Christmas Sausage

We have started a tradition here in the Fredell household, following our love of pig: the Christmas sausage. Actually, we are not original. In Sweden, the traditional Julbord (Christmas Table) contains many different kinds of sausages and in the good old days, these would have been made by hand. So last year, we started making our own, figuring that we love sausage, it will be fun to do our own, and what the hell, why not at Christmas?! I spoke to my sister-in-law today, to wish each other Merry Christmas, and informed her that Peter and I were elbow deep in pork and she commented that we were not alone. Apparently, it is another Christmas tradition that the King and Queen of Sweden make sausage. Their sausage is proudly displayed on TV on Christmas day. So, we are in good company. This year, our sausage is flavored with orange, fennel, and garlic. Although it is for dinner tonight, we have already tested our creation, and I can tell you it is really good.

I know that everyone might not be up for sausage making, but, really, making the meat stuffing part is simple. If you don't want to stuff all those intestines, for which you need some special equipment, I think using the stuffing to make meatloaf would be equally delicious, or even meatballs! This recipe makes about 30 or so regular size sausages, so if you want to just do a meatloaf, cut the recipe down to 1/4 th or so.

5 pounds cheapest cut of pork (we used shoulder)
1 small packet of bacon
1 pound pork fat (you can ask your butcher for this)
zest of 3 oranges
1 to 2 heads of garlic, peeled
2 large onions
1 fennel bulb
3 to 4 tablespoons fennel seed
salt
pepper
some olive oil
pig intestine for casings (you will probably have to order this from your butcher)

Dice the onion, and fennel bulb. Finely dice the garlic. Saute on medium heat the onion, fennel, and garlic in some olive oil until soft, but not browned. Take the pork and bacon and cut into chunks. Use either a meatgrinder or food processor to grind into mince. If you are using the food processor, be careful not to grind it too finely. You want it chuncky like hamburger meat, not a smooth puree.

50,000 Evil Stinging Little Suckers in Your Garden

Times two.

Think of 50,000 stingers, times two. That’s one hundred thousand evil little stingers.

This is how our nearest neighbor perceives our new project:Two beehives.

Just to make sure that we get maximum emotional effect, we have “aimed” the beehives straight at the neighbor's house.

Actually, we don’t eat much honey, but when we decided to plant even more lavender in our garden, we also decided to use the flowers for honey as well as for their looks. I mean we already have a lot of bees in our garden, but now they are going to be OUR bees, and they are going to make OUR honey.

I guess all our neighbors (maybe not one of them), and all our friends, will get honey for free for the next few years. Apparently, one hive produces between 30 and 150 lbs. of honey per year. That’s a lot of honey.

Evidently, honey bees are really friendly. They just get grumpy when it is cold, raining, dark, and when you try to get really close to the hive. The last item being somewhat of a requirement when you want to steal their honey. Oh yeah, they get sort of grumpy when you try to steal their honey as well.

This is going to get fun: apparently you get stung so much as a bee keeper so you get immune to the stings, unless you die first.

More reports will follow.

Thanksgiving Sides

Thanksgiving is getting closer and I am starting to think about the menu. As we have not been living in the U.S. for the last ten years, Thanksgiving has been an excuse for us to give a big party, rather than the family event it is here. We have had a couple of really memorable ones. One year, when we lived in Stockholm, we borrowed a greenhouse which was part of a cafe in the summer, only a few minutes walk from our house. Peter spent hours filling the greenhouse with candles, and lit the snowy path from our house to the greenhouse with torches. It was really beautiful. The guests had drinks at our house and then walked in the dark, following the torches up the road to see a glowing greenhouse in the white snow. Meanwhile, my friend Marybeth and I furiously cooked in the cafe's kitchen...we got to use their industrial ovens and potato peeler; which was a good thing because we had about 50 guests. The next morning, we staggered back to the cafe, after having had about 4 hours of sleep to clean up the whole thing. We had a plane to catch to Brussels in the afternoon, so there was no sleeping in. After that experience, I always try to remember to hire someone to clean up after a big party...a luxury, yes, but it makes it so much nicer! Another excellent Thanksgiving was in London a few years back. My friend Nancy came and we cooked up a really fantastic spread, with about a million side dishes, two kinds of cranberry sauce, a gorgeous cheese plate, and 3 desserts, including a lemon rose cake. That feast was probably the pinnacle of food excellence for any of our Thanksgivings.

Judging by all the articles in magazines about turkey, people seem to focus on the bird. But for me, Thanksgiving is all about sides. Who cares if the bird is dry? Smother that baby in Madeira mushroom gravy and eat it with potato squash gratin and brussel sprouts with chestnuts, and who is going to notice a little dryness? I like to cook up new sides every year, while still keeping the same categories of potato, squash, and something green. Here are some side dishes that I really like, mostly from that gourmet Thanksgiving in London.

Spicy Sweet Potato (serves 4 to 6)
I do this quite often. I like to serve it with roasted pork belly. The sweet spiciness tastes great with pork. This is really easy to do, but the spices make it a bit dramatic. You could also do the same thing with squash, like pumpkin or acorn squash. It won't be as rich or sweet, but still it will be nice.

2 large sweet potatoes
1 floury potato (you can just use another sweet potato here, as I have often done, and nothing bad happens, but the spiciness is a bit less pronounced)
1/2 stick butter
some fresh rosemary
1 fresh red chili (heat of chili according to taste)
3 to 4 cloves of garlic

Peel and boil the potatoes until tender. Mash. Meanwhile, melt the butter in a saucepan. Lightly chop the rosemary. Peel the garlic and slice. Finely slice the red chili. Add spices to melted butter. Cook until butter is golden brown. Add hot butter and spices to mash. Stir it in and serve hot. The mash can be made in advance and kept in the refrigerator. To serve, heat up the mash in the microwave, remember to stir to make sure it is evenly hot, make the butter spice mixture, and mix.

Antonio Carluccio's Savoy Cabbage with Pancetta (serves 4 to 6)
Bacon and cabbage always taste great together. Actually, bacon tastes good with most things, I find. Anyway, this is really easy and really nice.

1 large Savoy cabbage (this is the medium colored green one with really crinkly leaves)
4 tablespoons olive oil
100 grams unsmoked bacon or pancetta, cut into matchsticks
1 clove garlic, chopped
1 dried red chili, crumbled
300 milliliters water
salt and pepper to taste
Quarter the cabbage, core and slice thinly. Heat oil, add bacon, garlic and chili. Fry for two minutes. Do not brown the garlic. Add the cabbage and water, season to taste. Stir and cook covered for 10 to 15 minutes until the liquid is largely evaporated and cabbage is cooked tender. I like to leave a little bit of bite in the cabbage, but others like cabbage very soft. Do it as you like.

