Summer salad

A friend asked what lenses I use for my food photography. Ha! My poor Nikon is gathering dust, I rarely even snap pics with the iPhone.

Anyway. It doesn't look like much, but a salad like this is so refreshing and goes with almost anything. It's cubed mango and watermelon, a squeeze of lemon juice, a little chopped up mint and lots of crumbled feta cheese. Mmmm. Good stuff.

Strawberry & Punsch Semifreddo

Summer means ice cream. And lots of it. However, not everyone happens to be blessed with an ice cream machine, although I think it should be a staple i any kitchen. Mine is at least 25 years old – really! – and still working just as well as it always have. But since you maybe don’t have one, let’s make some ice cream without a machine.

Or, let’s make a semifreddo. In Italian, it means half-frozen, and although I prefer it more “freddo”, you should take it out of the freezer a while before serving, or it’ll be too hard and icy. It can be flavored with absolutely anything, but, being summer and all, I thought we’d use strawberries. And, for a Swedish touch, some Punsch. Punsch is a Swedish liqueur, sweet and not very strong. It’s flavored with Arrak, and there’s a pretty good article about it on Wikipedia. As it happens, it goes extremely well with strawberries. A good alternative would be Amaretto di Saronno, a lovely almond liqueur.

Strawberry & Punsch Semifreddo
Serves 8-10

500 g fresh strawberries
3 tbsp Punsch
6 egg yolks
200 g sugar
200 ml full-fat cream
200 ml thick yogurt (about 10% fat, Turkish or Greek style)

Clean the strawberries. Mash half of them with a blender or a food processor, and thinly slice the other half. Mix both with the punsch.

Whisk egg yolks and sugar until very pale and fluffy. (A stand mixer sure helps, but handheld beaters work as well.) Whisk the cream into soft peaks, and fold into the eggs along with the yogurt. Finally, add the strawberries.

Freeze, preferrably in a tin with removable sides – mine is made of silicone and very convenient. Freeze overnight, and let it thaw for a short while before eating.

(Recipe has previously been posted on sweden.se while I was blogging for them.)

Recipe in Swedish

Dill-Cucumber Cole Slaw

I recently bought the cookbook Smitten Kitchen. I follow the blog, and Deb is  a wonderful writer so I had high hopes for the book. Well, let's just say I am not disappointed. At all. The book is beautiful, and Deb's texts are as good as ever. And so are her recipes. I haven't gotten very far in the book - I keep it next to my seat at the kitchen table, and try to read a little at breakfast - but I immediately had to make this green, crunchy cole slaw. Perfect with so many things, and since Per has bought that big smoker, I foresee something like this at most of our gatherings.

I was too chicken to try Deb's amount of dressing - I had a small cabbage, and also didn't fully follow her proportions. So for the original, buy the book. It's well worth it. 

Dill-Cucumber Cole Slaw

1 small head of fresh cabbage, very thinly sliced (about 500 g, or thereabouts) 

1/2-1 cucumber, very thinly sliced

2 tbsp finely chopped dill

For the dressing: 

90 ml white wine vinegar

1 tbsp salt

1 tbsp sugar

90 ml cold water

Stir together vinegar, salt and sugar, until everything is nicely dissolved. Add the water. Toss with the cabbage, cucumber and dill until well combined. Let the salad sit for at least an hour, but it'll keep well in the fridge for several days. 

Tabbouleh

A very quick sketch of the perfect summer salad - tabbouleh. Cooked bulgur wheat, lots of flat-leaf parsley, a little red onion, tomatoes, red pepper, cucumber. Lots of lemon. A little olive oil.

We ate it with lamb meatballs - lots of garlic, lemon zest and coriander - and a sauce with mayo, yogurt, chili and garlic.

Classic Potato Salad

Ok, another potato salad? Really? Well, yes. I usually prefer vinaigrette potato salads, but sometimes, mayo and sour cream is the way to go. It's perfect with cold cuts, or as we served it last, with bbq chicken drumsticks. You can prepare it in advance, it'll just get better if it's left overnight. Add the leeks just before serving, though.

Classic Potato Salad

200 ml sour cream
100 ml mayonnaise
2 tbsp capers
1/2 yellow onion, finely chopped
1 tbsp mustard, ideally sweet/hot
salt, pepper
1 kg potatoes
1/4 leek, finely sliced

Peel and cook the potatoes until tender. Meanwhile, whisk together the sour cream, mayo, capers, onion and mustard. Season with salt and pepper.

Dice the cooked potatoes, still warm, and stir into the sauce. Mix well. Place in a bowl, and before serving, decorate with finely sliced leek.

Milk Chocolate Cookies

For Titus birthday party, I gave him Martha Stewart's Cookie book and asked him to pick one to make. He pointed to the one on the cover and said "that one's fine, mama". Clearly uninterested in the task. Oh well. I randomly flipped around a bit and landed on what looked like a very nice, flat, crackly-chewy cookie called Milk Chocolate Cookies. This, more or less, is it. (I used less sugar, and other slight variations.)

You'd never guess they're milk chocolate though - they're pretty dark and intense.

Milk Chocolate Cookies

120 g milk chocolate, coarsely chopped

110 g butter, unsalted

2 eggs

300 g sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 tsp baking soda

125 ml cocoa powder

250 ml all-purpose flour

120 g milk chocolate chips (or again, coarsely chopped chunks)

Melt butter and the first amount of milk chocolate in the microwave. Add this, along with the eggs, sugar, vanilla extract and salt to the bowl of your mixer (or just mix by hand, it's not hard work). Mix until fully blended. Stir in baking soda, cocoa powder and flour and mix until combined. Finally add the rest of the milk chocolate. 

Mixture will be soft but scoopable, so scoop onto baking sheets. I use a cookie scoop, but a regular spoon will do. I could fit about ten cookies on each sheet. 

Bake at 160°C for about 12-15 minutes. Cookies should be flat and crinkly, but they'll be fairly soft so let them cool before attempting to move them. 

Cookbook watch: summery cookbooks

I'm way, way behind on my cookbook reviews, so I'll try to post a bunch of fairly short reviews in order to cover a lot of books that I want to mention. First out, a bunch of books that are especially perfect for summer.



Magisk sommar ("Magical Summer") by sisters Hannah Widell and Amanda Schulman. These sisters are fairly well known in Sweden, albeit for their various jobs in the media and not for their cooking. I don't really mind non-chef-y cookbooks, and this one is surprisingly nice. A third sister - Amelia Widell - has taken all the photos, and they're very good too. The book is based on their summer vacations on the Swedish island Gotland, where they all have summer houses. It has a little bit of everything - baking projects for rainy days, barbecue, yummy desserts, picknick food... The recipes are short and approachable, and don't shy away from shortcuts.

And I really need to try princess cake with meringue cake layers - why didn't I think of that?



Grilla med bröderna Timell ("Grilling with the Timell brothers") is another book by a famous pair of siblings, brothers this time. Martin and Anders are both well known in Sweden for various TV- and radio shows. Martin mostly as a fix-it kind of guy, Anders seems more of a party person and has a daily morning radio show. This book is about their summers, on ANOTHER Swedish island. Popular theme.  And again, it's not a bad book. It's rather nice, actually. The recipes are easy to follow, but seems to yield fairly impressive food, definitely something for when you have guests over.



Kockarnas grillbok ("the chefs grilling book") has a lot of recipes from more or less prominent Swedish chefs, and many of them look great. However, the book is completely unstructured which makes it a little hard to use. It's nice to look through but as there are no chapters at all, I don't find it very useful.