A wonderful meatball dinner

meatball dinner, originally uploaded by Vilseskogen.

Some dinners are just simply amazing and simple.  Tonight my husband (PP) made these giant meatballs (from local beef from Jane et al and local lamb from Harry & M). He cooked them in olive oil and served them with some pasta, my homemade tomato sauce from last summer, and cooked broccoli rabe with cannelini beans on the side.  It was incredibly delicious.  Wow, those meatballs were to die for.  I wish all of you friends and family could have been here to share this meal with us.  And thanks Jane and Harry for excellent meat.

As per request: Homemade pizza recipe

We have a Friday night tradition since the last couple of years - homemade thin-crust pizza.  After maybe 100 times of making pizza dough, tomato sauce and toppings, I think we have it down to near perfection now.  So, dear readers, as per request from several of you, here are the instructions.

Our dough was initially based on this recipe by Barbara Kingsolver, but we have modified it slightly.  Look for the heading for the part of the recipe you need.

TOOLS
As for tools, we use a KitchenAid mixer to mix the dough (optional), a rolling pin (just regular wood), and a ceramic pizza stone (you can use a regular cookie sheet, but a stone makes a big difference if you are going to make pizza often).
Our stone is as large as possible and round, and so light that you can lift it in and out of the oven easily.  I wouldn't recommend those superthick real stones. I can see a lot of crushed toes and achy backs from using those in a regular kitchen. Our stone is made of ceramics, very durable, started out as white but is now black (which is normal), and less than 1/2 inch (1 cm thick).  It is very easy to lift the stone out of the oven with the pizza on it, so no need to fiddle with wooden paddles or peels and other things you don't really need. Just get a thin stone and use your regular tools to lift the pizza over to a serving plate or serve it on the stone. And of course you can bake bread on the stone of you like too.
A pizza slicer is good, but think about what is below the pizza.  Soft aluminum might get scratched, and I don't really know if you can use it directly on the stone (we use heavy-duty scissors to cut our pizza mostly).

The recipe below makes 4 wonderful 16-inch pizzas (30 cm).

PIZZA DOUGH (partly whole-wheat, healthier style)

Time (active): 10 min.   Time (waiting): 2-10 hours.

Ingredients:

• 1.5 cups of hot water (not boiling, about 42 degrees C, so varm but not superhot - I just use it out of the hot water faucet)
• 1 package of dry yeast
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 1 tablespoon dried basil or other Italian herbs
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 tsp ground flaxseed (totally optional, just adds fiber)
• 1.5 cups whole wheat flour
• 2+ cups white flour (organic bread flour is good, but any regular all-purpose flour is OK)

Environment:  Yeast is a living organism and it lives and works best when the temperature is not too hot or too cold (about 68-80 degrees F, 20-25 degrees C).  During the winter, since we have a kitchen that is colder than 68 degrees F, I help the yeast along by warming the dough bowl first in hot water, and then by putting in the finished dough into a slightly preheated oven.  I turn on the oven at 100 degrees F, then turn it off and put in the dough in its bowl.  You never want to put the dough in the oven if the heat is on, then you cook it, you just give it a little extra warmth and less cold drafts.

Time: Most often I just make the dough in the morning, leave it out on the counter the whole day (8-10 hours), and when I come home for dinner the dough has risen and is ready.  You can of course make the dough 2-3 hours before you want to make the pizza, that is fine too, but then you might have to put the dough in a slightly warmer place than we do.

Using a standing mixer or not: This is totally up to you.  If you don't use a mixer, just mix by hand and knead the dough very thoroughly.  No clumps here.