Lemon Green Beans
This is from Nigella Lawson's cookbook called Feast. Simple and tasty. I love the freshness of the lemon in contrast to all the other heavier, creamier, side dishes.

1 kg fine green beans, topped and tailed
75 grams butter
few drops olive oil
1 lemon
Sat and pepper to taste

Bring a pot of water to the boil, throw in some salt, and blanch the beans for about 6 minutes after the water comes back to the boil. The beans should have lost their raw taste but retain crunch. Strain them and put them back in the pot on stove on low heat with. Throw in the butter and olive oil. While the butter melts, prepare the lemon. Peel the lemon, making sure to take off all the white pith (the easiest way is put the lemon on the cutting board, and slice off both ends. Then set the lemon on one end, and slice off the skin downwards, turning it as you go). Slice the peeled lemon, letting it fall apart into bits. Push the sliced lemon bits and any juice into the pot of beans. Stir the pan and add salt and pepper to taste.

Truffle Potato Gratin
I made up this recipe because I had a bottle of gorgeous truffle oil, and I needed something to do with it. What could be yummier than cream, potatoes and truffles? The recipe below isn't actually how I did it. I just sliced the potatoes, layered them with salt, pepper, cream and truffle oil, then I baked the whole thing until the potatoes are tender. However, I have always felt that my potato gratins don't have the right lucious texture and it is often a hit or miss thing. I have recently read a couple of recipes that do this pre-cooking and I bet that is the trick to a really good dish. So, I am giving you the recipe that I am going to make NEXT time I do this dish, based again on one of Nigella Lawson's recipes.

500 ml mil
500 ml heavy cream
1 onion
2 to 3 bay leaves
4 peeled cloves garlic
1 1/2 tablespoon salt
2 kilo floury potatoes
truffle oil to taste
butter for greasing the dish

Preheat the oven to 220 degrees C (about 450 F). Put milk and cream into a large pot that will be able to fit in all the potatoes. Cut onion in half, put in pot along with bay leaves, garlic cloves and salt. Bring the cream mixture nearly to the boiling point. Turn off the heat, cover, and let the onion and bay leaves infuse.

Meanwhile, peel potatoes and cut into slices (about 1 cm thick, or a bit more than 1/4 inch). Put the potatoes in with the cream in the pot and brink back to boil with lid on. Lower the heat to simmer, taking off the lid if necessary to avoid milk overflowing the pan. Cook the potatoes until they are tender, but not dissolving into mush. Fish out onions and bay leaves. Season with truffle oil, pepper and salt, to taste. Grease a large roasting pan with butter and pour in the potato mixture. Cook in the oven for 15 minutes or until the potato is bubbling and brown on top. Sprinkle some more truffle oil on the top. Let stand for a bit before serving.

Marathon Madness

Hey! I just ran a half Marathon last Sunday. Yup. That is 13.1 miles of pain, for those of you who aren't into running statistics. If you don't believe that I really did this, you can check out the results of the race.

Now, you might wonder what that has to do with FOOD, but of course it has everything to do with food. Do you think I would be torturing myself like that, if it were not to burn off 1300 calories that I can then use to eat pie, steak, foie gras? No, you are right, I would not. Life is food. Food is life.

Ok, Ok, I admit it. The link to food is tenuous but I just had to brag.

Project Chicken

Here is our new chicken house! Is it not just the sweetest thing you ever saw? We are going to have very happy chickens...how could they not be happy, living in a house like that? We have spent the last few days painting...the kids and us have paint in our hair to mark our hard work. While we bought the house online, we had to put it together and Peter has had to make several adjustments and improvements because the nestboxes were too big, it needed a new perch, and we added latches to keep the racoons out, and a chicken wire foundation.

So next is to order some chicks....we are going to have some old-fashioned dual purpose hens (which means that they lay eggs but they also taste good when you have to get out the old axe). We are going to have to order a few more than we need--25 to be exact (it is the minimum order for chicks through the mail). So about 8 will get to live and lay, and the rest will have a shorter life ending up in our oven. Young roasted chicken anyone? We are probably going to have some sort of party, because we are going to have a lot of chickens to eat. Sign up if you want to be invited.....I can't wait to be able to go out in the morning (and evening) and collect some eggs for breakfast! Not so eager to clean out their coop, though.

Apple Frangipane Tart

Since I am on a woozy woo kick, I thought I would share this recipe that I would never have created if I didn't have my favorite gadget. Thus far, I have resisted putting up recipes that don't have a story attached because I think that a simple recipe should have a picture with it, which means I have to make it and take a picture....but that isn't really happening much, given I am constantly on a diet and I am horrible at taking pictures. So, what the hell. A recipe without picture. Just use your imagination.

We were living in London and having some guests over for lunch. I happened to a lot of whole blanched almonds lying around which I wanted to use up. So, I invented this dessert, which I am particularly proud of. It is easy to make, looks fantastic and tastes even better. Don't leave out the lemon zest in the filling...it adds a bit of umph and also uses my other favorite gadget, which is my lemon zester. For you Americans, I am sorry about the metric measurements, but I was living in England at the time...it is easy enough to convert. Most cookbooks have conversion tables at the back or you can simple type it into Google (i.e 500 grams to ounces).

500 grams puff pastry
3 to 4 Granny Smith apples
85 grams whole blanched almonds
42 grams (3 tblsp) butter at room temperature
18 grams (2 tblsp) flour
1 large egg
about 85 grams powdered sugar to taste
zest of one lemon
cinnamon to taste

For the Frangipane Filling: Grind almonds in woozy woo or food processor until fine. Add powdered sugar to taste until sweet, but not overly so. Add flour, egg, and lemon zest. Whiz it up. Should be a spreadable consistency, slightly runny.

For the Tart: Roll out the pastry to a rectangle. Cut strips off each side (or fold over sides), about 1/2 inches wide, and stick back onto rectangle to form an edging. You can use a beaten egg as glue. Spread tart base with frangipane filling. Peel and core apples, and slice thinly (each apple should yield about 16 slices, i.e cut apple into quarters and then cut again into 4 slices). Arrange apple slices over filling. Try to make the slices look pretty. I usually arrange them in long columns. Sprinkle the apples with a bit of cinnamon and sugar. Bake at between 180 to 200 Celcius (350 to 400 F) for about 40 minutes until pastry is golden brown and apples are tender. Serve hot, warm, or at room temperature with icecream or whipped cream.

