The 3-Week Plan: All of the last week

It has been a bad week for plans, with lots of unexpected changes this way and that, and the husband, who is entering a period of extensive travelling (he will be away more than he will be at home for the next couple of months) has been in a restaurant mood, eager to spoil me a bit before he goes, which is nice of him.

He took me to a very fancy place, Hemmagastronomi (= home gastronomy), which is a combination restaurant-delicatessen store. We shared three medium size dishes: vendace roe with blini, smoked shrimp with aioli, and a plate with dried hams, salami, cheese, pickles, and tapenade. They served a delicious sour dough bread with that. Beer for me and a lemonade for him. I wouldn´t mind going back there!

One evening, the sister-in-law (who has been visiting the mum-in-law) treated us to her home-graved salmon, spiced with elderflower saft and gin. I have the recipe, and here it is:

Take a 900 g (2 pounds) salmon filet, with the skin still on, take out any remaining bones and cut it in half. Mix 4 tablespoons of sugar, 4 teaspoons of salt, 1 tablespoon freshly ground white pepper, and zest from one lemon; rub this into the salmon. Put one filet on top of the other, skinside out and one thick end against one thin end. Put a double layer of plastic bags around it and add 4 tablespoons of concentrated elderflower saft and 3 tablespoons of gin. Put this on a plate in the fridge for 2-3 days, turn the bag over a couple of times during that time. Then scrape off the spices, cut the fish into thin slices (discard the skin!) and serve with lemon, ground black pepper, boiled potatoes, and mustard-dill sauce. 

I didn´t take a photo of it, but it had the nicest pink colour ever. There is a blogger who has a good recipe for the entire dish, sauce and all, here.

One of the days I made some more cornbread and let the husband taste Dave´s black eye peas, which he liked a lot. "I imagine this is what the cowboys ate," he said and he might be right, I guess. I intend to bring some to the mum-in-law eventually, as I have much left in the freezer.

Mash, fried salmon, tunnbröd, mango chutney. 

One day this week I fried some salmon and mashed some potatoes. That is a favourite dish of ours, fast food (half an hour plus however long it takes to peel the potatoes - I favour buying large ones!), but properly cooked. It´s so easy it isn´t even a recipe.

Our personal quirk is perhaps that we accompany fried salmon with creme fraiche and mango chutney, which makes for a very good blend of tastes. The idea came from a friend who said that mixing creme fraiche and cloudberry jam makes a very good salmon sauce. We prefer blending it on the plate - if nothing else, it´s frugal.

Today, we had leftover köttsoppa (= meat soup) built on bits and pieces from a kalops (meat stew), Dave´s black eye peas, and green peas from the freezer. I baked a fresh loaf on rye and whole wheat flour. Nothing fancy, but good all the same.

Next week, I will be alone and do a pantry cleaning menu. It´s a personal sport of mine which I do when the husband is away for a whole week - the challenge being not going to the store at all, but making due with what´s available. The eating equivalent of "shopping one´s closet", I suppose. But first, the husband is taking me out for Italian!

The 3-Week Plan: Day 12 and 13

There isn´t much to say about day 12. I was eating alone and made French Toast for myself, or something resembling French Toast. In England they call it "Eggy Bread" and eat it with ketchup, which doesn´t sound particularly tasty to me (perhaps because I detest ketchup). I am firmly Americanized in regard to French Toast, which is called Fattiga Riddare in Swedish, (= poor knights) and eaten with jam or sugar and cinnamon; I insist on syrup. It doesn´t have to be maple syrup to please me, ordinary Ljus sirap (light syrup, which is actually more golden) is fine. A cousin of French Toast is Bread Pudding, which I also enjoy, but the husband not so much, so I rarely make it. It´s basically jam sandwiches soaked in egg and milk and cooked in the oven. Yum! You may call this dessert, I call it dinner when I feel like it.

And very pretty-looking beans they are!

