Danish Julefrokost

This past Saturday the Danes on my hall hosted a julefrokost which means Danish lunch.  This never really made sense to me because it's a dinner and not a lunch but just go with it.  Basically it's just a huge spread of delicious food and lots of schnapps.

My friend Anne who lives on my hall with me and I decided to volunteer to help cook the dinner.  We first ventured with the other three volunteers to our local grocery store to buy the food.  A traditional julefrokost includes three courses but we decided to cut ours to two.  We bought lots of fish and meat.

When we returned to our kitchen Anne tried her hand at cooking bacon while I made some meatballs.

Anne and some other volunteers cooking

My meatballs!

We started the preparations at 3 pm and the dinner began at 630.

Our feast included:

schnapps

Course One:

salmon, shrimp, pickled herring, breaded fish filets and other Danish spreads that I wasn't familiar with

rye bread, white bread, more rye bread

sauces

The idea is that you put the fish along with some sauce on top of a piece of bread and eat it as an open faced sandwich or "smorrebrod"

more schnapps

Course Two:

liver paste (which looked like cat food but I was a good sport and tried it and it wasn't bad when served with bacon and mushrooms), my meatballs (!), a roast, lots of sliced deli meat

cheeses, cucumbers, tomatoes

rye bread, white bread, more rye bread

schnapps again

And you also had to take a shot of schnapps when anyone said "skal" or "cheers" in Danish.  I'm sure there was more food that I can't even remember, but suffice it to say that I was stuffed and we still have leftovers in our refrigerators (two days later).

Carlsberg Brewery

Carlsberg is Copenhagen's signature beer.  There's signs everywhere that say: "Probably the best beer in town"  Not the world - just in town.  And not definitely - just probably.  But humble as they are, they are definitely Copenhagen's beer of choice.  Their brewery is located right in the center of town and is open to the public, so one day last week my friend Jordan and I decided to stop by and check it out.

For 70 kroner - somewhere between 10 and 15 dollars - we decided to go on a self-guided walking tour of the brewery.  Our adventure started with one of our two included drinks.

I think I got jipped - mine was the one on the right.

After finishing our first drink, we headed into the next room which was full of horses.  Still don't really understand why but they were huge and really pretty so we were all right with it.  It really did smell like horses in there though.

We became friends with one who was named Louise.

After the horse room we walked through their sculpture garden (quickly because it was blizzarding outside) into the third room.  There was a large exhibition in there about the whole brewing process with a lot of history about Carlsberg as well as the world's largest unopened bottle collection.  They had a plaque from the Guinness Book of World Records and everything.

Rows upon rows of bottles from many different decades.

Once we finished checking out everything this building had to offer we went to our final stop and picked up our second included beer.  In this last building there was a table full of different scents that are added to the various flavors of Carlsberg beers.

Bottles filled with scents from corn to cocoa to citrus.

The idea is that you go around smelling all these different scents, pick your favorites and then go over to a chart that lists all their beers and the scents incorporated into each one.  From there you should be able to pick out your favorite beer based on which of the scents are included in it.  Pretty interesting.  After finishing our second beer we braved the snow once more and headed back home to Hvidovre.