Happy New Year! 2014 is here.

I can't believe it.  I am not ready for this.  I need another couple of months in 2013 to do the things I wanted to do that year, and now it is 2014.  As usual it will take me a few months to start to write the right year on the checks when I pay bills, but otherwise, things are just the same :) 

I like that it snowed both on Christmas Eve and New Years Eve with big lovely thumbnail-sized snowflakes even if they don't last that long.  This morning we woke up to severe cold and it is supposed to get down to 0 degrees Fahrenheit tonight (that is -20 C for those that use the-rest-of-the-world temperature system :).   The cats seem OK outside, and they are getting pampered with hot water bottles, hot drinking water and plenty of treats and insulating blankets.  They don't care a bit about dates, only about morsels of 'Tempting Tuna Flavor' treats.

So, 2013.  It was a year without giant weather events and storms.  Thanks!  I feel we needed that after 2012 which was horrible weatherwise.  Superstorm Sandy, the snowstorm in October one week after Sandy, the spring rainstorm that felled lots of conifers, etc.  So 2013 was calmer, a bit hot of course in these days of global warming.  Lots of canned tomatoes and homemade hot sauce ('Molten Lava' was one of them), two wonderful and successful kids in college, I learned how to use natural dyes for dyeing silk, wool, and cotton, and insect collecting in cold November with my Dad and sister were some of the highlights. And hundreds of great dinners with fantastic homemade and local food, thanks PP!  So, 2013 was a good year.  On to 2014 now...

But, it is still The Year of the Snake in the Chinese Calendar, and their New Year happens in a few weeks. Here is a US stamp showcasing the Chinese new Year celebrations.  Happy New 2014!

Stamp of the day: Lichens and conifers

Stamp from Åland, an island between Sweden and Finland, which belongs to Finland but have their own stamps.

This time of year is the best time to look at lichens,mosses and conifers here in Sweden. The leaves have fallen from the trees and the light reaches down to the ground level again. And there they are in all their glory! Amazing structures, colourful and slowgrowing. Most people don´t think about it but they are also part of our Christmas traditions. In our advent candle holders, the tradition is to put "white moss" around the candles. It´s actually not a moss but a lichen that grows in Swedish forests.

And I believe there is quite common to have little Christmas gnomes made of conifer cones and felt fabric. At least we have them, homemade of course!

No more stinky Wettex!

When you watch old episodes of the classic TV series Law and Order on instant Netflix I needed to have something to put my hands to work with. There is nothing better than mindless (well...) knitting so many cotton kitchen dishcloths being knitted up. You can make make about half of one during one evening, so pretty fast too. This is the old classic Ballband pattern (more examples here, not mine; pattern here).

They are made in 100% cotton, so throw them in the washing machine when they start to be dirty or smell bad. No more self-disintegrating, sour milk-smelling Wettex dishcloths in our kitchen. OK, I admit, I used to love Wettex, but not any longer. I hope I will never have to have a slimy Wettex cloth in my kitchen. The Wettex wipes kind of take on their own (microbial) life after a while, and these handmade knitted dishcloths works a lot better!

If you  blog reader know who I am and want one or two dish cloths, send me a note and they'll come in the mail (well, depends on how many of you that respond). Which color combination is your favorite?

Gorgeous: Inlagd gurka (pickles)

Making dill pickles at home, originally uploaded by Vilseskogen.

Can pickles be gorgeous? Well, they can be gorgeously good, especially if you make them yourself or eat the one's mom made. There should be dill and garlic and maybe mustard seed in the brine. Last year I 'only' made about 22 jars of pickles, and it wasn't enough. We are running out and have maybe only 5 jars left at the most and there are months to when the cucumbers start growing again. I am going to plant the cucumber plants in the spot where the compost bin was, I think they will love that soil. I just need to make a little raised bed and fill in some more soil, and build a giant trellis for them to climb on. No problem, I still have some time...

Funny fact: 'inlagd' means not only pickled in Swedish but also admitted, such as 'he was admitted to the hospital' (= "han var inlagd på sjukhuset").

Winter, winter, more winter

It is snowing again in NJ, large aggregated snowflakes that drip down slowly from the sky.  The cats are lower than the depth of the snow, so they use our shoveled paths to get around (to bird feeder, compost, barn with firewood, and basement...)- severely restricted pathways compared to their usual garden wanderings.  A deer lept through our yard and left deep double tracks over 1.5 m (=yards) apart.  Winterwonderland out there, so unusual, and reminds me of Swedish winter landscapes.

