Goose Liver Fog

- I love this wonderful taste of chocolate, my wife said.

Immediately, our friend; a fellow hunter, and a professor in criminology, gave Lan-Ling a bottle to bring home. The wine that we were drinking was the famous (and expensive) Chateau d’Yquem in its 1975 vintage.

He did this at a fabulous dinner at his mansion in Sweden, after a particularly good Duck shoot that he had organized. The professor was in a very good mood since he himself had been shooting very well. I have a vague suspicion that he at that moment also had somewhat amorous feelings towards Lan-Ling.

The gargantuan amounts of wine that he, and indeed all of us, had consumed at dinner were probably also a contributing factor leading to both the love and good mood.

The bottle of Sauterne traveled with us from Sweden to Belgium, and subsequently to London when we moved there. Two years later, it was time to move to California. The bottle however, couldn’t travel anymore due to the cork slowly creeping out.

It was time for a mercy killing.

As you all know, Chateau d’Yquem has to be drunk with foie gras.

For you who do not understand French, this is a goose liver that has contracted liver cirrhosis. This is what we humans get when we, for example, drink the amount of booze that we really want to drink. All the time.

Geese do not drink booze, instead they get their stomachs pumped up with grain via a “reversed” vacuum cleaner. All the time. They like this. They are happy geese. As a matter of fact, they are as happy as you would be if you drunk all that booze. I think.

We went to Harrods and bought the liver. Too much liver. We always buy too much. We always cook too much, too.

We solve this continuous problem by inviting friends and neighbors on extremely short notice;

- You guys want to have dinner?

- Sure, what date?

- In twenty minutes.

This time it was our next-door neighbors who got the call. Of course they came over. They were fairly used to this by now so the fact that they themselves had some people over for dinner didn’t stop them; they simply brought them too.

We opened the bottle that was about to die, and a few extra other bottles to make it more into a mass murder exercise.

Since I feel that you have to eat goose liver immediately, we all congregated in the kitchen to eat the slices as they came off the pan.

Now, the best way to prepare goose liver, in my view, is to take a whole liver, clean out the blood vessels, cut it in slices, rub in salt and pepper, and then fry it on high heat for a few seconds on each side. You are basically giving it a surface. Beware, if you fry it for too long, it melts.

This method unfortunately produces a lot of smoke. Much more than your stove fan can handle. So much so that in a normal London kitchen, you can’t breathe. Or see your hands. As a matter of fact, it produces so much smoke so that all fire alarms in your house will go off, and your neighbors (the ones not currently in your kitchen) think your house is on fire.

The neighbors that currently are in your kitchen (you guess they are still there, because you sure as hell can’t see them) are happily eating fried goose liver and drinking the professor’s Chateau d’Yquem……….

Are you Pigheaded?

The Christmas before last we spent in Sweden. Earlier that December, my sister, who was going to join us, asked what I wanted for Christmas present. My answer came lightning fast; -a Pigs head, or actually, two.

There was a long silence on the phone……….

-A what? She said.

-A pigs head, or two, I repeated.

This was apparently not something she had thought of, I thought smugly.

You have to realize that there is somewhat of a history here, where my sister is notorious for giving bad Christmas presents. The worst being a book that she apparently had stolen in a library. This was proven by the stamps in it saying “Property of the City of Stockholm Library”.

Anyway, the stunned silence turned into some indeterminable whining about pigs’ heads. –I don’t know where to buy them, -they are heavy, -bloody, -smelly, -and what the hell are you going to do with a pigs head anyway, etc. etc. In the end she refused to buy me my pigs head with the motivation that her daughter might see it, and get traumatized for life.

So that Christmas I didn’t get to make head cheese or anything else good that you can do with a pigs head. I did, however, boil pigs feet and fried, breaded, crispy pigs’ tail. But even then I was relegated to the second kitchen where nobody would see me, or smell my cooking.

Now, this little story illustrates what has gone wrong with people and their relation with meat. People in general don’t know anymore what good meat is, and they don’t know that meat comes from animals that were once alive.

This Christmas we spent in Berkeley, and in order to make my Head Cheese, I went down to Chinatown and bought my own pig’s head. When I came home, I let my two boys look at it and play with it a little bit.

-Dad, Can I keep the eyeball?

- Look Dad ! I can stick my finger all the way into the mouth and it doesn’t bite!

After this I butchered it with the kids watching and giving helpful comments.

Try this at home! It is sort of tricky knife work if you are not used to it, but the good thing is that it doesn’t matter if you botch it up. You are anyway going to cut the whole thing to small pieces later. Essentially you are trying to “undress” the head i.e. separate everything from the skull. A hint, the snout has small pieces of cartilage in it. Locate those and take them out. Another hint, pig’s snout tastes very good, so if you can buy a few extra, do that and add them into the dish. Cut off the ears and put them into the refrigerator. You are going to use them later to make crispy pig’s ear, I’ll tell you how in a later posting.

