Life in Motala

I tried this recipe over Christmas. I liked it, I got the chomping-on-chips feeling. I tested it on a bunch of kids and it got a rating from OK to super. The trick to making these chips is making sure the kale is dry and then watching it so it doesn’t go brown,  it tastes burnt then.

KALE (GRÖNKÅL) CHIPS

Cut away the stems and tear into smaller pieces. If you wash the kale, make sure it is dry before using it. Pour a little olive oil over the kale and use your hands to make sure all the leaves get coated. Sprinkle with salt (and maybe some vinegar or spices). Spread on an oven tray and toast in the oven 150-175 C until crisp (about 10 minutes).

I have only made this with green kale, the purple kind is supposed to taste best.

This last Tuesday was Tjugondag Knut - Twentieth Day after Christmas and Knut’s namesday. This is the day to traditionally remove all the Christmas decorations and eat up any candy left on the tree. We have both stopped with the SCD diet and started with some more starchy foods like rice. It took me a long time to understand the SCD diet. I had questions like It’s supposed to be a starch free diet, but there is starch in a lot of vegetables we eat??? Some starch is straight while some starch makes complicated formations that look like snowflakes. The snowflake stuff is in foods like grains, virtually impossible to completely break down and it seems to cause havoc in sensitive people.

Yummy chicken:

Fill a large pot half full with water. Add 2 bay leaves, 5 peppercorns, some thyme and rosemary (a twig or two of each). Bring to a boil and let boil for 5 minutes. Take a whole, cleaned chicken, and drop it into the pot together with a lemon cut in half and half an onion. Lower the heat and let simmer for 50-60 minutes. Fill the kitchen sink with cold water and place the pot in the cold water. Let stand for 1 hour. The chicken is now still warm but easy to handle. It literally falls apart in your hands and makes perfect chicken for sallads or just a snack.

Ingrid wanted to eat the traditional Swedish Christmas food and I wanted to keep on going with the sugar and starch free diet. We ended up compromising. We ate smoked salmon, mackerel, salmon roe and crayfish with sallad as the fish starter and then had waldorf sallad, cooked ham and two kinds of spare ribs (American style and Asian spicy) as the main plate - all SCD "legal". Ingrid also ate Janssons, a potato casserole with anchovies, and home-made inlagd sill, pickled herring (sugar, vinegar and spices). The foods we completely skipped this year were the Swedish meatballs, the short little Christmas sausages and gravad lax, raw salmon marinated in sugar and salt.

We also have a tradition of making a plate of cookies and candies to eat when opening the presents. I was pleased with the plate I made this year, though I did cheat a little, I used some cocoa powder in one of the treats (cocoa is not allowed on SCD).

On the plate: ginger cookies made with almond flour, peanut butter squares with hazelnut toffee, julknäck Christmas toffee made with honey, nut brittle and cocoa and butter balls. The photo does not do justice to the amount of work put into this… LOL. All in all, it was a good Christmas.

My allotment is producing a lot of squash (zucchini) now. I love squash, I eat it almost everyday. Here is a great breakfast: diced cooked squash with bacon. Yummy!

Here we are ready to eat, just back from a great swim in the marina. We are going to eat smoked mackerel, shrimps and boiled eggs together with squash, swiss chard and lebanese mini cucumbers from the allotment (the cucumbers from a generous neighbour there!)

Here is a picture of Lucky smelling that great mackerel smell!

The photos were taken by Ingrid’s friend who lives downstairs. Both she and Lucky got some mackerel too!

The water between Southern Sweden and Finland, the Baltic countries and Poland is called the Baltic Proper. It can turn into thick pea soup along the coasts on hot summers when the algae blooms. You can’t swim in it because you can get sick. The last decade it has gotten worse and everything from global warming to farming (nitrogen leaking into the sea) has been blamed. Now it turns out that the main culprit is cod-fishing! Cods eat sprats who eat zooplankton who eat the algae (phytoplankton). When the cod disappears the sprats increase and the zooplankton goes down. There you go. We need to eat more sprats!

I like tinned sprats (brisling) plain in olive oil.

I eat a paleo diet most of the time and one of the big questions on that diet is What do you eat for breakfast?

Today I ate a couple of boiled eggs and some sprattus sprattus (English: Sprat, Brisling, Garvie, Garvock, Whitebait) one of the fishes on WWF:s green list. In Swedish it is called skarpsill because of its sharp taste.