Category: Christmas

A Scandinavian Christmas part III: The food

Published on by Hanna1 Comment

I know that last year’s Christmas is done and dusted, but I still want to show you what we ate on Christmas Eve. Before Christmas I gave you the low-down of what happens that day, so it is about time to show you as well.

For lunch (or breakfast for me) we have the cold foods, such as pickled herring, smoked eel, smoked salmon, eggs, bread and cheeses.

And then in the evening we have all the warm food. The reason for this divide is that we don’t want to eat too much so we think having less dishes will help with that, but I’m not sure it works. We all leave the table dying to lie down on the sofa because we’re so full.

Anyway, the first course in the evening we enjoy meatballs, Jansson’s frestelse [temptation] (potato bake with anchovies), small sausages calles prinskorv, red cabbage, brown cabbage (i.e. caramelised white cabbage), Christmas ham with mustard crust, this year we also had a boar ham which was delicious, bread, cheeses and my chicken liver mousse.

Next course is very traditional, and not my favourite I have to admit. The fish is poached salted ling, served with allspice, boiled potatoes and a mustardy bechamel with melted butter.

Dessert consists of rice pudding with lots and lots of whipped cream mixed in and a coulis. We have raspberry and cherry coulis to choose from.

After dinner Santa comes with all the presents and once they are opened we have coffee and pastries. Very typical are the almond biscuit (second from left) and ginger bread of course.

A Finnish-British christmas meal

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On Saturday a few of us gathered at Anna and Ian’s for a Christmas dinner among friends. The two hosts decided to have a little cook off and to serve traditional food from both Finland (where Anna is from) and Britain.

The meal was utterly delicious and we definitely have two winners in the cook off! Thanks guys!

We started off with some nibbles. Both smoked salmon on rye bread and this smoked reindeer meat that Anna’s mother brought with her from Finland, on rye bread.

The main course was a smorgasbord of dishes; lovely moist turkey with homemade stuffing and wrapped in pancetta, roast potatoes, sausages wrapped in bacon, juicy mustard glazed ham, Finnish Christmas box (puréed potatoes and parsnips baked in the oven and a lovely sallad with pickled beetroots (the Scandi way with acetic acid instead of vinegar) and potatoes. Needless to say we ate in silence for a few minutes and just enjoyed the food.

After a short break I prepared my mother’s version of Glace au Four (Baked Alaska), and because it contains icecream we had to eat it pretty quickly. After another little break we had recovered enough to dig in to the cheesecake Jenny had brought as well.

Thank you and Happy Christmas to the hosts; Anna and Ian:

Photo: Jenny Mills

Advent gathering

Published on by Hanna5 Comments

The first Sunday of Advent is special to me, and I like to invite people over to celebrate it with Swedish glögg and plenty of nibbles.

Unfortunately I was too busy in the kitchen to have time to take pictures of everything, but at least a few things got caught by the camera.

For the first time ever, I made my own glögg, which is basically a sweeter version of mulled wine, served in little cups wit almonds and raisins.

I love it, and you can have white or red glögg although the red one is more common. I also made mulled cider which is a bit drier, although still sweet, so that was why I served mainly savoury nibbles this year.

We had mini potato bakes with anchovies (it is a lot nicer than it sounds, promise), meatballs and pickled beetroot on scewers, dates wrapped in bacon, ginger thins with Stilton (great combo), clementines and a soft gingerbread cake with frosting (recipe to follow). I also made a little spread with potato, hardboiled eggs, herring, dill, chives, mayonnaise and creme fraiche, knows as old man’s spread. A dollop of that on crisp bread is delicious.

Homemade glögg, 70 cl

Translated and adapted from this recipe.

1 bottle red wine

1 whole cinnamon stock

20 cloves

1 tsp ground ginger

4 cardamom kernels, crushed

300 ml caster sugar (start with 200 ml if you don’t want it too sweet)

1 tsp vanilla

some grated lemon zest

Pour the wine into a large sauce pan. Add the spices and leave it for at least an hour and a half. Before serving, add the sugar and vanilla and heat it up without boiling. Pour through a sieve to remove the spices. Serve in a small cup (espresso size) with almonds and raisins.

Mulled cider, 2 litres

2 litres dry cider

1 vanilla pod, cut in half lengthways

2 tbsp brown sugar

2-3 star anise

2 tsp ground cinnamon

orange or lemon peel

Place everything in a large saucepan and heat up. Serve without the spices.

