Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow - Fish Soup (#ReadCookEat)

I reckon you don't want to hear anything about snow right now, but ... I do it anyway. Where does it say that you have to read books playing in winter and with snow and winter and summer books in summer? Does this aid your imagination or what?
Well, I read a certain book, when I feel like it. There was it on my bookshelf: Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow or as you would call it in the original Frøken Smillas fornemmelse for sne by Peter Høeg. What shall I say? For sure there are better short summaries of the book online somewhere, but I still give it a shot. 
Smilla, 37 year old daughter of a female Inuit hunter and a rich Danish physician lives alone in an apartment complex. One of the neighbours is an alcoholic. That one has a son called Isaiah. She forms a friendship with him. Suddenly Isaiah dies. The police explains it as an accident, the boy falling from the roof. However, due to his marks in the snow on the roof and some other facts, Smilla does not believe in an accident. She investigates, later together with another neighbour, called Peter. He is a mechanic. Whatsoever, there is some kind of conspiracy and ... the rest you have to read for yourself.
As Galina from Chez Maximka and I myself are still doing the ReadCookEat challenge, it is no wonder I also kept an eye on the food in the book apart from obviously following the real plot.
While I would have loved to go for a raspberry cake I decided for this ...

In one scene in the book the mechanic, Peter, is preparing a fish soup for Smilla and himself. The description of the ingredients and the preparation is quite detailed so I tried to reproduce it, although I stuck to the ingredients I could get more easily ... eh ... for what was in that one shop, when I went shopping for the dish.

Ingredients:
Splash of olive oil
1 onion
2 carrots
1 small bulb of fennel
1 leek
Various items of fish (I had: gilthead bream, haddock, salmon)
Hand full of prawns
Rice
2 Star anise
1 tsp. cardamom
2 tbsp. sour cream
Juice of half an orange
Salt and pepper

Method:
I prepared the rice in the usual way with the star anise and the cardamom. I did this in a separate pan. You know, double amount of water, bring to boil, cover, reduce heat to minimum or turn off and let it work for 20 minutes. Anyway, you may have a different method or even a rice cooker. Feel free to do as yo are accustomed to do.

Than start with a large pan to do the soup. Give a splash of olive oil to the pan, which you put on low to medium heat. Chop up your onion and throw it into the pan.
Afterwards go for the carrots. Peel, chop up and off to the pan. Now the fennel and finally the leek. Give the vegetables a good time in the pan to soften them a bit and to release some flavour, maybe 20 minutes or more. Just make sure, you don't burn anything.
In between season the whole thing with salt and pepper and Pour in 1,5 litre or water. All this you bring to the boil and let simmer for 10 minutes.

It's not called fish soup for no reason. Therefore we need some fish in the pan. If you feel you just want to go ahead as I did (with little knowledge about fish) just use whole fish like I did with head, fin and bones and all (as was done in the book as well). However, that might get a bit messy, for later you don't want the head, fins and bones in the finished soup. For your convenience use fillets of fish. That will make your life easier, but you might have less flavour, if you can notice. Just one more thing, you don't want to have the scales of the fish anywhere near your pan. That, of course, if you have a good fishmonger should be no problem at all. I don't have ... a good fishmonger.
Fine, you put your pieces of fish into the pan, pushing it under the liquid and let the fish boil together with the rest for 10 minutes. If you need to remove heads, fins and bones afterwards ... your problem. 
Once all the undesirable parts are removed, add the prawns and cook them for another two minutes. After that you can finish the soup of with the sour cream and the orange juice.

Serve the soup together with the rice and if you like some bread as well.
That was one of the more expensive dishes, for you know, fish isn't that cheap. However, I got a good quality meal and finally some more fish for my health and a more balanced diet. Apart from that, there are some leftovers for another day ... or maybe too.
While eating I still discovered some fishbones in the soup - maybe that's why I don't have fish too often.
Whatever I say, I enjoyed the fish soup and am glad I have some more for the weekend.
Now that's something lovely for ReadCookEat.

Anyway, it wouldn't have been my fault, if the soup would have been terrible, for I followed most of the time Peter Høeg's description.

