I am not surprised to see the egg recall here in the USA. Salmonella is a direct result of poor sanitary standards, as usual in the USA, the egg industry, just like the oil industry has bribed themselves into a self control that obviously does not work. The company producing the eggs are abusing the hens that produce the eggs and the consumers that eat them. I am happy to have my breakfast eggs from my own, happy and beautiful, free roaming chicks. If you have a yard, get yourself some chickens, they eat bugs, fertilize your lawn and come running like dogs when you get home, take care of the left overs and if allowed to eat grass, produce eggs that you have never seen before!

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The Swedish-American-Russian cake team.

Last Saturday we were celebrating the wedding of the Swedish crown princess with good food and great friends, the teens made a wonderful Swedish strawberry cake.  We picked wild flowers in the meadow behind our house and decorated the table, we had sill and snaps and sang Helan Gar all night long, a little bit of Sweden in Florida!

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Swedes, especially Gotlanders, love to make elderberry lemonade from the large, white elderberry flowers.  Now is the time to make this delicious lemonade as the elder flowers are ready to pick. The Florida elder can be found along countryside roads, fence lines and channels. It is easy to stop the car and pick enough flowers to follow this easy recipe for a flowery lemonade.

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The Danish restaurant noma has bee nominated the world's best restaurant by the magazine Restaurant Daily. The Finnish restaurant Chez Dominique came on 23rd place followed by the Swedish Mathias Dalgren on number 25. What can I say, the world loves Scandinavian people and our culture!
noma is in Copenhagen, read more http://www.noma.dk

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April is one of the best months in Florida and many Scandinavian expats get visitors from home. It is always nice to be able to cook a typical southern dish for your northern guests. The real estate agent that helped us to find our wonderful home in the beautiful Tampa Bay countryside in an area called vintage Florida by many, invited us for dinner and served grits. We found it delicious. Grits are stone-ground corn porridge or gröt served plain for breakfast or with added flavours and ingredients as a meal for lunch or dinner.

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Someone nudged me about a new Sweeeedish beer available in Florida. Stockholm Premium Lager Beer is available at Publix and Total Wine among other places. More beer to taste with the Easter food! Eggs, pickled herring, gravlax, fresh potatoes and beer, yum!
 Read more about the beer stockholmbeerUSA.com

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Orange Blossom Pilsner, sounds like the perfect Florida beer. Made in Orlando so it is local for real.  
Must try to get a few bottles to taste, I suspect this beer can be very, very good with the Easter food.
Read more http://www.uniquebeers.com/obp/the_beer.html

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The food and eating culture in the US is damaging to your health and general well-being to say the least. Processed foods are everywhere and good, healthy, clean food is scarce.Sitting down at the table having a home cooked meal is considered an exotic habit here where people prefer to bring food home that they eat standing up, normally only using their hands and fingers as utensils. Unhealthy snacks with extremely poor nutritional value such ad bread sticks, fried processed chicken meat, and so called salads are served as school lunch here, together with a sweet drink and a cookie. I strongly recommend the book  Food Rules for you who wants to reconnect to the Scandinavian life style. If you have americanized kids, discussing every rule, at the dinner table, is a great way to prepare them for a healthy life.

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The Easter faste or  quadragesimais the Christian faste, the faste begins seven weeks before Easter. Swedes traditionally had a sweet, creamy and delicious bun, semla from latin simila which means wheat flour. The semla is served on the Tuesday, called the Fat Tuesday before the first day of faste. Today, we like to eat the semla even if we do not faste. It is super easy to make your own semlor. If you bake the buns today you can add filling and whipped cream tomorrow and have a semel party. We are cheating as the kids have the day off from school and have out semel party today. Warning, if you have to many semlor, you might have to faste for a week! And yet again, a traditional Swedish dish might have killed a king. King Adolf Fredrik died at the age of 60, on February 12, 1771, after having ended a banquet by eating 14 semlor.  

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                                                                                       Courtesy Allt om Mat

Traditional Swedish pea soup made of dried yellow peas and bacon is sooo good, add Swedish thin pancakes with whipped cream and lingonsylt and you have a heavenly meal of the best Swedish comfort food. The Swedish Club of Sarasota is hosting a Peasoup and Pancake event on March 7 at 3 pm in the St Armands Key Lutheran Church, Sarasota. I will take my family for a drive to beautiful Sarasota and enjoy pea soup in the company of the nice and friendly Swedes of Sarasota!  

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Photo: Anders Jonsson

The creamy potato and anchovy casserole is an inexpensive delicacy on the smorgasbord or julbord. I serve it together with pickled red beets, the sweet tartiness of the beets goes very good together with the creamy and salty Jansson.  It is important to use Swedish canned anchovy fillets for this recipe  as they are brined in a special mix of salt and spices.

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IKEA has always had a special meaning for me at Christmas time. When I was a young girl we spent every third Christmas with relatives in Stockholm, from the island of Gotland, in the middle of the Baltic Sea, we travelled for eight hours on a steamboat and then drove for two hours to get to hour relatives house on beautiful Varmdo in the Stockholm archipelago.

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We attended the first Kräftskiva at IKEA Tampa Bay.
We liked the crayfish, the cheese and the lingonberry bread. The vodka though, Polish, was not as good as the Swedish vodka.
We will be back next year!

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A classic Swedish recipe modified to satisfy the carb- conscious gourmet.

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Friday July 10 we went to IKEA for a late lunch. When we arrived the restaurant was quite crowded, or rather it sounded very crowded.  The restaurant has an open airy and clean layout with nice wall art depicting Swedish landscapes.   The décor is 100% IKEA furniture that somehow makes this big space feel a little bit like you are in a home.  However, the acoustics is not so good, even when the restaurant is half-full it is noisy.  

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Today I found chanterelles in my back yard. After several days of rain these golden nuggets popped up seemingly out of nowhere.  I picked the biggest ones, cleaned them and sautéed them in butter.  Eating chanterelles to me is to get a flavor of the deep woods, like eating oysters it to get the flavor of the sea.  

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This dish will disappear quickly from your smorgasbord.
I have served it many times here in Florida and everyone likes it.

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