Rotmos is Swedish for "root-mash". As you would expect, this is a simple dish of baked mashed root vegetables.
The basic recipe is quite plain, and indeed much Swedish food is rather plain if you've just spent two years exploring Italian cuisine! You can jazz this up a little by using a strong vegetable stock or other stock, but don't go crazy if you are trying to set out an authentic Julbord.
Here's a festive-looking and flavorful Christmas dish from Sweden that we served on the Julbord at our Swedish Christmas Dinner in December 2022. It includes red cabbage, apples, raisins, lingonberry jam, and other goodness.
This dish is good both hot and cold, and in Sweden is sometimes served on a sandwich.
This is one of those dishes that's better cooked ahead of time to let the flavors come together. It stores well and reheats easily.
This is the traditional Swedish Christmas ham. It's an unsmoked ham, boiled and cooled, then glazed with mustard and coated with bread crumbs and briefly roasted to toast the glaze. It's served at room temperature on the julbord, and we enjoyed it in our Swedish Christmas Dinner in December 2022.
You have to plan ahead for this recipe because it takes time for the ham to boil, and even more time for it to cool, preferably overnight. You can save a lot of time by using a pre-cooked ham, which won't be seasoned to your specifications but which will save a day.
This recipe calls for a 5 pound ham, but you can scale it up as big as you like if you are feeding many people.
Here's a surprisingly simple, delicious pie for luncheon or breakfast that you can whip up in under an hour. It works best if all ingredients are at room temperature when you begin.
White truffles, Tuber magnatum, are even more expensive than black truffles, and they are used differently. They are seen more in northern Italian cuisine than anywhere else. The two you see here, one ounce each, cost $590 in November 2021!
White truffles are mostly used as a seasoning, seldom cooked into heavy dishes, as the flavor is reduced by prolonged heat. A brief time in the skillet (as with scrambled eggs) is OK, but you wouldn't cook them into a risotto, rather you would shave a truffle very thinly on top as it is served.
They lend their flavor easily to butter and eggs. If you combine white truffle shavings into butter or eggs, the food becomes perfumed by the truffle within a short time. You wouldn't use the butter to saute anything, but it would be delicious on cooked vegetables or pasta, in a fondue, or to finish a sauce.
This classic combination is amazing, and amazingly expensive! I happened upon an opportunity to buy some white truffles in season from Alma Gourmet at a time when I had some extra cash to blow on an extravagance. I had read about and heard about white truffles, but I had never had the opportunity to try them myself, so I grabbed the opportunity, even though it was $295 for a one-ounce truffle. At least the shipping was free!
We tried them three ways: shaved over scrambled eggs, shaved and mixed into the eggs to absorb the flavor, and shaved over pasta with butter and cheese, the way Richmond had enjoyed it at a memorable culinary experience in Venice. This was my favorite way to enjoy them.
This is a simple, tasty dish that you can make whenever there are cauliflowers in the supermarket. The main flavors are cauliflower, tomato, and oregano. It's good enough as a standalone vegetarian dish or as an accompaniment to anything with an Italian flair.
I have also seen this prepared with the cauliflower sliced into steaks, with the sauce and cheese on top of each steak.
This is a base recipe for a number of classic French white fish recipes. I use sole here, but you could use the same recipe for any white fish: cod, hake, flounder, haddock, etc. This works with trout too.
On September 5, '21, we celebrated the cuisine of central Italy with our friends and summertime neighbors Lance and Lynda Hylander. For this project, one of three recorded on this blog, I defined "Central Italy" as the six regions north of Campania/Apulia and south of Emilia-Romagna and the Po River valley, to wit: Tuscany, Umbria, Marche, Abbruzzo, Molise, and Lazio (Lazio is where Rome is).
As usual for these dinners, we started out with Vermouth in cordial glasses and an Antipasto course of a fine salumi platter that represented all of the regions featured in the dinner.
The Insalata course was a hearty Insalata di Lenticchie, or lentil salad, with delicious tender lentils from Umbria, an area known for its lentils. This also showed that not all Italian cuisine demands tomatoes! With the salad we opened a couple of local white wines, a Trebbiano d’Abbruzzo (from Abruzzo) and a nice Frascati (from Lazio).
We didn't get to take a vacation in 2020, the plague year when everything was locked down to prevent the spread of Covid-19. By late spring of 2021 things were gradually opening up again, and everyone wanted to see distant loved ones. Melissa had come to visit her mother, and then we all went to Florida so she could see her father in Palm Coast, just south of Jacksonville in the north.
