Parasols!

[trigger warning: this post is made up of 100% boasting]

Parasol mushrooms, Macrolepiota procera, Stolt fjällskivling - the mushroom picker's wet dream. We have them on our doorstep! Aren't we lucky?

In fact, in a sudden outburst of smugness, I had to measure exactly how close to our doorstep these guys grow, and I am pleased to tell you that the nearest specimen grew exactly 9.8 meters from the corner of the house, which makes it about 18 meters from the kitchen where it was to be turned into lunch. Parasols are huge size mushrooms and like all fungi they grow incredibly quickly. These two showed up the day before yesterday, and back then they were barely visible!

Parasol mushrooms, when fried, end up tasting a bit like steak but almost better. Like the idealized steak, I would suggest; juicy, savory, meaty... Mmmm!! Mine were sliced and served with pasta today.

Over and out.

Oh... did I mention that I have spotted six more on the go in the immediate vicinity?

Bread (food for thought)

Some foods have more of a sensuous shimmer attached to them than others, and to my mind bread has always been one of those foods. Good bread is something that I find it hard to live without, and sadly it seems to be one of the hardest things get hold of too. Supermarket bread, at least in Sweden, is almost universally terribly disappointing and dull bread is probably one of the main reasons I hate hotel breakfasts (except in England, as the English breakfast cleverly bypasses bread and gives you things like black pudding instead!). If you live in a big city, or in a country like France where they value their bread, you go to your favourite baker to buy bread. But what do you do in the middle of nowhere in Sweden?

When I was little I loved staying with my grandparents and I learnt a lot of my basic cooking skills from my grandma, who incidentally also made almost all the bread that they ate. And indeed when living in the Swedish countryside, learning how to make good bread is certainly the easiest and arguably most rewarding way of getting access to really good bread. I have spent many hours in the last ten years or so making bread. Trial and error, combined with a healthy portion of the scientific theory of bread chemistry has been my method. And as of the last few years I have arrived at a method that seems to deliver the result I am looking for. So many factors come into play here; what flour you use, which proportions, the raising agent, the amount of salt, how you knead/prove/form the loaf, how hot the oven is... but most importantly what it boils down to is the kind of experience that you (sadly) can't learn from a book. The feel for when things seem right. I find that in a world when so much knowledge is available on tap, as it were, right there on the web, experience should be valued higher than ever. Experience require perseverance, dedication, patience, an inquisitive mind and probably some talent - the same things that are central to learning to master a musical instrument, as it happens. And to get started all you need is four simple ingredients: flour, salt, water and time which together transform quite magically into bread.

Of course the word bread carries a wider notion - that of food and sustenance in general - give us today our daily bread. And arguably it is a bit superficial to complain about the quality of bread in Swedish supermarkets when there are plenty of people who either have no choice at all, or frankly have no bread on the table in the wider sense. Well, one thing we could get a lot better at in our privileged part of the world is to value what we have, and stop taking our food for granted. And we need to consider more how our food consumption affects people in poorer countries, including its effects on climate change and other environmental and socio-economical aspects. We could also make sure that we don't bite off more than we can chew in the literal sense, as food wastage keeps increasing. And there are various Fair Trade schemes we can support to make sure the people who grow the exotic foods that we import are safe and get paid properly for their hard work. And then there is the political challenge...

And while on that note, we here in the Western World also need to remind our politicians that man does not live by bread alone...!

Pianos and fine wine

We are coming to the end of yet another week of intense pianistic activity at Music at Ambialet, the piano summer school run by my dear friend and former teacher Paul Roberts. I have had the pleasure of being part of this operation for many years now, and I have always felt honoured to be invited to teach alongside Paul in this lovely inspiring atmosphere that he manages to create. There are hundreds, possibly thousands, of summer courses for young pianists all over the world, but almost all of them are exclusively for young pianists at conservatoire level or similar. Music at Ambialet offers something different in that we have an advanced class of mainly young music students alongside an intermediate class of people all ages from all over the world. This eclectic mix clearly creates a really different and most stimulating environment and many participants keep coming back year after year. In my case I have been coming here for so long - first as a participant in the late 90s, then as a helper (I used to run the bar!) and finally invited as Paul's co-teacher - that it has started to feel like family and almost a home away from home.

