Swedish cucumber salad

Here's another Swedish recipe for your smorgasbord. This salad is right up there with my favourite cucumber applications: it's sweet and tart, and spiked with aromatic dill and plenty of black pepper. This is a fat-free salad, and its clean and crisp taste makes it an excellent side dish where you're serving up oily foods. It works especially well, for some reason, with fish; this is just fantastic with salmon. If you want to serve up some smoked salmon (or, more appropriately, gravadlax) with your smorgasbord, make the dill sauce here on Gastronomy Domine, which tastes authentically Scandinavian and goes extremely well with these dilly cucumbers.

I'm enjoying cucumbers a lot at the moment, largely because my Mum has been growing some real corkers in her greenhouse. They're smaller than the kind you buy at the supermarket, but are extremely sweet and with a good flavour. If you too are in a particularly cucumberish mood right now, have a quick look at my recipe for Chinese smacked cucumbers.

To make a Swedish cucumber salad to serve six to eight as part of a smorgasbord you'll need:

2 cucumbers
2 tablespoons coarse salt
2 level tablespoons caster sugar (superfine sugar for Americans)
2 tablespoons boiling water
4 tablespoons white wine vinegar
1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1 small shallot, minced
1 small handful dill, chopped finely

Slice your cucumbers thinly and arrange in a colander, sprinkling with the salt as you go. Put a bowl on top of the sliced, salted cucumbers and weigh it down with the set of weights from your kitchen scales (a heavy book will do the job too if your scales are digital). Salting and pressing the cucumbers like this will drive out some of their moisture, leaving them much crisper, and better able to take up the flavours of the dressing. Leave the weighted colander for an hour (keep it on the draining board so the drips can fall into the sink). Remove the cucumber pieces to a large bowl, chill for an hour and pour off any extra liquid they might have produced.

To make the dressing, dissolve the caster sugar in the boiling water, then add the vinegar, shallot and dill. Mix well and pour over the chilled cucumber. Serve immediately.

I'm very fond of cucumber salads, and there are several on this blog - click here for a few more.

Cold remedies

Mae Gabriel from Rice and Noodles asked me to join in another tagging exercise, this time on homebrew cold remedies. I'm delighted she asked; I very seldom get colds. This is not because I have a killer immune system. It's because I have a kitchen cupboard full of magic.

My first move on feeling a bit numb around the soft palate is to down a glass of water with twenty drops of echinacea tincture in it. I did read the studies last year suggesting that it doesn't work, but the office cold tends to pass me by every winter, so clearly something I'm doing is killing the bugs. I'm not going to stop glugging echinacea just yet.

Mr Weasel's Granny used to make a cough syrup at home which became known as Granny's Marvelous Mixture. I rang Mrs Weasel Senior to find out what went into it. You'll need:

Granny's Marvelous Mixture
1 tablespoon golden syrup
1 knob (just under an ounce) butter
1 teaspoon vinegar

Melt the golden syrup and butter together. (Mrs Weasel Senior uses a bain marie over hot water; I put them in the microwave for thirty seconds.) Stir the mixture well and add the vinegar, then taste the syrup. The vinegar should catch the back of your throat while the buttery syrup soothes it. Add a little more vinegar if you feel you need it. I used cider vinegar; Mr Weasel's family always used malt vinegar. Whichever way you do it, it's surprisingly tasty. Mr Weasel and his sister used to run around after all the snotty, snivelling kids at school trying to catch colds so they could get someone to make them some Marvelous Mixture. He's currently sitting on the sofa dipping a spoon into it, licking it and making happy noises.

Honey made by bees which have collected nectar from the Manuka bush in New Zealand is supposed to possess remarkable antibacterial properties. It has a smoky, dark, slightly bitter caramel taste, markedly different from other honeys. Those who are regulars at the local florist will notice that the picture on the front of your pot looks a lot like Waxflower, which is used as foliage with a tiny, pretty pink and white flower in arrangements. The foliage has a beautiful, lemony scent. Clare from Eatstuff tells me that the two are related; both are members of the myrtacea family. (I had originally thought they were the same plant. This is what comes of living on the opposite side of the planet from the nearest specimen of the real thing.)

Manuka honey makes a really delicious cold remedy when mixed with the juice from limes and hot water. Limes are packed to the fruity gills with vitamin C. There's always a bowl of limes in our house; they're excellent in a gin and tonic, and while there is potential that I may have a slightly swollen liver, I certainly don't have scurvy. Add one and a half tablespoons of the honey to the juice of two limes, and top them up in a mug with hot water from the kettle. The curious kitten is optional.

Sickrooms, like kitchens, can get stinky. In our poorly ventilated kitchen, I use Armenian burning papers, traditionally burned to kill germs, to get rid of the pongs produced in cooking. They're magic - these scent-impregnated strips of paper have been produced to the same method for 500 years now, and remove smells magically. They're proof against raw onions, blachan (fermented shrimp) and all kinds of seafood. Armenian burning papers are available at Aedes de Venustas in America, and at Nature et Decouvertes in Europe. (Nature et Decouvertes is a hell of a lot cheaper.)

To use the papers, remove a strip and fold it accordeon style. Light one end with a match. The flame will die down immediately, and the paper will smoulder away to ash over about five minutes, releasing its powdery, incense-heavy smoke. It was believed that this deodorising smoke killed the foul-smelling miasma responsible for influenza, and removed dangerous damp from the air. It doesn't do either of these things (thank heavens for microbiology), but it does smell great, and it does a fantastic job of removing bad smells.

If your cold is still hanging around after all that, you've one last remedy to turn to: our friend garlic. Garlic has powerful antimicrobial and antifungal properties, and after you've chewed on a raw clove nobody will want to come close enough to give you a cold. Bruise a clove and steep it in a shot of vodka for a few hours. If you're not feeling brave, stir in a spoonful of Manuka honey before chugging it.

I'm meant to tag five people with this one. What do you do when you have a cold? This time, they're not all food bloggers - I think some of my perfume blogging friends might have something to add here too. Cait from Legerdenez and Great She Elephant: you're it. Food bloggers who can expect an email shortly are Kalyn at Kalyn's Kitchen, The Winemaker's Wife and Santos from The Scent of Green Bananas. Have fun everyone, and don't forget to use a handkerchief.