I can imagine that this tart would also be wonderful with many other kinds of fruit: pears, blueberries, and peaches come to mind. You could also do a tart with just the frangipane, in which case I would double up on the amount of filling and then sprinkle the top with sliced almonds and cinnamon.

The Woozy Woo Transformation

I don't know what other people call it, but I call it my woozy woo and it has changed how I cook. Basically, what you have is a mini food processor, a mobile blender, and a quick whipper. Now, you probably have all these capabilities in other machines if you have a food processor and/or a blender/ and/or mixer. BUT do you ever pull any of these things out, just to make a tiny quantity of sauce? No, you don't. So that is what is so great about this thing. It is small and portable and it just works great. Suddenly, blending herbs, onions, and olive oil is not a big job but a quick little easy job. Chop some nuts to sprinkle on a salad? No problem and no fuss. Last night we had some friends over for dinner; the woozy woo was working overtime. I used it to to make breadcrumbs from fresh bread; I pureed pumpkin; I whipped up two sauces for steak (recipes below); and finally I chopped up nuts and mixed up a crumble to top my apple pie. OK, I realize I sound like an infomercial here but I really do love this gadget. Really.

I have had two. This particular product shown in the picture is more like the first one I got. Works great. The one I have now is a bit more involved because it has two separate little mini food processors...a bigger one and smaller one. Also, the blender thing is metal. Amazon doesn't appear to be selling the one I have now. But, I think probably the first one I had was a tad bit better, because the small food processor is sometimes, well, a bit too small, while the big one is too big.

Tom's Anchovy and Garlic Paste
This is very garlicy, salty, and strong. It tastes fantastic with steak, which is how it was first served to me at a wonderful dinner with Tom and Elisha. I haven't yet got their recipe but I liked it so much that I tried to recreate it. I think Tom handgrates the garlic, which gives a prettier texture but they don't (yet) have a woozy woo or I am sure they would use it! I think this would taste nice on toast or on buttered pasta.
1 small can anchovies in olive oil
about 1 head garlic
some olive oil
Peel the garlic and open the can of anchovies. Take about 5 cloves of garlic, the can of anchovies and dump into the woozy woo. Pour in a bit of oil to lubricate. Whiz it up and taste. It should be salty and garlicy. If you like more garlic, then go ahead and put in a few more cloves. I used about 3/4 of a head. Whiz until it is a smooth puree, adding a bit of olive oil if necessary. You may need to get out a spoon and push the bits down. Put into a little bowl and serve alongside steak. Since the puree is not such an appealing color, I drizzled a bit of olive oil on top.

Amendment: Tom has since come back to me on this sauce and he advises not adding the olive oil that the anchovies are packed in but just using fresh olive oil. He also suggests chopping half of the anchovies and adding it into the sauce at the end for texture. Finally, some chopped fresh parsley would work well as a garnish so that "it doesn't look so much like regurgitated cat food." He also notes that the original recipe was from Chez Panisse Cafe cookbook, so there is some pedigree here. Still, it will always be Tom's sauce to me!

Argentinean Chimichurri Salsa
We love this sauce which we first had on a pigeon hunt in Argentina. For lunch they would stoke up a fire outside where ever we were shooting and grill huge slabs of meat and sausages, which they would serve with this sauce. No vegetables or starch. Just meat and sauce. I think it would taste great with fish or chicken also. After these huge lunches, they would string up hammocks so we could have a nap. Bliss.
4 fl oz olive oil
2 fl oz red wine vinegar
1 teaspoon dried oregano (can use fresh)
one big bunch flat leaf parsley
1/2 teaspoon crushed red chili flakes
1 large clove garlic
1 bay leaf
1 tablespoon salt
Combine all ingredients in woozy woo. The heat of the chili does not come out immediately, so don't put more in until you let it sit for a while. This can be made in advance and kept in the frig for a couple of days.

Pie by Ken Haedrich

Now is the season for....pie, of course! With the holidays and colder weather approaching, what we all need is a delicious piece of pie. And if you want to make great pie, then you need this cookbook. It will have you salivating over every page and recipe. There is a pie for every person here. The book also contains what I love in a cookbook, which is a lot of chitchat regarding each recipe and helpful tips.

Now, of course, the crust is what makes pies challenging. This book goes in-depth into how to make a good crust and has many different recipes. But the author is not a pie snob; he even includes recipes for store bought crusts. So, you have no excuse.

For Thanksgiving, I love his selection of different pumpkin and nut pies. I have recently fallen in love with Maple Pumpkin Pie, which I then top with Golden Marshmallow Topping from a different recipe. Another favorite is Pumpkin-Praline Pie, which is a pumpkin pie topped with a pecan topping; sort of two pies in one. Another fantastic pie is Angel Pie, which is a meringue crust topped with whipped cream and fruit, served with a custard sauce. I made this for a dinner party and it was spectacular. I also made individual portions of Angel Pie with strawberries for a mid-summer party. There are so many pies in this book, in fact over 300, that you will want to make pie every day. Tonight, we are having friends over and I will be making The Mother of All Apple Pies. Wish me luck and get this book!

Good Tip for Lobster

We saw last night on a TV cooking program, whose name escapes me, a good tip for eating and preparing lobster that was so nifty, we had to share it. All those pesky little lobster legs...good eating, if you have the patience to pry the meat out, right? Well, a better way is to take each leg, cut off the knobbly joint which attatches to the lobster body, then take a rolling pin and just roll it over the leg. You start at the "toe" of the lobster, roll it up, and the leg meat just comes right out. Brilliant. The show also showed a recipe for preparing the lobster that looked pretty nice. They parboiled (or steamed) the lobster for a few minutes until it turns red. Split the lobster in half. Remove the claws and the legs. Make a filling by sauting some shallots and spring onion with butter. Add the meat from the legs (which you have first removed by above rolling pin method). Then add some crushed crackers to make a dry crumbly mixture. Take this filling and put it in the body cavity. Brush lobster tail meat with olive oil. Broil in the oven with claws. Remove meat from claws and place on top of lobster tail. Serve with melted butter. We'll try it and get back to you.

