Smoking salmon in the back yard

My friend since forever had recently bought a smoking machine, as in a machine to smoke whatever food you think is best served smoked. We decided to go for something fairly standard, and smoked some salmon. The result was fantastic.

The process was quite simple. You put the fish on something flat and add salt (or whatever flavoring you prefer). You also put some wood chips on a plate and shove these into the tube shaped smoker.

Then you turn it on and let it be hot for 30 minutes or so. Then you turn it off and leave it for another 20 minutes. Then the food is done.

While waiting, we also put some potatoes in the oven and fried some mushrooms that my parents had picked in the forest.

The resulting smoked salmon was great. The rest of the food was good too, of course.

Mushrooms and bread

My parents pick a lot of mushrooms. Many of these are types of mushrooms that you cannot find in Japan. They serve them in many different ways, but one breakfast/lunch we had was fried bread with stewed mushrooms, which was very good.

Christmas presents from Sweden

I got home and found a not in my mailbox saying that someone had tried to deliver a parcel larger than my mailbox (which is tiny) and had put it in one of the larger mailboxes that are intended for situations just like this. So I found a large parcel full of Christmas presents from my parents.

I got dried mushrooms, chocolate, licorice, a kitchen towel with descriptions of edible parts of animals, a cheese slicer, and more chocolate. The cheese slicer is nice to have, since things like this are not sold in Japan. On the other hand, cheese is only sold in super small quantities, so you cannot really find any cheese to use it on either.

I also received something labeled "reindeer poo". I tried to eat some of it (who wouldn't?) and it turned out to be chocolate.

Mushroom excursion

This year was a very good year for picking mushrooms, my parents tell me. They also have mushrooms in every room of the house, on some drying nets. They have picked too much to eat and fit into the freezer, so they are drying the rest.

We borrowed my brother's dog one day and went out to look for more mushrooms. We found some, but not as much as when it is the peak season (now it is a little late).

Sweden has very little to offer when it comes to fruits (you can get apples, pears, and prunes), since it is a bit cold and dark. There are lots and lots of berries in the forests in the summers, though. There were still a few blueberries and lingonberries hanging around, but the season is long over.

This one is, as you might guess, poisonous.

Swedish shrooms

My parents pick a lot of mushrooms. They served me food with mushrooms, and they also had large parts of the house converted to mushroom drying stations.

Hunting for mushrooms

Since the summer in Sweden had been something like the rainiest summer in recorded history, there were good chances of finding nice mushrooms in the forests when we were in Sweden. Since picking mushrooms and berries is a popular and common Swedish summer activity, we took some time during the afternoon to go looking for some, but we found a group of men coming out of the forest saying: "Ah, by now there are only tiny ones left"... They had been picking since the morning so there was not so much left for us withing reasonable walking distances.

Our very meager findings.

Since the summer had also seen one of the coldest Junes ever, there were not so much in the ways of berries either. It had been too cold even for the hardy Swedish berries. Otherwise, Swedish forests are full of berries.

We did get a lot of mosquito bites, though. Lots of rain meant lots of places for mosquitoes to lay eggs, so there were even more of them than normally.