Om Mig

I spend my retirement baking and cooking for my family, including four grandchildren. I want to give them a chance to grow up loving the traditional swedish foods my own mother and grandmothers cooked for me. These recipes - for example, the "husmanskost" dishes and the myriad varieties of Swedish biscuits - fill our kitchen with the scents I remember from my childhood, bringing back memories of proper home cooking and the people who worked, lived and laughed in those long- ago kitchens. I will blog about those recipes here that have been passed down through the generations, as well as some new family favourites. It is a treasure I hope to share with others.

Two of the beloved pyrs who have blessed our family life; Arcas, who has sadly passed on, and Betzy.

I always tried to cook all our family's food from scratch. I wanted to be sure that the food was nutritious and healthy. And then suddenly warnings started to pop up, about this or that additive or ingredient being chemical-laden or harmful, and I realised how important it is not to rely on processed fabricated foods for convenience.

In Sweden early on one environmentalist made the news when he demonstrated that you could wash your shirts with a popular brand of coffee whitener. On prime time TV he showed how the shirts lathered up and became bleached white. At the same time, pressure was starting to mount on people to live clean and look thin and a certain way. Sugar was vilified while food additives with names that can't even be pronounced were becoming more common. In the recent years several books have been published here in Sweden exposing the unsavoury food business and their short cuts and fake methods. One that had a great impact on me, "Den hemlige kocken", is published in english as "Best Kept Secret" by Mats Erik Nilsson.

I hope that my grandchildren and children will be able to experience the lovely scent of a home cooked "köttsoppa" (Beef soup), made from scratch with seasonal vegetables and real, not mystery, meat. As a child I loved "bruna bönor" with fried salted pork, kroppkakor, dillkött, kåldolmar, kalops... Real, old fashioned Swedish foods. Those days I was in such a hurry to get back from school when I knew my favourite dishes were on the menu!

My mother was a great cook, and my grandmother had a diner where she really got to show her cooking chops! Grandma and Granddad also had a factory that made sausages and hams and other meat delicacies, to be sold in their shops. Whenever the men had made prinskorv or wienerkorv I would be allowed to sample the result. Still I can recall the scent of alder wood or juniper wood that was used to smoke the meat. No fake smoke essences were used there!

Betzy with the newest addition to the pack; our dearest Theia!

One of my first memories from childhood was about food. I caught our great Irish Wolfhound Vokka (the only memory I have of her) coming down the stairs from the diner store room. I remember my happy thrill over seeing her! In the storeroom Grandma had placed some breaded veal chops, to be served for lunch that day. Unfortunately I had probably opened the store room door and the dog got in... Grandma had to rewrite the menu that day! So even as a child, food made a great impression on me.

Food has always been important in my life. I worry over additives that are said not to be harmful in small amounts... But what happens in our bodies when those small amounts accumulate, or mix with so many other strange chemicals that make their way inside us?

We have to learn how to take care of and not waste our food. The environment and climate are important to us all, regardless of our political inclinations. What do we do when our grandchildren can no longer survive on our planet?

Me and my family and our three dogs are very lucky that we are living in a peaceful place on earth. Hopefully the small local things we do can make some tiny, tiny difference on the global scale.

Betzy, Theia (who is all grown up now) and the small dog with the larger than life personality; Maggie Lou the pug!

Greetings from Anki