Defying the Dark

The previous post featured a lot of darkness. Right now — it’s the longest night of the year as I write this — Denmark itself features a lot of darkness. So I’m going to try and keep this light.

First: many family members who peruse this blog are fans of American Chinese restaurant style “crispy orange beef.” I finally found a recipe that’s competitive with most of the best in class versions of this dish I’ve had in the states.

I can send the recipe to anyone who wants it. I know it’s a strange thing to post, I just wanted it in here as a reminder so I don’t forget to make it again. And again. And again. (Also I finally figured out how to make restaurant-grade pork fried rice.)

I open on the topic of food because we’re going to start with our Thanksgiving — it was our turn to host Steve & Elizabeth’s family, and we got their permission to sous vide the bird.

I will never not sous vide a turkey again.

It was actually very simple: first, carve up the bird.

You have to do the dark and white meat parts separately, and, as you can see, you have too peel the skin off the breasts.

The only seasonings we used were fresh, homegrown rosemary and thyme. Whole sprigs just tossed (and sealed) in with the bird parts.

The recipe I used suggested putting the breasts in a configuration where the wide end of one is against the narrow end of the other, and vice versa. With some herbs in between them. And then tied tightly together before being sealed. Like so:

And goddammit, I have never even my life tasted better turkey breast. (Sorry, mom!) They never went into the oven: they just came out of the 2½-hour sous vide bath a little before serving time, and the breasts had melded together into an easily sliceable “roll” of the most succulent, flavorful turkey you’ve ever tasted. Just look:

The rest of the meal was also very good — and the dark meat parts were also spectacular (they had 14 hours in the sous vide and then about 100 minutes in the oven to get the skin crisp). But to save time I’m just going to let the millions of Thanksgiving pictures speak for themselves.

Remember last month how I promised Molli’s 8th grade class picture would appear in the next post?

It’s the next post.

About half those girls have gone off to other schools since the photo was taken. Curiously, Molli doesn’t seem to mind a class that’s almost entirely male. You’d think she liked boys or something.

On Monday, November 26, Maddie made her public singing debut at the Cultural Center in Farum.

She was allowed to mingle with the audience while other artists performed.

No pictures of her performance, because I only got video, but Jørgen also took a video and put it on YouTube. You can find it by searching for “Furesø Musikskole koncert 26 nov 2018,” Just ping me if you’d like the actual URL. She did a great job! (Although the sound wasn’t mixed very well.)

Everyone who has access to this blog already knows the whole Didi saga, and I don’t have it in me to rehash the whole thing here. But I did want to include some pictorial evidence of some of our more hopeful moments.

…And also this picture because it’s a funny story:

It had been Trine’s turn to sleep on that mattress by Didi’s bed (as we did each night during the expectant period.) I woke up the next morning to the scene in that picture. I thought it was adorable that Trine had taken Didi under the comforter with her. They were obviously both asleep, so I very quietly made some coffee and tiptoed away. Not long afterward I came back and Trine was sitting, fully dressed and fresh looking at the dining room table.

“How’d you do that so fast?” I asked.

“Do what?”

“I was in here like fifteen minutes ago and you were both asleep under the comforter.”

“Huh?”

I noticed the bed still looked the way it had fifteen minutes earlier. But Trine was at the table and Didi was in her birthing bed.

“Is that one of the girls?” I asked.

“It’s my duvet and pillow,” Trine said. She didn’t even bother articulating the well-deserved, you idiot.

Making this sleep-deprived period even better, the DSB train conductors kept pulling not-quite-a-strike strikes, so getting to and from the office became a game of transportational roulette.

…and sweetening it all the more, it was creeping up on Maddie’s birthday…

And on December first, of course, the Christmas calendars began on television.

This year’s adventure on DR1 is “Theo and the Magic Talisman.” It’s entirely about death. Has very little to do with Christmas. Our household is a little puzzled — and so is most of Denmark.

Here’s Maddie’s room the last night of her life as a nine year old.

And, uh… guess who woke up as a ten year old?

She’s in her handball outfit because she had to wake up early to play a match on her birthday.

So we had a midday celebration.

And the picture below is not a giant donut…

Its Maddie’s birthday cake, obviously. Delicious chocolate coffee cake. But it still burns me that Danes simply cannot grasp the concept of “one to grow on.” (Maybe it’s because we’re the second-tallest country in the world?)

I love the thoughtful look in the next picture. I imagine Maddie thinking, “My god, I’m ten. Ten! And what have I got to show for it? What of the dreams I had when I was five or six? What have I done with my life?!” But in reality, she’s probably thinking something more like, “Did Didi just fart?”

Very traditional Danish birthday celebration with homemade boller:

And cheese (not homemade):

And hot cocoa!