Hooked, Pirates, Poaching, And the Perfect Fish by G. Bruce Knecht

Here is the good news: If you didn't know about Chilean Sea Bass, you are in for a treat. Here is the bad news: You can't eat it anymore. This book is a fascinating tale about the discovery and subsequent marketing bonanza of the Patagonian toothfish, re-named Chilean Sea Bass. If you have eaten this fish, then you know how good it is...juicy, great texture, nice flavor, but not too strong. Strangely, the book starts out with the premise that the fish really doesn't taste that good and is really bland--great for those unsophisticated Americans.....well, I have eaten fish in many countries, and I think it is great, as does my Swedish husband. If you haven't eaten it, then go to the store and try it...although it is expensive. It tastes great just simply fried in butter. Of course, after that, you need to read this book, and then, as I said, you can't eat it again. You see, these fish live up to 50 years, which means that they also take a long time to grow. So, you can imagine that over-fishing is the next step. Yup. And the author does a great job of making you see how that happens by telling the story of an exciting boat chase between a determined and ruthless pirate fish poacher, and an honest, righteous policeman chasing through storms and open seas. Throw in some courtroom drama, and the biggest culinary success in years, and you have the makings of a good story. Read it for the story, and then stop eating the fish. Sorry.

Plumbing, gardening, what next...pear preserves?

Throughout our life together, my husband's motto has been "never learn anything useful, or you will be destined for a low income job forever". Thus, as we have moved across continents from Sweden to Brussels to London, when the toilet clogged, we called a plumber. When we needed the floors repaired, we called a floorman... You get the picture. When I first moved to Sweden to be with Peter, we lived in a cottage with a lovely garden in the middle of Djurgården, a beautiful park on an island in the middle of Stockholm. I had visions of herbs and roses, maybe a little lemon tree....Peter said, "Gardening?...I will provide emotional support sitting on the deck with a glass of wine." So, you can imagine my suprise, ten years later, when we moved here to Berkeley to our first house that we own together, as opposed to the rented places we had occupied over the years, and Peter started browsing through hardware stores buying power tools. At first, I was very doubtful...why are you buying that chainsaw? Won't the gardener we hire have one? Suddenly, my armchair husband was leaping onto the roof to fix leaks, under the sink to fix the disposal, out in the garden cutting down trees....He has become a great gardener...our wonderful kitchen garden is 90% due to his efforts, his weeding, trimming, cultivating, and compost turning. So, I have slowly been coming to terms with the fact that Peter actually has practical, dare I say, "manly" fix-it skills beyond finance.

The first new suprise, this fall, came as Peter was trimming our kitchen garden and had a huge pile of peppermint. He said, we are going to make jelly. I said, uh huh, and went back to my computer. A few hours later, after hearing banging from the kitchen, I wander over and there is Peter, knee deep in jars and sugar...mumbling things about pectin. Another hour or so, and lined up on the counter are 5 pretty little jars of golden brown jelly! The next morning, we try the jelly on toast...it is good...tasty even...really nice.

A few days later, Peter comes to me with a basket of pears that he and my son have picked and said, we are going to preserve these pears. I say, OK, and go back to my computer. He stops me...no, we are going to preserve these pears NOW and you are going to help. So, I find myself at the kitchen table peeling pears to his explicit instructions. He is measuring sugar and vinegar and mumbling to himself about ginger....and voila...a few hours later, we have a few beautiful jars of pears preserved in a ginger syrup. He forgets to let me taste them before he cans them....but they look gorgeous. So, I say, let's do another batch using our own red wine vinegar flavored with cinnamon. (Because with all the wine Peter drinks, we have lots of leftover dregs which we had to do something with...so voila! red wine vingear). This time, I remember to taste before we put them in jars, and they are fantastic. Sweet, sour, spicy...the pears melting on the tongue. This stuff will be great over vanilla icecream.

Next apples...we discover we have 5 or so apple trees and the apples are actually pretty tasty. But what are we going to do with all of these apples? Apple pie, apple crisp, apple cake all come to mind...but as we are continuously on a diet, it seems a bad idea to go down that route....of course! Apple cider. So one beautiful Saturday morning, we invite our friends over, rent an apple press, and make apple cider. After drinking lots of it straight, we still have about 10 gallons over, which we are now fermenting into hard cider in a huge glass jug. Peter checks it about every 15 minutes. It is now almost a week later, and it is bubbling away merrily, yeast consuming sugars making alcohol...Peter checks it with various gadgets he has purchased and informs me that sugar level is good. He spends an hour on the telephone discussing the intricacies of carbonization versus alcohol content with his best friend....I just look forward to drinking it.

I am not sure what to make of this new do-it-yourself Peter. While, I love the garden, the preserves, and I think I am going to enjoy the cider, I am not enjoying helping him de-clog the toilet. Why can't we just call a plumber? I am thankful, however, that he feels roof duty is too dangerous for me, so I just watch out the window as he heroically climbs up in the middle of windy rainy storms to adjust the gutters, so that we won't have flood of water leaking into our house. I try to do my part by having a cup of hot coffee and a towel ready for him as he comes dripping back into the house.

Here is a recipe for the lovely pear preserves. The base recipe is from the 1940 edition of Hemmets Kokbok, the Swedish counterpart to the Fannie Farmer cookbook.

2 kilo pears
600 grams sugar
3 deciliters of white distilled vinegar
6 deciliters water
2 pieces of peeled fresh ginger

Peel the pears, but leave whole. Trim the stems and scrape off the skin of the stems. Lay them in water after each is peeled to prevent them from going brown.

Take the sugar, vinegar, water, and ginger and boil it up in a big pot until the sugar dissolves. Lay in the pears and simmer for 3 to 4 hours without a lid until they are soft but still retain their shape.

You can put them in a bowl with the syrup and refrigerate overnight to eat the next day. Or you can put them in sterilized jars to conserve (there is lots on the web on how to do this...we just put clean canning jars into boiling water for a couple of minutes).

A Variation: You can vary this how you like with different kinds of vinegar and different flavorings. One that we liked very much is to use half red wine vinegar and half distilled vinegar and replace the ginger with a couple cinnamon sticks. Another flavoring we used is to boil some fresh rosemary in the syrup before adding in the pears. All were delicious.

Goose Liver Fog

- I love this wonderful taste of chocolate, my wife said.

Immediately, our friend; a fellow hunter, and a professor in criminology, gave Lan-Ling a bottle to bring home. The wine that we were drinking was the famous (and expensive) Chateau d’Yquem in its 1975 vintage.

He did this at a fabulous dinner at his mansion in Sweden, after a particularly good Duck shoot that he had organized. The professor was in a very good mood since he himself had been shooting very well. I have a vague suspicion that he at that moment also had somewhat amorous feelings towards Lan-Ling.

The gargantuan amounts of wine that he, and indeed all of us, had consumed at dinner were probably also a contributing factor leading to both the love and good mood.

The bottle of Sauterne traveled with us from Sweden to Belgium, and subsequently to London when we moved there. Two years later, it was time to move to California. The bottle however, couldn’t travel anymore due to the cork slowly creeping out.

