Weird Swedish food: Messmör and Mesost

How could I forget those?

Well, I guess it’s because while I often see them in the supermarket I rarely buy them for myself but eat some of it every time we visit my BF’s mother. But anyway. I will buy some after I come back from this long weekend to take proper pictures, as those are pictures I found on the web (baad wererabbit, baaaad!).

Messmör and Mesost packets.

Messmör (“whey butter”) and Mesost (“whey cheese”) are products made from whey, the part of the milk that’s left over after you take all the good stuff out of it when making cheese. Sound weird? It gets weirder.
Since it is made from leftovers, it is not very fatty (about 5,5g fat per 100g “butter” according to the labels) but it is very sweet and contains a lot of milk sugars, calcium and iron. It is supposedly very healthy and if you get to know it as a kid, you will love it.
Most of it is made in Norway, and it can be made from cow, sheep or goatmilk, although I suspect the original is supposed to be from goat milk. You buy the cheese in blocks and the butter in small containers.

Mesost (blatantly stolen from kuoksu at blogspot.com, I’m going to replace it soon, I promise!)

My verdict? Messmör is a little too weird for me. It’s very sweet but has no interesting taste or zest that would make me take to it better.
Mesost, on the other hand, is just weird enough for me. I love it! Now take this with a grain of salt and let me explain the taste before you rush to buy some: It tastes like sweet goat cheese. The texture is soft and sticky, a bit crumbly and reluctant to be spread, so still very much a cheese. But the sweet-and-sour mixture together with the zesty taste is actually very nice. It fits best on lightly toasted bread with some butter (if you need to have that fat after all!).

On a slightly different note, look what I found during my image search!

It’s a Wererabbits Wensleydale cheese! Anyone know where I can get my paws on one of those?

PS: I apologize for the images outside this post being down this weekend. We somehow managed to unplug the circuit for the Modem our server is connected to during shutting down for the weekend. They’ll be up again Monday or early Tuesday!

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Bento #97 – Fear the Ducky!

There’s probably only one person in the community who will get this, but this week’s bentochallenge is “My favourite song” and since I have a weird music taste I took my favourite song in a very special aspect – DDR!
You see, I have this DDR game called “In The Groove” that came with my dancemat. I like it a lot better than the original DDR, actually. And in there is a song called “Xuxa” whose video features a appearing and disappearing rubber ducky, a pond with the label “POND” next to it for some reason and a smiling sun. It’s really cute and incredibly much fun to dance to!
We’ll see if it gets guessed at all!

The yellow rice “rubber ducky” was originally colored with saffron, but since it didn’t get yellow enough I added turmeric in the end. It got a lovely rubberducky yellow, don’t you think? The negative aspect was though that it was very un-sticky afterwards. Hrm. You can see how the ducky crumbles where I stuck the parts together… definitely need more experimenting with different rice sorts for that.
Around the ducky are stirfried broccoli, chinese cabbage, leek, sugar snaps and champignons stirfried with ginger, chili, garlic, limeleaf, soy and mirin. Mmm limeleaf. I don’t need any other flavouring! Why didn’t I get a pack of those before???
Then there is a deco of chinese cabage, carrot “DDR arrows” and in the silver foil cup are jelly beans, walnuts and kompeitou for dessert. I wanted Skittles but the last packet I had left had only red and orange skittles left! Can’t have a red and orange pond now, can I?

Hm, was that technically vegan now? Except for the jellybeans maybe…

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Bento #96 – more weekend leftovers

I should use more leftovers for my bento. The sad thing is that I’m really picky when it comes to leftover food – I had some more things in my fridge that I had planned to pack but when the time to pack came, I looked at them and knew I wouldn’t want to eat them any more. *sigh*

On the other hand, having a free side container all of a sudden means I could put something more colourful in there, and the box needed any colour it could get!

The big compartment holds potato wedges separating oven-baked breaded mushrooms and fish (my dictionary says it’s called plaice), and a sauce kitty with Hollandaise.
The small compartment on the top holds red and green grapes and a quick mayonaise salad containing chopped carrots, apple, leek and corn.
The small compartment on the bottom holds mozarella, tomatoes and basil leaves.

