St Lucia’s Day

In Sweden, it is easy to think that St. Lucia Day is only about the saffron-infused, raisin-topped, reverse-S shaped buns (Lussekatter) which appear on every home and meeting table in the month of December:

 

 

(photos by Ryo Yonami)

But in Fittja, the tradition of St. Lucia’s day at school is very important to many of our young friends, even if they themselves are not Catholic or born in Sweden. Our friends Kubra and Cevda invited us for 7am at their school, though we didn’t see them till later that day. Even the school told us to come back at 8; we were welcomed into the elementary school with a stern look and ‘shoe protection’:

After appropriately outfitting our shoes we were seated in the school’s auditorium with its beautiful tapestry:

And then the saints walked in…

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There were so many kinds of saints on the stage, from female St Nicholas to every kind of St Lucia imaginable, except for Kubra and Cevda. Still it was fun to see the elementary school sing, and to hear the female drum corps lead them off the stage:

We got to cook with Kubra and Cevda later on, and to top off the holiday, Phil Hession gave an artist talk and performance event at the Fittja youth center which turned into an impromptu open mic and dance party.

The night ended at the Pelikan with traditional Swedish Christmas fare and a long slow farewell to Phil and his amazing project.

(the elk)

What a treat. Thank you everyone – Cevda, Kubra, Phil, and everyone at Botkyrka Konsthall – for a really warm St. Lucia’s Day.

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To make St. Lucia rolls in the style of Malin, an artist and farmer who is part of Kultivator, here is the recipe:

 6.5 cups of flour; 1 cake or 4.5 tsp of active dry yeast; 1 tsp salt; 1 cup fresh milk; 3/4 cup sugar; 1 cup melted butter; 1 tsp saffron threads pounded to a powder and mixed with 2 Tbs vodka; 2 eggs beaten together plus one egg white for glazing; raisins.

Melt 1 cup butter and add 1 cup milk with 3/4 cup sugar and 1 tsp salt. Stir to combine and heat through.
Cool mixture to skin temperature in a large mixing bowl and break up or stir in yeast. After 5-10 minutes add 6.5 cups of flour gradually, in alternation with 2 beaten eggs and the saffron dissolved in vodka. Once mixture comes together in a soft dough, stir or knead well to combine and develop the dough. Allow to rise for 1-1.5 hours, then deflate and knead several times on a floured surface. The dough should be smooth, soft, and elastic. Divide dough into small handsful and roll to make snakes; then curl top end toward left and bottom end toward right to form a backward S. Decorate with raisins at either end of the curl and allow to rise again, covered, for an hour. Meanwhile, warm oven to 375, and when rolls have doubled in size, brush them with egg whites and bake for approximately 15 minutes, or until golden.

Fittja Food and the Takeaway Caffe

Yesterday was our first workshop of the Takeaway Caffe here at Krogarvagen 26.

At first, all of our guests were from Botkyrka Konsthall…

(photo: Ryo Yonami)

Shashtin, the ceramicist at the Konsthall, taught Ryo how to peel an apple in 30 seconds flat while they began simmering the apple butter which would cook all afternoon.

(photo: Ryo Yonami)

The kitchen was pretty quiet at first, so we began cooking Fittja Food recipes, including a winter vegetable soup which we put on to boil just as Irina, the curatorial intern at Botkyrka Konsthall, walked through the door.

(photo: Ryo Yonami)

Here is Irina at the table with Elmas, our friend from October, who had been waiting for us to come back. Elmas taught us how to make Turkish dolma in October, so when she came, we began steaming the eggplant and peppers to stuff for this week’s dolma.

Here are Erik, Irina, and Chanise discussing recipes. By far the most prepared visitor, Chanise brought much more than she took away! She arrived with a whole chicken, a pair of slippers to wear, and ready to chat, saying that in Jamaica, where she’s from, everything happens around a plate of jerk chicken.

As she was writing the recipe, team MAGO showed up: Mohsen, Oden, and Gyorgye, three friends who were ready to cook. All of their fathers work as restaurateurs or cooks in restaurants, some as far away as northern Sweden, and they confidently took knife in hand, cutting up Chanise’s chicken and spicing it – heavily! – for a very open interpretation of Chanise’s recipe.

