fish and soy sauce

Some friends had lovingly introduced us to Swedish surströmming (see this story). As a matter of returning a favor, we exposed them a little later to our experiments in Indonesian cooking. One of the recipes that I tried on one of these occasions was Bandeng bumbu ketjap, according to the Dutch-Indonesian Keijner cookbook (I have also posted here about this book).

Bandeng is Milkfish. I must admit that I do not know its taste. Everyone says that mackerel is a good substitute for Bandeng. On the other hand, it seems rather unlikely to me that mackerel works as a substitute for anything else than mackerel.

In any case, there was no Bandeng in Borås at the time, so I did take mackerel for this recipe.

coffee and ear damage

Here I am asking the universe for an improvement. Worldwide. Think that you are in a medium large city, carrying around a backpack with a book or two, your calendar and your laptop, you’ve got an hour to spare and it is, say, 11:15. Time for a seat, a cup of coffee, a horizontal surface and an illusion of a tiny private space. Unless you’re at some American university campus and have access to some dedicated sit-and-wait-and-sip place, your chances of finding a suitable café are small.

In one typical kind of coffee place one can only manage a quick, standing and back-nudged espresso, like in that corner shop in Ithaca’s Collegetown where there was not even a place to hold the cup.

In others, such as the last-resort-type cappuccinery at Kiel Central Station, one drinks one’s coffee while balancing on a wobbly bar chair.

sweet dreams

Last night, I dreamed that I attended a large birthday party. They were just beginning to hand around cakes, brownies, pastry and stuff - lots and lots. I believe I saw about 20 items in huge piles, chocolaty ones, flaky ones and some big bits with thick layers of sugary gleaming icing.

I had just managed to think that I’d better skip most of the powdery brownies (while munching one) and other lesser kinds in favor of the ones with the most icing when I woke up.

three-tastes party chicken

A great way to entertain a bunch of standing, balcony-invading, chatting, newly arriving and otherwise not organizable guests is to place a baking tray full of chicken bits in some strategic location close to the drinks. In order to avoid big or unwieldy pieces I don’t do it the cheap way this time, which would be chopping up a few whole chickens. Robin likes chicken wings; I find that they often have too much crunch in relationship to the meaty part. I buy a lot of chicken drumsticks.

I preheat the oven to medium high, 360-370 F (180-190 C). I pour an appropriate amount of salt over all the parts and mix them by hand. I press some garlic over two thirds of the chicken bits and mix again (I do wash my hands before and after). Then I make three heaps, two with garlic and one without.

lamb, curry, cream; living and cooking in amsterdam

Our kitchen in our third-floor Amsterdam apartment looked out on a wide, flat roof under which the ambulances of the city were parked. The white-blue Chevy Van ambulances would hoot their jolly Dutch warning melody (a 4-6 chord c-a-f-a) into our living room whenever they roared and squeaked out of their cave. This experience belonged to the front of the house. The roof at the back was owned by the cats and usually relatively quiet. Cats have a mind of their own. They would howl at nights, chase the gulls, fall off balconies with astonished faces, but they refused to touch the rat while it was fresh, that had experienced a major roof-climbing mishap.

kristianstad revisited

For some altogether unknown reason, my earlier post about Kristianstad’s restaurants has been honored by the greatest amount of hits on this blog - 141 altogether (while, for instance, the delicious chicken thighs with tomatoes only caught forty-something hits). Time for a sequel: last weekend I was back. However, because of a lack of time and of social obligations of the “stick to the gang” kind, I never found my way into Modesto, as promised, which was sad for me but good for my purse.

What I can offer instead is a review of the Greek restaurant Den Lilla Tavernan,

surviving the shop

This is not going to be about food at all, it is my weekly rant about elbows. We are back from the store. It is Friday afternoon, and even this time, we survived. This isn’t so easy as it sounds.

I’m born in Western Germany. One would think that this prepared me for most shopping styles of the world - however, a Friday in a Swedish store makes me wonder. But let’s go generalize nation for nation.

crunchy veggie horrors

During the 1992 opera rehearsals in the beautifully situated Swedish castle Läckö we, that is the singers, the musicians and the people who talk with their hands in their pockets (we call them producers) got mass lunch in the castle’s cozy restaurant Fataburen. As soon as the performances began, I was suddenly the only one who stayed out at the castle (the rest of the gang traveled from elsewhere) - in the most fantastic weather on the camping site nearby - and still needed lunch. They gave me a special price, and during those three weeks I tried their whole menu up and down again. This is long ago - nevertheless I should recommend their kitchen wholeheartedly even today.

…or at least almost wholeheartedly.

game symphony and other swedish pizza

I thought that low tide in Swedish spring was reached during this year’s edition of the annual song contest, with Christer Sjögren’s abysmal sixties-schlager-revival song “I love Europe” and the flopped joint venture of Carola and that other cowboy, but no. We are bracing ourselves for the next big event: the Nordic Championship In Pizza 2008.

Nordic Pizza? But of course.

ribs from another world

Swedish pork ribs are different. They come with a four-inch layer of meat-streaked blubber un-firmly attached, and are pretty difficult to treat in the kitchen. Here are the choices:

- You cut off the offending layer and treat the ribs as ribs. Use the fat and the meat for sausages.

- You do a Chinese slow pot roast with star anise, garlic, soy sauce and spring onions. This will have to be a heck of a slow pot roast, or you’ll end up with layers of salty, tough meat embedded in sweet wobbly matter that carries a faint taste of anise. If you manage to summon the patience to cook the ribs all the way through (three hours…four hours??), discard as much of the accumulated fat as possible, rescue the heavenly sauce, but take care to have the Vodka chilled nevertheless - you will need it.

- You make several deep cuts in the meat parallel to the ribs and oven-roast - or grill - the whole combo, with the objective of letting the fat cure or tenderize the meat, or at least getting it to dissolve and vanish. This is, however, not going to happen: