Category: Recipes

My co-workers know that second breakfast is my favorite meal of the day.  And yogurt with fruit and granola is my favorite second breakfast. 

I often wind up buying pots of yogurt from Pret downstairs from the office, but I have to eat it with the distaste I have for its price.  Granola is cheap and easy to make. 

This is a riff on the recipe The Amateur Gourmet posted for Baked's granola.  Adam's right, it's a wholesome, everyday granola with a good dose of salt to balance the brown sugar.  It's crunchy and just clumpy enough (thanks to the honey).  You can add whatever nuts and seeds you have on hand.  Just make sure you don't add the fruit until the granola has cooled completely -- the dried fruit turn into chewy dogbone bits if you bake them.  I also dialed the salt down by 1/4 tsp.

It's been a busy few weeks.  I had a setback in my writing schedule when I got ill with some flu-like thing again. Maybe next year, I get the flu shot.

I never feel more alone than when I am ill.  I hear that mothers always feel this way -- that there's no one to take care of them when they are sick.  Knowing I'd be in no state to cook when I got home, I picked up some cupcakes on the way to the train.  I like stocking up on crack snacks when I'm ill because they're easiest to get past the killed tastebuds.

So when day 1 of my illness turned into day 2 and I'd plowed through my two cupcakes, I needed more simple carb sustenance.  My neighborhood offers very few delivery options, and I was not about to walk more than a block from home in my state, so I figured I'd have to pull something together from the cupboard.

Everybody needs an arsenal of pantry-ready recipes.  I searched for something simple and found this Chocolate & Zucchini recipe for Yogurt Cake.  It's my favorite kind of recipe -- barely measured, simple to follow even when the flu has turned your brain to mush.

But in a feverish moment of inspiration, I decided to add those stewed apricots.

It still sucks to be alone when you're sick, but what am I going to do?  Sometimes it's enough to stuff my face with this cake and watch Jerry Springer for an afternoon.

 Apricot Cardamom Yogurt Cake

The pan pictured here is one of those floppy silicone jobs which La Doug got for Christmas one year.  Worked well for popping the cake out at the end, but you have to put the pan on a baking sheet or you won't be able to carry it into the oven.  Such a weird design.  I haven't figured out what they would be best for yet.

"My friends were poor, but honest; So's my love."
-- Helena, All's Well that Ends Well

We had an impromptu dinner party for 12 of our best friends at Sarah and Alex's palatial new flat in Fort Greene.  Sarah and Shannon's cinnamon-hued hound puppy made a few social appearances between naps while the rest of us pulled our chairs up around a rough-edged marble kitchen table, sipping prosecco from wide-mouthed champagne glasses, picking at a hunk of pecorino and peppery water crackers. 

Newcomers toured their epic backyard garden -- wet burgundy Japanese maple, slick pebble and white-painted wood, pre-blossom wisteria enveloping the walls, the dual hammocks dripping cool spring rain.  Even the indoor cacti were looking as succulent and lush as I've ever seen cacti look.

Really, it is heaven to be there with all of my beloveds.  My friends don't have a lot of money, and we're in varying states of employment, but many of us have lucked out on good New York apartments; on days like these, surrounded by my crew, I feel like a contessa. 

La Doug chose this recipe for the dinner party because it was easily doubled and can be made in one pot.  We all loved it. The ground cashews add a bit of texture, giving the curry zaftig body and meatiness, rounded out by the mellowing yogurt.

It went over like gangbusters with some sauteed spinach and rice cooker-prepped jasmine rice.  You absolutely MUST use a good curry powder -- we love S&B Oriental curry powder,
the blend of choice for Japanese curry.  It can be found at any Asian grocery store and a surprising number of delis in Manhattan.

Chicken Curry with Cashews

This recipe is from Epicurious. 

Heat 1 stick (1/2 cup) butter in a 7-quart heavy pot over moderately low heat until foam subsides.

Fry 3 chopped onions, 4 chopped garlic cloves, and 2 tbsp. minced ginger until softened, about 5 minutes.

Add 6 tbsp. S&B curry powder, 1 tbsp. salt, 2 tsp. ground cumin, and 1 tsp. cayenne and sauté for 2 minutes.

