I've been meaning to post this for a month now, but I wasn't able to figure out how to cut up the darn PDF scans I made because I don't want to pay for Photoshop and I don't want to download it either.  But I think I found a solution.

Anyway, here I am in the October 2009 issue of Allt om Mat!  Remember I said I would share?  Well, here's the epic, many page story about me.  My Swedish is so-so, so I'm not sure how I come off.  But my dear friend Malin wrote it, and hopefully she made me sound as I am. 

Cliffs Notes version: title of the story is "New Thai flavors in borrowed kitchens".  The gist is hey, Ganda's new in Stockholm, and she's meeting people by cooking in their kitchens.  She has a blog and cooks Thai-ish food.  Blah, blah, Thai Pimms Cup!

The recipes, however, are totally mine.  The test kitchen tested them and everything.  So exciting!  I will translate them for you another night when I haven't been at work for 12 1/2 hours.  (Holy shit, that's really how long I was at work today.  Sheesh, I've got to go to bed.)

So now I am totally famous in Sweden.  Like ABBA in reverse.  Only ABBA in reverse is still ABBA.  Whatever, look at me and my stand-in model friends!  (Except Malin, in the cool old school apron.  She is bona fide friend.)

Click on a thumbnail to see a larger image. 

These Nunu Chocolates, they're dangerous.  A little 1 1/2 inch thin of firm, stretchy dark caramel is covered in a thin layer of dark chocolate and sprinkled with a little fleur de sel.  They're too good.  And they ought to be -- they're wicked expensive at 5 in a box for $7. 

The worst part is that once you have one, you'll start thinking about them once in a while.  You'll get a flash of that bittersweet chocolate shell.  Then maybe you remember the meltaway sea salt on the back of your tongue, prepping the slate.  But in comes that damn salty-gooey siren song in your mind's palate until...you can't take it!  You must have it!  You find yourself crashing through the door of Brooklyn Larder, hunting for that infernally small, see-through cube of chocolates.  And you might share a few begrudgingly with your friends, but in a matter of four, maybe five bites, they're gone, a receding caramel dream, a dark secret your tongue will brood and pine for until your next dalliance.

I have one left.  Look at it taunting me from its plastic cage.  I will hide it in a drawer until the moment is right and the Precious and Sméagol can get some QT together.

Oof, see what happens when I open the door a crack for sugar?  It barges in and sets up camp on the sofa.  Starting tomorrow, I'm back on the no sugar wagon. 

God, I love the Met.  The giant Chagalls, the quivering crystal starburst chandeliers, the gold ceiling, the nodding-off septuagenarians...it's my favorite thing about fall and winter, hands down. Saw From the House of the Dead tonight with La Doug, Eric, and my friend Chris who's in town from L.A. 

What happens when you change your mind about going out on Saturday night and forget about the bottle of Raventós i Blanc chilling in the freezer?




---

Halfway point!  NAMBLApopozão!

The more often I return to California, the stronger my love for New York grows.  The sunshine makes my brain stop working.  And no, I don't think that's a good thing.  It feels like the majority of my time there is spent sitting in a car that is either A.) stuck in traffic or B.) careening down the freeway at speeds that make me anxious.  The only time I really enjoy being in a car is late at night in the cab that is taking me home when Grandma has been out past her bedtime.

There are a few things that are better in California, though.  One is the housing situation.  My cousin just moved into a cavernous, quiet hacienda-style house at the top of a hill in Echo Park for about the same amount of money as a one-bedroom highrise apartment in Manhattan with about 1/10 the square footage.

Some of my favorite features are an indoor grill with hood:

A tangerine tree heavy with fruit in the backyard (backyards!):



And this insanely cool giant cactus.

 

I've always dreamed of having fruit trees: lemons, limes, avocados; maybe peaches and plums in the summer.  But someone (who was it, Swiss cheese brain?) was telling me about the fruit tree they had in their backyard when they were growing up.  When fruit was abundant, it would thump onto the ground and lay there until the rats came to feast.  With the fruit fermenting and rotting as it lay, the rats would get drunk, stumbling and lolling in the shade.  I don't know if that's possible, but I love the image.

Captain's Daughter ($8): Salted foccacia with sardines, a sliced pickled egg, and "salsa verde" of whole parsley leaves and sliced scallions tossed with olive oil and capers.  YUMS.  Does everyone already know about this place?  Best possible thing I could have eaten before the gig at The Knitting Factory.  The individual quince tarts' crusts sparkled with granulated sugar, enrobing fuchsia colored fruit.  Though I yearned for one, I held back.  The cup of loose leaf jasmine tea was the perfect cap to a really tasty and virtuous meal. 

