dispatches from sweeden, via poppytalk

Scandinavia must be the most inspirational region on the planet. It seems like everything that comes out of there has the same charming minimalism that makes me swoon with admiration and envy. Every so often Popytalk contributor Elisabeth Dunker of Fine Little Day posts something spectacularly charming she found in her home of Gothenberg, Sweeden. Last week she posted these, boxes of dry cereal and museli.

Breakfast in Sweden. Maybe some organic yoghurt or curdled from Milko, and some energetic cereals or museli from Ica? Or we could make some oatmeal porridge and eat some wholemeal bread with it. Or we could just sit there and look at this great packaging, and eat later.

I love the mountain climbers. And I don't know what fullkornsbrod is, and it doesn't really matter, but it looks an awful lot like rocks. Maybe it's mushrooms...

appreciative palate

My mom forwarded this to me yesterday. It's an article from the Tucson Citizen I think, about my gradmother, Mrs. Elmer Courtland.

She talks about cooking, learning to cook, and cooking for my grandpa: "'His palate is an appreciative one,'" she says. It's a perfect phrase. Far more precise, and less elitist than the popular terms for someone who cares deeply about food. "'And cooking for people who appreciate good food'" she continues, "'is a real incentive.'"

That said, these recipes seem strangely simple for publishing. My grandmother was a truly great cook, and although I agree that if you can read a recipe, you can cook, there's also a special touch to cooking you can't learn from a book. And she knows that more than most.

My grandmother, no longer Mrs. Elmer but Fanny, made matzo balls with this special skill. Dozens of small globes, perfectly light, and perfectly schmaltzy, that required her hands. I'll grant that most people think their grandmother's matzo balls are the best because that's what they grew up with. But my grandmother's actually were superior, as were her chocolate chip cookies. I mean, nobody else made cookies that tasted/crunched like hers, and she used the recipe on the Nestle Tollhouse bag!!

My grandma hasn't cooked in at least three years now. She fell and broke her hip a month before my graduation from UCLA, then again shortly after recovering the first injury. The second spill left her with some brain damage and enough cumulative muscle atrophy to keep her from standing on her own. My grandma believed that food was her gift to us, so none of us learned the secret to her special touch and I worry that it's lost to us now.

I wonder if my grandma was holding back in the article. She was of course politely understated about her skill, but she didn't believe in microwaves and her spaghetti sauce took hours to simmer, so the idea that she'd offer Easy Peach Compote and Fish Mold as her summer dishes somehow feels overtly withholding. I understand why people would want to have secret recipes, but I disagree with it.

For this reason I'd like to submit an addendum to "Everybody Cooks: Cool Summer Dishes": Good food should be for everyone. It isn't enough to cook well for your family, you have to teach them to cook well too. I'd much rather live in a world where you didn't have to eat before certain dinner parties, than one where a few very special people made a few very special dishes. Also, no one should ever make fish mold.

tea with amanda

My friend Amanda the baker had me over for tea. She's currently nesting in her parent's guest house with her fiancee, Adam the actor/playwright. We've been friends for six years and I've never seen her yard. It's like The Secret Garden fell to disrepair in suburban Los Angeles, by which I mean it's the most romantic little yellow house I've ever had the privilege to visit. She has an industrial stainless steel sink and a dozen fruit trees growing outside. I adore it.

She asked me if I wanted a scone and I said yes, of course, assuming that she had some lying around. Instead, she took out a mixing bowl and set to making me a fresh batch of Meyer Lemon Strawberry Scones. Charmingly amorphous and lightly fragrant, they were perfect with blood orange marmalade and our loose leaf Earl Grey/rose tea mixture on a Wednesday afternoon in her new home.

MEYER LEMON STRAWBERRY SCONES

Preheat your oven to 350.

In a bowl, combine:
1/2 cup sugar
zest of 3 Meyer lemons
and rub together with your fingertips until the sugar is fragrant with the oils of the zest.

Add:
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tblsp baking powder
3 cups all purpose flour
and toss together with your hands.

Add 8 ounces of cold butter, cut into cubes and use the pad of your thumb to push the cubes of butter against the base of your forefinger into long flakes that look like giant fish scales. The motion is like a slow, deliberate, forceful version of the hand gesture that normally means "cash" when done quickly and repetitively. Do this fairly quickly and don't worry about making all of them perfect. The goal is to have long flaky bits of cool butter in your dough that will melt and steam in the oven, creating long flaky pockets of buttery goodness in your dough.

