Gooseberry Fool with Pistachio Meringues

Browsing the shelves in the supermarket when I first moved to London for grad school, I was entranced by all the names of things unfamiliar: crumpets, double cream, golden syrup, scotch eggs, tinned rice pudding, hot cross buns...I wanted to try it all.  My gaze landed upon a little carton that looked like it might be yogurt.  It said "Gooseberry Fool."  What in the world was a fool?  What was a gooseberry?  I had to know.  Turns out a fool is bit of fluffy dessert goodness that melts in your mouth, creamy and tangy. I still wasn't sure what a gooseberry was, but I assumed it was, well, some kind of berry.

Fast forward a few years (ahem, many years) later, when we first bought our summer house here in Sweden.  Peter pounced upon a unassuming looking bush with glee!  "Great," he said, plucking some kind of fruit that looked like a strange veiny green marble. He popped it in his mouth and said, "Mmmmm...gooseberries are my favorite."  Aha!  So that is the elusive gooseberry.  Gustaf is also a big fan of the gooseberry and so all of our small crop is eaten every summer straight off the bush.

This summer, Gustaf said to me, "I found a big gooseberry bush.  It has big gooserries.  A lot of them."  I said, "show me."  We went to the bush.  This was a huge gooseberry bush.  The father of gooseberry bushes.  It was sporting the most enormous gooseberries that I had ever seen.  A few coming close to the size of a ping pong ball.  It was beautiful.  But there was a catch. Technically, it seemed to be in a field that belonged to noone.  But it was very near our neighbor's house.  And the only reason why it had been exposed is because the neighbor had mowed a path through the field from their house to the road.  Gustaf and I debated.  Can we take the berries?  We decided to keep an eye on them.  Once they were ripe, we would see if the neighbors picked them.  Last week, Gustaf reported in, "No one is picking the gooseberries."  Something had to be done.  I decided to take the initiative.  I walked up the path and went right up to my neighbor, Anna, who was standing on the porch and asked her whether she wanted the gooseberries.  She said that only her husband liked them and that we should take as much as we wanted!  Bingo!  She even lifted up the branches to help me pick. Thanks Anna!

I knew immediately what I wanted to make.  A fool.  This is a dessert with a long pedigree going back the 1500s.  Older recipes show it as a type of custard infused with fruit.  The modern recipe is a fruit puree folded into whipped cream.  Gooseberry is the classic fruit.  Its tart sweetness keeps the dessert from being cloying.

I decided to make some meringues to go with it, to add some texture and crunch.  I sprinkled the meringues with pistachio, mainly for the pretty green color which would echo the gooseberry.
This is how I did it.

For the meringues:
(Makes about 9 meringues)
4 egg whites
about a cup sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
small handful pistachios, chopped finely

Beat the eggwhites on the highest speed until they form stiff peaks that do not fall down when you lift up the beaters.  Add the vanilla and then gradually add in the sugar.  Beat for a few minutes until the grains of sugar dissolve and become almost unnoticable in the eggwhites. The egg whites will become thick and glossy.

Preheat the oven to 100C.  On a baking sheet lined with parchment paper, divide the eggwhite mixture into 9 circle shaped balls.  Use a spoon to create some nice swirls in each pile and to pat the pile into a nice rounded shape.  Sprinkle the pistachio over each meringue. Bake in the oven for an hour to an hour and a half.  If you want them very dry, when they are done, turn off the heat and let them sit in the oven until it cools.  You can do this the night before and leave them in the oven overnight.

For the gooseberry fool:
(serves 6 to 8)
about 500 grams of fresh gooseberries
6 tablespoons sugar
300 ml Greek yogurt
300 ml whipping cream
one teaspoon vanilla
2 tablespoons powdered sugar

Make a gooseberry compote by putting the fresh gooseberries (topped and tailed) into a small pot on a medium high heat.  Add the sugar and stir.  Bring to a boil and cook about 10 minutes, stirring occassionally.  The gooseberries will pop and break down, but still have some chunks.  Taste and add more sugar if the gooseberries are very sour.  Set aside and let cool.  The compote will thicken as it cools.

When you are ready to serve, whip the cream to soft peaks. Add the powdered sugar, vanilla and yogurt.  Whisk together.  Taste to check the sugar.  It should just be barely sweet.

