two secret uses of the salad spinner

I own a Moulinex salad spinner that has served me for approximately 25 years. It holds vast amounts of goods, has a turning crank and the habit of getting unbalanced.

One turns to get rid of the worst of the moisture, and then the spinner begins to spin and wobble out of control. So one stops, opens the lid and very carefully re-distributes the content until the internal spinner-colander almost balances on the pivot. Then one closes the whole machine very carefully again and the spinning becomes a feast.

Robin has a “good grips” spinner that has no such problems of balance. But it turns slightly slower, so the drying takes more time. So we have two spinners, a slow and safe one, and a battered Ferrari.

I don’t want to write about dry lettuce. We all know that it’s better. There is a nice restaurant in the Gothenburg Brew House in Gårda, called bEAT (yES1) that offers very fine, fancy, hand-hewn salad dressings (in line with their other food, which is most of the time very good). But at lunchtime, they serve their lettuce literally floating in its rinsing water. Quite disgusting really. Matter of one hand of the cook not knowing what the other does. Hope he doesn’t cut himself one of these days.

I want to advertise two alternative uses of the salad spinner.

belgian fries

I almost feared that I mis-tasted on my first visit. Not so, it is true:

The Göteborg based Delirium Café not only has one of the widest beer selections imaginable, but some person in the kitchen also seems to replace the frying fat at reasonable intervals. This is the third Swedish restaurant in sixteen years where I have found high-end deep frying.

As a web-search on “delirium cafe göteborg” will show, some people object to the roomy atmosphere of the place. Others are put off by the fact that Delirium “brags” with 2000 kinds of beer while, in practice, many of these can be sold out. I do not agree. We got all the kinds of beer we fancied (even the spiced “Jacobite” brew of Traquair House), I like their wooden tables and the high ceiling (although the huge vent pipes are a bit out of place), and yes:

I ordered Belgian fries, listed here as “Pommes frites with aioli”. In view of their wide range of fancy and pricey main courses, it might seem unfair to judge the kitchen by the fries. But these fries were absolutely fantastic.

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.