It all started like this:

We see here a thoughtful founder with his crowbar, considering the administrations necessary to create what eventually was to become one of the most awesome ice cream and gelato venues I have ever seen.

How it turned out is more or less like the picture here above, with people moving eagerly around in front of the counter to get a better idea of the stunning selection of flavors, and others moving equally fast behind, to serve their customers in the best and most effective manner.

During two weeks of intense work, I have tested the majority of flavors and styles available at the Split Banana. What I found is a stunning example of how well the simple philosophy, to use high-quality, preferably locally produced, ingredients, can work out, if the preparation is then inspired by an unfailing dedication to perfection.

During my stay, I was, for example, the witness of a significant upgrade of the Pistachio flavor which was excellent to begin with. The upgraded version could best be described as gelatified freshly roasted pistachios-in-a-bowl, of an intensity I had never tasted before.

Many of the flavors are surprising, not always in their suddenness and intensity, but often in their subtlety. Whereas, for example, the coconut bounces around in your mouth shouting Fresh! Fresh! in a silly giggle (the best coconut ice cream – or was it gelato? – I ever had), the Virginia peach (in September just as fresh as the former) is astonishingly mild and mellow, and not half as belligerent as your average up-sugared fruit products tend to come across.

Many flavors are traditional but are assembled with just that little extra bit of dedication. The sorbets are all perfect, and the corn-syrup-aware crowd will appreciate that they are made with honey – yet they lack that demonstrative what-am-I-healty taste known from many, otherwise just fine, ‘responsible’ sweets.

A few of the creations are daring, and have, as I heard, their respective fan crowds. One that comes to mind is the unlikely pineapple-basil match, which blends into a surprising and fresh aroma other than either of these ingredients. The other is a peppery ancho-chocolate combination for the grown ups.

My special favorite was butter-pecan, but then one day there was peanut, based on prime-quality local peanut butter. Imagine this as a milkshake…

Being torn between such alternatives does nevertheless injustice to all the other flavors, no matter whether we’re looking at the lemon sorbet, chocolate, maple syrup or any of the others, until we arrive at the right-hand side of the counter where we find the somewhat silly and rightfully hugely popular birthday cake ice cream mixed with m+m’s.

(And did I mention the banana split?)

Great sorbet in other words, great gelato, great ice cream and a nice location in the very center of a lovely city.

You may consider Ulricehamn, a pretty little town, for the first one of these. Check out Günther’s German bakery, which has a sublime choice of sweet in-betweens (their new website is still under construction). Long before Günther made the news (and Crown Princess Victoria’s wedding cake), he was locally famous for his elegant confectioneries. His Café is in the center of town, a little off the main pedestrian zone.

In terms of lunch, Ulricehamn can be summarized as an assembly of pizzerias, uninspired Chinese restaurants and Swedish school-meals-gone-public; an experience which you will not regret to have missed.

One might instead aim for Jönköping, a larger and more businesslike city at the shores of lake Vättern. I once was talked into accompanying my boss of the time into one of the allegedly better lunch places there, and ended up with an over-salted, brown and wrinkled chicken leg beside a bunch of peas and fries and some low-alcohol beer. I could be prejudiced, but may I suggest a far better and more picturesque alternative, about twenty minutes or so before you reach lake Vättern?

You turn off the 40 at Bottnaryd, taking road 185 north toward Mullsjö. Just before reaching this village, you turn west and enter Ryfors bruk. The signs cannot be missed. The centerpiece of Ryfors, an assembly of historical smithies, mills, sawmills and whatnot, is the English villa, which is marketed as an “authentic English Cottage” built in 1886. It houses a recently renovated hotel/restaurant with an excellent kitchen and good, personal service.

We stumbled upon Engelska Villan on Robin’s birthday (a luxuriously rainy summer day), on our way to Habo kyrka, the interior of which can be seen here (if you look carefully, you even see part of my harpsichord in the right-hand far corner. But that is a coincidence.):

Because of the hostile weather the English Villa was almost deserted, but our dedication to make this a special occasion and to conquer the empty dining room was well rewarded. Based on a copious amount of nachos, a delicious bowl of gaspacho, penne with a wine, cream and beef sauce, and a perfectly cooked piece of salmon marinated in honey, all reasonably priced but very nicely prepared and served, I am happy to recommend this kitchen without any reservations.