After you “undressed” the head, cut the meat and skin in medium size pieces and put it all into brine together with the extra 3-4 pigs’ tongues and lean pork meat that you bought. If you found extra snouts, put them in as well. Leave it in the brine for about 5 days in the refrigerator.

Now, this is what you do after those 5 days:

1. Fill a big pot with water, put in the tongues and cook on low heat for 30 minutes. Add skin, snouts, and meat from the head and cook for another thirty minutes. Then add the lean pork meat and boil on low heat for an additional half an hour (or so). It is good to remove (skim) the scum now and then whilst boiling.
2. Take out the meats and strain the cooking liquid. Reduce it to about a quarter of it original volume.
3. Trim the tongues (peel them) so that no coarse surface is left. You can also take out the cartilage of the snouts here, it’s easier than if you do it when the snouts are raw (but hotter). Dice all the meats into pieces. The size of the pieces is really up to you, but remember you have to stuff them into a casing, but you are not really making sausage. ½ inch maybe.
4. Take the now diced meats and mix it with all the other ingredients and a suitable amount of the reduced stock. How much? Well, you are not making soup. You are not making hamburgers, somewhere in between, where the meats can take up the juice inside the casings without bathing in them.
5. Stuff into waterproof cooking casings (synthetic), or use cow intestine. I prefer the intestine, where I use the sausage maker attachment on our Kitchen Aid to stuff the meat into the casings (take away the grinding part, or else you are going to get minced meat).
6. Put the stuffed casings (sealed of course) in nearly boiling water. Let this simmer away until you believe that the internal temperature matches, or is just under the water temperature. The reason I don’t give you a time here is that it depends on so many factors, like the size of your casing for example. I really don’t believe you should be too worried about over-cooking though. Last time I did this, I let them simmer for about an hour.
7. When you are done, take them out of the water and refrigerate for at least 24 hours before eating.
8. Take your traumatized kids to the shrink.

Ingredients
Now here is a little bit of a dilemma, this dish is highly individual. Everybody who makes it is going to do it differently when it comes to how much lean meat you add, and what spices you use. I tend to think of the lean pork meat as filling and everything from the head as “goodies”. I then sort of look at the two different piles and try to determine whether it is too much goodies or too much filling. As you can see this is a highly scientific method which I suggest you adopt. Trust me, it will taste good whatever you do. As to spices I suggest that you put in what you like. In the list to follow I feel that the pine nuts, cinnamon, and nutmeg are essential because these are the tastes I associate strongly with this dish. As for the amount of spices, test your way. Since the meat is cooked when you mix the spices, you can feel free to taste the mixture until you like how it is spiced.

1 pigshead
Lean pork meat
Extra tongues (2-3)
Extra Snouts (if available)
pine nuts (I love pine nuts in this dish so I tend to use a lot)
Black pepper, ground (or White pepper, whatever you prefer)
Cinnamon
Nutmeg
Mace
Clove
Herbs like Rosemary, Sage, or Thyme

Brine
The liquid has to cover the meat.

Per litre of water:

100 g sugar
150 g Salt
3-4 Juniper berries (optional)
3 Cloves (optional)
1 Bay leave (optional)

Bring it to the boil and boil until sugar and salt has totally dissolved. Let it cool before putting in the meats.

PS. If you make this, you will be in my list of cool people. DS.

9 ½ Fingers

- urgh heapr po fiiilt

- miiina polit ääää

This what was we heard when we met the Swedish west coast fisherman that our friend Gunnar had brought us to. We were there to buy dungeness crabs straight from the fishing boat. This fisherman had such an incredible thick local accent that it was impossible for me to understand what he said.

-grroo tri fsakk, he said and invited us onto the boat. We went onto the boat where he started hauling big net cases, that were hanging on the side of the boat, out of the water. Those net cases were full of crabs.

-hmpphh aaaaa put, he said and opened the cases.

I was trying to avoid letting on that I couldn’t understand a word of what this man said by looking out to the sea, presumably intensively admiring the view.

- hmmm aaaaa eau AARRRGH!, Gunnar said. Great! I thought, he speaks the dialect, and I turned around to partake now that it was safe that we actually could communicate.

There was Gunnar with a gigantic Dungeness crab attached to his finger.

- AAAHHHHHAARGHHH! he said, and the fisherman probably believed he said that this year’s national elections had gone particularly well from his perspective.

