Sunday, July 30, 2006

Treasures

To continue the random tales of our holiday I’d like to introduce you to my treasures! Whenever I look at my kitchencounter at this moment I feel a bit like Gollum from Lord of the Rings: I guard my finds protectively and for the moment I am not ready yet to part with them. At the mere suggestion of my family to open a pot of jam I lisp: precious!
Well, what did I take home with me?

From left to right you'll see: mustard-dill sauce for gravad lax, rönnbärs gelé (rowanberry jelly = Vogelbeerengelee = Lijsterbes gelei), liquid pectin (not readily available in Holland), and Hjortron sylt (cloudberry jam = gele (moeras-) framboos). The sausagelike roll in the back contains lingonberry sylt (= cowberry jam= preiselbeeren = vossenbessen).
Cookiecutters in moose and Dalarna horse shape.


And that's not all folks! Here you are looking at various flours (Graham flour is not available in Holland), herbs and syrups for breadmaking (I suspect that they are "plain" malted treacle and sugarsyrups), a knife to cut in tefal-pans and a "smörkniv"! (I love the Swedish language), it is a small serrated knife with a large rounded blade so you can cut with one side and smear with the other... Clever!
And....a square springform pan! Yay! Happy! Just found it on the shelves of a grocerystore. For you out there on the other side of the water... Our Dutch assortment is not as grand as yours, I can only dream of the various shapes and gadgets the magic Internet shows me.
And.. in an outlet store we discovered this beautiful dark blue ovendish from Emile Henry for only E25,-! ::Sigh:: outlet stores are another phenomena that is only coming into view here in Holland.


Coming soon: the story of our car breaking down, the candy village, moose, shopping and cooking in Sweden, hikes and campfires and more…



P.S.: I have to apoligize for the lay-out of my blogposts. Blogger is still refusing to upload any pictures so I have to use Picasa and I haven't figured out how to vary with sizes and spacing. Sorry!

4 comments:

  1. So, Gollum, I wouldn't want to part with those pots of precious too soon. Anticipation is terrific.
    Cloudberry jam - that sounds exotic - one I have not heard of, I'll try to look for that one. Love Lingonberry, hadn't seen it in a sausage.
    No whole wheat flour in Holland, that I would never have thought.
    You are going to have such great fun with both those pans. The Emile Henry roaster will be terrific!
    Your coming soon, you are such a great tease.

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  2. Oops, the lingonberry jam was in a sausagelike plastic roll. They have a lot of stuff in these plastic rolls, don't know why...
    And we do have various kinds of whole wheat flours here but I was wondering what the Graham flour they talk about in my bread bakingbooks would be like and now I can try.
    Greetz Gollum

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  3. Welcome back home ! I will be glad to come back for more lovely stories about your trip ! And like Tanna said keep your treasures unopened for a while - the more memories they will bring along !

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  4. Great goodies. I have not seen a square springform pan before-very, very cool. What will you make? I love to shop in grocery stores, hardware stores and drugstores (chemists) when traveling.

    Despite the fact that everything is much more homogeneous than it used to be, you see little differences in these shops, in an interesting way. Besides, they are great places to shop for presents to bring home for people.

    I was just talking to my elderly mother about how much travel has changed. When I was a little girl and went to England to visit family, it was so much more, well, different than it is now. If someone had set me down on a London street then, I would have known right away that I was not in the US. It even smelled different-the people were dressed differently-the shops were very different.

    Now, unless you were around certain kinds of buildings, or listened to the accents, you couldn't tell. All the starbucks, and so on. And, of course, in any major Western city, these days, half the people are from somewhere else!

    Strange.

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