(To reach Habo church, a gorgeous large decorated wooden church, we later drove on through Mullsjö and crossed the countryside heading east. The village of Habo itself is somewhat less memorable, were it not for the industrious Anders Ö and his well-stocked, and sometimes open, store of n-gauge trains.)

It is certainly a phenomenon that drives travelers nuts. As usual, the spice lies in the word “may”. So the fact that the Japanese-style meal I had on a flight between Amsterdam and Tokyo was really quite acceptable may have its cause in JAL over-seasoning their foods, but it may also be that they fly with silent planes. It may, on the other hand, be that the pasta-horror SAS tried to serve me once on an Copenhagen-Detroit trip, over-cooked on one side, cold on the other, and miles from being heavily seasoned according to any style, was one of those deplorable exceptions from the rule because, “I’m sure airlines do their best,” as Andy Woods from Unilever’s laboratories and the University of Manchester is reported to have said to the BBC.

Do I have to believe that all those dozens of  food-in-the-air experiences I had to endure before, between and after these two examples may have been such a complete waste because of the noise? I’m waiting for four complementary studies that prove that a fear of dropping plastic cutlery on an un-reachable dusty floor, the agony of preventing to splatter over-spiced food over one’s neighbor while cutting it with a blunt knife, the acrobatics of keeping wine, water and crumbled plastic wrappings together on a pleasantly vibrating stamp-sized table, and the experience of masticating with one’s elbows pressed tightly against one’s body suppress whatever tasting abilities we have left after being exposed to all that flavor-destroying racket.

Are we sensing a waste of sponsor money, that should have been put in more spices? I really can’t tell, but I testify here that, even with earplugs firmly inserted, most plane grub tastes awful (and we all know it).

As a researcher, Andy must travel quite a bit, and I just don’t believe him to be all that sure about the airline’s lofty intentions. Perhaps he travels business class (where there is less noise, no doubt), but still. If the airlines at least did something about the crunchiness…

After an evening rehearsal at St. Mike’s in central Southampton, a snack was in order and, more by chance than by design, my colleague and I stumbled upon and into Indian Melody, a new vegetarian/vegan restaurant on High Street (see another bunch of reviews here).

The menu is impressively long and slightly intimidatingly outlandish. After asking for a few more details, we found our way to two light dishes, a mixed spiced rice bowl with some freshly made condiments and a touch of fresh cilantro, and a crisp sort of large pancake with a deliciously juicy fresh cheese and vegetable filling. I’m bad at names, forgive me.

While we were waiting, the owner introduced himself at our table, asked how we had found out about Indian Melody and whether we were content, informed us about his passion for food based on freshly imported ingredients, and finally inquired about what we had ordered, promising to go into the kitchen in order to make sure that we would be truly satisfied.

Whether it was because of this individual care or because the culinary concept of this restaurant in any case is utterly sound I cannot judge, but we subsequently spent a very happy time with what we got.  The food is startlingly fresh, beautifully presented and very tasty. The restaurant is roomy and has a pleasant atmosphere (unlike some restaurants I know that are so overloaded with tables and chairs that the guests end up sitting half on each others’ laps, listening to everyone else’s cell phone calls).

Desserts were recommended and brought: cute little sweet things completely unknown to me, but a perfect ending of the experience.

I will have to return another day really hungry, in order to get to know the full scope of the kitchen, but on first impression this beats most of the vegetarian, and all of the Indian restaurants I have seen thus far (and I say “most” only because I once dined in that absolutely fantastic vegetarian restaurant in Edinburgh the name of which I sadly forgot, or I would have written about it long ago). This place has an enormous potential and I would like to encourage everyone, no matter whether they are some-time vegetarians or veritable hard-liners, to test out for themselves whether my impression is correct.

So the service. I do appreciate a personal touch and I found it truly helpful that the owner stepped in and gave us an idea of his philosophy. He is very enthusiastic, which I personally do like, but I wonder whether some guests might be tempted to misinterpret this readiness to communicate as a somewhat forced eagerness to please. These things are difficult to balance but worth pondering. I am sure that there is an abundance of material available to guide fresh restaurant owners in matters of guest-contact etiquette.

