Welcome to Cooking with Friends

Once your have read this you can just click on any of the navigator buttons on the left forgo my ramblings.

The recipes: Here are some of my favorites that I cook regularly at home and recipes that friends have asked me for. I am really flattered that they like them so much and happy to share them.

Recipes that I use for my Private Chef services are of course something you won't find much of here. Those you will have to whittle an invitation to dinner to sample.

But I think that you will be happy as I don't spend as much time cooking dinner for my household as you might think, (we are two). Most recipes here are great for making when you get home from the office or are just too stressed to be bothered. Many will be great for some light entertaining.

Weights and Measures: You will notice that almost all the recipes are in metric, that is because I live here. I have also put them up with corresponding ounces, pounds and Fahrenheit for my friends back home, you know America where they still haven't found the beauty of the metric system!

The Herb Page is for all of you who have read English recipes and have been stumped by what a particular herb/spice is in Swedish. Let’s face it; even I have a hard time sometimes with Swedish recipes in knowing what a certain ingredient is in English. It's there to make your life easier as are some of my other lists. They will all get up shortly as I am in the middle of writing them right now. North Atlantic Fish, Cuts of Meat and so on. It's my way of being nice. For some reason I have always been hooked on lists, silly isn't it?

Updating: I have gotten this up over the New Year (2007) so there is not so very much up right now. I will work on this a bit every day for the next couple of months. So do come back periodically. It has taken 2 months to put what’s here together as I have written the entire site (code and all) myself.

For my friends: Yes I know you have asked me for a recipe! Yes I have been a bad friend and not gotten it to you. So e-mail me and remind me, that’s the best way of embarrassing me into getting me to do it within some reasonable period of time.

On Eating

I have in one form or another cooked everyday for the past 30 years. I think I owe my good health to the fact that I can go months without a McDonald’s burger (even though I love them). I drink in moderation and still smoke cigarettes which are terribly unfashionable these days. I weight only 60 kilos and at my house we consume about a kilo of butter (2 pounds) a month. I can only say that Julia Child had a big impact on my butter consumption. I am healthy but not ridiculous about staying that way.

Diets of foods that are basically manufactured to feed millions of people or frozen for several years, simply can't be as healthy as going in the kitchen and rustling up something myself. I have a lot of opinions (my friends say too many). But concerning food, I know, "you are what you eat" anything else - excuses - are just bullshit. If you don't care enough about yourself to watch what you eat then don't be surprised when you wake up one day needing a coronary bypass, liposuction or your stomach bypassed.

Sorry, to be so rough, but like they tell me, life can be tuff. So, that's enough of making me making my point.

And I know that I am not a dietary expert but I have been living a long time and my cholesterol in rather low, (in spite of all that butter), as is my blood pressure, and I am not dying of lethargy. So I must have some idea of what I am doing. Not that my recipes are going to help you much if losing weight is what you have in mind. I think that if you eat like I do and are not inherently thin then, "fat is going to be very were it's at".

But these recipes are not about dieting and I don't have any interest in that. They are about eating well, expanding your kitchen and having you enjoying it as much as I do. They are about getting together with friends and sharing food, funny jokes and laughing a lot.

So I will try to have some useful information, some good recipes. Hopefully I can throw a bit of my well known sarcasm in, especially when I am writing about food things that generally piss me off. Like foods that can be frozen for years, don't glow in the dark and strangely keep their color when they are defrosted – isn't that weird?