This New Year, I felt for something special but really couldn't be bothered to spend the whole day cooking a
dinner. It would just be family, so I decided on a menu of foods that we really love to eat and to eat the way we love, by which I mean lots of little things eaten at the bar in the kitchen, rather than a sit down formal affair.
To start, we had
Gravad Lax. My father-in-law, a former butcher and fish monger pronounced it excellent, which is in my book, the highest praise possible.
Then, we had my version of Oysters Rockefeller. This delectable dish is supposed to have been created by the famous New Orleans restaurant Antoine's and named after the then American's richest family. There are many recipes out there but it is claimed that no one has recreated the original correctly. I don't care about that, however, because my version tastes delicious and everyone that I have ever made it for has been equally entranced.
Up next was a dish of scallops that Peter recreated after eating them at the wonderful restaurant Fäiviken near Åre. At that magical meal, we were served the largest scallops we had ever seen, from Norway we were told, served simply in its own shell with a bit of butter and set to cook over juniper smoke. There really isn't a recipe for this. You put a pat of butter into the scallop shell and put them over the BBQ which has been topped with juniper branches and let the smoke infuse the scallops, while the heat cooks them. Unfortunately, I didn't get a good photo of these.
Our main course was a pasta with lobster sauce, where I was trying to recreate the wonderful pasta I have had several times in Italy. The secret to infusing the sauce with lobster flavor is to fry the shells in the oil that you will use in the dish. It is impossible to recreate the flavor of eating this dish while sitting on a sunny terrace in Italy, but I was pleased enough with the result to eat a third helping, which I do not advise but seemed a very good idea at the time.
Finally, we finished with some
madeleines and a rich
salted chocolate rye cookie, made famous by the San Francisco bakery Tartine, but which I had for the first time at the
Green Rabbit here in Stockholm. Do not think I was so ambitious as to make two desserts. The madeleine batter takes just a few minutes to throw together and I had some left over chocolate cookie dough in the freezer, which I garnished with candied orange peel instead of sea salt.
After all of that, I could barely move, so I waddled over to the sofa and lay down, nursing my excellent glass of Quinta Do Vallado 10 Year old Tawny Port. And fell asleep well before midnight. Which was fine by me. Happy New Year!
Oysters Rockefeller
Allow at
least 2 per person, or 6 if you are greedy.
The hardest
thing about Oysters Rockefeller is to shuck the oysters. Luckily, Peter is excellent and this task and
does it happily. If you don’t know how
to do it, you can find a good description here.
2 dozen
oysters, shucked on the half-shell
One package
frozen spinach, about 500 grams
150 to 200
grams bacon, diced finely
About 1 cup
heavy cream
Salt and
pepper to taste
Parmesan to
garnish
Breadcrumbs
to garnish
Heat some
olive oil or butter in a pan on medium heat and add the bacon, diced fine. When the bacon is cooked, almost to how you
like to eat it, add in a big sploge of cream and the packet of frozen
spinach. Stir occasionally while the
spinach thaws and cooks for a minute.
Salt and pepper to taste. The
spinach will let out a bit of water, so let the water cook down so that the
cream is thick, about 10 minutes. If you
think it does not look creamy enough, add some more cream. Be careful not to salt too much, because the
oysters will be salty. If you like, you
can add the juice from the oysters into the spinach which will add both salt
and bit of sea flavour.
When the
oysters are shucked, arrange them on a baking pan. You can use the other half of the shell to
try to stabilize them so that they lay nicely on the tray. Put a good tablespoon or so of the spinach
mixture on each oyster, smoothing the mixture over so that the oyster is covered.
If you have leftover spinach, it makes a
good omelette filling for your breakfast the next day. Sprinkle a bit of breadcrumbs and a generous
layer of parmesan over each oyster. Bake
in a hot oven, about 220 C (425 f) for about 10 minutes or until the parmesan
is nicely coloured and the spinach is bubbling.
Eat while hot.
Lobster Pasta
Serves 4 to 6 persons
2 cooked
medium sized lobsters
4 to 5
tablespoons olive oil or butter
1 onion or
a couple of shallots
4 garlic
cloves
One packet
cherry tomatoes (minus the ones your son ate during the day)
Zest of one
lemon
Juice of
half a lemon
Splash of
white wine (or more lemon juice)
Large handful
of fresh basil
250 grams
of spaghetti
Salt and
pepper to taste
Dried red
chili pepper to taste, if desired
Remove all
the meat from the lobster, reserving the shells. Do this by splitting the lobster in
half. Pull out the tail meat. Remove each claw by twisting and use a knive
to cut the shells so that you can remove the meat. Chop the meat roughly into bite sized
pieces. You can also get the meat out of
each tiny leg by using a rolling pin along the leg but I usually can’t be
bothered.
Heat a
large pot of water, add some salt and cook the spaghetti according to the
instructions.
Meanwhile,
chop the onions and garlic finely.
Quarter each cherry tomato. Chop
the basil coarsely.
Heat up a
large frying pan with 3 tablespoons olive oil.
Fry the lobster shells on medium high heat for a few minutes until you
can smell the lobster scent and the oil takes on some color from the shells. Remove the shells, shaking them to keep as
much oil as possible in the pan.
Throw in the
pan the onions and let cook on medium heat until translucent. Throw in the garlic and cook for another
minute, stirring to keep the garlic from burning. Add in the tomatoes, lemon juice, lemon zest, splash of wine, and chili pepper, if desired. Cook for about ten minutes until the tomatoes
start to break down. Season with salt
and pepper.
About two minutes before the
pasta is done, throw in the lobster pieces and basil, reserving a bit for
garnish and heat gently. Add a further
tablespoon or two of olive oil. Taste the mixture and correct the seasoning. If the mixture seems to be a bit dry, add a
few tablespoons of the pasta water. When
the spaghetti is cooked, add to the mixture and toss until the spaghetti is
fully coated with the sauce. Garnish
with basil. It is not considered “correct”
to eat seafood pastas with parmesan, but add some anyway, if you like.
The other day, Gustaf asked me if I would go down to the lake and fish crayfish with him. When Gustaf was small, we would often go down to a creek near where we lived and catch crayfish. We only ever caught a few at a time, mainly for the fun of catching them, rather than for the eating. So, when he asked me this, I had visions of sitting for hours trying to catch some pesky crayfish by hand, and I politely declined the pleasure. 
So the next day, I was quite surprised when he went to pick up his haul of crayfish. He had obviously moved on in terms of technique because he had laid out a crayfish cage. He caught a bucket worth, 44 to be exact, of which he threw 10 back because they were too small.
When he proudly and happily came home with his bucket of crayfish, Farfar sprang into action. He showed Gustaf how to flavor the boiling water. He added salt, tasting periodically until it was sufficiently salty. Farfar whipped out a bag of frozen home grown crown dill, which is the flower of a fully grown dill plant and is traditionally used to flavor boiling water for seafood in Sweden. He threw in a few sugar cubes and then pronounced it ready. 
After the water was brought to boil, we threw in the crayfish. "All at once," admonished Farfar, annoyed when I tried to stop the action to take a picture, "otherwise the water cools and the last crayfish don't die immediately." The crayfish are boiled for a few minutes and then set out to cool in the cooking water. Two days later, we sat down to eat perfectly salty, sweet crayfish.
