Dalarö bageri

If you are in Stockholm, or anywhere nearby, do pay Dalarö Bageri (bakery) a visit. It's a wonderful little bake shop, located in Dalarö which is right outside Stockholm. It's best in the summer time, as it's in the archipelago, but it's beautiful all year round. I visit every now and then, since my aunt lives there. My mother grew up there, and my grandparents are buried there. Me and Per visited with my aunt and cousin yesterday, to see the progress of our kitties, and to delived a computer.



We went for a brisk snowy walk to the bakery, where we bought those gorgeous pastries you can see in the picture. It's puff pastry stars with a filling of vanilla cream and raspberry preserves. The black bits you can see - that's cardamom. We also had delicious cardamom buns with almond paste (devoured long before I got the chance to take a picture) and we bought a dark, deep spicy bread.



When we got back, I decided to start my copy-catting and made Molly's Alsatian Onion Pie. I followed the instructions, but only had a 10 inch pie dish so mine came out a little flatter than I would have preferred. Note to self - buy another pie dish! I made the pastry according to my own regular recipe - 3 deciliters of flour (roughly 180 g), about 100 g butter, diced, and a tablespoon of iced water. Worked out nicely. I never roll out pie dough - way too stressful for me - but instead use a mosaic technique. Shape the dough into a log, and slice it very, very thinly. Put the pieces in a mosaic pattern in the dish, and use your fingers to press it all together. Works like a charm! We had the pie - it was truly delicious! - with baked chicken and a small rocket salad.

Mm, an excellent Saturday night

We spent Friday at Per's parents, to celebrate his little brother's birthday. (Well, not so little at 19 years and quite a bit over 6 feet - but still.) It was very nice - we had Hamlet and Glinda with us, for change, and the rest of the cats got to stay at home. We came home on Saturday, and tried to decide on something reasonably fast, but nice, for dinner. A quick browse at the food store yielded a fillet of pork (tenderloin, right?), merengue and whipped cream for the dessert. I sliced the fillet and browned the flattened pieces, and drenched them in a gorgeous sauce that I learned years ago. It goes very well with rice, but I had a yearning for potatoes and made a big rösti instead.

Dessert was something most Swedes love - marängswiss. It's not very translatable - merengue-suisse, possibly. I have no idea if they eat this in Switzerland. It's basically merengue, icecream, whipped cream, and chocolate sauce, and sometimes with added sliced bananas. We found strawberries, so I marinated those in a dark brown sugar, lemon juice from half a lemon and some lemon peel, and that went very well with it too.

Pork tenderloin with cream sauce
1 tenderloin of pork - about 500 g
300 ml of cream or creme fraiche
2 tbsp sherry
2 tbsp chili sauce
1 tbsp soy sauce
3 teaspoons dried tarragon
1 teaspoon cayenne pepper
black pepper to taste

Brown the pork in a deep pan. Mix all the other ingredients, and pour over the pork. Cover, and let simmer until pork is done. Serve with rice, or something else that soaks up the saucy goodness.

Rösti for two hungry eaters
6 medium sized potatoes
2 small onions
salt
pepper

Grate the potatoes, over a clean kitchen towel. Wring out all excess liquid, and put the dry potato stuff in a big bowl. Chop the onion finely, and add that. Add lots of salt and pepper, and fry in a large frying pan with some butter. Press down on the mixture so it forms a uniform cake, the same size as the pan. Fry until the bottom is starting to get golden, then flip it. (And don't be brave here, it's very fragile. I used a big cuttingboard and carefully slid the rösti onto that, and then flipped.) Fry on the other side until done - 5-6 minutes or so.

Thanks everyone!

I want to thank you all for the helpful comments on my desperate call for help with photos. I think I've got a good solution now, mostly thanks to Sam of Becks & Posh who kindly took the time to write a really helpful instruction for me. So, with some luck - it'll keep working, and I'll have nice clickable pictures here in the future.

I'm taking next week off from work, and I'm planning on staying home as much as possible and hopefully try out a lot of fun recipes that I've been gathering. There'll be a lot of copycat work going on, because I have so incredibly many recipes bookmarked from other blogs. I can't wait to try them!

Is my blog taboo?

