I love Fridays

The summer is officially over. I LOVE IT! I hate summer, and even more than that, I hate spring! But that's because I'm allergic. As I look out the bedroom window (live on the 6th floor of an apartment building), the top of the elm tree (at least, i think it's an elm tree) is bright red. It's just the top though, the rest is green. Most of the rest of the trees are still green, though, but that elm(?) is the tallest tree here. I was out with my dog earlier this evening, it had just rained and the air was all crisp and clear and there were the smell of garden fruits..... Yeah, this is my time. Although, early autumn often means crap winter..... I hope not, I love winter. 3 dm of snow and -15 degrees, and I'm home.

Coming inside again after our walk, i had a great urge for some hot chocolate and a piece of cake or a cinnamon bun or something. Buuut, I had none of those....

Seeing as it being Friday, I thought I'd talk a little about food. Everybody eats, right? Swedes like to make a thing out of food, and we seem to love it. Especially coffee and breads and buns and treats, we even made it a whole movement. Or close to. The concept of "fika" intrigues me just as much as it intrigues many foreigners I've met. Maybe because I don't drink coffee. It goes like this: Your busy working and minding your own business, and suddenly, a co-worker shows up by the door or your cubicle or whatever system you have to get some kind of privacy for your phone calls..... whatever, you know what i mean.... S/He asks if you're not going to come and have some fika. This usually happens around 10 in the morning, and again at about 2 in the afternoon. And it doesn't matter how many times you say no, they keep asking til you say yes or quit because you can't stand the question anymore. To try to understand just how important this is, a cup of coffee at least, but probably also a sweet bun or piece of cake or shortbread, here are some statistics:

Swedes ate 78,1 kg of breads, buns, shortbreads, cakes, pizza bread and pirogi per capita (person) 2010. They also drank 161 liters of Coffee. That is 8,6 kg of coffee beans. To put this in perspective, Italians had 5,9 kg of coffee beans per capita, US had 4,3 kg and Japan 3,3 kg. So, yeah, that's a LOT of coffee.

Fridays also means another phenomenon I have never heard of by any friends world-wide, Fredagsmys. Well, it does exist out there, I guess, keeping your family home, eating good food (here, it seems to be tacos, always), seeing a crap movie you don't really want to see, just to be able to have Fredagsmys. For me, Fridays is good food, good desserts and good movies or TV-series. On DVD, of course, who has the patience to wait for a whole week for the next episode.

To top off the Swedish extravaganza, Swedish kids gets Lördagsgodis, or Saturday sweets. Unless their parents are scared of sugar of course. I must say, my parents weren't. Therefore, I will share with you my family's Saturday treat: Chokladbollar!

Ok, so Chocolate Balls sounds a little..... try not to go there..... but these sweet chocolate-y treats are great. You need no tools other then measuring cups and your own hands. But you could put it in a food processor or use a mixer. And it's kid-friendly, make them roll the balls....

Ingredients:
3 dl (ca 1,2 cups) oatmeal
1 dl (little less than 0,5 cup) sugar
2 Tbs cacao powder, unsweetened
1 tbs vanilla sugar (i don't know if this even exist outside Sweden, otherwise, just a little vanilla extract or      pure vanilla powder will do the trick)
100 g soft butter (please don't use margarine unless you have too.)
1 Tbs water or milk or orange juice or coffee (or rum for an adult version)

Stir the dry ingredients in a bowl. Add the butter and water and stir into a dough, should feel just about as a cookie dough. this should take only 1 or 2 minutes. Put the bowl  in the fridge for 30 minutes or as long as you need to do something else in between. When you are ready, take the dough out of the fridge and call the kids. Make ready a plate or platter to put the balls on, and ask the kids if they want coconut shavings or sprinkles on their balls. Or maybe both. Then get ready to get messy. a way to keep the mess a liiiittle less messy is to rinse your hands in cold water every now and then, and it gets easier to roll the balls. Roll balls from the dough, take about 1 teaspoon to 1 tablespoon of dough, or more, depending on how big you want them. Then roll the balls in sprinkles or what you will, put them on your platter and put them in the fridge. They should keep for about a week, but they'll probably be gone long before that. They can be put in the freezer as well. The recipe make about 25.


So, that was my childhood Saturday treat. Enjoy.


(Statistics for Sweden taken from Swedish Jordbruksverket, for other countries World Resource Institute.)