Nordic Masterclass and Tasting at Abergavenny Food Festival

Posted on September 10, 2011 by Signe

Gravlaks: a true Scandi favourite (photo by Debi Treloar, copyright Saltyard Books)

Ahh…Abergavenny. My favourite food festival. It’s packed with great stalls, producers, speakers, classes and debates, not to mention tutored tastings. This is the food festival as village fête: friendly, fun and replete with delicious food everywhere you turn.

This year I’m lucky enough to be giving not only a Nordic Masterclass but Tutored Tasting in all things Nordic at Abergavenny. The fab Trina Hahnemann is my sidekick and we’ll both be signing our cookbooks after each event.

If you’re planning on a visit to the festival anytime over the weekend of September 17th and 18th I thought I’d share with you the menu for both our events. If the weather provides I may even don a Sarah Lund-esque jumper. Though mine’s Norwegian, not from the Faroe Islands I’m afraid.

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Chocolate Hazelnut Brownies

Posted on August 4, 2011 by Signe

Chocolate Hazelnut Brownies

Brownies. What defines them? In recent years they’ve become ubiquitous here in the UK and to be honest, most of what you see is ersatz. The brownies you see this side of the Atlantic tend to be either slabs of barely cooked, oozing, molten, chocolate fudge bordering on the grotesque, or a thin-ish, cake-ish slice of dark chocolate-ish cake with an identity crisis. Iced brownies are a complete travesty so let’s not even go there.

The brownies I recall from summers spent in New England were neither gooey nor cakey. That’s just a false dichotomy folks. They were also nowhere near 5 cm tall, as seems to be the current vogue here, nor did they contain 500 g of sugar – I’m looking at you Nigella – in one single traybake. A fast-track to diabetes if there ever was one…

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Dark Chocolate And Orange Marmalade Quick Bread

Posted on July 1, 2011 by Signe
Dark Chocolate and Orange Marmalade Quick Bread

Dark Chocolate and Orange Marmalade Quick Bread

Need a spot of baking inspiration this weekend?

How about a squidgy and utterly more-ish dark chocolate and orange marmalade quick bread! Americans are great quick bread bakers and basically they’re just cakes baked in a loaf tin using raising agents such as baking powder and/or bicarbonate of soda instead of yeast. My predilection for loaf cakes stems from childhood birthdays when Mama J baked me a chocolate cake from a packet (always amplified with an extra spoonful of cocoa powder) in a loaf tin, slathered it with chocolate buttercream and decorated with Freia Non-Stop (Norway’s answer to Smarties). It’s just a riff on good old chocolate cake baked in a cake tin but somehow much, much more satisfying.

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A Scandi Midsummer Feast

Posted on June 21, 2011 by Signe

North Sea Prawn

Prawns, Lemon & Norwegian Mayo (from a tube no less)

Prawn Skagen Crisps on Peter's Yard ace sourdough crispbread

Wye Valley Strawberries & Rodda's Cornish Clotted Cream

Midsummer is traditionally marked across all the Scandinavian countries with celebrations, festivals and even bonfires – in some countries the festivities go on for the entire week of summer solstice, in others you’ll find the feasting restricted to the 21st or 23rd of June.

Flowers are picked, good food is shared and there is a steady trickle of booze to lubricate everyone well into the morning. Songs are sung and as long as the weather holds, much of the midsummer celebrations take place outdoors. Because it’s light virtually 24 hours at this time of year you don’t sleep much – something I relished as a child, using the excuse of midsummer insomnia to read all my favourite comic books late into the night, not to mention the excuse to snack on strawberries from my grandparents’ strawberry patch on their farm.

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Hansen & Lydersen smoked salmon

Posted on June 12, 2011 by Signe

Hansen & Lydersen smoked salmon, creme fraiche and dill canape at The Albion (photo taken by Neil Davey)

“The Best Scandinavians” according to my mother “are always the ones living outside Scandinavia.”

As an Anglo-American married to a Norwegian for nearly 40 years this has been a common refrain from the long-suffering Mama Johansen. She-who-must-be-obeyed would roll her steely grey eyes at the comedy of my father’s immediate family – most notably Papa Johansen’s charmingly eccentric sisters. It made my mother and I a little uncomfortable listening to their continual exclamations of Norwegian pride and how Norway was the best in absolutely everything.