Day 13 is Saturday and improv day and I decided to have some proper food, even though I was eating alone again. I haven´t been able to get the cornbread out of my mind since Divers&Sundry shared her recipe (which you find in the comments) with me the other day, and I decided to make it and have something suitable to match. I can´t quite get my mind around what catfish is, so I went with black eye peas, or beans, as they are called here. I googled for a nice-looking recipe and found Dave´s Georgia-style soup, stew, or pot or what you want to call it. It is not unlike Swedish yellow pea soup, but that is a lot more creamy than Dave´s seem to be according to his photos.

I halved the recipe; the beans come in 900 g bags, which is almost exactly 2 pounds, so I took half that. I let it soak over night, then added 1,5 liters of water, four cubes of vegetable boullion, 2 fried regular size onions, 240 g of fried bacon (they come in 120 g packets), and skipped the ham. I added whole grain white pepper, since it is a slow-cooking thing. No salt, and as it turned out, with the saltiness of the bacon and the boullion, it doesn´t need any.

Dave says to keep this on the stove for 8 hours (!) after soaking, but the reviewers seem to think four was enough. I tried my beans after 3 hours and they were thoroughly cooked, but I wasn´t quite hungry yet then, so I let it sit for another hour, while doing my excercises for the drawing course I am attending. After that, I was both frustrated and hungry!



Now, this is important: when Americans speak of corn, they don´t mean korn, which is tempting for a Swede to think. They mean maize (Sw. majs), also called Indian corn, as of corn-on-the-cob (Sw. majskolv). Corn in Britain can mean oats (Sw. havre) or even wheat (Sw. vete). Swedish korn is barley in English, and it´s the stuff they make malt whisky of, while the American bourbon whiskey is at least partly made from corn - I mean maize. Confusing, eh?

The corn (maize) flour I bought comes from Italy and is called farina di mais per polenta. Polenta is a maize porridge, mostly known to Swedes from fancy restaurants where it is left to cool and congeal, cut up, grilled and served with meat. Don´t get the wrong kind, or you will end up with a very boring and sad sponge cake.

I made the cornbread pretty much like I make sponge cake. The trick is to mix the dry ingredients and the wet separately, and then stir just enough to mix it. The mum-in-law taught me to use one of the whisks, it´s a really good trick. It came out very nicely, I think. Perhaps Divers&Sundry will please grade my attempt?

I understand black eye peas are traditional on New Year´s Eve in the southern States, and is considered to bring luck for the new year. Well, I am certainly impressed enough to make this one of my standard recipes and make it for guests as well. We´ll see how it does in the freezer, but I don´t think it matters much if the beans fall apart some.

After having done the dishes, I poured myself a well-deserved G&T and knit some on my scarf while watching Guy Ritchie´s "Sherlock Holmes - A Game of Shadows".

PS. If you are Swedish and reluctant to try American/English (ok, the Brits are officially on the liter scale, but so often prefer "old money") recipes because you can´t get your head around "cups", check out your local ICA or Coop for quarter liter (2,5 dl) measuring cups. They now also come with cup- and half cup measuring lines, as you can see in the picture below. Liters on the right, cups on the left. Thank the good ol´ internet & multiculturalism for that one. DS.

Baking in a Baking-House and The 3-Week Plan: Day 11

The small house on the far right is the baking house. 

All this talk of and drinking boiled coffee made me remember when a friend of mine bought a house and moved out in the country. On the property was a bagarstuga, a baking house. Way back, building a baking oven was quite an expensive investment, and in many villages here in the north, they would build a joint one, where the women would bake together, sometimes for days at a time. Mostly, they would bake tunnbröd (thin bread), which was dry - much like a biscuit - and could be stored for a long time, and mjukkaka (soft cake) which was a flat, soft bread.

Today mjukkaka is commerically baked by Polarbröd bakery in Älvsbyn, and their brandname, polarkaka (= polar cake, or bread), has to a large extent replaced the old name mjukkaka (I have seen recipes for "how to bake your own polarkaka"). This bread is exported all over and we once had a very expensive sandwich in Paris, salmon on polarkaka!