Making the dough:

1. Put the hot water in the bowl. Add the dry yeast. Let sit a minute or two.
2. Add olive oil, salt, and dried herbs. (And flaxseed if you use it). Mix thoroughly.
3. Add 1.5 cups of whole-wheat flour.  Mix thoroughly.
4. Add white flour 0.5 cup at the time and mix in-between.  How much you need to add depends on how dense your flour is.  So go slowly and add enough so that the dough becomes soft and slightly sticky, not dense and not sticky at all (=too much).  You should be able to lift up the dough in one ball without it falling apart, and the dough should not stick to the wall, but it should still be slightly sticky.  Most often I add about 2 cups of white flour, sometimes slightly more, sometimes slightly less.  
5. Let the dough sit in peace in the bowl under some plastic wrap and or kitchen towel for a few hours (up to 10 hours is OK).  Don't put it in the fridge.  The dough will double in size, so make sure your bowl is big enough.  Some people spray or coat the dough with olive oil, I put plastic wrap over the bowl instead to avoid it drying out during the day.

TOMATO SAUCE (homemade from canned tomatoes)

Time: 1 hour

We like chopped or strained, fire-roasted, San Marzano, plum or any other kind of Italian tomatoes for our sauce. Pomi is a good brand.  Watch out for canned tomatoes with a lot of salt or other things added to them - you just want plain tomatoes (with none or a little salt). Fresh tomatoes in the summer are wonderful, but need to cook down a bit, since they are quite watery, so add cooking time then.  Don't even try making this from flavor-less tomatoes from the store in the winter, then just use canned tomatoes.  Your own sauce will be better than store-bought pizza sauce, but if you don't have time, buy a good brand of good sauce without funny things in it. 

Ingredients:

• 1 large can of tomatoes (28 oz or so, or use two small cans)
• 3-6 cloves of garlic
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• fresh basil (chopped, as much as you like)
• black pepper
• salt (maybe)

How to make the sauce:

1. Chop up the garlic into tiny pieces.
2. Add the olive oil to a pot, heat it up a bit, and then add the garlic.  Stir and let the garlic become yellow (not brown!), and then add the tomatoes.  
3. Let it all simmer on low temperature for a long time (the longer the better), but don't let the sauce become so thick it burns at the bottom, then just turn it off.  You start out with a thinner sauce and the simmering will make it thicker.  
4. After simmering for a while, add cut up fresh basil leaves and black pepper, to taste.
5. When the sauce is done, check if you need to add some salt. It all depends on how much salt was in the canned tomatoes.

Hints:  If you use chopped tomatoes, then your sauce will be chunky.  If you don't like that, run an immersion blender or use some other tool to smooth the tomatoes first (blender, etc.).  If your sauce is too runny, just let it cook longer. 




TOPPINGS

All our pizzas have some kind of cheese on them, and this layer is added last, on top.  Mostly it is grated mozzarella, sometimes parmesan, and sometimes ricotta or goat cheese.  We never use other kind of 'regular' cheeses, like cheddar, jarlsberg, etc.  They just don't act the same good way on top of a pizza and are only emergency-cheeses.
For all ingredients (except the sauce), try to make them as dry as possible.  Remove wetness by draining them or blog away fat with paper towels.

• Italian sausage, hot or mild.  Cook this in a frying pan before adding to the pizza (this also gets rid of a lot of fat). (Swedes: this is NOT hot dogs.  This is ground up meat sold as fresh sausage, uncooked.  If you want to imitate this in Sweden, buy ground meat, add lots of spices and herbs, and then fry it up so the meat is  all in little chunks).
• Pepperoni sausage or chorizo (cut up, not cooked)
• Thin-sliced onion, raw, or cooked so it caramelizes
• Thin-sliced mushrooms, fresh (we NEVER use canned)
• Fresh basil
• Fresh green or red peppers, thinly sliced
• Roasted red peppers, canned, drained and dried on paper towels
• Olives, pitted and cut in half, drained. (Black olives are best)
• Artichoke hearts, canned, cut in half and drained
• Shrimp, thawed and shelled, dry on paper towels (you cook these on top of the pizza, so you add them raw to the pizza)
• Anchovy, drained on paper towels
• Very thinly sliced eggplant
• Arugula leaves, fresh (to add at the end)
• Spinach, cooked, or fresh spinach (which can be watery)
• Tomatoes, fresh from the garden in summer, great, but watery :)
• Asparagus, fresh or slightly cooked

Let your fantasy go wild, there are many more options here. 

