Poached Egg

How do you like your eggs? While I have a fondness for super cheesy, lightly scrambled eggs (in a tortilla!) my heart belongs to poached eggs. I'm finally getting the hang of poaching eggs but it's an art every time. This egg, however, turned out perfectly. The key? Lightly simmering water, a small whirlpool, and letting the egg poach for exactly two minutes.

For lunch today we had poached eggs on a bed of kale with feta cheese and toasted sunflower seeds. It was delicious.

Apologies! My Favorite Sandwich.

I haven't written here in almost a month. I'm sorry.
At first, my excuse was the holidays. We were out of town and there wasn't a lot of cooking on our part, mainly people cooking for us. Luxury! And you know when you're holiday lazy? All you want to do is eat simple food and wear pants with elastic? That's kind of the diet we've been on recently even though it's well past the holiday season. I love wearing elastic pants.
And the be honest, I just haven't felt inspired in the kitchen lately. It's dark here. It's grey. It's cold. It's freakishly chilly, like to the bones.  All I want to do is stay snuggled on our couch watching TV.
Also you guys should know that we're moving in the next two weeks! It's super exciting for many reasons but one of the big ones is we're getting a dishwasher! YAY! I'm going to make so many dirty dishes.

This is a hard bread sandwich. It's my way of apologizing to you for not writing here in almost a month. It's an apology because I'm showing you one of my favorite foods.

It took me about two years to actually appreciate the Swedish version of a sandwich. A piece of hard bread (literally, bread that is hard, like a cracker), a bunch of butter, a few slices of cheese, and your choice of a vegetable. Most sandwiches have cucumber. I opt for red pepper or sometimes cherry tomatoes. To mix it up a bit you can use some grated pepper or some salt! Swedes are shaking their heads right now: seasoning a hard bread sandwich is too adventurous! 

 I thought this sandwich was stupid when I first came here. I mean, I come from a country where a sandwich is TWO pieces of soft bread and the size of your face.  I started eating Christmas flavored hard bread this year (flavored with anise and fennel, it tastes like friendship) and from there I went to the regular stuff. Now I eat hard bread sandwiches for breakfast, sometimes lunch, snack, and sometimes dinner. Maybe I've been here too long but the simplicity of this sandwich is really lovely. The crunchy, wheaty bread with creamy butter, the salty cheese, and the fresh crisp veggies- it's perfect really.

Christmas Toffee with Chocolate and Orange

Last night we were invited to an impromptu glögg and Christmas baking party! It's been snowing like crazy and my feet are ankle deep in huge drifts of snow no matter where we walk, thankfully I have my Grandmother's hardcore winter shoes (and what a difference those make in the winter. Thank you Grandmama). With all of the snow it feels soooo Christmas-ey, so it was perfect timing, the weekend before Christmas, to hang out with dear friends and bake.
We made pepparkakor and some of the best candy I've ever tasted: chocolate orange toffee. And it's easy. So easy. With so much butter. Easy and Butter? That's a great combination right?
If you need a last minute Christmas gift you should make some of these toffees while listening to your favorite Christmas album and sliding around the floor in your thick, winter socks.

Chocolate Orange Toffee
100 grams of butter
2 dl of cream
1 dl of light colored baking syrup (Americans- corn syrup works)
3 dl of sugar
3 tbsp of honey
1 vanilla bean
1/2 dl of cocoa powder
1 zest of an orange or clementine

Bring the butter, cream, syrup, sugar, honey, and vanilla bean to a boil (for the vanilla bean you can just cut it in half and throw it the pot). Stir continuously and bring the heat down once it reaches a boil. You need to mixture to thicken and it should take about 30 minutes. Keep stirring! Have a bowl of cold water near you and once the mixture starts to thicken put a drop of it in the cold water. If you can form a semi-hard ball it's good to go. The mixture should be dark, toffee color.
Remove the mixture from the heat and pour in the cocoa powder and clementine zest. Mix thoroughly with a fork. Then pour the mixture onto a baking sheet lined with parchment paper and set it outside or in the fridge so it can chill and firm.
Once firm, cut into medium-small squares and eat. Or your can cut out small strips of parchment paper and roll the toffees in them.
Last night I ate about 15 of these. They're addicting. And have Vitamin-C.

Roasted Sunchoke Mash

If you look at the photo above and exit this page, I understand. It's not very appetizing. But it's what food baked in a casserole dish, mashed together, usually looks like. So I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
So what is it? It's a roasted sunchoke, twice baked potato, onion, and garlic mash. It is winter comfort food.
I had a very bad experiences with sunchokes once. It was a few summers ago and we were eating at a fancy restaurant with a snooty waiter. Ew. And the only vegetarian item on the menu was a sunchoke puree with something (I can't remember what!) underneath. So I ordered it. And the puree came out half ice cold and half lukewarm. I asked the waiter about it and he was like, "it's supposed to be that way."
What? Since when did restaurants serve a food that was half ice cold and half warm? Like I get it if it was hamburger (warm patty, cold lettuce, etc) or a pasta salad (warm-ish pasta with cold avocado)
But not a puree. I asked the waiter to rewarm it, please. He wasn't too happy. And I decidedly hated sunchokes.
So how did I come into possession of a bag of sunchokes? They were cheap at the store.
I did a lot of research on sunchokes last night. Just their name is disturbing. They are also called jerusalem artichokes or in Swedish "jordärtskocka." In my research I couldn't find anything terribly wrong with them: i.e. nothing about people choking. However, supposedly some people can't handle the carbohydrates in them and they can cause terrible stomach pains, but the majority of people have no problems. Dinner in our household is always an adventurous risk!
Last night was the Great Sunchoke Experiment and it was successful. They're good you guys! Especially served at the same temperature throughout. They're kind of nutty and earthy.