It was time for a mercy killing.

As you all know, Chateau d’Yquem has to be drunk with foie gras.

For you who do not understand French, this is a goose liver that has contracted liver cirrhosis. This is what we humans get when we, for example, drink the amount of booze that we really want to drink. All the time.

Geese do not drink booze, instead they get their stomachs pumped up with grain via a “reversed” vacuum cleaner. All the time. They like this. They are happy geese. As a matter of fact, they are as happy as you would be if you drunk all that booze. I think.

We went to Harrods and bought the liver. Too much liver. We always buy too much. We always cook too much, too.

We solve this continuous problem by inviting friends and neighbors on extremely short notice;

- You guys want to have dinner?

- Sure, what date?

- In twenty minutes.

This time it was our next-door neighbors who got the call. Of course they came over. They were fairly used to this by now so the fact that they themselves had some people over for dinner didn’t stop them; they simply brought them too.

We opened the bottle that was about to die, and a few extra other bottles to make it more into a mass murder exercise.

Since I feel that you have to eat goose liver immediately, we all congregated in the kitchen to eat the slices as they came off the pan.

Now, the best way to prepare goose liver, in my view, is to take a whole liver, clean out the blood vessels, cut it in slices, rub in salt and pepper, and then fry it on high heat for a few seconds on each side. You are basically giving it a surface. Beware, if you fry it for too long, it melts.

This method unfortunately produces a lot of smoke. Much more than your stove fan can handle. So much so that in a normal London kitchen, you can’t breathe. Or see your hands. As a matter of fact, it produces so much smoke so that all fire alarms in your house will go off, and your neighbors (the ones not currently in your kitchen) think your house is on fire.

The neighbors that currently are in your kitchen (you guess they are still there, because you sure as hell can’t see them) are happily eating fried goose liver and drinking the professor’s Chateau d’Yquem……….

Are you Pigheaded?

The Christmas before last we spent in Sweden. Earlier that December, my sister, who was going to join us, asked what I wanted for Christmas present. My answer came lightning fast; -a Pigs head, or actually, two.

There was a long silence on the phone……….

-A what? She said.

-A pigs head, or two, I repeated.

This was apparently not something she had thought of, I thought smugly.

You have to realize that there is somewhat of a history here, where my sister is notorious for giving bad Christmas presents. The worst being a book that she apparently had stolen in a library. This was proven by the stamps in it saying “Property of the City of Stockholm Library”.

Anyway, the stunned silence turned into some indeterminable whining about pigs’ heads. –I don’t know where to buy them, -they are heavy, -bloody, -smelly, -and what the hell are you going to do with a pigs head anyway, etc. etc. In the end she refused to buy me my pigs head with the motivation that her daughter might see it, and get traumatized for life.

So that Christmas I didn’t get to make head cheese or anything else good that you can do with a pigs head. I did, however, boil pigs feet and fried, breaded, crispy pigs’ tail. But even then I was relegated to the second kitchen where nobody would see me, or smell my cooking.

Now, this little story illustrates what has gone wrong with people and their relation with meat. People in general don’t know anymore what good meat is, and they don’t know that meat comes from animals that were once alive.

This Christmas we spent in Berkeley, and in order to make my Head Cheese, I went down to Chinatown and bought my own pig’s head. When I came home, I let my two boys look at it and play with it a little bit.

-Dad, Can I keep the eyeball?

- Look Dad ! I can stick my finger all the way into the mouth and it doesn’t bite!

After this I butchered it with the kids watching and giving helpful comments.

Try this at home! It is sort of tricky knife work if you are not used to it, but the good thing is that it doesn’t matter if you botch it up. You are anyway going to cut the whole thing to small pieces later. Essentially you are trying to “undress” the head i.e. separate everything from the skull. A hint, the snout has small pieces of cartilage in it. Locate those and take them out. Another hint, pig’s snout tastes very good, so if you can buy a few extra, do that and add them into the dish. Cut off the ears and put them into the refrigerator. You are going to use them later to make crispy pig’s ear, I’ll tell you how in a later posting.

After you “undressed” the head, cut the meat and skin in medium size pieces and put it all into brine together with the extra 3-4 pigs’ tongues and lean pork meat that you bought. If you found extra snouts, put them in as well. Leave it in the brine for about 5 days in the refrigerator.

Now, this is what you do after those 5 days:

1. Fill a big pot with water, put in the tongues and cook on low heat for 30 minutes. Add skin, snouts, and meat from the head and cook for another thirty minutes. Then add the lean pork meat and boil on low heat for an additional half an hour (or so). It is good to remove (skim) the scum now and then whilst boiling.
2. Take out the meats and strain the cooking liquid. Reduce it to about a quarter of it original volume.
3. Trim the tongues (peel them) so that no coarse surface is left. You can also take out the cartilage of the snouts here, it’s easier than if you do it when the snouts are raw (but hotter). Dice all the meats into pieces. The size of the pieces is really up to you, but remember you have to stuff them into a casing, but you are not really making sausage. ½ inch maybe.
4. Take the now diced meats and mix it with all the other ingredients and a suitable amount of the reduced stock. How much? Well, you are not making soup. You are not making hamburgers, somewhere in between, where the meats can take up the juice inside the casings without bathing in them.
5. Stuff into waterproof cooking casings (synthetic), or use cow intestine. I prefer the intestine, where I use the sausage maker attachment on our Kitchen Aid to stuff the meat into the casings (take away the grinding part, or else you are going to get minced meat).
6. Put the stuffed casings (sealed of course) in nearly boiling water. Let this simmer away until you believe that the internal temperature matches, or is just under the water temperature. The reason I don’t give you a time here is that it depends on so many factors, like the size of your casing for example. I really don’t believe you should be too worried about over-cooking though. Last time I did this, I let them simmer for about an hour.
7. When you are done, take them out of the water and refrigerate for at least 24 hours before eating.
8. Take your traumatized kids to the shrink.

Ingredients
Now here is a little bit of a dilemma, this dish is highly individual. Everybody who makes it is going to do it differently when it comes to how much lean meat you add, and what spices you use. I tend to think of the lean pork meat as filling and everything from the head as “goodies”. I then sort of look at the two different piles and try to determine whether it is too much goodies or too much filling. As you can see this is a highly scientific method which I suggest you adopt. Trust me, it will taste good whatever you do. As to spices I suggest that you put in what you like. In the list to follow I feel that the pine nuts, cinnamon, and nutmeg are essential because these are the tastes I associate strongly with this dish. As for the amount of spices, test your way. Since the meat is cooked when you mix the spices, you can feel free to taste the mixture until you like how it is spiced.

