More Lentils

I wanted to add a few more photos today. Today is just another of those totally splendid days that we don't get that many of during a summer. Awesome, temperature around 27°C/80°F and sun all day. Makes me remember that being alive is such a good thing...

 One of the dishes I'm adding photos of is a lentil gratin I came up with yesterday that turned out absolutely great. The very simplest thing to make, and so many possibilities to tweak it. I will make it again, for sure, and probably change it, but I thought I should add th

e recipe. This time around, I used red lentils, but really, any kind should work. I think Puy lentils would be just great... Lentils were just cooked until barely tender and then put into a gratin dish together with a minced shallot and a sliced garlic clove, a diced tom

ato and some feta cheese. Some of the lentil cooking liquid came into the dish with the lentils. Also, salt and pepper was added, and some dried thyme (I didn't think the fresh thyme would really have any taste left after a while in the oven). I topped this with leftover bread which was about to go stale, poured maybe a dL of wine over it 

(until there was only very 

little space left in the dish) and put it into the oven at 200°C for maybe half an hour. I'm not quite certain of how much lentils I used, since I started to cook about 2 dL, but that was too much to fit into my gratin dish, so I used maybe a little more than half of the cooked lentils.

The other dinners in this post is just a simple tomato sauce pasta with some Västerbotten cheese on top, and todays dinner which was braised green cabbage and some marinated chickpeas. Or at least, I think this is green cabbage in English? In Swedish, green cabbage would be something diferent which I don't know what it's called in English, and this would be white 

cabbage.

I'm sitting here writing itching all over right now. Since today was rather warm, and the last few days actually have been warm and nice I decided to go out to the community gardens and see to the watering of all the seeds I planted last week. Actually, some of them are above ground by now! The radishes are at least. Maybe, just maybe, I might be able to have some radishes before I leave for France in two weeks. At least if the weather stays this good, which I'm hoping for since we're planning a picknick for tomorrow. Tomorrow is a holiday here, and I spent some of this afternoon on buying wine and ridiculously expensive beef (which should be ridiculously good, hopefully), planning to make a beef salad. I was also thinking about some kind of desert, but I really don't know what to make. Someone else is going to

 bring some cheese, so maybe we don't need desert after all? But then again, I really wouldn't mind an excuse to bake something sweet in addition to the olive bread I started to make. So I don't know... What are your best recipe for lemon cookies? That would be a good

 thing... and my last attempt was disastrous.

Note: Is using dL to measure things a uniquely Swedish thing? Google won't do the converting from dL to cups... A dL is a tenth of a liter, so 2 dL is 0.2L.

Dining Lately

Woooha.. I'm on my new computer. And I just finished processing a few photos in absolutely no time at all. Also, I could see what I was doing to the pictures! Although I do love my little 12" Ibook by now it is actually several years old, and not at all suitable for some of the things I do, like try to edit my photos. Now, changing to a 24" screened Imac definitely have some good sides. And, since it's more than three years newer,  it's so much more powerful I can't believe it. Just saving a photo used to take loads of time, now it's instant. 

But, I'm not really here to rant about my new computer. I wanted to put up some more dinner photos. I've been waiting for the computer to arrive all week, and so I was lazy with fixing t

hose images since I knew it would be much quicker as soon as I got this to work. That's why you get a number of dinners in one post here. Top one is today's sesame seed salmon stir fr

y (today must be the day of alliterations). Then, my first real taste of summer. That's new potatoes (but I have to admit that they weren't that great, it's just not time yet.) I'll have to wait for a few more weeks for the real thing, but still, new potatoes with pickled herring and chives might be the most essential summer meal to me. Except for strawberries, that is. Further down is a quick fried rice with frozen peas (no way that the fresh thing is available up here yet, unless they fly it in from quite far off), and a tofu stir fry. 

And yes, there is some kind of stir fry emphasis this week. I'm sort of going through

 some of my cookbooks when making shopping lists. I pick one and sit down to find a number of meals I could make from it and write a list of things I would need. This week I happened to choose a Chinese cookbook, or at least a Swedish version of a Chinese cookbook. I'm quite convinced that not all of the recipes in there are totally authentic, but I sort of got inspired to learn more about Chinese cooking. Anyone has hints about the best books for learning more on the regional cuisines of China?