Christmas meatballs, makes 50

500 g beef mince

500 g pork mince

2 eggs

150 ml breadcrumbs

100 ml cream

1 onion, finely chopped or 1 tbsp onion granules

2-3 tsp salt

white pepper

1,5 tsp allspice

Pour everything but the meat into a large bowl. Mix and let it sweel for a few minutes. Add the meat and mix it throughly with a wooden fork. Rinse your hands in cold water and roll into smallish meatballs. Fry in the oven or in a frying pan until cooked through Serve hot or cold. Place a meatball on a toothpick together with a wedge of pickled beetroot for a simple canapé.

Old man’s spread (Gubbröra), makes 30 canapées

2-3 medium potatoes, cooked, cold and chopped

1 jar matjes herring, chopped

2 hardboiled eggs, cold and chopped

4 tbsp mayonnaise

4 tbsp creme fraiche

1/2 bunch dill, finely chopped

1/2 bunch chives, finely chopped

Mix creme fraiche and mayo in a bowl. Add the other ingredients and mix. Break crispbread into small pieces and place a dollop of the spread on each. Serve straight away as the crispbread will soften from the moisture.

Bacon wrapped dates, makes 18

18 pitted dates

9 slices smoked streaky bacon

Cut the baconslices in half. Wrap a bacon piece around each date, fasten with a toothpick. Place in a baking tray and bake for 15 minutes in 200C until the bacon is crisp. Serve while hot.

Hannu’s Christmas paté

Published on by Hanna2 Comments

My mother is very much into her gardening, and she’s very good at it too, everyone who has seen her garden can verify that. One of my mother’s favourites within gardening is a Swede called Hannu Sarenström, and he does recipies too! We found this recipe in his book  Vinterkalas (Winter parties), and my mother and I made this at Christmas. It might be a bit late to post a recipe for a Christmas paté after New Year’s, but there is nothing Christmassy about this paté apart from the name. You can make this paté all year round.

We nearly followed the reipe this time, but made a few changes. We used 200 g chicken liver and 200 g mixed mince instead of pork mince and smoked ham instead of smoked bacon. We just added slightly less liquid and that worked really well. We also used a food processor for everything but the mince, so ours is a bit smoother. Really nice!

Hannu’s Christmas paté (called Barbro’s traditional Christmas paté in the book)

300 g chicken liver

300 g lean pork mince

1 packet smoked bacon

1 onion, grated

2 cloves garlic, pressed

2 tsp salt

2 tsp marjoram or oregano

1 tsp black pepper

100 ml dry white wine

2 eggs

100 ml plain flour

100 ml double cream

2-3 tbsp chopped parsley

Chope the liver and add to the mince. Cut the bacon into small strips and add to the mixture. Add onions and garlic. Add salt, oregano (marjoram) and pepper. Stir in the wine, eggs, flour and cream. Add the parsley.  

Put the oven on 200C. Grease and coat a dish with flour, fill it with the mixture. Cover with tin foil and bake for 1 1/4 hour.

Saffron cake with marzipan

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This is a great Christmassy cake that I treated my friends to on Sunday when they came over for lunch.

It is nice and moist and has a lovely colour from the saffron. Served with lightly whipped cream and a warm raspberry sauce this is divine!

Saffron cake with marzipan, serves 8

250 ml caster sugar

100 ml grated marzipan

100 ml plain flour

3 eggs

2,5 tbsp vanilla sugar

a pinch of salt

125 g melted butter

1/2 g saffron powder (if you buy the long strands grind them in a pestle and mortar with a tbsp of sugar)

Grease a sprinform and cover it in breadcrumbs. Stir together all the dry ingredients apart from the saffron. Add the saffron to the butter. Add the butter and eggs to the dry mixture. Combine and pour into the springform. Bake in 180C for about 20 minutes until it has set.

To make the raspberry sauce, bring frozen raspberries (or fresh) to a boil, break them down with a fork and add some caster sugar, so it is still tart but not so much. Serve warm with the cake and lightly whipped cream.

Christmas dinner with friends, anchovies bake and brussel sprouts with bacon

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On Saturday we had a little Christmas dinner among friends. It was David, Gaby, Ian, Anna and me and Christopher and we all contributed to the dinner by bringing different dishes, and the result was a great smorgasbord of Christmas food with an international touch.

Blinis with smoked salmon, chives and creme fraiche

Anna (who has a Russian mother and a Finnish father) served homemade blinis with smoked salmon, chives and creme fraiche as a starter. Wonderful!