Here are some of our favorite combinations (all have tomato sauce):

• Margarita:  tomato sauce, basil, and mozzarella.
• Prosciutto special:  Bake a pizza with tomato sauce, basil and mozzarella. When 2 min are left on the baking time, take out the pizza and add large thin slices of prosciutto over it, and a little parmesan.  Then back into the oven for a minute, then take out and add fresh small arugula over it. 
• Mushroom, sausage and onion:  This is just what it is called.  Yum!
• Anchovy and onion heaven:  Add lots of sliced raw onion and then anchovy and parmesan plus mozzarella. 
• SAR combination:  Shrimp, artichoke and roasted red pepper. 
• Burger pizza:  Instead of sausage, cook burger meat and add to pizza with some onion.  Then the pizza is cooked, add fresh, chopped lettuce on top.  Eat. Good. Food.

MAKING THE PIZZA AND COOKING IT
(Start this at least an hour before you want to eat.)

1. Put the pizza stone in the oven.  It needs to be put into a cold oven, not hot (this is important!), and needs to heat up for at least 30 min.  (Skip this step if you don't use a stone)
2. Turn the oven to highest temperature (450 F for us).  [This is why you should NOT use baking paper for pizza.  It might ignite at these high temperatures). We have a convection oven, if you don't, just use the regular setting for overall heat.
3. On a large clean surface, add some white flour and put the dough on top of it.  If the dough is very loose, you can knead in some more flour now, but usually you don't have too.  It depends if it sticks or not.  Cut the raised dough ball into 4 pieces, and put three pieces aside.  Take one of the balls and roll it out into a round area with a rolling pin, use flour underneath and flip it over now and then so it doesn't stick.  When the size is right, stop. The dough is thin, this makes thin-crust pizza (so, much less carbs than thick crust pizza.)
4.  When the oven is hot and the stone has warmed up, take the stone out of the oven. It will be very hot.  Put the rolled out dough on the stone, let it sit for 2-3 min to cook on the lower side, then flip it over with two spatulas so the other side can cook a little.  Add tomato sauce and all the toppings.
5. (Note for people that don't use baking stones.  Add your dough to a floured cookie sheet, and cook the dough by itself in the oven for 5 min or so, than take the dough out and add the toppings, and then back in the oven.)
6. Put the pizza in the oven, cook it for 8-12 min (this depends on your toppings and your oven).  You want the edge to be a little brown and the cheese to have started to brown on top.  If your pizza is done but still very wet and saucy, that is probably because you used very wet ingredients (shrimp, fresh mozzarella, fresh peppers, etc.).  Don't worry about it, just eat it with fork and knife. 
7. Take the pizza out, slice and eat. Enjoy!
8. If you want to make more pizzas (you have 3 doughballs left!), just remove the pizza you made from the stone, put the stone back in the oven to reheat for 5 min, and make one more.  We eat and make 3-4 pizzas every Friday night and make them as we go along, since they only need to cook for such a short time.  

What about leftover pizza slices?   Save for next day lunch or freeze. We put baking paper between our slices so they don't stick together.

You can freeze the dough, just put it in a plastic bag and seal.  To use frozen dough, remove from freezer, thaw at room temperature or slightly above in a bowl with some flour.  Remember that the frozen dough has already risen, so it will not get bigger than the piece you have.  So roll it out, and make the pizza bottoms as usual.  I find that fresh dough is better, because it is slightly fluffier when you bake it, but frozen is OK too.

The dough is also perfect for flatbreads, pierogies, and other small pockets of food. 

RESULT


 

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]

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.

