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World Cup food blogging – Sweden

I’ve been trying to keep optimistic about England’s chances in the World Cup, but it’s not easy. Michael Owen was the only forward in the squad with a history of scoring lots of goals, so that injury is a real blow. Crouch actually did OK today in midfield areas, but I just don’t think he’s a real goalscorer. At least Rooney gave a couple of reminders of just how good he is. But mainly: we still haven’t seen a performance of conviction or cohesion from the team as a whole. As long as they’re still in the competition, there’s a chance that they’ll suddenly get their act together, but at the moment it feels like they’re just limping from one crisis to the next.

Anyway. The food blogging. I didn’t fancy herring or akvavit, so I poked around on the web and found a recipe for pepparkakor (ginger biscuits). I just don’t get why Americans insist on measuring everything in cups. I mean, flour – OK, although I’d still personally prefer to measure it by weight. But butter? Why would you measure butter by volume? They turned out quite nice, a bit like gingernuts. Apparently they improve if you leave them for a bit, as well. I doubled the quantity of spices, because it just didn’t seem very much, and they certainly aren’t overpoweringly gingery.

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Amusing football thing

Zlatan Ibrahimovic juggles chewing gum.
(via Släpkoppel)

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Culture

Soccer, soca, and similar

I was getting antsy waiting for the footy (an hour and twenty minutes build-up before the match clearly isn’t enough, dammit), so I thought I’d try and buy some music from each country England plays in the World Cup.

I already have a fair bit of Swedish pop, thanks to Catchy Tunes of Sweden. Trinidad and Tobago was easy enough; the team nickname is the ‘Soca Warriors’ after all, and so I looked up soca on Wikipedia and bought a few tracks from iTunes, some old (Lord Shorty, The Mighty Sparrow, Lord Kitchener), and some new (Shurwayne Winchester, Machel Monatano).

Paraguay, on the other hand, seems a bit tricky. Calabash, everyone’s favourite fair trade world music mp3 shop, doesn’t have anything from Paraguay. Wikipedia was useless. iTunes mainly offers me traditional harp music which, to be honest, I’m not getting enthusiastic about.

Can you tell I’m killing time here?