Breaded soy-marinated fish and vegetables
This is after something I tasted in a restaurant once, and had to try at home. The original recipe used fish, but – vegetarian friends rejoice! – the mushrooms tasted much, much better even! It was just regular champignons but they tasted amazing. I think eggplant would also fit it rather well.
It’s rather simple as well.
For the marinade: Dark soy sauce, a spoon of honey dissolved in it, crushed ginger and garlic. Marinate (or if you want to save time, cook the stuff in it for a bit).
Bread with flour, salted scrambled egg and milk, and crispy breadcrumbs with sesame seeds mixed in.
Oven-bake or fry.

I think a fruity yoghurt sauce would fit it really well, but the BF requested Hollandaise, so Hollandaise we had…

Also, a fruit breakfast box from last Friday, which I didn’t post then because I wasn’t that fond of it:

Stuffed dates (recipe courtesy of The Daily Tiffin), grape skewers, apple and kiwi slices, and pocky in the lid.

Oh, and Jennifer! I looked into the Japanese store this Friday and they still have the “Deli Club” three-compartment box in blue and red for 100 SEK (~14.43 USD) each. If you can’t find it anywhere else, I can look into how much shipping to you would cost…
I bought a male box there this time, for the same price, and it’s HUGE! I wanted a slightly bigger one but this one is amazing. 810ml! Maybe if I’m REALLY hungry someday… else my BF is going to use it. Apologies for the bad picture, the camera didn’t cooperate without a flash.

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New category: Weird Swedish Food

I lived in Sweden for a few years now and am still discovering weird new foodstuff those Scandinavians have! So I figured I’ll have to introduce a new category: “Weird Swedish Food” for whenever I stumble across some.

Today’s new discovery is something I saw when I first came to Sweden a long time ago, when all food was still weird to me. So I forgot until now, when I mentioned something about rosehips to my boyfriend (I believe I asked if you can do the same things to the big fruits of the garden-hedgeroses – which also grow wild here, weirdly – as you do to the small wild ones). He suggested that I should try some “Nyponsoppa”, and being the sucker for weird exotic food that I am, of course we did.

Nyponsoppa is a sweet, soup-like stuff made from the pulp of rosehips. It is eaten warm with vanilla icecream (according to the BF, anyway) and sometimes little almond biscuits.

Since it was warm (and the icecream very unwilling) the picture didn’t come out so well. I added a few mint leaves since I figured they might fit the taste well (I was right) for color contrast.

So what’s the verdict?
It smells – weird. Sour, somehow. *wrinkles nose* But it actually tastes a lot sweeter, and has the aroma of rosehip berries. I missed having some nuts or those biscuits though – it was way too souplike for my tastes, especially when it had melted all the icecream. The taste is quite nice though – although I think I would prefer it to be a bit thicker so I can use it as marmelade instead. It seems like it should be a great comfort food having just a bowl of it with some buttered bread.

The packet lists another recipe: “Put soup in a bowl. Cut a banana into slices and add to the bowl. Sprinkle crumbled knäckebröd on top. Eat.”
O_ô
Okaaaaay.

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Bento #95 – A Selfportrait in Sushi

Vegetarian sashimi – Tamagoyaki, avocado, fried and vinegared bell pepper and fried eggplant, pickled ginger rose with wasabi petals, fishy with soy sauce, rice and nori/bell pepper decoration.

It may get image heavy. You have been warned.

First, I felt the need to make sushi today. But Tuesday is also Gym day! So when I had boiled the rice (It’s longgrained jasmine rice – mea culpa: I forgot to buy white shortgrained rice and didn’t want to substitute brown rice or arborio rice because I needed a white background – see below!) I didn’t feel like standing for another half an hour making nigiri. Ouch!
So I decided to use my new smallish black and red bowls as side bowls and arrange the vegetables as a sashimi.

Fresh and colorful!

