Fiskelasagne

We have had many, many delightful meals here in Denmark -some of them familiar and others quite different. Most of what we eat at the folk school is delicious. Several times, we've experienced various lasagna recipes. A few vegetarian ones with eggplant or zucchini as the base, a more typical one with tomato sauce and ground beef, another vegetarian one with just cheese and tomatoes, a bacon, pork, and mushroom one with a white, creamy cheese sauce. All have been delightful. So imagine our surprise this week when we arrived at lunch for another lasagna and heard the cook listing off what was for lunch, and her words included "fiskelasagne." My Danish is not very good -understandably, since I am not taking classes because they are far away- but even I know the word "fisk", and I don't believe it should ever be in the same sentence as "lasagna", and yet it was. When you scooped a mouthful of delicious lasagna onto your fork, instead of meeting beef, or zucchini, or tomato, or eggplant, or pork, you see a large chunk of white cod. We ate it. It was best if you removed the fish first, and ate that separate from the lasagna.

Dinner was amazing. There were pork ribs, fried potatoes, tomato and red onion and feta salad with balsamic (leftover from lunch, we ate a lot of it then too). Svea went to town on a pork rib! I think she ate more than I did. The rest of us chowed down on the potatoes, which were more amazing than french fries. They were a take on oven fries, but somehow even more good than that. Ah, redemption.

Jeff was invited to speak at the boys' school yesterday morning to talk a little bit about what it's like to be a kid in the USA. They are learning about the USA right now, so it was fun for the boys to get to share a bit of what it's like for them. Jeff made the rookie mistake of mentioning to the group of 3, 4, and 5 year olds that we had two dogs and a cat...thus prompting all of the children (there are 26 if everyone is there) to talk about what pets they have at home, and some to say "well, I used to have a cat, but it died" and things of that nature. Other than that, it went well. The kids had fun, and the teachers were glad to have Jeff come talk for a bit to the kids. The boys also had swimming in the afternoon. They enjoy that quite a bit. Every other Thursday they get to go for a while during the day and play in the shallow pool next to the larger one at the community center.

I am rather behind with writing about our adventures this month, since I'm spending most of my writing time working on the nanowrimo project. I have over 21,000 words now, and am still on track to finish before November 30. So that is fun. I read a book by the creator of the project, and it mentioned how in the second week you often get bored with the writing, and I have definitely experienced that. The best remedy is just to keep writing, or throw some sort of wrench into the plot to shake things up a bit and see how the characters come out on the other side. As long as I stay on track, I will be able to finish it. Then I can get back to my blogging about our adventures, my knitting projects, and my reading!

I will have to think of another project for December -well, maybe. Perhaps December's project will be Christmas. The boys and I are going to try to make a lot of the ornaments for the tree we will get. It will be a small one, but I really do want to have one. I want to get a few of the traditional Danish ornaments for the tree that we can take home with us also, but mostly we will make them. I like the idea of a homespun Christmas. We are even going to use old knitted socks for stockings. I think I am going to doctor them up a bit, maybe add the kids' initials or something. Yes, it seems that December's project will be Christmas.

For now, it's about time to get ready for lunch. Many of the students have left already on their long trips of the semester -some to Istanbul, some to South Africa, some to Georgia, some to Ghana. It will be a quiet week here next week. But I do hope that because most people are gone, we don't end up with fiskelasagne leftovers...