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.

ratatouille philosophies

Strictly spoken, this blog is not for recipes. There are gazillions of recipes out there, what do I have to contribute? But I will here make half an exception. I am copying a Ratatouille approach from my private recipe collection, because our last batch of this dish gave me reason for additional musings.

I once asked a French flute player about her way of making Ratatouille. She could report nothing very remarkable except for the addition of a “ridiculous amount of herbs.”

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.