Well. This is an entry for IMBB? #12, which marks the anniversary of this fun blogging event that originally Alberto thought up. This theme is "Is my blog taboo", and it's hosted by Carlo. I wasn't planning on participating, but.. the deadline got extended and I thought - what the heck. I'll do it.


The kitten didn't hate it.

So. What's taboo in my culture? Or what do we eat here that might be taboo somewhere else? The answer to the last one is easy - surströmming. It's fermented herring. (Uh-huh, fermented as in rotten.) You can read about it, should you want to. I'm certainly not going to talk about eating it, I don't come near the stuff. It smells like death. People claim it tastes a lot better than it smells, but frankly.. I'm never trying it. Ever.


Would *you* eat this?

Ok. So something that's taboo here then. That's not a lot. Sweden is an old farming society, and people are not generally very squeamish. But I let my mind wander and travel across the Atlantic.. and what came to mind was this: Swedes are very wary of additives in food, of anything not-completely-natural in fact. (Swedes have a very hard time at US supermarkets. It can be a scary experience. I personally don't mind additives, and will happily eat Kraft Mac & Cheese, or Kool-Aid) And what is completely unnatural then? I didn't have to think long about this: Jell-O.

Jell-O is scary. Very, very scary. I know that this is widely accepted in the US - and the scariest for me is not the pure form, but the things that are done with Jell-O. Like Jell-O salads. Dude. That is just awful. I googled for a recipe involving Jell-O and other things I would not normally eat, and after a while I came upon this one. Strawberry Pretzel Cake, also known as The Pink Horror In My Fridge. The recipe claims "Strawberry Pretzel Cake is an unusual recipe that has a pretzel crust and is delicious." Yeah, unusual is about right. Delicious? Not so much, no.


Look at this pretty closeup. Bright, bright food coloring. Yum.

I made it according to instructions, using the nearest thing I could find to Cool Whip - some kind of German whipped cream in a can. It actually has cream in it though, which I don't think Cool Whip has. It tastes equally awful. It was a bit hard to get the Jell-O to set, I poured on the final layer while it was still pretty much liquid, and hence the orange-pink clotting that looks like a particularly nasty cottage cheese. As for taste? Well. What did you expect? Something edible? Sorry, no. I took a small bite and promptly threw out the rest. Ew.

A shopping list

I wasn't planning on joining the latest Is My Blog Burning?; even though it was the anniversary edition and all. Saturday was really busy for me - the kittens moved out, and I spent the day with the new owners. However. Carlo has extended the deadline, so I don't have a good excuse anymore. (If I ever did.) I won't reveal what I'll be making just yet (I'm shooting for Wednesday) but here's a translation of the e-mail I just sent to Per.

"They've extended the deadline for IMBB. I suppose I'll join in... could you please pick up:

Pretzel sticks
cream cheese
canned whipped cream (the disgusting kind that you squirt out)
and maybe some frozen strawberries (because ours are about a thousand years old)

Kisses,
A"

Sigh.

Let's try again

Ok. I'm trying to play with Hello/Picasa/BloggerBot and I'm not quite getting it. Is this size - medium - ok, by the way? And posting pics directly to the blog seems stupid as that makes a new post - I usually add pictures last. So, I suppose I'll start a parallell blog, and then link to those pictures? Except.. hm, how do I find out the right address to link it into, so to speak? Gah - I sound completely moronic, I know. If anyone knows what I'm talking about, H E L P M E :) Oh - or is it as simple as editing the post in the parallell blog, copying the img link there and posting in my regular blog? Hm? Is that it? It sounds reasonable, doesn't it?

Oh, and meanwhile - enjoy the picture of my darling Kelly as a baby. She's about three months old, right when we got her. Now, she's almost two years, and pregnant with her first litter of beautiful babies.

Lamb with rocket

I was at a small function a couple of weeks ago that served finger food. We had four different things - a small noodle salad served in glasses, mainly made up of glass noodles and some type of greens, chicken skewers with a chili dipping sauce, some outright disgusting sushi type roll with crab and shrimp (it was slimy and tasted muddy - no thanks!) and then the glorious thing - small slices of grilled baguette with a grilled lamb, and topped with a creamy ball of chevre cheese. Mm.