The cats hang out in their new cat houses, homebuilt and homedesigned by PP and with real cedar shingles on them. They are spoiled rotten with attention, hot water to drink and hot water bottles at night :)



A cat house.


Our walkway to the cars from the house.  I know, you have it like this in Sweden all the time, but 30+ cm snow overnight is less usual here.  And even less usual is that it seems to be staying and not melting away quickly.



Ella in snow. 

OK snapshot: Julmat (Christmas food)

Homemade sausage is a tradition in our Swedish family, and here are
chorizo and lamb sausage made by OK and EH and friends this past
weekend. Yummmmmmmy! I wish I could be in Sweden and eat it too.

What is cooking?

Or rather, what has been cooking in our kitchen in the last month or so:

Braised lamb shanks with onions, carrots, and celery, plus fresh herbs, cooked for a very long time until the meat fell of the bone and melted in our mouths (thanks PP!). These are photos from the beginning of this dish made for Sunday night dinner.

Applesauce ('äppelmos'), 7 liters

Habanero hot sauce (sweetened with carrots), about 2 liters!:

Roasted jalapeno and roasted garlic hot sauce, but I have only a photo of the main ingredients after they were charred in the oven.  It is delicious!

Italian tortas filled with greens (many kinds, like kale, swiss chard ('mangold'), bok choy, leeks, onions), garlic, cheese, egg, and herbs and crushed chili pepper.  The dough is like a pie dough, no yeast, and we freeze them and have them for lunch.  They are so good!  Filling to the left, ready to bake to the right.

Blueberry jam on the move!

Homemade French bread:

Amazing pizza:  onion, artichokes, olives, and rehydrated Swedish yellow-footed chanterelles ('trattkantareller') fried in some butter... incredible!

Perfection in an oven

The best homemade pizza ever, originally uploaded by Vilseskogen.

The last year we have made homemade pizza most every Friday night so we have now reached near-perfection (see photo).

It started with that we bought a pizza stone, a must for thin crust pizza. Then we made dough, partly whole wheat and often with dried herbs in it, made tomato sauce (usually not from a can, but cooked or blended by us), sliced up some mozzarella and added other necessary things (onion, olives, anchovies, artichoke hearts, shrimp, clams, fresh garlic, roasted red peppers, parmesan, basil, mushrooms, pepperoni, capers.... not all at once but in different combinations). One set of dough makes about 4 pizzas, and since each cook in 8-9 minutes it is easy to make them and eat them immediately. Yummy!

Another result of this is that I no longer eat pizza at restaurants (well, Nomad in Hopewell is an exception), because ours is so much better.

(If you want the dough recipe, make a comment below or send me an e-mail. It works great for pizza on the grill too, as well as flatbreads.)

Pickling and jamming

So far this year I have made 18 pints of pickles, that is about 9 liters. And I also made half-sour pickles that are whole cucumbers fermented in salt-water for a week and then eaten directly, and they turned out to be really good! I don't think they will last long in the fridge. (Click on photos for larger images, all on my Flickr account.)


For the first time in my life have I canned the American way, which means that you have special glass jars and lids that are processed in either boiling water or steam to sterilize the content after the jars have been filled. The jars are called Mason or Ball jars, and are really easy to use. These jars were invented in the mid 1800's, and I think it is amazing I never saw them in Sweden. So smart design! After sterilization you can store the canned food at room temperature (but lower temp is better).


The lids have a rubber area on the inside of them (orange), so you heat the lids (simmering, no boiling), and then put them on the top of the jars with screwtop metal band to hold them not too tight in place. During the sterilization, extra air will come out through the lids and after the boiling, when the contents cool the jar will be sealed along the rubber edge and under negative pressure. You replace the lids each year, but can reuse the glass jars and the metal bands that hold the lids in place during sterilization.  If you find a jar that doesn't have a properly sealed lid you shouldn't eat the content, they might have spoiled and be contaminated with bacteria. So you want to hear the 'pop' when you open a new jar.

When we grew up in Sweden people would preserve food in jars too, but nobody ever boiled the jars. Maybe it worked better there, with less risk of food spoilage because people had better and colder storage places for jars. I didn't hear anybody worry about botulism in Sweden, but here it is a big scary deal and people die from it, and mostly from improperly processed homecanned food. So I learned how to sterilize and can fruits and veggies this year. Last Christmas I got this bomb-proof pressure-canner pot from PP, and I am putting it to use! Here are the basic steps:


Making the syrupy brine to pour over pickles - water, vinegar, sugar, salt, and some dill stems for flavor.


