My Christmas Eve

Here in Denmark, Christmas eve is the big event with Christmas day as a secondary event.  Almost everybody celebrates both days, but Christmas eve for sure.    I was lucky that I was off from work on the 24th but I had to get up out of bed at 4:20 Christmas day to get ready to go to work.

Christmas eve was such a special day that it even started out with the star of David - Well..... not exactly but what a spectacular sight of the full moon. And you are looking west.  The star of David was in the east.  It was Jens who pointed it out to me while we were sitting at the table having breakfast.  This was snapped at about 8:45.  The sky was clear but look how dark it is here.  Not really, I had to play with the lighting on the camera to capture the moon.

We started to buy most of our meal the week before Christmas.  We ordered dessert from the local baker in good time and picked it up at the last minute so that it would be fresh.  Eventually we got an invite to X-mas dinner at Dan's place.  Dan's house is basically always open to pretty much anybody who has the time to pop in - if he's home - which often he is not.  But otherwise, feel free to pop in and he'll feed you something from his yard or slide open a cupboard and pull out something from America, Germany or India.  World traveler this one is.

Dan is from New Jersey and he lives just 10 doors away from where we used to live.  He pretty much moved in at the time that we were moving out.  We were neighbors for about a year or so and finally our house sold.

Anywho… Dan said to us, "Come on over and we'll make Hawaiian sandwiches."  I gagged right there and then.  "No thanks", I said, "Why don't you come over to our place and we'll have a real traditional x-mas dinner - we've already got the meat."  There was one condition however I told him; both he and his husband, Stephen would have to leave by 8:30 because I had to get into bed to get up early the next day to go to work.

But a few days later Stephen had an even better idea:  "Why don't your bring your meat and food to our place and when you need to go, you can just leave when you need to and not have to worry about cleaning up after Dan and I leave."  That was a great idea, so I agreed.

I brought the food, dessert and wine, we all cooked together, we all ate together, and they cleaned up.  That was sweet!

I snapped only a few pix.  I could have continued but we were limited on time.  Plus I have already been to Tivoli - ha ha.  Dan's house was sooooooooo heavily decorated, that it actually looked like a part of Tivoli was stolen.  I don't think I have ever seen a house so cute, charming and Christmassy as his place.  I should have started snapping photos from the street but I only clicked my camera from the inside of the house.

After breakfast I started to prepare the meat for Dan's oven.  We started with a nice side of pork with the skin.  And then we flavor it up with cloves and bay leaves.  There are many ways to cook it.  Some insist the skin should be up and some say the skin should start out facing down and then turned up after 20 minutes.  There are arguments also about the length of time and at which temperature.  I ain't no chef but it comes out pretty well every time we do it.  and it also depends on the oven as you will see in one of the following photos.

Out of the package.

Before you stick in the cloves and bay leaves, you have to spread lots of rock salt between each slice of the skin that the butcher has already pre-sliced.  The salt (and high heat) is the key ingredient to crunchy rind.

When the meat is just about done, you have to crank your oven up to as high as it will go and wait until it juuuuuuust starts to turn black.

Every oven has it's hot spots and not so hot.  It's the combo of the salt and the heat that turns the skin into crunchy rind.  But if the oven does not heat evenly, some parts may be over done and other parts not even starting to bubble up.  I'd rather have it under done than over done as black rind is in no way tasty.  As you can see, the corner closet to the jar of beets is just right at the edge of turning black while the opposite side still needs to bubble up.  It's a science of which I only have tried about 4 times.  But yes, it was delicious!

Next up:  a few pix of just some of the many cozy Christmas decorations.

 

Next up: The hosts and the guest.

 Dan

Stephan, Dan and Jens

 Yours truly, Dan and Jens

 Jens

And now for the food and the table - both were amazing.  Before we even put out the food, the table looked like something from a fancy department store window.

In the above picture, the little black spots on the meat are the cloves that we have to pick out.  We had already taken out the bay leaves earlier as I learned from last year that if you don't do it early, you will end up with the top half of the bay leaf as ash.  The rind came out perfect except for the part of the skin that looks more like bacon (cuz that's what it is) (notice the smoother stripes of meat under the shirt button)  The greasy black pan was frying up the Christmas sausage (below photo).  

We laughed and laughed because Dan has his way of making sauce and I have my way of making it and we just kind of mish-mash our ways together and it was out of this world.  After eating this heart stopping, artery clogging meal, it will be easy to make cutting down on fattening food an easy New Year resolution to keep.  I'm also eating a ton of sweets right now so that I can cut down on the sweets starting on Jan 2.

  Christmas pork sausage with candied potatoes.

(well..... that's what they were supposed to be)

Once again Dan and Stephen - thanks for your offer and making our Christmas 2018 a memorable one.  Oink Oink