From the outside, I wasn't quite sure what the brightly lit, sparsely furnished railroad space was.  A fish and chips shop?  A bakery? The counter is set deep in the narrow storefront, and the pastry case also houses stacks of books. The purposefully askew white lettering on the cartoon whale blue wall menu spells out abstract sandwich names like Spanish Armada and Ship's Biscuit without descriptions, forcing customers to consult the card on the counter for ingredients.  It feels preciously sewn, and it brushes my hair in the wrong direction (Steve Zissou?). But that's a teeny quibble for such sandwich pleasure.  My only request: add some chips to the menu so I can make it a square meal.

Saltie
378 Metropolitan Ave
(at Havemeyer St)
Brooklyn, NY 11211
(718) 387-4777
  

Did you have plans today?  Cancel them, because you are going to need the entire day to make these cardamom buns.  I'm serious.  You might be able to read a New Yorker article while you're waiting for the dough to rise, or maybe catch up on an episode of 30 Rock, but this triple-rise dough -- or the homemade almond paste, or the hand-ground cardamom -- will hold you hostage for the next seven hours.  

Also, be warned that this recipe yielded 72 cupcake-sized buns.  72!  But this is good, because you will not want to make them for a long time once you realize how jobbigt (an adjective meaning much hard work) they are, as the Swedes would say.

But oh gentle marzipan sweetness, sultry slow-burn cardamom and rich, salted butter filling!  The pärlsocker (pearl sugar), looking like little crunchy bits of snow melting on a golden brown pillow!  "They're like chips," said La Doug.  It takes an uncommon amount of willpower to eat just one.

These bullar are sturdy yet seductive, never cloying, like a seasoned belly dancer gently stoking a fire you didn't know you had in you, leaving you wanting more.  With coffee for fika, or toasted in the oven in the morning, nothing brings me back to Sweden like this flavor. 

 

 

This recipe is adapted from the beautiful Vete-katten cookbook.  Vete-katten is the unbelievable konditori that was just down the block from my Stockholm office.  This is the second recipe I tried -- the first, from another book, was not nearly as good. The dough requires THREE rises -- the first rise apparently makes the yeast stronger, and the long second and third rises make for a lighter dough.  Or something like that -- my Swedish isn't that good.  

Swedish Cardamom Buns

 

A few tips:
 
1. Use a scale to measure the dry ingredients.  
2. You must use whole cardamom -- not the pods, but the kind that are little black B.B.'s.  And you must hand grind, preferably with a mortar and pestle, so you get some big bits and some tiny bits -- think cracked black pepper.   
3. The recipe calls for 375 grams each of butter and almond paste for the filling. I only used about 3/4 of the filling I made, so I'm cutting down the amount by a little here.
4.  In Sweden, you can get mandelmassa, or 50/50 almond paste, from any grocery store.  I could only find atrocious looking canned crap at my local shop.  I've included a simple recipe for mandelmassa I found online which worked really well and was probably the easiest part of this very long recipe.
5. I also used Doug's mom's rolling technique instead of Vete-katten's, which I didn't really understand through translation.  The picture above features buns wrapped in the Vete-katten method, which is to take a wide strip and wrap it in a knot around your finger.  I much preferred the swirl to dough ratio of Doug's mom's method, detailed (but not pictured) here.   

Translated from the Swedish and adapted to American measurements and ingredients.  I hope you had a good breakfast this morning because you are going to need some energy. 

For the almond paste:
Adapted from CHOW
1 1/2 cups whole raw almonds (make sure they're fresh)
1 1/2 cups powdered sugar
5 Tbsp. light corn syrup

1.  Boil water in a medium pot.  Blanch almonds for one minute.  Rinse under cool water.  Squeeze the skins off.
2.  Pulse in a food processor until it's a coarse meal, 20 seconds.
3.  Add powdered sugar.  Pulse again until sugar is blended in.  Add corn syrup and grind until you get a pretty smooth almond paste, 40 seconds.   Set aside. Makes 1 1/2 cups of almond paste. Are you tired?  I hope not.  There are a gajillion more steps.

For the starter dough:

1 block (50g) fresh yeast (or 1 packet dry yeast)
1 cup (250g) finger-warm whole milk (80 degrees F or 26 degrees C)
3 Tbsp. (50g) sugar
12 1/3 oz. (350g) flour

1.  Dissolve yeast in the milk.  Mix in the sugar and flour and work the dough until it's elastic, about 5 minutes in a mixer or 10 minutes by hand.
2.  Cover the dough and let it rise in a warm place until it has doubled in size, about 30 minutes.