Add 6 lbs. chicken parts and cook, stirring to coat, 3 minutes.

Add 2 (14.5-oz.) cans tomatoes with juice and simmer gently, covered, stirring occasionally, until chicken is cooked through, about 40 minutes.

Grind 1 1/2 cups cashews until very fine, then add to curry along with 1 1/2 cups whole milk yogurt . Simmer gently, uncovered, stirring, until sauce is thickened, about 5 minutes.

Serves about 8 on a rainy Sunday.

--

After we got home from Sarah and Alex's:

DOUG: I really feel like the kitchen's not that bad at all.

[pause]

DOUG: That's why I'm going to wait 'til tomorrow to clean up.

Dear Crabby,

What up with all the crazy colors on your recipes now, dog?

Colorblind

Dear Colorblind,

1. Sorry, you are probably S.O.L. on this one, because I like my color scheme.  Sorry.

2. Here's my rant.  I have long, long believed that the recipe is a technology in desperate need of an upgrade.  You Cook's Illustrated types will have no fucking idea what I am talking about.  Fair enough, please go and organize your jars of heirloom beans in alpha order while I talk this out.

The rest of yous might be able to appreciate this.   I am impatient when it comes to recipes.  I want to understand a recipe at a glance.  I don't want to miss an important detail like the length of time I should saute a scallop before it turns into a rubber eraser.  So why are those important details so often lost in the middle of dry, wordy, finger-wagging sentences?

The way I see it, recipes should be as easy to immediately grasp as guitar tablature.  There's a huge difference between this:

Place your index finger on the fourth string from the top at the second fret; place your middle finger on the fifth string from the top at the third fret; and place your pinky finger on the bottom string at the second fret; but refrain from hitting the top two strings.

and this:
A paragraph is an imperfect form for a list of tasks that have varying difficulty and length.  We move from task to task. 

Also, why are the ingredient amounts listed separately from the instructions?  Some people measure every ingredient out onto individual bowls in a dish-dirtying mass of mise en place.  I am not one of those people.  I want to grab the cumin once, throw the right amount into the pot at the right time, then put the cumin back into the pantry. 

Why is it that temperatures and times are given the same text weight as nonsense like "bring to a" and "stirring occasionally"? 

The digitally trained eye no longer reads.  It scans.  It looks for keywords.

Recipes can be poetry, and they can be prose, but rarely are those kinds of recipes utilitarian for me.  I cannot bear to use my pinky knuckle to scroll down the page of a particularly chatty recipe when my fingers are full of pork juice.

At their core, recipes are just collections of data and should be treated as such.  I have a gazillion ideas about how to organize recipe into data that can be scanned and sorted by the cook who doesn't want to stand around reading the details of a recipe before digging in and making it.

If you're a developer who wants to work with me on my grander ideas, get in touch.  In the meantime, I'll be experimenting with recipe presentation in the coming posts using text, font styles, color.

For now, here's the color decoder to my upcoming recipes:

blue: ingredients
red: timing
green: action

These changes have already given me much satisfaction.  Stay tuned for more, and let me know if they work for you.

Well, hello there.

I've been away.  My job has been really eating up a lot of time of late, so I'm sorry for the absence. 

This weekend, I went to see the Memento 10 year anniversary screening, followed by a panel with the actors, the filmmaker and a pair of neuroscientists.  Have you seen Memento?  I won't ruin it for those of you who haven't seen it, but the mystery starts with a man who has no short-term memory (actually, it's long-term memory said Dr. Corkin on the panel, but that's another story) so he completely forgets recent events, places he's been, people he's met.  His brain is a sieve, and only his camera and his pen can help him retain the facts of his own life.  He winds up writing knowledge down on index cards, taking Polaroids to remember faces.  Without memories he can trust, he realizes that he can only place trust in his own familiar scrawl.

Which, of course, is what this blog has always done for me.  Everyone's memory, by nature, will fail them, as the brain rebuilds every event anew -- the more often it is accessed, the better the chance of a creative rebuild.

And all of these unrecorded events of my life, I don't want to lose them in the vast and ever-expanding stacks of my hippocampus.  No moment of life is too inane.  Time feels more scarce in the new lines around my mouth, the white sprouts at my cowlick, the tightening hinge at the base of my spine.

