Two lovely hotels... on either side of the Atlantic pond

I have two hotels that are my absolute favorites, and they are both alike and so dissimilar that you wonder what do these really have in common.  Neither is cheap, so save up first for a fantastic experience. So, on to the reviews and reminiscences:

The first is Sigtuna Stads Hotell in Sweden,just northwest of Stockholm, where I stayed maybe 10 years ago with PP.  It is a hotel from 1909 that has been immaculately renovated, cared for, and preserved while being updated to modern standards.  It mixes old white and unpainted wood with modern chrome and clean lines.  It is a blessing for tired eyes, and tired bodies.
      It also helps that they have the best Swedish breakfast buffet I have had in a long time.  It really impressed my husband-to-be at the time, he still talks about it. Take a visitor here from another country and they will really 'get' what Swedish breakfast is about.  Hardboiled eggs, many kinds of cold cuts, cheeses, Kalles kaviar, musli, yoghurt (several kinds), homebaked bread, real butter, jams, and on and on.  It might be changed now but I doubt it.
     Their dinners are also amazing, and all based on local, sustainable food. I have no memory of what we ate for dinner only that it was exuberant, memorable, and plainly amazing.  You sit in the old dining room and look out over Lake Mälaren, not far from the island Björkö that was one of the first Viking cities and trading places (named Birka by the vikings). In these areas history goes deep, as does the sense of nature and responsibility.
     The early 1900s components melds here effortlessly with 1950s,. 1960s, and 2010s both in design and food traditions. (Note how I left out 1970s and 1980s?  That was totally on purpose.)  I love this place and want to go back. (More photos via Google of this hotel here.  Worth googling and oogling and longing for. )


(Images borrowed from Sigtuna Stads Hotell website)


The second place is a recent discovery - Hotel Vermont, in the city of Burlington in the state of Vermont in the United States of America. Burlington sits on the eastern shore on Lake Champlain, and on the other side of the large lake is the Adirondack Mountains, blue shades in the distance on a clear day.

(Images borrowed from Hotel Vermont's website)
 Hotel Vermont is only a year or two old, so brand-new really and they have incorporated sustainable, beautiful and functional design throughout.  As much as possible they try to promote local food, local artists, and local artisans.  The soap is made locally, the mugs are from a local pottery, the artwork is local, and even if the glasses with cows on them are Italian, they are imported and sold locally in Bennington.  We know because we bought the same glasses in Vermont a few years ago, and I think they are gorgeous.
 
(Images borrowed from Hotel Vermont's website)

The artwork behind the check-in desk in the lobby, a large wooden collage of reclaimed wood, has a very special story.  It was designed and constructed by Duncan Johnson by wooden pieces from destroyed houses after hurricane Irene which destroyed large parts of Vermont villages in 2011 through massive, and I mean MASSIVE, flooding.  Hundred-year-old covered bridges were washed away, people were disconnected from the world by non-existent roads for weeks, and houses filled with mud and water and fell apart. Hurricanes don't always have the worst effect along the coast, which Irene showed.
 
 (Images borrowed from Hotel Vermont's website)

But back to the hotel - our room had understated art, a very smart bathroom solution where one person can have privacy on the toilet and the other can take a shower - all arranged through frosted sliding glass doors.  There is free sparkling and mineral water in the hallways (which are very quiet!), as well as many kinds of coffee and tea.  The bed, oh the bed.  It is alike a dream sleeping in that bed.  Just perfectly soft.  Amazing pillows too.  A hotel with bad mattresses kills a good visit.  (OK, worst mattresses ever?  OTS research station in Palo Verde, Costa Rica, takes the price.  Then there is a big gap, and unfortunately Hotel Latchis in Brattleboro comes in second.  If they changed their mattresses their hotel would suddenly get 4 stars in my book - I love that art deco hotel but the hard old mattresses are killing me...).  Someone at Hotel Vermont really cares about sleep quality. Thank you!
 
(Images borrowed from Hotel Vermont's website)

The breakfast is served at Juniper, a small restaurant near the well-designed bar, which in itself is a great treat.  Many local beers and other liquids there too (at the bar).  Back to breakfast, which was amazing and not too expensive.  Mushroom ragout on homebaked bread with a soft-poached egg on top, and I was in heaven.  PP had grits with a sunny-side up egg and young pea shoots, and he was in heaven too.
    A few days earlier we had paid $11 for breakfast at an inn in southern Vermont, for food that was about 5% of the value and experience of this food (moldy, uncooked, tasteless), and this food was not much more expensive.  How can that be?  "Could it be a whistlepig?" [That latter quote is a somewhat internal Vermont story, which involve groundhogs, a bike, and Whistlepig whisky, and now is a family quote here at home. Sorry, couldn't help myself. ]

(Images borrowed from Hotel Vermont's website)

So, we stayed at this hotel and I failed to take any photos.  How is that possible?  I don't know. Whistlepig, maybe? :)  Actually, I didn't have any whisky, but I did have an amazing elderflower drink.  Vermont knows their elderflowers, it goes in their lemonade, beer, and even rum.

(For the record, all reviews on this blog are voluntary, and do not include ANY kind of marketing or money from any commercial companies.  It is just my own personal opinions of places where I have paid to eat, sleep, walk, think, shower, and be for a little while. Just so we are clear on that. If I win a million dollars on a lottery someday, you'll find me at either of these hotels for a little while :)   )

Poem by Candace Black: Mr. D Shops At Fausto’s Food Palace

This poem really brings back the previous times when locavore food (locally sourced food) was the normal. Can't you just imagine the fish counter in this little store after reading this?