Anyway, my friend invited a group of us to bake in her bagarstuga, and I think I had a cold or something (it is more than 15 years ago, and hard to remember exactly), because instead of baking, I was taking photos. My friend´s husband was heating the oven with birchwood, and when it was hot enough, the embers were raked to the far side and the bread was placed on the hot brick surface. On the side of the oven was an open fireplace where he boiled our coffee. Of course, we had some fresh bread with it!

It was a great experience and when the mum-in-law tells her stories of baking the old way, I know exactly what she means. My friend and her husband have since given up this house and moved back to a flat in town, but they had some great years in the country, doing all the things they had dreamed of: raising sheep and ducks (I have some photos of myself picking feathers from dead birds, but for some reason they tend to gross people out...), had a garden (she even wrote a chapter in a garden book, about gardening in the severe northern climate), and what not. But I suppose everything runs its course eventually - they seem very happy back in town.

About my 3-week plan: I am eating alone tonight and since I can´t bother cooking for myself alone, I am having tea and sandwiches for dinner. It´s a bit lazy, but that´s ok, too.

Cold-Brew Coffee and The 3-Week Plan: Day10

Tuesday:

In April, I saw an article in the paper about a new local coffee, called Lemmel, as in lämmel (= lemming). The story (as told by Markus Lemke of Gällivare, here in the photo from the article) is that the lemmings are so aggressive because they are guarding their great secret, their coffee rosting-house. This is the first dark-roasted boiling coffee (which is usually a light roast), advertised for outdoor use with the catch-phrase "no sleep, just coffee". I bought 3 half-kilo packets by mail (I have repressed the price, it was horribly expensive), gave one packet away for a gift and started on one myself. It tastes very good, but I do find the process of boiling coffee just for myself a bit tedious on an everyday basis (I usually make my cup when I´m barely awake), so it´s been sitting for a while in the fridge.

Now I read in the Guardian about cold-brew coffee, According to the recipe, you should use coarsely ground beans, which is exactly what this is, and it´s supposed to taste less acidic and more chocolat-y, which sounds like a very good thing to me! I had to try at once! It takes some planning, though, as it needs to sit for 24 hours to brew. Well, it´s not like I have to sit and guard it like the lemmings, do I?

Wednesday:

Not quite 24 hours later, but 20 perhaps, when I filtered my first two deciliters of this stuff. It was black, allright, and strong to the taste. I diluted it 50/50 with water, but it still tasted odd. It occured to me that I can´t really say one way or the other, since I´m not used to drinking cold coffee, so I made a cup of the 50/50 mix and heated it in the microwave.

Let me tell you, it´s gorgeous. Just as they promised, not acidic at all, but full of wonderful taste. I then added just a dollop of milk and the flavour was unlike any coffee I have ever had. I think I´m firmly hooked!

These are the instructions that came with Lemmel coffee:

1. Leave civilization.
2. Make a fire.
3. Fill your pan with water from a lake or stream.
4. Add enough coffee to allow a wood mouse to walk across without getting his feet wet.
5. Bring to the boil.
6. Let it draw until it´s strong enough. Fill your soul.

On Vimeo, you can see how it´s made: kokkaffeporr! (= boiling coffee porn)

As for my dinner plan, it was cancelled. We took my mum-in-law and sister-in-law to a restaurant, where we ate suovas, which is smoked reindeer shavings. I shall make it myself someday soon, just for the blog - to make up for having chosen such a lousy time to blog my fabulous 3-week plan, when I can´t stick to it at all... Oh well.

The 3-Week Plan: Day 8 and 9

Day 8 in the plan said pickled herring. The husband didn´t feel like it and took me out to a restaurant. We went to one of our regular places, Mediterran, where a pair of brothers from Kosovo (we think) make Italian food, and very well, too. I had Spagetti Bolognese and the husband had Pasta a la Casa, which is fillet of pork with capers and red peppers.

Elder herring and archipelago herring.