So I return to the metaphor I love -- the consumption of Life, so simple and full of wonder, spoonful by spoonful.  I want to savor these moments in the years to come, and I want to give my brain all the help it needs.

I spend my work week chasing page views and search engines, and sometimes I felt like I had to put some of that effort into my personal web space.  But whenever I did that, it was easy to lose the joy of writing, of recording something that was only meaningful to me, not to an audience outside of myself.

But I have always been able to find comfort in the familiar angles and pressure of my own scrawl.  My mundane Sunday morning breakfast of stewed apricots and yogurt may not be what everyone is searching for, but it means something to me --  it's a memory of a late night after a long day at work, unwinding at my friend Sarah's old apartment in Murray Hill.  It's a snapshot of the slippery squish of a black leather couch, one that was inherited by Sarah's boyfriend Alex from my other friend Shannon's bachelor pad days.  There's even a chuckle over Sarah's observation about the graphically Sapphic nature of the soaking apricots.

That couch is gone -- Sarah and Alex have moved to another apartment without it.  Shannon is no longer a bachelor.  Now that Sarah is no longer in Murray Hill, I don't have the luxury of popping over for a late night snack-chat after work. But I have these apricots and a few words, like a Polaroid in full development.  




Stewed apricots with greek yogurt, raw honey and pistachios

This recipe was given to me by my friend Sarah, who adapted it from a much more involved Nigella recipe.

Soak 2 cups dried California apricots in enough water to cover overnight.

Coarsely grind 1/2 tsp. cardamom.  Add to apricots and simmer for half an hour until soft.

Cool to room temp.  Keeps about a week in the fridge.

Serve over Greek yogurt with 1 tsp. raw honey and some pistachios.

Lina put me in charge of the Janssons frestelse (left), a duty which I took very seriously.  It can be a challenge to make a dish you've never tasted -- how will you know if you got it right?  In that situation, the only way to go is to follow the recipe as close to the letter as possible.  But I ran into trouble hunting down Swedish anchovies.



On the left, we have standard Spanish anchovies cured in salt and preserved in olive oil.  On the right, you see Swedish "anchovies", which are not anchovies as we know them, but sprats.  They're cured in a sweet/salty water-based brine that tastes of Swedish spices -- allspice, clove, that kind of thing.  Absolutely not the same thing.

I had to stalk the Swedish anchovy for a day and a half before I found some.  Let no one say I lack persistence:

> 6 train to Wall St.
> IKEA ferry to Red Hook
@ IKEA - Find out they ran out of anchovies an hour before I got there
> IKEA Shuttle to Jay St.
> F train and walk to Eagle Provisions in Park Slope
@ Eagle Provisions - Closed for the night.  DOH!
> Walk home to Sunset Park, where I eat my disappointment in the form of half a roll of Göteborg Singoalla cookies, which I had purchased from IKEA
> Wake up the next morning, play hooky from work to hunt for anchovies, walk back to Eagle
@ Eagle Provisions - no anchovies
> Take the bus to Bierkraft
@ Bierkraft - not open until noon
> Walk to Union Market
@ Union Market - no anchovies
> Walk to Blue Apron Foods
@ Blue Apron Foods - no anchovies. Counter guy suggests Russ & Daughters, though my friend Emil tweeted in reply to my frantic request for advice that they have none this year
> Walk to Brooklyn Larder
@ Brooklyn Larder - they don't open for another half hour, but the guy who answers the door says there are no Swedish anchovies
> 2 to the 1 to Christopher St.
@ Gourmet Garage - no anchovies
@ Murray's - no anchovies
@ The Lobster Place - no anchovies
@ Citarella - no anchovies
> Cab to Gramercy to pick up some keys from my friend Sarah R.
@ Sunflower Diner - we have grapefruit and tea, Sarah suggests I try Schaller & Weber.
> Call Schaller & Weber:

ME: Do you have Swedish anchovies?

GUY: Of course we got Swedish ham.

ME: Not Swedish ham. Swedish ANCHOVIES.

