nu-nu-nu-tella!

Sometimes you find yourself playing right into the stereotype you sort of hope to avoid -for me that stereotype would be "mummy on maternity leave" - you know that way too politically correct mum with too much time on her hands who bakes organic spelt bread for the whole family and makes home made jams -you know, the ones that you are just dying to see eat a bigmac! well.. i do in fact bake all the bread we eat and i do use a lot of spelt and if this wasn't for all the sugar in this, i would now be one giant step closer to the stereotype: I made home made NUTELLA! And i tell you it was both easy and exceptionally D E L I C I O U S! I found the recipe on this very friendly danish foodsite.
▶ take 150-200 g of hazelnuts and roast them on a pan or in the oven until the skin cracks and can be removed easily with your fingers -i did it on a frying pan and it did not take many minutes ▶ blend the nuts as finely as possible in a food processor (or maybe a coffeegrinder) ▶ you have to blend until the hazelnuts almost turns in to a cream themselves ▶ then you add: 4 tbl spoons of pure cocoa + 2 dl of powdered sugar + a touch of vanilla sugar + 175 grams of butter (i did it all on slump and think i used a little less butter and sugar and maybe a little more cocoa) ▶ blend until the butter turns soft and it becomes a delicious thick cream. DONE! Finito! spread it on a roasted half rye/half wheat bread and tell Elinor she can't have any until she turns 14

▶ When Skies are..: i know -i could wear them every day for another year and i wouldn't mind it
▶ Zelda: thank you
▶ Malene: Tusind tak for prisen! den er jeg glad for!
▶ Lisen: Im really bad at wearing summer clothes! i always wear jeans and jackets all summer, im not sure why..
▶ Saga: oh thank you for that sweet illustration!

▶ ▶ ▶ The Ungt Blod Pizza Guide!

Okay okay, here it is: My guide to making pizza! I would just like to start by noting that this is just the way i do it and i do not claim to know what im doing, but we do like our pizza: in the last two weeks we might have had pizza 7-9 times! delicious! Okay, here we go, this is going to be a long story:

The first step is the dough. I base it on some tips i got from my brother in law ▶ the idea is one part water + one part flour, wait, repeat, wait + one part flour ▶ So for example for this portion (which will make up to six pizze) i took 2,5 dl water, added 10g yeast + some salt ▶ added 2,5 dl flour (this time i experimented and used a little full grain spelt, which worked out good)▶ and then i let it sit for an hour ▶ after the hour i add 2,5 dl water + 2,5 dl flour and waited let it rise for another hour ▶ finally i added 2,5 dl flour and split the dough into six parts ▶ i added enough flour to each part to make it firm enough to shape. not very precise instructions, i know, but you need to experiment. leave the dough for 20-30 min - i place the dough in the fridge and take it out as i make the pizze one by one.

▶ My tip about choosing flour is looking a something high in protein. This will make the dough more elastic!


▶ Now if i should choose the most important tip for making good pizza at home it is without a doubt: GET A PIZZA STONE! This is a round, flat stone that you heat up in your oven and then you bake the pizza directly on it ▶ Your oven should be turned up to the max (300 on ours) and then wait for 10-15 minutes after the oven says its hot enough. Then the pizza stone is heated all the way through and you will get the most crispy crust!

▶ Roll out a piece of dough - i use a glass bottle - in plenty of durum flour so it is completely non-sticky! ▶ place the dough on a light cutting board (you will use this to slide the pizza on to the stone - if you have a pizza peel - lucky you) ▶ then add tomato purée in a thin layer

▶ after having experimented a lot with the tomato sauce i finally settle on this very quick and easy solution with plain tomato purée -its simply the best! sometimes i will add some puréed sun dried tomatoes - thats good too. ▶ add cheese and other toppings you want baked - like sausage (i often use salchichón or chorizo) or mushrooms or thinly sliced potatoes!

