More cooking adventures!

In this edition of cooking adventures I am going to post three recipes! Just to save space, and time on my part. The first recipe is for Chicken with bacon and penne. This recipe makes enough for 4 servings. This was one of my favorite recipes since we started our cooking adventures, because its really pretty simple to make, and it tastes really good.

Ingredients:
About a lb of boneless skinless chicken breast.
2 yellow onions
2 cloves of garlic
about 3.5 oz of mushrooms (Its best to use fresh ones)
about 5 oz of lightly fried diced bacon. (Do not substitute in bacon bits. it does make a difference)
4 servings of penne pasta (about 14 oz)
1 tbsp of oil
14 oz of crushed tomatoes
1/2 tsp of dried oregano
about 3/4 of a cup of light creme fraiche

Another delicious recipe

This recipe is for a toffee cake that Anton's grandfather made when we went over for fika a while back. Its delicious, and as I am writing this I am starting to want some more.

Ingredients for the cake bottom:
about 8 oz of Almond paste.
2 egg whites

Ingredients for the toffee cream:
13 tbsp. or 3/4 of a cup + one extra tbsp of cream
about 1/3 of a cup of granulated sugar.
2 tbsp of molasses
1/2 tbsp of butter

My first recipe post!

This is the first post of quite a few where I will either type out or type out and translate a recipe that we have made during our cooking adventures!  I'm starting with the one that we just made last night, because its pretty simple, and really delicious, and does not require me to translate anything. So without any more blabbering, here is the recipe for chili corn chowder:

ingredients:
14 oz frozen sweet corn
1 medium potato
5 cups or vegetable broth
1 large onion
2 sticks of celery
1 red chili pepper
A sprinkle of thyme
1 pat of butter
2 oz of cheddar cheese
a dollop of sour cream for each bowl that you plan to have.
olive oil
salt
black pepper

Köpenhamn!

This past weekend we went on a new adventure! We went to Köpenhamn, or Copenhagen as its spelled in English. Saturday morning we woke up early, finished cleaning the house, and did the rest of our laundry. Then we went to meet Anton's parents at the train station. We had fika and discussed what the plan would be for the day, as well as what is new in our houses. We talked about how I am teaching Anton Spanish, or at least basic Spanish. That way I can keep my brain in "foreign language mode" when I am speaking Swedish and don't know a word or phrase. A lot of my problem with speaking is that if I don't know a phrase, and have to say it in English, it gets hard to go back to speaking Swedish. After having fika we hopped on a train and we were off on a new adventure! We were on our way to Köpenhamn. I was excited. Anton tried to catch some sleep on the train ride. I was too excited to sleep. Once we got there I was excited. It was bigger than Malmö. It was pretty darn different too.

Back in Sweden.

So its been a while, and I really just have not had motivation to post. Although now I found it again, and am posting. We've been back from Berlin for a little over a month, and my three months here are almost up. I have however applied to stay here in Sweden. I love it so much, and want to just stay here, study, and adventure some more. Since we got back from Berlin a lot of things have happened. We started what I call cooking adventures. We found out that one of the grocery stores has an ad that contains recipes, so we have started using those to make a shopping list. We have made a lot of different things. I we have a few pictures, but none that really do the food justice. I think I will start trying to take more pictures of our food. I also am going to start trying to translate the recipes and posting them on here as well. That way I can share those with you all. They actually are very delicious.

I've been going out on my own as well during the past few weeks. Its interesting. Never once have I felt unsafe. I really like that about this city. I think thats one of my favorite things about it. There is only one area of the city that I have not really explored yet, which might just prove to be the most interesting part. I am going to try to get there soon.



Other than our cooking adventures not a whole lot else has been going on here, just life. I finished my first class in Swedish last week (level A1) and am starting level A2 tonight! Since I started I feel like I have learned so much about the language, and am able to have/understand basic conversation. I think the most frustrating thing is, I understand the grammar concepts, but I just dont have a vocabulary built up yet. I am still working on that. Once I get that built up I will be a lot more confident. Although I will say that I do pretty well at typing out stuff. I just have to use google translate to figure out some words. A lot of the time google translate leads me in the wrong direction, and if I would have went with what I thought originally I would have either been right, or closer to correct. Soon I will be starting to introduce more Swedish on here as well. so that I can get more practice typing it.

 Melodifestivalen has ended and the winner was crowned.  Loreen was the winner, and although she sang a song in English. I really did like her performance. I've linked the video to her performance below. I also have linked the video to the runner up. The one thing that I thought was cool about melodifestivalen was that throughout the whole process whenever you wanted to vote for a song, you were making a donation. The total donations that they collected were over 1million dollars.  You had the option  to donate either about the equivalent of half a dollar, or a little over a dollar when you voted based on the number that you called.  It takes about 6.75 krones to make one US dollar, and there are only 9 million people in this country. If you were to look at all the votes, it equals almost one vote for every person who lives here in Sweden.

