My tuna salad at Miss Voon.

On Tuesday, I finally got to the Stockholm restaurant that I’d been dying to go to since it opened a few months back. I’d been looking forward to Miss Voon as I’d read good reviews and the cuisine is described as Asian fusion – one of my favorites. I’d even recommended the place to a lot of friends. But as I am so often disappointed by eating out in this town, I was nervous about going.

While I wanted to be wowed, I wasn’t. It was just average. OK. I was there at lunch and I had the tuna salad, so maybe it wasn’t the most representative choice of the restaurant’s talent, but still. The Asian noodles and tuna were buried underneath the lettuce and coriander in a rather ordinary looking presentation. And as there was just a hint of dressing on the salad, there wasn’t much taste to it at all. I was there with my friend Debora who swore that this salad was usually good, so we asked for some dressing to be added on the side. Instead, our salads came back drowning in dressing with even more dressing on the side. Yikes. It was definitely not subtle, nor was it that inspiring. I felt so let down.

Miss Voon is part of the F12 group and I generally find their restaurants to be some of my favorites in Stockholm. So I am willing to give the place a try again. I’ll let you know what happens.

On a roundabout related note, I was reading a very funny expat blog that I recently discovered. It’s written by a woman from the Netherlands who lives in Moldova. On a recent post, she had a link to an older post that featured great quotes about countries. The first one is about Sweden. And it just couldn’t have been more appropriate:

“Eating in Sweden is really just a series of heartbreaks.”  Bill Bryson

So thank you Bill Bryson for the laugh.

Cider and oil from Oaxen Skafferi in Stockholm.

More tasty choices.

Our helpful cashier.

Recently, I discovered Oaxen Skafferi. Located on Södermalm at Mariatorget, the Skafferi (Swedish for pantry) is a butcher shop and specialty food store with a variety of aged, smoked and cured meats and sausages, mustards, oils, chutney, honey, butter and such Swedish favorites as gravad lax and pickled herring. We bought pepper sausages, a liver pate, pickled beets and cheese and thought everything was pretty good.

By the way, the pantry is owned by Oaxen Restaurant, voted one of the top 50 restaurants in the world. Oaxen closed its island location at the end of last year and will reopen in Stockholm on the island of Djurgarden in 2013. The Skafferi opened in December.

A semla from Tössebageriet.

You have to give me credit for trying. I have never been a fan of semlor, but every year I feel this strange obligation to eat one again. So this year I thought I would up the ante and go to one of the best-rated semlor bakeries in town – Tössebageriet – and try one again.

A semla is a wheat bun spiced with cardamon that is filled with a mound of whipped cream and almond paste, looking very much like a pastry hamburger. Traditionally eaten on Fat Tuesday or Fettisdagen, semlor are now typically available in mid January. I ate my annual semla today as I will be in Sydney by then.

As for what I thought of this semla, I really do like the idea of Swedish semlor, but I am still not a fan of the cardamon or the wheat bun. And all that cream is just way too rich. So I ate half my semla. Maybe I’ll do the rest later.

By the way, I’ve written of my trials with the semlor before, comparing them to king cake and to a cream-filled hamburger.

Robert's salmon and fish soup.

When I first moved to Stockholm, I did not like salmon. At all. But salmon is extremely popular in Sweden and was served at EVERY dinner party we went to. I didn’t want to be rude, so I would ask for just a small piece and force myself to eat it with copious amounts of potato to mask the taste.

Salmon made me feel like that annoying kid that I was who refused to eat just about everything: fish, peas, lima beans, hot dogs, hamburgers, bananas. The list of my dislikes was endless. Dinner was an ordeal that I tried to get through by creatively hiding peas under my mashed potatoes and by taking a big mouthful of something disgusting and then spitting it into my napkin and dropping it on the floor for the dog to eat.

I longed for a dog to sit by my side on those salmon nights. But then at some point over the years, I realized I could tolerate the salmon. It’s not one of my favorite foods, but I actually like it now. I especially like it in fish soup and Robert makes an amazingly good one with chunks of fresh salmon, mini shrimp and vegetables.

I guess you could say that eating salmon is just one of the many ways Sweden has had an influence on me.

