Christmas stories from New Jersey

Reflections and lessons learned this year. 

1. It is actually snowing on our Christmas Eve!  Snowing, unexpected, and wonderful.  We are getting a white Christmas after all. Lets see if it lasts until tomorrow morning.

2.  I know you should buy local, but sometimes you need to buy further-local to get the really good stuff:  Christmas ham from Dakins Farm in Vermont, and many kinds of Vermont cheeses...  And yes, red currants from Chile, which is a sin, but they tasted better than expected. Homemade green tomato chutney balanced it all out on the cheese plate.


3.  Our little gingerbread train put together by AREA and AC.  The kit didn't come with a smoke stack on the locomotive, so that had to be added, and then moved to the right spot (I will say no more... you would think that based on the number of train pictures in this house that the position of a smokestack wouldn't be a strange fact :)  Note the siding track, and the rock sugar trees that fell over in the Sandy hurricane.  Chocolate and licorice fills up the tender.


4.  Never get a blue spruce as a christmas tree.  They look great - dense and full, but the needles are horror stories.  I had to put on a raincoat with the hood up to be able to get under the tree to get the tree stand attached.  This is a really mean tree - we wore thick gloves when we put on the lights.  I prefer the softer Norway spruces... So, our tree this year is a true sharpie... and decorated similarly.


5.  If you make Jansson's temptation with cream instead of milk  it tastes about 50 times better.

6.  After you make Swedish meatballs, save the drippings and fat from the pan and add it to the brunkål (brown cabbage), and that will also taste 50 times better.

7.  For gravlax, simplest is the best - salt, sugar, dill, and black pepper.... and a giant hunk of sockeye salmon from the wildest of Alaska. If you want the recipe, just holler here on the blog.

Stamp of the Day: Then and Now

Then: Phone booth.  Now: iPhone

Then: Printed maps. Now: GPS.

Then: Ice boxes.  Now: Refrigerators

Then: Black and white TVs.  Now: Flat-screen TV.

Then: LPs and record players.  Now: iPods.

The technological development during the last 50 years is featured on these Australian stamps.  I can write a million words on this, about its pros and cons, but that will have to wait.  In the meantime, I'd like to point out that phones used to function without having to have batteries or being plugged into an electrical outlet, maps work when the power is out, and I don't think anybody would like an icebox in their regular kitchen.

Book Review: Om jag var din hemmafru av Lotta Lundgren (Swedish cookbook, English review)

Om jag var din hemmafru by Lotta Lundgren, is an amazing cookbook (in Swedish only, for now), by Lotta Lundgren, a former advertising copywriter who changed careers to become a food writer and chef.  I got this book as a present, and I love it, not only for the amazing gorgeous photos (which Lotta as the model!), but also for the food writing.  The recipes are fine, but the best is the intros to each dish and the irreverent humor that is everywhere, in every line. 

It is hard to explain this in English, but she has a fantastic tongue-in-cheek, silly, intelligent, and contemporary humoristic take on life, food, love, and eating in her Swedish text.  It is just GORGEOUS from both a visual, intellectual, and foodie viewpoint.  I have so far cooked two things out of the book, but I have read the whole cookbook, from front to back page.  And that is usually not the case!  Often Swedes are too serious, and this book just loosens everything up!

In many ways this is an anti-book book, a book that suggests that you don't take life, food, recipes and work so seriously - that you just let go and enjoy it.  Many of the recipes do not give exact measurements.  Lotta, THANK YOU! 

USA needs this cookbook, but I am not sure most people here would get it, considering the backwards, horrible trends among some groups here (anti-love, anti-good food, anti-birth control, anti-personal freedom - just thinking about the recent republican presidential campaign makes me shudder of disgust).  At least we Swedes have this book to be happy about. 

Sweden publishes the most cook books per year per capita, which is pretty amazing.  But Swedes care about food, good food, organic and local products, and they also travel near and far so they are used to many different cuisines.

(If you can read Swedish, here is a great review of the book from Kulturdelen)



[Large photos by Vilseskogen on Flickr, Creative Commons; book cover by Norstedts]

Book review: Wildwood Wisdom by Ellsworth Jaeger

This is a most wonderful book.

