Lifecruiser

Swedish crispbread, the noisiest bread ever, has been crunched for 250 years. In the past its long life made things easier for housewives as they only had to bake once or twice a year. Today, people on the look-out for a healthy diet delight in its rich source of fibre.

Its lasting qualities were proved in the Fourties when a tin containing crispbread was found in the Stockholm attic of the Schumachers bakery after the owners death. It had been baked in 1897 exclusively for Andrée the explorer and his north Pole trip in the hot air balloon Eagle. The ill fated expedition didn’t last very long, but the bread in the attic that the baker Schumacher had kept as a memento was still edible after almost 50 years!

Knäckebröd
Recipe for 12 round cakes

50 g yeast
0,5 L lukewarm water
1 L rye flour (or oatmeal)
400-500 ml wheat flour
1 tsp salt

Dissolve yeast in water and add the rest of the ingredients. Let dough rise for 40 mins. Roll out as thinly as possible, cut round cakes and place them on a tray. Prick cakes with a knitting needle, golf peg or similar. Leave to rise for 30 mins. Bake at minimum 250 degree celsius for 3-4 mins, turn the cakes over and bake for another 2-3 mins.

Source: “Things Swedish” by Mari Hemming

Generally people don’t bake crispbread themselves any more, we buy it in the store. There is a lot of different brands, shapes and taste to buy. We often buys the heartshaped “Leksands knäcke”, see our photo.

I haven’t tried to bake the recipe above on my own - yet. We eat a lot of crispbread, its really yummy, the crispy feeling is kind of addicting. Its suitable to eat together with the dinner meals and especially soup.

Or just as a snack meal in the night with some good stuff on it. You can put almost anything on top… Like Dagwood, famous for his super-duper sandwiches, in the good old comic Blondie. I feel really connected to him, as he loves food too :-)

Something really yummy is to put on some creamy potatoes au gratin (with onion and garlic) left overs from the dinner, in the middle of the night after a party or something nice like that.

The Swedish crispbread is one of the typical swedish edible things that we Swedes really long for when we’re away from home.

Writing about it made me hungry as usual…

When asked what he would like for dinner, chances are the average Swedish man will answer “Mothers Meatballs”, traditionally served with lingonberries. The berry contains a natural preservative and has enriched Swedish meals since before the days of regrigeration.

Although meatballs have a firmly established past in Sweden, the prefix “Mothers” dates from 1959. It arose in from the world heavyweight fight in the USA between Ingemar Johansson (challenger) and American Floyd Patterson (champion). During the build up to the match it emerged from the Swedes camp that his entire family were with him and that his mother was doing his cooking.

Because of this and because Johansson was often seen out in Manhattan nightlife, the Swedes unexpected victory caused a big, worldwide sensation, but his mothers meatballs received almost the same attention and it was even suggested that they provided the power for that celebrated right hook. The secret of mother Ebbas recipe? “Lots of onion,” according to the champion himself.

Classic meatballs

400 g minced meat
1/2 onion
150 ml milk or cream
1 egg
5 tbsp breadcrumbs
1-2 tsp salt
1-2 pinches allspice (alternative cayenne pepper, Dijon mustard or similar)
Butter and/or oil for frying

Mix milk or cream, breadcrumbs and spices and leave to soak for at least 10 mins. Peel onion and chop finely, brown on low heat. Mix all ingredients. Roll into small balls (works best with wet hands) and fry. First brown to seal, then lower heat and fry the meatballs in another saucepan or in a roasting dish in the oven.

Source:
“Things Swedish” by Mari Hemming

I can confirm that mothers meatballs (mammas köttbullar) really is delicious, but I wouldn’t do meatballs on only 400 g, I would do it on 1 kilo, because the are disappearingly yummy and if I’m going to dirty my hands with it, I want a lot of them. I wouldn’t take allspice, I would take white pepper and then grated onion instead of chopping it.

There are a lot of different recipes how to make them. Some put in a bit of liver pâté too, but I’ve never tasted that myself. I don’t use to change to another saucepan either or put it in the oven.

Usually we eat meatballs together with pasta and ketchup or boiled or mashed potato and the lingonberrys. There is always meatballs at the christmas dinner table too.

They’re perfect to throw into the freezer to take out and warm up again - or eat cold on a sandwich. A very useful picnic ingredient.

