When grouchy...cook.

Yesterday, I was having one of 'those' days.  For no good reason, I was in a big fat grouch.  Maybe it's the unending winter, that keeps pushing it's way into my world, in between teasing moments of Spring. Maybe it's the lack of conversation about the weather that is part of every day in Ireland?  Maybe it was just an off day.

I'm one of those annoying people who is almost always in good form.  I don't know what to do when I am grouchy for no good reason.

Except cook.  Cooking always helps, even if it's just the joy of kneading dough until is succumbs to my will.  It's cathartic.

Last night, I decided to make pizza dough and sauce from scratch.  Mountain man inspired me, with two punnets of cherry tomatoes, which were bought for a party he had while I was away.  I'm not sure what exactly the tomatoes were for, but they were still in the fridge when I got back, so they spent 45 minutes in a hot (200°C) oven with 3 cloves of garlic, two sprigs of rosemary and a few sprigs of fresh thyme, along with a glug (technical term) of gooey balsamic vinegar, salt and pepper and a drizzle of cold pressed, organic sunflower oil.  It's a failsafe way to turn somewhat tasteless out of season food into something worthy of your belly.

The smell was intoxicating.  It's hard to be grouchy with smells that good, but I was determined to cling on nonetheless.

While the pizza dough rose slowly in a clingfilm covered bowl atop the radiator, I chopped pizza toppings, burned some shallots that were supposed to be caramelising and dropped a carton of feta on the floor.  Mountain Man wisely handed me a drink and cleaned up my mess, even washing the burned saucepan and chopping fresh shallots for me.  Did I mention I love my husband?

Dough refuses to rise any faster than it feels like, forcing me to wait and take a breath.  Cooking teaches patience, who knew?!

Finally, 2 hours after I started, dinner was ready.  Mountain Man had a

movie lined up and ready to watch and I sank gratefully onto the couch.  Biting into the first slice of pizza made me feel even better.  In spite of my weird mood and determination to burn everything, the pizza tasted like a little piece of heaven and with the blinds down and a blanket to snuggle into, I didn't even notice that it was snowing again.

It always works.  No matter what my mood is, cooking always cheers me up.  Am I the only one who finds cooking restorative, cathartic, meditative?

A Corsican in Malmö who speaks four languages

We moved house on Monday.  I started writing this on Tuesday and began to see double, so thought it best to wait.  We've moved house 3 times now in the the last year.  Boy am I tired of it.

I have learned a few lessons in the process though.  Probably top of the list for me is this one:
Never, ever attempt to cook the day or two before you depart House A & move into House B. It's not worth the stress of trying to find what you need, explain to your family why you need to hang onto that saucepan, that baking tray, those utensils for another day and then, more than likely, beating yourself up for abandoning ship and getting a pizza.

This time, I didn't even attempt to cook the night before we moved, or any of that day.  We found a gorgeous Thai takeaway down the road, which served us well for dinner and lunch leftovers on Monday.  At 7pm on Monday night, when we had been on the go for 10 hours, with another 4 ahead of us, we stopped for dinner.  Another wise move.  We drove our hire van into central Malmö and parked down the street from what has become our favourite pizza place, ModoMio on Stora Nygatan.

Didier owns and runs the place.  He bakes his own bread & makes the best pizza bases I've had in a while. He uses really high quality Italian ingredients, for his breads and pizza toppings and also creates what look like lovely fresh salads and pasta dishes all day (I've only ever seen them as they are whisked past my table to be served to someone else).

I'm a fussy pizza eater - I make my own, so rarely eat them elsewhere, but I make an exception for these pizzas.  I've learned from experience that, with pizza, less is more.  A light crispy base, with a selection of flavourful toppings that don't swamp the pizza and turn it into a puddle of juice and cheese is the way to go.  If that is done right, then there is very little left to say or do, except eat!  The pizzas at ModoMio are this, they are perfect.  

