Fish Fry and Frozen Food

I know that you want to know what everything is.  Read on!

Because I took Susan out to eat last night to celebrate our anniversary, our family did not have a Scandinavian Saturday supper.  Instead, Abigail (my helper this week) and I planned to make the Nordic meal tonight, and that's just what we did.  Well, we did prepare tonight's dessert yesterday afternoon so that it would have plenty of time to freeze, but otherwise it was a Scandinavian Sunday supper this week.  (It was a Scandinavian Sunday in another way, too: we spent the first part of the afternoon at a Sons of Norway meeting for our lodge.)

On the lower left part of the plate are dill poteter ["dill potatoes"].  We boiled, cooled, peeled, and quartered little potatoes and then fried them in butter until they took on a golden color.  Then we tossed them in chopped fresh dill.  That's it!  Simple to make but really delicious.

On the lower right part of the plate are fiskekaker ["fish cakes"] with urte remulade ["herb remoulade"].  We chopped up pollock fillets and mixed them with scallions, eggs, cream, tarragon, parsley, the juice of a lemon, potato flour, and seasoned bread crumbs.  We formed the mixture into little cakes and fried them in a mixture of butter and cooking oil.  To make the remoulade, we mixed together chopped gherkins, chopped capers, mayonnaise, sour cream, chopped scallion greens, tarragon, minced carrot, freshly squeezed lemon juice, Dijon mustard, curry powder, salt, and pepper.  The fish cakes had a crunchy crust on the outside but were moist inside.  They were tasty on their own, but the creamy, savory remoulade added great flavor, too.

At the top of the plate is a salad of Romaine lettuce, sea-salt-and-cracked-pepper croutons, and chopped cucumber, celery, carrot, and scallion.  We tossed it in a dressing that we just made up using Dijon mustard, raspberry vinegar, olive oil, crushed caraway seeds, curry powder, tarragon, salt, and pepper.  It was really good!  Not bad for just "winging it."

For dessert, we served frozen vaniljesaus ["vanilla custard"] with molte karamellsaus ["cloudberry caramel sauce"].  Yesterday afternoon we mixed together vanilla extract, egg yolks, and sugar.  We beat some heavy cream and then folded it into the whipped egg yolk mixture and put it in the freezer overnight.  The recipe called for it to be served with fresh red currants, which are not available in local grocery stores.  Therefore, we made up a sauce using things that we had on hand.  We heated up some cloudberry preserves and passed them through cheese cloth and a sieve to remove all the hard seeds.  Then we thickened the sauce with cornstarch mixed with port.  We tempered the sweetness of the sauce with butter, cream, and a little salt.

To be honest, I didn't care much for the sauce, mostly because cloudberries have a flavor that's a bit too sharp or perfume-y for my taste.  I'll try the berries again in the future, but I won't make this sauce again.  However, the custard was delicious--super-creamy (of course) and distinctly vanilla-y.  Once again, we have Trina Hahnemann to thank (for the custard, fish cake, remoulade, and potato recipes).