We had our good friend, Carol Vandenakker, over for our Norwegian dinner. I know, her name's from the wrong country, but we let that slide. We cranked up the German ooompah music---again, best we could do, and I served up the appetizers which consisted of a cucumber salad, brown bread with butter and mustard and this:
It's called a ooodenorkveynterlatzenoqueterdort, or something like that. Those are walnuts spread with a blue cheese with a grape between them. They are stuck into the apple for purely decorative purposes.
The main dish was pure scandinavian high-fat yumminess. Meat patties made with pork and hamburger, dumplings made from shredded potato (I learned that potato oxidizes very quickly) and stuffed with bacon, and a delicious vegetable dish made with rutabaga, leeks and carrots (simmer in chicken bouillion). The dumplings were something else. Once eaten, they resume their original shape in the stomach where they sit and sit and sit and sit. I have a theory that if I ate four or five dumplings every morning, I wouldn't want to eat for the rest of the day and I'd lose a ton of weight. Of course, that would be horribly unhealthy, but I would lose a lot of weight--even if I fried them up in bacon fat first.
The grand dessert was, of course, the kranselkake.
Sadly, our printer ran out of color ink just then so I couldn't decorate it properly with little Norwegian flags. But considering that I didn't have the proper molds, I think it was a darn fine effort. I wonder if the real thing tastes anything like mine? It's a shame that Catherine wasn't here for this cake. She loves meringue and royal icing and that's really all this is. The cakes--which are really more like cookies, are just ground almonds, powdered sugar and water. The molds are supposed to have butter solidified on the bottom, so I just coated the cookie sheets with a thick layer of butter and called it good. The cookies spread out more than the real thing would have, but we still enjoyed them.
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