Stockholm, Sweden

I know....I know....Stockholm isn't in Kent.  It isn't even NEAR Kent, so why do I mention it?  Well, it's a foodie blog, and we had some great food while we were there, that's why!

As most of you probably already know, the Swedish eat a lot of fish.  Salmon, prawns, crayfish, but mostly herring.  There were plenty of alternatives though, and elk, pork and beef all featured.  We stayed at the Handelsbanken training centre and hotel at Södegarn just outside Stockholm and ate all of our evening meals in the restaurant there because the food was very good indeed.  Everything was very expensive in Stockholm, beer ranged from £5.50 to £9.50 a pint (well....I say pint, obviously I mean 500ml) and a quick lunch from around £12.50 to £25.  Fortunately, the beer was a minimum of 5.3% and the food was fantastic!

 The first day we arrived just after lunchtime and the chef whipped us up a local speciality (the name of which is even more unpronounceable than I had expected) that consisted of finely diced potato, onion and ham fried up together with herbs and topped with a fried egg and with a dish of pickled beetroot on the side.  A sort of thinking mans all-day breakfast.  Hot, tasty and filling, just what the cardiologist ordered!

The week featured a series of stops for coffee and cake, known locally as "fika".  This one, simple little word encompasses a great deal.  Fika means everyone stops what they are doing and troops off to one of  the many coffee places around for a cup of fresh coffee, something sweet like a cake or cinnamon bun, and a good old chat!  Whole office departments troop off for fika at least a couple of times a day.  We should do that too.  It hasn't harmed their productivity or profit margins, so why not?

We also stopped at a number of bars for lunch, picked pretty much at random, or at least on the basis that "this one has a terrace that's in the sunshine, so let's stop here!".  Our first go at this was remarkably successful and rather set the tone for the rest of the stay.  We ordered a dish of crayfish on toast and a warm goats cheese salad.  Now, keeping in mind that this was just a little water-front bar chosen from dozens of similar looking places, look what turned up!  It tasted just as good as it looked, too.

 Another day we wandered up to a bar in a square and ordered one of each of the daily specials, which turned out to be a salmon fillet with horseradish sauce and braised vegetables for me and traditional home made meatballs and mashed potato with lingonberry sauce for Dee.  Again, the presentation was excellent (and there's not much you can do to meatballs and mash to make them look anything special!) and they tasted great.  We went in and ordered at the bar, and the barmaid told us to help ourselves to bread, crackers, salad and coffee from the table behind us as part of our meal.  An unexpected bonus as the salad was varied, the bread was fresh and the coffee strong and dark.

 We didn't have a bad dish the whole time we were there.  It just goes to show what we've always said....it's not hard to do good food!  Why do we put up with the rubbish that gets dumped in front of us for so much of the time here in England?  Life is too short to eat bad food, particularly when there is all this creative, interesting, tasty grub out there waiting to be found!  What a great city.  Not cheap, but a must-do for all you foodies out there.