Sweden

We arrived back from a long weekend in Sweden this afternoon. We went over because I was playing cricket and we were staying in a small town so there wasn’t a lot of opportunity to do much gastronomic exploring, but we took a few pictures of anything other than our staple diet of crisps and beer as we went along.

The most interesting gastronomic experience was actually seeing the bag of freshly picked golden chanterelle mushrooms that some people had found in the forest. We were initially keen on the idea when someone suggested going to look for mushrooms, but ended up sitting around drinking too much strong lager instead of going. Which in hindsight was a missed opportunity, especially seeing as the weather in Sweden has apparently been ideal for mushrooms this year, with alternating wet and warm spells.

On the first evening it was certainly wet rather than warm, so we paid a visit to a bar / restaurant nearby. We had visited it when we visited two years earlier and were rather wary of it, but the only alternative that we knew about was a particularly nasty pizza place.

I chose pyttipanna, which I had eaten elsewhere last time we visited. It is a dish of diced potato, meat and sometimes vegetables, often served with beetroot and a fried egg:

I think that my pyttipanna won in the edibility stakes that night, as others ordered… pasta bolognaise:

… a mystery pasta that I can’t remember the name of but can see that it contains bacon, olives, cream and some herbs:

… and there was another dish that was schnitzel with a mushroom sauce and “roast” potatoes which was almost inedible except for the superbly fresh chanterelles in the mushroom sauce.

The next day we had hot dogs during a break in the cricket. They were actually served during a drinks break rather than during the lunch break. Here is one with mustard, ketchup and “roasted onions”, which look a bit like deep-fried onion crumbs and give a nice oniony crunch when sprinkled onto things:

While investigating the local supermarket, Kerri found a bag of cinnamon rolls, which were rather tasty. Then the next day someone brought some home made ones along to the cricket, which were very tasty indeed. They are known as “kanelbulle” in Swedish:

A barbecue the next day, with chicken burgers and beef burgers. Sadly the only picture of an assembled burger was one that I’d already half eaten and that didn’t look very appetising, so these have to do:

And this little fellow was a bit too small to eat, so we threw him back, but clearly he told all his larger friends to avoid the apparently tasty worms floating around nearby because we didn’t catch anything worth eating:

If we find ourselves there again, we’ll see if we can organise to go over a couple of days early to visit Stockholm and the lakes and also do some proper gastronomic exploration.