The main difference for me this year is that I have my car here (and as of a couple of nights ago Karna has joined us too) and so I thought that as I am in the south of France with a car it would be a shame to miss the opportunity to buy some nice wine. The summer course has changed venues a few times over the years and as of last year it takes place on a small farm in a very remote corner of the Tarn region. The place is owned by Michel Berger, a French wine merchant who lives in Belgium during the year. Good news for me in my search of some good wine, as Michel was able to point me in the direction of a very interesting winemaker. So yesterday I punched an address into my GPS and drove off past the striking medieval town of Albi and another half-an-hour into the countryside beyond, and eventually ended up at a small vineyard called Domaines Plageoles. The surrounding area is littered with vineyards with small shops for dégustation et vente and the hills are covered with wine as far as the eye can see.

Domaines Plageoles turned out to be a very exciting winemaker indeed, with a special focus on old grapes of the Gaillac region with exotic names such as Ondenc and Prunelard. I spent 25 minutes tasting some absolutely wonderful wine and came out of there with a dozen of bottles as well as feeling immensely proud of having dealt with it all in French!

Road trip

As I write this I find myself in the South of France, in a tiny place called Albignac deep down in a beautiful lush green valley, where I am teaching and playing at the piano summer school that my old friend and once-upon-a-time teacher Paul Roberts runs here. A bunch of pianists - half of them young conservatoire students, half of them amateurs all ages - have come from all over the world to play to Paul and myself and when we don't play pianos we get waited upon and served lovely French food prepared from local produce by Paul's family and friends, who have come to be dear friends of mine over the more than ten years that I have been coming here. Hardly surprising then that I have come to count this as one of the highlights of my year!

In previous years I have always travelled here by plane, but this year I decided it would be fun to drive, so that's what I spent the last three days doing. I left home in the drizzling rain on Thursday morning and drove southwards, stopping in Malmö to pick up my friend Henrik who lives in Hamburg. Together we carried on through Denmark and waited for a slightly undesirable hour and a half for the ferry at Rødby, followed by a horrendously rough 45 crossing accompanied by horrendous fast-food on the boat. In the end we came to Hamburg where I stayed over night. 

I left on Friday morning on an investigation of the Autobahn system that was to take me to Luxembourg. On my way I fitted in a short stop in Cologne complete with a bratwurst and a visit to the magnificent cathedral. Aided by my trusted friend, the iPhone GPS who bravely struggled with the foreign street names (some entertainment value there, I can assure you!) I eventually arrived in the remarkable fairytale landscape of Berbourg in Luxembourg where I was served a lovely meal and stayed the night with old friend Anna Dannfelt. 

The final stage of my journey took me through France yesterday, and to the remarkably hilly and stunningly beautiful regions of Aveyron and Tarn, down some of the bendiest roads our trusted Peugeot has ever had to negotiate and come six o'clock last night, I had arrived. Slightly knackered I was too, but after a some cassoulet a drop of wine and a good night's sleep I was ready for some piano action!

Here is the view I woke up to...

Honey... and cabbage!

Yesterday we harvested the first honey this year. To our great relief we found that the bees of our new colony turn out to be really rather peaceful, particularly compared to the horribly hostile ones we had last year. (Pity they didn't survive the winter, but to be perfectly honest, no-one is going to miss them!) Either way, even aside from the potential risk of getting stung by bees, honey harvesting is quite a messy business, not to mention sticky!

First you have to lift frames full of honey out of the hive, starting well above shoulder height as can be seen in the picture above. Each frame, if mainly capped, weighs about 2 kilos or so, and they have lots of confused bees hanging on to them which need to be brushed off too. And as soon as you have taken the frames that have enough honey to be worth extracting you need to take these away to somewhere bee-free rather quickly before the clever little ones find the honey and all fly there in order to take it back.