I have read this book nearly from the first page to the last, and looked at the over 400 handdrawn wonderful illustrations, and contemplated the ways and means that people in the past survived and thrived in the wilderness.  This book has been my late-night companion before my eyes close for sleep for maybe a month or more, and it has been a great read.

Wildwood Wisdom by Ellsworth Jaeger was published in 1945, and has recently been reprinted by First Shelter Publishing, a company that specializes in 'keeping worthy old books in print'.  Jaeger also provide all the amazing and lovely illustrations.

So, what is the book about?  It is about how to survive in the North American wilderness pre-1950s, before nylon, Goretex, GPS, cell phones, and all the fancy equipment we have today.  It builds a lot on Native American tools and techniques, as well as the European trappers and explorers of the 1700s and 1800s.

It is a how-to-book for anything you might need to know while living outdoors.  How to start a fire?  Jaeger presents a dozen ways.  How to skin a skunk? No problem, just be careful and cut off the skunky glands by the tail.  How to make snowshoes?  It is here too.  Food, shelter, bathroom issues, edible and toxic plants, making buckskin and pelts, stalking animals, building shelves out of tree fungi, and how to cook over open fire - just open and read.  And admire the illustrations...

Everything is practial and with exact enough detail that you can copy the methods and sew your own buckskin coat, make a pancake on a hot rock, or built a tepee (see image to the right).  I learned so much from this book; things I might never need to know, but that I love to know.  Today someone at work said - "you are like a sponge soaking up knowledge, and that is so wonderful", and I feel just like that.  THere is so much interesting things out there, from the past, from today, from the future, and real things, hands-on things that exist.  I am not sure things on the internet really exist, but an ax or a pancake, they do really exist.

So, for anybody that goes camping, kayaking, or hiking, this is the book to get them for Christmas.  It works in Europe too, even if you don't have skunks, rattlesnakes, or poison ivy.

The only thing I noticed that was wrong was some of the information about edible fungi.  Some of the mushrooms that were considered edible in the 1940s have now been reevaluated to 'Don't ever think about eating these'.  Otherwise, the book is a true goldmine of great information.  Get it while you can!

Stamp of the Day: Pomegranate

Pomegranate (granatäpple in Swedish, Punica granatum in Latin) is a wonderful fruit.  It has hard seeds surrounded by fleshy, bloodred juicy arils, nested inside a labyrinth of white placental flesh (it is actually called that, botanically). Nobody really knows where it grows wild, maybe on the tiny island of Socotra in the Indian Ocean, but it has been cultivated and eaten by humans for thousands of years.  We open the fruit, squeeze out the seeds over a bowl (so you don't get red juice all over you and your kitchen), and then put the seeds in salads.  For Christmas Day dinner we are having a turkey, served with balsamic-pomegranate glazed carrots.  Those carrots are to die for....   In case you didn't know it, the apple in the Paradise in the Bible most likely was supposed to be a pomegranate, but when they translated it into English for the northerners, nobody knew that fruit up in the cold north, so it became apple instead.

Ponderings over American school food and eating habits

It is a well-known fact that there are many kids that won't eat anything green, spicy, or 'weird'.  This might be based on their genetics, such as that they have specific alleles for tasting bitterness that some people don't have.  With age, we get used to it and the genes matter less.

However, I think most kids today stick to bland, mass-produced factory food because their parents feed them that kind of food, out of convenience and influenced by advertising.  McDonald's burgers (with no lettuce and tomatoes on the kid burgers, mind you!), french fries, chicken nuggets in a heat up plastic box, poptarts from aluminium foil packets, neon-colored 'cereal' with marshmallows, all soaked and dusted with fat, salt and sugar, oh the compounds we humans love!

And, it certainly doesn't help that most parents eat such food too, so they are not providing a home environment with real cooked food and a variety of ingredients.  Many parents just take the easy way out - why force Bill to eat broccoli and have a scene at the dinner table?  "Frozen pizza is so great, lets have it for dinner", again. 

