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:

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.

small improvements

Someone on ask metafilter is asking for new hamburger recipes. Funny that people actually know what to answer. I mean, we’re talking about hamburgers. What I would find interesting with hamburgers is how they are cooked, technique-wise. This is much more important than what happens in terms of authenticity if I mix another teaspoon full of this, that or the other into the burger mix. Spices and combinations can be improvised, cooking techniques much less so. A spoiled burger remains spoiled, no matter whether we’ve added thyme or not.

The small good things that happen in the kitchen have little to do with recipes. They are about spending tiny bits of time on actions that make all the difference. Reducing watery matter is one such example.

tahini chicken - tahini fish

Chicken fillets normally turn out best when prepared like I have described elsewhere: you separate the small and the big muscles of one fillet, and you slice the big one into two (or in big specimens several) horizontal layers. A really sharp knife is a Must in this operation, or you will get sloppy fillet bits and minced fingertips. The problem is now that in order to turn these fillets-of-fillets into something edible, you actually have to stand there, watch them, turn them in time, stop the cooking in time, and let the house elf or kitchen troll do everything else in the meantime.

I tried to solve this by creating an oven dish, which was inspired by ground lamb in sesame sauce, as served in a restaurant in Abu Gosh west of Jerusalem.

spanish pub-style mackerel

The story of this recipe starts with a pile of fresh octopus, an abundancy of chopped garlic, much white wine and an excess of olive oil in this restaurant in Cadiz:

Needless to say, this experience was followed by a sleepless night in the hotel, but the basic concept nevertheless struck me as so successful that I wanted to try it at home, using fresh fillets of mackerel, skin on.

cooking for swedish teenagers

It is spring vacation, or sports vacation as it’s called here - a tradition from the days when we had snow in early February. This year, one might call it mud-week. Most parents have no mud-week, and so our newspaper printed this large article with “easy-to-make and good-to-eat” things that teenagers can prepare alone using what’s already at home - food that takes little time to prepare so that the kids can devote themselves to “computer games, their friends and skating” (Borås Tidning, 2 February, p 18-21).

Let’s have a look.

leftover mangement

Johannes Mario Simmel’s Es muss nicht immer Kaviar sein is a juicy WWII spy novel that, in every other paragraph, features a new and unexpected turn (followed by a bold-face cliff hanger), and supplies cooking recipes throughout. On p. 333 (in the Knaur pocket edition), we learn how, in Paris, Thomas Lieven (the cooking hero) saves a perch that Therese (the clumsy kitchen maid in the service of the banker Ferroud [a crook]), had dropped so it broke apart: He makes a gratin.

“Cook a whole fish, drain it well, discard the skin and the bones and divide it into pieces,” the recipe begins. Then, a lot of other cooking goes on, while the bits of fish get cold - finally they are incorporated into a sauce (white sauce, white mushrooms, capers, white wine, crème fraiche and parmesan) and the whole is put into the oven. Check the finest recipes in your favorite cookbook. They almost always require some preparation on top of another, or the process must be very simple indeed:

Fry the chicken livers in olive oil with the onion rings, add white wine, sage and pepper, mince them using the biggest chef’s knife you have, add breadcrumbs, chopped garlic and parsley etc. etc.;

Slice the turkey breasts in thin layers, bread them thoroughly, fry them in oil, and slice these slivers diagonally as soon as they are cool enough to handle. Put these on top of the salad;

Quickly sear the cubes of tuna and immerse them in a mix of soy sauce with chopped garlic and ginger, while the other preparations go on;

Roast the hippopotamus and set aside to cool.

sea-magazine and ratatouille-the-movie

So we went to Leif Mannerström’s Sjömagasinet, Göteborg’s one-star fish and seafood place and culinary meeting point. Helped along by a very generous gift certificate, we just sat down and ordered…

The restaurant is housed in an old timber-frame building down at the river, which was built by the East India Company in 1775. It can be reached by car if one drives straight on where a right turn would have led on to the night ferry to Kiel, or by tram, after a lengthy trip out of the Göteborg centre. We had company of a jolly 77-year-old gentleman from Finland, who told us the story of his life, so the tram trip appeared somewhat shortened.

Cold and with the good-humored singsong of our company still in our ears, we entered the restaurant. The interior is sophisticated, if somewhat hand-hewn. The main theme is the building’s original timber structure. Sjömagasinet’s service is absolutely impeccable, and the tram trip was soon forgotten. There is nothing here of that uncomfortable feeling of some high-end food places, where no amount of suitable bank cards in one’s pocket can scatter one’s sensation of basic inadequacy.

tuna sale

Last summer, Hannas fisk was renamed Bollebygds fisk, and is since then run by Hassan, who offers fish and a friendly smile. Food seems to sell well in Bollebygd. The community is growing. There are many people who work in the city (Göteborg) but live here and buy their stuff here. Today (Saturday), Hassan had a pile of tuna slices left, and instead of consigning them to the freezer or letting them get old over the weekend, he sold us a bag full for a substantial discount. Once at home the tuna turned out to be absolutely fabulously fresh (like everything sold at Bollebygds fisk). We hope that his fantastic attitude will safeguard Hassan’s survival as an inmate of the Bolle supermarket: never disappoint a customer with mediocre goods. If more people were really truly quality-minded, he would already have had to expand his place. I have not seen any other fish seller in these parts with such high standards.

Some of them have actually rather curious ways. When my daughter was around five years old, a fish-man in Borås scared her out of her wits by poking his big finger into the eye of a large salmon on display (needless to say, I had noticed that that eye didn’t look too fresh). Now why would he do such a thing if he wanted to keep the accompanying parent as a customer?

Some time earlier I had obtained a slice of halibut at the same place which turned out to be so well seasoned that I threw the bag from the kitchen counter right into the trash. I live 16 km from Borås, and I didn’t want to keep the fish until the next time I went there. Later the lady at the counter told me what to do in a situation like this: put the stinking fish into the freezer and bring it along next time you visit the shop. Oh and: yes, according to her, the smell had nothing to do with freshness, actually, sometimes halibut develops a smell…

Sure.

In any case, Hassan is my hero.