Göteburg Food!

I don't have any particular recipes to share from Sweden, but I wanted to post about the delicious food we had there. We ate most of our meals at our friend's home, so we got "the real deal" as far as home cooking in Sweden goes. Here's what we experienced:

• Snaps: highly popular alcohol that basically tastes like vodka seasoned by herbs like elderberry flowers, dill, caraway, etc.
  
• New potatoes: around midsummer, the potatoes are new and small. I've never seen this type of potato in the States, but I am going to do some investigation on potatoes now, to learn more about the variation in taste and season.
• Pickled herring: we lucked out and got to taste home-made sauces that the pickled herring marinated in such as traditional (onion and carrots), lingeonberry, mixed mustards with dill, and a creamy garlic sauce. They were great.
• Fish, fish, fish: we also had smoked mackerel cut from the fish right in the kitchen, gravlox, hot smoked salmon and cold smoked salmon.
• Cheeses: we had a Swedish Cheddar which is white not yellow, and Västerbotten which is a traditional cheese during celebration events named after a town in Sweden.
• Fil mjolk (/feel mee-yelk/): a yogurt to eat for breakfast that is thiner than American eaten yogurt and a bit more tart.
• Shrimp sandwiches: a common lunch time sandwich is the some bread with mayo, slices of hard-boiled eggs, and a pile of delicious tiny shrimp, with a strip of cucumber on top.
• Half special: "sausages," or hotdogs, are commonly sold by vendors on the street, almost like in D.C. or other US cities. The "half special" was a thin hotdog in a bun with an enormous mound of mashed potatoes on top, plus fried onions, ketchup and mustard.
• Weak beer: the alcoholic beverages are referred to by their "class" (1, 2 or 3) referring to the percentage of alcohol in the beverage, because that is how it is taxed. The lowest amount of alchohol in beer is called weak beer and is sold basically like a soda and drinken anytime. We had a weak beer and our half special one late night on the street side after being out with friends.

The food in Sweden that we tried was amazing, and by just a bit the flavors were familiar but not common as they are there, which we enjoyed. In Gotenburg fish is the most common thing to eat BY FAR as a port city, and it is delicious!