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>This weekend is the annual Yulefest at the Nordic Heritage Museum in Ballard, just a few blocks north of us. Today Zorg and I went and up and channeled our fathers’ Scandinavian ancestors as we ate at a lunch of open-faced sandwiches (meatball, egg salad, and herring), split pea soup, cakes, cookies and rommegrot.

I’d gone up to the Yulefest when it opened at 10 a.m. to scout the crafts booths, and stopped in at the aebleskiver cafe to watch them prepare these spherical Danish dessert pancakes. While various websites I consulted later compared aebleskiver to American pancakes, they remind me a bit of beignet. They’re cooked in an aebleskive pan, cast iron with seven hemispherical indentations for the batter. As they puff up, you rotate them using a thin wood skewer or very delicate fork until they are round and brown.

Like beignet, aebleskiver are sprinkled with powdered sugar; in addition they come with a side of jam.

My favorite Scandinavian food (well, after Swedish korv, which isn’t on the Yulefest menu) is rommegrot, a Norwegian porridge I first encountered at the Yulefest several years ago. It’s fairly obscure, but I chased down some recipes and in the process discovered that there are two types of rommegrot: One includes sour cream or yogurt; the other uses regular cream. I’m definitely a fan of the sour-cream variation.

Since the recipe involves combining butter, flour, sugar, and (sour) cream and then topping the resulting hot porridge with more butter and sugar, plus cinnamon, this is not a dish you’d indulge in frequently. I have devised a one-serving recipe for it, but usually just wait for Yulefest to enjoy it.

Here’s a good recipe from the Sons of Norway website; it even it tells you how to make your own sour cream using whipping cream and buttermilk.

>Tonight John and Barry and I went to hear Christopher Kimball, the driving force behind Cook’s Illustrated magazine and website and America’s Test Kitchen, speak at Third Place Books in Bothell. He was charming, and spent most of his time taking questions from the enthusiastic audience that packed the stage area and overflowed into the food court that adjoins the bookstore. I realized that I miss clever, articulate preppies. And I came away determined to try his new vodka pie crust for my next apple pie (though I’ll be using one of Martha’s designs for the crust assembly).

Before Kimball’s talk, the topic of molecular cooking came up. John said he hadn’t heard much about that trend. My knowledge of it is, unfortunately, abstract rather than experiential. Spearheaded by restaurants in first in Spain (El Bulli), and soon after in Chicago and New York, it uses scientific principles to create dishes such as fried mayonnaise, and pate that can be tied in a knot. Predictably, it’s also inspired a vituperative backlash — all of which is described well in this post at 3 Quarks Daily. And there’s even a website devoted to the broader topic of molecular gastronomy: khymos.org, which has tips for home chefs who want to try the molecular approach in their own kitchens.

>I devote five hours a week to fitness. That includes four hours of actual workout and one hour of getting to and from two 90-minute yoga-based classes and one 60-minute belly dance class that involves a 10-lb. weight belt.

The reason I do this is because if I do any less, it doesn’t work. What I mean by “it doesn’t work” is that fat doesn’t burn any more. And, to some extent, the workout is a struggle rather than enjoyable — I guess because at once or twice a week I can’t maintain the levels of strength, balance and flexibility that make working out physically enjoyable.

Five hours, in three 90-minute chunks, is a LOT of time. It means that two times a week, dinner with Zorg is disrupted. And that I can’t attend professional meetings on the evenings when my classes meet. And that I don’t like to go away for the weekend because that means missing the Sunday morning class. And that when we have guests, I go slithering off to class instead of being a good hostess and cooking for them.

Perhaps there are people for whom fitness is something they can just “fit in” in the openings in their schedules. But I find there are few such openings in mine, and certainly not enough of them to keep me fit. Fitness has to be planned and scheduled, and lots of fun or important activities sacrificed — and other people inconvenienced — in order to get results.

And, oh yes, it’s totally worth it.

>Zorg has asked that I cook fish more often. Something beyond my usual fall-back, expensive salmon grilled on the barbecue. Thus I found myself at the market, eyeing a heap of nice-looking sole. I equate sole with flounder, and I cook flounder by dredging it in flour (mixed with salt, pepper, and herbs) and frying it in butter.

The fellow at the fish counter suggested that I toss all the little filets into a glass bowl, pour in some sherry and herbs, and microwave it for three or four minutes. That just sounded weird to me. But I bought a pound of filets anyway.

