on the lack of variety in great recipes

Look (again…) in Marcella Hazan’s Classic Italian Cookbook. The text looks like she has been sponsored by the garlic and parsley industry. No wonder. Copped garlic and chopped parsley is good in almost anything.

Why do I mention this? Well, a check-through of the recipes on this site revealed that, most of the time, I seem to be using spinach, salmon, chickpeas, lemon juice and not very much else. Many of the very best recipes are too easy for words:

bean sprout salad

My daughter is about to move to Utrecht all on her own and study there. She also wants to try eating vegetarian. This is the test. Am I able to provide some useful recipes or will she starve?

My daughter is actually her own boss, thank you very much, and she can cook. But there is no reason not to publish this bean sprout salad in any case.

A nice thing about Holland is that bean sprouts have entered the universal diet and are available fresh and cheap everywhere. Sweden has them only in Eastern markets, and I have had quite a few batches that sort of crept out of their bags. No amount of chilies can help in such a case.

lemony chickpea soup with salmon

The last scoop-in-the-pan of home-cooked chickpeas is usually too watery for hummus. But it is a perfect starting point for chickpea soup.

The following recipe is slightly too much for two. No, maybe it isn’t.

I sauté a cup or so of finely cubed carrot and half a cubed onion in olive oil. If you have really fresh really red peppers, you could add some of these as well. A little later, I add a chopped clove of garlic and cook everything a little longer. Now the chickpeas enter with their cooking water - the amount is a little up to taste but I guess that I’d use two or three cups of chickpeas-as-if-drained and as much water as there is. I add fresh water until there is enough soup and bring the whole to the boil. I mash some of the chickpeas with a fork against the side of the pan, but not too many.

In the meantime I have been in the garden for some fresh mint.

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.

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.

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:

lamb cigars

My recipe for meatball-cigars has been waiting in my private recipe archive for a year. Today I gave it a new try in the kitchen, allowing for a few improvements, and here are the results.

Ingredients for two:

- 400g (0.9 lbs) of ground, fresh and wool-smell-free lamb. If you’ve got a meat grinder, try finding assorted bits of lamb-for-cooking, cut the meat off the bones, deep-freeze the latter for some future soup-orgy, and mince the meat. Otherwise, some butchers offer decent (albeit often greasy) minced lamb.