Archive
Kitchen Shortcut to Amazing Toast – with Instructional Video!
Where I lived in Sweden, we didn’t own a toaster. I love toast with my eggs in the morning, so I figured out another way to make toast that was fast and easy.
With the holiday this week, I’d love for people to make this for their folks and tell me whether they like it – or don’t like it, however unlikely the possibility.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Why did I make this video? I’m probably not the first person to think of buttering the bread before toasting it… My point is to demonstrate that preparing tasty food from basic ingredients can be painless!
(Many thanks to D. McGovern for help with the “script” and filming it.)
Things I learned in Sweden
This is a list, in no particular order… of some things I learned and skills I cultivated during my 14 months living and working in Sweden.
1) Playing acoustic guitar. A winter with 4 hours of daylight means you need to have a good indoor hobby. Glad I picked up the guitar in October last year. Thanks for the tips, Josef and Gunnar. And Raili, thanks for letting my guitar accompany your ukelele at xmas.
2) Cooking without recipes. Having a properly stocked kitchen means you can experiment and not fear mistakes. Also, doing more chemistry at my job somehow led me to think about various cooking techniques in terms of heat and water distribution, for example, and a better understanding of what exactly was happening inside the pot or pan. And, thanks, Farid, for keeping such a lagom kitchen.
3) The Swedish language. My first month in Uppsala, my pronunciation was so bad, I would ask for something in Swedish at the store, to have the clerk reply to me in English. Thanks, Daniel, for all the useful social phrases; Henrik, for all the stuff I’ve asked for help with translating at work and over gchat (cumin, coriander, what?); and, the municipal gov’t, for covering the cost of the Sfi language course. What a difference it makes when a trained teacher explains the nuances of pronunciation to you. I felt I turned a corner in the winter, when I called a restaurant and booked a table, entirely in Swedish. And then again this summer, in Copenhagen, having an extensive conversation with a Swedish-speaking Dane in a noisy bar. So I try to keep up with the language. And thus, thanks go to each one of you who continues to tolerate my suboptimal listening comprehension during our Skype calls. Vad sa du? Igen?
… It’s getting late, so I will write the rest of my list in a second post, sometime soon, while the thoughts are still fresh and interesting!
[Photograph: I took it in Smögen, on the west coast of Sweden, when I was there for a workshop last summer]