When all of the butter has had this done to it, add

1 cup of buttermilk

and

2 cups of diced strawberries
and fold together gently with your hands. Scoop out half-cup portions of dough onto a prepared baking sheet, a couple inches apart, and push down into roundish blobs. Brush with a little bit of beaten egg, garnish with slices of lemon or strawberry, and sprinkle with sugar.

Bake until they lift easily off the tray and are deeply golden brown and fragrant and lovely.

Depending on your oven, this could be anywhere from twenty five minutes to a bit more than half an hour.

breakfast still life arrangements

In elementary school I knew a kid whose mother would dye his sandwiches with food coloring. I envied him. His lunches were mesmerizing and distinct, and in a small unconscious way they expressed the love that his mother had for him--a love so great it couldn't help but pour over on to his meals, warming him from his tummy out through his limbs--a love surely greater than all the mothers who made normal sandwiches had for their children. Albeit to a lesser degree I also felt this way about my friends who had cans of soda and fruit roll ups in their lunches: their mothers must love them so much, I thought, to bestow on them such treats. I believed Lunchables were the ultimate delicacy.

Then came March, and the Saint Patrickfication of our school. We colored leprechauns with red beards to hang in the windows and cut four leaf clovers from construction paper. My friend's mother made green egg salad sandwiches. They were vivid green, like the moss on the teeth of children who ate sugar cereal (my mother's name for Fruit Loops), with darker patches suggesting something more rotten, more sinister. Putrid.

The sight of them was stirring, to my stomach and my soul. In my life I've gleaned more than a little insight from sandwiches, moments of perfect clarity about culture and Truth in bites of corned beef on rye, but never before has such a revelation come from sheer sight. In a glimpse I realized that my friend's mother did not love him more than my mother loved me, she just had less to do during her days. I imagined that dropping him off at school was the hardest part of her day, and picking him up was the happiest. Around this time I stopped asking to have the crusts cut from my peanut butter and jelly and realized the meat in Lunchables was slimy and disgusting.

I unconsciously developed disdain for people who play with their food. I don't think I've seen Close Encounters all the way through because of the mashed potato mountain, or maybe I thought it was boring. The feeling has subsided as I've gotten older, but it still peaks out every so often, catching me and the poor soul with whom I'm sharing a table off guard. I'm not sure what triggers it exactly, but often wonder if it has something to do with those green sandwiches and that sad lady who made them.

Naturally, my feelings about these photos by Museum Studio are a bit mixed. They are, in all honesty, extremely charming and sweet. Very happy pictures. I just hope that someone ate these breakfasts after the photo was snapped. Because I like them, I have to imagine they did.




photos via BOOOOOOOM!

doughnuts of late

Portland is quite probably the best vacation city in the United States. You can literally spend hours just browsing bookstores, drinking coffee, sampling food trucks--all of the things you enjoy doing in your own city, without the guilt of doing stuff you do in your own city. Portland culture is that of cultural aesthetes, a collective of our type of people doing stuff we like to do. Zinester/animal portrait artist Nicole Georges, whose Portland zine anthology Invincible Summer I am currently enjoying very much, describes it as "a city of seasonal affected disorders and kids who never grow up," and every time I visit it gets harder to leave.

On that note I've been eating a lot of doughnuts at work lately. And I don't like doughnuts. To me they're like arcades, alluring and charming, only insofar as I understand they're supposed to be. Things for which other people's abundant excitement has often swept me up, though I have no particular interest in them myself. Jonathan Taylor Thomas was another such popular fixation. [In third grade I bought a Tiger Beat magazine because I assumed it was another part of being a girl my age I didn't yet understand. Like bras.]

Voodoo Doughnuts in Portland meets every criteria for a necessary vacation visit--small, local, weird. These are qualities I seek out tirelessly in other cities. And yet, during our last trip, I started walking over to shop, after a perfect vanilla latte from Stumptown, located conveniently down the street, and at the last minute I decided to keep walking because I didn't want a doughnut. This probably seems insignificant, I know, only it wasn't. In my own city I do and eat things that I don't even like. And why? Maybe it's easier and less exhausting than a life of amazing things all the time, less emotional. Is that why Portland is such a special place to visit, because it encourages you to behave like a local and live exactly as you would if you didn't worry about money and failing and the future. That's what it does for me.