There won’t be any dishes to do or wishbones to save at casa Martha & Tom this year. We are headed to Brett & Mary’s, who joined us here last year, for a Bide-a-Wee Thanksgiving. Tom made his pâté, for the third year running, and I made a pumpkin pie.

We wish you a wonderful day with family, friends, and forkfuls of Thanksgiving flavors. Love from Minneapolis,

M&T

Welcome to the adventures of shelf install in the kitchen! This post was almost titled “How to break an easy, no-explanation-necessary project down into several illustrated steps.”

As you can see I’m not very good at taking actual [right] before pictures. The above left image of the sink is almost 4 years old (I can’t believe we’ve been here that long!), and the image on the right is about 2 years old. But, they both serve to illustrate the shelving issues in the kitchen. By the sink, there isn’t a convenient, sturdy place to store soap. When the dish rack gets full it’s impossible to reach soap all the way over on the little counter to the right. By the stove, the shelf installed by a previous tenant is useless–anything placed there gets covered in grease and out of reach. In order to keep things at hand, they have to occupy space on the tiny counter space to the left of the stove. In the new configuration, this space become usable as a working countertop.

We’re all breathing easier without the nasty “look-at-me!” brackets of the old shelf, aren’t we?

I started this project Halloween weekend, first shopping for lumber and a mahogany-colored stain to match the existing un-painted wood in the kitchen. While our neighbors were applying glitter to their fairy wings, I was staining pine planks out back. Fortunately I managed to avoid getting any glitter stuck in the wet stain. This was my first time staining anything by myself, so I did my homework. Step 1: ask a random man in the stain aisle (no, not a store employee) if one should use a regular paint brush. The man will surely tell you that you’d be better off using a rag. It is best to use a rag to which you have no great attachment. Later, you will throw this rag in the trash because it will be impossible to clean; according to the label on the little tin of stain, it could even spontaneously catch fire if not disposed of properly. Step 2: phone your father (any knowledgeable, experienced stainer in the family will do) and share an in-depth discussion on the application of stain with said rag. He will go into detail about the instructions on the side of the stain can, placing emphasis on the importance of removing excess stain and avoiding drips for fear of an uneven finish. Step 3: don a pair of latex gloves, or similar, and get cracking. Allow the wood to dry over night.

Now that the wood is dry and you are satisfied with the color, it’s time to get out the tool box. You’ll want to mount the L-brackets before attempting to attach the shelf to the wall, unless you happen to be an octopus. For the shelf above the sink, the positioning of the brackets was based on the edge of the sink itself and the edge of the small counter below. In the case of the shelf by the stove, the brackets are evenly spaced from the ends of the board. As you decide where to place your brackets, a measuring tape and a pencil will come in handy. You might even consider putting a T-square on your Christmas list if you are lacking one as I am, wink! I placed the brackets against each piece of wood on the floor and used the floor to make sure they’d be flush to the wall. This step is based on the assumption that the floor and the wall are actually level–in my apartment they are not, but it’s close enough. Once the brackets were in position, I used a set of bar clamps to hold them in place while drilling.

The most important part of drilling is making sure not to go through the boards. You spent a lot of time staining them, remember? As I learned from Rod, the easiest way to do this is to wrap a small piece of tape around your drill bit that indicates how deep you want the bit to sink.

With the brackets in place, it’s time to mount the shelf on the wall. You’ll need a level and your pencil again. Since I have only 2 hands (again, I’m a human–not an octopus), I don’t have any pictures of this part. Taking a tip from Anna of Door Sixteen, I painted out the bottom half of the brackets so the shelves would appear to float.

Now that the shelves are in place, it’s time to put them to work. Give them a purpose, make them feel wanted, and make sure they feel pretty. As I said, the main role for the shelf above the sink was to give us a solid place to store soap. But, as you can see in the above images, there’s room for a bit more than that. I read recently that all decorating is part function, part display. I was thinking 100% display with everything that came after the dishsoap, but it turns out this open storage is also highly functional. Tom and I are actually using these pieces now that they’re within arm’s reach. That, of course means our pretty bowls feel useful again and these shelves feel pretty useful–esteemed, even.

Special thanks to the man in the stain aisle, my father, and Tom for contributing a second set of hands.

