IRON MEETING

..Is a little dinner meeting my mom and myself try to have every now and then (first it actually took place once a week, but that surely failed, we're just sooo busy.. not).

At Iron Meeting night Blodpudding is served; a very traditional Swedish dish which is made by cooking swine blood, milk, rye flour, fat, sometimes beer with a filler until it's thick enough to congeal when cooled. Nowadays people buy the already made blodpudding in the supermarket and then usually serve it with bacon, cabbage and/or lingonberry jam!

"Blood food" is very rich in iron and we usually wash it down with a or two of red wine, which also contain a high level of iron. I introduced mom to my new favorite; Sunrise Carmenere.

I sautéed yellow onion, bacon and steamed carrots, and put some lingonberry on the side! Yum!

MEINKLANG

Last weekend my gorgeous friends Malin and Markus (Mrs & Mr) brought me a bottle of the lovely Austrian white wine Meinklang (2007) which I hadn't tried before; it was a dry, spicy and fruity wine, with hints of melon, white pepper and lime. Grapefruit..? A scent of almond..?

The Grüner Veltliner grapes are grown according to biodynamic methods. One can read in several places that it's a very "food-friendly wine" and it's said to be the classic pairing for the otherwise hard-to-pair asparagus.

It was indeed marvelous darlin'..

It's about 79 SEK at Systembolaget. Not bad!

DELICIOUS DORSET

My awesome friend Helena brought me a box of really yummy Dorset Cereals a couple of days ago when she visited for my birthday; it was the Super Cranberry, Cherry & Almond kind that included Chilean Flame Raisins, no less! It was picked up at the cute store Matdistriktet on Rådmansgatan 57 in Stockholm.

COLLECTING CRISP BREAD or KRAZY FOR KNÄCKE

Today I received a home made bag in thin cotton fabric to keep round pieces of Swedish crisp bread (a k a knäckebröd in Swedish) in. The lady that so generously gave it to me had made a whole collection of various colors, I immediately picked a pink to match the interior of my little pink kitchen :)

LOVING LIQUORICE

My friend Linda stopped by yesterday and since weather has been warm and sunny in Sweden we sat down on my terrace and had a fika.. Fika is simply coffee or tea and maybe a little something to eat, like a cinnamon bun or cookies.. (or slice of pie or cheesecake or or...). In New York there's actually a restaurant named Fika.

The indulgence of the day was the Swedish Singoalla brand of cookies that have just hit the market with their new liquorice flavor.. Not too sweet, just simply yummy and very dipable :)

CHOCOLATE

The other day someone offered me to pick the first piece in a box of Paradis chocolates.

Paradis is the milk chocolate version of the very popular chocolate box Aladdin which contains both dark and milk chocolates. Aladdin has been around since 1939 and is usually sold in all Swedish supermarkets, they are seen all over the place at Christmas time when it's extremely common to purchase these as Christmas gifts or as a bring-along-present to Christmas parties/dinners. There are 2 layers (of the same chocolates) in these boxes and the rule is NOT to start the second layer before finishing the top one. One can choose from many different chocolates in these boxes; coconut-caramel, cream nougat, cherry, liqueur truffle, rum-raisin, triple-nut, orange truffle, egg liqueur and my favorite "the pearl nougat" which is nougat covered in white chocolate, it's placed in the middle of both of the boxes, but someone always grabs it before me.. But now I had the chance to indulge!

Last night the famous Swedish TV hosts Filip & Fredrik aired the very first episode of "Söndagsparty" (Sunday party) which is sent live from Chelsea Studios in Manhattan. It was alright, but they had 2 interesting guests where Marilyn Manson was one of them, he was sipping on absinthe, but was then offered a piece of chocolate from a Paradis box and picked...*drum whirl* .. the Pearl Nougat!

I'm SO Marilyn Manson..

TOURNEDOS ROSSINI

I took the quiz "What (food) dish are you?" on Facebook today and the result was: Tournedos Rossini, which is served every Sunday at the Carlyle Hotel on Upper East Side in New York. I once took my (then) boyfriend there for his birthday for a great dinner; while Woody Allen played his clarinet.. Pretty fancy indeed.