Country 44: Denmark - Breaded Plaice with Rødkål & Brunede Kartofler

I was excited about cooking Danish food - I went to Denmark in 2016 and enjoyed myself there (apart from drinking much too excessively and spending the following day on a 2 hour train ride where ultimately I ended up throwing up right as it came to my stop. Fun times. 

The tricky thing with a lot of European countries is that even if they have a long stretch of coastline, a lot of the countries still like things like pork and beef, and Denmark is no exception. I thought, considering it's a peninsula between the North Sea and the Baltic Sea, it would have quite a lot of fish dishes, but surprisingly it doesn't. They do have foods like pickled herring (no thanks) and lots of prawns, but Nick can't eat prawns so we had to find something else. 

I'm not going to lie to you, I cheated big time on this. I found a recipe for smørrebrød, or open faced Danish sandwiches, with breaded plaice on it and thought that would be easy enough to do, but instead of smørrebrød I just did the plaice with the two side dishes. And the cheating goes even further than that - I saw breaded plaice in the shops while I was looking for the fillets, and grabbed them. I thought actually in the long run, it would be better to bake the fish than fry it in oil and so I made a healthier decision.

To be honest, it's good that I did, because the rest of the meal was revolting. 

Rødkål is braised red cabbage, and I was actually fairly excited about that as I really like braised cabbage, especially on the side of roast dinners. Interestingly, this recipe called for it to simmered in vinegar for the first half hour, and then add sugar and either currant or elderberry juice to it and simmer it for another half hour. I didn't have currant or elderberry juice, so I used cranberry juice instead.

It was awful. I followed the cooking times exactly but something clearly went terribly wrong because the cabbage didn't taste nice at all. I ended up sticking it in the slow cooker the next day to try and braise it some more, but that actually just ended up making it worse. And I had so much bloody braised red cabbage, I had no idea what to do with it - I ended up making mushroom and cabbage dumplings and added sriacha and soy sauce and honestly, I should have just quit while I was ahead because they were terrible too. 

Here's the recipe I followed for rødkål in case anybody wants to try recreate my disaster of a meal.

And then to make matters worse, the other side dish I cooked was brunede kartofler, sugar browned potatoes. I was intrigued about these, not least because the picture that I was looking at looked really tasty. These are usually served at Christmas, alongside the braised cabbage and typically with roast duck, so I gave it a crack.

Once again, I followed the recipe exactly, pre-boiling the potatoes and then cooking the sugar and the butter before frying the potatoes in this mix. Honestly, I'm not really sure what I was hoping for. These were also completely horrible. Potatoes should never be sweet, unless they're actual sweet potatoes. I think both of us got through about two each before giving in. 

Here's the recipe.

I hold my head in my hands and moan to myself, why didn't I just go with smørrebrød???