As the chicken was finishing, our friends Cevda and Kubra came and took charge of the last of the cooking and eating:

When it was all over, we had cooked a massive feast, including winter vegetable soup, eggplant and pepper dolmas, MAGO’s extremely spicy jerk chicken, beetroot salad, a chicken stock for the week, apple butter, and a cauldron of milk tea, mixing recipes from Jamaica, Turkey, Estonia, Sri Lanka, Chile, and of course Tumba and Fittja.

We sat down for a final conversation with the kids about food, agriculture, St. Lucia Day (today! the 13th of December!), and Rihanna, and then the hallway began to empty of boots, jackets, and snow pants.

Cevda, Kubra, and Allison – our daily participants from the fall caffe – were the last to leave, and we’ll see them again today at 7:30 at Fittja School for the St Lucia Day ceremonies!

OPENFittja Caffe is open again!

It’s many days after the second day of Fittja Caffe, and we’re overdue on updating the blog with the amazing weeks spent in Fittja in October with Marjetica Potrc and her studio of students from HFBK in Hamburg, farmer-artists Kultivator, and student artists from the Konstfack and Royal Academy of Art Schools here in Stockholm.

(photo credit:  Johanna Padge)

However, it’s no longer sunny – in fact, when we arrived in Stockholm today at 3pm, it was already dusk turning to dark and snow was falling everywhere! Now the front yard of the caffe is covered in snow, and student artist Ryo Yonami from Berkeley, the most recent OPENrestaurant intern and collaborator, is making snowpeople for the first time!

Here is Ryo in front of the same apartment/residency/caffe, two months after the photo above, at 5 in the afternoon!

We will be updating the blog daily, or as often as we can, during the next week and a half that we are here in Fittja, making the recipes we learned in October during the OPENFittja Caffe / Common Roof Kitchen, and creating a recipe and leftovers exchange in the gallery at Botkyrka Konsthall.

(photo credit: Anneli Backman)

This is Hilda, niece of our project manager Anneli, running past OPENrestaurant’s table at the State of the Craft Exhibition at Botkyrka Konsthall. The table is one of fifteen that were made for the Common Roof Kitchen at Fittja Open / OPENFittja Caffe by Til Richter and others from HFBK (Hochschule fur Bildende Kunst, Hamburg).

Saturday, 15 December from 12:00 – 15:00 we will be filling the table with Fittja Food in an exchange of leftovers for our takeaway containers. Sunday we will be in the gallery again making more of the containers with gallery visitors.

Here are the takeaway containers in their shipping crate, all intact after 24 hours of plane travel!

We will be cooking at Residence Fittja, 26 Krogarvagen tomorrow, Wednesday, December 12 from 14:00 – 18:00.

All are welome to visit, eat, cook, and share ideas.

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Already today in the taxi from the airport, Ildo our driver shared some recipes. He lives in Tumba with his wife, his two-and-a-half-month-old daughter, and his son, who is five and who loves to cook. They are always in the kitchen together, cooking Swedish food, and cooking Estonian-Russian fare with his wife – Ildo says this is “quite a bit lighter” than Swedish food!

Ildo suggested that if we are making Fittja Food, maybe we would try Baklava? And he contributed a few recipes for Tumba food, including the recipe for Jansson’s Frestelse (Temptation), which will be on his Christmas table, along with salmon, mashed potatoes, vodka of course, and a salad of grated beets, garlic, and mayonnaise (“100% for sure!”).

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Jansson’s Frestelse a la Ildo

Use anchovies, or scandinavian sprats.

Line the bottom of a casserole with butter, then potatoes cut into fries, then sprats.

Repeat with potatoes and sprats, potatoes and sprats, until the top, sprinkling each layer with salt and black pepper.

Onions can also be used, sauteed first in a pan to soften them and then layered in with the sprats and potatoes.

Over the top, sprinkle crushed knackebrot, then pour cream or half and half over all.

Bake it in a 425 degree oven for one hour or until cooked through and browned on top.

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From Day Two to another season

Open Cafe: day two

Today  is day two of Open Cafe and we invite you to Krögarvägen 26 to make traditional skräddmjolsdrommar (“oatmeal dream”) cookies and recipe sharing. Today we’ll also decide which of your favorite recipes we’ll make tomorrow.

