Fish!

I hardly ever cook when I'm on my own. It just seems so pointless somehow, not being able to talk to anyone while eating, not sharing your day over the meal. But man cannot live on porridge and porridge alone, so today I did some Proper Cooking (tm) -- pan-fried plaice with oven-roasted potatoes, carrots and parsnips! (Yes, Ilva at Lucillian Delights sort of inspired me...) It's dead simple, and incredibly delicious!

Ingredients, serves 2

300 g plaice
Coarsely ground rye flour
Salt
Pepper
Butter

400 g potatoes
3 big carrots
3 small parsnips
Salt
Pepper
Olive oil

Instructions

Pre-heat the oven to 200 C/ 390 F.

Prepare the vegetables:
Scrub the potatoes, peel carrots and parsnips. Quarter the veg, and douse in a good amount of olive oil. Salt and pepper to taste. Place in an oven-proof dish, and bake for 20-25 minutes, or until soft and edible.

Prepare the fish:
Pat the fish dry with a paper towel, and coat with the rye flour. Salt and pepper on both sides. Place a generous knob of butter in a hot skillet, and fry on both sides until golden brown. Serve as is, or with dill-flavoured sour cream, or some more butter.

I don't have any pictures to show you of the food (my man moved to Bavaria, and took the camera with him. Bastard.), so here's a picture of a dog on a sofa instead.

Pan-fried Herring on Crisp Bread

Herring has been an important staple of Swedish cooking for a very long time. The Swedish working class used to subsist almost exclusively on salted herring and potatoes, with the occasional pickled herring when it was party time. Due to its importance, herring holds a special place in the food culture of Sweden. This recipe is one of the most beloved, but luckily also one of the simplest. If you're ever in Stockholm, you can buy these sandwiches at the square by Slussen. The only tricky part about the recipe is finding the right type of herring. Or perhaps, finding herring at all, depending on where you live.

You see, herring comes in many styles, depending on its origin. The version used here is the smaller and leaner Baltic herring (the subspecies Clupea harengus membras), fished in the Baltic sea off the east cost of Sweden. This type of herring is known as strömming in Swedish, while the larger and fatter herring used for pickling is called sill.

Pan-fried herring on crisp bread
If you prefer, you could serve these with mashed potatoes and a sour cream dip, but do try them with crisp bread at least once. If you have a hard time finding decent crisp bread, try IKEA, who usually carry crisp bread from Leksand. Avoid Wasa if alternatives exist.

1 kg of fresh herring fillets
a large bunch of parsley
bread crumbs



Remove the back fins from the fillets, if present, wipe them dry with kitchen towels, then match them up in pairs of roughly equal size.



Chop the parsley, and place a generous amount between each pair of fillets. As you can see, frozen parsley is fine too.



Pour bread crumbs on a plate and coat each fillet pair with a generous amount of crumbs.



Get your local nationalist butter...



...and place a big knob of it in a hot skillet.



Then fry the fillets for a few minutes on each side, until golden brown.



Now get your best crisp bread. This particular brand is produced in a community of treehuggers in Järna, south of Stockholm. They also sell their own flour, beans and lentils, all of which is great produce.



Spread some butter on the bread, place a couple of fried fillets on it, and you're done! Serve with a cool beer or a glass of cold milk.

Swedish Style Cured Salmon (Gravad lax)

Easter came, as it does once a year, and brought a whole new world of food-related trouble. In my family, Easter is a tradition-laden event, where the whole family would gather for an Easter smörgåsbord, that decadent Swedish specialty. My mother would serve up a range of traditional and untraditional dishes: the ubiquitous pickled herring (inlagd sill), boiled eggs, cold meats and sausages, Västerbotten cheese pie, meat balls (köttbullar), fresh baked bread, and more. But there is one dish that would somehow set itself apart from the other delicacies, and make itself king of the smörgåsbord. I am talking of Gravad lax; salmon cured in salt, sugar and dill. Food does not get much more Nordic than this, and not much simpler either, if you have a couple of days to spare.


This year, being an expatriate in Munich, I couldn't just pop over to my parents' house for Easter, so Angelica and I had to try to create our own holiday spirit. It didn't look too bad at first, we Swedes have a trick up our sleeve to get the necessary food stuffs for holidays. Can you guess it? Picture the colours of the Swedish flag, navy blue and yellow. Now picture a huge-ass warehouse building painted in that blue colour, with yellow letters on it. I'm talking about IKEA, of course.

