kareina

Yesterday was the julfest for the local folk music and folk dance group, and it was much fun. They had an afternoon of crafts projects, followed by the party in the evening. They had supplies and instructions for a variety of projects, or people were welcome to bring whatever project they wanted to work on. That was scheduled for 12:30-16:30, and the party was to start at 17:00. I originally thought to spend the whole day, but during the morning I felt more like curling up on the couch re-reading The Mystic Marriage, and didn't actually get out there till nearly 15:00.

When I arrived there was a small group of people happily working on projects, and another small group in the kitchen cooking for the party. I joined the crafts people, and made progress on finishing the new, improved pocket on my winter coat till it was time to clean up and set up the tables for the party. We managed to get the last of the tables up and decorated (when did they start making such cute strings of tiny battery-operated Christmas lights? they looked great twined with strings of tinsel on the tables) about the time the musicians started getting out their instruments, and I happily spent the rest of the time till it was time to sit and eat dancing to the Christmas music they were playing (many of which are Swedish song only, others exist in Swedish translation but were originally in other languages). There wasn't much room between the musicians and the tables, but since I was the only one dancing just then, it wasn't a problem.

One of my friends commented that I am always dancing, and I pointed out that I was planning to eat lots of risgrynsgröt, so it was important to dance as much as possible. There were 26 of us for the party itself, so we had four tables with three seats on each side, and at two tables there was an extra chair at the end. I took one of the extra chairs, and the only other child (a 12 year old) took the other.

The meal was traditional, but simple--thinly sliced ham and other toppings for open faced sandwichs plus the above mentioned rice porridge. I never really liked ham back when I was eating meat, and the other sandwich toppings weren't to my taste either, but that didn't worry me, as I love rice porridge. I stopped at seconds. However, when the evening was over I noticed that there was a large pot of porridge left over, so I borrowed a large soup bowl from the hall and took home some porridge. Then I went past a grocery store and bought a small thing of cream, and this morning I whipped the cream and blended it with the porridge to make risalamalta, or as I like to call it, the food of the gods. (This is good, as this means that I have only a relatively small amount of it in the house. If I had decided to make some myself, I would have made a large batch of porridge, and thus would have made a large batch of risalamalta, and I don't need to be eating lots of it, and with no one in the house to help me with it...

On every table when we sat down there were several copies of a booklet of Christmas songs (all in Swedish, but some are translations of ones that were first written in English). We sang several before eating a few more after eating the first bit, but before going back for seconds, sang even more after eating seconds and before the games begun, and yet more between the rounds of the games.

After everyone had had a chance to finish eating they turned on the overhead lights again, and divided us up into teams of three (we had no choice as to who would be in our team). Then we played games in rounds--the first round they gave us a piece of paper and asked up to provide the names of 21 different birds based on the word-play clues they provided. My team was the only team of four, the above mentioned 12 year old, his mom, and one of the musicians. Luckily both the mom and the musician was good at bird names, as neither the 12 year old or I were able to help at all with that one.

The next round the paper had a list of a bunch of English phrases, and a bunch of Korean phrases, and we were to match them up. The Korean phrases were all things that if read out loud would sound like an English phrase, so it was pretty easy to match them up with the actual English phrase with a similar meaning. The 12 year old wandered off for this one, too, but the other three of us kept grabbing the pencil and writing down answers--we were all three quite fast at it, and we all were looking at different phrases, so we were the first group done with that part, but I did go through and check all of our work to be certain we got them all before turning it in.

The final round was a musical crossword. They provided a blank crossword puzzle, then they would ask out loud a question and then sing a tune, and we needed to write down the answer from the song, which meant needing to be able to recognise the song, and know the lyrics well enough to answer the question. Needless to say, I wasn't able to help with that one, either. My teammates were able to fill in answers for most of them though, and every group in the room filled in enough of the answers that we were all able to shout in unison when asked that the phrase in the pink highlighted row (formed by alignment of the other words, which were all on a Christmas theme) was gott nytt år

After the games and coffee and desert (which was served between rounds) we packed up the tables, turned off the overhead lights again, and the musicians started playing Swedish folk music. I danced, of course, every dance. They stopped playing a bit after 21:00 and we packed up and went home. I was ok with that, as it gave me a chance to swing by the closest store to the house before they closed at 22:00 to get that cream I mentioned above.