Once this is done you have a few hours of rather sticky work - uncapping and extracting the honey - to look forward to. But as long as you are prepared that everything, and I really mean everything will get very sticky, it is quite a fun process. Here is a picture of me uncapping a frame of honey.

The bees put a seal on each honeycomb cell once they are happy with the water content in the honey. If the honey contains too much water it will ferment, so they fan the honey by flapping their wings above the cell until enough water evaporates. Fascinating little insects, aren't they? Naturally for the same reason, as a beekeeper you are looking to extract mainly capped honey, and the 17 frames that we selected yesterday were all basically completely capped. And at the end of the day, when you are looking at 36.5 kilos of beautiful golden, quite literally mellifluous honey, all the hard work seems like nothing.

We finished the day with another beautiful bit of harvesting: that of the first cabbage (of the brassica oleracea var. capitata elliptica variety, there does not seem to be an English name for it) from our new garden. It was so crisp and sweet that more than half of it ended up being eaten fresh as a snack!

Deep waters...

I promised I would occasionally be a little opinionated on here, so here goes...!

Today Karna and I found time to do some fishing for the first time this year - really unusually late for us, but we have had a lot on (like creating a vegetable garden!) this spring and early summer, and besides we had put so much fish in the freezer last year that it lasted us until last week. We fish with nets which we put out in the evening and then lift out of the lake in the morning, by which time the nets usually contain a few Perch, or a Pike and, if we are lucky, the odd Perch-Pike (Zander if you are on the other side of the Atlantic!). This method of fishing carries a lot of nostalgic memories for me as we used to fish with nets in the summers of my childhood, spent in the cottage my family used to have near Gryt on the Baltic coast. Pulling the nets out of the water still brings out a child-like sense of excitement in me, as I peer as far into the depths as I can see in order to detect any gleaming, wriggling fish. (Incidentally, digging up potatoes does about the same thing for me!)

The subject of fishing brings us to the uncomfortable but salient fact that sooner or later, if you want to eat the fish, you are going to have to kill it. Obviously this translates to any other animals that you decide you might want to eat too - pigs, reindeer, grasshoppers, oysters - and while I guess this is something that everyone must surely be aware of, it certainly seems to be something that more and more people choose to turn a blind eye to. I have eaten fish and meat my whole life so far, and I would be lying if I said there had not been times when I didn't give this much thought. But lately, now that I keep animals for food and catch my own fish, this moral dilemma has certainly come into focus in a most tangible way.

And let me be straight about this: killing the animal is not an enjoyable action. Not in any way. But on the other hand, I have made the decision for myself that I feel I can put up with this undesirable hurdle and so I include meat and fish in my diet. And in the cases, such as with fish or poultry, where I feel I have the sufficient experience and skill to perform the task, I am prepared to take care of the slaughtering process when needed. In fact I am a lot happier to be involved myself when it comes to killing an animal that I am going to eat, than to buy it from the supermarket where I have very little control of any other part of the process than entering my credit card PIN-code at the checkout.

I firmly believe we all need to eat more vegetables and less meat, and I would perhaps go so far as to suggest that if we feel we have to shut our eyes and ears to the fact that eating meat involves killing animals, then we should not be eating meat at all! It seems that quite a few people I have been talking to lately considers it a lot worse to have to kill a gregarious farm animal that you have known for all its life than a fish that has been swimming in the lake, unseen until the moment you pulled it out of there. To me they are both beautiful creatures and I struggle to see the difference.

Here is the deal that I believe in: if you are going to eat meat and fish, you make sure as far as realistically possible that the animals involved have had the best possible life, that they have had a chance to graze and socialize and behave according to their instinctive preferences. And that the slaughter has been a stress-free and painless process. If there is any doubt, eat vegetables instead, they are delicious!

To be continued, I am sure...

Preserving summer

Since I moved back to Sweden and out in the country (after nearly 10 years in central London!), the extension of my food obsession that is gardening has grown exponentially. In the last few months we have arranged a large kitchen garden for ourselves here at home with raised beds, in short, my dream garden! I shall introduce the garden and the ideas behind it in full in a future post. 