Then I went home and read the flat-fish section of Mark Bittman’s book on cooking fish. I put 1/3 cup of soy sauce into a big flat-bottomed pan, added some sliced ginger root and fresh garlic cloves, and a bit of sesame oil. And a sprinkle of sherry. Brought this to a boil, then took it down to low, tossed in the sole filets and put on the cover. Nine minutes later: Dinner.

We both liked it enough to put the recipe into regular rotation. But the biggest fan of the soy-poached sole was Sheba, our deaf white cat. We had some left over, and she has been demanding a bit every time we go near the refrigerator.

Now I’m wondering about poaching a thicker filet, such as swordfish.

>One of the inspirations for Food, Fitness, Fashion is Amber Nussbaum, who blogs about all those topics on My Aim Is True. Amber takes a hands-on approach to fashion as a member of the Norfolk (Va.) Craft Mafia, a gal group featured this past week on the cover of their local newspaper. Great photo!

>Music and Cats has what may be the definitive post on slow-roasting tomatoes and then using them for pasta and other dishes. And such gorgeous photos of the tomatoes!

>When you feel good, you crave activity (aka exercise) and good (aka healthy) food.

This is where bodywork — from classic massage to Chinese medicine and Rolfing — comes in. These treatments and techniques relieve pain, help you overcome physical restrictions, and heighten body awareness.

My friend Larry Swanson, a top-notch web designer, has created a site called Bodywork U. It’s primarily for bodywork practitioners to find professional development programs and classes. But, with its list of state-by-state list of massage schools and other programs, Bodywork U is also a great way for you to find the leading studios and practitioners in whatever bodywork area you’d like to explore.

>It’s squash season, so I tore a recipe for squash soup out of the Wall Street Journal (Oct. 20-21) and picked up a large acorn squash at the Ballard Market.

It wasn’t until I began making the recipe that I realized the “Roasted Squash Soup with Brown Butter” was one squash, 2 tablespoons of brown sugar and one cup plus two teaspoons of butter. That’s not soup, that’s squash-flavored carmel sauce. Somewhere at the Wall Street Journal, a recipe writer is out of his or her gourd.

I found it particularly bizarre because the recipe starts by having you split, seed, and roast the squash, which will carmelize the vegetable’s abundant natural sugars and make additional sugar pretty much overkill — in every sense of the word.

So while my (unsugared but lightly buttered) squash roasted, I went back to the drawing board with the rest of the recipe to see what I could do to replace the butter with something a bit more appetizing.

I ended up sauteeing some naturally sweet vegetables — chopped sweet onions, a chopped red pepper, and three chopped carrots — in a little bit of butter. Then I added water to cover the veggies and dropped in three stalks of celery (to be removed later, before pureeing the soup) and left that to simmer.

After the squash finished roasting, I removed the skin and added the squash to the vegetable soup, and then removed the fibrous celery. Then I left the soup to cool (so it could be pureed later in the blender).

To get the browned butter flavor, I reduced the cup (16 tablespoons) of butter called for in the recipe to 2 tablespoons and followed the fairly involved directions for melting and boiling the butter, which concludes by setting the saucepan in an ice bath to get the golden brown butter separated from the milk solids. That butter is then added to the pureed soup.

(I did it, but it was a pain. I wonder if an interesting oil could be added instead — sesame perhaps?)

The recipe winds up with cayenne, cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, vinegar, lemon juice, and salt added to the puree, which is then gently heated before serving. I pulled back quite a bit on these final additions; my soup was less rich and sweet and thus needed less sharp flavoring to “cut” it.

The final soup got Zorg’s “yum” of approval, and I’ll be cooking it again.

>When I noticed how many posts on my personal blog were about food, fitness and fashion, I realized that I wanted a place to blog about these topics without making my usual readers roll their eyes. Thus “Food, Fitness, Fashion” was born.

I’ll be commenting on fashion trends, focusing on a longterm perspective. Sure, “kitten heels” are back, but where the bleep did they come from in the first place?

And I’ll be writing about food, reporting on ways to cook, eat, and even indulge healthily and enjoyably — without turning yourself into one of those ghastly food vigilantes. (If you think I’m turning into one, please comment immediately and send truffles.)

Finally, I’ll be writing about fitness — a topic on which I’m afraid I am a bit of a vigilante. You may be able to guess, by checking out the blog’s fitness links (at right), what kind of vigilante.