Tuesdaily with a short story and a cooking disaster...

So, on Thursday, we decided to make pitepalt. This is a traditional Swedish dish that we fell in love with when we lived there: a dumpling-like ball with a core of salt pork that you cut in half and smother in butter and lingonberry sauce. We have low-bush cranberries all over our land, which is closer to lingonberry than it is to the cranberries you find in the store. I started a simmer, which promptly boiled over on the stove and smoked. *sigh*

It would not thicken. The 10 minutes of boiling turned to 40, before we finally declared it close enough. It was, I will admit, delicious, and worth the wait, and we've got a half a quart of it in the fridge now, so the meal wasn't a complete waste.

The pitepalt itself is a mixture of mashed potato and rye flour. We were very excited about this, as we got a flour mill recently, and have enjoyed milling fresh flour. We had some rye berries, and made up some fresh whole flour. We didn't have salt pork for the center, but we've had it with other sausages in the middle before, and pulled out a random sausage from the freezer. They went together well, and patted into beautiful, symmetrical balls. Mmm...

It was about this time we read further in the pitepalt recipe and discovered that it took 45 minutes to cook. We were already hungry, so we had a snack and started the boil.

15 minutes we peeked under the lid... to find 8 sad sausage bits floating in the weakest, nastiest potato soup you ever saw: our balls had completely disintegrated! What little remained on one or two of the sausages was undercooked, goopy and looked a bit like paper mache.

I was very disappointed, and I completely blame the finger monsters:




And, I'll leave you with a fictional story, posted today at Torn World...

( What a Warsailor Has To Be )