no cream here, just a butter-flour-milk roux with boiled and chopped kale thrown in. I think there was too much sauce for the amount of greens.

Is | Ice cream

Turns out the Danes are the #1 per-capita consumers of ice cream in the world. I too the opportunity to clean out a bunch of ice creams I'd made over the summer: vanilla, mint, saffron-cardamom-pistachio-rosewater, and peach sorbet.

We had a great time, as Lars, Bijou and Allison regaled us with stories of Danish life and culture, and the soundtrack played local pop and other sounds.

Next week we head to a place that also has sourdough-based bread, and plenty of meat and butter — and that's where the similarities end, 'cause it's the little East African nation of Djibouti.

Photos by Laura Hadden, who finally found a rye bread she likes.