Sanddorn / sea buckthorn / havtorn

Our bike foraging mission around Amagerfælled resulted in a good collection of blackberries, and also a flush of bright orange sea buckthorn berries.

I remembered trying to collect these with my Mum, and failing as they exploded / were too thorny to get at. These weren't such big problems this time - perhaps the berries were a little underripe? Slow going though, they are small and you have to move slowly to avoid the thorns.

Having collected a couple of pints, we got home and wondered what to do with them. I decided to keep it simple, and just heated the berries in a covered pan until they started to pop, then squashed them with the back of a wooden spoon. I strained the resulting mush, and ended up with a cup or two of thick, very bright orange juice that looks like mango juice but is quite sour. I liked it mixed with maple syrup to take the edge off, then either mixed through plain yoghurt or in these drinks.

Sanddorn and maple syrup fizz

Mix a couple of tbsp sanddorn juice with a couple of tsp maple syrup, then top up glass with fizzy water and mix. The colour is wonderful and the syrup takes out some of the sharpness from the sanddorn so you can taste it better.

Havtorn gin and tonic

Add a couple of tbsp havtorn juice to a gin and tonic with ice. Perhaps a little maple syrup to taste if you find it too sour.


Note: the sanddorn juice could be saved for future use by freezing - it won't keep more than a week or so in the fridge.

Blackberry, oat and yoghurt muffins

S made grand plans to go on a foraging mission on Saturday. We biked through Nokken and around the Amagerfælled, with our eyes out for tempting stands of sanddorn (aka sea buckthorn aka havtorn ahhhh living in three languages is a little crazy sometimes, I just hope I get so I can really use the other two for stuff other than berries before too long!) or blackberries (aka brambles aka brombær aka brombeere)... We were also looking out for mushrooms but not so much luck this time - although we did find our first Danish edibles (oysters and chanterelles) a couple of weeks ago in the Danish Switzerland. We gathered some sanddorn near Nokken - more on that here. We hit up a couple of blackberry patches in the Amagerfælled (and they hit back...). We filled all our containers... then biked on to Amagerstrand for a swim and a Lidl picnic (really good gazpacho and S's fave pretzels).

Quite a few of the blackberries have gotten mixed into yoghurt, with or without muesli, and eaten just like that. I decided to freeze the remainder before they got too soggy, to keep them for future muesli (spread them on baking paper / baking tray in a single layer to freeze before putting in a bag or container so they don't stick together). But first, 5 oz got made into these muffins.

I used to make these muffins a lot. They were from a muffin recipe book my uni flatmate S had when we lived together, and I made them loads and wrote the recipes down when we moved out. This is a particular favourite - they work well with blueberries or raisins, but I reckon the blackberry-yoghurt-cinnamon-oat combination is a real winner.

(makes 12 medium sized muffins)

3 oz / 75 g oats
8 fl oz plain yoghurt
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
7 oz / 175 g plain flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
4-5 oz / 100-125 g brown sugar
1 egg
3-4 fl oz milk
3 fl oz vegetable oil
5 oz / 125 g blackberries (or other berries, or 3 oz / 75 g raisins)

Heat oven to 200C / 170C fan / 400F. Grease and/or line a muffin tin. Mix oats, yoghurt and bicarb and let stand for a minute. Mix the remaining dry ingredients in a large bowl with a fork. Add the remaining wet ingredients to the yoghurt mixture, whisk and then tip into the dry stuff. Mix until just combined, adding berries in the final few strokes. Then dollop into prepared muffin cups. Bake for 20-25 min, until well risen and golden. Let cool ten min before moving to a cooling rack.

Peach and fennel cake

Stone fruit in Europe is so, so much better than any we ate in the USA. Everything: peaches (especially the UFO ones), nectarines, apricots, greengages, all kinds of plums - Victoria through damson. Plums are Danish but peaches and nectarines aren't even coming from round here - mostly from Spain. Even via Lidl, I haven't eaten a bad one yet.

Having filled my face with all of the above, I decided that the last few white peaches I had could get baked... This recipe caught my eye (via the most beautiful Instagram ever). We are going to lunch tomorrow at a fairytale farmhouse in Lyngby, so I decided to make this to bring. Hope it goes down well (and travels OK - we are planning to bike there, around 40 km)!