While they visited, Lorna and I drove from Jacksonville to Key West and back.
Here's how it went:
By Thursday we were winding down from our sprint along all of Florida's Atlantic coast. We joined Melissa and Bob for a leisurely drive to New Smyrna Beach for the afternoon, and then up to a Big Cat sanctuary north of Jacksonville to wrap up this adventure.
New Smyrna Beach is a nice town, with far better shopping (per Lorna) and coffee (per me) than we had seen in Key West or even in Miami Beach. I was surprised to see ten public shuffleboard courts, all well occupied with even young people playing.
After they finished shopping and I had caught up with note-taking and coffee, we had a fine lunch at Third Wave, where I got to try another celebrated southern specialty: shrimp and grits. We dined outside in a shady courtyard with a pleasant breeze and no street noise.
As evening approached we returned to Palm Coast and split into two cars so Bob could join us to see the Big Cats north of Jacksonville, near the airport hotel where we'd be staying that night.
Key West is a long way from anywhere, and Marathon is just an hour closer. The drive back to the mainland, reversing the drive down, was uneventful, until we got to Key Largo. Then the rains came, in buckets. The road up to Homestead is straight and limited access, so everyone just pushed on at a slightly slower speed. The rain continued until we were just north of Miami.
We had to get all the way up to Palm Coast that day, and we had two stops planned, so we could ill afford to lose the time to the rain.
I had originally wanted to see the Everglades, with a backup plan for the Flamingo Gardens in Davie. When Lorna learned of that, the alligators lost and the birds won.
I'm glad it worked out that way. We arrived at the Flamingo Gardens just as the rain was ending, but it was still pretty wet and quite hot so we took a very good tram ride around the property, seeing not just flamingoes but peacocks (including a white one), ibises, toucans, and other tropical birds. The driver was knowledgeable and happy to answer questions. And of course I found a book in the gift shop.
Our only other stop that day was up in Sebastian, at the south end of the "Space Coast". This was to visit Lorna's cousin and his wife for dinner, and then to get out to Route A1A to see the water views.
On the evening of Day 3, after our mango adventure, we drove down to Key Largo and along the Oversea Highway to Marathon, about halfway to Key West. The first part of the road was not a lot different from any built-up area around here. That was something of a disappointment.
We did notice that on every island there seemed to be a Sandal Factory store, or some name like that. It mystifies me how many sandals people can wear out down there, that there's such need for that many stores.
After Islamorada, things were much less built up and we saw more of that wide-open, sea-on-both-sides view that you see in the tourist brochures. There were still power lines and scrub on the many little islands that you pass along the way, and for much of the way we were accompanied by the remains of the Henry Flagler's 1912-era Bahia Honda railroad bridge, which connected the keys before cars were common.
Do you like mangoes, avocadoes, dates, nectarines, pistachios, kale, quinoa, soybeans, winter wheat, cherry blossoms, bamboos, or pima cotton? Thank the brilliant early 20th century botanist and plant explorer David Fairchild. Here he is in his later years with his wife Marian (daughter of Alexander Graham Bell) at The Kampong, their garden-home in Coconut Grove.
Fairchild wrote Exploring for Plants, The World Was My Garden, The World Grows Round My Doorstep, and Garden Islands of the Great East, memoirs of his travels, discoveries, and work building the USDA Plant Introduction Service. I have read and enjoyed them all. Today was my long-awaited day to explore palm trees and mangoes as brought to us by Dr. Fairchild.
Miami Beach did not thrill us. Its heyday was back in the 1920s, '30's and '40s, even into the '50s. The long waterfront was developed in those days, and the structures, mostly hotels, are fine examples of Art Deco architecture. But toay Ocean Drive is just a fancy setting for partiers and beachgoers. The shopping was disappointing and good food is there to be found, but you have to look for it. Of course, I might have been more charitable if I'd had the sense to go in January...
Some of the places do try to maintain a sense of "another time", especially 1957, the last year of pre-revolution Cuba. Here we have an authentic cigar girl, going from table to table hawking cigars, cigarettes, and more modern versions of the combustible vices. Naturally none of the cigars are actually from Cuba, but they all play to that forbidden fruit mystique by claiming to be made from tobacco grown from Cuban seed, or using names like Havana Especial (made in Honduras). If she sold a cigar, she would open it and cut it for the customer and lend him a lighter so that he could bless us all with his romantic vaporous exhalations.