Didier is from Corsica originally, but has lived all over the place and speaks four languages - French, Italian, Swedish & English.  We learned all this on our first visit to his lovely little restaurant, when we shared with him our own woes about trying to find somewhere new to live (our landlord sold our first home before we had even moved in) and spending a small fortune on parking our car, while we waited to be registered in the Swedish system and get a resident's permit.  Didier listened, sympathised and even made suggestions on where to find a new home.  When his English failed him, Mountain Man asked him for the word in French and kept the conversation going.

Where else can you find service, good food and empathy like that?

I'm almost ashamed to admit, we tried pizza in a place called Mira Mare one evening before viewing an apartment to rent.  We were stuck for time and so, made a decision on where to eat with a hungry belly growling at us.  Needless to say, we regretted it after the first bite.  Fake extruded ham, cheese like glue, nasty old veggie toppings...yuck.  The pizzas there cost between 8-15 Swedish Krowns less than in ModoMio, but it's a false economy as they are almost impossible to eat.  We told Didier on our last visit that we believed his to be the best pizzas in Malmo.  He glowed with pride.  We then broke it to him that we had strayed from the path of good pizza and eaten elsewhere, but it hadn't measured up.  This stocky bull of a man almost shrunk at the news.  We had hurt him with our betrayal.  I think we have been forgiven though, it certainly seemed that way on Monday night.  This man takes his food seriously and if he fails, it's definitely personal.

Malmö truly is a diverse city, with nationalities from around the world providing a rich offering when it comes to food.  Now that we are in our new and hopefully permanent (for 2 years!) home I am looking forward to trying more of what this city has to offer.

...flour by any other name does taste as good!

I like to think of myself as being quite organised.  I almost always remember to bring bags with me when I go shopping and generally prepare a shopping list in advance, based on a sort of flexible menu for the week.  A bit OCD, but there you go, this is my 'thing', this endeavour of cooking and eating, so I've been improving my shopping technique for a while now.

Last week I went grocery shopping with mountain man for the first time in Malmö and somehow didn't think about the language barrier.  I imagine I expected the universal language of food to be sufficient.  Mostly it was.  I don't need to know the word for onions in order to select the ones I want (I now know it is 'lök' by the way and garlic is 'vitlök' which I must say I enjoyed learning, as the two are related botanically too).  I did need to know the word when it came to weighing them though, that was fun.  I'm sure other shoppers thought I was a bit mad as I dashed from shelf edge to scales repeating the word over & over under my breath for fear I would forget it before I had pressed the right button.  Most of the food we put in our trolley was fresh fruit or veg, so there was repeated dashing from shelf to scales, with the associated muttering.

Fresh fruit & veg selected, I headed for the baking aisle.  I'm not particularly brilliant at producing baked goods.  This is partly because I enjoy cooking savoury food more, but also because I don't want to turn into a roly-poly pudding with diabetes and heart problems (which has much more to do with sugar and refined flour than fat by the way, but that's another story)

I do like to make wholegrain breads and spelt pizza dough and for that I need certain kinds of flour.  Ahhhhhh, but I have no idea what it's called in Swedish.  The baking aisle had lots and lots of different flour and in the end, I chose purely on 'feel'.  I ended up with a wholegrain ('fullkorn') and plain ('vete') wheat flour (I think) and last night mixed them together to make pizza dough.  It seemed stickier to knead than it would at home and the plain flour looked rather yellow to me, unlike the bright white of flour at home, but maybe plain flour in Ireland is bleached?

The result was hugely successful.  Lovely crunchy & slightly chewy pizza bases and a small loaf of foccacia, drizzled in sunflower oil (higher burning temp than olive oil) rosemary & salt and baked for 20 minutes, then dipped in olive oil and guzzled down. I have no doubt it wouldn't pass the test of a fussy Italian, but we both loved it and managed to eat the entire loaf of foccacia.  The lesson in my grocery shopping adventure?  Don't be scared to make mistakes, sometimes the best discoveries happen that way.