I like to cook; it’s satisfying to prepare a tasty meal that looks and smells delicious. The only problem is that I’m often too lazy to try anything new, because usually “new” is equal to “complicated”. I used to be more experimental with food but, during the past few years, my range of recipes has shrunk to the minimum – or I have gotten tired of the same flavours and have stopped using some of the spices. All the cookbooks we have in our bookshelf (photo above) consist of too classy or too weird or too complicated recipes, so I have only occasionally tried new dishes. So, most of the time we eat same meals week after week, and recently, too often, take away food. Oh yeah, I’m not the only one who cooks, Katja takes part too.

The internet is an unlimited book of recipes but most of the (Finnish) food blogs concentrate on too posh or very simple food. Neither which appeal to me. The ingredients may also be difficult to find from a local grocery. The situation may be easier in the southern Finland but here the selection is limited. This is also the reason why I don’t usually search for recipes from foreign blogs although we like exotic tastes: food from Asia, Mexico, Italy and the Middle East.

Most of the exotic cookbooks that are sold in Finland are foreign books. They are translated but very rarely localized. It seems that no one makes sure that the dishes are actually possible to prepare here. On Saturday, I was more than pleased to find a new cookbook (in a photo above) called “Fem asiatiska kök” from a local bookstore. The book is by Yukiko Duke and it presents five Asian kitchens, but not in a traditional sense. The book doesn’t try to cover the whole Asian food culture and all its twists, but it introduces five Asian-Swedish families, their actual kitchens and favourite dishes. The book offers the basics on Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Korean and Thai food and food culture, and gives tools for the reader to invent cross-over dishes of one own. All these families are immigrants in Sweden and they have been forced to mix and match Asian and Scandinavian food and ingredients. Because of this, the recipes seem to be realistic to prepare.

I’m pretty sure we will eat lots of Asian food during the next weeks. I’ll report more when we have tested first recipes. Both photos of dishes are from the book “Fem asiatiska kök”.