While we are waiting to harvest things out of the vegetable garden (we already have had some early things out of it, but it is yet to come into full swing), there are plenty of berries to take care of from various bushes and plants. I love preserves; jams, chutneys, cordials, pickles, and I love making them. In fact, when Karna and I first met, Karna's family took to calling me Grandma in recognition of this (they have stopped now!). Either way, I have come to the realisation that few things give me so much pleasure during the dark and cold months of the year than opening a jar of homemade jam or to have a home pickled cornichon with some charcuterie - a little portion of preserved summer! And last night these lovely gooseberries were turned into some rather lovely jam...

Dillkött

In my professional life I spend quite a bit of time trying to get people outside Sweden (and within!) to discover Swedish music, old and new. I don't know quite how we have managed to get ourselves in the situation that we are in in relation to our own art music in Sweden, but generally speaking it has such a low profile that most people, including a lot of musicians seem to be almost unaware of its existence! Hopefully this can be rectified relatively easily - by performing the best works more often and to do it extremely well. And if we start playing it at home, chances are that more people will get curious of it abroad too. At least this is how I see it, slightly simplified perhaps, but then I am on holiday at the moment. Which brings me to... Swedish food!

I don't think you could say that Swedish cuisine is keeping a particularly low profile these days; Swedish chefs seem to do extremely well all over the world, both in prestigious cooking contests and as award winning restaurateurs, and the romantic notion that we all go into the woods to pick mushrooms  berries and to shoot birds and beasts certainly seem to strike a chord internationally. But not all Swedish food is about things gathered in the wild, and in fact most traditional dishes rely mainly on farm produce as it would have been far to time and energy consuming to go foraging in the old days. 

Today I passed through Katrineholm where my friend Peter runs a great butcher shop called Landet i Centrum, and I bought some really lovely local neck of lamb, which I turned into dillkött (literally meat with dill) for our supper. Dillkött is one of those hearty, yet summery dishes that Swedes remember being served by their grandmothers. It contains a few of the trademarks of traditional Swedish cuisine: the fondness for exotic spices and the combination of sweet and sour tastes, and of course it is served with potatoes. (Food in Sweden used to translate almost exclusively into meat or fish and potatoes as recently as 25 years ago!)

Here is how I make it: 

500g neck of boneless lamb (or veal) + bones (optional)

1 medium onion, quartered

2-3 carrots, cut into chunks

the white part of one leek

5 white peppercorns 

5 pieces of allspice

2 cloves

2 bay leaves

1 sprig of thyme

salt

single cream

butter

flour

copious amounts of dill

75ml caster sugar

75ml water

2 tsp spirit vinegar 

Cut the meat into 2 cm dice and put in a pan (along with the bones if you have them) covered by cold water. Bring to the boil and let simmer for a few seconds. Drain off the water using a colander and rinse the meat under cold running water. Clean the pan and put the meat (and bones) back in along with the onion, carrots, leek, peppercorns, allspice, cloves and bay leaves. Cover with water and put in 1 tsp salt for each liter of water. Bring to the boil once more, skim off any foam that rises to the surface and then let simmer in a covered pan for about an hour or until the meat is tender. In the meantime combine the sugar, water and vinegar with the stalks from the dill in a separate pan and bring to the boil. Check the balance between sweet and sour in this liquid - it should be the same as in a good Chinese sweet and sour sauce. Set aside. 

In a new pan, melt a good dollop of butter and whisk in a tablespoon or two of flour. Let the roux sizzle for a little while without getting browned. Ladle in some of the cooking liquid from the meat and whisk vigorously until you have a smooth and quite thick velouté. Using a slotted spoon, transfer the meat and carrots into the velouté and add some cream. Season with salt and by adding a few spoonfuls of the sweet and sour vinegar and sugar solution. Add more cooking liquid if needed. Chop the dill finely and add it to the finished dish just before serving to ensure maximum dill flavour and to prevent the dill from turning grey in the sauce. Serve with new potatoes.