So, it is absolutely no surprise to me that a big food experiment with school lunches in Los Angeles failed. (read the news story here) They changed the menus to include more vegetables and healthy food, such as new dishes such as veggie curry, jambalaya, and pad thai (Mmm...).  Now, my kids love those three things, but I don't think most kids do. Actually, I know most kids don't.  In the test program, the schools got rid of chicken nuggets, nachos, chocolate milk, and other fast food calorie-bombs.  The kids hated the change, many refused to eat the new food and just threw the food in the garbage.  Undercover food snack deliveries started, and it was just a giant flop.

I am not surprised at all.  First, these kids probably never or rarely had healthy food at home, at school, at restaurants or anywhere else.  They are brought up on the bad stuff, and their parents eat the same thing.  Unless you get the parents with you, and start this early on it will not work.  I guess the only exception are those weight-loss boot camps where there is no alternative, "either you eat this or nothing, and there is just desert around here so you better eat here".

Second, if you are in middle and high school, there is giant psychological tension at all time, and especially in the cafeteria.  Eating something weird, or not eating something, can easily turn into a trend, a thing to be teased over, or just something you don't want to deal with. Cliques of popular kids can very likely influence loads of kids not to eat something strange.

Third, in the schools, why was the left-over food thrown away?  Give it to some pigs if it is leftovers from kids' plates. Keep the pigs outside the cafeteria, and tell the kids where bacon comes from! If there are left-over food from the kitchen, pack it up and give it to soup kitchens, hungry Occupyers, disabled vets, or anybody else that needs some great, fresh food. (This idea came from VFK when we talked about this.) If the food could be thrown away like that, then they also have a bad recycling system at the schools. 

Fourth, if you really want people to change giant habits like this you to have to make it relevant to them.  It has to be personal, not imposed by Big Brother, and it has to feel like an option, not a must and something a teenager has to rebel against.  Use it as a teaching moment, without them realizing it is educational.  Have cooking classes with parents plus kids.  Do survival courses without any cooked food, with foraging from basic ingredients only.  Grow the food on the school yard, plow up all that useless grass. Make the football team dig potatoes by hand for exercise.  Keep bunnies, chickens, and pigs.  Eat weeds.  Cook cultural dishes from around the world, and cook ethnic 'fast-food' like dishes.  Spaghetti with sauce, tacos, hamburgers - these can be great and good!

If I could decide, certain foods would be outlawed, and there would be no food advertising in TV (or anywhere else) for kids under 10. And no fake infomercials either.  Everything would have 50% less sugar in it (if it had any to begin with), and no cereal would have food coloring.  Everybody would have to intern at least 2 months on a farm, in a bakery, slaughterhouse, kitchen, or something like that before they end high school, to understand where food comes from and how it is made. (Actually, interning at a hamburger patty factory might not be bad. Might turn you off hamburgers forever. )  And kids should visit farms all the time, from the time they can put their fingers in their mouths and say gaga over sheep and apples.  Chicken nuggets and other super-processed machine-made food should have giant warning labels on them, saying "NON-FOOD FACTORY PRODUCT".

In the end, I think this is of course a societal problem, but it really comes down to the parents.  If the parents don't care about food, and the food for their children, then the kids will not care. If parents give in and are laissez-faire parents (=letting any little kid decide for themselves all the time), then you get kids that are whiny, picky, irresponsible, selfish, and won't eat any anything real and interesting.  And who wants to live with such a person when they are adults?

Of course processed fast-food taste good, it is made to make us love it - it is all part of the commercial plans to sell more and to earn more money for the companies.  But you don't have to buy into it.  As a parent, stay strong, and if you slip now and then, that is OK.  I have given my kids Hungry Man TV dinners, mac and cheese from a box, Spaghettios from a can, and so on.  At the time, it was what I could handle, because of other circumstances.  But now they eat nearly everything (well, one is a vegetarian that eats fish, and neither eats beets, which is perfectly fine).

It is never too late to change, to try something new. But to dare to try, I don't think you should be in a giant high school cafeteria and be served lukewarm sticky jambalaya surrounded by other teenagers that tell you it looks like "you-know-what"...  I think this whole food movement would work better if people knew how to cook better, so maybe that is where things should start.  With a knife, a pot and a cutting board.  Maybe we should have survival courses in the kitchen.  "How to cook from scratch during 5 days without electricity and a functioning fridge", hehe... Well, we don't have to be that drastic to begin with.  How about "How to cook from ingredients that come in boxes with less than 3 ingredients listed on each box"?