Exactly What I Needed

So tonight I threw together a pasta, quite simple, really almost no work. And it turned out to be exactly what I wanted tonight. Somehow fresh tasting, and still interesting enough to make it feel like a splendid meal. The chives I grew on the balcony last summer have survived, and I managed to find some fresh aragula lettuce. Yummy!

Yesterday I had dinner at a friends house, which included asparagus and some salsicca that was oh sooo tasty. I wonder if I will regret not going to the right store when getting some sausages to go with the risotto I was planning for tomorrow, when my mother will be visiting. Let's hope the ones I have will do.

And, the lentil soup I made on Monday by the way : It was extremely simple. Some minced onion (one small) and pancetta (four slices) sauted in a little oil. Vegetable stock (or should it be broth, I'm uncertain of the difference of those words in English? anyway, about 750 ml, a little more than 3 cups) and lentils (200 grams, about 7 oz) added, together with salt, a little pepper and few crumbled leaves of fresh thyme. Cooked until lentils where nice and soft and served with a little lemon juice and grilled pancetta. Be carefull not to throw all the grilled pancetta on the kitchen floor, pancetta is quite fatty and you will immediately need to clean the floor (speaking from experience). :)

A Decadent Saturday, and A Somewhat More Austere Monday

It seems as if I'm eaten at other peoples homes more than at my own place lately... And even though it's not entirely true, since I don't bring I do get less pictures to put here. I also was totally amazingly lazy duringn the weekend, and except for this one meal from Saturday afternoon I didn't really make anything I could even think of putting here, even though I'm trying to keep my ambitions for what's allowed here not too high. The idea of putting my dinners here was to motivate me to cook anything at all right now, remember? But this, on the other hand, was extremely good. So maybe that makes up for it? I don't buy meat for myself that often, but since I was doing my shoping downtown in a store that has very good meat from a farmm just outside town, I couldn't really resist. And polenta with blue cheese doesn't make it worse, don't you think?

Today though, after a lazy weekend, I went for something a bitmore healthy... Lentils, and pancetta soup with garlic toast, though I managed to burn the toasts a bit. And I don't want to talk about the pancetta... Really, I managed to get a first batch all over the kitchen table when I tried to turn them to grill the other side. I think some cleaning godess heard my secret thought about that I could maybe get away with not cleaning the kitchen floor until later in the week. But it made me feel a lot better about being lazy all weekend. Both the cleaning and the soup. And I can have lunch from the leftovers tomorrow. :)

My Favourite Potato Salad

This potato salad was first made for me by my Bulgarian roommate Petya in Prague. She made it when she had recieved a care package, containing among other things Bulgarian goat cheese from her mother. She was a bit homesick at times, and I think this warm salad reminded her of food from home. And it's one of the best potato salads I've ever had, so I make it every now and then. It was March when she made it there, so it was made from winter potatoes. I don't think I had had potato salad that wasn't made from new potatoes before, but this works fine, at least tastewise. It looks a bit mushy though. And I had no Bulgarian goat cheese, so I used some lebneh that I found at a local ethnic store some time ago, which made it even mushier, but still tasty. I don't know if I mentioned it yesterday, but I finally had time enough to make some bread to. I used it for the toast. And then, now I just finished my dessert. Sometimes there's nothing like a cup of hot chocolate.

To Get A Lot Out Of A Little

The title refers to getting a lot of dinner out of relatively little work. And I'd say that's certainly what I did. I made some soup tonight, but the sallad was just using up leftover beans and adding some tomato. The soup was great though, made from a vegetable I had no idea what the English name for was, but according to wikipedia it seems to be called sunchoke or Jerusalem artichoke. Anyway, under it's Swedish name (jordärtsskocka) I have gladly used it for a long time. It's great in a potato gratin, or roasted, but it might be even better pureed in a creamy soup.
You see, spring hasn't really started yet up here. The birches are just beginning to look faintly green. On Saturday I went to a barbecue at some friends place, and they had actually sown some carrots about a week ago (so, still long time before anything is up really), but they have a very well protected place to keep them with a good micro climate. I'm considering sowing the coming weekend in my community garden. But from this part of the country there is still really -nothing- that has been growing this year. Sunchokes, on the other hand, can be harvested throughout winter when the ground isn't frozen. (At least I think so?) So while I read about a lot of people starting to use spring ingredients, that's not for me yet. If anyone is interested, the season for local strawberries up here is in July... On the other hand, the sun just dissapeared behind another building from my northern window. So, when season is here, it's here for real :)

