After a day in the fridge and under pressure from a English-Danish dictionary and a physics book from my engineering studies, my rolled sausage is finally finished.
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I’ve had a taste of it as well and I must say that it’s great! Actually a lot better than the greasy stuff you buy at the supermarket. The intelligent reader might have noticed that there are two rolled sausages in the pre-cooked picture below and has started wondering what has happened to the other one. Well, the one on the picture above is for immediate consumption! The other one I’ll save for my Christmas lunch with some Danish friends in the beginning of December.
While I was in the kitchen I also made som Danish sausages (medisterpølse). I got the casings from a butcher on Sunday (yes, they are open on Sundays here!) and bought the pork today. So it was only a matter of grinding the meat and stuff the casings. The result can be seen below
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Not the nicest looking sausage – I know, but just imagine that one fried and with red cabbage and mustard….hmmm

Understanding asian culture also involves understanding the food. This is very interesting – especially in Sinagpore where we get to eat both Malaysian, Indian, South Chineese and Indonesian food. However after a few months you start to miss some of the Danish dishes. The dark Danish bread (Rudbroed) and the liver paté (leverpostej) are among the favorites that remind you about home. One of the rare made things when you are abroad is the danish rolled sausage (rullepoelse). I’ve been looking for the piece of meat that is used for some time now and found out that the English name for it is pork belly. So yesterday I went to a butcher that knows how to cut pork the European way and bought a nice piece of pork belly. The next thing was then to find the spices that are needed. I found cloves (nelliker) but was not able to find allspice (allehaande). So today was the big prep. day.
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As you can see from the picture the rolled sausage worked out quite successfully. Its now cooking and will then be pressed over the next comming days before I can make a final verdict.

For the past few months Karina has been looking for a MP3 player. This might seem as a simple task, but a quick search on the net gives you approx. 200,000 hits on Google and 500 different models to choose from on the danish price search engine www.hifipriser.dk.

To avoid too many gadgets that need to be recharged I was initially looking for a new mobile phone that included a MP3 player. The most recent phones (Like Sony Ericssons K750i) have a slot that allows you to put in extra memory, but given they are “recent” models they are also quite expensive. Older models (like the one I have – Nokia 6230) do have MP3 capabilities but they also require you to dismantle the phone to put in the memory. So a phone was a no go.

Returning to normal MP3 players the most obvious choice would be an Ipod. Karina was looking for a small one, so I looked at the Ipod Shuffle. Its quite nice looking and build quality is top notch – one of the reasons why Apple is market leader. But I turned it down for one reason – Itunes. A friend of mine tried his new Ipod on my computer by installing Itunes and what a mess! The computer started to freeze and it was really a pain the “#¤% to get Itunes installed.

Given that Karina likes pink a lot I then came across the latest Sony MP3 player. What I like about them is that they use a new kind of display that cannot be seen when the player is turned off. Only when you turn it on does it display text. Its very stylish as well and features a FM-radio, which the Ipods don’t have.
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The player is very easy to use and has a normnal mini-jack plug so that you can use other (read: better) headphones than the standard ones that are part of the package. On the downside it also requires you to use certain software to copy music to the player. In this case not Itunes but Sonic Stage. I’m having really big problems understanding why I can’t be allowed to drag n’ drop my MP3 files in Windows Explorer onto the player like I do with all other files on my normal USB memory stick. Is it to keep customers because they have to convert all their songs in order to use another brand? Beats me! However Sonic Stage is not the worst software I’ve used. I actually like the way it organises all my music files/albums. But I still don’t like that it must convert my MP3s into a Sony-format for the player to read the files.

But in the end the stylish look and the ease of use won and after a little while I guess Karina won’t really think about the software anymore.

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After watching Mach Point by Woody Allen I was looking forward to his next movie. His recent films have all been shot in London, which for some reason has brought the films back to the good old days of Woody Allen. Match Point was a great movie. It really gave you food for thought, which (sadly) is not that common anymore.
In Scoop their isn’t as much food for thought. Its a comedy, but not the fast food version that comes out of Hollywood these days. What sets it apart are the subtle comments that Woody Allen has throughout the movie (he plays a leading role). I won’t tell more about it – other than go watch it if you have a sunday afternoon of and want a healthy movie-meal instead of the fast food movie offers that are also out there.

P.S. The movie starts on Nov 24th. in Denmark