CatPoet

Good Morning to you and Merry Lucia and may the sun return. This was my husband and daughters breakfast, tomtegröt ( gnome porrdige) with is like a soft rice pudding, gingerbreads, saffrontwirls with icing and lussekatter. I was as always eating my standard spread, yeah for meds..... NOT. But I got a lussekatt and gingerbread and tea later on. If you want recipes of anything I have made, tell me and I post them, I can also get hold of Värmlandskorv aka potato korv recipe , I have a friends family recipe here. So question time. Sour cream. Well according to Mrs B, Swedish sour cream taste like American and to Mrs L, it taste fresher here and these both two lovely ladies who grew up in USA, One is from the Midwest and the other one from D.C. They both move around a lot. Mustard: Dill and senap sås is eating with gravad lax, smoked salmon both cold and warm smoked and crab, Grov senap is eating with sausages, chicken and ham or anything you would have mustard on. My mustard this year is Honey mustard, this one has a kick of a mule and sweetness of honey, we are also going for a mild and creamy mustard and a coarse mustard , it most for the ham and sausages but we like to have the options. Other fun things the word Stor in Sweden means big, yes just big. And IKEA stuff is either named after towns , human names or real Swedish words, like their gift wrap this year is called winter snuggles and they have candles called First moment of love ( Nykär). I am being dragged of to a Christmas market today.. so more picture will come.

I have marinated pork in apple cider and it turned out yummy. I have also brined it salt and sugar and it turned out lovely.

Today I made sausage, these pictures are not from today, but 2 years ago. My husband and cameraman had something more important, something for our future. I normally buy bag of about 5 meter sausage skin, well this is how it should look, yes it is messy but I have a muscle disease and I or rather hubby clean the kitchen before and after. But this year I got 4 meters instead.. so I had a lot left so we made sausage patties for dinner tomorrow. The sausage is made of pork, lard ground fine, then potato starch, dried ginger, allspice, black pepper, salt, sugar and water worked in for 30 minutes. Made in to sausages . Then packed into salt and sugar and the blood draw over night and in the morning washed. Served boiled with mustard and it is really lovely. You will see it at Christmas. It is Lucia tomorrow!!! So I made lussekatter and saffransnurror ( Saffron twirls) . The heroes of the hour is Sweet yeast, milk, egg, ½ gram saffron steeped in Tullamore Dew, butter, liquid sugar, salt and flour. First you make a starter dough with nearly all flour and leave it to rise for 1 hour. Then you add a mixture of egg, sugar ( in my case liquid sugar), butter and saffron. Add this to the starter dough, feel like you failed and then just keep kneading and kneading and suddenly you have a sticky dough and then you add more flour and then slowly as you knead the dough turns yellow. Then you start rolling sausages and then roll them in to wrong turned S and leave them to rise. They are small, I prefer to do them old size, which is small. from a full dough I get out 40- 45 lussekatter.How ever being me, I divide the dough in half make 20 lussekatter and 20 saffrontwirls. Saffrontwirls,like cinnamon rolls but better, they contain marzipan , sugar and butter. YUM The lussekatter gets a raisin in each twirl and a egg wash and baked golden. The twirls you get to see tomorrow because it is Lucia. I would have taken more picture but it is hard with sticky hands and as I said my husband is doing very very important stuff at the moment. And now I will just rest and enjoy next week, I need my rest , my body is screaming STOP, lay down woman, play opossum! I think I need to obey or Christmas will be spent , crying in bed,

The joke here is that Finns got the left over letters no one wanted, Just to give people an idea of the problems facing gfron. Savo dialect. Kokko, kokkoo kokkoo koko kokko! - Koko kokkoko? - Koko kokko. Kokkookko? Kokko (a surname), gather up the whole bonfire! - The entire bonfire? - The entire bonfire. Now will you gather it up? Good luck and you will finds speciality foods, trust me, just dont go for presliced and eila is lactosfee if you wonder. I miss Finland, one day I may return, so have a lovely trip.

I'm happy you loved Tallinn. Yeah the buffets average on those boats, sadly and it is the season for fish. I'm looking forward to seeing more pics and hearing more about your travels.

Time to bake pepparkakor! Time to bring out the Christmas cutters... or not. Nice mix of Christmas cutters and other random cutters I had and I have 300 of them... yeah OOPS. Baked and done! YUM! Then we made some ornaments, to be honest, only one, due to my daughter eating up the candy that goes inside.

Sorry it took time but I could only find the cookbook edition where they left out the milk . A bit more digging and here is the recipe. WHen it comes to icing it, some just add icing sugar on top, some has a thin layer of raisin jam and then marzipan and then a white icing over. So it is up to you what you want to do. Saffroncake 200gram butter½ gram saffron1 sugar lump1- 2 tablespoon vodka.2eggs 300 ml sugar150 ml milk400 ml flour2 tespoon baking powder Turn the oven to 175 C.Butter and dust a 24 cm diamter springform pan. Grind the saffron and sugar lumpin a pestle and mortar and add vodka. Melt butter. In a bowl whisk eggs and sugar untile pale and fluffy. Add milk, saffron and butter and combine. Mix flour and baking powder, sift this into the eggmixture. Stir until combined. Bake in the cooler part of the oven for 45 min.