If it happens to be the case you have been reading something or are still doing so and you find any connection with food in that book and find the power to do a dish, then I see no reason, why you should not join ReadCookEat this month ...

Click here to go to the Link-up

Further up North there is a Cake ... and a Dream

What comes to your mind, when you think about Scandinavia? Be quick! Name three things!

Polar lights, elks, vikings (I'm surprised, too, that not this furnish company from Sweden came to my mind).
Well those were the things that came up in my mind without extra thinking. Next I think of Denmark, at least that is a part of Scandinavia I have already been to. Yet, this is already quite some years ago. I remember Copenhagen and visiting the Tivoli with it's wonderful display of lights at evening time. Further I remember buying a large back of popcorn only to notice too late that it was salted and not sweet. Just a little bit of disappointment there.
Alcohol comes next. There is a certain Danish alcoholic beverage that never failed to help in cases of stomach problems - fail safe!
No, I don't want to bake a cake with that alcohol now. But, yes, it just now came to my mind: Would a cake containing this alcoholic beverage make it possible for you to have more pieces of it before your stomach goes funny?
We will not find out now.
Nevertheless we want to start drifting towards the subject of cake.
Back then, when I visited Denmark, I read about the speciality 'Kanelstang'. That is a kind of cinnamon cake with puff pastry, marzipan and, of course, cinnamon. The important part here, however, was marzipan. So I had to try and was not disappointed. Now I have to try to reproduce it in my kitchen one day.
For today, though, no experiments. When it comes to Scandinavian food, there is not as much on offer as to cookbooks as for example with Spanish, Italian, Mexican or Indian cuisine.
I found out about one person that wants that to be changed, somehow, or at least wanted to contribute as regards cookbooks concerning Scandinavia. So I got myself that cookbook: Secrets of Scandinavian Cooking ... Scandilicious from Signe Johansen.
I tried one of her recipes (Cardamom twists) from her website before and was not disappointed. So far I tried also a few things from the book and it was fine as well.
Let us concentrate now on the cake up North (Of course it all depends from were you live. For me 'up North' is up North. For you it maybe down South or over West or whatever ...).
The cake under subject is Drømmekage (Danish coconut dream cake). The final result was very delicious and, lucky me, somehow I still have some left of it so I can continue to enjoy it (without needing this alcohol mentioned above).
The batter for the cake doesn't contain anything spectacular, just the usual suspects such as sugar, butter, buttermilk, flour, baking powder and eggs. Well, fine, there was also some vanilla extract and a tiny amount of salt. Vanilla already sounds good.
Still, to make it really great, there is more to come.
First of all the basic batter goes to the oven for 20 minutes or a bit more - as it is with my oven, it always needs more time.
The really good thing about this cake is the topping that comes over it after baking for the first time. After all, we want it to be a coconut dream and when you go over the list of the suspects, you don't see any coconut mentioned.
Tragically, though, we are not going to see any coconut on the cake anyway. The recipe called for 150 g desiccated coconut. A frantic search through my cupboards started, but no matter how desperate I searched, I couldn't find any traces of coconut.
All is lost!
No! Lovely Signe was so kind to provide topping variations at the end of the recipe.

I would have liked to have a dream with coconut, but we had to change the cake to Toscakake by substituting the finely chopped hazelnuts for the desiccated coconut. That proved to be lovely as well (Right, I don't know whether the coconut variation would have been lovely, but I guess so).
Another option would have been chocolate-coffee caramel Bømlokake for all those chocolate lovers out there. That means there are many more good reasons to come back to this recipe again.
For the time being we like to stay with our ... now Toscakake. Apart from the hazelnuts, butter, sugar, milk and vanilla salt went into the topping. Oh, I don't have vanilla salt. I just put some fleur de sel and some vanilla extract in, although the book states, how to make your own vanilla salt.

Anyway, I will have some more of that cake, because ... I can.  
So, what comes to your mind, when you think about Scandinavia? Hopefully also some good food and a dream of a cake ... although it might not be a Drømmekage with coconut.