Kitchen Therapy

So, I'm back home. Actually, I came back on Monday night, though I wasn't able to enter the appartment until after midnight, due to forgotten keys and security guards taking an hour to come and let me in. It was rather cold here on Monday night, about one degree above freezing. Guess who felt extreeeeemely foolish for forgetting keys? Because of all that, I was rather tired yesterday, and didn't manage to do what I thought, namely make one of those dinner posts I mentioned earlier. But here I am today! I actually got inspired and cooked a bit more seriously than I usually do for myself. And it was tasty. And I even got dessert!
While in France, I bought a book called le Petit Larousse de la Cuisine or something similar (I left the book with D. since it was rather heavy to carry back). I'm planning to use it next time I go there, since even though I can usually cook what I want, I really don't know that many of the ingredients names in French. So I thought, if I have a cookbook I can buy what it tells me, and maybe I'll learn some new words. But, this book also have some preliminary words on how to eat, very fascinating to compare with Swedish recommendations. For example, cheese was, as I understood it recommended to eat after both lunch and dinner, dayly. And dessert. So today, I took this to heart (not the cheese though) and cooked two different courses, and cut up some melon to have for dessert. For someone who usually just throws together some pasta with something to make it taste good when cooking for noone else, this is quite a feat. :)
The photo shows everything together. First some beans fried with onions and sweet pepper, then an improvised rice dish with spinach and hazelnuts and some melon with honey and yoghurt. I know this is no way a gourmet meal, but it was tasty, and the cooking of it really helped me slow down after a rather hectic day back at work.

Can't Stop Munching - Roasted Chickpeas

This is again something I'm sure many people have done a million times or so. But I just did it for the first time ever, so I'm going to write about it. I really shouldn't be sitting here eating... I had a nice and filling dinner not so long ago, and I'm quite full. But while D. was washing the dishes and I was messing around with some bread that I'm making (my project with making enough dough for several loaves but leaving it in the fridge for baking one at a time is turning out great) I realised that we did have a small amount of chickpeas in the fridge that really needed to be eaten. So I decided to try something I had been thinking about for some time. It's quite easy. Turn on oven, rather hot (I used about 200°C). Heat some oil in a pan on the stove, mince a little garlic and pour into the heated pan together with leftover chickpeas and some dried chili. I used some of the chili that I tried to grow on the balcony this summer. (That didn't work, it's far to cold for chili to be out of doors up here, unless you have a nice southern wall or something. It got to grow in our bedroom window instead.) When everything is nicely coated with oil and garlic and chili (or use any kind of spice that goes well with chickpeas I think?) is well spread out, put into the oven for some 15 minutes. I've been eating they cooled down enough to not burn (to much).


Oh... I just emptied the camera to get the chickpea photo and found a few other ones that I took because I considered posting about it but forgot to write anything. Now I decided I'll just share the pictures here. Both are dinners from last week, two of those that turned out good. Onion tart with endive and Rochefort sallad, and a fish which I don't know the English name of (Röding anyone?) with a lemon pilaff, grated carrot and green beans. Yum. Now I almost got hungry again. Maybe some more chickpeas...
Argh.. Blogger's spell checking does not seem to work today. You'll have to do with a non-spell checked post. Hope it's not too bad

Just can't believe it's been almost two weeks

I don't know what happened. I really didn't intend this to happen. I wanted to create a blog that I would use, all the time, since it is about something that I enjoy doing daily. But those last two weeks things just were to much I guess. Work has been kind of very very busy. And last weekend we had a wonderful break from everything, and went south to see my family. We didn't see them at all during the Christmas season, not at all actually since last summer, so it was really about time. My parents had even had time to move house since I was there. Anyway, my not writing does not mean that I haven't been cooking of course. I'll just have to get better at reporting it :)

