kitchen gadgets of doom

My flat in the UK, a new temporary post-doc-studies accommodating asset, is furnished, which includes pots and pans and things in the kitchen. Most of these are new or at least clean. Only the oven, split into a baking and a grilling compartment, has seen way too many moons and could apparently not be cleaned any more. I am looking forward to a 19th century-style ur-British day of coal mining one day. For now, I’m happy to consider here the various things I am renting.

First, there is the scooper. This is a bent slotted spoon made from heat-resistant black plastic, apparently, or hopefully, used for scooping up sausages from their greasy bath. The plumber, who came after a week to fix a leaking tap, forgot his keys behind the wooden panel in front of the bathtub and used the scooper to retrieve them.

parcel experiments with savoy cabbage

Somewhere in my archives there is a recipe with Savoy cabbage and salmon. I am sneakily not giving the link. Otherwise people would never have to leaf through my accumulated postings which would be sad.

I keep being interested in the possibilities of savoy cabbage -  it should be a marvelous vegetable, the queen of leaf cabbages. We might, for example, attempt to braise the cut-up cabbage in white wine and give it a creamy lift at the end. We’ll likely end up with a soggy and squishy heap that tastes quite nice but looks like what, when I was little, the farmers gave to the pig. Alternatively, we might try out some kitchen-wiz oven treatment with shredded savoy and minced lamb, which could result in dried-out, brown and bitter strands between the sizzling fragments of meat.

restaurants in summer sweden III, marstrand

The beautiful city of Marstrand is located at the Swedish west coast a few miles north of Göteborg. You reach it if you drive off the E6 highway at Kungälv, turning west and following the signs. Be prepared for over-wide and unsteadily-driven campers in the summer and inconsiderate moose in the winter. The picturesque old part of the little village is located on the Marstrandsön, an island that can be reached by a ferry.

We run into a colleague of mine on the ferry, who just bought a house here. Our subsequent restaurant hunt is based on his well-meant recommendations. This works very well indeed regarding the Café Berg’s located at the northern section of Hamngatan. Fortified with reasonable Cappuccinos and some nice sweet apple-filled bits of bakery, we conquer the island until, eventually hungry, we begin heading towards his second recommendation, Lasse-Maja’s krog just across from where the ferry arrives.

Lasse-Maja’s website is not quite complete at the moment, but it sports some impressive art-photography of the menu, which changes every day according to the products available on the market. We’re talking here mostly about fish, so this devotion to freshness is an excellent sign. We can also read the following: Lasse-Maja’s chef Richard Waje guarantees top quality in everything including the ingredients and the service. In other words: the guest has every right to have the highest expectations.

restaurants in summer sweden II, borås

The city of Borås has a bad name in Sweden, for no real reasons. Yes, it rains a lot here, and the highway that goes right through the city does not allow for picturesque views. But the center of the town is calm and nice at daytime, not too large for a casual stroll and it offers good opportunities for hanging out and getting a decent meal.

Restaurants come and go at quite a quick pace in Borås, which often makes me sad: one would wish that all those enterprising chefs had a little more success convincing the Sjuhärad residents of the benefits of an international cuisine. A little color would truly make everyone happier.  A new large Indian restaurant opened only yesterday on Yxhammarsgatan; I want to wish them well.

The Greek taverna on Lilla Brogatan, on the other hand, has been there for quite a while now. It is a nice, relatively large space with a few random Hellenic decorations and painted crumbling plaster walls

restaurants in summer sweden I, bollebygd

Anyone traveling in Sweden knows that highway restaurants, relatively scarce as they anyway are, are called things like McDonalds, Shell or Korvkiosk (sausage hut). Names like “Route 66″ or “Smakfullt” (the latter meaning both “full of flavor” and “tasteful”) do occur, too, but are the exception. Anyway, it is good to know about a few alternatives. This series of reviews will guide the innocent traveler towards some decent meals. I’ll tag these posts in Swedish – let’s see what happens.

It will, for example, be helpful to know that four minutes away from “Smakfullt”, which lies on the R 40 half an hour east of Göteborg, a bunch of enthusiastic people is trying to make a “Family restaurant” go round, with occasionally quite nice results. They need a real audience, however, and a critical one, too.

I am talking of La Familia Macsad which is situated in the in the southwest corner of the tallest building of the pulsating center of Bollebygd, aptly called Centrumhuset, (just beside the Trend-Makery, a boutique which has housed a stable collection of household Non-Necessaries for about a decade). Other highlights of Bollebygd’s center are a wine and beer store, a medical center and a parking lot with too narrow spaces.

La Familia has inherited the espresso machine of the previous owner who didn’t succeed in spite of his good coffee – that’s why we started going there. They have a fixed lunch menu which seems okay, and on some evenings they are open and offer dinner à la carte.

a new season: another asparagus rant

Bremen in May means asparagus. Every morning, my mom jumps on her bike and returns a little later with kilos of the stuff, right from the farm. We recently ate asparagus for a whole week, every day. This makes me relaxed enough for a candid report about my asparagus life at home in Bollebygd.

hunting for additives

It may be a little lame to always claim that Sweden is twenty years behind with everything except internet access and safe cars, but what are you gonna do. Since the seventies, nature-minded wacky Western Germans have had access to long lists of food additives and their shorthand E-numbers. The consumer could go into the shops, look at the labels, compare with their lists and, for instance, say: this sausage contains food coloring, taste enhancers, saccharine, artificial aromas, potato flakes and milk powder. I’ll buy something else.

boneless pork chops, white wine, and cream

Even in otherwise really fabulous cookbooks, one can encounter any number of rather less fabulous never-do laws about the treatment of lean pork in the frying pan. In part, this may be caused by the watery no-good pork selling-practices in some countries. Put a large Dutch pork chop into a small skillet, and it will inevitably begin to boil in its own juices before the cooking fat has had a chance to get things under control. In such a case it is perhaps indeed better to slow-cook or braise it instead (or, in fact, to forget about it right away). But even in the North, with reasonable non-watered pork easily available, no standard professional cooking advice ever helped me to avoid a dry piece of pork. So I threw it all overboard and made this:

krauty fishy childhood flashback

One of the hardiest prejudices about sauerkraut cooking is that you only can use it with sausage or other heavy duty pork – nothing could be more wrong than this. Today I finally called my mom and asked how she did her oven dish with sauerkraut, fish and potato puree.

Why? Because I remember loving this dish from as long as I remember anything. And it is not my childish predilection for impossible food combinations that dictated this love: the original recipe comes from a hefty mid-fifties tome Seefisch – schmackhaft und pikant (sea-fish, tasty and savoury) by Rudolf Rösch. Its cover illustration depicts Fish and Ships. From the foreground, an unhappy vertical green Haddock stares at you with round, orange eyes, as if telling the reader: this is serious business.

oven time II

And since we were using the oven anyway, Robin developed this Hot Salad:

You need zucchini, tomato, onion, all sliced very thinly;
crumbly goat cheese, salt, pepper, olive oil and oregano.

In a small open oven dish, layer the ingredients as follows:

zucchini-onion-salt-tomato-goat cheese-olive oil.
Repeat.
Sprinkle with pepper and oregano.

Bake in the pre-heated oven at 200C-392F until done, c. 20 minutes.

A salad, you ask? Yes!