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Tag archives for Recipes

Oh, snap(s)… it’s Midsummer.

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There’s no use trying to be delicate about this. A crucial part of the Midsummer festivities is the drinking. I’m trying very hard to sound very adult-like and responsible in this blog, but even the totally responsible adults I know seem to be prone to, ahem, a little excess during Midsummer.

Snaps! Aquavit! Brännvin! Bål! Where to start?

Delicious glasses of bål chilling out with the Midsummer Head Wreaths. Photo: Kate Wiseman.

Here’s the basics.

Bål (pronounced like “bowl”) is an alcohol-based fruit punch, usually made with soda for a light and bubbly taste.

Aquavit is the traditional pairing to pickled herring and is made from a vodka base (either potato or grain). Like parmesan and champagne, aquavit is an EU-protected label that must be made with either dill or caraway or both, a baseline flavor that can then be paired with other herbs and spices to make distinctive varieties.

Brännvin is any kind of flavored, distilled alcohol, including but not limited to aquavit. The name “brännvin” refers to the “burning” or distillation of an alcohol, and different kinds of brännvin have been made throughout Scandinavia for centuries.

Snaps is not a type of alcohol; it’s the way a shot of alcohol is drunk. Snaps can be any liquor or combination of liquors and other ingredients, but snaps must be taken in combination with food. At Midsummer, snaps of aquavit or other types of brännvin are usually taken after “snapsvisor” (traditional Swedish drinking songs) are sung.

Kate and Anna’s home brew… sort of

People tend to be on their most Swedish behavior around me as though they owe it to me to show me what a real Swede would do. This system works out really well for me, and whenever I get an idea in my head of something we should do because it’s Swedish, chances are really good that people will play along. Not only that, but since all the old traditions are new to me, I am having a lot of fun taking part in all the things people usually stop doing when they’re children. The “be a good cultural ambassador to the foreigner” complex is awesome. I quite like it.

Which brings us to the snaps situation.

I love Johanna Kindvall’s Kok Blog, and ever since I consulted with her on my Holy Herring! blog post, I’ve been curious to try her recipe for aquavit—she said herring is at its best when paired with the strong and spicy liquor, and I knew that herring was definitely on the menu for Friday. Fortunately, Anna said she was up for the challenge, so we went for it.

Measuring, grinding, steeping, smelling... and voila! Our very own homemade snaps. Photos: Kate Wiseman.

Final result: delicious. I can’t even tell you how many people were like, “Well, I’m not much of a snaps person, but I’ll try it anyway since you made it,” then took half a shot, then reacted with a great deal of surprise: “Wow! That’s not bad!” Two minutes later, another drinking song has started and they’re making a grab for your bottle instead of the store-bought bottle sitting on the table…

You can find the recipes for both the black currant and aquavit varieties on the Kok Blog. The black currant might be a little hard to make if you don’t grow the bushes yourself, but perhaps some readers can suggest where to find them.  I highly recommend both varieties. I liked the aquavit better, but the black currant is lighter and perhaps a little easier to drink if you’re not into spice. Just be sure not to let the black currant leaves steep for too long, otherwise it will start to taste a little grassy.

Back to the bål

For those of you who are not into shots, the bål (fruit punch) that we had at our party was amazing. And therefore dangerous. It was somewhere in the middle of my fourth glass that I thought to myself, “Hmm… I hope this isn’t too strong because I am drinking it really quickly.”

There are almost endless variations of bål and while most are fruity, they can also be made with bitter ingredients, like angostura. You can see an abbreviated selection of the flavor combinations suggested by Systembolaget, the national alcohol monopoly.

A small selection of the wide range of bål variations. Photos: Systembolaget.se.

For those of you who might want a taste of Sweden at your next summer party, here’s the punch that I can vouch for as totally tasty, with thanks to my friend Matilda for sharing the recipe!

Matilda’s Midsummer Bål

Will make two punch bowls full

4 bottles of white wine (or one box)

2 bottles of Sprite

¼ bottle of elderberry cordial/concentrate (find recipe here; can also be bought at Ikea stores worldwide)

¼ bottle of rhubarb and strawberry concentrate

A generous splash of Bacardi lemon

Frozen chopped mango pieces

Fresh lime, sliced thinly into triangles

Frozen strawberries

A few fresh strawberries

A few last thoughts

For those of you who are wondering how I felt the next morning, well… I wasn’t exactly jumping out of bed, itching to run a marathon, but overall I was fine. Water! Water is good for you. Thank goodness I drank a lot of it at the end of the night.