(And a caveat - there are exceptions of course, but I think everybody can eat better.  Being 3 years old is no excuse to live on only 4 types of food.)

More tomato dishes

..from our overabundance of tomatoes...


Tomato, mozzarella and basil salad plate.


Tomato, avocado, mozzarella salad.



Making sundried tomatoes in the food dehydrator.

Maybe only in America....

... and maybe only in Chicago, Illinois, the home of the old, large slaughterhouses, can there be a Baconfest... and there was, last weekend.  A few weeks ago the organizers noted:

"Baconfest 2011 is totally sold out and tickets cannot be had for love or money. " 

Their manifesto is worth reading too:

"We live in one moment in a great continuum – a single fatty cross section of our lives – a straight line from birth to death, punctuated by cured meat."

I love people that do what they believe in while making many people around them happy, not poor, and not stupid.

Stamp of the Day: Gravlax

In honor of the poor trout that died from mosquitoes sucking their brain juices (see post below), here is a Swedish stamp of the making of the Swedish salmon dish 'gravlax' or 'gravad lax'.  That means 'buried salmon', and lax and loks are of course the same word.  You take two salmon fillets, with the skin on, mix a rather large amount of salt, sugar, and spices together (including dill), stuff the spice mix between the fillets and put it all in a plastic bag.  Into the fridge, turned a few times over the next few days, then take out, rinse, and cut fish into thin slices and eat!  Mmmmm....  I suggest you follow a real recipe though so you get the right amount of salt, sugar and fish, to get it really cured.  We always had this for Christmas and it was a luxury dish when I grew up, and one of my favorites.  It was served with grandma's homemade mustard-dill-sauce.  It is really easy to make this so try it.

Recipe - almond apple cake from Rosendal

My mom gave us a wonderful cookbook, The Garden Cafe at Rosendal, which is filled with recipes, photos and stories from the organic garden and cafe Rosendal on Djurgården in Stockholm.  For Valentine's Eve I made one of the recipes, Apple Cake with Almond, with some slight modifications (I didn't put shaved butter on top, like the recipe says). It was dense, luscious, and delicious. 

Ingredients (American measurements):
5 eggs (an egg is an egg in the US too!)
3/4 cups granulated sugar
1/2 cup vanilla sugar (can be bought at IKEA, if you don't have it, use confectioners sugar and two drops of vanilla extract)
5 oz almond paste (look in the baking section of the supermarket, Odense is a good brand)
2 tbsp cinnamon (we had extra strong cinnamon so I used only 1 tbsp)
1 3/4 cups white flour
4 large apples (I used 2 green and 2 bright red, organic is best, do not peel)
1/2 cup (or less) pearl sugar (can also be bought at IKEA)
5 tbsp butter (I didn't include this, too many calories... but it makes the cake more moist and fresh...)

Turn on oven to about 375 degrees F. Whisk the eggs, granulated sugar and vanilla sugar a lot so it turns into whitish foamy mix.  Grate the almond paste using a cheese grater (large hole size), and mix in separate bowl with flour and cinnamon.  Add the egg mix, mix in slowly. Cut apples in half, core them, and then slice very thinly. Take a round pan with removable sides and butter it and then add breadcrumbs, so the cake will not stick in the pan.  Add the mix, and then stick the apple pieces into the pan.  Put MANY apple pieces in.  I added them in a circular pattern that looked great, but I should have added more apples, will do next time (I will probably add the mix and the apples in horizontal layers next time too, then I can add more apples and maybe use a bit less egg and flour mix. Add the pearl sugar on top.  At the end you are supposed to shave off thin slices of the cold butter and add on top, I skipped this step.  I am sure it will be just more delicious if you add the butter.  Put in oven, takes about 40 min (check with toothpick to see if it is done).  Before and after photos below (click for larger photos on Flickr).  Mmmmm!

Memories of summer food...

To Die For, originally uploaded by Withering Dawn.

Fall is here in NJ, winter has come to Sweden, and while you are hanging out in the dark, remember that there will be fresh tomatoes with basil, black pepper and mozzarella next summer too. Photo by AREA of course, click on the photo to see more photos by her.

