Falukorv with stir fried vegetables

Well, one of the advantages of my new job is that every now and then I end up very near an IKEA store, like last Friday and I took the opportunity to check out the Swedish food shop. I spotted this wonderful Swedish sausage called Falukorv - "Falu" as from the city of Falun and "korv" as in Swedish for sausage.

This is something I haven't had since school and then I always loved it (though would never have admitted it, as no one else claimed to like it). And so I bought one. Traditionally they used to be wrapped in a bright red skin and used to be huge and shaped like a horse shoe. Nowadays they've been spruced up - for starters they aren't as large, so you don't have to keep eating it for a week. Second, the skin was orange and had flowers printed on it. This refers to an old Swedish children's song - "Jag vill ha blomming falukorv till lunch, mamma!" basically a child asking for a flowery falukorv for lunch, because it doesn't like any other food. In addition, they also support the BRIS foundation. This is Barnens Rätt i Samhället translating to Children's Rights In Society.

This week-end we also went and spent some of the vouchers we got for our wedding (despite having said that we didn't want any presents). So now we have fancy new everyday cutlery that we're both happy with (so far Lundulph has used his ones from the days before we moved together and I've used the ones I inherited from my parents). And I have a new set of pots from Tefal - compact ones, where the handles fold to one side and take up a bit less space.

Today I tried the large one out by stir frying some vegetables, a bit inspired from having had lunch at Wagamama yesterday. Actually we were supposed to barbecue, to try out Lundulph's new unitasker - a wok-shaped colander that can be used to "stir-fry" vegetables and prawns over a barbecue. But the Sunday rained away, so we had to change our plans.

I peeled the bright skin off the sausage and cut it in 1 cm thick slices. It has sufficient amount of fat in it, not to need additional oil for frying in a non-stick. It's enough to just brown the sides.

For the stir-fry, I had an aubergine, a courgette, half a leek, 2 bell peppers, 1 chili, 6 mushrooms, about 20 leaves of Thai basil and a couple of tablespoons of sesame seeds. I fried them in toasted sesame seed oil and added some Japanese soy sauce. The cutting in strips was made very quick with using my Alligator cutter, that I got from my Mum a few months ago. This is yet another unitasker that I'm slowly getting used to, as it's quite useful for chopping vegetables quickly. It sort of works, if everything is needed in julienne form...

Anyway, the cooking part was very quick on both sausages and stir-fry, which was the main idea I think, we've been shifting furniture around today and sifting through a lot of our things and throwing away quite a lot, while keeping an eye on the Wimbledon tournament and time flew by and suddenly we were hungry. I had some left-over rice in the fridge, so that made the carb part of our meal.

The stir-fry tasted very much like a Ratatouille with a hint of Thai basil. The falukorv was saltier than I remember it, but very tasty. The chili was not noticeable, despite being labelled as very hot. We had to add a couple of drops of Cajun sauce (can also be used as rocket fuel) to give it a bit of a kick.



For dessert we're having biltong - I found a small bag in the larder. Must remember to put it on my shopping list.