So that got me thinking. I want more lamb. And more chevre, for sure. So, a couple of nights ago I decided to make my own version. This was a lot more filling than it looked, and it's just a simple salad of rocket, grilled and skinned red bellpepper, grilled lamb in thin slices and topped with coriander, served with a chevre cream from cheese and creme fraiche. It was a great little evening meal.

I'm typing this with two kittens on my shoulder, playing with my hair. Claws are very, very sharp. I suppose it's a hint to go feed them.

What he fixed

Mm, I have a very good boyfriend. (Or well, fiancé really - we're getting married this summer. It just seems like such an awkward word to use.) He made me a delicious Valentine's dinner!

He had previously asked if I'd prefer an appetizer or a dessert. I opted for the dessert. So, for the maincourse, he fixed Saltimbocca with risotto - that is, veal with parma ham and sage, in a delicious winey broth that the kittens were disturbingly attracted to. The risotto had asparagus and mushrooms, and was the first risotto Per made on his own. Excellent results!

For dessert, he poached granny smith apples in sugar syrup, covered them with a thick blanket of luscious merengue, topped with flaked almonds, baked, and served with ice cream. It was incredible. I'd love to have that again, any time.



Dinner last night was more of a use-stuff-up-from-the-fridge kind of affair. We had a lot of sausage, and made a stew, sort of - sausage, onion, garlic, baby corn, garlic cloves in chili oil, soy sauce, sweet chili sauce, creme fraiche, cream... served over rice. Yummy. And I think I got rid of at least four canisters from the fridge. Not bad!

Happy Valentine's Day!

I really feel that I should post something special today, but alas - no time. I'm stuck at work, with a late meeting, and when I get home my darling has hopefully fixed me a special meal. I don't really know what he's going to cook, but I know it involves risotto, granny smith apples and flaked almonds. And I think I saw a carton of whipping cream in the fridge this morning, too. Exciting, isn't it?

For the story behind this little semi-holiday - please visit this site. I'll finish by saying what my teacher in water aerobics class did today - "You know that friend you've been meaning to call for so long? Today is the day."

Ok, back to normal

Thanks to everyone who commented on my last post! I still have no idea what happened, but it was that little musical game that did it. I deleted the post and reposted it, and that worked. Strange. Oh well! And it seems to indeed have been browser specific. Next challenge: How do you host your pictures? I'm using Imageshack, but I'm not all that happy with it. I'd like a better, and preferrably more reliable solution.

I'm woozy. I spent the weekend on a ferry to Helsinki, Finland, with the people of one of the boards I'm on. We had a great time, and the food was wonderful - but there's a storm, and there were some really, really big waves tonight. I didn't get much sleep, and now that I'm off the sea, I still feel like everything's rolling.

Per comforted me with a big steaming bowl of my current favorite pasta - Pasta Bianco from Jamie's Dinners. Heaven in a bowl. Also known as silky smooth tagliatelle coated in a light sauce of butter, garlic and parmesan. That's all there is to it. No picture. I ate it all - and the kittens finished the scant leftovers. (And no, it's not a great idea to feed cats garlic! It can actually be poisonous in larger doses.)

Dinner will be guacamole and chips, also one of my very favorite things. The picture is from the last time we made it. I put a lot of coriander in my guacamole. Yum!

Anne's Guacamole
2 ripe avocados
handful of cherry tomatoes, halved or quartered
juice of 1 lime or half a lemon
1 large bunch coriander, chopped
2 cloves of garlic, smashed
some creme fraiche
salt and freshly ground black pepper

Mash the avocados. I use a nifty handheld immersion blender. Add the garlic. Mash some more. Add the lime, the salt and the pepper. Add the tomatoes, and decide if you like the texture or if you'd like to thin it out a little bit with some creme fraiche. Finish with the coriander, and that's all there is to it. Enjoy on corn chips.

What the heck happened?

My blog has a problem. See the sidebar? No? Scroll down - it's somehow slid all the way to the bottom of the page. Very, VERY annoying. And I can't figure it out. It must have started with yesterday's post - or did it start when Blogger changed their commenting system? If anyone can help, I'll be eternally grateful, that's for sure.

Sugar High Fridays #5 - Petis Pains au Chocolat

When Clement announced the theme for SHF:5 - Puff Pastry: hundreds and hundreds of layers my immediate thoughts were, in order:
1. I don't like puff pastry.
2. I bet that's a bitch to make.
3. I'm not participating.
4. I wonder how hard it is?
5. Oh well. Someone else will eat it anyway.