Bits and pieces from the internet

The stone age people ate plants, not just meat! ("Of course", is my comment to this.  What is easiest, hunt down a mammoth or dig up some cat tail roots? File this scientific paper among the ones classified as"obvious research results published in major journal due to the sexy topic". And the idea that cooking came before hunting has already been suggested by Wrangham.)

Inspiration for pumpkin carvings can be found here.

And you can check out the Fearless Dishwasher here.

Old Sweden...

From Colorado to Sweden in three days - talk about contrast. Language, flora, history, and weather is all very different, and also very different from New Jersey.  100 degrees Fahrenheit in NJ, and then 50 degrees in Sweden.   Two days ago we visited a living outdoor museum on a mountain (Torekällberget) in the city of Södertälje, south of Stockholm.  It has old historical buildings (the typical Falu red paint is on them of course), and also exhibits a living farm with heritage breeds that are endangered now. In the part that mimics a little old cobblestone town you can find real stores with craftsmen making pottery, printing (with old presses), weaving (mostly linen from flax), baking, and blacksmithing.  I bought two really nice kitchen towels, and took lots of photos, which you can see here.  Here are some:


An 200-300 year old Swedish kitchen. Note the crispbread on the poles in the ceiling, and also the two large painted boxes, those contains two beds. This building was built in 1775-1776 and was moved to this museum much later.


An old-fashioned Swedish round pole fence, made from all plant materials and no nails or strings. People still maintain these around Sweden.


I bought the green ones of these kitchen towels locally out of linen. The store is called Axlings Linne.


Swedish cinnamon buns (kanelbullar) is a really Swedish thing. At the bakery they come in many innovative varieties, not just cinnamon.

Italienska läckerheter (Italian delicious dishes)

The last couple of weeks we have been cooking a lot from three cookbooks by famous chef Mario Batali - Simple Italian Food, Molto Gusto, and Italian Grill, all fantastic and mouth-watering cookbooks with easy recipes of Italian food that is not the usual lasagna, spaghetti with meat sauce and pizza, but more authentic, more tasty, and more real. And more vegetables.  Lots of them. The difference between Mario and many other famous chefs is that you feel that he really cares, and he really LOVES this food.  It is not some gimmick to sell more cookbooks or gadgets branded with your name. So we have been cooking away, and it has all been delicious.  Above - grilled baby octopus salad (you marinated the octopusses in oil and lemon juice and scallion, grill them and then throw them back in the marinade and eat). It is like eating tender sea rubber bands in a very good way. (Click on any photo to see a larger version)


Steamed globe artichokes, more dense and less prickly than regular artichokes.  You cut the top of the artichoke and put it in a steamer pot for about 40 min, and make sure to add some cut up lemon, black peppercorns, salt, and herbs (tarragon, thyme... whatever) to the steam water before you start.  Serve as is, with garlic aioli as dipping sauce and you will be in heaven. Take a bract (yes, that is what they are), dip in sauce, rip off the inner fleshy layer with your front teeth, and discard the rest of the bract in the 'dead soldier bowl' on the table. Repeat. Repeat.



A new take on eggplant - slice them thin, thin, then grill them and roll them up with goat cheese and pesto inside, put them on top of some home made tomato sauce and eat, eat, eat.

Spaghetti a new wonderful way.  Make a broccoli rabe pesto, and mix it into spaghetti.  Absolutely delicious.

More cabbage related plants.  Broccolini, like broccoli but not as mutated, cooked for 5 min and then dressed with orange-garlic dressing.  Scrumptious!  Now there is a word that sounds like it describes dried sheep's testicles, but it really means something really, really good.

Grilled halibut with broccoli rabe with grated cheese in the background.  The halibut is a giant flat fish, like an overgrown flounder, with fantastic white flesh.  It lives its whole life sideways (and if you haven't seen the movie Sideways, do it, and it has nothing to do with halibut). On top of the halibut is a herb sauce, just olive oil, lemon juice and herbs.  Did I mention simplicity? Below is a plate of broccoli with "whipped parmesan".  A new favorite.