After a while, though, he caught on and helped Gunnar from his predicament. After doing this he said,
- heartefs bolla PILON! And showed us that one of his fingers was only half of what it used to be. Gunnar, who still had his whole finger, translated that a crab had taken the fishermans finger (you see, Gunnar could understand what this guy said).

We bought about 20 Crabs from the guy and paid about 30 USD.

We went home to the house that we borrow from Gunnar every now and then for summer vacations, and cooked them.

Now there is really only one thing to remember when you cook crabs: Salt. Almost every person I know undersalts the water. The water must be like sea water, i.e. very salty. Check the salinity of your local sea and match your boiling water to it. Oh, one more thing, I boil big crabs for 20 minutes, and small ones for 10.

For you readers on the US West Coast: What you call Dungeness crab is something completely different, and not at all as good as the Atlantic Dungeness. If you travel to Europe, order one, and then feel sorry for yourself forever that you can’t get the real thing at home.

There is a smaller crab on the Swedish west coast which we call the “seaweed crab”. You catch it by tying a semi-crushed mussel to a string, then throwing the mussel in the water. After a minute you lift the mussel out of the water, and voila, there is a crab attached to it. Rather stupidly, it won’t let go, so you just grab it and throw it in a bucket. Now, these guys are small, but if you get a lot of them you can boil them in saltwater and Dill. It is very good.

You can also do as my then 3 year old son. Iwas going outside to get the bucket of crabs in order to cook them. What I saw when i came outside was my son chasing crabs all over the lawn and smashing them with a spade. When I asked what the hell he was doing he said, -they pinched me! ALL OF THEM! Yep, they are aggressive little suckers. Especially when you insist on sticking your fingers down into a whole bucket of them. Since they are also fast runners, we didn’t get to eat any crabs that night. I just didn’t feel for running around the garden for the survivors. But hey, the seagulls got a good dinner.

A couple of days later we had Gunnar, his wife Gunilla, and her mother Gunnel over for dinner (in their house). You see, they have two houses on the same island—we borrow one of them. We had bought a whole Seawolf (about 5 feet long). Now, the house has a good kitchen but it doesn’t have a five foot long oven, or frying surface (few houses have, I’ve sadly noticed). I really wanted to do the thing whole because it is sort of cool to serve a five foot long fish. Just lay it on the middle of the table and tell people to dig in.

So, I was walking around trying to figure out how to achieve this when I saw a rather largish pile of gravel on the end of the driveway near to the garage. Aha! I thought and got some help to dig a six feet hole in the pile. Subsequently, we gathered some firewood and made a fire in the hole. I must say the whole thing took on a sort of pagan burial rite feeling.

Whilst the fire was burning, we salted and peppered the fish, scored it with diagonal cuts on both sides and stuffed and surrounded it with a lot of herbs (basically all the dill we had plus everything in the garden). We then wrapped it with aluminum foil. So think foil, a big layer of herbs, and then the fish surrounded by the herbs.

When the fire had burnt out, we put the fish down in the hole and covered it with the gravel. The cover was about a foot and a half in thickness.

We let the thing sit there for an hour and then we dug it out, found a plank which we sawed off to suitable length, put the fish on it and carried the whole thing in to the waiting guests and friends.

12 bottles of wine later, it was all agreed that the dinner was a big success.

We are going back this summer, so we will see what culinary delights await us this time

Lasagna Anyone?

I have just shoved two huge pans of lasagna in the oven after three hours of preparation. My shoulders, neck, and arms ache from all the chopping and stirring. Why so much lasagna, you ask? Well, it is because all my friends are having babies! I have two friends who have just popped the little ones out of the oven and I, helpful person that I am, said, " You must be so tired; let me please make you some lasagna to feed you and your hungry family." Then, a few days later, another friend had a baby, so I said, " I am already making lasagna, why don't I make a pan for you? It will be no trouble at all." So, I got up this morning, went to the store, bought ingredients and started cooking. How long could it take, right? I figure, the lasagna will be in the oven in an hour, and I will go running while it cooks. And the plus is that my family gets an excuse to have yummy lasagna for dinner, too. Three hours later, I am just finishing up. A huge vat of tomato sauce made with beef and pork sausage and flavored with rosemary and porcini mushrooms...and a huge vat of bechamel sauce with Parmesan...a hunking pile of grated mozzarella....Hey! This is starting to be work. Finally, I can begin assembling. I take out the pasta and realize with horror that I have bought the old-fashioned kind that must be boiled before layering up....oh god...well, here goes... OK, so finally I am done. But here's the catch....there was only enough sauce for two pans of lasagna...no lasagna for us for dinner! Peter comes in the kitchen as I am finishing up and hears the bad news. He sulks. It is sad to see a grown man sulk. I promise, I will make you lasagna with bechamel any time you want....just not today.