GUY: Hold on.  [Muffled voice] Do we have Swedish anchovies?  ANCHOVIES.  Yeah? [Back into the mouthpiece] Yeah, we got 'em.

ME: Hmph. Alright, thanks.

> With great skepticism, take the 6 train up to 86th St., walk to 86th and 2nd.
@ Schaller & Weber - SUCCESS!  Stacks of anchovies in the refrigerator case, as well as all kinds of Swedish foods.   
> Take 6 train to the N train all the way home, where I reward my hard work with the other half roll of Singoalla cookies.

Here's another recipe adapted from Leif Mannerström's The Art of Home Cooking (Husmanskonst).  Theories on the dish's etymology vary, but the basic recipe is onions, julienned potatoes, cream and Swedish anchovies.  I was intimidated by the amount of anchovy called for in his recipe, since nobody else seemed to include as much as he.  Even with half the anchovies, the dish tasted plenty saline to me. 

The anchovy liquor and sauteed onions add a unique sweetness to the dish -- again, this is a bit of a level 2 Swedish dish.  It's not for everyone, but I quite liked how the rich cream and gentle sweetness cut the umami sprat flavor.  Also, pretty nifty, you can do as I did and cook it 3/4 of the way through, cool and refrigerate, then travel on the subway with it to your destination, top up with a little cream and bake at 400 for 20 minutes until heated through, finishing with the broiler to brown the top.



 
Jansson's Temptation (Janssons frestelse)
Adapted loosely from Leif Mannerström's The Art of Home Cooking

4 medium yellow onions
5 large Yukon Gold potatoes
Butter
2 tins of Swedish anchovies
2 cups of heavy cream
salt and pepper

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2. Peel onions.  Use mandoline to slice onions thinly.  Melt a knob of butter in a pan.  Saute the onions slowly over medium heat until golden brown.
   
3. Peel potatoes.  Use mandoline to julienne the potatoes.
4. When onions have cooked down and are golden brown, add the potatoes, cream and anchovy liquor to the pan.  Taste and season with pepper and a bit of salt if needed.  Stir and let cook over low heat for 5 minutes.
5. Butter a large oval casserole.  Line the bottom of the casserole with half of the potato onion mixture.  Put half of your anchovies on top of the potatoes.  Cover with the remaining potato mixture.  Top with the other half of the anchovies.
6. Bake for 45 minutes until golden brown on top and bubbly.  Alternatively, bake for 30 minutes, then cool and refrigerate, covered in foil.  When ready to serve, bake uncovered in 400 degree oven for 20 minutes, finishing under the broiler at the end to brown the top.  Serve as classic fixin' with meatballs for Christmas Eve dinner.

--


 
For future ref, should you ever be in need of Swedish ingredients for Christmas, save yourself some grief and try Schaller & Weber first.  Fine selection of Abba herring, source for German 25% vinegar, which can be substituted when diluted with one part water for Swedish ättiksprit spirit vinegar (which is 12% acidity).  I like the rather alarming warning at the bottom of the label:

I've never had lussekatter, traditional Christmas Swedish saffron buns, so I had no idea if I had made them right or not.  Luckily, there was a translated recipe in the December Saveur, which came from an Allt om Mat editor, so I knew the recipe would be straightforward and trustworthy.



These buns are very mildly flavored and not very sweet.  They reminded me of Hawaiian bread (do you know what I'm talking about?) which I adored as a kid.  But it didn't really go with dinner -- I suspect it should be a fika treat, something to nosh with coffee either mid-morning or mid-afternoon, before dinner.  It's definitely not a dessert.
 
I tried to follow the recipe closely -- the only deviation I made was to soak the raisins in amaretto overnight -- I love a boozy raisin.

They really need to be baked and eaten day of -- they go stale quite quickly.  But the leftovers made a pretty lovely bread pudding with the addition of almond paste, cardamom, custard, and more raisins.

