(Communication Researcher. Food lover. Famous for making everything from scratch. Loves Mexican and Italian food. Often throws dinner parties with delicious food and good wine. She and her husband share a passion for good food. Imports her own oil, wine and balsamic vinegar from Italy).
Sabrina
”I come from a home with no cooking tradition whatsoever. It was this place where you fried in margarine and left it on the pan for next time you cooked. I thought that was so disgusting. So the moment I moved away from home, I used the opportunity to completely change culinary style.” Sabrina is explaining to me about her food habits as we are shopping in the Danish supermarket Føtex.
Shopping Routines
“I come here every Monday and do the shopping for the whole week”, she explains. “On my way here, I decide which meals we’ll have. Generally it’s the same, like, 14 meals we alternate between. It’s like that when you have kids. It just has to work!”
”I come from a home with no cooking tradition whatsoever. It was this place where you fried in margarine and left it on the pan for next time you cooked. I thought that was so disgusting. So the moment I moved away from home, I used the opportunity to completely change culinary style.” Sabrina is explaining to me about her food habits as we are shopping in the Danish supermarket Føtex.
Shopping Routines
“I come here every Monday and do the shopping for the whole week”, she explains. “On my way here, I decide which meals we’ll have. Generally it’s the same, like, 14 meals we alternate between. It’s like that when you have kids. It just has to work!”
Sabrina takes me through the supermarket, showing me how a Monday shopping session looks. She picks what she needs as we walk down the various aisles. Certain things are always part of her shopping. Milk, for instance. And rye bread, and oats, and minced meat. And Tex Mex ingredients, like Santa Maria taco sauce. “Oh, this is very revealing, isn’t it?”, she smiles, making an implicit excuse for her love of Mexican food. “But we just LOVE that stuff”. She only buys the Santa Maria brand, because no other brand is as tasty. We reach the dairy section, and she takes me to the parmesan cheese, holding up the classical triangular cheese. “One of these each week!”, she says. “We’re addicted!”
In the vegetable section she reaches for the organic carrots. “We eat these every day. I cut them in sticks and put them on the dinner table. The kids love them and it’s a good way to make them eat some vegetables.” Sabrina always buys organic carrots, because they taste better, she feels. The Monday shopping also involves cucumbers. “For the kids”, she says. “But here I just go for the Danish ones – not the organic ones. Really, I only buy organic if I feel that it makes a difference in taste. Taste is the number one”.
Good food is food prepared from scratch
“You’re talking to a woman who used to make her own peeled tomatoes!”, she says. “None of that canned stuff”. She smiles and winks. ”I truly believe that the best food is the one prepared from scratch. Although my motto is: Prepare it yourself, unless the alternative is better”. She shows me a small pack of flour and seasoning for Danish meat balls. “I buy this instead of adding the flour and seasoning myself. Because they always turn out great and get the perfect consistency. It’s simply better than my own homemade meat balls.”
“I also bake my own bread. I’m proud of my bread”, she smiles.
And then the kids arrived…
“Well, the homemade peeled tomatoes are history”, she sighs. “That was before I had kids. Now it just has to work. Everyday food is practical food. Food Loving is when we have guests. There’s a big difference between our daily meals and our dinner party meals.”, she explains. Before they had children, they would often cook elaborate meals for each other and peruse the special shops for the best ingredients. Now she shop in a place where she can get everything she needs at once. “Previously, we might decide some Thursday evening that we wanted blinis with lumpfish roe, and then we’d go to the shops and find the ingredients. Today it’s spaghetti Bolognese, meat balls, tex mex, and pita bread with falafel.”
A miminum standard maintained
“Even though times are pretty pathetic for food loving after we got kids, we try to keep a minimum standard. I bake my own bread, and we have our own olive oil, balsamico and wine imported from Italy. Plus we always use “Læsø Salt” – that’s kind of our trade mark.” Læsø Salt is a high quality sea salt produced on the Danish island of Bornholm.
“Whenever we have guests, I serve my homemade bread and our Italian olive oil. That’s just a mandatory part of the meal.”
Sabrina also insists on taking the time to buy good coffee and grind the beans herself. “This is just something you have to find the time for!”, she says. Another of her trademarks is to always serve the very expensive chocolate made by the exclusive Danish chocolatier Peter Beier. “His chocolate is just divine”, she says with a half dreamy, half guilt-ridden smile.
Butter
“I ALWAYS buy Lurpak”, she says with a firm voice. ”It just tastes the best.” There is obviously no discussion about Sabrina’s preferences in butter. She is even famous among her friends for being such a die-hard Lurpak consumer. She doesn’t buy the organic version, because it grows stale too quickly, she feels. It takes a long time for her family to consume a pack of butter, and she finds that the organic butter tastes bad after one week in the fridge. “Look, you can tell how it has this yellow color.” She gently flips open a pack and shows me the color.
She would never buy garlic butter or parsley butter. The idea of putting a giant lump of butter into your baked potato grosses her out. She only uses butter for baking and for putting on bread in the weekend. During the week days no butter is allowed on bread out of a concern with calories and weight. For cooking she uses olive oil exclusively.
“On special occasions, I buy the Lurpak butter with Læsø Salt. I told you that Læsø Salt is kind of our trade mark”, she smiles. On a daily basis she doesn’t buy the Læsø Salt version because it’s too salty.
She would never dream of buying spreadable butter. “It’s not butter!”, she exclaims. Once, she tried the Lurpak version, and she was very disappointed. “I guess I thought it was still real butter. I mean, I guess I didn’t think that Lurpak would sink to deep as to sell spreadable butter. They also put that product on the market very late compared to the other producers. It tasted horrible. It wasn’t butter. It didn’t have that Lurpak taste. I like the fact that it comes in this hard box, because the paper easily tears and is difficult to handle. But I can live with that.”
Sabrina also vehemently objects to the use of margarine. “It’s simply disgusting”, she says, and reminds me of the frying pan with old, stale margarine in her family home. “I just swore to get away from that”, she says.
As we pay at the counter, she tells me that tonight’s menu is Spaghetti Bolognese. It’s one of my favorite meals – given that I’ve prepared it myself”, she smiles a little apologetically. “Don’t you know how sometimes a meal just has to taste a very specific way to be right?” I nod. “Well, I make a mean SpagBol”, she grins.
This is Sabrina’s recipe for her other favorite meal: Young cock on root vegetables
The cock is rubbed with olive oil, salt and pepper. Placed on a bottom of roughly chopped root vegetables (potatoes, carrots, parsnips, parsley roots, Jerusalem artichokes). Roasted for 45 minutes in the oven at 200 degree celcius. Add ¼ litre of cream (13%). Let it roast for another 10 minutes, then take it out.Serve with beet salad (fresh grated red beets with pine nuts) and green salad with lettuce, cherry tomatoes, avocado, pine nuts and parmesan. Plus (obviously) homemade bread and Italian oli
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