So, right now I made real homemade vegetable stock for the first time in my life today. Can't say anything about the results yet, since I haven't cooked anything with it (but I'm planning to use it for some polenta with shiitake and fava beans tonight). Right now I can just say that maybe the taste of soy sauce is a bit to much (I followed a recipe, but maybe I shouldn't have?). But we'll see what happens when it's put to use.
Second thing is that I'm working out a method to keep us with fresh bread throughout the weeks. Usually I do this by making a lot and putting what's not going to be used for a day or so into the freezer, and even though it works fine, it's not the same as really fresh bread.
(If anyone is wondering, this part of the world isn't for bread snobs like me, that is, people who don't like the bread at the supermarket, if you don't bake your own. Unless you were living right in the middle of town here there is no way to get fresh bread daily without going quite far to obtain it. And besides, I like baking, and I certainly like the taste of my own bread. )

My latest idea was to try out leaving some of the dough for one of our favourite bread in the fridge a bit longer than it usually stays there. See, usually it goes into the fridge overnight for a long and slow proofing. This time, I made a full batch, but I only put one bread into the oven. The other two (or the dough for two more planned got to stay in a plastic box in the fridge. Today I took out enough dough to make another loaf and put it into the oven. Haven't tried it yet, but it looks as good as the loaf made at the time prescribed by the recipe. If this thing seems to work I might write down the plan.

I've also been thinking a bit. About the time I spend on cooking, and how and why I do that. I mean, most people don't. Most of the people I meet daily certainly also cook daily (maybe not all of the old professors at work, they might rely on wife's cooking, or maybe I'm just prejudiced :) ). There's not much choice, you need to eat to live, and to eat you need to cook, right? But most people wouldn't spend an hour on Friday night planning what to buy when buying groceries on Saturday, in order to have a number of nice meals to choose from when wanting to cook throughout the week. We had a quite nice Friday night in the sofa, with a glass of port wine, doing exactly that. Does this make me obsessed? We just had no other plans, and it's so much easier to get things to make sense while shopping with a list than when you're just trying to come up with some ideas while at the supermarket...
On the other hand, cooking has lately turned into one of my most time consuming hobbies. And why not? I have the time, I also have the money I spend on it (most of which I would have spent anyway, since, like I said, you need to eat to live). And at least sometimes the results is delicious enough to justify the effort... :)

Simplest Sallad - A Childhood Favourite

Being back in town means that I plan to post a little more regularly, so I'll start that off today by admitting to still love this simple salad. It's maybe a little bit childish, and not very elegant, but I can't help it, this time of the year it's so perfectly simple to make for any kind of quick dinner. I used to love this salad when I was little, and I still do. It was almost destroyed by the school kitchen, where they used more coarsely grated carrots, and too little, or maybe no orange at all, but my love for the good stuff survived. It's so simple, and most people might already either make it, or think it not worth making, but I'm going to put it here anyway. Just because I like it so much. To make it, you need a couple of carrots, I used three rather large one for the bowl in the photo. You also need an orange. Peel and grate the carrots on the finer side of a grater. (A coarser grate can be fine too, but in this combination with oranges the carrots become nicely juicy if grated finely.) Peel the orange and slice it in slices slightly less than a cm. Make the slices the way so that each slice can be easily divided into several parts by hand. Remove seeds. Mix together and eat.
If you're two people who like it a lot, this is enough for a side salad to go with one meal. If you don't like it as much as we do, it keeps well in the fridge.