I think that is about everything that has happened really in the past few weeks. Well, we had a birthday party for Anton and his uncle. It was a lot of fun! I made a pancake cake! Its basically a cake made out of very thin almost crepe like pancakes, you put whipped cream, and different types of jam on each layer. Our cake wound up being 15 layers! It was so much fun! I also helped make cinnamon buns! They were delicious! I always have fun when we go home to visit Anton's parents and brothers! On the next blog I will write about this past weekend! This past weekend I had an amazing saturday and sunday! I cant wait to share it with you all! 

Hej då! 

Day 2 in Berlin

Day 2 in Berlin proved to be just as nice as the first day. The weather was great, and we had a lot of fun. We started off the day trying to go up in the Reichstag, but by the time we got there the line was super long. We decided to skip it for the moment, and go back later in the day. From there we went on to the Natural history museum. That was amazing. It was a bit of a walk, but we wound up taking either the S or the U bahn part of the way, I don't remember which goes where, which considerably shortened the trip. Here are some of the pictures from the walk there:

Finally we arrived at the Natural History museum. It was interesting. There were a lot of really cool exhibits. Here are some of the pictures: 

There were a lot of really neat exhibits. The only thing that I did not really like about this museum was that the staff could not speak English. I asked them a simple question, and without even a word about how they couldn't understand, the first staff member directed me to another staff member, who completely misunderstood my question. I also noticed that not a lot of the exhibits had English translations. You would think for a national museum, that they would at least accommodate the tourists a little. I mean a lot of the world speaks English, so the language that most of the tourists are going to use to communicate would be English. I guess I thought it was a bit weird.

Moving on from there, we decided to get some good German food. We had been in Germany for a while, and had not had German food yet. By the time we had gotten out of there it was about lunch time anyways. So we went to another place that the book recommended. This one was a bit of a splurge, but it was TOTALLY worth it. It was DELICIOUS. Here are some pictures of the food that we had: 

After all that delicious food, it was time to move on to more museums. We wanted to visit some of the more classic museums in Berlin. So we headed to museum island again. We had been there the night before, and wound up getting the museum card that got us into 60 different museums in Berlin for one price. Which was handy, because had we just gotten tickets to each one, it would have cost us more than the price of the one ticket by quite a lot. We took a lot of pictures from the last three museums that we visited. (Alte Nationalgalerie, Pergamon Museum, and Neues Museum) All three were on museum island. I could not tell you which museum housed which statues. The Alte Nationalgalerie however is the only one out of the three that had paintings. So here are the pictures of the way to the museums, and the pictures from the museums: 

After hitting all the museums, we hit up another site that is on museum island, Berliner dome. Now the pictures  definitely do not do it justice. It is huge, and magnificent. It's definitely a site to see.  Here are some of the pictures of that. We couldn't take pictures of the inside, because they were rehearsing for mass. and, I did not climb to the tower, but Anton did. 

After that we went to the Reichstag, which we were disappointed to find out that we were not allowed to enter, because we did not make reservations saying that we would be going, in advance. We were unaware that we had to do that. Now we know for future reference to make reservations. After being a bit disappointed about not being able to go up there, we decided to call it a night. Especially seeing as earlier in the morning we had found out that the workers of the U-bahn were going on strike at 4am, which was the time that we were planning on leaving. 

So we had to leave to get to the airport at 2am. We took the U-bahn. Which was very confusing, because at first we were under the impression that we would have to take a replacement bus. Well, that's only on the weekdays between certain hours. So we finally got on the train, took it to where we were supposed to be able to catch a bus to the airport... only to find out that it didn't start running until 4am, and that it was not running then due to the strikes. After talking to some security guards we finally figured out that the only way to get to the airport at that point was a taxi. Now we were trying to avoid taking a taxi, because we had heard that it was expensive. but we were close enough that it was not too bad. It was still not as cheap as the bus. but it was better than nothing. 

Finally after an exhausting morning, we were at the airport. We talked for a LONG time until we decided to get breakfast with our leftover Euros. and after breakfast it was time to go through security, and head home. I think it was interesting though, how they ran things at this airport. We had no idea where our gate to get on the plane was at, so once through security we had to sit in a hallway for a couple of hours while waiting to see where our gate is, but instead of telling us where it was before boarding time, it told us instantly that we were boarding. It was a bit confusing. something that I thought was different about planes here is they board using the stairs, not directly into the building. I am sure that there are some that do, but the ones that we had to and from Berlin all boarded outside. It was overall an amazing trip. One that I will remember for the rest of my life. 

One last thing that I thought was interesting, because I don't know where I was supposed to put this but Berlin had a lot of casinos. within the 10 min bus ride we had on our way to the hotel we saw 9 casinos, and as we were walking the city we found more. I just thought it was interesting. I had so much fun.  I cant wait to go on another trip.