Kosta Boda Art Hotel is great

KOSTA BODA ART HOTEL is located in the small village of Kosta that are famous for the Orrefors glass design and the heart of glass manufacture in Sweden.

The hotel that is built some years ago by the owner Torsten Jansson who hade the idea of a great place to show all the design and to use as showroom for the best glass designers that Sweden have today.

The Hotel is a masterpiece in Swedish design and you can stroll around the hotel and you will find one of a kind pieces that are truly mind blowing and extremely rare.

The pool is made of tailed glass and show some great pieces on the bottom of the pool and are changed on regular basis to showcase something new all the time.

The exclusive Spa and guest facilities are wonderfully made and on highest level in every aspect, If you ever come to Sweden this is a must place to visit for some days.

The Linnéa Art restaurant is serving excellent food in wonderful setting and serving some of the best food from around the area and the staff will do they best to fulfil all your needs.

The menu I tried are this:

Creamy soup of leek

Seared scallops with celeriac puree, pear and dill meringue

Herb coated cod medallion with 63* egg, caviar from Kalix and Sandefjord sauce

Ice shavings gin & tonic

Creation of lamb from local farmers

Swedish cheeses from Jurss dairy farm

Passion fruit parfait with brown butter cream

All the food was paired with great wine selection and I’m looking forward to visit this lovely place again very soon.

Many thanks to Bengt Sjöström and all the staff.

Sausage making

Making sausage with friends is one of the funny things in life.

We started up with all of us bringing 5 kg of meat each to the table and ended up with 60 kg (some of the guys hade what they called leftovers)

Great fun to grind the meat the different and to flavour all the mixtures in to what finally ended up as 12 varieties of classical and not so classical sausages.

After a few hours and some more beer the kitchen looks like a disaster and we have to call in some cleaning persons who swiftly solved our little problem.

Part of the meat was used to smoke in the backyard and we also BBQ some of it with great result.

Here are some pictures of our sausage night, do try at your neighbours house J

DMZ (demobilisation zone)

If you travel to Korea you have to visit the DMZ (demobilisation zone) that runs between North & South on the 38 parallel.

This is a remarkable please when you consider that in the south you have one of the worlds strongest economies and in the North are people starving to death to remember is that the line is only 2000 meter wide but the most heavily guarded piece of land on the globe.

There are many places to visit and I recommend using a good guide who knows the history and all the stories.

The known tunnels that have been found is impressive when you know that 40 000 men with field artillery could pass each hour, and this only 44 km from Seoul, scary!

The south regular army of 650 000 men are nothing when you know that north side have over one million hungry men on the other side with army training for 10 years for all the men and 7 years for all the women, this is teambuilding don’t you think?

North Korea:

 The bridge of no return

 Mines everywhere

 The new build train station thet have never been used:

Korea part 2

I did not have any expectations of Korea before we left for the congress, the only thing I did know is that the Korean chefs association will try the best to fulfil our needs for those days, and the did for sure, more than 60 people was food poisoned including me and Christina and that did take away many of the nice days that we expected to enjoy here in this beautiful country and friendly people.

What surprises me is how low the level of foreign languages are here not even in the hotels do they speak anything except Korean at the front desk, strange due to that the hosted the summer Olympics 88 world cup in soccer 04 and will host the winter games in 18 this is for me very strange.

The Korean people are as I mentioned very friendly and very stylish when it comes to fashion especially the female side where you can se how the high economic standard is worn in all the handbags and shoes of the most famous designers, I love it

Seoul is a true mega city with 10 million people in the city centre and 22 million with the outskirts, talk about buzzing city and if you think about that Korea have less than 2% unemployment you quickly realize how big the spending power is here, how the hell do they all keep the weight?

South Korea 1

The WACS (world association of chefs societies) congress are over in South Korea for this time with great achievements regarding cooking and also great to make new friends and to meet up with all the people from the culinary world.

67 member countries was at place with some 500 chefs and with some help of culinary students we could set a new Guinness record of 2111 chefs in one place, great fun.

The next congress will be held in Stavanger Norway in 2013 and we are all looking forward to this and dearly support Norway for great success.

Athens in Greece will hold the congress in 2016 so they have 4 years to sort they economics out and make it work, I am sure they will.

Sebastian Gibrand was representing the Swedish chefs association in the Hans Buschkens junior competition where 7 of the top junior chefs drawn from the globe are competing, he made 2:d place and made us all very proud.

Going to the toilet here in Korea is a remarkable experience due to all the fuzzy buttons on the seat all for different reasons, and of course I have to try them all, I still can’t figure out what the blowtorch is for J

The big negative setback have been that about 60 people got sick as dogs of food poisoning witch gives the organizing people a lot to think about, this is including me and Christina as well J

Tomorrow is a couple of days in Seoul and rest of Korea to do some sightseeing before heeding for home.

More to come.

Best Restaurant in Stockholm?

Frantzen / Lindeberg is a ** star restaurant in the old town of Stockholm and the place to visit as a foodie, many thing has been wrote and said about this small 20 seat restaurant and of course I have to try is as well, so how was the dinner?

You can just say it in one word GREAT with fantastic 18 course menu and great wines and a amazing staff at the tables that is unusual to meet in Sweden.

The menu are inspired by the season with own farmed veggies and close by meat from selected producers, I love the bread dough rising at the table before it was baked and the way of making the butter at the table is wonderful.

For me to try to explain the whole menu is impossible due to that the courses are complicated and will not do justice if I try so look at the pictures (I missed some) and please visit if you can for a exceptional food experience.

Wine tastings

Me and Christina are doing more than 70 wine tastings every year for wine drinkers who love wine but do not know so much about it, I love doing that and let people explore wine in a good and sensible way without fuzz..

This is a great little film about wine where John Cleese guide you thru the most basic stuff in a very good way http://youtu.be/BF6twaKn8xM   for all of you out there who drink your wine for the taste without caring about the label.

Enjoy and give all the posh and snobby sommeliers a hell next time you go out for dinner J