We had the pickled herring today instead (the plan said sausages, but they keep in the freezer). I have written about that before, so I will not bore you with a long tale about that. I bought a new kind, Skärgårdssill (= archipelago herring) and it wasn´t perhaps as good as it looked. It was seasoned with herring roe, which made it taste a bit like Kalles Kaviar, another Swedish speciality which is excellent on a hardboiled egg sandwich. I probably will not buy that one again, but stick with our favourites: löksill (onion herring), svartvinbärssill (black currant herring), flädersill (elder herring), citronsill (lemon herring), and senapssill (mustard herring). There are many more flavours out there, this really is a staple in Swedish cooking.

The sugar is kept in an old
lidded beer jug.

Besides the herring, we boiled potatoes, hard-boiled some eggs, added some lettuce, yellow pepper, and grated carrots. Now, the husband likes his carrots coarsley grated with a sprinkling of lemon on top, while I like mine finely grated, with half a tablespoon of sugar on top, disolving in lemon. The sugar doesn´t really make the carrots taste sweet as candy or anything, but rather brings the flavour out in an absolutely wonderful way, like a spoon of sugar does to a tomato sauce. My mother used to make it like this and to me, it´s the only way.

Also, we had some tunnbröd (= thin bread). Our favourite comes from Dahlberg´s home bakery in Piteå. It has an excellent crunch to it and a strong taste of fennel seed.

The 3-Week Plan: Day 7

... of which there isn´t much to say. The original plan was to eat with the mum-in-law; we did that yesterday. Today we cleaned the house, put away all the things on the balcony for the winter, and put down new carpets for the hall. At the end of it we decided to go out for hamburgers. After that, we went home for fika, or tea and cookies from the market. At least that was a bit special.

I´m afraid I had taken a bite before I remembered to snap them...

The International Street Market or The 3-Week Plan: Day 6

Saturday on our food plan is for improvisation and Sundays are for eating with the mum-in-law. This week we included her in our improvisations and brought her food (she declined to come with us this time as she had been on a long walk yesterday and was a bit knackered). Last year was the first time the International Street Market came to Luleå, the weather was smashing and they were a big success. We were a big success to them, buying food for an incredible 8 million SEK! I don´t remember what the husband and I were doing, but we didn´t go then. This year, I was sent by the mum-in-law to get some sausage and cheese on Wednesday, and was bowled over by the diversity and quality of what was on offer.

Today was the last day and the last chance to go for the husband, who became so entusiastic that he declared that next year we shall eat all week at the market. There was certainly enough variation on offer: ragu from France, curry-wurst from Berlin, waffles from Belgium, bigos (hunter´s stew) and pirogi from Poland, fish & chips and curry from England, and more.

Also, next week is the Swedish elections, so there were lots of heated political discussions on the street. The Swedish custom is that every party puts up a valstuga, an election cottage, where people can come and get information and discuss all the current issues. Immigration is a hot topic, and the Sweden Democrats (who aren´t really much for democracy when it comes down to it, having their roots in and being ideologically estabished in the neo-nazi movement) have support from about 10% of the electorate. I hope the abstainers will rise from their sofas this year and stand up for democracy and decency in Swedish politics.

Continental cookies, a grand selection.

Italian chocolate, which I didn´t even know was a Thing.

Turkish delight, of which we had three kinds: almond, rose, and lemon.

The Christian Democratic valstuga. Campaigning that more jobs = more welfare.

Very pretty Brittish teacups.

A sea, nay, an ocean of English fudge (and I bought none, still full up from this summer´s excesses in Scarborough...)!

Centerpartiet (used to be the farmer´s party),
campaigning for a sustainable Sweden.

Not just food on offer, but lovely quality clothing as well.

The strudel-makers were making lots of money!

The Berlin sausage booth had a real fire going.

Local politicial Stefan Tornberg (of Centerpartiet) being photographed with a voter.

Our desserts.

Folkpartiet´s valstuga (the Liberal party), campaigning for
dignified care of the elderly.

Swedes love sitting outdoors, even if it means having warming fire and blankets.

Pirogi, which we had for dinner (among other things).

Bigos, the Polish hunter´s stew, that has sauerkraut in it.

Dutch cheese.

We ended up at home late in the evening in front of a Bond adventure on the television, with whiskey (for me, the husband is a teetotaller) and an assortment of goodies.