1 pigshead
Lean pork meat
Extra tongues (2-3)
Extra Snouts (if available)
pine nuts (I love pine nuts in this dish so I tend to use a lot)
Black pepper, ground (or White pepper, whatever you prefer)
Cinnamon
Nutmeg
Mace
Clove
Herbs like Rosemary, Sage, or Thyme

Brine
The liquid has to cover the meat.

Per litre of water:

100 g sugar
150 g Salt
3-4 Juniper berries (optional)
3 Cloves (optional)
1 Bay leave (optional)

Bring it to the boil and boil until sugar and salt has totally dissolved. Let it cool before putting in the meats.

PS. If you make this, you will be in my list of cool people. DS.

9 ½ Fingers

- urgh heapr po fiiilt

- miiina polit ääää

This what was we heard when we met the Swedish west coast fisherman that our friend Gunnar had brought us to. We were there to buy dungeness crabs straight from the fishing boat. This fisherman had such an incredible thick local accent that it was impossible for me to understand what he said.

-grroo tri fsakk, he said and invited us onto the boat. We went onto the boat where he started hauling big net cases, that were hanging on the side of the boat, out of the water. Those net cases were full of crabs.

-hmpphh aaaaa put, he said and opened the cases.

I was trying to avoid letting on that I couldn’t understand a word of what this man said by looking out to the sea, presumably intensively admiring the view.

- hmmm aaaaa eau AARRRGH!, Gunnar said. Great! I thought, he speaks the dialect, and I turned around to partake now that it was safe that we actually could communicate.

There was Gunnar with a gigantic Dungeness crab attached to his finger.

- AAAHHHHHAARGHHH! he said, and the fisherman probably believed he said that this year’s national elections had gone particularly well from his perspective.

After a while, though, he caught on and helped Gunnar from his predicament. After doing this he said,
- heartefs bolla PILON! And showed us that one of his fingers was only half of what it used to be. Gunnar, who still had his whole finger, translated that a crab had taken the fishermans finger (you see, Gunnar could understand what this guy said).

We bought about 20 Crabs from the guy and paid about 30 USD.

We went home to the house that we borrow from Gunnar every now and then for summer vacations, and cooked them.

Now there is really only one thing to remember when you cook crabs: Salt. Almost every person I know undersalts the water. The water must be like sea water, i.e. very salty. Check the salinity of your local sea and match your boiling water to it. Oh, one more thing, I boil big crabs for 20 minutes, and small ones for 10.

For you readers on the US West Coast: What you call Dungeness crab is something completely different, and not at all as good as the Atlantic Dungeness. If you travel to Europe, order one, and then feel sorry for yourself forever that you can’t get the real thing at home.

There is a smaller crab on the Swedish west coast which we call the “seaweed crab”. You catch it by tying a semi-crushed mussel to a string, then throwing the mussel in the water. After a minute you lift the mussel out of the water, and voila, there is a crab attached to it. Rather stupidly, it won’t let go, so you just grab it and throw it in a bucket. Now, these guys are small, but if you get a lot of them you can boil them in saltwater and Dill. It is very good.

You can also do as my then 3 year old son. Iwas going outside to get the bucket of crabs in order to cook them. What I saw when i came outside was my son chasing crabs all over the lawn and smashing them with a spade. When I asked what the hell he was doing he said, -they pinched me! ALL OF THEM! Yep, they are aggressive little suckers. Especially when you insist on sticking your fingers down into a whole bucket of them. Since they are also fast runners, we didn’t get to eat any crabs that night. I just didn’t feel for running around the garden for the survivors. But hey, the seagulls got a good dinner.

A couple of days later we had Gunnar, his wife Gunilla, and her mother Gunnel over for dinner (in their house). You see, they have two houses on the same island—we borrow one of them. We had bought a whole Seawolf (about 5 feet long). Now, the house has a good kitchen but it doesn’t have a five foot long oven, or frying surface (few houses have, I’ve sadly noticed). I really wanted to do the thing whole because it is sort of cool to serve a five foot long fish. Just lay it on the middle of the table and tell people to dig in.

So, I was walking around trying to figure out how to achieve this when I saw a rather largish pile of gravel on the end of the driveway near to the garage. Aha! I thought and got some help to dig a six feet hole in the pile. Subsequently, we gathered some firewood and made a fire in the hole. I must say the whole thing took on a sort of pagan burial rite feeling.

Whilst the fire was burning, we salted and peppered the fish, scored it with diagonal cuts on both sides and stuffed and surrounded it with a lot of herbs (basically all the dill we had plus everything in the garden). We then wrapped it with aluminum foil. So think foil, a big layer of herbs, and then the fish surrounded by the herbs.

When the fire had burnt out, we put the fish down in the hole and covered it with the gravel. The cover was about a foot and a half in thickness.

We let the thing sit there for an hour and then we dug it out, found a plank which we sawed off to suitable length, put the fish on it and carried the whole thing in to the waiting guests and friends.

12 bottles of wine later, it was all agreed that the dinner was a big success.

We are going back this summer, so we will see what culinary delights await us this time

Lasagna Anyone?

I have just shoved two huge pans of lasagna in the oven after three hours of preparation. My shoulders, neck, and arms ache from all the chopping and stirring. Why so much lasagna, you ask? Well, it is because all my friends are having babies! I have two friends who have just popped the little ones out of the oven and I, helpful person that I am, said, " You must be so tired; let me please make you some lasagna to feed you and your hungry family." Then, a few days later, another friend had a baby, so I said, " I am already making lasagna, why don't I make a pan for you? It will be no trouble at all." So, I got up this morning, went to the store, bought ingredients and started cooking. How long could it take, right? I figure, the lasagna will be in the oven in an hour, and I will go running while it cooks. And the plus is that my family gets an excuse to have yummy lasagna for dinner, too. Three hours later, I am just finishing up. A huge vat of tomato sauce made with beef and pork sausage and flavored with rosemary and porcini mushrooms...and a huge vat of bechamel sauce with Parmesan...a hunking pile of grated mozzarella....Hey! This is starting to be work. Finally, I can begin assembling. I take out the pasta and realize with horror that I have bought the old-fashioned kind that must be boiled before layering up....oh god...well, here goes... OK, so finally I am done. But here's the catch....there was only enough sauce for two pans of lasagna...no lasagna for us for dinner! Peter comes in the kitchen as I am finishing up and hears the bad news. He sulks. It is sad to see a grown man sulk. I promise, I will make you lasagna with bechamel any time you want....just not today.