I may sound patronizing with this remark but this is only because I wish Indian Melody all the success in the world. I feel that between now and that success, a bit of extra streamlining is necessary.

This applies to the general organization as well. For two small main courses, drinks and dessert, we had four persons at our table during the course of our stay, who, while all being polite and mild mannered, weren’t fully coordinated, which resulted in insecurity as to whether we already had ordered, what we had ordered, and whether the owner had or had not forwarded the dessert order to the kitchen. While, again, this is not a huge problem if everyone remains calm, there is no real reason why Indian Melody couldn’t organize their table service in a slightly more efficient way. Nevertheless highly recommended.

Fusion, in this interpretation, is the same as a non-original globalized mix of ingredients and cooking techniques. Robin tells me that the dapper Borås Tidning recently printed a Chili recipe. It incorporates all sorts of seasonal vegetables (Swedish, that is), a tiny amount of Spanish peppers and, as a special treat, soy sauce. It should be served with lingonberry bread. So this is Fusion for Dummies or, if you really need a name, Spicy Beef Stew with Swedish Seasonal Vegetables and Soy Sauce. No Chili, though, so much is clear.

A southern cuisine newbie like myself still feels his head spin when people who know more about Chili than myself begin discussing Heat’n'Meat ingredients. Tanis’ recipe for “Green Chile Stew”, New Mexico style, is accompanied with two excursions into various local varieties of New Mexico green hot peppers, Anaheim, poblano chiles (also called pasillas) and roasted jalapeños (p. 252 and 255-6). No matter, in spite of the advantage of his superior knowledge, Tanis calls his recipe what it is: a stew.

In simple recipes, “original” and “non-original” is largely about the use and mis-use of terminology. Salcia Landmann, in her belligerent and entertaining culinary-opinion-book Gepfeffert und gesalzen, teaches us about the distinction between Goulash and Pörkölt (the second of these is in fact what we think the first is). To mix up these terms is wrong, but no fusion, both are supposed to be authentic of the same part of the world.

In Landmann’s version, Pörkölt (what we uninitiated would identify as Goulash) is the simplest thing to make. All you need is a heap of meat and a heap of chopped onions, maybe a dash of red wine and some tomatoes, and a lot of patience. And Paprika. The paprika needs to be of top quality, it is added quite late in the proceedings.

After a few tests I believe that two elements are of superior importance for the success of Pörkölt in particular, and any stew incorporating paprika in general: the patience and the late addition of the paprika. In comparison, our frantic efforts to “brown the meat over high heat” are less important. The success of browning really depends on the cut of meat and on the specifically desired result: do we need the sauce to be meaty and the meat boring or do we prefer some kind of a balance?

Even in the – for Pörkölt preferred – cheaper cuts of beef, the ones with fat and tissue and thingies still attached, I have identified three kinds of browning behavior.

No. 1 is what all those retro-cooks remember from their horse cart years: cheap, sincere beef, a bit dry around the edges but not yet smelly. Toss it into your kettle with the almost smoking fat, together with the chopped onions, get a strong dude from the workshop to stir vigorously with a small spade, add the wine, salt and chopped tomato as soon as browned, reduce heat and switch on your patience for a couple of hours. I have not been able to find such non-watery cuts for years, but I still remember that they once existed (I have good hopes, though. The butcher around the corner offered me to provide special cuts if desired at my first visit. And his lamb steak was the best I had in a very long time).

No. 2 does get brown like no. 1. It also gets fibrous, tasteless and tough, and stays so even if it is cooked for a week. Maybe its brownness (“caramelized” in fancy talk) adds a certain je-ne-sais-quoi to the sauce but its leatheriness definitely doesn’t. Better un-browned and slow-cooked.

No. 3 is Our Daily Beef; bits out of a package (or perhaps cut from a larger slab of rib meat that comes out of a package) that immediately begin to boil in their own juices no matter how large your kettle is and how hot the cooking fat. Since the stew will boil for hours to come, there is no need to go on boiling the bits in their own juice. Add wine and tomatoes and get going with your stew.

