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!

oven time I

As usual, Swedish January brings us an inch closer to madness. So now we have this new fad: do everything in the oven. It becomes nice and warm in the kitchen in the process.

The whole thing started with Robin coming back from Virginia with a new oven-roasted cabbage chunks idea. There it’s an element of lean cooking (I hear) but over here, Robin chopped half a red cabbage in large big chunks, put them in a cast-iron pan with a lid (one of these nice ones with internal goosebumps to auto-baste the roast)

in search of “1888″

In my previous post, I have provided a revision of Bremen’s Hachez chocolate. We are unfortunately left with a feeling of high-cocoa deprivation and turn, saddened, to other options. One of these, as I have written earlier, is the brand 1888 by the Malmö chocolate factory. This is a very small company. I have now tested a little over half of their assortment and have only noted highest points, even for the Christmas-flavored kind (julchoklad med glöggkryddor). All of Malmö Chokladfabrik’s kinds have a cocoa content of 70%, are conched for a looong time and are smooth as butter. Their quality is uncannily consistent. So how does one get hold of this extraordinary stuff?

Here in Borås, there is Berg’s, of course:

hachez chocolate – ups and downs

There are various ways for me to introduce the Bremen chocolate manufacturer Hachez here. Of course, I have mentioned their products before. Since I was born in Bremen, I am naturally partial to their chocolate and their philosophy, but there is more to their excellence. A production process that includes a conching time of 72 hours is a good starting point for an exceptional collection.

The ups

As a child, I was not really aware of Hachez being special – let’s say that a child’s perception of sweets is, well, different. Hachez was something on grandma’s coffee table, distributed in minimal quantities and accepted with a munching smile of regret (is there not more of it?) – it never really entered my world in the same massive way as the towers of Ritter squares that my other grandmother had assembled for me one Christmas, or the bite-size chocolate bits, called Schogetten, that were the accompaniment to our afternoon teas, as soon as the Ritter squares were gone. I achieved some virtuosity in snatching Schogetten from the plate – the trick was to reduce them before even being noticed.

Aided by the fact that it is not easily obtainable abroad, Hachez has now become my special favorite. Visits to Bremen result in my carrying back piles from their classic “Edel Chokoladen” collection, with a special emphasis on Edel-Bitter-Sahne, Edel-Zartbitter, Edel-Mokka-Sahne. There is nothing better in the world, I believe, than these.

tofu incognito

So here were my kids, visiting for Christmas, and my daughter has become a vegetarian. In lieu of the traditional heap of goose, I cooked my spinach salmon for her (the occasional bit of fish is okay with her), while my son and I hacked away at an over-sized and unfortunately somewhat too dry bit of ham in a bread crust (there’s no recipe needed for that one – only that I salted a fresh ham for a week together with herbs and spices, that I overdid the crushed juniper, that I half-cooked the ham and wrapped it in bread dough, which I baked in the oven until done).

But on New Year’s Eve, we had a problem. The Dutch tradition calls for huzarensla, a decorated heap of mashed potato salad with pickles, bits of meat and mayonnaise (all recipes I know are a bit boots-on and can easily be improved and refined, which I usually do on a trial and error basis – a little differently each time. Here’s one recipe. You’ll find more). I needed something that could stand in for the strips of pre-cooked pork that I usually put into my huzarensla – something to provide a certain chewiness. I decided that westernized tofu was my solution.

tapas

I have no real idea about the economic hazards of owning a restaurant. I only assume that certain business formulas are more likely to be on the secure side than others. Ten years ago or so, a Mexican restaurant opened in Borås. Their lunch menu of the first few weeks was exuberant and the fees were low. In the course of time, the lunch selection become ever more mundane (and less “Mexican”); eventually the fees seemed high for what was on the plate. This is when I stopped going there. A few months later the whole enterprise was history. The plan to suggest heaven first and apply thumbscrews later is clearly not so smart.

Tapas culture has found another way. Here, everything is about the idea: you pay for a bit of time at a square little table, candlelight, for fishing bits of things out of many small bowls, and for believing  that you almost are in Spain, minus the eternal hassle with taxi drivers, stolen cell phones and inferior hotel plumbing.