And that was that. Buying ready-made puff pastry was not an option for me at all. Since I don't like it very much, the whole fun would be in the making. Or so I thought. My first choice was classic Wienerbrod, danishes. However, I balked at the idea of making a complicated dough, a complicated filling AND a glaze. That just seemed too much. I briefly touched on croissants, before landing on my final choice: Petits Pains au Chocolat. Since I never had done something like this before, I followed a recipe to the letter. My chosen one comes from Swedish pastry chef Jan Hedh, author of the wonderful book Chokladpassion. (I think you can easily see what that translates into.)

So, I was going to make a yeasted puff pastry. Not all puff pastries are made with yeast. The trick to making puff pastry, to put it shortly, is to make an elastic dough, get butter to be inside the dough and STAY there, and then roll it out and fold it over. Many times. That's how you get the layers. Easy in theory. A little less easy in practise. But definitely do-able. So, on with the recipe!



Petits Pains au Chocolat
by Jan Hedh
20 g fresh yeast
125 g tepid water
150 g full-fat milk
500 g flour (in Sweden, you should use Vetemjöl Special that has extra protein. In other countries, look for an extra-strong flour.)
55 g sugar
10 g salt
300 g unsalted cold butter
200 g excellent dark chocolate
2 eggs for glazing

Day one:
Dissolve the yeast in the water. Add the milk. Add the flour, sugar and salt. Knead for five minutes by hand, or for three minutes using a machine. (I used my trusty Kitchen-Aid.) Let the dough rise for two hours, or until it has doubled in size. Knock it down and let it rest overnight, in the fridge. Check it after an hour, if it's started to rise, knock it down again. It's not supposed to rise any more. (I had major problems with this part - check my post on the Dough That Wouldn't Sleep.)

Day two:
Cut a cross on the top of the dough. Roll out each quarter, so you have a vague flower shape. Bash the cold butter with the rolling pin (this is fun!) so it becomes a little bit soft. (Alternatively you could probably cut it into thin slices. But the bashing was fun.) Put this in the middle of the dough, and fold each part up over the butter. It needs to be fully enveloped and not allowed to escape. Flour the dough and your workarea, and roll out the dough into a large rectangle. Measure - it should be 40 * 76 cm. (That is really large.) Make a threefold, wrap it in plastic and let rest in the fridge for half an hour. Repeat twice more - roll out, threefold, rest in fridge. It will be increasingly more difficult. Definitely make sure you don't tear the dough so the butter oozes out!

After the third rest, roll it out one final time. Same size as before. Trim the edges, and cut the dough with a knife into 8 small rectangles. (Once lengthwise, four times crosswise) Divide the chocolate into 16 equal squares. (I used large buttons from Weiss Chocolat, and just added four or five to each pastry.) Glaze the dough with beaten egg, and add a piece of chocolate to each. Make another threefold, and put 8 on each baking sheet. Glaze with beaten egg again, and let the pastries rise for two hours. Warm the oven to 190 degrees C, and give the pastries a final glazing with beaten egg. Bake for 12-15 minutes until they are golden brown.


Edith, enjoying a little taste too.

So. Was it hard? Yeah. A little. The dough kept tearing towards the end, and my working area got very messy. Was it impossible though? Not at all. No. It was fine. And they tasted absolutely wonderful. All in all, I am very very happy I took part in this SHF, and I already look forward to the next! Keep those challenges coming!

Music in my kitchen!

Oh well, I suppose I can't escape this any longer. :) I was tagged by Oslo Foodie in a blogger-chainletter-thingie, and while this one is so not suitable for me (I'm the most boring person in the world when it comes to music) I'm glad to be included. :)

What is the total amount of music files on your computer?
Um. Good question, yeah. I should have checked. I'm at work right now, and there's no music at all on this one. But I'm guessing about.. fifty albums or so. Plus a couple of hundreds misc. songs. I rarely, rarely listen to it. Update: 4,2 gb.

The CD you last bought?
Awfully embarrassing. I have no idea. It's been years. Several years. I'm guessing it's a Frank Sinatra collection. I mostly buy collections - on the rare occasions that I do buy. The last CD I got as a present though, was one that my dad and his jazz band recorded. Very nice! And the last CD I downloaded, that must have been the latest by Aimee Mann. Her "Driving Sideways" is in one of the car commercials on tv here, and it gets stuck in my head in a most wonderful way.