My recommendation is to begin by trying to brown a few bits at a time. If the meat even then doesn’t play its part, just abandon the browning exercise. Long cooked stew with a lot of onions and nice, spicy paprika is good in any case.

This act of severe retro-geekiness – writing Bach with a pencil – costs a lot of time; time I cannot spend on cooking (one may wonder where I get the time to write this blog entry). In anticipation of all this, I bought a whole organic fresh chicken (these things are possible in Southampton. I’m still amazed). Preparing a Chicken roast goes fast, and you don’t have to stand and chop and stir all the time. But even here, most of the talk is about how to fill the gaps, or rather, the chickeny hollows.

1) A real quick chicken roast goes like this: heat up the oven to 200 C/392  F. Rub the chicken, inside and outside, with salt, pepper, rosemary and crushed garlic. Put the chicken, breast down, in an open baking tray. Turn the chicken after 3/4 of the baking time. Depending on its size, bake for something like 1 1/2 hours, or until the juice that runs out when pierced (inside the thighs, where the beast is thickest) is clear and not pink an more. Let the beast rest for a while before dividing. One could possibly rub in the spices and salt on the preceding evening and refrigerate the chicken overnight – for the old brining ploy, you kneuw – but one should be easy on the rosemary in this case, unless one has some fresh leaves right from the bush. Anyway. The result is plain and quite nice, but in certain ways a waste: there is little or no juice or sauce, no filling, and there are no caramelized veggies at the side.

2) Better is the following manner, which is my expanded version of lemon chicken, a recipe from Marcella Hazan (although I forget from which of her books). Pre-heat the oven, and prepare the chicken as before. Take one or 1 1/2 un-waxed lemons, wash, and pierce many times with a fork. Fill the chicken with the lemon(s). Choose a baking tray that leaves some space around the chicken. Cut a few tomatoes in half and 2 onions in wedges; arrange the vegetables – tomatoes face up – around the chicken and sprinkle with live oil and salt. Bake like before.

After the onions have taken on some color, and the chicken has oozed off some fat and cooking juices, fill the tray with a shallow layer of water, to prevent anything from drying up or burning (burned lemon-based cooking juices are even more bitter than burned normal juices). Occasionally, turn the onions – not the tomatoes – and check the sauce level. Baste the chicken a few times with the water during the last ten minutes or so (a glass of white wine, replacing some of the water, may help with the taste, of course).

While the chicken rests, you can assemble the onions and tomatoes (discard the lemon), de-grease the sauce from the pan, and do whatever you like doing best with it: reduce it, for example. Or make gravy: in a suitable pot, melt a tablespoon of butter, roast a tablespoon of flour (or less, depending on how much sauce you have) until not yet browning, whisk in the cooking juices until smooth and thickening, check for salt.

3) If, however, you are

a) lucky and find a chicken with the livers (or find some separate chicken livers),

b) have done your homework last November and still have a few bags of chestnuts in your freezer,

c) have bought a small bit of pork shoulder together with the chicken,

you need to spend very little extra time for a true blow-thee-away quick chicken: do everything as before, but fill the chicken with

- a first filling, consisting of the cleaned and chopped chicken livers; a similar amount of finely chopped or ground pork shoulder; one small finely diced onion, pre-sauteed for a minute or so; a philosophical squeeze of garlic; thyme, pepper, salt; and about a quarter of an apple in small dice. Push this filling all the way into the chicken.

- and a second filling, which is nothing else than a handful of cleaned chestnuts (if you happen to have a few extra minutes, cook them first in a dash of white wine together with a tablespoon of butter, until the wine is gone), and a handful of diced dry white bread (never throw away an old baguette. Cut it up and put it somewhere to dry. Or: no filling!), more thyme and a sprinkle of salt. Fill the remaining empty space with the chestnut mix. Don’t even worry about sewing the opening together, just put the chicken in the tray and proceed as before. The baking time will have to be somewhat longer for the filling to get properly done.

Make the sauce/gravy. Cut up the chicken after c. 10 minutes of resting. Arrange the parts and the veggies on a platter, scoop out the fillings into two bowls and the gravy into a third, serve.