If you cannot be here today and want to make Oatmeal Dream cookies at home, follow this recipe:

Oatmeal dreams

450 g butter
360 g flour
540 g toasted oatflour
510 g sugar
90 ml canola oil
30 ml harthorn salt

15 ml vanilla power

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Cut the butter into cubes.

Mix all ingredients and cool it in the refrigerator until cold.

Shape into small balls, place on parchment paper set on a plate.

Bake in the oven at 150 °C for 12 minutes, the cookies will crack on the surface.

Let the dreams cool.

Bag them air-tight with paper which has drying effect between each layer.

Join us between 15.00 – 18.00

 

 

the Fittja Cafe is here!

Today is the first day of Open Fittja! Please stop by Krögarvägen 26 between 3:00 – 6:00 pm today. On this first day, we invite you to come help decorate the cafe, start a batch of apple sauce, take portraits of others who’ve come to the cafe, or record your favorite recipe for the Fittja audio cookbook. Yesterday we harvested dozens of apples from Järna, and are ready to make apple sauce with you today. Check the window at Krögarvägen 26 every day for an announcement about the afternoon’s activities. Here is one of the apple trees from which we harvested yesterday:

If it’s raining, we’ll be inside. Just come to the front window and we’ll pop around the side to let you in.

-Asiya

A morning in Hallunda and an afternoon chicken coop

We began the day by heading to Hallunda, where there was a sort of “NGO day” where about half a dozen NGOs and artisans representing NGOs came to sell various wares to support their organizations. Among the organizations at the festival today was a women’s collective that crafts homewares from recycled materials. The small rugs and trivets below were made using worn t-shirts, and are essentially sold at costs to support future projects for the collective. We bought a small rug and a few trivets for the Open Fittja cafe. We originally went to the festival to hand out fliers advertising Open Fittja, and not only were able to do that, but also wound up meeting a number of women actively involved in local Botkyrka organizations. We spoke with local teachers, librarians at the Hallunda branch library, and women who both pass through Fittja and spend a fair amount of time there. We explained the Open projects taking place over the course of the next two weeks, and invited them to bring their children to the afternoon fikas starting next Monday. One woman who is well-connected to teachers in Fittja offered to scan our flier and email it to contacts within Fittja. Another volunteered to pass it along to a few women she knew in Fittja, too. I should note that public spaces that I’ve seen thus far have been quite gendered, so we mostly encounter either one sex or the other. Being women, it is naturally easier to make inroads with groups of women that it is with men here in Fittja. Of course men and women, boys and girls are invited to the activities over the next two weeks, and it just so happens that so far we’ve only spoken to women about the events.

This afternoon Ariel and I were returning to Krögarvägen 26,  a woman and her daughter were returning from a wildly successful apple harvesting mission. Although she didn’t speak English, we were able to communicate the simple question of “Where do you harvest your apples?”, and not only did she tell us where to find these prolific trees, but she gave Ariel and me each an apple! Here are the apples:

These apple trees are near the lake, and if you walk in the direction of Alby, the next town over, you’re bound to come across the trees. Tomorrow we are headed to the Järna countryside to harvest apples to use in the cafe.

At around 2:00 pm, the folks from Kultivator arrived, along with some friends from Stockholm who helped assemble the chicken coop. By dusk, the coop was completely assembled, and the construction drew curious stares from passersby. Some residents stopped to chat with us about the project, but the neighborhood children were, unequivocally, the most enthusiastic about the coop at Krögarvägen 26.

We invited a few children into the residency apartment, and with Ayhan’s help, explained Open Fittja’s cooking and story telling projects. It’s our hope that the neighborhood kids will attend the fikas, and eventually, it will encourage their parents to join the coffee breaks and Open Fittja workshops as well.

By the time that Ariel and I left for Skärholmen to go grocery shopping, the coop was complete:

Since we’re finding ourselves in Sweden during the height of beet and apple season, we are picking our friends’ brains for recipes that combine the two, and thus far, an apple borscht is the leading contender. Next week residents are invited to partake in any number of beet/apple kitchen festivities: beet apple borscht, beet apple slaw, and assembling beet stuffed apples to name a few. What are your favorite beet apple recipes? How about an apple beet charoset?

Good night!

-Asiya