Happy New Year (and dinner the day after)

I had planned to write about our New Year's Eve dinner yesterday. We really amused ourselves, putting together a huge menu, and then cooking it. But tonight, after spending a day taking it easy, and really rather tired of rich holiday food, I think I'll write about tonight's dinner instead. I really love tomato soup. Tomato sauce is one of the first things I remember cooking, and it's so perfectly versatile. Tomato soup is more or less a diluted tomato sauce, with some garnish, but lately we have developed a tomato soup which is somewhat different from the tomato sauces I usually make. We ate it with a slice of nutty bread (leftover from yesterday) covered with tasty Danish (I think) cheese (Sorte Sara) quickly grilled in the oven. This tomato soup becomes really tomatoey, but is still somehow fluffy. It is made something like this:

Canola oil to cover the bottom of your pan
Two yellow onions
Garlic to taste
Pinch of dried chili pepper powder or cayenne pepper
1-2 Tablespoons of tomato paste
One bottle of pureed (?) tomatoes (the Swedish word is "passerade" - I really need to get a culinary cross language dictionary) (The bottles we find here are about 700 grams.)
Water
Salt and white pepper to taste
Dried oregano to taste
1-2 tsp honey
10 or so sun dried tomatoes - the dry kind, not the one soaked in oil
Either 1/2-1 dl of cream, or 1 egg yolk and 1 Tbsp cream

Start with rehydrating the dried tomatoes by putting them into a small container and pour some boiling water over them. Leave them like that for some time. Meanwhile, saute finely minced onions and garlic in the canola oil. Add chili powder and tomato paste and allow to get hot. Pour in the contents of the tomato bottle and add water until a good consistency is reached. Especially if using an egg yolk in the end, the soup can be rather runny. Season with salt and pepper, and add some oregano and a little honey. Allow the soup to boil for some time. Take the dried tomatoes out of the water (I usually add the soaking liquid to the soup) and mince them about as finely as the onion (equal, and small, size of the bits and pieces give a nice feel in the mouth in this soup). Add them to the soup and let it simmer some more. (For example, spend this time by making grilled cheese sandwiches to go with the soup.) Finally, either add some cream, take the pot of the heat and whisk around so that the soup cools down a bit, or, if you happen to have a lonely egg yolk lying around in the fridge (we had tonight) use a fork to stir it together with a little cream. Take the pot of the heat and whisk it around a bit to cool a little. Add the egg-cream mixture slowly while whisking. Voilà. Tomato soup with tomato and some more tomato.

I usually make this soup with just cream, as I said above, the egg yolk was mainly to use up a egg yolk leftover from yesterday. The reason that it came into being was a granita that we had for dessert today. Yesterday we had it between courses, but the recipe yielded quite a lot even though D. was halving it when he made it, so some "champagne" granita desserts are about to happen this week. Quotation marks are because though the recipe called for champagne, D. used a rosé cava instead. He also used red orange juice, and the result is a sweet looking pink granita, quite unlike the icy elegant one pictured together with the recipe.

Oh, and as you might notice, I have pictures!! It's not that I finally managed to find the stupid camera cable (it's still gone) but Santa (or rather D.) was awfully nice to me and bought a far to expensive Christmas gift, so I have a nice new camera. Now I only need to learn to use it. And to fix some useful background for my pictures, just letting whatever part of our often messy kitchen act as a background just isn't such a good idea. :)

OK, so that's it for today. Maybe I'll get back to writing more about the things we amused ourselves with yesterday, but for today, tomato soup will have to do...

Dinner guests

I didn't have time to write about this before, but this Wednesday I did another of my weird things. There was a guest from abroad at work, someone who was supposed to visit someone, but this someone urgently had to leave because of family matters. So the rest of us sort of had to make up for that. And after going for Indian food on the Tuesday I just didn't feel like going out for a second night in a row. So on a whim, I invited everyone interested over for dinner. We ended up five people, and we had no way planned a dinner for more than two. And that was at about 5.15, on the way home, and with those who didn't find their way on their own coming immediately.

I did have a vague plan though. Doubling the lasagna we were planning should work out and with salad and bread that should make a decent meal. I mean, everyone knew it wasn't a planned big thing, so I hoped they would understand that it wouldn't be something terribly fanciful. The lasagna is the one we usually make, fresh cheese (maybe this is called curd) mixed with spinach, nutmeg and grated cheese as the white sauce, and a tomato sauce as the red sauce. Top with more cheese and pour some milk over it all. I like this lasagna, better than anything I ever made with meat in it. And for Wednesday, one of our guests was vegetarian, so so much better.