Telling someone that you're Swedish will usually result in one of three responses: 1) "Oh, with the chocolate and the mountains?" "No, I'm not from Switzerland", 2) "Oh, blonde girls with big breasts?" "Well... yeah, but...", or 3) "Oh... IKEA!". Frustrating as this can be, I am still happy that IKEA exists. As soon as I set my foot in that huge store, I immediately feel at home, and it is a great source of Leksands knäckebröd and pickled herring. With the crisp bread (knäckebröd), pickled herring and flavoured vodka (snaps) in place, disaster struck; there was still something missing: the cured salmon.

Munich is a quite land-locked city, with all of Germany between it and the Atlantic and Baltic Sea, and the Alps between it and the Mediterranean. Consequently, the poor people don't really have a culture of eating fish, and the prices of fresh fish reflect this fact. Shelling out €30 / kg for farmed salmon didn't exactly make me happy, I consider it to be well over twice a decent price for the fish, but Easter only comes once a year, and what can you do? Besides, the result was worth it.

Well, I'm getting on a bit, so let's move on to the recipe.


Gravad lax

The food authorities in Sweden recommend that you deep freeze your salmon for a couple of days before curing it. This is because the fish will be eaten uncooked (unheated), and apparently salmon can sometimes have parasites, presumably worms. Me, I'm brave; I eat fish raw without freezing, and as of today, I'm still alive. Your mileage may vary. The problem with freezing the fish is that it tends to become a bit watery and looses firmness, which has a negative impact on the cured product.

Speaking of fish quality, take a whiff at the filet before you buy it. If it smells faintly of the ocean, it's fresh. If it smells like fish, it's not fresh enough. Find another fishmonger.

This recipe is calculated for about 1 kg of filet, which was what I used, but you can cure enormous amounts at once, just scale it up. Curing less than 1 kg can be sort of tricky, since you need to double-layer the fish.

Ingredients
1 kg of fresh salmon filet, the fatter the better, and firm in texture
50 ml salt
60 ml sugar
1 tsp of coarsely crushed white pepper
a big bouquet of dill


Instructions
Mix salt, sugar and pepper. Cut the salmon into two equally large (geometrically, not weight-wise) pieces. Finely chop the dill, including stalks. In a dish large enough to accommodate the salmon, sprinkle the bottom with some of the salt-sugar-mix, and some of the dill. Place one piece of fish, skin-side down, on the mixture. Sprinkle nearly all of the mix and dill on the fish, and place the other piece on top, skin-side up. Cover with the last of the mixture and dill. Place some sort of surface on top, for instance a small cutting board or plate, and then place a milk carton or some other heavy item on top, to apply some pressure. Let sit for about 3 days, turning the filet-package upside down once during the time. The longer the fish cures, the more water will be extracted from it, and the firmer and less raw it will be. Three days is pretty much optimal. The fish will water lots during the curing; this is normal.
Once the fish has cured, pick it out, brush off most of the dill, and slice it very finely. Cured salmon is delicious on its own, with boiled potatoes, on toast, or on crisp bread. Always serve with hovmästarsås, recipe below.




Hovmästarsås

This sauce is traditionally served with cured salmon, but is great to any fat fish served cool. The name translates to "Head waiter's sauce" and is so named because it would be stirred together right at the table, by the waiter himself. Or so I'm told.

The dill, that lovely Nordic herb, shows up again here. Whenever there's fish in Sweden, there's likely to be dill around. The recipe calls for Swedish style sweet mustard. I know that you can find sweet mustard in Bavaria, but it might be hard to conjure up anywhere else. You could try using Dijon mustard instead, but reduce the amount to 1 Tbsp in that case, and probably add a bit of sugar.

Ingredients
2 Tbsp sugar
2 ml salt
6 Tbsp finely chopped dill
3 Tbsp sweet mustard
1 Tbsp red wine vinegar
100 ml neutral-tasting oil
fresh ground white pepper, salt

Instructions
Rub sugar, salt and dill in a mortar to bring out the dill flavours. Mix in mustard and vinegar. Add the oil in small doses, stirring vigorously (like a mayonnaise), until it's all incorporated. Season with salt and pepper to taste.