Take a bit more than half of the gooseberry compote and stir it into the cream and yogurt mixture.  Taste and add more compote, if desired.

To serve, pile a serving of the fool into a bowl.  Drizzle with the a spoonful of plain gooseberry compote and serve with a meringue.

If you have any compote leftover, it tastes lovely drizzled on some yogurt and topped with granola for breakfast or as a topping for pancakes or waffles.

Foraging: Meadowsweet (Älggräs) Cordial

A couple years ago, I had the pleasure of going to Fäviken, the celebrated restaurant in Northern Sweden near Åre, Sweden's largest ski resort. It was like entering into a winter fairy tale, walking from the candle lit pathway dug out of the snow into the sparsely decorated barn-like interior of the restaurant, where dried mushrooms were hanging, a fire burning, and a bear coat was casually hanging in a corner.  We had brought our two boys along with us and after we had sat us down, the attentive staff informed us that they had prepared a special non-alcoholic drinking menu for the boys.  For each course of the meal, they brought the boys a different drink and made them guess what was in the drink.  Many of the flavors we could guess and were familiar tasting.  But one was competely new to us.  A honey flowery scented drink.  It was delicious but elusive.  What could it be?  They told us it was flavored with meadowsweet, an herb.  I kept this nugget of knowledge in my brain, intending to look up the herb at some point....and this summer, many years after that beautiful Fäviken dinner, the nugget resurfaced and I looked it up.

The scientific name for Meadowsweet is Filipendula ulmaria. In Swedish it is called älggräs. The plant has small white flowers which have a strong distinctive smell like honey and almonds.  The leaves are also fragrant with a different sweet scent with a more grassy note.  The entire plant, incuding the root, has medicinal uses. It is mentioned by Chaucer and was a favorite of Queen Elizabeth I to strew in her apartments to keep them smelling sweet.  In the middle ages, it was often called meadwort because its flowers were used to flavor mead and is still used today to flavor beers.

Even more interesting, I found that meadowsweet had been used to make  aspirin!  Like willow, meadowsweet contains pain relieving compounds and in the 1800s, they experimented distilling the chemicals that relieve pain from the plant.  Bayer named this new compound "aspirin" after the old scientific name of meadowsweet which was then called spiraea ulmaria. Later scientists realized that that the drugs they had made from willow were the same as those from meadowsweet, namely salicylic acid.

I found that there are many recipes for meadsweet cordial, so I had to try it.  As has become my routine, I showed the picture of the plant to my son, Gustaf.  He said, "Oh yeah, that's everywhere."  I gave him a look which he understood to mean, "Get me some now".  He ran off and returned ten minutes later with a large handful of flowers.  I smelled them and compared them to the pictures, and voila!  I had meadowsweet.  I rushed to the kitchen and boiled up some sugar water and poured it over the flowers.  I tasted.  It was delicious.  The flavor was flowery and aromatic with very strong almond notes.  It had a slight bitter after taste.  After some research, I determined that this was due to the salicylic acid in the plant and could be minimized by stripping the flowers from the stems.

Yesterday, Gustaf and I went out with a basket and picked a huge bunch of flowers and made the cordial again.  In order to save a lot of work picking out the stems, I recomend that you strip the flowers off stems as you pick.  Even with beautiful bunches of de-stemmed flowers, the cordial may have a bitter after-taste, which you may or may not like, depending on your affinity to bitter flavors. The recipes that I found all instruct you to infuse the flowers overnight.  However, I noticed that immediately after infusing the flowers, the syrup tasted flavorful without any bitterness.  Half an hour later, the flavor was is much stronger but bitter tannin notes popped up.  The resulting drink, once diluted with water, only had mild tannin afternotes.  Even so the next time, I will only let it infuse for 10 minutes before straining out the flowers.   For the final cordial, I added citric acid to give it a sour refreshing taste.  The almond flavor of the flowers alone is lovely, but a little cloying. Many recipes use lemon for this.

The leaves of the meadowsweet plant also make a nice tissane.  I stripped off a couple of leaves and put them in a mug and poured boiling water over it.  After it had infused for two to three minues, I drank it.  It has a clean grassy flavor with a nutty overtone. 