Winter Mash: Roasted Sunchokes, Potatoes, Onions, and Garlic
4-5 sunchokes
3 medium sized potatoes*
1 large yellow onion
4-6 garlic cloves
Olive oil to drizzle
Salt and Pepper
Oregano
Parmesan cheese for grating
Fresh spinach

Preheat your oven to 200c. Wash and peel the sunchokes. Slice into medium-thin discs (as you would with potato gratin). Wash and peel your potatoes, slice into medium-thin discs like the sunchokes. Chop your onion into long, thin slices. Remove the papery skin from the garlic cloves and chop each clove in half. Throw everything into an oven proof baking dish. Drizzle with olive oil, sprinkle with salt, pepper, and oregano. Mix together. Bake for about 30-40 minutes until all can be pierced with a fork.
When out of the oven, grate a fine sprinkling of parmesan cheese over the mash. Serve in a bowl on a fresh bed of spinach.
It's good!

Notes:
* We had three potatoes that were already baked sitting our fridge so I used those instead of starting with raw potatoes. I put them into the mash about halfway through the baking times for twice-baked potatoes a la Central Market.

First Advent

I've never celebrated Advent. But they celebrate like crazy here in Sweden. Most of the windows have their Christmas lights now, most streets have decorations, all of the bakeries are serving lussekatter. I woke up on Sunday and opened Facebook to discover that all of my Swedish friends had Advent candles lit in their photos.
We didn't have any Advent candles.
I turned to G, "Why are you depriving me of Advent?"
"What?"
"You're Swedish, you celebrate Advent, but why don't we have any Advent candles?"
I was terribly upset. G had to leave the house to meet up with a friend but came home later that afternoon not only covered in snow but with Advent candles and the fixings for our first Advent fika. I am no longer deprived and feel throughly Christmas-Swedish.

Here you can see some typical Christmas fika foods. Pepparkakor, lucia buns, and glögg. I'm not the biggest fan of pepparkakor but I like to dip them in my glögg. They are also really good with blue cheese.
Hopefully this year I'll make some lucia buns and some gingerbread cookies. And my own glögg. But we still have to put up our tree and all of the other decorations.
You guys, it's less than a month until Christmas. How did that happen?

A Thanksgiving in Stockholm

I hope you guys had a good Thanksgiving. We had a snowy one. Very snowy.
We decided to spend our Thanksgiving in Stockholm with all our friends. We currently live about seven hours south of Stockholm and traveled by train up to Sweden's capital city on Wednesday.
We celebrated on Friday instead of Thursday since it's not a real holiday here and you don't get the day off.
In my usual obsessive-planning way, I sent out a list of typical Thanksgiving foods and asked everyone to pick a dish to make. At first G did not understand, "isn't Thanksgiving just like any potluck? You bring what you want?" "No, you can only have certain foods at Thanksgiving, it'd be like if I were to bring a bowl of hummus to Christmas dinner." "Oh. Ok."
I'm glad we got that straightened up.
I made the stuffing and the cranberry sauce. The stuffing is a family recipe and my favorite part of Thanksgiving. The cranberry sauce was a bit too soupy but got the job done.

Apparently Thanksgiving food is really hard to photograph. Especially after a glass of wine or two. So I mapped it out for you guys.
Our friend Oskar made a tofufurkey (most of us are vegetarians) which ended up being baked in a form-spring pan. We sliced it like pie and it tasted like Thanksgiving.
Anders made the sweet potatoes, he was skeptical of the marshmallow topping. It's an acquired taste.
Sofia, who hosted us, made the amazing dinner rolls and set the table with cute leopard print napkins.
Ivan and Vanja made mashed potatoes and a really cinnamon-ey apple pie (not pictured).
Also not pictured is the pumpkin pie our friends Niklas and Therese made. It tasted like home.

Despite the modern day conventions, I'd imagine that this was what the first Thanksgiving was all about. People coming together, enjoying each other's company, and being thankful. I definitely was thankful to celebrate a holiday that would've otherwise made me feel terribly homesick if it hadn't been for our amazing friends. Thank you guys.

the first glögg of the season

This is glögg. Glögg is a spiced wine you warm up and serve with almonds and raisins in little tiny cups during the Christmas season.
On Friday, we had our first snow here in the South of Sweden. It was a heavy, wet snow. Almost like sleet but a bit more solid. I didn't get any pictures because it was 4:00 in the afternoon and pitch black outside. We were out on a walk. A cold, wet, snowy walk. And even though my husband claimed it was "too early in the year for glögg" I convinced him that the first snowfall should be celebrated with a warm  cup of glögg. So we bought ourselves a bottle of glögg, lit some candles, and settled down to a cozy evening with Dexter Season 3.

Come December 1st we'll be drinking more glögg, eating saffronbuns, gingerbread cookies, and my new favorite Julknäckebröd- which is a hard bread flavored with anise and fennel. I'll be making that later today so be looking forward to that recipe.
In the mean time, you can go here to see a few photos of our apartment. Not very food related except there's a photo of our huge kitchen and the "bar" area.