Cheryl Marie Cordeiro

French Onion Soup à la Provençal
Photo © Jan-Erik Nilsson for CMC 2009

One usually associates the summer heat with a cool ice-cream. But today, the heat utdoors triggered a nostalgia of growing up in the tropics and of having hot soup on a hot day. So I thought I’d look around for something nice and warm for lunch, something that would go nicely with a glass of red.

My choice fell on a traditional onion soup à la Provençal. This soup is different from the clear broths I grew up with, but it’s a fairly well-known dish in the West. It exists in numerous variations and hopefully nobody will mind if I add our version to what is already available on the internet. You’re most welcome to enjoy the recipe or take it as inspiration.

Ingredients:

4-5 Onions
1 – 1,5 liter of calf broth. Meat cubes might do instead.
1-2 cloves of garlic
10 All spices seeds
Bay leaves
Thyme
Basil
Sherry
Butter
Olive oil

Onions in warm water

When handling onions, my favourite is to soak them in hot water, which also makes them easy to peel.

Quarter the onions and stir fry them until golden brown.

At the end of the stirring I add the spices; some All Spice seeds, Bay leaves, a few cloves of garlic and a few branches of fresh thyme (nice, but you will need to pick them out later). Then I add the calf broth and a dash of sherry. Leave on medium heat until you feel it is done. 30 minutes should do but this soup actually gets better the longer it cooks. Tomorrow it will be even better.

Fresh from a strawberry farm in Sweden.Photo © Cheryl Marie Cordeiro-Nilsson and Jan-Erik Nilsson for CMC 2009

I’ve always known strawberries to come bottled in sweet jams. In fact, ‘strawberry’ as a flavour was so common when I was growing up in Singapore, where you have them in almost everything from milk to kiddy toothpaste, that I thought strawberry was common commodity even without actually having tasted the real fruit.

My very first encounter with a strawberry farm was in Genting Highlands, Malaysia when I was about eight years old. Genting Highlands is about an hour’s drive from Kuala Lumpur and I found it a scenic region with cooler temperatures than the tropical heat of the lowlands. I remember Genting Highlands because every morning, the grounds of the hotel where we stayed would be covered in thick condensation, a cool fog that made you feel as if you were walking in clouds.

I liked strawberry jam but the experience of visiting a strawberry farm in Genting Highlands, changed my understanding of strawberries completely! I remember my parents buying farm made strawberry jam from the farm we visited, and after one taste of what I thought was the most decadent strawberry jam, I never liked the highly processed versions found on the sheleves at the Singapore grocery stores.

The strawberries, just before they disappeared!

The digression on Genting Highlands strawberries is just because Midsummer weekend is around the corner here in Sweden and we’ve tried our best, in the past few days, to seek out freshly picked Swedish grown strawberries. And today, we found some!

These strawberries are smaller and a deeper red than the hydroponically grown strawberries that are also found at the local grocers. So for those in Sweden, home-grown Swedish strawberries are in season right now and it’s a recommended buy!

A light stew in sugar and they make a perfect topping to ice-cream or have them fresh atop some traditional strawberry fruit cake with cream!

Standing at the set tables to the dinner party at Matsmak; I wore a pink pleated Tadashi gown with vintage gold tone jewellery.
Photo © J E Nilsson, David Neikter Nilsson for CMC 2009

The public defense of my doctoral thesis was followed by a dinner celebration held at Matsmak with Mikael Sande as Chef de Cuisine.

The evening event was surreal in the sense that Mikael’s restaurant had just moved to its new location at Drakegatan 1 in Gothenburg, and we were able to book the entire restaurant on a Saturday evening for ourselves. The restaurant, being located in a building with mainly offices, also meant that our guests had the entire building to themselves to enjoy that evening.

We had our seating outside of the restaurant, in the inner courtyard of the building that had white marble floors and a skylight roof that allowed the evening Scandinavian summer sun to stream through to the tables, where the light reflected pretty prisms off the rims of the wine glasses. Tall potted palm trees turned the inner courtyard into a cozy garden, so that you felt as if you were dining outdoors on a languid summer’s evening.

My husband, Jan-Erik Nilsson, during the cocktail session before dinner.

We had a cocktail mingle session with sparkling white wine before the actual dinner. This gave our guests time to acquaint themselves with each other if they had not already done so earlier on during the day. I was most happy to see a few friends and colleagues who had already graduated from the university, present at this dinner. It was like a reunion of sorts where you could catch up with what was going on in their lives.

Getting seated and making new acquaintances.

The theme of the dinner continued in its French-Italian theme from the lunch buffé, though in this event, it was Mikael Sande who was in charge. Menus were printed for each guest with their names, according to their mother tongue and placed at their respective seating places.
Continue reading “Dinner party at Matsmak: the PhD disputationsfest” →

To fry a few pieces of Couer de Filet of Beef to perfection,
sprinkle with sea salt, let the beef rest in room temperature for about 40 minutes. Fry one side until brown in a grill pan, flip once and fry until done. Let the beef rest for 5-10 minutes before serving.
Photo © J E Nilsson for CMC

There are a million good reasons to go out and buy a new pot or pan to the kitchen if you really try to come up with some. But what it eventually boils down to (excuse the pun) is that it makes cooking more fun. Sometimes, having a new utensil might even improve the results of your efforts.

On my part, I often find myself buying something that looks nice, figuring out later what to use it for. Eventually I will show you a very nice Italian milk-foamer and yes, a perfectly useless high-tech electric juicer that currently eats up half a cabinet of shelf space and we can’t throw it away because it was too expensive to buy in the first place. And is there anyone who actually even knows what a raquelette is?

However, our latest toy was not improvised but something that we decided to make do with, after we decided that a separate grill section to the stove would not be practical after all. After some shopping around we simply chose the heaviest cast iron grill pan we could find, which turned out to be an 11″ AGA with black enamel coating inside and out. The very look of the pan sitting snug in the shop was enough to get us all excited about it, conjuring up dishes to cook in it!

Our new toy, 2.9 kgs worth of cast iron AGA grill pan makes frying in barbeque style a breeze. The heat source does not matter as long as it can make the grill pan sizzling hot.

Continue reading “My new cooking buddy, the Grill Pan” →

A summery dessert.
Photo © J E Nilsson for CMC, 2009

One scoop of vanilla ice-cream. On the side, one small apple sliced, diced and fried in butter, sugar, cinnamon and some breadcrumbs. Decorate with a quick drizzle of dark syrup and top off with a small leaf of mint.

By the end of last autumn, we received a large number of apples from a neighbour who had a spacious garden filled with old apple trees. Apple will store and keep over the winter if kept reasonably cold and dry. Now however, we were down to our last batch and looking at our very last three apples and we decided to celebrate them by transforming them into this wonderfully sweet and temperature cooling dessert. And besides, if looking for something Italian inspired, what could be more Italian than gelato?