▶ slide the pizza on to the hot hot pizza stone. This is difficult! Sometimes i fail. I really want a pizza peel... ▶ If you give up on the whole sliding thing, an alternative is placing the pizza on baking parchment which will slide much easier, but you will loose some of the goodness in the crust! ▶ The pizza will be done after about 7-8 minutes - this depends a lot on the oven so just check on it after a few minutes and take it out when you like how it looks.

 ▶ Then add any fresh toppings you desire: I like fresh mozzarella, tomatoes, arugula, fresh basil or thyme, parmesan, chopped black olives, pesto, prosciutto... not all at the same time, but they can be combined in many delicious ways!

▶ finally i put a cup of olive oil with garlic and chopped, fresh basil on the table to drizzle over the pizza.

And there you have it! all the delicious pizza you desire! its actually really easy and quick - you can make a big batch of dough as i do and keep it in the fridge for later in the week -or in the freezer for even later! That way you avoid the only step that takes time and that you have to plan. I hope you will all go experiment and PLEASE: send me your favourite toppings! i need new inspiration!

coffee ritual

So if you follow this blog you know, that i enjoy a my coffee. Actually im pretty serious about the whole thing -even more so since becoming pregnant and drinking only one cup of coffee a day -it has to be good! So i thought i would let you in on my coffee ritual. Its going to be a loooong post.. I have an espresso machine, but these days i mostly use a bialetti espresso maker. Let me take you through this step by step ▶ first i grind beans on my krups coffee-grinder. I have had this grinder for a few months and im actually really pleased with it as it grinds evenly and fine. I use espresso beans or a good Kenya AA coffee. My favourite coffee is probably Illys dark roast espresso. Using an espresso-maker is actually almost an art form, as you can end up with some burned bitter water-coffee if you don't watch out. Im in no way a barista, but these are the tips i have ▶ you need to get to know your espresso-maker, so you can use as fine a grind as possible without clogging the pot ▶ Fill the lower part of the espresso-maker with cold water up to the mark and put the coffee in the little pot loosely! No stamping! (EDIT: okay, so i have started to stamp just a little! if you do it too much, it will clog, but if you do it just right the coffee will perfect and dark) Screw the espresso-maker together and put it on the heat -i use gas. Now you need to know your espresso-maker again ▶ You need to keep the heat LOW and be patient, leaving the top open so you can watch the coffee. The coffee needs to slowly fill the pot -never ever making that evil hissy sound! just slowly pouring in the top part ▶ And then you have to know when to stop. You can't get greedy - the less coffee you make the better it will taste! Its much better to have a small, strong espresso (I know this is more a moca, not an espresso) than a weak, bitter but bigger cup. So you will find out just how much coffee you can make and you take it off the heat in time letting it finish ▶ Now its time for the milk! i like a strong cappuccino-like drink with lots of foam. I use the bialetti foamer and its the best in the world! you really need to look for that little man with his finger in the air! thats a sign of good coffee equipment in my mind. Pour the milk in the bialetti foamer and put it on the heat with a thermometer! ▶ You need the milk at the right temperature: if its too cold it won't foam and if its too hot it will totally change texture and be undrinkable! I heat my milk to 70 degrees celsius. you need to take it of the heat somewhere between 65-72 degrees ▶ Then you just use the double layered pump - not too long - and get the smoothest milk-foam in the world! the goal is for all the milk to be foamy -not for a stiff layer of foam on the top, so that when you pour it in your coffee it all mixes nicely ▶ If you don't get the foaming just right you can bang the milkfoamer a couple of times to the table to eliminate the biggest air-holes. And there you have. My coffee as i like it and the longest, most boring post in the history of blogs! A big thanks to my brother in law Emil for helping me get to know my espresso-maker!