All in all a lovely evening. I remember a time when my only social outlet was the SCA (which is still my primary social outlet), but one of the best things about living in Luleå is that there are other groups which fill a similar niche as the SCA in my life--providing me an opportunity to do crafts, sing, and dance, with good friends (we even wear costumes, but not yesterday).

As a bonus, here is an entry for my long-neglected "Learn Swedish One Song at a Time" series. One of the songs we sang last night was:

Jag såg mamma kyssa tomten


Jag såg mamma kyssa tomten ja
Tänk om våran pappa kommit då

Jag hade gömt mig i en vrå, för att titta lite på
Ett konstigt stort paket som någon av oss skulle få
Och då fick tomten mammas klapp och kyss,
sedan sa hon "Å vad du är bra
nej ingen ser att det är du",
men jag såg att det var
tomten mamma kysste igår kväll

Which literally translates to:

I saw mommy kiss Santa, yes
Think if our daddy had come then

I had hidden myself in a corner, to look a little at
a strange large packet which one of us would get
and then Santa received mommy's touch and kiss,
after which she said "Oh you are good
no, no one can see that it is you"
but I saw that it was
Santa that mommy kissed yesterday evening

This afternoon David, Caroline, and I went down to visit his parents. It was, as always a delight to see them and their beautiful home. I love their old fashioned farm house in the countryside, with plenty of out buildings.

Dinner was good, of course, but I also noticed the spoons set on the table above the plates, and figured that meant desert would follow. I also had noticed the empty cream container on the counter, which is a good sign. As we ate dinner I wondered if desert could possibly be risalamalta, but tried not to get my hopes up, since it isn't Christmas yet.

After dinner dishes were cleared away his mother brought out a jar of wild raspberries that had been thawed, cooked a bit and cooled, and a jar of blackcurrant jam, both of which got me hopeful.

David's parents know how much I love risalamalta, so when his mother then brought out the risalamalta she asked me Vad är det här? (What is this?), to which I replied "The food of the gods"... and it truly is.

This morning when I stepped on the scale I noticed that I am, once again at the high end of my normal range and thought that perhaps I have been eating a bit much recently (my food log agrees), and perhaps I should cut back a little. However, when I saw desert, I thought of that idea and thought "tomorrow", and happily had a generous first serving and a small bit of seconds. Yum!

When last I left off I was enjoying Julafton Christmas Eve at the home of lord_kjar's parents. While many people I know tend to overeat at big holiday meals, I don't tend to have that problem with the traditional Swedish Christmas dinner, since it involves several varieties of fish (which I don't care for), ham (which I also don't care for), meatballs (which I used to enjoy, but since I largely quit eating meat when I figured out what was causing my digestive issues, I tend to skip these, too), and pickled things (the absolute top of the list of things I don't eat, and would prefer to never even smell!). This left a small assortment of things on the table that I do eat: plain boiled potatoes, steamed broccoli (from frozen), a fluffy baked egg/cheese souffle thing, a green salad, hard boiled egg (I skipped the caviar topping that is traditional for these), cheese (the kind made from cream, which is popular here for Christmas), and thinbread (the stuff that is kind of cracker like, but less than 1 mm thick).

However, I was totally content to eat lightly for dinner (I took only a bit of each, and didn't go for seconds. Why? Because my favourite Swedish food, ever, is risalamalta, and I knew that was coming for desert. Those of you who read my last year's holiday post in praise of this dish can just skip to the next paragraph. For those of you who haven't yet tried this little bit of heaven in a bowl, you can make your own by slow-cooking rice in way more milk than you think it should be able to absorb to make a rich yummy rice pudding. Don't add any sugar, it doesn't need it. They eat this pudding for breakfast on the morning of Julafton --they add sugar and cinnamon in the bowl, but I eat it just as it comes out of the pot. Then set the rice pudding aside to cool for some hours (in the fridge once it is cool enough to put there, or outside if you are blessed with nice cold weather). When it is nearly time for desert whip lots of cream and blend it with the cooled rice pudding. The result is wonderfully fluffy and rich. They serve it with berries. This year we had a choice between raspberry, strawberry, and hjortron (cloudberry) (all of which had been mashed while fresh and then frozen and thawed for the occasion). I, of course, tried them all, in turn, since I ate three servings in quick succession, and then, after a pause, had even more. (But not as much as lord_kjar's oldest brother did--he took as many servings as I, but each was larger than I took.)