At the age of four, I learned to be careful with food away from home: The kitchen of the Weberhof on the island Juist (at the time best described as a seaside vacation kindergarten, where I was supposed to have fun while my parents went on an old-instrument museum trip), bluntly introduced me to the culinary side of homesickness (my present addiction to home-cooking may still be a late compensation for the loneliness of those four weeks).

Regarding North-German red cabbage, there was every reason for my reluctance: in the homes of friends or relatives, it tended to be too sweet (sometimes it was made with raisins), always slimy (the non-judicious use of roux — flour browned in fat — is a trademark of old fashioned everyday German home cooking), and the inevitable bit of smoked side of pork had in most cases turned into a sagging heap of blubber. Unlike in other cabbage, smoked pork is here out of place: its texture does not match the rest of the dish in any case, and after a lengthy stay in a red, bubbling environment, it looks and tastes as if retrieved from the pantry of a long-sunken ship: half disintegrated, discolored and with a hint of smoke of long-gone days.  Small wonder that, when I began to cook my own food, I searched for better ways to deal with red cabbage.

While cutting the pork into small bits before cooking, and pre-sauteing these with a few chopped onions directly creates better results than the amorphous blocks of glorp from my memory, red cabbage might be the only leaf cabbage that does not clearly benefit from the addition of meat, lard, or even stock. I poked around for alternatives, and finally found a reference to chestnuts in cabbage in a small German kitchen dictionary (I think I remember it was the old dictionary from the DTV-Verlag, which includes many good — if laconic — recipes, some good entries about various ingredients, but a lot of misleading information about any kind of non-German regional cooking).

Chestnuts in red cabbage are not new. In Beethoven’s 18th preserved conversation book from the beginning of November 1822, we find exactly this combination mentioned by Beethoven’s nephew (p. 8r; in the modern VEB edition Vol. 2, p. 282). Not being Beethoven or his nephew, it took me a while of experimenting to come up with a way that was truly presentable, and finally presented, at a recent Thanksgiving party. Here is what I do:

Ingredients: 1 medium large red cabbage (usually the organic ones result in a less smelly kitchen), finely shredded; one tart apple in chunks; about 20 fresh chestnuts in their shell (or more to taste); some chopped onion; 4 or 5 cloves; some ground black pepper; salt; at least a tablespoon of butter; and altogether about half a bottle of dry white wine.

While I’m shredding the cabbage, I very slowly saute the onion in about a third of the butter in a large pan. At home I use a cast-iron casserole for this task; here in my Southampton study-hole, I had to do with a large stainless-steel pan. This worked fairly well; however, the sides get less hot, which retards the cooking process, while the bottom tends to heat up too much, making it necessary to monitor the progress closely in order to avoid burning the food.

Now I add the cabbage, the apple, all the spices, some salt, and two thirds of the wine. I stir, adjust the heat so the whole starts to simmer, and cover the pan. I stir occasionally and check the sauce level. If necessary, I add a little more wine.

The chestnuts need no oven-baking: while a suitable amount of water comes to the boil, I cut a cross in each chestnut shell and boil the chestnuts for about 8 minutes, drain them, let them cool slightly and shell them. I also peel or scrape away as much of the brown inner skin as possible, breaking the chestnuts apart where the skin goes inward, while trying to be time-efficient about this: there is no need to get rid of every last bit of it. Dark areas of chestnut need to be cut out, of course (I was lucky and found organic Italian chestnuts at my store — one of the moments where it truly ‘shared my values’ as the slogan goes — and ended up with having to discard only two chestnuts out of a whole bag, while the rest of them were large and impeccable).

The resulting strainer full of half-cooked, cleaned chestnut chunks gets rinsed and set aside (this is, incidentally, the stage where a larger batch of chestnuts would go into freezer bags for later use. I avoid canned chestnuts), while I slowly heat up the rest of the butter in a small pan. The butter foam has subsided completely before I add the chestnuts to the pan, but the butter should not have browned more than very slightly. We want to enhance the chestnut flavor, not mask it.

Stirring around on low heat, I wait until some of the butter has been absorbed and everything got hot and starts sizzling. Now I add the rest of the wine and a little salt, and adjust everything to a medium-low simmer, uncovered. The chestnuts should take about 30 minutes to cook; if the wine gets absorbed earlier, I add some more, or water; if some wine is left at the end, I boil it off until about a tablespoon of sauce is left in the pan. Now I set the chestnuts aside to cool. They will absorb most of the remaining sauce and butter.