My daughter and I played sous chef, I was the sous chef. My daughter decided for twig, potatoes, saffron, cream, stock and peas. Twig is her word for leak so this turned out to a really lovely soup.

I have done piped marshmallows, that how we do them here. I even gave the recipe that works ace.

But peanutbutter and soy can be linked allergies since peanuts are not nuts and true nut allergic people are not allergic to peanuts most often and peanut is a bean. I have done a similar recipe and I replace the peanut butter with nutfree chocolate spread and it worked fine.

Julmust is a the Swedish Christmas drink, it is a soda pop made with malt , barley and spices, it sweet but not as sweet as cola and lovely and yes we buy it in bottles. Well the lingon was bought in the town market this autumn and frozen, I dont dare to pick them in our forest due to the bores. So I just added these frozen jewels and they balance the sweetness of julmust prefectly. We all love this meal and it isnt often we have beef.

Advent stew, with lingon, julmust and beef. YUM! My daughters plate, she wanted a picture of it. Yes, she gets the same food as us.

Oh and Swedish mums mums, skumbollar,gräddbullar has pipeable marshmallow. 450 ml caster sugar75 ml icing sugar1 eggwhite150 ml cold water1½ tablespoon gelatine powder150 ml boilinghot water. In a bowl add both type sugar, cold water, eggwhite .Desolve the gelatine in hot water and add to the egg mixture. Now beat until white and fluffy, this can take 30 min. Pipe out on to digestive biscuits or wafer rounds. Freeze for 1 hour and then dipp into chocolate.

Can this recipe be of any help? http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/chocolate_marshmallow_60410

I remember that type of saffron bread when I was little, I haven't seen it in years. The saffron bread came to Sweden around 1600 due to the trade with Germany. They used to be called devil cats, due to the devil around this time ran around spanking children and good kids got from Jesus a sweet bun coloured yellow to ward of the Devil . It wasn't called lussekatter until 1930 here, it used the old word for Lucia and the word devil cats was removed from use. So now we use the saffron buns as a typical winter treat, a reminder of the sun to come and it has become a tradition.

Why dont you do a post in the food and culture instead?? Easier for people to find you

So I made the gingerbread dough today, we are going to bake it on Thursday. It needs to mature, a minimum of 10 hours, but 2 days makes it even better. So lets start with pepparkakorna , flour, golden syrup, clove, ginger, cinnamon brown sugar, bicarbonate soda, cream and in the bowl some butter. Creaming butter, syrup and brown sugar. Changing to dough hooks and adding flour. A bag of slightly tacky dough going in to the fridge for maturing. Important stuff, otherwise the spice flavour will be harsh but at the same time a bit dull and the clove will take over. Bonus! I made tablets from a recipe pre condensed milk, so it is just butter, milk, sugar ( a lot of it), whisky and golden syrup.

You got my childhood favourite chocolate, I used to love the pink box but the orange is good too. When you get finnish bread, try to find dark rye, Finland is famous for it. Good sausage that pre sliced is Kotivara and Atria ( lauantaimakkara is a famous sausage) . I think you got free range eggs.

At least you didnt get yours in a barley and meat filled pirogi as I did in Finland! I hope you have better luck tomorrow.

No pictures today but I just had something horrid. I bought these expensive ( of course on sale) corn fed chicken thighs, it supposed to be heaven and people rave about it, but it was grease and slimy and horrible, I couldn't swallow the meat with out gagging and my husband disliked it , however my daughter loved it. Never again, I am going back to the chuck I have normally.

Yes Haresfur is right about the sound of the å ! Kåldolmar means cabbage dolmas, one cabbage dolma is a Kåldolme. Do you have meat and rice in them?

Deryn: the heat from the butter mixture cooks the flour enough. Tiny: It is dense, but still crumble in the mouth, if you doing wrong it becomes rubbery or like brick.

I really hope you have a lovely time! Oh I wish I could meet you up but the train to the harbour cost 10 times more then the boat trip...

Market nougat. I a bowl add 600 ml flour, 400 ml icing sugar / powdered sugar and 100 ml unsweetened cocoa, stir to combine. Papper a not to large square tin ( I dont know the size and cant check at the moment) In a pot add 125 gram butter, 575 ml sugar and 175 ml water. When it starts melting, let it cook for 2 minutes not more. Mix the wet with a dry and stir with a wooden spoon until combined. Now pour it out on the tray and let it cool. Cut into small squares, like ½ inchx½ inch or less. YUM.

Oh and Karjalanpiirakka, you have to eat at least on, it is a savoury pastry with potato filling and it is so yummy.