▶ Brit: you should. As i have said before; triangles are easy!
▶ Lea: Jep -Mahmoud er en håndklædekamel, hvilket gør ham en lille smule nusset fra start!
▶ Sandra: We definitely need to fika when we stop by your city! i have been longing for all the amazing looking cappuccinos you drink for ever and ever! i will let you know!
▶ Famapa: I mean it when i say that my belly is much bigger than it look in the picture! i don't know what happend there, but really its HUGE. Does your belly get the hiccups too? Ponyboy does several times a day and my whole belly makes these rhythmic jumps :)
▶ Emma: We still don't know if it is a ponyboy, but you have to call the little creature something :)
▶ Alice: you are so right! how cool! I always knew there was nothing new about my aesthetics
▶ Celine: Thank you so much. It is a huge huge huge pillow -the sofa is made from a mattress and two huge pillows -really i have never seen this big a pillow before !
▶ Lisen: How funny!! i knew that there was a ladies and a mans side to but the opening, but i just put in the buttons - i of course should have thought of the fact that men always sits to my right :)
▶.girl ferment. : Thank you so much!
▶ Tilda: Thank you! actually the camel is a pattern i got from a librarybook years and years ago, so no its now my own pattern.
▶ Lina: Very cuddly -he used to be a handtowel!
▶ Maria: Lovely little Mahmoud and lovely little Rufus can't play though. Its gonna be though to keep the babys things seperate from rufus'!
▶ Provins: TAK

omelet

last sunday i decided to repeat the brunch success, but with one crucial addition: an omelet! I have never in my life been able to eat eggs -or dishes where eggs are the overshadowing main ingredient. I just simply do not like eggs! and therefore my brunches has always lacked something crucial! Then last weekend i visited my cousin and his wife together with my sister, her man and Ivan, and my sisters man Emil -who is a fantastic cook - made omelet for lunch! well i was hungry and didn't want to be rude, so i took a piece and WOW! That omelet was not just eatable -it was DEL.ICIO.US! So i got the recipe and tried it out both for dinner and a miniature for brunch. Perfect! Here is the recipe, courtesy of Emil : mix 2-3 grated potatoes with one onion + one clove of garlic. If you like, ad any other vegetable you like -finely chopped. add salt + pepper + some thing sweet -for example honey + some wine/wine vinegar. Now fry the whole thing in some olive oil for 5-10 minutes so it covers the pan. Then mix: 5-7 eggs + olive oil + grated cheese + one decilitre of sour cream + one teaspoon of mustard + salt + pepper + thyme/oregano/what ever you want. Pour this mixture over the potato mix and cook on medium heat with a lit over! I tell you it is just delicious ...you can hardly taste the eggs...

▶ Lea: Yeah -even I could spend a day looking through the Rufus Doofus section!
▶ Lottie: I really had to force my self to forget that i was standing in the middle of them! just close my eyes and shoot!
▶ Emma: the swans did so many cool things, but i only had my little digicamera and it wasn't fast enough!
▶ Sylvester and mama: We were at a wedding at the cityhall and when somebody threw rice the pigeons went MAD and almost attacked the bride!
▶ Hanna: I bet seagulls are more evil in københavn than anywhere else.
▶ Bettina: åh nej -det lyder også mega surt!
▶ Lisen: You are sweet! D always think i have too much rufus on the blog, but i tell him: Thats what my readers want!!
▶ Kathrine: Nej, det så jeg ikke? men jeg kunne sagtens forestille mig det! for at spare spiser vi i forvejen meget lidt kød -tilgengæld køber vi altid billige :( det er ikke godt!
▶ Maikki: Lets decide that they are nice from a distance! we used to live a place where we could hear the harbour. i love the sounds!
▶ BB: flying reptiles! ugghh!
▶ Steph.: I have thought about giving rufus a blog, but who would read my blog then?? Maybe if i combine a trip from billund with a visit to my parents it would be cheap. these days you can actually fly cheaper to jutland than by train.
▶ Lina: Thank you!
▶ Mothersvea: Now, THAT is scary! seagulls taking over a whole street. my mother just told me about a place where she used to work and she had to cross through a place where lots of seagulls lived.

hindbærsnitter

D made hindbærsnitter the other day! its a lovely little danish pastry with raspberry jam and sprinkles. it even has its own website. It was so good see D in the kitchen (for once:) and the cakes were sooooooo... good! (and almost gone all ready!)
Here is the recipe: mix 250g soft butter with 250 g sugar. Then mix in 500 g white flour and the mix in 3 eggs (mixed together). Then you part the dough in two and roll put each half to a thin layer and bake them for aprox. 15 minutes at 200 degrees Celsius. When they are done spread a layer of raspberry jam on to one of them, place the other one on top and spread icing (from powdered sugar and water) on it + sprinkle with lots and lots of sprinkles! -cut while hot and you are done!