Lussekatter
adapted from December 2009 Saveur

2 1/4 oz. packages active dry yeast
2 cups whole milk, heated till finger-warm (110 degrees)
2 tsp. saffron, lightly crushed
3/4 cup plus 1 tsp. sugar
6 1/2 cups flour
3/4 tsp. kosher salt
3 eggs
12 Tbsp. unsalted butter, room temp and cut into 1/2" cubes
64 raisins soaked overnight in 1/3 c. amaretto liquer

1. In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a paddle, mix together yeast, milk, saffron, and 1 tsp.sugar.  Let sit until foamy, about 10 minutes.  Stir in remaining sugar, flour, salt and 2 eggs.  Mix on low until dough forms and gathers around the paddle.  (I don't have a stand mixer, so I just did this by hand.)
2. Replace paddle with dough hook and add butter.  Knead on medium-high speed until dough pulls away from the sides of the bowl, 8 minutes. 
   
3. Grease a large bowl with butter.  Transfer dough to the greased bowl and cover with plastic wrap.  Let sit in a warm place until double in size, about 1 hour.
4. Divide dough into 32 pieces and roll each piece into an 8" long rope.  Form each rope into an S-shape and then roll each end into a tight spiral.  Place buns 2" apart on parchment-lined baking sheets. Cover with plastic wrap and let rise in a warm place for 30 minutes.




5. Preheat oven to 400 degrees.  Uncover the dough pieces and place a raisin at the center of each of the spirals. 
   
6. Lightly beat remaining egg with 1 Tbsp. water and brush each bun with egg. 
   


7. Bake until buns are golden brown and cooked through, 16 minutes.  Cool for at least 10 minutes.  Serve with strong brewed coffee for fika.

Lussekatter Bread Pudding

Okay, there is no tradition of lussekatter bread pudding in Sweden, as far as I know, but it's a nice way to use up some of those stale buns, and it's quite pretty to boot.  I used some leftover frozen almond paste butter with cardamom, so I'm just going to give you an approximate recipe and you can trust your judgment for the amounts to add.



1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Take 6 stale lussekatter.



2. Slice into 1" pieces.

3. Heat 2 cups of milk with a knob of butter, some grated almond paste and a bit of ground cardamom over low heat until hot but not boiling.

4.  In a large bowl, beat 2 eggs and 1 egg yolk with 1/3 cup of sugar.  While whisking vigorously, pour in a bit of the hot milk mixture.  Once well beaten, add more of the hot milk mixture until it's all well mixed. Add a splash of vanilla extract and, if desired, a splash of amaretto.

5.  Add cut-up lussekatter and some soaked raisins, let the bread soak for a few minutes. 

6. Butter a small 5" x 9" casserole.  Pour soaked bread custard into casserole.  Bake for 30 minutes until top is crisp and golden brown and custard is cooked through.  Serve warm.  Or eat cold from the fridge.  I'm not judging if you're not judging.

I have an orange blossom candle which I've placed on my radiator.  Whenever the heat is on, it releases the slow, lazy smell of desert blooms -- the Orient, powdery and sweet. 

In my dreams, I invite the women of Marjane Satrapi's family over.  They sip strong tea from a samovar, perhaps in glass cups hugged by metal filigree.  The steam rises in double brushstrokes from their thin cups.  I sit on the floor at their feet, knees together, ankles tucked next to one hip. 

I serve these cakes. They are the secret held behind Ilsa Lund's plush lips when Rick Blaine corners her at the bazaar.  They are a pink silk nightgown trimmed with cream lace, pinned to a clothesline.  They are the sillage of an arch-browed woman in seamed stockings, the thin embroidered lines like the continuation of her spine down into the tips of her heels.  They are the inner courtyard of a tiled blue palace, a rose garden where a teenage girl fans her long, wild hair in the grass for a sun bath.

Persian Tea Cakes

The base of this cake is Smitten Kitchen's yellow cake recipe, which I am officially obsessed with.  With cardamom, rosewater, orange and pistachio, they are impossibly feminine and perfumey and delicate. They're perfect with a strong cup of tea.  I used foil cupcake cups, but you could easily use a greased cupcake tin and pop 'em out before icing for prettier presentation. I am in love with them, and I can't wait to show them off again.