Oh my, I’m beginning to drool here….

The embryo for this post started at the dinner table the other day. Suddenly in the middle of a bite, I asked Mr Lifecruiser what we should have for night meal. He just shaked his head and said: “An outsider would have thought that you were a maniac.. start to talk about that in the middle of the dinner! You should be full and not thinking of food already again”. Well, an outsider won’t know that I always have to have something before I go to bed, otherwise I will be too hungry in the middle of the night and can’t sleep.

Then I remembered that it was a lot of eggs in our dinner and said: “You know, it’s a lot of eggs in this food, so there will be a lot of serious farting this evening.” That didn’t convince him about me being normal either, but hey, he should be used to it by now, after all he is married to me. At least I didn’t fart or pick my or his nose at the dinner table….

We are generally rather outspoken about everything here in Sweden, but maybe not so far as to this point of disgusting things for most of the people. And certainly not at the dinner table. Normally I don’t speak like this when we’re with other people - except Miss Ass. Lifecruiser who is as crazy as we are.

Anyway, that started a little wondering. Why does it smell like rotten eggs when farting after eating fresh eggs? If you eat other things, it doesn’t smell that way even if you do get gases from it. What is it in eggs that makes it smell so bad when it comes out? We started to joke about it, saying that “Oh, it must be because the eggs have passed two butts, the hens and ours…” and stuff like that.

But seriously, why does it smell, what is that smell?

I began to search for the answer and found out that Hydrogen Sulphide is what makes the smell of rotten eggs and it’s even produced by the bacteria in our stomach when we’ve eaten fresh eggs.

Flammable facts about flatulence:

The average human releases 0.5 to 1.5 litres (1 to 3 U.S. pints) of flatus in 12 to 25 episodes throughout the day. The primary constituents of flatulence are the non-odorous gases, in descending order of concentration, nitrogen (ingested), oxygen (ingested), methane (produced by anaerobic microbes), carbon dioxide (produced by aerobic microbes or ingested), and hydrogen (produced by some microbes and consumed by others). Odors result from trace amounts of other components (often sulphur containing, see below).

Nitrogen is the primary gas released. Methane and hydrogen, lesser components, are flammable, and so flatulence is susceptible to catching fire. Gas released mostly has a foul odor which mainly results from low molecular weight fatty acids such as butyric acid (rancid butter smell) and reduced sulfur compounds such as hydrogen sulfide (rotten egg smell) and carbonyl sulfide that are the result of protein breakdown.

Source: Wikipedia

You see, there is sience in everything!

There is only once that I have thought that Mr Lifecruiser were so disgusting that I wouldn’t kiss him and that was during our honeymoon!

We were on the greek island Crete driving around and stopped at a nice restaurant to eat something. There really is some great food in Greece, but of course Mr Lifecruiser had to choose to eat deep fried octopus… I can’t stand octopus, neither the smell of it or the look. *feeling sick at the thought of it*

He had to make it even more disgusting by putting the whole mouth full of them, challenging me to try some of them. That was the only time I’ve said: “There will be no more kisses for a couple of hours at least, despite the fact that we’re on honeymoon!”

He thought I was hard at him, but that was really the only time I’ve thought he was disgusting. There were grease from the fried octopus all over his mouth…

For me, it was like some one participating in The Fear Factory. *shivering with fear*

No honeymoon lips for kissing!

Well, we never seems to come to any proper bedtimes in this house… How hard can it be to go to bed?

The last weeks it has accelerated, we’ve been up day and night and maybe taken a short nap now and then. The strange thing is that it work out so good! And after all, it’s a pity to waste our precious time by sleeping it away…

On the other hand, we don’t think that it’s so healthy in the long run, so we better get our selves together and come back to normal routines.

But what is normal? Hm…. Is it not normal to sit in the kitchen at 8 o’clock in the morning and eat a real dinner?

We have done that for several days now. Pancakes one morning, maybe not so strange for you, but not at all usual here in Sweden. Sausage and pasta another morning and we had been eating fried eggs on sandwiches just a little while before that, so it was amazing that we could be hungry again!

Because of the fact that we are in hibernation, we haven’t so much food at home to prepair either, so it really keeps our ability to “do the magic trick” here. We can now determine that you get more hungry when you’re not sleeping enough. Yesterday I had a mountain of Nachos with cheese on the top for breakfast-dinner. I thought it was really yummy.