Near Death Experience Requires Steak

Yesterday, Peter almost died of heat exhaustion during our training session at the Icechamber. Seriously. He had 3 wisdom teeth extracted the other week, and has been on a semi-liquid diet since he can't chew very well. Basically, he has been scarfing down icecream every night and apparently this was not providing him with enough nutrients or liquids...So, about half way into our session, he feels dizzy and naseaous--a fairly common feeling at what we fondly like to call the "torture chamber"...so he sits down and rests, which normally does the trick. 20 minutes later, he still feels awful and his pulse is going crazy and his hands go icy cold...we call the ambulance. Scary.

Two IV bags later, in the hospital, he starts to feel better...and he is thinking about dinner. LL, he says, I have to have a steak...let's have a BBQ and invite some friends. I say, don't you think you should rest? No, I want steak. OK, he is certifiably crazy but...you gotta love him for that! So we had steak. I marinated and grilled 4 juicy well-marbled T-Bones with pepper, garlic, and soysauce. My son Oscar and I pulled fresh potatoes from the garden, which I boiled and then dressed with a sauce made with fresh herbs, again from our garden, olive oil, vinegar, and a touch of mayo. I also pulled up some little onions and grilled those with the steak. A feast fit for...an invalid?

A Word on Olive Oil

A great olive oil can transform a salad. If the oil is good, a salad really doesn't need anything else other than a sprinkling of salt (Malden, if you please). I like a grassy, buttery oil which has very little tanin. My love affair with great olive oil began when Peter went on a business trip to Milan and brought me back a bag of goodies from a very exclusive foodshop (olive oil, dried porcini, and proscuitto... Aren't I a lucky girl?) This bottle of oil (Biondi Santi--Peter remembers the name because it is the name of a wine) was amazing...drizzle a little over steamed green beans...and mmmm I was in heaven. Sigh, since my days of jaunting to other European cities for food items --Darling, we are out of tea; Let's go to Paris this weekend-- are sadly over (Why? Kids...and um...moved to the USA), I have had to scour the shops here for a good one. And lucky for me, California does not just grow grapes, but olives too. I found a fabulous local oil: Stonehouse Silver Medal Blend, which you can conveniently purchase online at www.stonehouseoliveoil.com,if you can't go to one of their shops. They also have a lovely garlic infused oil which I use when I am too lazy to fry up some fresh garlic. The other scented oils taste good, but I have yet to figure out what I might use them for, since if I want lemon in a dish, I would just squeeze some lemon on it...

Fried Cod

Ingredients

1 Cod

Loads of Butter

Retired fisherman

Fast car

Go down to the nearest harbour. Hirtshalts in Denmark is a good choice. Find a retired fisherman who just came in with the cod that he had caught just for fun.

Buy Cod, pay about USD 1.5 / pound.

Go to your fast car and drive it to the nearest convenient frying pan.

Filet and fry fish in loads of butter.

Eat.

This will most likely be the best fish you have ever eaten. Cod tastes extraordinary when it is super fresh, and can not really be compared to the store-bought variety.

Another fish that mysteriously changes taste from something approaching culinary nirvana, to become, in a few hours after catch, rather good, but nothing really special, is Grayling. We realize that this fish can be hard to come by, but we just thought you should know.

Split Pea Soup with Lovage

The best split pea soup I ever had was in Sweden in the region of Värmland at a village moose hunt, mainly consisting of a bunch of geriatric men with guns, as well as our group of city folk. At a hunt like this, the men with the guns, shooters, sit at designated stands in the forest. Those who don’t shoot, beaters, walk in a long line through the forest which moves all the animals ahead of them toward the shooters. Theoretically, the shooters are supposed to shoot in the opposite direction of the beaters and the shooting stops as soon as the beaters pass the hunters. I was basically dependent on a bunch of old grouchy men to curb their shooting instincts in favor of safety…and when it is farmers against city folk, one cannot be sure that safety will win out.
As a beater, one tries to walk at a medium pace and check in regularly by yelling to make sure you are still in a line, since you normally are just out of viewing distance of your fellow-beaters. Further, you have a designated place just after the shooters in their stands where you stop walking and meet up with the others. Well, during this particular hunt, the terrain varied quite widely, so there came a point where I had to walk up some hills. I yelled out to check that I was in line, but received no answering calls. I thought that due to the hills, I must have fallen behind the others, so I increased my pace and in a few minutes called again. No answer. After walking about fifteen minutes without hearing anybody else, I reached what I thought was the check-point, a small stream with a meadow beyond. So I stopped and waited. And waited. And waited. No one materialized. After about an hour of pacing at the edge of the meadow, I realized that no one would come and that I was lost.

I had been warned about getting lost because these forests extend unbroken all the way to Norway. If I walked in the wrong direction, I could walk for weeks without seeing anyone! The best plan would just be to sit tight and wait for them to find me. So I sat down on the damp ground and waited. Finally after what seemed an eternity, I couldn’t wait anymore and thought I would just explore my immediate surroundings. I headed toward where I thought there might be a road and was lucky enough to almost immediately see a large tractor heading down the road--one of the local farmers who had been dispatched to search for me. I hitched a ride with him back to the group where they were having pea soup and sandwiches for lunch. I was cold, my socks soaked wet from wading through small streams, and that pea soup was hot and fragrant and damn good. I ate two bowls.

As it turned out, as I started climbing those hills, I had passed the check-point, which was not a stream at all, a mistake due to poor translation from Swedish to English. And I had even passed one of the shooters who watched me climb up the hill as he said “like a bat out of hell”. Irritated, I asked angrily why the shooter hadn’t called out to tell me I had passed the checkpoint. It was explained to me that the man could not speak above a whisper-like croak, so I would not have been able to hear him in any case. Of course, the shooters have walkie-talkes, so he COULD have told the next shooter over...but I guess he just figured let the city girl walk...The final score however, was one to the city folk, and zero to the country geezers....Peter shot the only moose at that hunt!
In Sweden, pea soup is made from whole dried yellow peas and generally cooked with some kind of pork which is then sliced and served with the soup. Traditionally, pea soup is served with pancakes for dessert on Thursdays. These pancakes are thin and crepe-like, served with jam and whipped cream. Delicious. My pea soup is flavored with lovage, an old-fashioned herb which is related to celery. If you want to use this herb, you will probably have to grow it yourself. Lovage has a very special and strong flavor which is celery-like but more aromatic and flowery, almost lavender scented. If you don’t grow lovage, you can just leave it out. It won’t have the special flavor that I like in this soup, but it will still be a fine pea soup.