What was the song you last listened to before reading this message?
Um. Before I got tagged? No idea. Before I sat down to write this? Again, no idea. I don't really listen to music. At all. I like silence, a lot. So, the last one must have been.. right, the theme song to Six Feet Under! Yeah. That's it. Does it count?

Write down 5 songs you often listen to or that mean a lot to you.
I'll have to go with some random ones then.
1. Everybody Hurts with REM (Perfect for when you want to wallow - this makes me feel so bad that it eventually becomes ridiculous and then I'm happy again.)
2. When You're the Best of Friends from Disney's The Fox and the Hound. (Reminds me of my dear friend in the US, Rebecca, and when we were in high school together while I was an exchange student. This was one of our favorite movies.)
3. Love Me Tender - Elvis. (Embarrassing story. My parents are both fairly musical people. Dad plays in a band and has done so for most of his life. My mom plays the piano, and has a beautiful voice. You'd think some of this would have been passed along to me. But no. As was proven on a ferry trip to Estonia when I was.. 14? 15? Something like that. This was when karaoke was pretty new, and the boat had a machine. I was curious, poring over the songlists. When I was out for a moment, my dad asked my mom if she thought I'd sing if he paid me 1000 SEK. She said, "no way." I came back, and my dad asked, would I pick a song for 500 SEK? I guess he wanted some bargaining room. Not necessary - I piped up with an immediate "yes!". I'll cut this short now, but suffice to say that it was terrible. I sang in the wrong key, the entire song. My parents were doubled over with laughter. It's a highlight for them.)
4. Every Me and Every You - Placebo, from Cruel Intentions. One of my fave movies. And a good song.
5. The ballad of Bilbo Baggins - Leonard Nimoy. It's so bizarre! (You have to go track it down now - are Clotilde of Chocolate & Zucchini, and I can't believe no one else has done that before me. (I've probably missed it.) Anyway, I'm dying to hear what's actually on that little beautiful Ipod! My next choice is Dagmar of A Cat in the Kitchen with whom I have much in common - we're both Swedes, we both love to cook and bake, and we share a love for British Shorthair cats. Hopefully she has more interesting music to share than I do. My third choice is The Passionate Cook - one of my favorite blogs! Such gorgeous pictures and the recipes sound wonderful. Let's hear if she has some nice music tips, too!

Time for the semla!

Today is the national semmel-day in Sweden. Everyone, more or less, eats semlor. And what is a semla, you might ask? Well, take a look at the picture. That's a semla. It's basically a yeasted puffy bun, usually flavored with a hint of cardamom, filled with almond paste and whipped cream. It's assembled by cutting a lid off the bun, setting that aside and scooping out some of the inside of the bun. The insides are mixed with some almond paste (and maybe some milk to loosen the mixture slightly), and put back into the bun. (Not too much - you don't want a sugar overdose here.) Top with whipped cream, put the lid back on, and dust with powdered sugar. I don't generally make semlor myself - it's easier to buy, since you can just eat one... Unless you have a big semmel-party that is. I don't know that anyone does.

So, why the semla? Well. Today is the last day before lent. Not that anyone acknowledges lent here anymore, but back in the days you had to stock up on your fat before lent. Hence the semla! Indeed, this day is called fettisdagen, translated into fat-tuesday. One of our kings died in 1771 from eating too many of these delicacies. Not so much because of that, but as a nod to tradition, semlor used to only be available for a very short period each year. Nowadays, you can get them all year round, but they're especially widely available from christmas to February. I've already had two this year, and with some luck, I'll have my third and last one waiting for me when I get home tonight. Then it's no more semla until next year!

See my cats

You know the Simpsons episode with all the puppies? Where Mr. Burns does an amazing musical number called "See my vest" that goes something like:

"See my vest, see my vest
made of real gorilla chest
See this sweater
there's no better
than authentic Irish setter"

You can find the whole lyrics here.

Yesterday, I had a bunch of friends over for coffee and kitten-cuddling. One of them happened to be an extremely talented photographer. Lucky me! Here's a site where he's put up a lot of the pictures - enjoy! (But don't ask me which kitten is which. I can identify them in real life but in pictures? Not so much, no.)

