Christmas and a Stroll Along the Beach

And suddenly Christmas hit! :-) Once again our little tag team was well prepared and ready at all battle stations. Getting ready for Christmas is actually a large part of the joy. In reality it hardly qualifies as a strenuous task, the team in combo boast an impressive amount of life experience - The two-man desert team alone manages to push the counter up towards 180 years of accumulated skills - no wonder it tastes delicious! :-)

Indeed we were so much on top of the game that we started experimenting, letting our sole foreign team member be in charge of the production of something as Danish as the pebernødder! :-) The recipe in the link is not the one we used, I will try to get the Larsen method online at some point - if not before, then Christmas 2010. One of the key steps in the process is to get the time in the oven just right - Looking at the pictures it is needless to say that this crucial final step was being monitored very carefully :-D - no reason to worry though, they came out just as delicious as usual.

We managed to pull of another home run Christmas night with a great mix of classical and slightly innovative dishes. The photo does not give the menu the credit it deserves, I blame it on the lack of a fast super wide angle zoom .. and stitching a panorama was no option, since food disappeared faster than the shutter speed of the D300. ;-)

All that food spurred a healthy hunger for a bit of exercise and what is better than a trip to the beach? The summerhouse is located at Ålbæk strand, which sports some excellent walking opportunities and as much of the Danish countryside during winter, there is not much human activity out there.

Danish birds are significantly more careful than their Australian counterparts. In combo with a good solid low hanging mist it was very difficult conditions for bird photography .. quite a few waterbirds were around, but kept beyond the reach of the Bigma.

The Mute Swans (Knopsvane) below would have been a bit of a scoop in Australia, but unfortunately it does not counts as a rarity in DK. In fact it has been chosen as the "National Bird of Denmark".

If you are sitting out there wondering what bird your country has chosen, use this link: List of National Birds.
Great walk! Unimaginably quiet! The mist and the snow kills any bit of sound in such a fantastic way.

Back in the garden in Balling all those "domesticated" birds were much easier to approach, in a snow covered landscape it does not take many days before the presence of berries in the trees makes the bird forget about the danger associated with a freezing, Bigma slinging, Australian summer acclimatized bird paparazzi Dane.