Home emergency readiness and crisis boxes

A while ago we were having coffee and chatting at Kalle's place in the village, a relative with great knowledge in many areas, he can really solve anything.

We started talking about old times and how people viewed food in the past and now. We talked about how we waste too much now and that we are generally bad at "making soup from a nail" and making a lot of food from few and little ingredients.

He pulled out a book he had in his stash and showed what fantastic tricks they used to resort to when food wasn't enough. Now, unfortunately, we are in a situation where we are talking about home preparedness and crisis boxes again. The world is unfortunately such today that we need to think about such things again.

I photographed a few pages in the book.

Hopefully, we won't end up in the same situation as during World War II, but there is still reason to think and reduce food waste.

You can actually do that even for the environment.

Another thing that we have become a little spoiled and comfortable with is how we get food and what we eat. Burbot, for example, is considered a junk fish that may possibly be good for dog food. But you know what?! Burbot may be "ugly" but it is a fantastic food fish.

I would probably say real luxury food. It is white and firm in the flesh and tastes like the finest "flatfish". Not eating it if you catch it is pure madness actually.

Here I will show you how luxurious a "junk fish" can be, and this particular specimen became dinner for five people and a lunch box.

I confess, however, immediately that it wasn't me who caught it. It was Kalle that too! How would I manage without him?

Start by catching enough burbot, here we had just over 800g of fillets.

It's perfectly fine to freeze the fillets.

Make a nice mashed potato preferably with a floury variety. Use butter and WARM milk so that the mash is fine enough to pipe.

Then make a white wine sauce, ingredients roughly as below will be good.

• 2 tbsp butter
• 1 dl shallot, finely chopped
• 1 little thyme
• 3 dl fish stock
• 3 dl white cooking wine
• 3 dl cream
• 1.5 tsp cornstarch
• 1.5 tsp water
• salt
• white pepper

Accessories are of course optional but become both tasty and fancy to

• 1 jar of crayfish tails

• 250 g mushrooms

Burbot

• 600 g plaice fillets
• 2 dl white wine

1 tbsp butter

Salt and pepper the fillets, roll them up and place the rolls in a greased frying pan. Pour over about 2dl of white wine and cook for 7-10 minutes. Until the fish is cooked. It depends, of course, on how big fillets you have.
Pipe the mash on plank or if you serve in ovenproof form. Gratiner in oven on high heat so that the mash gets a little color. Then assemble the dish by placing the burbot rolls. Add the drained crayfish tails to the white wine sauce, they should only get a little warm, not boiled. Pour sauce and crayfish tails over the burbot. Top with fried mushrooms, thyme and a little pepper.
Serve! Luxury, luxury, luxury (as Christina Schollin says)

As icing on the cake, Kalle had baked a vanilla sugar cake and stirred raw raspberries (which he had picked himself)

The bottom line is that "junk" can become something really, really nice if we just want to and rethink, then even the "junk fish" burbot becomes a fine dinner and we need to rewind a bit and learn from those who remember how they did it in the past. If we learn a little from how to "make soup from a nail" and dust off some old wisdom, we'll be fine.

Now I hope you dare to try cooking burbot next time it bites!

Somehow I even got this to be about managing resources in the same way that our entire business idea is based on this thinking. Typical me ;) Here you can find Västerbottenssåpa -> To Västerbottenssåpa

/// Sara