Second, the theme for Bento Challenge this week is “Self Portrait”, and being a comic lover and sometimes cartoonist, I couldn’t pass this up. So the rice box has a selfportrait of the Were Rabbit in Nori and bell pepper shaves. Beware the fangs!
I cut the nori and bell pepper by hand with kitchen scissors, from memory of an earlier self portrait design I had drawn (This time, it’s less Powerpuffy – yay!). Yes, I am that crazy and cut stuff in nori without any pre-sketching. Don’t try this at home, kids!
I did a few work-in-progress shots on kitchen paper so the nori wouldn’t wilt from the moisture of the rice like in the last nori picture I did, Totoro:

The finished picture.

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Bento #94 – Weekend leftovers and Weekend candy

Top: Tabbouleh and caprese salad in a muffin cup, basil leaves.
Middle: Indian potato, pea and tomato curry on a bed of rice.
Bottom: Blue and green grapes and sour skittles!
Today’s bento is a little heavy in carbohydrates, as I had some stuff left over from the weekend that I didn’t want to throw away entirely. But I still managed to include something from all of the basic food groups: carbohydrates, proteins, fats and Skittles*
And because I’m a good girl and know my foodgroups, there is also milk and chocolate banana Pocky hidden under the fork in the lid.

It’s a steep learning curve with my Indian curries, and I feel like I’m still at the bottom. One, I Never Get It Right. Two, if I do get it right, it’s a)not repeatable and b)won’t taste as good as it did fresh when warmed (I have a sneaking suspicion this will be true for most curries). Three, I’m going to stay away from premade curry mixes and make my own mix from now on. I can’t ever tell what is in those premade mixes and they *never* taste right. So I’m going to buy the supermarket’s supply of christmas spices in August, unless somebody can direct me to a better venture…
Help is very, very appreciated. Also, is there anywhere I can get Ghee in a non-metal container smaller than 1 litre?

On the plus side, yay for weekend shopping and coming home with fresh supplies of British and Asian candy!

*) Whaaat? *looks innocent*

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Bento #93 – Guess What I Made (again)

Wok-fried zucchini, leek, yellow bell pepper, mushrooms, cauliflower and fresh basil with taco seasoning, a yin-yang of sourcream and salsa, cheese rollups, avocado, jalapeños, salad, carrot and salsa.
Not shown: two corn tortillas to fill with the delicious mixture!

I just love tortillas and Fajitas. That’s why they keep popping up in my bento – well, that and that it is lovely, filling food that I usually have leftovers after making.
There is nothing at all that should keep you from enjoying them if you are vegetarian – veggie Fajitas are great without anything to replace the meat. In Mexican restaurants, they often serve a pan of fried meat pieces and vegetables to fill your tortilla with, and leaving out the meat does not influence the taste in a bad way at all!
I usually stirfry diced zucchini, leek or salad onion, bell pepper (red and yellow for a great contrast, sadly I only had yellow in the house!), mushrooms as a base and add any other vegetable that I find in the fridge that needs using up to stretch it. Fill the tortillas with a spoon of veggies, salsa, sourcream, and some shredded cheese and top with salad and carrot shaves. Enjoy!
If you absolutely feel the need to make burritos or have a meat-replacement, saffron rice, quinoa, or a sauce of shredded zucchini, onion and crushed tomato goes well with it.

There. That’s all you ever need to know about veggie tortillas. Now go out and make your own! What are you waiting for? There really is nothing to it! You could have sliced the veggies already by the time it took you to read this!

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Bento #92 – Salmon sukiyaki

Leftovers from the salmon Sukiyaki I made tonight on a bed of rice: I couldn’t find enoki mushrooms at my supermarket but those tiiiiny champignons were good as well. The salmon and tofu are sliced and fried in a little oil, then cooked with the rest of the soup to soak up and add flavour. I added a little broth, some miso and a dash of soy sauce while still frying which gave a lovely salty taste – especially the salmon got lovely!
The other ingredients are chinese cabbage, leek, and some carrot stripes. It’s such a simple and lovely food – I have to remember that!
The fish holds a bit of broth for dipping tomorrow.

In the dessert container is a colorful mix of grapes, frozen mango and marzipan bread from Germany.

Countdown to #100: 8! And I still don’t know what to make!

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