Greetings from New Mexico

I'm back in New Mexico after an ultramarathon journey from Stockholm—it took more than 40 hours to get here, with delays in Stockholm, Newark, and an overnight stay in Houston. I was one of the lucky travelers, though. If you've been watching the news over the past week, you may have seen how people have been stranded in airports for days. When I arrived in Houston (very late, after my scheduled connection had already left), the customer service lady told me they'd booked me on the next available flight to Albuquerque, which was scheduled to leave three days later! Luckily, I managed to get on a standby list and was able to make it Santa Fe the next day.

And it's well worth it to be here: there's over foot of snow on the ground (see photographic evidence) and I'm happily vegging out in my own living room with John, the kitties, and a roaring fireplace.

But I still have a couple of Sweden-related items to share:

1) My mother-in-law reminded me yesterday that I never posted about the results of the Sverige's Lucia contest. My favored national Lucia candidate, the dark-complected Nicole Wångne, did not win the flaming wreath. Instead, it went to a blondie named Emma Johansson. Oh, well.

2) I spent today revising the menu, shopping and prepping food for my Allt Om Mat dinner, the photo shoot for which will take place on Sunday. I realized that a few of the ingredients I was planning to use are impossible to find in Sweden. So I nixed tamales (no masa harina), switched the ancho peppers in my soup to chipotles (thinking those will be available in Stockholm—if not we can probably make due with smoked Spanish paprika), and switched the stuffed poblanos to stuffed roasted bell peppers. Hopefully that does the trick, but further revisions might be needed once we go back to the magazine's test kitchen. In any case, we're going to have a killer dinner with family and friends on Sunday. I'm making people wear earth tones so they don't clash crazily with our new pumpkin-colored dining room. This is perhaps the only dinner party ever in which the hostess tells the guests how to dress. Oh well, they'll get to be in a magazine and eat some yummy food in the bargain!

Here's the final menu:

Turkey caldo tlapeno
(soup with smoked turkey and chipotle peppers, thickened with pinto bean puree and garnished with Mexican crema and avocado)

Mincemeat empanaditas
(instead of the sweet, pie-filling style mincemeat, I'm slow-cooking the beef in rum and then mixing in the fruit and spices, for a rich and unique appetizer)

Grapefruit, shaved fennel and pumpkin seed salad
(with oak-leaf lettuce and sherry vinaigrette)

Roasted brussels sprouts with chestnuts and bacon

Chiles en Nogada
(poblanos and bell peppers stuffed with pork picadillo and covered with walnut cream sauce and pomegranate seeds)

Pecan pie with chipotle frozen custard

Yummmmmm!