Tomatoes! Hundreds! What to do?

Warning, this is a very RED post. 


Last week at our pickup of the weekly ration of vegetables and herbs from our CSA (Griggstown Quail Farm and Market, thank you!), we were allowed to take unlimited amounts of tomatoes.  Nice, red, big, firm, juicy tomatoes, rather enormous and perfectly fine.  So, LA and I packed up two giant boxes of about 20 lbs (c. 10 kg) each.  We also had plum tomatoes Roma and San Marzano) at home from our own garden, about 15 lbs, and some heirloom tomatoes for slicing in salads, and 5 liters of small plum tomatoes from the CSA.  So what do to with so many tomatoes?  Well, this is what we did (and we still have tomatoes left).


For good spaghetti sauce, you take your tomatoes...


Cut a cross in the end with the stalk and throw them in boiling water for 2 min, then dump them in ice water...


...so you can peel them easily and remove the seeds.  (This is not an absolutely necessary step, but if you do this then you don't have to run the sauce in a blender to get rid of skins, and all the liquid that is around the seeds don't need to be reduced down to get a thicker sauce.)


Boil sauce.


Boil sauce more. Hours. Add herbs.


Can. Result: 5 liters (10 jars of 2 cups each) of vegetarian spaghetti sauce, from peeled and seeded beefsteak tomatoes, canned and sterilized so it can be stored at room temperature.


We also cooked 3 liters of seeded and peeled Roma and San Marzano tomatoes for canning (which failed, the large jars didn't seal, so we froze this instead).


We also made pizza sauce from fresh cut up tomatoes with fresh basil for our Friday night pizza.  Yummy.


Putting sliced fresh tomatoes on pizza instead of sauce.  Next time, put the tomatoes on top of the cheese, or the pizza will be too soggy.  But it tasted fantastic.

We also had tomato salads, made sundried tomatoes in the dehydrator (hint, it takes longer than normal if you do it on the rainiest day in 100 years!), made grilled sandwiches with tomatoes and cheese, made tomato soup... and we still have more tomatoes to go, and will get more on Thursday. What a treat!  And these tomatoes taste so good, not like the store-bought long-distance ones that taste nothing or wrong.

A day has gone...

and when I summon up the activities it´s been a good day with a few mishaps.

First, in the morning, overslept and had to reschedule. Well, not really a problem. A tour to town in the morning.
Back at home again, apple picking and plum picking, and a few cherries too. A nice moment between rain and thunder, which continued and created large waterfalls from the rain drains.

Me and the kids decided it was a good day for cooking and baking. Sugar pretzels was their choice. I did plum and cherry marmalade (with port wine). A few pretzels and some lunch and then off to the dentist for one in the family. On the way to town there where large water pools and streams in the road. Kids laughing happily when the water sprayed high around the car. The thunderstorm continued.

Back home and a "fika", getting stuff and off to the cinema, Cars 2 in 3D. Gets highest grade from the kids and an OK movie for me. But you can see the game scenes in the movie. I particularly like the "007 Bond" character. Great secret agent theme!
If you liked Cars, you will probably like this.
On the way there I had to change a tire on the car, almost flat!! And after that I backed my car into another car! The number plate fell off from the car front. Stupid me! At least the woman was nice especially considering it was my fault completely.

Some planning for the weekend, and then back home to end the day with a sip of whisky, "dubbelträ" or doublewood , a 2 cask matured whisky from Scotland.

Great day despite the mishaps. How was your day?

Really good things from our kitchen

Homemade cherry pie and a cappuccino, originally uploaded by Vilseskogen.

My very first homemade cherry pie came delicious! And nect to it, AREA's cappucino in her handmade cappucino mug, ready to be swept into her mouth. Nice things, indeed.

pizza landscape

pizza landscape, originally uploaded by Vilseskogen.

Edible gourmetic formations.

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").

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!

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!

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.

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.