This night, I had been sleeping for as long as 5 hours, but Mr Lifecruiser woke me up because he was in the kitchen trying to take a sneak-meal! He should have known better (married to the hungry monster as he is), that I should notice something - of course I demanded my share of the goodies.

The conversations we have when we’ve been up for so long time, becomes really interesting ones. I have no idea what Mr Lifecruiser is talking about and he has no idea what I’m talking about and we both answer on totally different things - no wonder that our marriage is working out so good!!

We have become the masters of sleeping in front of the computers too. I found both of us sleeping, sitting in our chairs yesterday with our hands on the mouses…

Oh, now it strikes me real hard: maybe I should do something about my look and put on something really sexy to tempt Mr Lifecruiser to come to bed with me?

What do you say, is it necessary or am I sexy enough….?

As Mrs Lifecruiser is a hungry monster it’s not always so easy to feed here. On this picture she’s shovel in a big bite of our wedding cake and couldn’t resist the oppertunity to make a funny face of course, that’s my wife in a nutshell!

There is no need of a sign here that says “Don’t feed the animals”…. On the contrary, I have to feed her to keep her nice and quiet! Remember our earlier post about us trying to take pictures of the food on our travels? I blame it on her….

That’s why we were soooo very happy and excited when we found this really nice website about supersized meals.

She can sit and drool for hours about all the absolutely (for her) dreamy objects and get even more hungry - if that’s possible!

Then she takes a bite…… of me!

………….Help!

Go to Supersized meals

“Every time you marry some one, you get a ring, so you can only marry 10 persons”.

[ Kristine, 7 year ]

In our case it is not necessery to have more than one finger, beacuse we are going to stay married - at least for 42 more years to come - and yes, to each other!

Why 42 years? Well, 2 years ago, when we first met, we just said for 44 more years, it just was totally natural for us.

So where does that leave us…? I am going to be 88 years old and Mr Lifecruiser 95 years old then.

What we are going to do after that 42 years? Then we will sit down in our wheelchairs at the elderly home and negotiate - for another 44 years!!!

Of course, at that age, we are not going to remember any bad times - if we had some - so we are totally stucked with each other and it is a lovely feeling indeed :-)

Here you can see what we are celebrating it with. (Only part of it…!)

- 1 bottle of Dom Perignon 1996
- Whitefish roe on eggs
- A long sweet kiss

The rest is……… totally predictable!!!

Hot stuff, red alert, fire alert!!!

Cheers everybody!

The hardest thing with making swedish meatballs to put in the freezer, do you know what that is…..???

To NOT taste them! Because if you do, you keep on tasting more of them…. and soon there is no more meatballs!

(At least if you are a hungry monster like Mrs Lifecruiser)

See some examples below on meatsballs recipes, but keep in mind that there is a lot of varations in how to make swedish meatballs.

Everyone has it owns touch, which makes it even more…. interesting?

Scandinavian cookings meatballs recipes
Cooks.com meatballs recipes

Red alert!!! We suddenly discovered that it is almost christmas time and we have done NOTHING about it yet!!!

So today our time goes to christmas preparations. First of all to find our few christmas decorations and decorate our little home.

After that we will make swedish meatballs which is a tradition on the christmas table here in Sweden.

….And because Mr Lifecrusier loves rice pudding, we will make a load of it and eat today already, just to make a false start of the christmas.

To be continued…..

I really like the way our kitchen turned out after we have changed the furniture. Now it is really practical. With problems in my back it is just awesome to have these more kind of bar-hang-out-style.

OK, I confess, it is more fun to drink beer at home now! There, I said it.

There is one more fact, that I had to point out for Mr Lifecruiser, who had not noticed the just marbellous discovery I had.

I can remained seated on my bar chair and still reach everything on the tables, the fridge (most important to refill my plate or glass!) and the drawers etc! Oh, boy do I just LOVE this!

If the kitchen just have been a tiny tiny bit smaller I could even have reached the stove without moving my tired body at all. It is a heaven for a hungry monster….. *Up on the clouds dreaming*

We will not do anything at the dull walls, colors and such stuff, because we are not sure how long we will be living here.

After all, we are hardly living here now, travelling around the world so much and who knows where we are ending up….?