We had planned to make this salad some day later this week. I just love it. We made it for the first time a little after the blog post appeared, and I realised that they actually sell butternut squash at one of the nearby supermarkets. Winter squash is not at all common in grocery stores here, but they have had it all of this fall. Now we made it as a side for the lasagna, to make the meal a bit more varied.

It was actually quite well received I think. People seemed to eat and enjoy themselves. Almost all of it was gone and I never had a chance to take any pictures. But I think it tasted great (after all, I wouldn't have made it otherwise) and I sort of enjoy being able to feed people. Must be some kind of feeding instinct.

Quick Dinner

We arrived home rather late after a trip to the gym on our way home from work. We had been planning to make some beetroot and potatoe-mashed together and fried thing (I have no idea what to call such a thing in English, rödbetsbiffar is what I would call it), but at least I was far too hungry by the time we got started. So we ended up with a quick lentil-and-tomato soup instead. But, with a dash of cinnamon, and some fresh cheese with crumbled feta and honey it tasted well enough, though not sensational. Excellent fast food though. And a thick, almost stewy soup is perfectly warming this time of the year. (Though, to my total dismay, it's been raining today. It's ice EVERYWHERE. I mean, snow's been around for almost a month, but as soon as December starts, it has to decide to rain?! Awful. I wish for cold and more snow to cover the stupid ice.)

The soup went something like this:
Carefully soften one minced red onion and a couple of minced garlic cloves in a little oil. When properly softened, add first about 1 Tbsp of paprika and then three diced potatoes and 2 dl of red lentils. Stir and add 1 can of peeled tomatoes (400 g) and 1 l water. Season with some vegetable stock (we used powder version, real vegetable stock instead of water might improve the result), some honey, oregano, white pepper and cinnamon.
Serve with some fresh cheese into which you have stirred some feta cheese crumbles and a little more honey. Maybe some black pepper.

Cooks in about 10-15 minutes of boiling.

There Will Be More...

... marmalade! The two jars from last time got me hooked (we're still eating from the first one) so now I bought red grapefruits and I do have plans for them. It will need a lot of soaking though, so it won't be around untill next weekend. Tomorrow is reserved anyway, for making "lussekatter" and for having D:s parents visiting. They will bring gingerbread cookies!

Dinner today should maybe have been celebrating that we've lived in this place for exactly a year now. Or well, exactly a year ago we got the keys and managed to drop by here for taking a bath between work and a party. Just we, some clothes in a bag and a bath tub in a completely empty appartment, that was kind of fun. The next day the appartment got a bit more crowded, and by now it's full of stuff of course, but we like it this way too.

Anyway, we ended up far to hungry to celebrate, but rather finished of a batch of canneloni filled with chorizo and cheese in a tomato sauce which the recipe claimed was for 4 persons in no time at all. Stupid recipe. :) Tasty anyway, and I was so full afterwards when I started to think about it that I just fell asleep on the sofa. Oh well, that's what weekends are for?

Dinner tonight

Since I was part time busy with my bread making (see previous post) D. made most of tonight's dinner. I made the yogurt-and-lingonberry dip sauce and some spicing. What he made was a version of "pannbiff" (sort of like meat balls, but flat - burger style) with apple and parsley and roasted potatoes. (He also added the spinach, but that might not count as cooking :) )We seem to be eating a lot of potatoes those days. I really like potatoes, especially good ones. I wish I knew what sorts it is I mean by the good ones, but I do know how they are supposed to taste. Maybe I should start writing down what it says on the bag. When I lived further south I used to sometimes get some potatoes from my parents. They have a rather large vegetable garden, and especially summers when they don't really have time to take care of it they plant a lot of potatoes. Which is very fine with me, since they usually get more tasty potatoes than I usually get from any other source...

Photo should be added to this post too, even though I forgot to take one. D. seems to have gotten over laughing at my taking photos of my plate (he first threatened to report it as food obsession to my psychiatrist-mother), so he caught a picture of his plate before he started on it... But, as I mentioned, photos are delayed untill I find my cable, or I manage to find a place that will sell me one.

