New Adventures in Sweden

It's been a busy year and this post has been a long time coming. Since moving to Sweden in early 2013 for a university exchange program, I've taken many interesting classes in sustainability at CEMUS - a student-run organisation in collaboration with Uppsala University, and fallen into all sorts of things that I never saw myself doing. A group of students and I started The Scrap Lunch Project where we collected food waste from local supermarkets in order to provide a free lunch for 110 university students with entertaining educational presentations by a permaculture enthusiast, a chef from Uppsala's concert and congress building which hosts the city's most important cultural events, and a team of local Swedish food bloggers - Glimten i Grytan. I was employed by the university to photograph the preparations for an Education for Sustainable Development conference to be held in Nagoya, Japan; as well as filling in as an art director for Gyckeln Magazine for a few months and scrambling to learn inDesign on the run. The most recent of those things was running a restaurant every Friday.

From September last year, I took up a position of köksmästare or Head Chef of a restaurant run entirely by university students at Kalmar Nation. With a team of 6, we managed to turn the restaurant on its head completely and incredibly students completely flooded our booking system once we were established so that we were fully booked for the majority of the semester. I should mention that it was an entirely vegan and vegetarian restaurant which proved to be quite a challenge. For two special events, we enticed two very lovely bartenders to concoct special drinks to match our changing menus in exchange for food and a couple of kronor. My self-taught and very limited ability to use inDesign came in handy with creating the weekly menus (thank goodness!), and my Swedish partner imparted a lot of her knowledge of traditional Swedish flavours which we incorporated into new dishes. 

Working in a kitchen again made me realise just how much I miss cooking for others and feeling constantly challenged in an atmosphere of camaraderie, so I've begun compiling my CV to hopefully find a job over the coming summer. It will be infinitely interesting to see how Swedish kitchens are run. 

 Xanté sour cocktail made by Maria and Petra for our collaborative event

 Cord - a very happy and willing assistant cocktail tester 

 Our early menu design crafted in inDesign

 Pear Dartois (poached pear and frangipane enclosed in puff pastry)

 The core group of our amazing köksmästare team - Mareike, Julia, myself and Harriet

 Creme brûlée with sea buckthorn berries

 Eggplant chilli & mustard sill (traditionally made with pickled herring) and crispy potatoes

 Double-baked chèvre soufflé with mache and beetroot 

 This was a shot taken purely for social media promotion

Vegan and gluten-free sweet potato gnocchi with lemon mash and fried sweet potato skins

Swedish Midsummer, Gamla Uppsala

grilled pears & citrus spoon cake

As the weather warms up, Swedes tend to gravitate towards outdoorsy activities. The communal barbecue is a pertinent pastime and no student life would be the same without this cheap, easy, and entertaining form of cookery. As a beautiful welcome to the beginning of the mosquito season, a group of Kalmar friends gathered in the garden at dusk to bathe in the scent of smoking coals and good food. 

This citrus spoon cake is based on a simple pound cake recipe (1 lb butter: 1 lb sugar: 1 lb flour). With some leftover lemon icing, a little extra flour, some old cream that was beginning to sour, and one egg; the traditional pound cake was transformed into a soft and gooey mess that was absolutely scrumptious served with grilled pears leftover from The Scrap Lunch workshop event, and gingery apple syrup made with old apple juice and ginger peels.

Citrus Spoon Cake

250 g butter, at room temperature

250 g sugar

1 egg

zest and juice of 2 lemons

zest and juice of 2 oranges

350 g flour

2 dl cream

• With an electric whisk, beat together the butter and sugar until creamy and pale.
• Add the egg and whisk to combine.
• Beat in the juice and zest.
• Add the flour and stir it in gently with a spatula. Be careful not to mix it too much as the liquids will activate the gluten formation and will result in a rubbery cake.
• Add the cream and stir it in until well combined.
• Transfer the batter to a cake tin.
• Bake at 160 degrees Celsius for 40 minutes. When it's ready, the cake will no longer wobble in the middle when shaken and a knife inserted into the middle will come out clean.

Gingery Apple Syrup

500 ml apple juice

1 tbsp ginger peels

• Place everything in a small pot and let it simmer and reduce until you have a ginger-infused syrup left in the bottom of the pot. 
• This syrup can be stored in the fridge forever.

Grilled Pears

use however many pears you and your friends want to eat

• Slice the pears into cheeks (like a mango). You can save the rest for making jam or chutney, or a simple fruit salad.
• Place the pears cut side down onto the grill over a low to medium heat. You don't want the temperature to be too hot otherwise the sugar content will cause the pears to burn before they becomes soft in the middle.
• Turn the pear slices over and grill until both sides are golden brown and a knife can be inserted easily through the thickest part.
• Spread the pears onto a plate and let them cool for 5-10 minutes.
• Serve with citrus spoon cake, gingery apple syrup and whipped cream.

Sverige #6

Spring Foraging in Sweden

Sverige #5