Cleaned jars are filled with homegrown cucumbers and waiting to be filled with hot brine.


Pickles can be either long spears or slices. PP prefers spears, I love slices, so I made both.


For the first time we got a real harvest of red currants this year, and they were delicious. I made red currant jelly (röda vinbärsgele) of most of it. My grandmothers used to serve red currant jelly with Sunday beef roasts.


Red currant jelly is made from red currant juice. You boil the fruit and then strain it to get the juice without the skin and seeds. Then you boil the juice and add sugar so it gets a jelly like texture when it is cold - this step took much longer than I expected. This picture shows the jelly at a full roaring boil.


At the same time, the jars were sterilized in boiling water. I used our pressure canner for this and for the boiling-water sterilization of the filled jars, but without the heavy steel lid.


Filled small jars (1/4 pint, ca 1 dl) with red currant jelly, ready to be sealed with lids and metal bands.


The closed red currant jelly jars are put into the water bath to be boiled for 10 min.


Red currant jelly - finished! Heaven in a jar.

The best eggs in the world...

...or at least the best we can get our hands on, come from a small farm in southcentral New Jersey, River Birch Micro-Farm, where a flock of hens live their happy life in a chicken tractor and lay 'pasture eggs'. The farmer, who is also a professor, is doing some really interesting research on small-scale farming and especially chicken tractors (read more here if you like on page 43). A chicken tractor is a very neat contraption where the chickens live in a henhouse and movable pen on wheels, so you can move the chickens around in your yard every day while they are still protected against foxes and coyotes. This chicken tractor has about 35 chickens and they have a very happy life picking at whatever flies by or tries to grow up from the ground.

Recently a peacock showed up to join them, and even if the chickens were first a bit apprehensive, the next night the peacock slept next to the chickens (albeit with a wire fence between them). Unfortunately the dog chased it off a few days later. Anyway, these eggs... they taste fantastic, like EGGS, and the yolks are the most yellow you can imagine. You whip up an omelet and at first you are thinking 'wow, it is so yellow, why?', but then you realize that these are chickens that are outside, picking on leaves and bugs and worms, and get a billion more vitamins and betacarotens than the poor chickens that provide store-bought eggs in chicken egg factories on an egg assembly line. If you can get local, free-range chicken from a farmer you know, do it! It will cost you a bit more, but the quality is really a lot better and worth it. Here are some photos and quotes from our 'eggman', courtesy of Dr. Joseph Heckman.
"Peacock likes it here on the farm. When I went out this morning it was sleeping next to the chicken pen with its head under its wing."
"My daughter came out with me this morning not wearing gloves. Very cleverly, she asked get me some warm eggs (body temp, just laid) to hold as hand warmers."
"A photo showing color contrast of a grocery store bought conventional egg (light yellow yolk, bottom) and an egg (orange yolk, top) from my pastured chickens. The color contrast is noticeable even in winter. The difference would be even more remarkable with the hens on spring grass."

Most recent gadget - bomb proof?

Please welcome our most recent member of our household, the All American Pressure Cooker that I got as a Christmas present. This is not your regular Swedish pressure cooker, this is a bit more exaggerated. You can use it for regular cooking, but also for sterilization of glass jars of preserved fruits, jams, pickles, and tomato sauce (etc.). Canning is in, here in America. No more filled up fridges with 6 jars of Swedish-style pickles! No more dozens of plastic containers with tomato sauce in our freezer. Now it can all be stored at room temperature on a shelf after sterilization. Note the six heavy-duty bolts, and the gauge that goes up to 15 psi. The cooker is about 30 cm across and can take up to 7 jars at the time I think. You can also make beef stew and all the other good foods in it, but they warn you specifically not to cook split pea soup in it - it will clog up the valve :). Thanks PP, for a great Christmas present!

Handmade for winter

I just finished my first knitted hat ever - and I like it a lot. There really are only two yarns in it, but one of the yarns are changing colors so the effect is green, grey, turqouise, blue and black hat. What do you think? It was much easier than I thought and fast, took less than two weeks with knitting here and there in small pieces of time. The yarn comes from one of my favorite yarn stores, Pins and Needles, in Princeton.

It is hard to photograph hats without putting them on someone's head :)

Here you can see the hat from the top.