White cabbage is the new rocket

Who invented the Swedish pizza salad?

Who ever it was, their image should be immortalised in a white cabbage sculpture.
Pizza salad is for the visit to a Swedish pizzeria like soy sauce is to a Japanese meal – a must. And on top of it, one could interpret this glorious delicacy as a culinary expression of Swedish socialism because the pizza salad is FREE. Amazing. Or not.
The pizza salad is made by one of the cheapest vegetables there is, white cabbage. It’s a vegetable that in general isn’t going down in history as the most sensual or exotic piece of nature. While asparagus could trigger erotic ideas and the lure of phallic horizons, white cabbage draws a blank. Or, for the breastfeeding masses out there, white cabbage could, at a stretch, trigger ideas about soothing breasts riddled with the agonies of mastitis. Therefore, the likelihood of asparagus and white cabbage ending up on the same plate is not very big.

To create this delicacy, the cabbage is sliced thinly and then doused in oil, vinegar, salt, pepper and if you’re lucky, a spot of pickled capsicum. Does this sound pretty lame? Just hang in there. The salad gets better the older it gets. A bit like a nice wine. It needs time. Just not too much time because then your Grange Hermitage of pizza salads turn into bad cabbage. And you don’t want to eat that, trust me.

In Sweden, it doesn’t matter how fantastic the actual pizza is, and how cheap it is, if you don’t get offered your free pizza salad, the likeliness of a return visit to that particular pizzeria is close to zero. Sounds strange, but then again, we can be kind of strange people. So when my craving for a good ol’ pizza salad to go with my Kebab pizza gets the better of me I head to Sven’s Viking Pizza in Bondi Junction. So good is his salad AND his pizzas that the Italian Association of Pizza Makers in Australia is looking for a way to close him down. Not bad for a guy with a viking helmet. Go Sven!

Brush in style.

‘A spring clean’, what a wonderful, slightly dated expression, if you are to really look at what it says. The old idea of having seasonal cleanings, the ones where you turn the house upside down, drag everything out into the garden, devote a whole day, or weekend, to thoroughly scrub every nook and cranny of your place, well, yeah, keep the dream alive is all I can say. Perhaps something changed in our cleaning habits when the vacuum cleaner became a standard object in every household, perhaps we don’t find the time to do these gigantic clean outs any longer or perhaps we just can’t be bothered. As I often say when the dust balls tumble down the hallway like spinifex on the prairie and I’m pinned to the wall: ‘A little dirt has never hurt anyone.’ Which really just means that I can happily accept my lacking cleaning-gene that obviously wasn’t passed down from my mother.

But if I have to clean, which does happen, I like to make it as graceful an activity as possible. And this doesn’t include crawling around on the floor on all fours with a brush and pan to pick up unidentified objects. Oh no, I do this activity in style using yet another very smart Swedish product, the long handled brush and pan. It’s so simple it’s almost stupid. If it wasn’t so smart. What more can you ask for, functional and good-looking.

www.funkis.com

Homo Cyclius

While Swedes have seen the cycling light many light years ago, we are still struggling here in Australia to come to terms with the bicycle as a mode of transport, not just a leisure activity that includes a car ride, with bike on bike rack, to the park.

Bike riding in Sydney is up there with extreme sports like base-jumping. You are basically risking your life, willingly. People call you a fool for venturing out in the street jungle full of predatory machines such as cars. AND should you be so irresponsible as sticking a kid in the child seat, you could risk loosing custody of your own offsprings. This misconception could possibly be traced back to some clever car manufacturer, who knows. But let’s get one thing straight, bike riding is great. For so many reasons. And I’m not going to tell you which those reasons are; you just have to find out for yourself.

And while Sweden didn’t invent the wheel they invented bikes such as Skeppshult's wonderful machines. Second best I’d say. They are available in Australia, but you might have to pop to Victoria to pick one up.

www.cykla.com.au
Skeppshult Bikes