Kate Reuterswärd - Expat

June 28, 2011

When eating flowers out of the garden is not just for unruly kids.

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I don’t know how else to put this, but I’m sitting at my kitchen table drinking some kind of crazy flower-concentrate that I made myself from flowers I picked off a bush. A bush that was outdoors. Like, I found the bush in nature, not the grocery store.

I’m pretty sure that I was taught not to eat things I picked outside when I was younger.

It was probably my mom who told me that. Or my kindergarten teacher. Or my babysitter, or the next door neighbors’ mom, or some other adult-ish authority figure.

I’m pretty sure that I was told I would get sick and die.

But here I am, though, ingesting large quantities of this delicious, fresh-tasting elderflower concentrate/cordial/syrup (translations vary… in Swedish it’s “saft”), and I don’t think I’m dying. At least not yet.

See this flower? I ATE this flower. Check it out, close up and IN THE WILD. Photo: Kate Wiseman.

I think I’ve said before that I didn’t know what to expect when I moved to Sweden almost a year ago, but I’m sure that I didn’t expect to get all touchy-feely with the great outdoors. I mean, I read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Män som hatar kvinnor, for those Swedes who are following along). I was imagining some sort of futuristic, possibly dystopian society—probably monochromatic, but definitely cold, sterile, and unwelcoming.

Mmm, not so much.

This doesn’t go for everyone, obviously, but as a foreign observer, the average Swede seems so much more in touch with nature and so much more knowledgeable about plants and flowers than practically anyone I know in the United States.

Take that with a grain of salt, obviously. I wasn’t exactly the “let’s go hike the Appalachian Trail for the next five months of my life” type in the first place, and I grew up in the suburbs. But Lund could not be called “rural” by any standard, and people here who are my age actually know how to go out in the woods and find stuff that you eat.

Baby Adam is getting a head start on that whole "loving nature" thing. Photo: Kate Wiseman.

I didn’t even know that people still did that in this day and age. I thought it was just like reality tv-travel adventurer maniacs who did that. Apparently not.

And so, of course, I want to learn! Last fall, I got to go mushroom picking with some of my friends—definitely one of the highlights of my year. Holy cow, I ate the mushrooms we picked, and I didn’t die. Now that summer’s here, fläder (elderflower) was my next target.

Off we went to a public park, a motley crew: my sister, visiting from the United States, my boyfriend’s sister, her son, and my boyfriend’s mom, all armed with scissors and plastic bags with which to collect the flowers. Then it was back to the house, to clean and clip the flowers before mixing them with lemon slices, sugar, citric acid, and boiling water.

It's as easy as 1, 2, 3. Really. Photo: Kate Wiseman.

The mixture has to sit for 5-6 days in a cool, dark place, and then it’s time to drink up! Since it’s a concentrate, a little goes a long way… usually a 6:1 ratio of water to saft, depending on how strong you want it to taste.

Want to make your own? I KNEW IT. Here is Malena’s finest flädersaft recipe (if you’ve gotten this far in the post, you’re totally getting the Swedish treatment).

Ingredients:

40-50 sprigs of elderberry flowers

3 lemons

1.5-2 kg sugar (1.5 kg if you’re planning on freezing it)

60 gram citric acid, often sold in the US as “sour salt”

1.5 liter boiling water

Instructions:

Wash the lemons and slice them as thinly as possible. Rinse the flowers and cut them off of their stems.  Put them in a large jar or pot in alternating layers.

Boil water and mix the sugar in. Take the water off of the heat and add the citric acid. Then slowly pour it over the flower-lemon layers.

Store the mixture in a cool, dark place for 4-6 days, stirring it up a couple of times a day. Strain mixture through a cloth into a clean jar and keep in the refrigerator or freeze.

That’s it! This makes a lot, and like I said, you mix it with something else to drink it… it can be sparkling or still water, champagne, a delicious gin cocktail… the sky’s the limit! Go Swedish nature, yeah!

Kate Reuterswärd - Expat

June 15, 2011