Makes about 2 liters

about 20 handfuls of  de-stemmed meadowsweet flowers
2 liters water

2 kilograms sugar

60 grams citric acid

2 pinches sodium benzoate (2 mililiters)

In a large pot, put in the sugar and the water.  Bring the water to a boil and let cook until all the sugar is fully dissolved.  

Pick over the meadowsweet flowers, making sure you have as little stems as possible.  The stems and leaves of meadowsweet contain salicylic acid, which is a main component in aspirin.  While the amounts in the cordial are not enough to be really medicinal, the stems can make the drink bitter.

Once the sugar is dissolved, take the pot off the stove and add in the meadowsweet flowers, citric acid and the sodium benzoat and stir very well.  The citric acid will give it a pleasant sourness and complexity, which I think is refreshing against the honey almond flavor of the flowers.

The sodium benzoat is a preservative.  You can leave it out, if you like, but then you should either keep the finished saft in the refrigerator or freeze it.  If you do use the sodiumbenzoat, do NOT add it to the water while you are boiling it. This can make your saft very bitter flavored.

Stir the mixture and leave it to sit for 10 to 15 minutes. Strain out the flowers by pouring the mixture through a fine sieve.  I do it first through the finest colander I have, which takes away most of the flowers but leaves some petals.  Then I use a plastic and fabric coffee filter that I bought very cheaply to strain the rest.   Decant into clean, sterilized bottles.  If you have used the preservative, the cordial can stand in the cupboard.  If not, then keep it in the refrigerator or freeze it in baggies.

Note:  While I generally have made cordial and kept it in bottles at room temperature, just lately I have had problems with molding and yeasting.  I have gotten tired of throwing away gorgeous bottles of cordial away, so I have decided to store all my cordial now in the freezer.

To serve, add cold water or fizzy water to taste.  

Foraging: Lambs Quarters (Svinmålla)

Of the many things that I love about Sweden, foraging for edibles ranks on top.  Unlike in the USA, at least where I have lived, the Swedes still maintain bonded to the land and old traditions still live.  Many Swedes have a country home, usually a simple cottage near a lake or in the forest, where they retreat for the holidays.  It is typical to see Swedes hanging out their laundry in the countryside and picking wild flowers in the fields.

Picking mushrooms and wild berries is a favorite activity, beloved by most. There is a satisfaction in the hunt.  An excitement as to what you might find, whether you will return home with your basket empty or full of edible treasure.

Another very typical country activity is making "saft" or cordial during the summer, with whatever might be available in your garden.  Most country houses have a few currant bushes and perhaps a rhubarb plant or gooseberry.  Elderflower trees grow everywhere and elderflower cordial made from the flowers is a traditional marker of summer.

This summer, I found a website called Dags att Plocka (Time to Pick) which will send you a weekly newsletter on what is ready to be foraged.  This week's newsletter discussed a common weed called Lamb's Quarter or Svinmålla, in Swedish.  The Latin name is Chenopodium album.  The newletter intrigued me.  Lamb's quarters were commonly used as a main food item in the middle ages but spinach gradually replaced it.  Lamb's quarter is very nutrious, a good source of vitamins A and C.  It said that in India and other countries, the plant, called bathua, is still cultivated for food and used in curries.  I had to try it.

My son and I went out in the fields nearest to our house to have a look.  We found a plant that looked similar, but we weren't sure because the leaves weren't exactly the same as in the photographs. I showed a picture to my husband.  He said that the last time his father had been to visit us, he had pointed out a whole field of lamb's quarter.  His father had mentioned that it was edible. Eureka! This morning he went out and picked me a basket. Tonight I cooked it for dinner.  It was delicious.  It tastes like a mild spinach.  In fact, if you ate it without knowing what it was, you would think it was spinach.

The plant is quite distinctive because of the shape of the leaves. The entire plant is edible, including the seeds, which are a relation of the very fashionable quinoa.  You can use it in the same manner as you would use spinach.  For dinner, I briefly blanched it with a bit of boiling water, and then I sauteed it with garlic and olive oil. Tommorrow, I plan to use the leftovers in a omelette.  I won't be buying spinach again here in the summer! Why would I when I can have lamb's quarter, fresh, delicious, and free?

