Apple market in Kivik

The last couple of weeks have been filled with "everyday life". In between my mother-in-law has been visiting and last week I went to Gothenburg to visit my dear friend Andrea and my sister Karin. Unfortunately I forgot to bring my camera, otherwise I would have posted pictures from Café Villekulla where Andrea and I both had the cake buffet or some beautiful fall pictures from the walks along the canal. I'll try to do better next time.

This Saturday, Matts and I rented a car and took off to Kivik on the east coast of Skåne to visit the yearly Apple market. Every year they have a big picture or sculpture made of apples, and this year the picture looked like this:

We had a nice day exploring Skåne (especially since we got a bit lost on the way home) and brought apples, jams and apple juice with us home.

Hiking and other stuff

This Saturday we went out on a hike. A woman from Ad Fontes arranges hikes here in Skåne once every month and this time we came along. We went to almost the same place where we hiked last time and parts of the hike was on the same path. But it was so nice to come out and do something together with other people, so where we hiked didn't really matter. :-)

Sunday morning I went to church, Pingstkyrkan, and met lots of very nice people. Then back home for lunch and then away again to the gym with Matts. Now he finally has got a card at Gerdahallen, so we might try to go to the gym together now and then.

Yesterday evening we had hot sandwiches and watched lots of "tv" on svtplay. Nice and relaxed, just as it should be. :-)

Sourdough bread - the recipe

2 loaves of bread

Day 1 (sourdough)
20-25 g fresh yeast
3 deciliter water
3 deciliter sifted rye flour mixture (60% plain white flour, 40% sifted rye flour)

Warm the water to 37 C and dissolve the yeast in it. Add the flour and mix throughly. Let the mixture sit at room temperature under a towel for one or two days. If you leave it two days, add another ½ deciliter of flour mixture after one day.

Day 2 or 3
20-25 g fresh yeast
7 deciliter water
½ deciliter vegetable oil
the sourdough from day 1
1 tbsp salt
20 deciliter sifted rye flour mixture
about 5 deciliter plain white flour

Warm the water to 37 C and dissolve the yeast in part of it. Add the sourdough and the rest of the water as well as the oil to the yeast. Add salt, the sifted rye flour mixture and most of the plain white flour and work it all together to a nice dough. Cover with a towel and let it rise for about 1 hour.

Work the dough with the rest of the plain white flour on a bench and form two round loaves. Put them on a baking sheet, either greased with butter or covered with baking paper, and make some holes in the loaves with a fork. Let the loaves rise under a towel for about 30 minutes. Preheat the oven to 250 C.

Place the bread in the lover part of the oven. Immediately lover the temperature to 200 C and bake for about 45 minutes.

Let the loaves cool on a rack without being covered if you want to keep the crust hard.

Sourdough bread - part five

At last, the loaves are ready! And I can finally have lunch. :-) Oatmeal porridge, an apple and a nectarine and three big slices of warm bread. Yummy! The bread has a really hard crust and it is moist and soft inside. If it is as good tomorrow as it is today, I might make the same bread again and again and again...

Sourdough bread - part four

Ooooh, slowly getting there. The breads look beautiful and the smell is delicious! Soon and very soon I will taste this bread!

The metal thing in one of the loaves is a food thermometer that I use in addition to a timer to know when the bread is ready. 95 C is the goal.

Sourdough bread - part three

Time to shovel the breads into the oven. They have almost doubled their size in the last 30 minutes and will probably grow a bit more in the oven... After 45 minutes of baking I will have two gigantic loaves of bread to nibble on.

Sourdough bread - part two

So, after one hour, the dough almost escaped from the bowl - in other words, time to form two loaves of bread. These now must rest and rise for another 30 minutes before it is time for them to hit the oven. Oh, I cannot wait - I'm getting hungry now!

Sourdough bread - part one

The last few days something has been bubbling in our kitchen: my very first sourdough! Today it was time to make it into a real dough and here it is, ready to rise for an hour or so before it is time to make some bread out of it. The bread is called a Farmer bread and according to the recipe it is associated with the Swiss or German breads. We'll see about that around lunch time today - I am not convinced it will be anything like any bread I ate in Switzerland. :-)

Soft weekend

Yet another Monday. I hope it will be a good week. :-)

This weekend was a very soft one. On Saturday we walked downtown to check out a new lamp store with special opening offers. But we forgot the check the address before we left so we had no clue where to find it. Too bad considering this is Sweden, and even if it's the south of Sweden the evenings (afternoons) will quickly get darker. But we'll do another try another day. The rest of the day we spent indoors watching the rain and wind have a party of their own outside our windows. This truly is a windy place we have come to. Skåne is very flat and the sea is not even 10km away from here. I can't wait to find out how the winter is here...

Yesterday I went to church and then did pretty much nothing. Around 6pm we took a walk to our local supermarket (open 8am-9pm every day, Sundays included) to buy matches. Candles are quite a good substitute for lamps and our lighter ran out of gas on Saturday so we needed something reliable to have at hand. Tea lights and candles are a really big thing in Sweden, especially when it gets darker outside, so we'll see how long our 100-pack of lights from Ikea will last.

Our place

In the beginning of July we arrived to Lund just in time to collect the keys to our new apartment before office closing time (well, tecnically we came after closing time, but the guy there was kind enough to wait for us). All we brought with us then was our suitcases... Two months later, this is what our place looks like:

If your internet connection is slow you can try to let the page load "on its own" for a while and then come back to have a look.

September

When I grew up, September 1st always was kind of a turning point. The air always felt clearer and cooler on this particular day and for me it always was the day when I felt that the fall was coming. This, of course, was in the north of Sweden, but I pretty much had the same experience in Uppsala, south of the middle of Sweden. Now, however, we live in the south and September 1st offered blue skies and summer temperatures. I took a long walk and before I went back home I had a cone of delicious ice cream downtown. In the parks, people were hanging out on the green grass, playing football or just working on their tan. The playgrounds were full of children and the line to the ice cream place was long... It was a really nice summer day with no signs of fall at all.