Ideally, the cabbage needs at least two hours to cook properly. For some reasons, cabbage heated up on the next day tastes usually better, so one could prepare everything ahead of time and add the chestnuts when heating up the cabbage. Check for salt and balance: sometimes, a bit of good wine vinegar is needed to balance acidity and to enhance the flavor.

This is a great aside for any big roast at a feast dinner; it keeps for days and can easily be frozen when one’s leftover-feast-food-mood has vanished. Retrieved from the freezer, it greatly supports the solitary cooker’s Sunday cooking based on, for example, single browned bird bits.

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. There are two identical scoopers in my kitchen: one is for the plumber and one for the sausages. But seriously, who would even need one scooper and what’s wrong with a pair of regular tongs for grabbing keys and sausages, one could ask. So that is part one: superfluous gadgets.

Let’s proceed to part two: non-functioning gadgets. I have anyway had my time with whisks. The one I used most of the time (stainless steel; a few rather stiff wires) has no hook on top, and the fiddly screw-n-bent-wire thing I inserted into the mystical hole at the place where a hook should be keeps unscrewing and unbent-wiring itself, which drives me bananas. The effectiveness of this bit of kitchenware got later outsmarted by Robin’s whisk, which has more, and more flexible, wires and no hook, and hence drives me bananas too, but at least makes foam and whips cream or mayonnaise; that is, performs its duties. Now, my rented British whisk. How many? Eight? – strands of fat black bent plastic that clunk around in the mayonnaise bowl like a toddler on a three wheeler. It generates heat (in my wrist and eventually: head) and noise but no mayonnaise. No milk foam for my coffee either, in fact nothing at all. You still hear the designer’s voice above the hapless clattering and splashing: “let them try this and we’ll see if they still succeed!” The up-side: it is very easy to clean eight strands of thick plastic. This will make it easy to wipe the dust off my whisk when I move on.

Then, there is the category of booby-trap gadgets. Like the (black, plastic) scraper thingy. Apart from the color, it looks like any kind of slotted spatula. The silly thing about it is that it is too thick to function as a proper spatula while it is, for no apparent reason, made of flexible matter.

The ray wings (fiddly and messy as they are anyway) that I had fried in nut-brown butter, turned, fried some more and finally filled up with a dash of dry white wine, ended up stuck to the bottom of the frying pan (this was the first time that anything I cooked in brown butter ended up sticking to the pan. I should have listed that frying pan above. Also, as I learned only now, ray wings are better braised or steamed). I inserted the scraper thingy between the pan surface and the ray crust, but it was too thick to enter properly and made a holy mess of about a third of my dinner: half-soft bones, bits of flesh, translucent onion dice and beautiful brown butter all goo-ed together. Turned around to get a keener angle of attack, the scraper did in fact properly catch the ray-y edge. Then it flexed and Splat! A healthy scoop full of wine, butter, onions and ray debris was released across the stove and sent cupboard-wards where it took a good time to wipe off. I am sure that if someone would care to refine this effect, she would end up with some spectacular cooking techniques: turning an omelet while sending it diagonally through a large restaurant kitchen, for example, or serving meatballs across a schoolyard. But this is my little rented kitchen with too many to-be-wiped surfaces much too close together! I am going to buy a real spatula.

Kitchen tools still appear to be made by a bunch of wrathful men sitting behind their drawing boards, sketching (in the assumption that they are punishing housewives, like 35 years ago) their misogynous reflexes out of their systems. Or perhaps they think that the wonders they create are meant to be lined up beside the fridge for mere decoration. Why black, then?

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.

There are two easy paths towards better savoy cabbage: blanching and butter. Blanching makes the leaves soft and pliable – this enables you to wrap stuff in them. Butter is not even my first choice with other cabbages, but here, let me tell you, there is no way around it. Today I also got bits of fish involved in my experiment, but, you guessed it, minced veal or other niceties will do just as well, with some adjustments and a bit of luck.