And I haven't forgotten that Oslo Foodie passed the buck to me on the music thing. I will reply, soon.

The dough that wouldn't sleep

I'm in the process of making my creation for the next installment of Sugar High Fridays. I won't go into details now since that'll be a post for next Friday, but I have to tell you about my dough-making experiment from last night. My recipe called for the dough to be assembled last night, and after two hours of proving, it was going to rest over night in the fridge. Fine. So, I assembled it (ridiculously easy with my Kitchen Aid) - and it was a wonderful dough to work with. I let it prove for two hours, during which it doubled in size and was soft and pillowy. Just beautiful!

After that, it was time to punch it down and put it in the fridge. The recipe stated that you might need to check on it so it didn't rise wild, and if so, punch it down again. I put my air-less, punched-out dough wrapped in plastic in the fridge and sat down to watch a movie. (Collateral - not great, but not bad either.) An hour later, I went to check to see that my little dough was resting properly. When I opened the refridgerator door, the dough lunged for me. It was wild, allright. And rising. A lot. I removed it with some difficulty and punched it all flat again. I thought about reading it a bedtime story, and firmly set it back in the fridge.

After another hour, and the movie had finished, I thought I'd better check on it again. Just in case. I was a little bit afraid to do so, so Per had to come with me. The dough attacked him too! Still wild! Still rising! Still very, very much not resting. This time, he handled the punching. I mumbled a lullaby. Back in the fridge, and then bedtime for me. This morning when I opened the fridge, I was greeted by what you see in the picture above. Wild! Wild!

Oh well. We'll see how the final results turn out - if nothing else, it's been pretty exciting so far!

Food thief!

Oh, this sucks so much. I just got back to the office from my water aerobics class, and I was going out to the kitchen to have my late lunch. I keep a couple of frozen lunches in the freezer here, for emergencies and when I don't have any leftovers. I knew I had one frozen lunch left - a delicious chicken casserole with risoni, one of few microwave meals I really enjoy. Except that it's not there anymore. Someone STOLE it!

Call the police! Stop the presses! Or, at least, for god's sake - feed me! I'm truly pissed off now - and hungry, obviously. It's a fairly large workplace, so I have no idea as to who might be the culprit. To add insult to injury, I had some leftover beef casserole that I brought in last week, but upon close inspection, it had started to grow some not so appetizing fuss. Grr, grr, grr!

Cinnamon buns

Yesterday, I got home from work early, so decided to spend the afternoon in the kitchen. With four very, very, very hungry kittens, that was not as relaxing as it might sound. Four hungry kittens clawing at my legs, meowing loudly, running over and under my feet - well. Let's just say they were very cheap there for a while.

I finally managed to make another lasagna, like the one I've already posted about (Per absolutely loved it and wants to eat it all the time) and I also somehow made cinnamon buns. I followed this recipe from Who Wants Seconds? - because really, how could anyone resist that? I followed it pretty closely, except that I adapted the method slightly to work better in my Kitchen-Aid. Major difference being that I creamed my cold butter with the sugar, then added the yeasty milk with the spices. And I used cardamom seeds that I crushed in my pestle and mortar, rather than ready-ground. It turned out nicely. I left them in the oven for a tad too long - 17 minutes while 15 would have been enough, but Per is delighted. He likes crispy buns, while I prefer huge, fluffy, soft ones.

And then I really needed to give the kittens something. See, our chosen food for the cats is dry food - Royal Canin in various flavors. It's not very exciting, but it's good for them. They get as much as they want - it's always out. However, the kittens don't like it. At all. They refuse to try. Not so good. We feed them canned food twice a day, but... not quite enough. So, yesterday - having my pestle and mortar out, I ground up some of their baby dry food. I loosened it with a bit of water, and thus had kitten-food-paste. Not very appetizing - and to make it even less so for myself but more for them, I added a couple of squeezes of "ham-cheese", which is a soft cheese flavored with ham. (I know, it sounds absolutely disgusting. Sadly, it tastes pretty good, especially on toast.) This apparently made it good enough for my picky eaters, and they polished off the whole bowl in minutes. Gradually, I'll add less and less cheese.. and then less water - and then hopefully they'll get what dry food is all about.