▶ Emma: :) the beaches of Øresund are pretty great! and the one close to us is so nice to have around! -thanks for the tag! i made one about the fourth picture of the fourth folder a while back and it was sort of hard, because i don't think i keep my stuff that way :) but maybe i will do it still.
▶ Alice: Yeah -Amager Strandpark!
▶ B: Vi savner også dig!
▶ Lisen: Haha -D and Rufus incognito! with hats and sunglasses!
▶ Maria: me too -i am little jealous of it, but it looks silly on me. -and rufus is good now!
▶ Sandra: Me to -so much contact between them. i love that rufus is always jumping up and down!
▶ Júlía: i like it too! I think you can always get great pictures when you go really low. And thank you and yes, i felt like a pretty good dog owner carrying him home and giving him a foot bath!
▶ Katrine Ny: Its from Acne and was actually sort of hard to find. It is really perfect with the cap and every thing! I get stunned every time i look at the rufus pictures because the happiness really shines through!
▶ Kim: He is okay now! he was okay as soon as we cleaned his feet in a hot bath :)

collage

As I promised yesterday to some of my dear readers, i will now tell you the secret behind the huge collage: It actually came about quite randomly, so its nothing fancy. I was simply editing a set on flicker in the organizer and realized that before me was a cool collage -i arranged the photos randomly and took a screen shot! (on mac its cmd+shift+3) Then i cropped the photo in photoshop so nothing but the photo grid was left! simple! -well almost, because my screen only shows five rows in the organizer, so i did this over and over again until i had gotten them all! go do it! This is a food collage.

▶ Alice: Yeah life looks pretty good this way! and i just keep finding good memories in them!
▶ Maria: Thank you so much! i think it is so funny that somebody can find my recipes interesting, because i have never thought of my self as a good cook! but i do know what i like and how!
▶ Veja cecilia: :) its lucky not that many comment on a daily basis, because i could not keep it up then. But when its just once in a while i have to :)
▶ Tina: Tusind tak! ja, det har været et vildt år! tak fordi du kigger forbi!
▶ Niller: There is such a thing as exclusion from the competition on grounds of harassment you know....

♥ Ungt ♥ Blod's ♥ home♥ made ♥ pesto ♥ guide ♥

i hate store-bought pesto (okay, hate might be a strong word), but i L O V E home made pesto. So here is Ungt Blod's home made pesto guide: ♥ take the following ingredients: Pine nuts, parmigiana, (3 cloves) garlic, (a big handful) basil and olive oil ♥ Start chopping the garlic ♥ gradually ad some basil and some pine nuts ♥ then some coarsely graded parmigiana ♥ then more pine nuts ♥ then some olive oil ♥ and so on and so on until you have used it all! ♥ The trick is that some of the ingredients gets chopped very fine and some very coarse and this gives the pesto the best structure ever! ♥ yum -now put it on pasta, home made pizza, sandwiches or a salad! ...if only pine nuts were not so expensive...

▶ Lisen: You have made us love our floors again -so now we won't paint them after all!
▶ m: The beautiful vinyl-collection is all D's work. but i like having it around, even if it takes up a lot of space!
▶ Emma: Totally fresh and new! he got it for christmas! i remember having a blue and purple one as a kid (what a strange colourcombo!) and i had written and drawn all over it.
▶ Sammyrose: Yeah they are a really good solution. We inherited them from my father aunt and we are running out of space now.
▶ Mascha: Hej! hyggeligt at høre fra dig! -og fantastisk at du kan lide min blog! Jeg bruger for det meste et Olympus e510, som jeg fik i sommers, men engang imellem bruger jeg dog også mit lille samsung nv8 som er et rigtig godt kompakt digi-kamera!
▶ Fenke: I have got to get my self an espresso-cup -but im also pining for the egg-cup even though i do not eat eggs!! i just love his big hat!