And whipped cream for the cocoa! And jam for the rolls!

And finally it’s time to open the presents.

Hooray! Maddie got a “First Ten Years of Maddie” book!

And also… a brushed steel column with a threaded bolt on one end. Hooray?

A whole box of them, in fact. Four in all. Daddy says, “Follow me to the basement to see the rest of it,” and Daddy gets a reverse selfie on the way down.

And there in the basement she beheld her new bed. A giant queen-size bed. A grown-up bed.

“Can I sleep in it tonight?” asks the birthday girl.

“Of course,” says the well-intentioned Daddy.

Everyone else goes upstairs while Daddy tries to figure out how to get the bed up the narrow and winding basement stairs. . . and realizes it’s impossible. The bed entered the house through the sliding basement doors: it’s gonna have to go back out and up the outdoor stairs and around the corner and in through the front door and down the hall to Maddie’s bedroom.

So Daddy has to run out to the hardware store to get a dolly.

He gets home just in time for First advent.

And although it proved to be more arduous than expected, in the end our heroine gets to sleep in her brand new super-giant extra-colossal bed.

Unfortunately, due to Maddie’s birthday and her handball game, we once again missed the annual PensionDanmark Christmas tree party.

But it was quite a nice thing to walk into that Monday morning. (For a sense of proportion, that black rectangle in the background is a set of two-meter double doors, and is about twenty-five feet behind the tree.)

Maddie’s still feeling the joy the evening after her birthday.

But I wasn’t. By this point I was up to my third or fourth consecutive night of sleeping on the floor beside Didi. I took a midnight pic of her because I thought something was happening. But it wasn’t.

The evening of the next day Didi had her Caesarian. Here she is lying in comfortable oblivion while Trine and I stayed up with her way too late to ensure the epidural wore off and she could walk.

That’s it for the Didi saga. With the encouragement of our vets, we’ll try again next summer or fall.

Meanwhile, it’s been getting darker longer every day. Here’s a photo from about four in the afternoon that Wednesday or Thursday.

And here’s Maddie showing off one of the ears that was pierced as a birthday present from Mormor.

And here’s Trine, at ease.

And some handball shots of Maddie (#2 in all of these):

The girls’ Advent gift this year was that we all four got Tivoli Wildcard annual passes. It was a single gift for all four advents, so for Second Advent we made our first trip to Tivoli in about a year — the longest lapse ever for our family.

New ride this year, the Tik Tak:

Molli and I stood in line for it for 20 minutes before giving up: a couple had become trapped in the ride and couldn’t get out when the ride ended. No idea how long the poor couple was trapped; we gave up and called it a night–quietly thankful we weren’t the ones who’d been trapped.

Meanwhile, Maddie and Trine got to do the pirate ride.

Second Advent candle lighting: “Nu tænder vi to lys i kæld…“

It’s not a great shot of Maddie, but you can see the gap of those two recently lost teeth:

On the afternoon of the 13th I had just written an email to Trine from the office saying it seemed weird to me neither of our girls was going to be in a Lucia procession that day. It was going to be my first December 13th without such a procession in over a decade. Ten minutes later a procession went through our office.

I also had to swing through Bymidten on my way home, and there I encountered the tail-end of another huge procession–probably the same one Maddie did last year, but with this year’s third-graders.

And the following Friday was the PensionDanmark julefrokost. I include the next three pictures of my closest colleagues just to have it in the permanent record.

The dinner was held in the garage on a “graffiti/boogaloo/rap” theme.

The menu was, weirdly for a Danish julefrokost, “street food.”

And I did my damnedest to be festive.

I’d been called upon to participate in part of the evening’s entertainment, and had been looking forward to it. (Because I’m a ham.) In the end it amounted to my having to mostly act like a stuffy and boring pension employer disapproving of some rapper applying for a job.

(The rapper was Pede B, Denmark’s “champion” freestyle rapper. He was okay, but I have to acknowledge that most good Chicago poetry slam champions of the 90s would have made short work of him.)

What’s better than one julefrokost? Only one thing: two julefrokoster!

The very next day we got to participate in a Kammer Christmas lunch at Klaus’s. Here again I’ll let the pictures do the talking.

Note the first appearance of Christoffer’s new son William, born this past August.

It was fun and hyggelige — but if you’re wondering why Molli doesn’t appear in any of the pics, it’s because she had her first babysitting job and I had to drive her to it about 90 minutes into the meal.

The very next day we went to get our Christmas tree. For the first time ever, I think, we did it in daylight. Unfortunately, that meant it was just moments after Molli woke up, so she ruefully opted out — merely warning us not to get some stupid ugly too-fat tree like Daddy always wants.