More Brussel Sprouts and Pork Loin

Still no photos, since the university computer shop didn't have cables when I dropped by this afternoon. But we did make a quite nice dinner from leftover pork loin, some freschly made risotto and some more of the brussels sprouts mentioned in an earlier post. The risotto was a rather plain risotto variety, except for some apple cider vinegar, and some apples. We also used up the last of our bottled chicken stock in it, and after reading (in my case all of, in D:s case most of) "Den hemlige kocken" (The secret cook in English) about what kind of things go into modern food we almost decided not to buy a replacement. I guess we'll have to have another go at making chicken stock. I wasn't very much impressed by my last try (probably because I didn't watch it close enough, so it started to boil), but in the name of fewer food additives we'll give it another go.

I did start up a new sourdough yesterday! Now I only have to wait for it to start to bubble properly. I choose easy (my tries with more involved sourdoughs as the one in "Bröd" by Jan Hedh didn't impress me with yielding better results than easy so far) and used only organic rye and water (with a small addition of honey). With some proper feeding and some warmth that means that it should be rising very well quite soon. I'm looking forward to some more sour rye bread. And D. is looking forward to some more of "Olof Viktors ljusa bröd" (Light bread of Olof Viktor) from aforementioned "Bröd".

By the way, D. wasn't as negative to the brussels sprouts today as the other day. Today it was "vegetables - of the better kind". I did make them a bit different in order to maybe appeal to him more though. A little more cheese (he'll probably eat anything served with cheese, though he'll be upset by my claiming this), and I used oil from "raps" (Wikipedia translates this with rapeseed, Latin is Brassica napus according to the same source) instead of olive oil. I like it both ways. It's still by far the best brussels sprouts I ever had. And we have some leftovers for lunch tomorrow!

Green and pink

My camera cable seems to be completely lost. I even went up into the attic to look into the suitcase which I carried to Stockholm a little more than a month ago, on the chance that I had brought the cable with me and forgotten to take it out. So still no photo today, but I did take one of dinner tonight which will hopefully illustrate this post as soon as I remember to buy a new cable.
We're sometimes not so got at eating fish here. I guess we're both not completely comfortable with cooking it, but today, while I was doing a number of more boring chores D. made one of his pesto-style sauces, spread over a piece of salmon and baked. Good tasting with slices of potatoes that went into the oven beside the salmon.

Actually, the way the kitchen smelt while it was baking was kind of odd, but it all came out with a nice, garlicy smell and a somewhat crispy crust.

The pesto-style sauce is not a traditional pesto, really, but rather our interpretation of it. We use different cheese depending on what happens to be in the fridge, and this time it was Krutrök, my favourite for this kind of thing. Also, D. tend to use sunseeds instead of pine kernels. The rest of the ingredients are the same as for a more traditional pesto, basil, garlic and olive oil. The result is different, but I find it at least as tasty. And the locally produced cheese makes me feel better than imported Parmesan (I also prefer the taste). Think of it as a Northern pesto. Though basil seems not to be a very local ingredient, considering how the basil plants in our kitchen window looks by this time of the year. They miss the sun I suspect. Like me Maybe we should change all lamps in the appartment into light therapy equipment. :) I tend to get sleepy enough to get nothing done this time of the year, but today, I'm planing to at least start a sourdough before heading to bed. Hoping to have fresh bread to show before the weekend.

The Taste of Pork

One thing that I wouldn't have a photo of even if I found my camera cable is our dinner yesterday. Maybe that's as well, since I don't think it was very picturesque, but it was oh so tasty. We happened to drop by here (the web-page was rather emtpy, and the blog not updated, but the shop is a nice place) during our downtown visit, and, by impulse bought a piece of pork loin. And I don't think I ever had pork loin like that before. After being marinated in olive oil and lemon juice for a few hours and then quickly browned on the stove before it was put into the oven it tasted just like heaven and was more tender than any other pork I ever tried.

They buy their meat from selected farmers, and I was sort of assuming that it also meant that the farmers treat their animals better than the average meat factory. Actually, I think I was kind of assuming that it was from an organic farm, but I now realise that I should have asked. Though I find it hard to believe something this tasty could have been treated that bad... Next time I go there I'll ask...