✴ Ungt ✴ Blod's ✴ New ✴ Years ✴ Home ✴ Made ✴ Sushi ✴ Guide ✴

Here it is: ✴ Ungt ✴ Blod's ✴ New ✴ Years ✴ Home ✴ Made ✴ Sushi ✴ Guide ✴ -yesterday we had home-made pizza for lunch and homemade sushi for dinner! mmm... you should eat like that every day! This is my little guide to some simple maki-rolls. I am in no way an authority when it comes to sushi -i have no training and i don't really care if i do it "right" or not. But if you want to try out home made sushi this is a simple start! You will have to stop by an asian supermarket or the asia-aisle in your normal supermarket and pick up: ▶ Sushi rice ▶ wasabi-paste ▶ nori (the seaweed sheets) ▶ rice vinegar or sushi vinegar ▶ soy and what ever you want to put in the maki. I like: ▶ black sesames ▶ salmon ▶ tuna ▶ avocado ▶ mango ▶ cucumber and ▶ carrots -but really you can do what ever you want. The fish should be frozen for at least 48 hours to kill parasites and make it safe to eat raw. And if you are pregnant you should probably stay away from tuna. Last night i made rolls with salmon, carrots, cucumber, avocado and black sesames. Here we go:

▶ follow the instructions that comes with the sushi rice. ▶ I rinse them, ▶ then soak them for about an hour, ▶ then cook them and let them cool down with a moist cloth over. ▶ When they are cooked you should mix them with sushi-vinegar; either some that is premixed or rice vinegar that you heat up gently with salt and sugar. Cooking sushi-rice is an artform -that i have not yet mastered! mine often gets a bit overcooked (yesterday too). But even if you cannot perfect the art, you can still make delicious sushi!

▶ Chop your ingredients into sticks and ▶ mix some soy and wasabi paste (for dipping the maki in)

now for the fun part: It can make it easier to have a little mat to help rolling, but you can do without one too. ▶ Place the nori with the shiny side down and ▶ place a rim of rice on the lower half. ▶ Place your ingredients in the middle of the rice.

▶ Then simply roll the nori tight, ▶ squeezing a little, until the empty half of the nori closes the roll (you can use a little rice vinegar or water to close the roll) ▶ Then you cut of the ends of the roll (i save them in a box for lunch the next day) and ▶ slice the roll as you like -i like my maki pretty flat. ▶ Serve them with the soy/wasabi mix and eat them with your hands! its really funny to make sushi -and to include your dinner-guests in the making too! Voila!

yesterday, for the first time, i tried to make an "inside-out" -where the rice is on the outside. You simply place the rice on the nori as usual and the turn the nori over (using baking-paper or something to cover the mat). Then you place the ingredients on the nori and carefully roll. Remember that the rice rim should be wider and on the last half of the nori. -i was not too happy with my first attempt and they can get really sticky eating too.


▶ Lena: I can't wait to we can have a kid over to play in it! i just know how much i would have loved it as a child!
▶ Famapa: So cool that we are not the only ones with a quiet new years! it was such a nice day/night! and the cave truely is a-ma-zing! yesterday we tried fitting in there all three :)
▶ Happy new year neighbour!
▶ Mado: Happy new year to you too!
▶ Hanna: haha -i love that something can be me! and it really is!
▶ Lea: Of course -just knock when you need a little cave-time!
▶ Emma: haha-i will tell my parents that you said so! i knew my mother would understand the crazy-coolness of the cave!
▶ Stefanie: yes, that picture of me reading in the cave really caputures the cozyness!
▶ Lisen: As soon as i saw it in the store i could not get it out of my head! and i also knew Rufus would love it! he is a cave-dog!