Hope my cat likes the bones 'cause the eel tastes so good! No dark rye bread but that’s my very own sourdough you are looking at (100g rye and 400g whole wheat flour). I often eat raw beetroots and black radish.
I rarely eat something sweet but when I do it’s Lebkuchen. Tomorrow is the equivalent of Christmas for children in some northern European countries. These are some of the treats for the occasion.
Buy from a bakery, remove the original packaging, wrap it up with your own gift papers and give it to the neighbours/colleagues/acquaintances etc and say you have made it yourself. No, I have never done it but you could. I don’t know/like anyone enough.
Talking about eel, a good smoked one costs a fortune. I bought half an eel yesterday, around 34€ (75€/kg). That one in your pict is a lot. Isn’t it too salty to eat it like that?
A good one is seven courses of different eel dishes: poached eel, cold smoked eel, fried eel, baked eel, hot smoked (halmad) eel, jellied (ålaladåb) eel, and eel soup.
It also includes eggs scrambled with heavy cream, good rye bread, pressed potatoes, and lots of bitter drams to cut the fat.
Inevitable stories, singing and toasts in the usual Scandinavian fashion ensue, often with an accordion or fiddle player.
Yes, smoked eel IS expensive. It’s a treat once in a while.
Smoked eel here are small, unlike in Germany and what I saw in Helsinki. At least a metre long. I like the kind we have here and I think it’s more delicate in taste and texture. Not so salty, actually. All other things I eat with the eel have no salt so it balances out.
VikingK, is smoked eel also big in Sweden?
Oneday I’ll go to this town in Germany just to eat their most well-known speciality which is smoked eel. They have been smoking it for 900 years. Name of town is Bad Zwischenahn.
It goes exceptionally well with (scrambled) eggs. There’s a recipe for that in my Swabian cookery book.
Haha… squeamish? In Germany it’s served whole like that. Saw it in a food magazine and it’s the same in Denmark.
Have a look at the 2 photos here, scroll all the way down.
First thing I do when I get to my lodging is clean. Everything I will be touching and using needs to be cleaned again, by me. My quality control is so strict so far nobody gets it right.
These are the first few things that need cleaning and sterilsing. This lodging has no dishwasher and that means lots of manual work and a big waste of water, not to mention inefficiency. Incompetence and inefficiency make me mad.
Finally, I could sit down to my decent lunch. Here in Hungary, the pig, goose, duck are king, knight and bishop (respectively).
Hungarian brawn. I love it. Luckily I can get it from a Hungarian stallholder at the market. Garlicky, paprika rich, has rinds and other things we shall never know what exactly in it. There’s also a version with blood. Maybe I should try that next.
Had it once in Prague in 2005, also at a christmas market. Their rig back then was more primitive and more complicated. I prefer that primitive rig, actually.
