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.

what to do with slices of lamb

The leg-cross-section of lamb is popular. It is a great cut for all those who do not care to jeopardize their dental health on over-priced, bony and unfathomably structured lamb-chops but who have no time for the preparation of a whole roast.

The challenge, then, is to prevent these bits from
- curling or cupping during the preparation
- getting tasty but remaining tough
- remaining too rare
- reducing into flavorless bits of cardboard.

Here’s how:

all veggie 4-star stew

One thing not to compromise when you work without meat is yumminess. What ingredients have Yum? Well, tomatoes do, olive oil, braised onions – that sort of stuff. So here’s an autumny veggie stew based on these ingredients:

endearing initiative

I wasn’t even planning to write again about Swedish vegetable freshness, but this is just too sweet.

I trust that my writings have made the big supermarket in the next village, the Bolle, world famous. It is actually a good shop, reasonably spacious, well-equipped and with a cheerful leadership that attracts cheerful employees. They also have a healthy approach to keeping the shop – as a whole – fresh and attractive.

The latest initiative was to spruce up the steamy vegetable vault with large color posters showing super-size photographs of veggies of various kinds. These are lined up along the ceiling above the goods themselves in an attractive recurring pattern. They must be intended to form an appetizing barrier when we, in despair, lift our gaze once again to the skies because we stumbled upon a bunch of bashed-up tomatoes, a mound of Jivaro cabbages, chestnut-brown celery stalks or some green moldy organic lemons.

finally fika

Every day, our newspaper features a personal portrait of some local person of interest. I once got a page for myself after I found a piano at the recycling station. Most of the time we will read about someone who paints, loves music and/or is active in the church.

A few weeks ago, a young lady was interviewed. She listed “fika” as her hobby. To the uninitiated, this sounds as if someone has made “waking up” their hobby, or perhaps “using a remote control.”

So what is Swedish fika? You can read this article for an independent version. It transpires that fika is not, as I believed, coffee with or without a bun. It is planning to have, and finally having coffee and/or the bun alone or with friends/unfriends – an institution in other words. One example:

crayfish season

Every time the eyes see something unexpected, I mean really out of context, the human mind does curious things until it catches up. Years ago, a bobbing tiny dot very far away on a narrow and ruler-straight Dutch forest path gave me a magnificent jolt of prehistoric panic until I, milliseconds later, put dot and logic together and thought “person on a horse, advancing.” A motorway collision between two black Volvo station wagons of the 900 series left one of them neatly balancing on its side. It took me minutes after passing the site to figure out what I actually had seen there: no mystic over-sized black box but just one of Sweden’s most common cars on its side.

We have a little old door in our garden that leads to a small, damp and dark room which houses the pump of our freshwater supply. I have to go there occasionally because the garden hose has its faucet right there – watering the flowers involves an act of creep and crawl: the door is a step down and indeed very tiny. The pump room is occupied by a colony of shiny, dark brown spiders of a kind hitherto unknown to me, of which I actually have the suspicion that they don’t really belong in Sweden.