Day 473: Inherent Swedish Ability

This is a piece of knäckebröd. For anyone who doesn't already know, it's basically a cracker made from rye or wheat, tastes approximately like cardboard and is so hard you could probably stack a few together and murder some people. Swedish people eat them so much there is an aisle in the supermarket with different kinds of what is essentially the same thing. Kids at schools eat them at snack time. In the staffrooms of schools there is knäckebröd. On the tables in the dining halls of places of work there is knäckebröd. On the bread table at a buffet there is knäckebröd. Right now while I am typing, my Swedish boyfriend is buttering a piece of knäckebröd. I can hear it from next door because they're that fucking hard.

I would like to draw your attention to the picture above. I buttered that piece of knäckebröd and I have to say I did a lousy job. The surface has a pillowed texture and the butter just goes in the crevices. My attempts to put the knife in the gap and redistribute the butter have just meant the butter is piled in a similar quantity in an adjacent crevice. Now, I've lived here for 473 days so I like to think I've learned a little bit about Swedish life, but I don't think I will ever learn how to butter a piece of knäckebröd. Let's compare with my boyfriend's knäckebröd:

Look at that. It's a fucking piece of art.

While the butter is in the crevices, which is unavoidable, unlike my piece the butter is in pretty much all the crevices, rather than just one measly side. Also, it took me fucking ages to "spread" the butter, so mine is half melted. My boyfriend's piece has unmelted butter, effortlessly spread on with a single sweep.

Now, I'm not much of a scientist but I'm willing to state that this is evidence enough for Swedish people having an innate ability to prepare knäckebröd. Even with lots of practise I'm just not as good as a Swede when it comes to buttering. Hats off to you guys.

Day 468: How Sweet!

I've come to discuss this.

These are sweets. You can buy them in England. They're called mushrooms and when I was a kid I used to pretend I was Alice in Wonderland and that one side would make me tall and the other side would make me small.

But when I was a kid, the pink side was strawberry flavour and the white side had no flavour but sugar. These mushrooms here are BLACK LIKE THE NIGHT and it can only mean one thing in this country. Liquorice.

I'm not Liquorice's greatest fan. I'll admit to buying the occasional packet of Liquorice Allsorts, but not for the liquorice. The best sweets in the bag are the coconut one and the little pink or blue round one which have arguably the greatest sugar to liquorice ratio of all the choices.

That's right Bertie, I'll eat your face and feet.

Nevertheless these weird liquorice salty mushrooms are actually quite nice...I feel a bit wrong for having admitted that in a public forum. A while back Pretzel-Flipz used to be on sale in England, but only for a short time as the public just COULDN'T HANDLE chocolate (a sweet) with pretzels (salty) and I'm still and forever a bit disappointed in the British public for their failure to assimilate Pretzel Flipz into their hearts. Middle class people are coming around to the idea of salty/sweet now thanks to the advent of Salted Caramel (which coincidentally I hate.)

Here in Sweden once a sweet has emerged it's simply not good enough to only have one version. Let's examine this theory. We can start with the mushrooms. In addition to the salty ones above there are also the regular "strawberry" (according to the manufacturer's website, who knew?!) ones, and some "kola" ones (this doesn't mean Cola. It means Caramel)

Alright, thats just 3 types. But then, for those people who only like the white side of the mushroom (god knows why) there are sockerbitar.

Meanwhile those people who like the pink side of the mushroom can go for the Strawberry sockerbit. But I should probably warn you that eating only one of the two colours can cause you to be either excessively large or excessively small, such that doors could become unsurmountable obstacles.

And for those people who like the texture of mushrooms and sockarbitar but would like to branch out and try a different shape, there are foam bananas, or as I shall now refer to them, scum bananas since they are SKUMBANAN in Swedish. For the love of God, write to Ikea now and petition for a wardrobe or whatever called SKUMBANAN.

Don't tell anyone, but this is actually a picture of sugar free foam bananas

But what if you eat your own body weight in skumbanan and then you don't know how you can continue on from that point? Have no fear, chocolate scum banana is here (Or chocolate Mushroom if you haven't had your 5-a-day):

And if all that chocolate is getting a bit too rich on the palate, you can cleanse with a nice, refreshing, sour scum banana.

And when the sugar gets just a bit too sugary, it's back to salt. Salt bananas, that is!

Basically this post could go on forever with variants of the same damn thing, so I'll leave you with this gem I found while searching Google Sweden for all these sweets. And don't tell your excellent, Swedish dentist.