So we will need the butter, some bits of fine, white fish, a few savoy cabbage leaves, preferably big but not dark green ones, onion, salt, quite much coarsely ground black pepper, the juice of half a lemon, and butter: we had five cabbage-y packages today and I used about six tablespoons of butter. Obviously the number of leaves and the amount of fish, and hence the amount of butter, depend on how many are eating. For a topping, grated Parmiggiano is fine.

I cut flat the middle rib along the convex side of each cabbage leaf. I also pre-heat the oven on medium-high. The cutting requires a sharp knife and a bit of fiddling: we don’t want the leaves to split. While doing this, a pan with plenty of water begins to boil.

Leaves rinsed and waiting, I begin melting the butter in a smaller pan, taking care that it doesn’t get brown, but just begins to foam. If this happens on medium-low heat, I have just time to peel and chop one onion. When the foam settles, I slip the onion dice into the butter.  Now the water boils; I add salt and the cabbage leaves, one by one, pushing them under the surface with a wooden spoon, and boil on high for about 4 minutes.

I stir the onions and check that they are cooking slowly but steadily without browning – then I drain the cabbage. I pour half of the onion-butter in a large, square oven dish. I then squeeze the lemon, grind the pepper and cut the cleaned fillets of fish into chunks small enough to be able to wrap a cabbage leaf around each of them.

Now I sprinkle each cabbage inside with salt and pepper, put a bit of fish in the middle, add a little more salt and pepper and a careful dash of lemon juice, fold a tight, small package and deposit it, opening down, in the buttery bath of the waiting oven dish. Soon there is a whole assembly of green, square-ish parcels. I pour the rest of the butter strategically on top of each parcel – this prevents the cabbage from getting parched. Into the oven goes everything, and I can relax for about 20 minutes and grate the Parmesan, which goes on top of the parcels five minutes before the end.

The advantages of this procedure are many: we end up with a rich, buttery taste to enhance the cabbage, a peppery turn which manifests itself more in aroma than in bite, a lean filling and a beautiful touch of lemon to balance the massive surroundings, and an overall nicely al-dente texture (this reads as if I would be able to sell car cleaners in shopping malls. I am not). I think white rice is better with this than potatoes. And some tomato salad is fine, too.

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.

This is one of those restaurants where you don’t just plunk down on the nearest chair but wait neatly until someone takes care of you. So we wait. First there is nobody present. Eventually, a young man enters and vanishes behind the bar. He then turns on his heels and walks out again. Returning, he gets busy opening half a box of traditional Rosé bottles from Provence. After a while he somehow catches my eye and asks from across the counter whether we would like to follow him out to the terrace. Since the restaurant is empty and calm, but also dark, we agree. Following him as he balances his pink alcoholic load, we enter the inner courtyard terrace where our Cicerone leaves us standing and runs away with his bottles. We now realize that the terrace is mainly occupied by a large group of youngsters, and that their conversation is unfavorably reflected back down by a sun roof, creating considerable noise. We consequently decide that it would be nicer to sit inside in any case.

The waiter catches my eye again and by ways of gestures we agree that we will wait inside for him to return and find us a table. To make this short, it never happens: we place ourselves on a bench opposite the counter and wait. Our Rosé dude enters and fiddles around with some or another bit of gadgetry. A girl emerges from the kitchen, picks at her fingernails, looking bored and vanishes again. A gentleman whose wife remains seated at the window toward the street comes walking and demands with a loud voice whether he would soon be able to place his order. We try to seat ourselves tentatively at some table where we remain for a while. Some tourists enter noisily, step up to the counter, retrieve a bunch of menus (by magic, no doubt) and vanish out in the yard. Nobody catches our eye now. We then leave Lasse-Maja’s krog.

I am sad to report that if Richard Waje believes that the service of his establishment is as good as his kitchen seems to be (according to my friend’s judgment), he is fooling himself in a most gigantic and tragic manner. True, it is reassuring to know that he is willing and able to select fresh fish on the market. In the choice of his personnel, however, he seems to be substantially less sure-handed. In Mr. Waje’s place I would advise Mrs. Pick Her Fingernails and Mr. Bottles Of Rosé to find their luck elsewhere and I would then try to get hold of some real waiters.