Food Fair

First some cool news – this blog is now included on the cool site “Food Porn Watch”. Nice!

This past weekend, a large food fair (culinary show, whatever..) was held in Stockholm. It’s an annual affair, and it caters mostly to ordinary people rather than chefs or people in the business. It’s not very high-brow, but rather a matter of ambling around, looking at new products, tasting a lot of good stuff, maybe buying some new fun kitchen accessories. The name of it is “The Good Kitchen” (Det goda köket) and they used to have the aim that all visitors should learn about one new ingredient, and they should have at least one more recipe that they wanted to try. Something like that. I think this is the fifth year? Or sixth? I can’t really remember. Anyway – it’s widely popular, and it’s always a huge crowd.

Same thing this year. Tons of people. But it was still a lot of fun. The major trends were cheese and chocolate – there were more exhibitors of this than of anything else, I think. (Counting out the wine importers… we had a car, so we didn’t check out the alcohol section very much at all. If we didn’t drive, it’d be a nice opportunity to try some new things though.) We did try some excellent parmesan and surprisingly good chocolate from Chocolat Weiss. I bought two bags of pellets from them, so I can look it up. Perfect for making chocolates for Christmas! I also bought a small box of Puy lentils and am currently looking for a great recipe for them. I’m not a lentil fan, at all, but I know that Puy lentils in particular are considered to be the best. This was the first time I’ve actually seen them, so no wonder I couldn’t resist. The same place sold Maftoul, also called toasted couscous, Israeli couscous or pearl couscous. I’ve tried it once – at the same food fair actually, three years ago – but I’ve never been able to find it until now. So, I got a bag. Now, what to do with it? Any suggestions?

We bought some more plastic baking sheets, excellent non-stick little wonders. I have a lot already, but they tend to wear out. And, new ones meant I could cut up a couple of my old ones and make circles for my 9-inch springform pans. I also cut up tiny circles for a muffin tin – I haven’t tried yet, but I think it will be very handy for getting the muffins out in one piece when I don’t want to use paper cups. Oh, and I bought two big jars of Cloudberry jam, yummy golden goodness. I don’t know how readily available this is in other parts of the world, but if you can get it where you live – do so, and have some warmed up with a good vanilla ice cream. Mmm. Bliss.