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Archive for the ‘Food’ Category

I think Linus and I should get married again, so we can have one of these wedding cakes:

Drool

Yes, it’s a cheese wedding cake.  Yes, I want one for lunch.

We’ve been lucky enough to discover a patch of chanterelle mushrooms, quite close to home.

So today we foraged up this harvest, to go with some meatballs for dinner.

Here in Sweden, chanterelle harvesting spots are a closely guarded secret, so obviously I can’t tell you where we found them.  But just look at their golden loveliness:

Remember all those carrots?

About 9kg of carrot "thinnings"

We peeled, chopped, blanched and froze a couple of kilos last night, and I also decided to try out this recipe for carrot bread.  And it’s a winner!

Carrot bread

Such a winner in fact that I have made more carrot puree and stashed it in the freezer, so I can make some more loaves.  I left out the peanuts, and used dinkel (spelt) flour and it has turned out fluffy and moist.  It’s not super carroty in flavour, and works with both sweet and savoury.   I did mine in a large loaf tin instead of two flat shaped loaves (since we tend to eat a lot of our bread toasted, this shape just works out better).

We went out for a foraging walk in the weekend, around our neighbourhood, and came home with 1.25k of ripe blackberries which I promptly made into another batch of jam.

Wild blackberry jam

We also found a patch of chanterelle mushrooms in one of our nearby bits of forest, which we brought home and fried for our lunch.

I harvested most of our beans, since they are so productive that we can’t keep up with eating them all. So I picked 1.2kg and chopped, blanched and froze them.

1.2kg of green beans

Then we did a big carrot harvest.  We’ve been eating our carrots for a while, but they were getting so bushy that they were smothering the onions they are intercropped with.  So, we did a little “thinning”.

About 9kg of carrot thinnings

Now we have to do something with them all …

And finally on Sunday we were invited to pick black currants at L’s mum’s house.  I didn’t photograph or weigh them, but we guess there was about 4kg of currants.  Some have been made into cordial, some are dehydrating, and some are in the fridge, waiting patiently to be made into jam.

I did some weeding between the remaining veges, and they were looking lovely, so I took a snap.

Happy veges

You can see our parsnips and leeks in the foreground, and possibly make out some kale, celery, one lonely broccoli and one lonely red cabbage in the background.

In the spring we adopted a bunch of jeruslem artichoke plants from Linus’s mum, and planted them just next to the deck. Since then, they’ve been pretty much left alone, apart from some (not very successful) attempts to stop the slugs from eating them. They survived, and thrived, and grew very very tall … and this week we decided it was time to see if there was anything to harvest.

So Linus pulled up two plants, and this is what he found:

1.1kg of the freshest jerusalems I’ve ever met. I made this lot into a delicious soup for our lunch, and some puree for Anneli’s lunch, and we all enjoyed it very much.

These were both ridiculously easy to grow and really productive. That’s my kind of gardening!

Our pumpkins are ripening!

These are a small type of pumpkin, but it looks like we’ve got around 30 of them.

And we’re really looking forward to trying one. We’ve also had ripe tomatoes to harvest:

And they are super delicious

Speaking of delicious, I made my honey a birthday cake on Saturday:

It was my first time baking kladdkaka. This might be Sweden’s favourite type of cake – a dense, sticky, chocolatey delight that you’ll almost always find in cafes here. I used a recipe from Leila Lindholm’s book, ‘A piece of cake’, and it came out wonderfully.

Here were our strawberries, ripening up a couple of weeks ago:

And here they were last week, when I harvested them:

And shortly after that, I found some dark chocolate in the pantry (thank you Tracey!) and shortly after that the strawberries looked like this:

And then they went into the fridge, and then after dinner we yummed them good.

I’m having a bit of a getting-stuff-done weekend. Yesterday I did some shopping – got new hiking sneakers which I’ve been in need of for quite a while, and some sock yarn requested by mum. When I got home, I thought about the excess bananas in the fruitbowl, and decided they should be a cake. So I had to go back out and buy a cake tin, but it was worth it. I made a chocolate frosting (dark belgian chocolate, butter and soya milk) and Tracey popped over to help me eat some of it.

I also indulged in a few cake photos in the style of Jane Brocket:

This was taken with my new 50mm f1.8 canon lens, which I like very much. I also took this one of Linus drinking his espresso at Borough Market last weekend:

Speaking of my lovely husband, and since I’m apparently in a photo-posting frenzy, here are my valentine’s day roses. Linus got a valentine’s day cheese (a gorgonzola piccante), which I think he was happy with.

exciting
i picked up my wedding dress in the weekend. it feels a little weird to think that it is finished, and hanging up at home, rather than being this abstract incomplete dress far away in Cheshire. Gerd has done a lovely job and she sewed a horseshoe of tiny blue roses inside the lining, which she informs me is a scandinavian tradition.

disturbing
those terrorists are at it again, but luckily they’re being fairly incompetent so far. however it looks like all summer leave is cancelled if you’re a police officer – they’re very much out in force on the streets and in the stations and airports and so on. i had a tiny twitter of nervousness when i took a bus at lunchtime today, until i noticed there were 3 coppers on the top deck, and i have to say it did actually make me feel a little safer.

disappointing
last night on our return from Cheshire, dad & i went for a meal at le pot lyonnais (formerly known as le bouchon) on queenstown road. ever since the change of management that came along with the change of name, things have been going downhill. the breakfast has slowly eroded in quality. they were once an extravaganza of taste and good value, but each time we visited after the change over, something had gone bad. first the juice, which was once freshly squeezed, changed to standard issue from-concentrate carton juice. the quantity of toasted baguettes provided dropped to about half. and the tiny jars of bonne maman jam – the yummiest jam there is – are the same jars but are now refilled with very ordinary catering jam of approximately the same quality that you can get on your toast from benjys.

anyway, back to the dinner. the menu used to be a large A4-sized hardback edition that gives you the impression that it is changed with some frequency. now they are a tatty triple-folded cardboard menu. the food still sounds good, however, so i tried not to let that deter me and we both ordered the moules frites. they do make delicious frites, i’ll give them that, and the sauce was delicious, but the mussels were holding onto an unecessary quantity of grit, which does detract from the dish somewhat.

of course i’ll still go to le pot lyonnais, because it’s so close and it’s a pretty nice place to have a pint of 1664 and some frites. i’ll still try the restaurant again, but i will probably skip the mussels next time. our favourite waitress is long gone, as is the slightly dim one (who once asked me, in all seriousness, how i’d like my chicken cooked), but they’ve always had a quick turnover of staff so it’s fairly irrelevant. and it’ll be an even nicer place for that pint now that we have a smoking ban.

but i do find myself wishing just a bit that something new would open up nearby, to take up the place that the old le bouchon held in our affections. somewhere to get our sunday breakfasts would be a good start.

exciting, again
only 19 days to the wedding!

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