If there is one meal that summarizes most of the eating Martha and I did in Sweden, it would have to be the one we ate at Rolf’s Kök (pronounced “shook”), just north of central Stockholm. No fancy restaurant, Rolf’s was one of many restaurants downtown focusing on husmanskost, everyday Swedish cooking. Husmanskost restaurants generally have a set menu of one or two choices that varies depending on the day of the week (and varies seasonally), as well as a few à la carte items. In our (brief) experience, the two choices were both “meat” (including fish) and “potatoes”. I’ve heard the American Midwest described as a meat and potatoes culture, but the Swedes take this to a whole new level.

We went to Rolf’s Kök on a Monday in late August, giving us the choice between “Lukewarm Poached Salmon with Cucumber, Fennel and Dill Mayonnaise” or “Isterband (Fermented Lard Sausage – post forthcoming), Mustard Creamed Potatoes and Beetroot”, preceded in either case by a bowl of Cauliflower Soup. I ordered the salmon, Martha the isterband.

After our menus were taken away our server delivered a tower of crisp rolls of bread impaled on a spike. I’m pretty sure this arrangement would have been met with many a personal injury lawsuit if it were attempted in the U.S.A., but Sweden is a less litigious place and anyway Martha and I somehow managed to remove our rolls without receiving the stigmata. The bread was accompanied by twin whipped butters and a third container full of tiny ziggurats of sea salt.

The rolls looked so good that they practically demanded to be eaten right away, but Martha and I somehow managed to resist long enough for the cauliflower soup to come to the table – a good thing, too, since bread was the perfect implement to sop up every last bite of cauliflower cream. Europeans have a better developed art of vegetable purée than we do in the United States. Give a European a vegetable – just about any vegetable – and they’ll serve it back to you as a creamy-textured soup that tastes like the vegetable in question, but with subtle flavors that suggest greater artifice than simply tossing cream, broth and cauliflower into a blender.

I’ve said that our meal at Rolf’s was a typical example of the kind of food we were eating in Sweden, and indeed salmon with potatoes and dill mayonnaise is something you can get just about any-where and time) throughout the country. But to call the salmon brought to me at Rolf’s Kök average really doesn’t give the restaurant enough credit: this was a really exceptional example of the Swedish favorite. Lukewarm (exactly the word our waitress used to describe the dish in her impeccable English) is not a word that carries positive connotations for me, especially when used to describe food, but it was just right for this fish – you can’t really taste anything when it’s piping hot.

The sausage Martha ordered was described as ‘tangy’ which indeed it was. At the time we assumed this was from lemon zest or some acidic ingredient but later found out that the tangy sourness of isterband  is caused by Lactobacillus, active during the four or more days when the sausage is aged at just below room temperature. Isterband is not cured; it is moist like a fresh sausage. It’s just not quite fresh. This was one of the most interesting things we ate in Sweden.

That’s how it was with Rolf’s Kök: typical but especially well-executed Swedish food. The restaurant also stood out for us in a way unrelated to the food: this meal was the first time, after three days in Stockholm dining out twice per day, that we experienced real table service, where our order was actually taken while we were sitting at a table, looking at a menu book. Up to that point, the norm had been counter ordering, with our food either picked up at a central point our brought out by a server announcing the name in inscrutable-to-us Swedish or, better, our order number, which our two semesters of Swedish classes at the American Swedish Institute a few years ago barely allowed us to parse. Of course, the level of service we encountered  might have had something to do with the types of restaurants we were eating at – Martha and I try to be frugal within reason when traveling. But it’s not like we were eating exclusively at coffee shops, which is about the only place, in Minneapolis at least, where you have to put up with counter based ordering. It seemed to be a cultural preference for the Swedes, and it makes sense from an efficiency standpoint: one central place to post the menu, take the orders, handle the cash. But I always feel a little on the spot when ordering at a counter: trying to read a giant chalkboard menu, a line of hungry and decided diners behind me – and being next-to-clueless about the language the menu is written in only exacerbates my anxiety issues. In light of this and the other stresses of travel, being seated and handed a menu at Rolf’s Kök was a relief.

And it’s not like we had to pay a premium for the convenience, either. The prices at Rolf’s were comparable to the other places we had been dining. Our lunch cost 274 Swedish crowns, which the good people at Visa tell me is $47.51. This seems like a lot, but it was pretty hard to find a meal in Stockholm that cost much less. If they could all have been as good as Rolf’s Kök, we would have been well pleased.

Poketo Bike Bells, as seen on Rena Tom. The Poketo blog has a fair amount about bikes + biking. I’m adding it to my Reader… now!