Bean salad with asparagus, really, really good and so healthy and green.  Very good.

And now for something different.  Make homemade pizza dough, roll it out in little pieces and fill them, make flat and grill on the hottest part of the grill. We used a variety of fillings, leftover goat cheese mixed with basil pesto, caramelized onions, Kalamata olives, and rosemary leaves.  A giant hit, especially with the younger crowd at the dinner table. The name - grilled flatbreads.

If you want any of the recipes, put a note in the comments or e-mail me.

And while eating on the deck, the giant Citronella candles are burning to keep bark beetles (yes!), mosquitos and other buggers away, and it works. When it gets dark the fire flies are starting their stroboscope symphony, blinking away and competing with the stars...

And I agree with Mario: 

"Once you've put your groceries in the car, the quality of your dinner has already been decided."

Good food doesn't have to be expensive, but it takes some thinking, long before you turn on the stove.

Mastering art, cooking, and life...

This is two book reviews, a movie review and a cookbook review all in one post. A few nights ago we watched the movie Julie & Julia, which is based on Julia Child's life. Julia Child died a few years ago, but she was the person that popularized French cooking in home kitchens in America in the 1960s and onwards. She had a TV show, very barebones and very loved, and a personality that I would call 'sprudlande' in Swedish. I don't know how to translate that - maybe like an overjoyed fountain. She LOVED food. In France she went to cooking school, and went from someone that like to eat to someone that could make food you fall in love with. I imagine this at least, since I never tasted anything she cooked... I can't think of any Swedish chef that is as famous in Sweden as Julia Child is in the US.

Mixed in with the story in the movie Julie & Julia is another story about (and by) Julie Powell in post-9/11 New York, who in 2002 decides to start a blog called Julie/Julia Project (nearly the same title as the movie, and nearly the same title as the book published from the blog) about her attempt to cook all recipes in Julia Child's cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking (hereafter MAFC) in one year. That is 524 recipes. She succeeds, but not without lots of marriage and cooking troubles, some that are shown in the movie. Her current blog is here. (Julia Child didn't like the blog project either.)

I have read the blog book by Powell and her original blog, the biography My Life in France about Julia Child's years there in the 1950s, and now seen the movie. But I had never cooked anything out of the classic MAFC cookbook until yesterday when I took PP's mom's copy from 1967 [good vintage] out of the bookshelf and looked up French Onion Soup, which is what we then had for dinner. The soup was great. The recipe was supereasy. But the best part of the cookbook (from the two parts I read) is the foreword. It is wonderfully and uniquely written. Here are some examples (but get your hands on a copy and read the whole thing! and remember this was written in 1961):

This is a book for the servantless American cook who can be unconcerned on occasion with budgets, waistlines, time schedules, children's meals, the parent-chauffeur-den-mother syndrome, or anything else which might interfere with the enjoyment of producing something wonderful to eat. Cooking is not a particularly difficult art, and the more you cook and learn about cooking, the more sense it makes. But like any art it requires practice and experience. The most important ingredient you can bring to it is love of cooking for its own sake.

So here are my reviews:

The cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking: Based on the Foreword and one French Onion Soup recipe, this is a wonderful book. I want to tackle the deboning of a whole duck at some point, but maybe I should start with something simpler first, like roasted duck with orange sauce on page 276. [grade A]







The book, My Life in France: I could have sworn I had reviewed this wonderful biography here in the blog but I am glad I didn't swear on it, because it appears I never did. This is a great book, based on letters and stories. I loved it, and many scenes from this book make it into the movie. You don't have to be a food freak to love this book. It also wonderfully describes the very loving marriage between Paul and Julia Child. [grade A+]





The book, Julie & Julia: This book was also not reviewed on the blog, and I know exactly why. I read the book (which is based on her blog), but I didn't like it too much. A 20-ish woman blogs and whines about everyday life and miseries and successes in her tiny kitchen. The attitude was so different from Julia's attitude to life. I have sympathy, it is just that I didn't think it was great literature or very interesting. (Sorry Julie, if you are reading this... but I don't like swear words in print.] Her husband at the time must have been a very patient and understanding person (and is a great character in the movie). I actually didn't keep the book, I gave it away and I remember forcing my way through some pages. But it lead to something good, the movie... [grade C]