2 cups split peas
1 smoked ham hock
2 quarts water
1 onion, chopped
4 medium carrots, chopped
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 medium stalks lovage, chopped including leafy ends
2 stalks celery, chopped
4 sprigs each fresh thyme and oregano or ¼ tsp of each dried
1 bay leafSalt and pepper to taste

Rinse peas and take out any obviously bad ones. Put peas in pot with water, bring to boil and simmer for a few minutes. Remove from heat, cover and let stand one hour. Saute onions, carrots, celery, and lovage in the oil in large soup pot, until the vegetables soften and the onions are translucent. Add the ham hock and other herbs and a few grinds of pepper. Pour in the cooled peas with the cooking water. Bring to boiling and then turn the heat down to a simmer. Cover the pot and cook until peas are soft, and the ham is falling off the bone, about 2.5 to 3 hours. It is important that you do not add salt until soup is done and you have tasted it! You can also add some more water at this point, if you find that the soup is too thick.

About the ham hock: The one tricky aspect to this recipe is the salt content of the smocked ham hock. If the hock is very salty, you should rinse it before using to take off any salt on the outside. You may also want to double the amount of ingredients to ensure that the final soup is not too salty, particularly if your ham hock or bone is large. To serve, you can either leave the whole ham hock in the soup, forking a chunk off for each serving, or you can remove the hock and dice up the ham and put it back into the soup.

Olive Oil Mussels and Clams

In our financial consulting business, there was an industry conference held every year in Barcelona. Ostensibly, you went there to learn about the latest in financial technology and structuring. We went for the parties. Not that a bunch of bankers are the most stimulating of party companions, but among the bunch of serious analysts and boring lawyers, there could be found some party animals, generally the veterans in our industry who had seen a bit too much to care about what a banking vice president (title sounds impressive but actually indicates a banking slave) had to say about credit risk on mezzanine securitization tranches. We tended to stay out late drinking, have dinner, more drinking, and stumble to our hotel rooms at about 3am. By 1pm, we were vaguely conscious and in search of lunch…and a drink. A brief afternoon siesta, and we were bright-eyed and bushy-tailed by six, just in time for cocktails. Please don't think we are hedonists. As you may know, it is customary in Spain to take a siesta after lunch--indeed most shops are closed for some hours in the afternoon, making shopping for, say, a new handbag, a very frustrating experience...but that is another story. Anyway, because of this siesta, dinner is customarily taken very late. So really, by adhering to this schedule, we were trying to adapt to native life. It's trying sometimes, but one does one's duty.

One year, on our departure from Barcelona, they were having some sort of strike at the airport. Some sensible people left very early for the airport in order to minimize the risk of missing their flight. We went to lunch. The restaurant was called Els Pescadors and located in a tiny square in the outskirts of Barcelona (This restaurant is still there but from their website, the menu is completely different now). We had a feast involving the freshest seafood and fish…amazing rice and beans…to be honest, I don’t remember it all. But it was wonderful. Equally wonderful was phoning our friends at the airport. They were sitting in the dreary airport waiting for their plane which was delayed for hours, eating stale sandwiches and sipping warm coca cola. We were sitting outside in the sun, drinking wine, and eating spectacular food. Five hours later, we strolled into the airport and got directly onto our delayed by 3 hours flight home. Ahhh...sometimes life is good.

One dish that we had at Els Pescadore was a dish of sautéed mussels and clams. It was simple and breathtakingly delicious. Our attempt to recreate it is pretty good also. One caveat: As with all very simple dishes, the quality of this dish is reliant on the quality of the seafood. If you get sweet, fat, plump, juicy mussels, the dish will be fabulous. Sadly, unless you live in Belgium or the Netherlands, this is unlikely to happen by buying any old random mussels. Our hit ratio for mussel nirvana when living outside Belgium has been maybe 30%. I wish you more luck.

Take lot of mussels or clams, or both.
A lot of good olive oil.
A lot of garlic. And I mean a lot. Like two heads. Just peel until you get too bored to peel, and then peel a few more for good measure. Chop.

Turn on your broiler. Then, on the stove, take a very large frying pan or other dish that can go both on top of the stove and in your broiler, pour in the olive oil, and turn up flame to high. Put in the garlic, sauté a moment, and then put in the mussels and clams. Cook and continuously stir until the shells begin to open, which takes just a few minutes. Take the pan off the stove and shove in the broiler. Leave in the broiler until the mussel shells start to crisp at the edges, somewhere between 5 and 10 minutes. Check them every few moments, and stir, as they can go from cooked to burnt very quickly. Take out of the broiler and put on the table. Sprinkle some chopped Italian flat-leafed parsley on top, if you want to be fancy. Eat immediately with crusty bread to soak up the juices.
There will be a lot of juices in the pan. If you don’t slurp them up with the mussels, you can save this juice and make a great pasta dish for the next day. Shell remaining clams and mussels, if any. Take some spaghetti and boil in water, as normal, but only cook half-way. Drain the pasta and put back in pot with mussel juice. Cook until one minute before al dente. Add in shelled clams and mussels to heat. Throw in a bunch of chopped green stuff: parsley, arugula, or watercress all taste good. Serve in bowls with plenty of the juice.
PS. Never ask the goddamn Barcelonians for sea urchin late at night..they will serve you something else and then just lie to you about the ingredients. It is my experience that they will maintain this lie even after you extremely eloquently and courteously (after about three bottles of wine) point out to them that they are lying bastards that will be first against the wall when the revolution comes. DS /Peter

The Start of Dinner

Yet another food blog. Why? Why the hell not? But, actually, I have my reasons. It goes without saying that I am obsessed with food. Peter likes to say that if he wants to get me to do anything, all he has to do is link it to food and then I am willing. A normal conversation might go like this:
Peter, "Honey, let's go check out this windy, rainy, grey, cold beach where I think there could be good kitesurfing."
Me, "No."
Peter, " I hear they have some really great oysters there..."
Me: OK...Sounds good.
You get the idea. I think about food, dream about food, read about food, cook food, travel for food...though sadly, due to the fact that we are currently trying to get our weight back to pre-children, pre-money, pre-car levels, I don't eat food as much as I like. But that's another topic. So anyway, we had this idea that we should write a cookbook...sort of a travel, eating, living memoir. We figured that even if we didn't get it published, we could give it to friends for Christmas. But, as these things go...nothing much has happened with that idea. So, really, this blog is my attempt to get the cookbook going. I figure if we write for the blog, we can eventually reshape the material into the cookbook....or not. Anyway it could be fun. Here goes....