A Tog's Trek

A nation as huge and varied as the USA offers a wide array of cuisine, but if you're looking for the quintessential main meal, to eat with an Apple Pie chaser, you can look no further than the Hamburger.

A traditional Latvian side dish for Christmas, it also formed a key part of my Christmas meal this year. Eating alone due to the ongoing Covid pandemic, I went all out creating a traditional Christmas meal.

Much like my wander on Christmas Eve, I took an hours break from obsessively scheduled cooking to get some air and sunlight in the nearby Slottskogen Park. Winter sun is a tricky thing, it can be very bright, but its so low in the sky that you get long shadows or it is easily hidden behind low hills or high buildings, plunging your photos into the gloom.

Not one for staying indoors all day, I headed out to the nearby Göteborgs Botaniska Trädgård, walking through Slottskogen park to get there. Even at 1 pm, the sun was low in the sky as we are only two days past the Solstice, when the night is longest and daylight a brief golden splash of a few hours.

Still waiting for my replacement tripod to arrive, I once again decided to do some hand held shots of the moon. Getting the crystal clear sharpness is incredibly tough hand held, and I'm still not that happy with the results.

Today I discovered that my new apartment's lounge windows offer a great viewing spot for the moon on those rare days when it is not covered by Gothenburg's near-permanent grey clouds. Having missed the once-in-four-hundred-years alignment of Jupiter and Saturn yesterday due to cloud cover, I thought I would at least shoot the moon when she' broke through the clouds.

Every year, the Oscar Fredriks Kammarkör, the church choir for Oscar Fredrik's Church in Linne sings at my new building.

Sometimes you just chance on strange things. Outside my window, a stream of motorcycles, all dressed as Santa passed along Linnégatan. Beeping their horns and revving their engines they gathered a surprised audience.

Germany's national dish of Sauerbraten is a sweet and sour beef slow marinated and cooked in what becomes a think gravy. Done right, the meat is tender and succulent with a unique flavour.

My random number-driven tour of the world landed me in my neighboring country of Denmark. The national dish of Denmark is the simple, and delicious, Stegt Flæsk. A crispy pork dish with parsley sauce.

Italy has a vast number of dishes that define their cuisine, different regions will give you different answers, but for my Italian stop on Tog's Tuck, I chose to cook a Lasagne from scratch using the recipe from Walks of Italy

My culinary tour (and random number generator) took me to Bulgaria, where the national dish is Bob Chorba, a bean soup made for centuries (if not longer) in monasteries, as well as Patatnik, a potato pancake made with egg and mint.