CAKES:
2 cups plus 2 tbsp. cake flour
1 tsp. baking powder
3/4 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
1 stick unsalted butter, room temp
1 cup sugar
2 eggs, room temp
1 c. buttermilk
1 tsp. vanilla
1 tbsp. rosewater
1 tsp. cardamom seeds, ground in mortar and pestle

ICING:
Juice of 1 orange
1 tsp. orange zest, grated AND chopped fine
2 cups powdered sugar, sifted
1 pinch salt
1/2 c. Turkish pistachios, chopped

EQUIPMENT:
22 cupcake foil cups
Baking sheet

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2. Sift flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt together.  Set aside.
3. Beat butter and sugar together. 
   
4. Beat in one egg at a time on low speed, scraping down the sides of the bowl. 
   
5. Add buttermilk, vanilla, rosewater and cardamom.  Beat on low until blended.
   
6. Beat in dry ingredients, a third at a time, until just blended, scraping down the sides of the bowl.
7. Drop cupcake cups onto baking sheet.  Fill cups about 1/3 full.
8. Bake for 23-28 minutes until barely golden brown on top.  Cool completely.

For the icing:

1. Put powdered sugar, grated zest and salt into a bowl.  Add enough orange juice to make a thin, drizzle-able icing.
2. Ice the cupcakes with plenty of orange icing.  Top with chopped pistachios. 
   

--

I submitted these for my office's bake-off today.  Though they came in second place, two of the judges (one of whom was Jim Oseland, EIC of Saveur) said they gave it 10 out of 10, meaning the third judge was my downfall.  DAMMIT!  But, BUT, Jim Oseland said my cake and the olive oil cake (which just happened to be from a Saveur recipe) were his favorites (!).  So take that, pedestrian caramel oat chocolate chip WHATEVER in first place.  Harumph.

Photo from Winnie Yang

These köttbullar were so crazy delicious.  The recipe is from a book called The Art of Home Cooking by Leif Mannerström.  It was a parting gift given to me by my co-workers in Sweden, with reassurances that it is the best husmanskost cookbook out there.  (The Swedish title of the book, by the way, is Husmanskonst, a play on the word husmanskost, which means Swedish home cooking, and konst, which means art.)

The book says, "The following recipe is your chance of making the best meatballs in Sweden."  And brother was not kidding.

Winnie did all the work prepping them -- all I did was help shape and fry.  You can't go wrong with meat fried in tons of butter, but I think the texture was what really made those meatballs great -- crisp on the outside, soft as a cheek and super moist on the inside. 

But there are a few things you wouldn't really know on your own if you just read the recipe cold.  I have a few suggestions:

1. The anchovy liquor referred to in the recipe comes from Swedish anchovies, which are actually sweet sprats, not the salted Italian anchovies in oil.  Winnie used regular anchovies and just melted them down with the browned onions, but if you want to stick to the recipe, you'll have to hunt down Swedish anchovies. You should be able to get them at IKEA.
2. We found that the meatballs fell apart a bit in the frying pan.  I remembered a little later, though, that ground meat in Sweden is ground quite finely; mince comes out of the grinder in strands like thin spaghetti.  For rounder, more shapely meatballs, it might help to ask your butcher to put your meat through a finer grinder an extra round.  Or, you could pulse the meat in the food processor for a minute.
   
3. A nonstick frying pan helps keep the meatballs together.  It's also helpful to deglaze the pan every once in a while to pick up the fond, which wants to stick to your meatballs.  You could probably deglaze with cream to make a cream sauce instead. 
   
4. I think Winnie made the meatballs with half pork, half beef, and they were phenomenal, so that's the balance I included in the recipe.  Original recipe calls for half ground beef, half ground beef-pork mixture, which is a thing in Sweden.  So you could do three parts beef to one part pork instead; find the balance that works for you.   
   

Anyway, you MUST try these!  They went over like gangbusters with the 20 or so people who came to Winnie's Choice Cuts dinner and movie night.  (Details on the dinner here; more pics here.)  The Swedish factor makes it a bit cosmopolitan, but it's really accessible comfort food.  It's also a VERY kid friendly meal.  Meatballs are to Swedish kids as chicken nuggets are to American kids.

One interesting note -- Mannerström adds freshly grated nutmeg to his mash. I bet that's gooood.

Also, if you've never had the pleasure of attending a Choice Cuts event, sign up for her mailing list. The company is always interesting, the food is always delicious and ambitious, and Matt curates an excellent short before the well-chosen main feature.  It's the perfect thing to do on a Sunday night in Brooklyn.