(made 1 cake in standard circular tin)

1 tsp fennel seeds
125 g unsalted butter, at room temperature
seeds of ½ vanilla pod (used ½ tsp vanilla powder)
zest of 1 lemon (used 1 ½, thoroughly zested)
zest of 1 orange (skipped - did not have)
225 g sugar, plus 1 tbsp for sprinkling
pinch of salt 
3 eggs
120 g mascarpone (used skyr)
160 g flour
½ tsp baking powder
2 peaches (used 3 small white UFO peaches)

Heat the oven to 190C / 170C fan. Grease and line tin (s - original recipe was for 8 small loaf tins). Dry toast fennel seeds until fragrant, then let cool before crushing.

Beat butter, vanilla, zest(s), fennel seeds, sugar and salt together until just combined. Don’t cream. Add eggs one at a time, mixing each egg in well. Add mascarpone / skyr, flour and baking powder mix fast for a few seconds until well combined.

Slice two 'cheeks’ off each peach (one either side of the stone). Chop remaining fruit into small dice and mix into the cake batter. Cut the peach 'cheeks’ into thin, long slices (leave one end uncut). Put the batter in the lined tin(s). Top the cake(s) with peach slices spread out like a small fan and sprinkle with the additional sugar.

Bake for 20-25 min or until risen, golden brown and bouncy. Good warm, or else eat within 24 hours.


Update: we did not eat while warm as recommended, but it was within 24 hours. It was nice. Went well with the raspberries and mascarpone P+V had prepared.

Fresh hazelnuts / cherry bowl

The hedgerows are full of hazelnuts, and the frugt og gront shops have them too, fleetingly. I never ate a fresh hazelnut before. They are much softer and easier to crack. The texture is giving; taste mild. Might be interesting ground to a paste, but so far have done nothing but crack'n'snack... And look at them: so pretty!

Lip balm

I used up a pot of lip balm for possibly the first time ever. It was some I'd got from my friend A - she makes it with wax from her beehives. I kept meaning to buy more and forgetting / not finding anything that looked nice. Then I came across some of those rolled beeswax candles D+S had brought back from India and given to me and a lightbulb went on. This is beeswax! And I will likely never use them as candles, so why not conduct a lip balm experiment? So eventually I got round to it, and it was ridiculously easy, and I am definitely never buying lip balm again, at least so long as I still have candles left to unroll...

1 part coconut oil
1 part beeswax
drop of essential oil, Vitamin E or a little honey (all optional, and be careful not to add more that a teeny bit of liquid)

Put the coconut oil and beeswax into a microwave proof container. Put in the microwave for a minute at a time, swirling in between, until the beeswax is all melted. Pour into empty lip balm container(s), and leave flat to cool - should be solid and ready to use in less than half an hour.

Notes:
* I just made one little lip balm pot because it takes me a while to get through it, but it would be very easy to scale up for gifts etc, so long as you have enough containers.
* Modify ratios of wax to oil if you'd like a harder or softer lip balm.
* Use virgin coconut oil (the tasty stuff) if you would like a coconutty smell/taste - I had only the tasteless one, which is good if you want a pretty much unscented lip balm.
* I didn't test adding other scents / flavours but any kind of oil should work (might need to increase beeswax proportion to compensate for more liquid).
* Remember to save and clean lip balm containers.
* I think the mixture should come off pretty well with hot water, but to avoid having to wash the container used for preparation afterwards you can always melt it in a used glass jar destined for recycling.

Black pizza: balsamic reduction, date, walnut, fennel and goat cheese

I had forgotten how good this combination is. It is inspired by a pizza we ate by the waterfront in San Francisco once upon a time. We loved the combination of sweet and strong flavours. Then S suggested it when we were making pizza on a Sauna Wednesday in Norwich, and M helped us make the balsamic reduction that first time. S got really excited about pizza recently, because we are back on the dairy since moving to DK, and because our high-speed pizza dough has been especially good since we got here - perhaps the fresh yeast?

