Adventures in food

While on my study tour, I ate better than I have pretty much the whole time I've been in Denmark. More on that in a later post, but I wanted to share some of the fun meals I tried this weekend. We had two lunches, two breakfasts and a dinner provided for us, which was really nice, and I ate out in Flensburg one night with a couple friends.

Of course, everyone thought I was strange for taking pictures of all my food, but I was only thinking of you, my readers. Well, I say readers, but I'm not sure more than one person reads this. Maybe if you all started LEAVING COMMENTS, that would be nice. Or e-mailing me. Mmmhmm, that's right, I get lonely here!

Anyway, enjoy. I did. (Mostly)

Chile Con Carne - Danish style

In Odense, we went to a restaurant decorated Italian style that was both a steakhouse and Mexican restaurant. They had preordered chile con carne for us, and it was pretty good! A lot of people were complaining that it was too spicy, but it was perfect to me. I ate one of the peppers and I'd say it was maybe a little bit hotter than a jalapeno, so not so pleasant to eat all at once, but I got over it.

And they had ICE WATER at this restaurant. You can't understand how much of a thrill it is for me to get ice water here. I miss it so much. First of all, restaurants in Denmark pretty universally charge even for tap water - about $1, and many don't have it at all, and will just sell you a bottle of water for between $2 and $3. And if you aren't lucky, they'll only have Danskvand, literally Danish water, which is like sparkling mineral water. You have to ask specifically for still water. And then again, it's not always cold. And I love ice cold water.

I still haven't made the trip out to Ikea to look for ice cube trays, which is my last hope. I can't wait to come home to all the ice cubes I could ever want, and free water at restaurants. But I digress...

Sauerfleisch and potatoes.

Wow. Well, I wanted to try something pretty authentically German, and I picked this at a restaurant in Flensburg. Sauerfleisch was described in the menu as cold pickled ribs, which didn't sound too bad, I guess. I should have known something was up when the waitress was like, "Are you sure you know what that is? And you want to order it?"

It came to the table and I was a bit in shock, a bit in dismay. The meat didn't look like ribs at all, just pork, and it was all covered with this gelatinous mess. See the close-up below, which still doesn't really capture the inherent disgustingness of how this dish looked.

But I was brave. I scraped off as much of the gelatin as I could (according to Nikki it looked like placenta and according to Chris it looked like congealed fat, maybe giving you some idea of just how adventurous I felt eating this). The meat wasn't bad, just kinda tasted like leftovers or something. And when I put mustard on it, it was better. I didn't eat more than half that pot, which I don't think i would have even if it was good - it was a ton of food! And I was very thankful for the potatoes, which were delicious.

Here we have what Charlotte called a very Danish meal, but not too Danish to scare us completely. On the left is a shrimp salad (yes, I ate the shrimp and they were pretty good. I think they're just small enough to where the texture doesn't completely freak me out like with normal shrimp), then what very much resembled jalapeno poppers except with pimiento instead of cheddar, then roast beef with horseradish and some sort of sauce and some spicy little pepper things, then marinated chicken. There were also, inexplicably, french fries.

A very common lunch would be to take the shrimp salad or the roast beef and put it on a piece of rugbrod, making it a smorrebrod (open-face sandwich). Smorrebrod, of course, can have any topping, though there are definitely traditional Danish ones. Herring is popular, as is liverpate. I haven't tried those yet, though I'm willing to try the liverpostej...maybe.

Weinerschnitzel with potatoes and vegetables with a bernaise sauce.

Yes, I ate the vegetables. The Weinerschnitzel was okay, not great, the potatoes were excellent. I was sitting by Charlotte, the study tours coordinator and Anne Mette, one of my teachers, along with of course the other students. Anyway, they thought it was hilarious that there's a chain in the States (well, I've seen it in Texas at least, I'm not sure how universal it is) called Weinerschnitzel and they sell hot dogs. I knew at some point that Weinerschnitzel didn't mean hot dogs but I had no idea what it actually was.

The other cool thing about this meal was that we ate at a local microbrewery, Hansens Braueri. I tried the dark beer, which was superb, and they had a decent pilsner, too. But you could also order something called a meter of beer, which was a very wide yardstick basically that held a bunch of beers. It was very odd to me, but pretty cool I guess.

We also had a potato soup, but I like American potato soup better - hey Mom, by the way, you should make that when I get home and stuff. And give me your recipe. And they served some bread, but not enough for us, especially because we were all starving when we got there. Emily asked the waitress for more bread while we were eating our soup and the waitress said, "Well, you know there's another meal coming," and Emily said, "yes, I know, but I want some more bread," speaking on behalf of the whole table. Well, the next course came and there was still no bread so after maybe 15 minutes, Emily stopped the waitress again to ask for more bread and the waitress got this look of horror on her face and said, "STILL?" Emily said yes, and the waitress came back with a plate of two slices.

I'm sure that last story was really a lot funnier if you were there. But "STILL?" and jokes about bread are going to be little inside jokes for us for the rest of the semester, I'm sure.