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Competition Time…Win Six Iittala Coffee Cups And Saucers!

Posted on May 23, 2011 by Signe

Win six Iittala Korento coffee/tea cups and matching saucers. The Korento range is Iittala's latest launch and I love their bold, summery pattern of flowers and dragonflies

One of the things I miss most about living in Norway is the time-honoured tradition of sitting down and eating cake in the afternoon whilst enjoying a cup of strong coffee or tea. My grandmother always made sure there was a slice of something sweet to pick her up around 4pm, and if she didn’t have a cake already baked there was always the sour cream and vanilla waffle batter on standby for when guests dropped in at short notice.

If you’ve read Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy you’ll be familiar with how much coffee we drink in Scandinavia. Someone once quoted me a statistic that more coffee is consumed per capita in this tiny region than anywhere else on the planet. Who knows if that’s true but we do love our caffeine!

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It’s Publication Day!

Posted on May 12, 2011 by Signe

Strawberries in a favourite Iittala glass (photo by Debi Treloar copyright Saltyard Books)

I’m thrilled to announce that ‘Secrets of Scandinavian Cooking…Scandilicious’ is now available online and in bookshops across the UK.

For a chance to win a signed copy of the book simply tweet a link to this Jarlsberg & Fennel muffin recipe on YouTube and use the hashtag #winscandilicious by 4pm Friday 13th May.

And as it’s publication day I thought I’d share with you some of my favourite photos from the book…

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Lemon and vanilla bircher muesli

Posted on May 7, 2011 by Signe

Bircher muesli with lemon zest and vanilla

Lemon zest has that marvelous ability to perk up even the most humdrum of dishes. Spritzing some zest on a broad bean and three-cheese risotto I made the other night added just the right note of freshness to an otherwise cheesetastic dish. Meatballs with lemon zest, a la Nigel Slater, is always a crowd-pleaser and where would plain old lemon cake be without a judicious grating of that aromatic zest?

Admittedly bircher muesli has its fans and foes. Some love it and wax lyrical about the many health benefits of this traditional Swiss breakfast dish. Others just love the creamy taste of their morning bircher. Some find it utterly repellent and that’s understandable I guess. It’s a texture thing. Squidgy, cold oats may seem like a tough sell but there are some great riffs on bircher muesli out there, such as Food Stories addition of pomegranate seeds and pistachio nuts – if that’s not going to get you out of bed in the morning then nothing will!

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Win a beautiful ISAK landsby breadboard from Cloudberry Living

Posted on April 11, 2011 by Signe

The good people of Cloudberry Living have kindly donated this beautiful breadboard from top Scandinavian design brand ISAK to a reader of Scandilicious.

All you have to do is like and leave a comment over on my spankingly fresh Facebook page. Competition ends on Thursday 22nd April (just in time for Easter) and the winner will be picked at random. Available to UK residents only.

Good luck!

Sig x

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Len Deighton on Danish Smørrebrød

Posted on April 8, 2011 by Signe

Len Deighton's Action Cookbook (Trinity Travel Ltd 1965)

I have that grizzly, bearded rascal Tim Hayward to thank for introducing me to the joys of Len Deighton. They don’t make food writers like Deighton anymore (well they don’t really make food writers like Tim Hayward anymore either).

Deighton wrote bestselling thrillers such as The Ipcress File and then turned his hand to writing utterly brilliant cook-strips for The Observer. I’d love to see some comic food genius revive the cook-strip, why not? Who doesn’t love good illustration? As a child who grew up on a comic-literary diet of Asterix, The Peanuts and Lucky Luke I have to admit as an adult I miss reading good comics. It’s bizarrely frowned upon in Anglo-Saxon countries.

Anyway, Leighton is a salt of the earth kinda man, one who loves guns and gastronomy. He is also just plain funny. The perfect writer to wax lyrical about Brains in Black Butter (p.73), Beignets (p. 114) and Milk Pudding de Luxe (p. 124). But of course what caught my eye was his wonderful strip on Danish smørrebrød which you can see below:

The Secret to Danish Smørrebrød: remember the butter

Priceless.

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