In Sweden - Food & Drink

1. Knackebrod
2. Moose
3. Yummy
4. Fish Soup

As so often happens in my blog, I return to one of my favourite subjects...Food! The first meal I had in Sweden was a fish soup (see photo). Now, before moving to Belgium I had always regarded soup as a drink. I would no more have a bowl of soup as a meal than I would have a bowl of water or a bowl of tea. However, if I wanted a drink with my meal then I would take water. So the fact that I chose soup as my first meal in Sweden was kind of strange. We had stopped at a lovely harbour town on the west coast, called Fiskebackskil (there should be 2 little dots above the a but I don't know if I have them on my keyboard!). The first restaurant we came to offered a small selection of meals but the description of the fish soup -and yes, an English menu was available - promised the customer untold fishy riches. The description was spot on! It turned out to be one of the best meals I ate whilst in Sweden. As if that wasn't good enough, the restaurant offered a free Herring buffet to enjoy whilst waiting for your meal! Now a Herring buffet could possibly be someone's idea of Hell. Not for me! I was happy to try Herring prepared in every conceivable way. I wasn't to keen on the Herring in fruit marinade, but the rest of it was jolly nice.

The best meals we had in Sweden were prepared by our friends. You can't beat home cooking! We had a traditional meal of...Herring! Actually, this was our starter. Served with cheese and sour cream with fresh chives and pieces of crispbread. Called Knackebrod (2 little dots over the a and the o) it comes in large 12 inch discs with a hole in the middle. The hole allows you to hang the Knackebrod up in your kitchen and in the old days Swedish drivers would always keep a supply of them in the boot of their cars in case they needed a spare wheel.

The starter was accompanied by a schnapps, which compliments the fish. The main dish was of gratain (spelling could be wrong) with anchovies (pure genius! I love anchovies!), smoked sausage ( surely the king of sausages), prawns with caviar and meat balls. Oh, there were taters as well.

We also had moose. Absolutely delicious, tastes like chicken...that's a lie, it tastes like Beef, but stronger if you get my meaning. We also had a home made pie which was a little like a crumble, different taste but really, really nice! This was a secret pie, keep it to yourselves, ok? We had specific orders not to eat anything before our traditional Swedish meal!

I did say that eating out in Sweden was expensive. Actually, we had some good meals for reasonable prices. The fish soup was one of the cheapest meals we had. After a few weeks my taste buds were screaming for a curry but we had to settle for a Chinese meal instead! Again, the prices were no different than what we would pay in Belgium. So, I may have been a bit hasty in condemning Swedish prices. It's actually the beers that accompany the meal that puts the prices right up.

In Sweden, if you want a strong drink, you have to go to a special shop called a Systembolaget. The Systembolaget are state run and deliberately make your alcohol buying experience as annoying as possible. Whilst you can buy beer in the local supermarket, the highest alcohol content is 3.5%. I think this is quite a good idea. They advertised the beer in the supermarkets as barbecue beer, I tried a few and my only complaint would be that barbecuing them makes the can very hot difficult to open! Other than that, quite nice!