The next morning, when I came in for breakfast, lord_kjar's mother showed me where the left over risalamalta is, so, instead of having my normal muesli for breakfast I took a small bowl of risalamalta (about half of what was left) with a sprinkle of muesli for crunch, plus some of those crushed raspberries. Yum! Then I went out and enjoyed a 5 km walk on the ice, because if one is going to start one's day with risalamalta, one should also take a walk! However, when I returned from my walk hungry for second breakfast I noticed that no one had eaten the other half of the left over risalamalta, so I ate that, too. Yum. Didn't feel guilty about it either.

Christmas Day itself lord_kjar's youngest brother, his wife and their son, left fairly early to go spend the rest of the day with her family, which meant that the rest of us all fit around one table for dinner. Dinner that day included oxfilé, which smelled really, really good, so I asked what it was, and he translated that word as "like cow, but a boy", and then specified that the meat came from an animal raised by friends of the family, not from a grocery store. Since I am fairly certain that whatever it is about meat that bothers my digestion is related to some of the profit-motivated choices the meat industry makes, I felt safe to take a small bit of the meat, which tasted as yummy as it smelled. There was also a yummy fluffy baked dish made of a variety of mashed root vegetables, and yet more broccoli (it is lord_kjar's favourite veg, and since his mother knows I am 99% vegetarian she frequently serves it when we are there). I am not certain what else there was at that meal, since that was all I took.

I am able to follow so much more Swedish this year than last year (which was more than the year before)--I can converse with his parents now. However, I still wasn't able to follow much of the conversation between the brothers--they spent much of the weekend talking about the finer points of setting up a generator system so that we wouldn't be bothered by power outages if they happen. I am not certain I would have followed those details in English, either. Luckily, I had my sewing project, a book, and a hammer dulcimer, to keep me amused when the conversation got technical.

We drove home late in the morning on the 26th, and soon after we started the drive we got a call from a friend in Luleå, who was having car troubles--temps were about -20 C, and he had some water somewhere in his system that had frozen, so he couldn't drive, and he was wondering if we could tow his car home. We said yes, but warned him we were about an hour away, and he was good with waiting. Therefore we stopped by the big box store area where his car was and towed it back to his place (which isn't far from there), and then continued on home. I don't think the diversion added more than 20 or 30 minutes to the trip.

This got us home on time to put everything away, relax over a bowl of left over soup, and whip up a batch of blueberry cake from my cousin Arja's recipe( blueberry cake from my cousin Arja's recipe ) I have also made this cake with other berries, but I keep going back to the blueberry version (which is how she introduced it to me), because it is so good.

This batch was no exception. lord_kjar's oldest brother and his wife arrived at our place (after doing a bit of shopping in town (the kids were off at an adventure swimming place with the grandparents) just as the cake was going into the oven, and it was done about the time we finished the inside tour and were ready to do the outside tour. Then we settled down to coffee (them) and herbal tea (us) and cake. lord_kjar served the first round of cake: two slices (each about 4 or 5 cm square) to each of us. Then he got us seconds--the same two slices for the other three, and only one slice for me. I didn't take thirds, but the boys got two more slices each, and she took only one. Yes, the boys took fourths, too. I can't remember if they took fifths after a pause, or if the fourths occurred after said pause. I had expected that we would be able to freeze half the cake (since we normally do when I bake one), but there was less than 1/4 of the cake left by the time they finally gave up. If one more of the brothers had been there it would have totally vanished. However, I can't really mind when my baking is met with such enthusiastic response. Most of the time when I bake I just toss stuff in a bowl and it comes out fine. This recipe I actually follow (other than usually substituting yogurt or filmjölk for the sour cream, since we tend to have one of those in the house, and we don't tend to buy sour cream). Ok, this time I used less sugar, since we were nearly out and had only about 3.5 dl left.