Meatballs a la Lilian
adapted from Leif Mannerström's The Art of Home Cooking

1 1/2 dl (scant 2/3 cup) milk
1/2 dl (scant 1/4 cup) cream
2 dl (4/5 cup) dried breadcrumbs
2 eggs
1 dl (scant 1/2 cup) water

4 medium-large boiled potatoes (go for floury over waxy)

2 large onions

800 grams (1.75 lbs.) minced beef, ground finely
800 grams (1.75 lbs.) minced pork, ground finely
1 tsp. brown sugar
2 tbsp. "anchovy" liquor (or substitute a few anchovy fillets)
4 tbsp. concentrated veal stock
2 tbsp. Kikkoman soy
salt and pepper

butter for frying (at least a stick, maybe two.  Don't be shy)
Water or cream for deglazing

1. Blend the milk, cream, breadcrumbs, egg and water into a loose batter.  Let mixture swell for a while.
2. Mash the potatoes well.  Set aside.
   
3. Peel the onions.  Grate one of them finely, chop the other one finely and fry till golden brown.  (If you substitute anchovy fillets for anchovy liquor, fry the fillets with the onion here.)
4. Blend all the ingredients quickly into a smooth mixture.  Add salt and pepper.  Fry a small dab to test the seasoning.
5. Shape the roundest meatballs you can.  (Helps to have extra hands to shape meatballs here.) 
   
6. Melt a tablespoon of butter in a nonstick or cast iron pan. Fry meatballs in butter till golden brown on the bottom, then roll over and brown on the other side.  Don't crowd the pan or they won't brown correctly.  Try to brown the meatballs all over.  Add another tbsp. of butter for each batch you fry.
   
7. After you've fried a few batches, deglaze the pan with a little water.  You could use the juice to moisten the meatballs, though they don't need the help.
   
8. Serve with mashed potato, pressgurka (quick-pickled cucumber) and lingonberry jam (or cranberry sauce, as Winnie did).  Serves 10.

Pressgurka
adapted from Leif Mannerström's The Art of Home Cooking

1 English seedless cucumber
1 small bunch parsley
salt
pepper

Dressing:
1 dl (scant 1/2 cup) ättiksprit*
3 dl water
2 dl (4/5 cup) caster (superfine) sugar
10-12 slices chili
salt

1. Shave cucumber thinly.  Place on a dish and salt lightly.  Leave for about 15 minutes and then drain well in a colander.  Pat gently with paper towel.
   
2. Chop parsley finely. 
   
3. In a glass bowl, alternate layers of cucumber, parsley and pepper.
4. Mix dressing together, checking for seasoning -- you want sweet and sour.
5. Pour dressing over cucumber.  Sprinkle lots of parsley on top.  Refrigerate for at least 1 hour before serving.
   

*Ättiksprit is a special Swedish 12% strong vinegar.  Heinz distilled white vinegar, by comparison, is 5%.  If you are not as hardcore as Winnie, who brought a giant bottle back with her from Sweden (I'm certainly not that hardcore), I am guessing that you can do 2.5 dl (1 cup) white vinegar and 1.5 dl (scant 2/3 cup) of water instead of the 1 dl ättiksprit and 3 dl water.  Or, check IKEA to see if they carry it.

 

Fried a gazillion meatballs at Winnie's tonight for her Choice Cuts showing of Tillsammans.  Felt nostalgic for socialist Sweden.  Meatball recipe huge success, from translation of Husmanskonst or The Art of Home Cooking.  Will share complicated recipe when I have a moment.  But discovered a few things:

1. Deglazing the meatball pan helps the meatballs to not get stuck to the bottom and fall apart.
2. Carola's tårta really requires the tart red currants to balance the sweetness of the custard.  If I were to make it with banana again (as I did tonight), I would fold some whipped cream into the custard to cut the sweetness a bit and give it a little more body.
3. The fransk chokladkaka from Rosendals Trädgård's cookbook is a recipe I'll have to post, too.  Good with whipped cream, but I miss a crusty top.  The search for the perfect recipe continues.