The movie, Julie & Julia: Meryl Streep plays Julia Child and is the best I have ever seen her. Incredible. Just see the movie to see her! Julia's husband Paul, is a wonderful person and done by a great actor. The actress that plays Julie Powell, the blogger, got criticized for being 'too nasty and grumpy' in the movie, but they actually toned her down compared with the book. There are many other great actors as well, so the acting is outstanding. Nora Ephron (Sleepless in Seattle, remember that one?), was the director and she is also a former food journalist, and also had part in meshing the two stories together in the script. It works OK, but not great, to move back and forth between France in the 1950s and New York in 2002, and when you are in the New York scenes you just want to get back to France. But I would say New York is rather accurately depicted, after living there myself. The food looks amazing in the movie, it is nearly so you can smell it.

After seeing the movie, I slept bad the night after and woke up repeatedly with yummy images of giant whisks with whipped cream, tarte tatin, and sole in lemon butter... mmmmmm... However, some parts of the movie story made no sense, and were disconnected from the rest of the story, such as the government 'are you a communist'-interview in Washington DC of Paul Child, and the wedding of Julia Child's sister. But overall, it is a great movie, and the married men of both couples are wonderful, wonderful husbands. There is a lot of love in the movie, and not just love of food. Nora Ephron manage to show life and love and the art of living and cooking all at once. So rent it, it is gorgeous.

Grade A for the movie, would have been A+ if not for the lobsters that had to be put in misty cold water (looking like hot water) and "off camera representatives from the American Humane Association monitored the creatures’ health" - come on, guys, there is death and dying of seafood in every restaurant, why does this matter in a movie?! And to all you vegetarians, did you know that plants scream when we cut and cook them too? We just can't hear them. I am all for humane treatments of animals, but not being allowed to throw a lobster in boiling water in a movie is a bit too much. These people should worry more about pink slime in hamburgers. New York Times review here

Real Julia Child (left) and Meryl Streep as Julia Child (right).

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!

Very good food and very good food things...

Yesterday a very smelly package arrived in the mail - a Tennessee Smoked Ham from Benton's Smoky Mountain Country Hams, a small company that is recreating the old-fashioned smoked hams without any modern additives. Our ham was 14 months old and weighed about 15 pounds (that is about 7 kilo for us Swedes, so like a 1-year old or so). Heavy! But the smell. Close your eyes (oh well, you are reading, but imagining that you are closing your eyes and open your nostrils). Breath in - suddenly you are in a old smoky log cabin with bacon cooking on the stove, and the smoky smell is not that kind of annoying smoky flavor when you put wet spruce branches on a little fire in the winter and the smoke burns your eyes, but long-slow good smoke from a burning wood that has penetrated everylittle pore in the log walls of the house. You can't buy anything even remotely similar to this in any store around here. We haven't tasted our ham yet, since it is for Christmas Eve dinner ('julskinka' for 'julbordet'), but I am sure it will be heavenly. Thank you Benton's!

The day before Lucia (Dec 13) I made saffron buns ('lussekatter'), typical for Lucia in Sweden. They turned out great!

The beginning of a braised beef dinner from oxtail and short rib pieces, from our local supplier down the street. We bought a quarter of a calf that had fattening himself up over the summer here in the Sourlands, so now we have about 120 lbs (55 kilo) of grassfed, organic lean beef in our freezer for the rest of the year. And it is cheap to buy it this way. And yummy. Tomorrow we are making Cajun-style meatloaf from some of the ground meat.




I have tried to make Tarte Tatin (an upside down French apple cake) three times now, and everytime the apples stick to the pan at the very end. But it tastes great. Here is the beginning, when you slow-cook apples with butter and sugar for hours so they caramelized. Later you put dough on top, cook it in the oven, and then turn it upside down after it has cooled a bit.




One of my most favorite things in our kitchen is the superduper out-foldable pantry PP custom-built. It looks like two doors, but when you open you have shelves on the doors and inside, and the inside shelves fold out too. You can see every little can, pasta box and pepper jar, and all the spices are accessible and just right there when you need them. It is amazing how much food you can store at a little space with this. It is mouse proof too.