For the first time I tried making meatballs in the oven and then fry them afterwards, and they were perfect. 🙂

Instead of a main course we had a buffet with different dishes; David and Gaby’s amazing ham, Anna’s Salad Olivier (Russian salad with boiled eggs, potatoes, carrots, beetroots, frankfurters, gherkins, grated apple and mayonnaise), roast potatoes, meatballs, anchovies bake, brussel sprouts with bacon, carrots in orange butter, green beans and a shallots and red wine gravy. Really nice! 🙂

The prettiest ham ever!
Ham with wholegrain mustard from Daylesford organic.
Salad Oliver!
Anchovies bake
Brussel sprouts with bacon
A plate full of wonderful food!

Gaby made a lovely crumble with apple and blackberries for dessert. After that we had some Christmas sweets, the almond biscuits with cream and jam, clementines, tea, coffee and quite a lot of port.

Apple and blackberry crumble with custard

I woke up poorly the next day though. 😦 I hate having the flu, but it is difficult to avoid it this time of year… I really hope I will be feeling better towards the end of the week, because I’m flying home to see my family and friends on Friday.

Anchovies bake, serves 6

10 large potatoes

1-2 onions

1/2 packet anchovies with brine

300 ml cream

butter

bread crumbs

salt

white pepper

Grate the potatoes and the onions. Butter a regular dish and fill it halfway up with potatoes and onions. Cut the anchovies fillets in small pieces and scatter them on top. Put the rest of the potatoes and onions on top. Pour over the cream and the brine from the anchovies. Place a few dollops of butter around the dish, and sprinkle over some salt and white pepper. Lastly cover the dish with breadcrumbs. Bake in 200C for 45 mins to 1 hr. The potatoes should be soft and the top crispy.  

Brussel sprouts with bacon

500 g brussel sprouts

8 slices of bacon

butter

grated nutmeg

salt

white pepper

chopped parsley

Trim the brussel sprouts (a really boring job, but it has to be done. Take the outer leaves off if they look manky and cut off the white bits). Boil them in salted water for 10 minutes or so. They should be softer but still quite firm.

Cut the bacon in pieces and fry them crispy in butter. Add the drained brussel sprouts, salt, pepper and grated nutmeg. Add the parsley and serve straight away.

Almond biscuits with cream and jam

Published on by Hanna4 Comments

This is another recipe courtesy of my dear mama. In her recipe book these are called Evys mandelmusslor, Evy being a lady who clearly could bake, but I don’t know who she is/was. And mandelmusslor is the name for these biscuits. If biscuit is the right word… They’re not flat like normal biscuits, but dry and crisp and thin like biscuits. I have been thinking about how to translate the name, and that is just impossible as it literally means almond mussels… 😉 I settled for almond biscuit with cream and jam, but if you have a better suggestion, please – let’s hear it!

They are very light and crisp, and very easy to make. We always cover a mould with a thin layer of the pastry to make them as crisp as possible and they are best served with lightly whipped cream and a preserve of your choice.

You can half the recipe if you want, I did.

Almond biscuits, about 100

500 g cold butter

250 g icing sugar

1 egg

50 almonds, ground (you don’t have to peel them) 

600 g plain flour

10 bitter almonds, ground 

Mix all the ingredients in a bowl. Then coat the moulds thinly with pastry using your thumbs. Fill a baking tray and bake in 200C until they are golden. Put the moulds upside down on a work surface and leave them for a minute, then lift them up (with a oven glove or kitchen towel as the moulds are hot) and ‘slap’ them against the surface for the cakes to come out of the moulds. Leave them to cool upside down to maintain their shape. You can stack them according to shape in the tin later to save space, but they have to be completely cool.

Serve with lightly whipped cream and jam, and a napkinn because they can break easily. 🙂 A spoon and small plate will do too.

A housewife tip: Only wash the moulds in hot water and leave them to dry on a kitchen towel and the cakes will come off even easier next time.

Peanut butter flapjack

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When I was at Uni in a town called Lund in the south of Sweden I worked part-time as a waitress at this small hotel in the countryside. It is a lovely manor house and had recently been made into a hotel and restaurant business when I started to work there. The three chefs were great and created lovely food from local produce. The house could be quite cold in the winter and the warmest place was of course around the stoves in the kitchen. We used to stand there a lot drinking hot cocoa or Jerusalem artichoke soup, try a bit of this and a bit of that.

And every year in December we would open up the big banquet room as a temporary restaurant for the julbord, basically a Christmas themed smorgasbord. There was enormous amounts of food here, from pickled herrings, to Christmas ham, homemade sausages and of course a sweet section to finish it all off with. People always went mad coming here, both with the food and the snaps (much needed to help digest the food). I remember of course trying most things we served, but not all in one go as our guests. And this peanut butter flapjack is a recipe I kindly asked one of the chefs for. I haven’t made it for years and was surprised how nice it is, now that I made it again.

