Multekrem, Revisited

29 Aug 2016 2 Comments

by scolgin in Recipes Tags: , , , , , ,

It had been nearly four years since I wrote about cloudberries and the Norwegian dessert, multekrem, on this very blog. It was time to revisit the subject.

Multekrem

Multekrem

I would run into my towering Norwegian pal Pål (with the cool little bubble over the “a”) over the intervening years at school. Pål had brought polar cloudberries that his parents had smuggled in frozen from Norway to our house for dinner, and I was smitten. The cloudberries, folded into whipped cream, became multekrem — one of the most heavenly flavors ever. (Appealing, perhaps, to my northern DNA…) The salmon-colored cream would often enter my head for no reason at all, like a beautiful song from the past. More

Greggie’s Choice

18 Dec 2012 3 Comments

by scolgin in Food, Humor, Recipes Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Sometimes readers of my blog have great ideas that lead to new things and new posts! A few weeks ago — Election Eve, in fact — I wrote a post called “Barack, Brits & Bananas” about a spontaneous dessert I’d come up with for a last-minute party (or more appropriately, a long-planned party I’d forgotten about until the last minute): banana rum walnut bread pudding with Nutella dulce de leche. The post prompted a comment from my friend Greg:

“And in honor of President Obama you could make it banana macadamia nut rum bread pudding. Sounds delicious either way.”

I replied that I thought that was a fine idea, and left it at that. Until, that is, I had a couple slices of stale King’s Hawaiian Bread and was cooking Hawaiian-style pork ribs for dinner one night. And Uncle Greggie’s comment came flooding back into my head. More

Heaven Sent, Via Kentucky

27 Nov 2012 16 Comments

by scolgin in American Series, Food, Humor, Observations, Starlets, Yoga Students & Quinoa (stories) Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

I am fortunate to have not lost many friends over the years. There was a rash of deadly car crashes in high school, reckless kids gone almost before they began, but since then things have pretty much been quiet. With the exception, that is, of one of my dearest friends — a Southern gentleman named Dann Byck.

Dann at Byck’s Department Store in Louisville, 1977

Dann would bristle at that description of him, which is exactly why I use it. He had a good sense of humor. We met at a coffee joint on a snooty street in Santa Monica where we would both sometimes sit in the mornings and watch the beautiful Range Rover mothers push their babies past in Italian-made Peg Perego strollers. More

Barack, Brits & Bananas

09 Nov 2012 5 Comments

by scolgin in Food, Humor, Recipes Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Necessity, as they say, is the mother of invention. And I find this is often true in the kitchen — especially if one is going to a dinner party and needs to make something in a hurry.

The makings of a dessert

Election night: English friend Patricia down the street was having a disco birthday election bash which we, in the whirl of activity that is our lives, had forgotten about until our iCalendar gave us a cheerful little alert that same afternoon. More