For the second rise:

starter dough above
1 cup (250g) whole milk
Scant 1/2 cup (150g) sugar
Scant 1 cup (200g) room temperature salted butter, cut into pieces
2 tsp. (10g) salt
1 1/2 Tbsp. (20g) whole cardamom, coarsely-ground (mortar & pestle work best for this)
26 1/2 oz. (750g) flour
1 egg

1. Mix the starter dough with the rest of the ingredients for the second rise.  Work the dough until it is elastic again, about 15 minutes by hand or 10 minutes in a mixer.  You know the dough is ready when you can stretch it into a thin film without it breaking.
2.  Cover with plastic wrap and let it rest for 30 minutes.  Watch some TV.  Grab a magazine.  Maybe grind some more cardamom -- you're gonna need it later.

To make the buns:

Dough above
About 1 1/2 cups (340g) almond paste from above
About 1 1/2 cups (340g) room temperature salted butter
1 1/2 Tbsp. whole cardamom, coarsely ground
2 eggs, beaten
Pearl sugar (pärlsocker), available at European markets like Eagle on 5th Ave. and 17th St. in Brooklyn
Foil cupcake liners
Baking sheets

1.  Preheat oven to 450 degrees F (230 degrees C).
2.  Drop a bunch of foil cupcake liners onto your baking sheets, with about an inch of space between each cup.
3.  Blend almond paste, butter and cardamom in food processor into a light and airy filling.  You can grate the almond paste to make it easier to mix up. 
4.  Divide the dough in half.  Working quickly, roll out one half into a rectangle a bit thinner than 1/4 inch (4mm) thick and 12 inches (30cm) wide.
5.  Spread half the filling over the rectangle.  Starting with the long edge, roll the dough into a tight log.
6.  Using a sharp paring knife, slice through the log in 1/4 inch increments but leaving the last 1/4 inch intact.  Every third cut, slice all the way through the log.  It's like you're making a bunch of pieces of dough in the shape of the letter "E". 
7.  Take the middle slice of each "E" and flip it over so you have a "Y" instead. 
8.  Drop the Y, swirly side up, into a foil cupcake liner.  Don't worry if it's a mess, it'll work itself out in THE NEXT RISE.  Yes, there's still another rise.
9.  Repeat with the other half of the dough, still working quickly.
10.  Brush tops of buns with some egg and sprinkle with the pearl sugar.  Cover with plastic wrap.
11.  Let the buns rise AGAIN for about 45 minutes or until they are double the size. 
12.  Bake in the middle of the oven for 5 minutes.  Then reduce the heat to 400 degrees F (200 degrees C) and bake for 10 more minutes until they are golden brown.  Do not overcook or you will have dry buns and you will cry because you worked so very hard all day.

Makes 72 little buns.  If you aren't going to serve them right away, as soon as they are cool, freeze immediately in single layers in Ziploc bags.  Then reheat in the oven any time you are sugen för något söt (craving something sweet), as they say.

Oof, even writing that out made me tired.

Did I tell you that I sing sometimes?  My band, The Solitary Cyclist, is comprised of me, my buddy John Lindaman (True Love Always) on guitar and vocals, Julia Rydholm (Ladybug Transistor) on bass  and Chris Deaner (+/-) on drums .  Together, we are like Voltron -- there is no pink ranger in our formation.  When we rehearse, we bring delicious snacks, discuss car-free bike routes in Brooklyn and complain about how the other guys in the space never pick up their empty cans of Bud.  Yeah, that's how we roll! 

And -- get this -- we are opening for the amazing Versus and +/-!  How cool are we?  Very cool, I would say. 

It's sort of being billed as a Teenbeat night because JL is part of the Teenbeat catalog and Cotton Candy, Mark Robinson (Unrest, Air Miami) and Evelyn Hurley's band, is also opening.  Plus, there's a band called Ciudad coming from the Phillippines.

The Solitary Cyclist plays bossa nova-tinged duets.  We're good, clean fun.  We aren't going to rock your socks off, but we may tickle your feet.  As our Facebook page says, we are all love songs, no ambition.

Also, I may be guest squawking with +/-.

Versus, +/-, Ciudad, Cotton Candy
and The Solitary Cyclist
Friday, November 13
8pm
$12
The Knitting Factory
361 Metropolitan Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11211
Tel: (347) 529-6696

Is the author of this blog.  

La Doug is making a guest appearance over on The Amateur Gourmet!  Eating Thai food.  With another food blogger.  The famous Adam Roberts, no less, who by all accounts (including Doug's) is a lovely, lovely chap.  I'm not jealous or anything. Nope, not me, not jealous.

Proof positive that pork* makes the world a smaller place.

*See also swine flu.