The two shocking news of the day!

Today was a day with two very surprising and good news!

1. I found Swedish made pickled red beets in a store

2. Osama Bin Laden has been killed

...in that specific order.

I'm Swedish and not overly patriotic about it (as we Swedes tend to) but there's some stuff from the old country that I really need to keep my daily life going. Basically it's the Swedish "Knacke" hard bread and the pickled red beets. I can live happily without most of the stuff that Swedish expats long for: rotten herring, salty liquorice candy, blood sausage and stuff, but the two mentioned I really need to function normally.

The bread is eaten on a basically daily basis while the red beets are more used for cooking a few special dishes and as a side dish to others so it's more of a bi-weekly/monthly need as opposed to a daily need. Particularly the beets are basically required for the simple but delicious "left-overs" dish of pyttipanna made with left-over boiled potatoes, sausage and onion, pan fried together and eaten with a fried egg and the beets (and plenty of knacke of course!). As Mrs. Sunshine only has a rudimentary knowledge of Swedish, mostly related to baby vocabulary such as "poo", "fart", "puke" and "sleep" she refers to the dish as "German Potatoes" as a similar dish here in Japan is called. This usually triggers the evil eye of dissaprovement from my side and quickly has her change it to "Salaryman's Swedish German Potatoes", which is at least a minor improvement.

In my last shipment of food from Sweden I completely forgot to order the beets and putting in another order just for the beets felt a bit too much as it's a bit of a chore and the shipping fees are quite big. So I've done my best to make do without them, but earlier today as we were in our local "Kaldi Coffee" import foods shop, to my great surprise I found three cans on a shelf at a very reasonable price (I quickly snatched up all three of them!). Pretty amazing since I can't really imagine any Japanese people buying it and using it for any cooking.

This also reminds me of the time I had brought Mrs. Sunshine with me to Sweden and as we were doing some food shopping in a supermarket and effecient as I am, I thought that we should split up and get the stuff the needed of the shopping list. I asked her to get a few things and then quickly headed of to get some of the other stuff. As I came back, I saw Mrs. Sunshine standing at the same spot with nothing in the shopping cart and looking quite annoyed. As I asked her "what's wrong, couldn't you find the stuff?" I got a quite annoyed "how the hell am I supposed to know what's what in here? Nothing is written in any language that's understandable for normal people!" followed by some pointing at foodstuff in our immediate vicinity "rågbröd?! Köttbullar?!! Fullkornsmjöl??!! I don't know if this is even food!" (for you Swedes, you have to imagine these Swedish words pronounced in a mix of Japanese and English).

After that little frustrated outburst, we continued the rest of the shopping together, but she mumbled ""Mjölk"?! How am I supposed to know that that means "milk"?!" a few times...