Mea Culpa

After a series of accusations by Per, he has given me the courage to admit to y'all that:
I was never in Kenya this summer, but spent it in suburban Houston.
I apologize for any misunderstanding this may or may not have caused.

My Patented Chicken Grease Soup

Henrik and I have joketerrified Swedes with the news that a lady in Texas named Grandmother Butterswarmth has been executed for jaywalking.
Other than that, I made soup. When the chicken fat skimmed up to the top, I thought it was flour so I mixed it back in. It comes from a recipe for gumbo, but unfortunately okra is unheard of here. Of course I took pride in this in the way that people who live in foreign lands cling to peripheral regional differences when daily life becomes too absurdly similar. So I got really full of myself and tried explaining how it's a hexagonalish green cylinder that tapers of to a point at the end, with slimy-beady cross-sections, but that didn't make any okra appear. So in the end I made a chicken stew that turned into a chicken soup. Henrik "the dolt" doesn't eat vegetables so it was fun that he had to eat six different types of vegetables for dinner.

This is how to make it:
1. Make roux. That's mixing about 6 TBS oil with about 4-5 TBS flour.
2. Chop up one red pepper, one big onion, and two stalks celery.
3. Put it in. Lower heat and cook for about 15 minutes. I added more oil when it got too dry.
4. Peel and cut about about 4-5 big potatoes and about 6 carrots.
5. Put them in. i added a little water and covered it for about 10 minutes, about middle heat.
6. Cut up about 10 mushrooms, 3 really big thawed chicken filets, and press 4 cloves of garlic.
7. Put that in. heat at about 3. shake in a fair portion of black pepper.
cover with water. i covered it at least a good inch or two above, but that made
it too watery the first day and perfect today. Simmer for about 50-90 minutes (but you can take it off when the chicken's not red and the potatoes not crunchy.)
8. eat over rice with good bread on the side.
8 1/2: i bet if you used noodles instead of rice, it wouldn't be as good.
9. on the 2nd day bread isn't needed.
10.make sure henrik eats vegetables. otherwise he will serve himself
a plate of rice with some gravy and a potato on the side, and eat a bag of
chips an hour before the food is ready.
I'll post a picture soon. Well...I'm only kidding myself. If I wouldn't post a picture for Surya of the Norweigan fjords I'm probably not gonna post one of chicken soup leftovers.

I'm having mixed results in acting more Swedish. My friend noticed I had become more Swedish because when he complimented my Swedish-speaking I became flustered and uncomfortable, denied the compliment and changed the subject, instead of basking in it and encouraging more compliments. On the other hand, I can't get into snus, which most Swedish males use and is basically a bag of nicotine (with some tobaccos mixed in) that you put into your upper lip and leave there for awhile. It's mellowing for a while but when it moves around nicotine juice runs down into my mouth and tastes like accidentally biting down on aspirine.

The other day I saw a funny thing when I looked out the window and saw a hurried-looking felllow sliding and running down a patch of smooth ice while putting on his jacket and nervously checking the time on his cell phone. He couldn't have been foreign, but I'm actually getting pretty good on the ice slopes, which reminds me: with the skill I've gathered walking on ice I think I'm qualified to move to Latin America and declare myself the best hockey player in all of Latin America, and I'll become a continental celebrity.
So until you see me basking in crowds on Telemundo, bye.