Post #2 – Swedish Festival

The Swedish festival of Los Angeles

I’d been looking forward to this for quite sometime. I had missed the orange county Swedish fest two weeks ago, and this would be my last chance to experience Scandinavia in LA until next april….

We got to the shrine around 1PM and went right in through the entrance to be welcomed by women in their traditional Scandinavian outfits. A bunch of vendors had setup shop inside the auditorium selling all sorts of Swedish knickknacks and souvenir shit…. I hadn’t come to buy useless crap to leave on my already-cluttered desk; i was here primarily for the food….
Swedish food… hmm… what could it be? i always figured it would be stuff like waffles and fish… i guess i was partially correct, but i found a couple interesting things to eat…
the central vendor was selling this poison called “glogg”. this stuff is basically a hot mulled wine made of all sorts of spices, red wine, port and brandy… it’s potent stuff…….. very tempting…. but, we hadn’t had anything to eat yet… glogg would have to wait…

Arriving with an empty stomach, my brother (the tagalong) and i decided to grab some breakfast… We bought a plate of pastries including chocolate cake, gingerbread cookies and a roulette cake-kind-of-thing…. this stuff was all good and uninteresting… but… there was one thing that was quite good…….

Meet Semla

This thing looked like a hollowed out bread bowl gone cream puff….. Had it been just that, it wouldn’t have been all that interesting… but the X factor of this thing is that it’s filled with marzipan cream…… It’s got an almond paste-based cream inside which tasted so much better than its boring original counterpart….

So we grabbed one of these and a cup of Swedish black coffee (which is basic black coffee that has the words “Made in Sweden” on the label)…. and that was breakfast…

So after we devoured breakfast five minutes into arriving, we began planning lunch….. the good thing about a fast metabolism is that i can eat whatever i want whenever i want, and still be hungry within a couple seconds…. yeah, good stuff…

ten minutes into arrival, breakfast was over, we began our quest to find lunch….

there weren’t very many choices and drinking glogg seemed like the most appealing option… but we ultimately decided to do a sampler platter…. what i mean by this is, my brother and i each picked up one course and split it two ways….. He got the baby-shrimp open-face sandwich, and i got the plate of meatballs and mashed potatoes

to sum it up, the meatballs were decent and the sandwich had too much mayo…… we washed it down with some Julmust, the traditional holiday soft drink of Swedish, which tastes basically like Jack&Coke minus the alcohol. It tastes pretty good…. Closest thing i can think of is that special Pepsi holiday spice blend they have around Christmastime.. this stuff outsells Coke in Sweden in the holiday season.

okay we had been there for about 20 minutes and had breakfast and lunch… we decided we ought to go browse for a bit to digest the truckload of food we just devoured before picking up some glogg…
they had lots of miniature wooden figurines things for sale, along with other crap you’d find in tourist traps in the Stockholm airport…. the only decent section was the imported food section which had all sorts of imported Scandinavian chocolates, candy bars, drinks and other treats…. at the suggestion of some Swedish woman, i picked up whatever she believed was good. i took her word for it and bought a couple overpriced chocolate bars and licorice sticks… on a side note, I have to say that Swedish, or scandivian girls in general, are gorgeous…. really…. so, i entered a lottery to win tickets to Sweden (which i have not since heard from)

so we got tired of browsing and picked up two cups of glogg…. and wow is this stuff potent…. it’s not potent like vodka or any kind of spirit…. it’s more because it’s served hot… it’s like drinking warm wine with a slightly higher alcohol content…. inside these cups they had placed (i think) an almond and a raisin… i’m not sure if it was exactly these two things, but i was sure that i wasn’t going stick my fingers into my cup to dig them out… but i can assure you it was some sort of nut and a dried fruit…. as the glogg cooled off it became increasingly easier to drink…. we stood there and watched some Swedish Christmas pageant up on the stage while enjoying the rest of the drink…. overall a great experience….

i can’t wait until the next Scandinavian festival, which is gonna be in Thousand oaks on April 19-20…

until then, you can pick up glogg (or a non-alcoholic pre-glogg) from your local ikea..

skål