Chewy, soft and crunchy – all at the same time. With a hint of peanut butter and a layer of chocolate on top. Sounds nice, doesn’t it?! 😉

Peanut butter flapjack

50 ml caster sugar

50 ml golden syrup 

250 ml cornflakes

75 g smooth peanut butter

75 g dark chocolate

Bring the sugar and syrup to a boil. Take away from the heat and add peanut butter and cornflakes. Spread out onto parchment paper in a tin. Leave to cool in the fridge. Melt the chocolate over boiling water and spread on top of the flapjack. Let it set and cut into squares.

Saffron buns (Lussekatter)

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My dear mother has a difficult life sometimes… Like when I call in a panic on a Sunday morning to ask her for a recipe. Thankfully she knew this one off by heart and didn’t have to dig out her recipe folder, but of course I interupted her. Thank you, mother! 🙂

These buns are what we bake for the 13th December, when we celebrate St Lucia, the saint that brings light into the darkness. In school you elect a girl to be the Lucia and she wears a white gown and has a ring of candles in her hair and a red ribbon around her waist. The other girls follow her in white gowns with tinsel around their waist and a candle in their hands. The boys behind them also wear white gowns with coneshape hats on their heads and a stick with a gold star in their hands. Lastly a few boys are dressed like santas in red trousers and sweaters with a white trim and a santa hat and they usually carry a square hurricane light. In this order, two by two with the Lucia at the front, the children walk around the dark school singing Christmas carols and spreading light and happiness. It is an adorable tradition, and you can watch the Swedish Lucia (it is a bit like a Miss Sweden competition) and her tärnor on TV, there is usually a Lucia concert in the churches early in the morning, and afterwards you eat saffron buns and eat ginger thins.

I really love traditions, and now when I live abroad it is very comforting to make something that reminds me of my childhood. Of course the buns are tasty too, which is a bonus. 🙂

I find the buns a bit boring after a while, as they are very plain. It is basically a brioche dough with saffron and cardamom, so I usually make vanilla buns of some of the dough. You just roll out the dough and spread it with butter, sprinkle vanilla sugar on it, roll it up and slice it, and but the slices in cake cases. These have more taste to them and are of course more moist with the butter inside.

If you’d rather make cinnamon buns, you can use the same recipe, exclude the saffron and make substitute the vanilla sugar for caster sugar and cinnamon. They are heavenly when they’re still hot from the oven.

Saffron buns, about 30-40

50 g fresh yeast or the equivalent of dried yeast

150 g butter

500 ml milk

100 ml caster sugar

1 egg

850 g plain flour

1 tsp ground cardamom

1/2 g saffron

Melt the butter and mix with the milk, warm it up until finger warm. Crumble the yeast in a mixing bowl and add some of the milk mixture. Let the yeast dissolve and add the rest. Add the cardamom and saffron (use a pestle and mortar to break it down with a tablespoon of sugar), sugar and egg. Mix it and start adding the flour bit by bit. Mix with the dough hooks on an electric whisk and add flour until the dough lets go of the side of the bowl. Sprinkle some flour on top of the dough, cover it up and let it rise for 30 minutes. Knead the dough and cut into 4 pieces. Roll each piece into a roll and cut it in four, then cut each piece in half so you have 8 pieces of the same size. Shape each piece into a Lucia-shape (see the photos) and put raisins in them. Leave to rise on a baking tray. Beat an egg and glaze them before baking. Bake in 225C, high up in the oven until they are golden brown (about 10 minutes). If your oven bakes unevenly like mine, just turn the tray around after 5 minutes.

Use one (or two) of the large pieces of dough to make the vanilla buns. Roll it out thin (2-3 mm thick) with a rolling pin. Spread on softened butter and sprinkle plenty of vanilla sugar on top. Roll it up from the longer side and pinch the edge together with the bun so it doesn’t open lengthwise. Cut into 3 cm wide strips and place these with the cut down in a cake case. Glaze with beaten egg and sprinkle some sugar pearls (Swedish sugar) or caster sugar on top. Bake as above.

Peanut butter fudge

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Last year I found this recipe on Allrecipes.com and really wanted to try it. I didn’t have time however, but made sure to have time to make it this year. It is lovely, and the marshmallow fluff helps to make it set. The only downside is the boring beige colour, but the flavour is great, so once people have tried it, they won’t care about the colour. And if you want to make the fudge look more appetizing, may I suggest wrapping them in coloured cellophane.

Click on the link above to see the recipe.