Warm Glass Noodles, Eggplant and Soybeans

I have a crush on Yotam Ottolenghi.  I just bought his cookbook Plenty and I would like to eat every recipe. Today I tried one of his recipes for dinner: Warm glass noodles and edamame beans. Unfortunately I couldn't get some of the more exotic ingredients like tamarind paste and palm sugar, so I substitued items that I could get easily at the grocery store here in Sweden.  If you can get those items, then by all means, try the orginal sauce recipe but my sauce turned out delicious.  Among other things, I added fish sauce and a dash of HP sauce to give some depth.  Yes, HP sauce.  I know it sounds weird but it has a sweet/sour taste which I thought would mimic the missing tamarind. I also decided to throw in some eggplant to give the dish a bit more heft and because they looked so beautiful at the store.

I will be frank, this recipe, does require a lot of chopping and prep work for each ingredient.  Nothing is difficult and I actually enjoy working with these lovely ingredients.  The smell as you chop, grate, and juice are divine.  If you wanted to do this for a party, you could prep everything in advance and just fry up the noodles and warm everything through right before serving.

We ate this dish for dinner as the main and only course.  But it would be fabulous with some grilled chicken or pork, particularly if you brush some sweet soysauce on the meat before you grill. 

Serves 4

200 grams glass noodles

4 to 6 garlic cloves

1 box frozen soy beans, also called edamame (200 grams)

2 medium firm eggplants (aubergine)

4 spring onions

1 red chili (optional, chopped finely)

one bunch fresh corriander (about 3 tablespoons chopped)

one bunch fresh mint (about 3 tablespoons chopped)

one bunch fresh basil (about 3 tablespoons chopped)

3 tablespoons sesame seeds

olive oil

Sauce

1 to 2 tablespoons grated fresh ginger

juice of 4 limes

3 tablespoons olive oil

1 tablespoon soy sauce

1 tablespoon fish sauce

1 tablespoon HP sauce

2 to 3 tablespoons brown sugar

1 teaspoon fine salt

First, make the sauce.  Grate the ginger on the finest setting on your grater.  It will shred and form a pulp.  Juice the limes.  Mix the ginger, lime and all the other ingredients in a small bowl.  Stir and taste.  Adjust the sweetness to your liking.  You can add a bit more ginger or lime juice if you like.

Prepare the soybeans according to the instructions on the box, i.e. pour boiling water on the soybeans and a bit of salt in a small pot and bring the water back to boil on the stovetop.  Let the soybeans cook for 2 minutes then strain.  Set the soybeans aside.

Toast the sesame seeds by putting a pan onto the highest heat.  Pour the seeds in the pan and stir now and then, watching the whole time.  After a bit, you will see the oil coming out of the seeds.  When this starts to happen, stir often and shake the pan to move around the seeds.  Toast the seeds until they become golden.  Be careful as they easily burn.  Pour the seeds into a bowl and set aside.

Prepare the glass noodles according to the instructions on the packet, i.e. put the noodles into a bowl.  Pour boiling water over the noodles.  Put a lid on the bowl.  Let sit for 2 to 5 minutes (depending on what it says on the packet), then drain in a colander. Set noodles aside.  Don't worry that the noodles clump together. They will separate later in the sauce.

Chop all the herbs, chili, and the spring onions finely.  Set aside.  

Chop the aubergine into nice bite sized pieces.  In a frying pan on medium high heat, pour in a generous splash of olive oil.  When hot, pour in the aubergine, as many as will fit in one layer on the bottom of the pan.  Sprinkle with a bit of salt and toss to cover each piece in oil.  Fry until golden brown and tender, tossing frequently. Fry the remaining egg plant in batches in the same manner.  Set aside.

Take each garlic clove and semi-gently smash it with a knife.  Peel off the skin.  

Line up all your ingredients next to the stove and put out a large bowl or platter to hold the final dish.  

Put two tablespoons olive oil in a medium hot pan.  Throw in the garlic.  Fry the garlic, turning frequently until it is nice and golden. Do not let the garlic burn or it will become bitter. Throw the noodles over the oil and then pour in the sauce.  Toss the noodles with tongs until the sauce fully coats all the noodles.  Throw on the soybeans and eggplant and toss until everything is heated through.

Pour the noodles onto your serving dish.  Sprinkle with herbs, spring onion, and sesame seeds.  Toss again with the tongs and serve warm.  Leftovers would probably taste great cold but I have never had any...