THE CHENGDU BLOG

We came, we cooked, we served a lot of people….

After one hard week of preparations, we cooked everything but the sausages from scratch by ourselves, we were ready to let the guests have a taste of Swedish Christmas food here in Chengdu, China.

Eggs with shrimp mix.          Ribs.

Rolled ham.                                                           Bread.

Janssons frestelse (Guess it would be               A little of this, a little of that.

“Janssons Temptation” in English)

Gubbröra (Old Man’s Mix).                             Mozarella salad for one guest on forgot to mention

                                                                     she’s not eating meat.

The cold platters ready to be served.                       Old Man’s Mix, bread, egg with shrimp Mix, smoked mackerel,

                                                                             Fried pickled mackerel, tomato mackerel, smoked salmon.

Me making rice porridge for the first time in my life…

Ribs, brown fried cabbage, rolled ham,

meatballs, sausages, mashed potato

Watching (Kalla Anka och hans vänner       Guests.

önskar God Jul) cartoons.

Dishes before……..                 ...and when done by yours truly.

We still managed to smile afterwards even if

were very tired.

Have a look at the menu / invitation for this Saturdays Christmas dinner. It’s going to be a few hard days with all the preparations I guess.

For the Swedes I would like to point out we will also show “Kalle Anka och hans vänner önskar God Jul”…

when working i a café is that thee is always bread and stuff to make a quick little sandwich.

Yesterday I put a can of coke in the refrigerator to cool it down quickly… it was still there this morning and now I have some cleaning to do.

In Chinese my name is 大米 (da mi).

For those of you speaking Chinese you immediately see the fun in that name, for the rest of you I will explain it a bit.

It means rice, or to be more exact big grains (as opposed to small grains).

For any Chinese it’s a quite fun name as it would be like someone being called “potato” in English… go figure….

But, and it’s a big BUT. It makes people remember my name and when I first came here it was easy characters  to write and remember. It also sounds a bit like Dani and that’s what my dad calls me from time to time, especially when writing notes.

Anyway, today I met a “Chinese girl called “Audi” so Im taking the Chinese laughs with a smile and as I wrote, nobody here will forget my name…

A sack of rice… a bit like I feel those days

Well, have a look what we dealt with today…

When we couldn’t get our usual 5kg pack we had to bite the (expensive) bullet and buy the 25 kg one.

Our cinnamon rolls.

Here is a snapshot of our window and our biggest seller.. Swedish waffles.

We officially opened today.

yesterday I worked in the kitchen for 15 hours with only 2 breaks for the “washroom” but I got 350 meatballs, 135 chocolate balls, 250 cinnamon rolls, 4 coconut cakes, 4 breads, bread for 100 salmon sandwiches baked and God knows what more, my brain fried in the end.

Today was not slower… I took out the 8 vegetarian Paninis 2 minutes before the first guests arrived at 5 PM… that was after 9 hours of blood, sweat and burns from the oven.

I forgot to tell you about the 2 broken water pipes that broke just when I had 2 oven on, baking cinnamon buns, 2  frying pans frying AND 5 kilo potatoes just being boiled and ready to put in the dressing for the potato salad all about 3 hours before the guest were to arrive, the whole kitchen floor drenched in water and all of a sudden no working kitchen sink… that’s when plumber DANIEL stepped in haha.

Anyway, here are the photos from the opening night that I took, I hope there will be more added later when a friend delivers the ones he took.