(makes 2 medium-small thin-crust pizzas)

1 cup balsamic vinegar
1-2 tbsp sugar
1/2-2/3 batch of high speed bread dough (must be made in advance)
flour for rolling
cornmeal, semolina or grahamsmel for the baking sheet
6 dates, stoned and roughly chopped
10 walnut halves, broken into pieces
1 smallish bulb of fennel, thinly sliced (or onion)
about 50 g of goat cheese (or mild creamy blue cheese eg gorgonzola), roughly chopped

Heat the oven to 220C. Put the balsamic vinegar and sugar in a small saucepan and heat at a high heat until it is just starting to thicken. Take off the heat. Separate the dough into two balls, and roll each out to about 3 mm thick. Sprinkle two baking sheets with cornmeal and transfer the pizza bases to them. Spread the balsamic reduction over the pizza bases. Sprinkle the dates, walnuts, fennel and goat cheese generously over the top. Put in the oven and bake for about 20 min, until starting to brown. Take out and let cool for five minutes or so before chopping into pieces (I favour scissors) and eating.

Stikkelsbær og hyldeblomst / gooseberry and elderflower muffins (Danish summertime)

S came home with a punnet of gooseberries when he went on a chestnut rice related mission to Istedgade the other day. The previous lot of gooseberries (stikkelsbær) we had this season I had simply stewed and eaten, mostly with skyr. But I was a little unsatisfied - gooseberries are so tart they definitely need quite a bit of sweetener and/or dilution with something cakey or creamy.

This time, I was thinking of making muffins in the morning before N awoke, and S suggested doing gooseberry ones. I checked my Delia veg collection book and she didn't have anything with gooseberries, but the first recipe that came up online was a Delia one that I had all the ingredients for (including elderflower cordial I made a few weeks ago) so the gooseberries' fate seemed a foregone conclusion.

These were part of our 'balcony brunch', which also featured avocado on Manfreds sourdough toast with a softboiled egg on top, and tomato-mozzarella salad. I started with four eggs: one for the muffins and one each for the toast. Perfect.

(makes about 8)

150 g plain flour
1 level dessertsp (11 ml) baking powder
¼ tsp salt
1 large egg
40 g golden caster sugar
2 tbsp milk
75 ml elderflower cordial
50 g butter, melted and cooled slightly
225 g gooseberries, topped and tailed

For the topping:
18 extra (approx 100 g) gooseberries, topped and tailed
1 heaped tbsp demerara sugar

Heat oven to 200C / 180C fan. Line a muffin tin. Mix flour, baking powder and salt in a bowl with a fork. In a separate bowl whisk together egg, sugar, milk,elderflower cordial and melted butter. Add the dry ingredients to the egg mixture and fold together until just combined. In the final few strokes add the 225 g gooseberries. Spoon the mixture into prepared muffin cups. Lightly press 2-3 of the extra gooseberries into the top of each muffin, and sprinkle with a little demerara sugar. Bake for 30 min until well risen and golden brown. Remove the muffins from the oven, and transfer them straight away to a wire rack to cool.


These are really good! The elderflower doesn't come out very strong but that's OK. Perhaps my homemade one isn't as strong as the shop bought one? My gooseberries were pink but green ones would be good too, These are really well balanced - the sugar sprinkled on top (I didn't have demerara so just used golden caster) is the final touch to offset the tartness from the berries.

Packed lunches

Since we moved to DK, S has been bringing his own lunch to work as well as me. He always bought food for lunch before, but the cafeteria in our building was closed when we first got here in Winter, so he started bringing packed lunches and so far hasn't stopped.

It's a new challenge keeping on top of interesting food for both of us. He eats a little more than me, so more than twice as much food is needed. And therefore tumbled-together leftovers from the previous night's cooking are less likely to cut it. To be honest, I have been pretty worn out from work in the evenings so haven't been generating much in the way of inspired leftovers. Plus, we have been eating a lot of stuff-with-bread for all meals, since we can't get enough of all kinds of Danish bread.

I do seem to have been bookmarking a few really useful packed lunch recipes - likely leftovers or quick to throw together the night before or morning of, and often good with bread! Some of these are also good for potlucks.

Bread with hummus (embellished with raw carrots/radishes/peas/peppers for dipping) / Greve cheese / cornichons
Bread with caponata (it keeps very well for a few days in the fridge if you have time to make it beforehand)
Red lentil dal or chickpea curry with rice or bread and yoghurt
Various lentil salads
Overnight couscous
Pasta salad (zazzed up leftover pasta)
Noodle salad (similarly treated leftover noodles)
Pesto rice salad
Summer rolls with peanut sauce
Sushi
Potato salad (if we have potatoes - not all that often)
Oat and seed bread