__________________________________

American Life in Poetry: Column 356

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

Nothing brings a poem to life more quickly than the sense of smell, and Candace Black, who lives in Minnesota, gets hold of us immediately, in this poem about change, by putting us next to a dumpster.

Mr. D Shops At Fausto’s Food Palace

For years he lived close enough to smell

chicken and bananas rotting

in the trash bins, to surprise a cashier on break

smoking something suspicious when he walked

out the back gate. Did they have an account?

He can’t remember. Probably so, for all the milk

a large family went through, the last-minute

ingredients delivered by a smirking bag boy.

He liked to go himself, the parking lot’s

radiant heat erased once he got past the sweating

glass door, to troll the icy aisles in his slippers.

This was before high-end labels took over

shelf space, before baloney changed

its name to mortadella, before water

came in flavors, before fish

got flown in from somewhere else.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2010 by Candace Black, from her most recent book of poetry, Casa Marina, RopeWalk Press, 2010. Reprinted by permission of Candace Black and the publisher. Introduction copyright ©2012 by The Poetry Foundation.

Reposted here with permission.

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.

Book review: The Feast Nearby

The full title of this book by Robin Mather is "The Feast Nearby: How I lost my job, buried a marriage, and found my way by keeping chickens, foraging, preserving, bartering, and eating locally (all on $40 a week)". This is the truth.  I didn't make that up.  Being into books about canning, local food, and reinventing your life recently, this book called out to me from the Amazon.com website, and its 5-star reviews must mean that it is actually a great book, right?  So I ordered it.

Well, it wasn't what I expected. Not at all.  I feel kind of bad writing this review, because I bet Robin Mather is a very nice person in person, but her book fell flat.  There are a lot of books out there right now about back-to-the-soil, back-to-the-rural, or just plain back-to-the-kitchen and I wonder if she just thought she could ride the wave.  After all, the author had been a food journalist over many years so she could write.


I actually believed that the book would be about "How I lost my job, buried a marriage, and found my way by keeping chickens, foraging, preserving, bartering, and eating locally (all on $40 a week)".  In smaller print on the cover it also says "essays and recipes".  Here is the first revelation - half the book are recipes. Long, winding recipes.  If I want a cookbook I buy a cookbook.  If I want an autobiography I buy that.  I am not sure what to do with this hybrid book.  It won't be among the cookbooks, and if it is among the novels, then I will never find the recipes. And there is no list of the recipes in the book. There is an index, but that covers everything, not just the recipes. I am sure some of the recipes are very tasty, but they were used to fill up a thin book into a thicker one. 


What I wanted to read about was how she lost her job, how she overcome her sadness over the marriage that was gone, and how she only had $40/week to live on and budget with.  But the book lacks depth and details about these things.  Nowhere is there a budget.  Her marriage is just mentioned in the beginning as a side issue, something that forced her to move to a little cottage.  It is not really a book about moving to a new place - she already knew a lot of the suppliers and had friends in the area.  In fact, it often reads like a marketing piece for her friends that provide local food.  (Which is not bad, but not what I want to pay for.)  

And the foraging and bartering is minimal, honestly.  We are not talking about someone that picks 20 kinds of weeds and make a salad out of it because she has nothing else to eat. She is not growing any of her own food (despite the cover picture, which is not of her or her carrots). For example, how could she buy that expensive coffee and still be under $40/week?  There are other things that I wonder about - didn't she get unemployment insurance after she was laid off?  That would be more than $160/month for food I would think...  I just wonder, especially since she never clarifies her economic circumstances.  At one point she needs to earn money to pay for fuel oil, so she then freelances a few weeks and then gets the money, so why couldn't she do more of that at other times.  I just don't feel like we are given the whole picture. This might be because of privacy reasons, but if you hold back on those things, you can't have such a subtitle on a book.


Part of the book is rambling, preaching arguments about the bad food industry, the goodness of local food, the great thing about having chickens, and details about her pets.  Barbara Kingsolver has written so much better about the first themes (and Michael Pollan too, even if he is too rambling and fact-and number-crazy as well), that it feels old in this book.  We have heard this before.  

It would have been so much more interesting to read about the author's own feelings, fears, frustrations, happiness, and experiences, instead of reading another 'eat-local-it-is-good' book.  I believe in eating local and fresh food too, but I don't want to be preached and lectured to. Why spend so much time on explaining UHT pasteurization, CAFO animal farms, and coffee roasting facts?  I just didn't find her writing interesting.  It was well-written, factually accurate, but boring.  Why is each chapter focused on mostly one ingredient? Wasn't this to be about her life, not food ingredients? Why is half the book recipes?  It honestly feels a bit like a copycat of Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle book, but not even half as good. Sorry, I might be harsh, but at least I am honest. 


Instead of this book, I suggest you read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver (about local food), or The Dirty Life by Kristin Kimball (about growing your own food and starting a farm), or American Terroir by Rowan Jacobsen (about food ingredients).  All of these three books are fun, fascinating, and great entertainment and education at once.  


Now, there is some good things about this book too.  The book is exceptionally well designed and printed with nice font choices and paper.  But I still can't recommend it for reading.  I know I might be in the minority on this, but I think that with the limited time we have in the world, it is best to stick to books that are fun to read. This books get a C+, sorry.

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.

Blue gold

American blueberries, originally uploaded by Vilseskogen.

Just a photo from our blueberry picking in July, when we picked (in a cultivated field, not wild) 15 kg blueberries in 1.5 hours. Of course these are the giant American species, not the small wild ones from Maine and Sweden, but still, they taste great.

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."