I made pancakes for breakfast this morning. As I created the mix from scratch, following the classic Betty Crocker cookbook recipe, I couldn’t help but be reminded of home. As in the US. Pancakes were so much a part  of my childhood breakfast memories. But they weren’t for everyday breakfast. Rather, pancakes were what my brothers and I ate on the weekends or for holidays like Christmas. Cereal was what we typically had during the week. (And for years, the cereal I ate was either Cheerios or Captain Crunch.)

By the way, American-style pancakes have baking powder in them and are thus fat and fluffy. I always ate them with butter and maple syrup. In contrast, Swedish pancakes or pannkakor are thin and more like what I would call a crepe. And they are very much a part of tradition too – on Thursdays, Swedes like to have pea soup with pancakes and lingonberry jam for lunch. As I am not much of a pea soup fan, this is not a tradition that I have embraced!

This year, it was dinner for two for Christmas. It was both wonderful and hard all at once. It was fun in that we met up with friends for drinks, a Candlelight Christmas eve service and a boxing day dinner. And while it was good to have our own celebration in our own home after so many years of traveling for the holidays, I also missed having family around.  It felt a bit lonely and even though we called and Skyped our families in the US and Australia, it wasn’t the same as being there with them.

Robert and I made the best of it and cooked amazingly good meals for Christmas eve and Christmas day. For Christmas eve, we made reindeer with lingon berries and roasted potatoes and parsnips. Very Swedish. And we had Swedish style appetizers as well with herring and hard bread. Christmas day was more American/English and we had Cornish hens with stuffing, sweet potatoes and green beans with mushrooms. I was so full that I could not move.

Hanging out at Peppar with Zanne and Micke.

We kicked the holiday weekend off with drinks and friends on Friday night at Peppar, a restaurant and bar in Vasastan. This place is as close as you can get to an American dive bar and serves up margaritas and Tex-Mex style food. It was also completely decked out for Christmas. White cotton batting and candy canes lined the entryway. A tree and ornaments hung from the ceiling. A snowman sat on the bar and Santa was in the toilet. Lights and decorations filled every inch of this place and it was so tacky that it was cool.

At just a few minutes before midnight, the Peppar bar staff handed out glasses of glögg and sparklers. Precisely at midnight, John Lennon’s Happy Christmas was played and the entire crowd in the packed bar sang along. Everyone wished us god jul/Merry Christmas. And that was all good fun.

The start of the holiday.

A wallenbergare from Clas pä Hörnet.

Since I wrote about popular Cincinnati comfort food food yesterday, I thought I would counter with a classic Swedish dish today: wallenbergare. A wallenbergare is shaped like a hamburger, but made up of finely ground veal, egg yolks, cream, a few spices and breadcrumbs. It’s typically served up with potatoes, lingon berries and peas, just as you see it here. It is Swedish home cooking or husmanskost just as much as meatballs are. The wallenbergare here is from the restaurant Clas på Hörnet, which incidentally, has been around since 1731 or longer than the US has been a country.

Jin & Peeters vegetarian dumplings are served up with dipping sauce, salad and rice.

The unlikely but very tasty menu combination at Jin & Peeters.

Chicken dumplings at Potstickers.

Thai chicken dumpling noodle soup at Teatro Fantasia.

Oh, and the restaurant reviews? I would go back to all three. Just probably not within the next week!

A reindeer somewhere north of the Artic Circle.

Before I moved to Sweden, I had never, ever seen a reindeer out in the wild. Now I have many times in northern Sweden and Norway. (Around the Arctic Circle, they will saunter ever so casually down the highway, oblivious to the traffic around them.) And I’d never, ever eaten reindeer either. Nor did I even want to try it. But in the last several years, I’ve had it many times: as carpaccio, sausage, stew, steak. We live in Scandinavia, after all. We’re just hanging with the locals.

The other night, I ate some delicious reindeer fillets at Hotel Skeppsholmen. The meat was served up with gravy, mashed potatoes and lingonberries. And you know what, it was really good. I can admit that. Although I wouldn’t dare tell my Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer loving niece that I did. So keep it quiet.

The venison and mushroom crepe.

Located on a street corner in Vasastan, Byn is a French-style crepe restaurant. It’s small and cozy. Service is good. And all of our dinner crepes were mouth-wateringly tasty. And they were beautifully presented too. While we drank wine, I’ve heard that the French cider there is good too. Next time…

I love the beetroot, carrot, walnut and apple garnish.

The chicken crepe.