Stockholm – EcoSalon

How Green is Your City?

Jill Ettinger — Sun, 10 Mar 2013 08:00:27 +0000

A new infographic details municipal efforts to make cities more environmentally friendly.

With the definition of “green” still fuzzy when it comes to products, it’s even more difficult to measure the efforts of cities attempting to decrease their carbon footprint. What are water consumption policies like? How many cars on the road? What types of recycling programs and waste reduction efforts are underway? Are there any green building or alternative energy incentives?

HouseTrip set out to find out and measure the efforts of the world’s top “green” cities. Motivation for the project came from wanting to help draw attention to the importance of cutting global pollution generated by cities. With more than half of the world’s population now living in urban areas, cities are beginning to become leaders in environmentally responsible living. Data collected from the Siemens Green Cities Index and other sources provided the information to develop the infographic.

The inforgraphic shows which of these most progressive cities are doing what in the world of green: London, New York, Vancouver, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, and Stockholm. So what are these cities up to? Just 44 percent of New Yorkers own a car, for example. Compared with 95 percent of the rest of Americans, that’s a pretty huge difference. Head over to Amsterdam and you’ll see more bikes than people—one bike for every 0.73 people in fact. Copenhagen is among the cities embracing the benefits of green roofs, with legislation requiring green rooftops on all new buildings, which will add 5,000 square meters of vegetation. Vancouver and Copenhagen recycle 55 percent of all their waste. Vancouver generates 90 percent of its energy from renewable resources; Stockholm is at 60 percent.

Keep in touch with Jill on Twitter @jillettinger

Images: HouseTrip

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Spätzle: German Egg Noodles

Johanna Kindvall — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 16:05:31 +0000

How to make delicious egg noodles for stews.

Årsta fältet, a flat field in a suburb of Stockholm, may not be the most exotic place to visit in the capital city of Sweden. But somewhere in that field I had one of my most peculiar food memories ever. It was there I ate spätzle (or maybe it was Hungarian nokedli) for the first time in my life. The spätzle was served with a rich goulash that we made in a hanging cast-iron pot over an open fire. This is that kind of moment that is hard to recreate.

The goulash was amazing but it was the spätzle that won my heart. Since then I’ve been treated to spätzle again and again and I love it as much every single time. However, not many cooks have been able to share their recipe as they cook it by instinct and without any instructions. Fair enough. I just had to start figuring out my own way.

I started by playing around with different recipes I found online. The result was often not that great, which probably had more to do with the choice of flour than the recipe. I discovered that, for example, pastry flour (why use that in the first place?) made the batter taste really floury in an unpleasant way. I also tried adding fresh grated potatoes but then it became halušky (potato noodles). At some point I gave up and started to use just regular wheat flour.

Recently, I followed Steen Hanssen’s recommendation to use dinkelmehl (spelt flour). The spätzle became darker and had a slight nutty taste. I liked it.

Spätzle Batter
(2-3 people)

3 eggs (depending on size)
¼ cup of lukewarm water
About 1¼ cups of spelt flour or regular flour
A pinch of salt
Some freshly grated nutmeg
A couple tablespoons of butter

Heat up some water until its just lukewarm. Mix together eggs, water, nutmeg and a pinch of salt. Gradually start adding flour, little by little. Make sure to avoid creating lumps. The dough has got enough flour when its a little stretchy and easily falls off your spatula without breaking. If you get the dough too stiff, just add some more water. Let the dough rest for about half an hour.

There are many different ways to “form” the spätzle and it’s probably very individual which method you may prefer. I have tried some techniques with more or less success. I think using a spätzle lid is the easiest (see image above).

Heat up some salted water in a large pot that will fit the spätzle lid nicely (see below for other methods). Bring the water to a boil. Lower the heat. Place the lid on top of the pot and add ¼ of the dough on top. Start to press the dough down with a spatula (often comes with the lid). Stir around the spätzle a little so they don’t stick together. The spätzle are done after about 2-3 minutes when they float up to the surface. Use a skimming ladle to fish them up. Repeat above steps until the dough is finished. Adjust the heat if necessary. Add some melted butter to the spätzle so they don’t stick together.

Serve the spätzle with a rich goulash, creamy mushrooms or baked in the oven topped with cheese.

Other methods
Another technique is to use a pasta strainer, preferably those with larger wholes. My stainless steel strainer worked fine, even if it was a little clumsy, the spätzle came out tiny and delicate. Just let the strainer rest at an angle on the edge of the pot (see image above) and use a soft spatula to press down the batter through the holes into the hot water.

If you want larger spätzle you can use a smaller chopping board and a chef knife or a bench scraper. Place one batch of dough on the chopping board and let it rest at an angle at the edge of the pot. Start to cut small pieces of the dough right into the boiling water. Know you’ll get better with practice!

Illustrations by Johanna Kindvall

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Royal Vintage Exhibit An Inside Look At Swedish Royalty

Johanna Björk — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 16:59:48 +0000

Stockholm’s Royal Vintage exhibit gives us an inside look at Swedish Royalty.

Most girls dream of someday getting to play dress-up inside the closet of a real-life princess. Perhaps getting to peek into it would be a close second, and that’s exactly what a show at the Royal Armory in Stockholm lets us do. Entitled Royal Vintage, it’s a showcase of dresses worn by the women of the Swedish royal family, from the early 1900s up until today, with a main focus on the 50s and 60s. Over 70 couture pieces are featured in the exhibit, all displayed according to color. Most of them come from the gilded closets of King Carl XVI Gustaf’s mother, Princess Sibylla (who would have been queen had the current king’s father not died in a plane crash in 1947, before the crown was passed on to him), and sister, Princess Margareta, Mrs. Ambler.

The dresses are all hand-made, mostly locally in Stockholm by prominent tailoring schools. One of the most respected ones was the Märtha School, named after sewing enthusiast Princess Märtha. Like most tailoring schools at the time, it included a French department with models often sewn from original Parisian patterns. The school founder, Countess Margareta von Schwerin, considered that French fashion led to more economical consumption as the garment lasted for at least three years.

At this time, slow fashion was the only kind of fashion, accessible merely to the privileged elite. Hooks, buttons and closures were all made by hand, although as the times progress, zippers start making appearances. The curators of the exhibit has made durability and eco-conscious thinking a main focus of the show. It’s hard not to ponder the fact that these dresses all look as good as new even though some of them are going on 100 years old. One factor may be that they probably weren’t worn that many times, but it’s clear that a well-made garment does last.

For those interested in seeing more garments from the wardrobes of Swedish royals, it would be worth your time to check out the rest of the armory. Stand-out garments include garb that two kings wore when they were killed, complete with blood-stains that tell the eerie tale, and even a stuffed horse named Streiff, upon which King Gustavus Adophus rode when he met his demise on a Polish battle field in 1632.

Besides an amazing red coat (very 70s-style, which was right, except it was from the 1870s), and the fact that the people seem to have been very short (yes, it seems Swedes were short once upon a time) a few hundred years ago, what I am most enthralled by is the clothing from the early parts of the 1900s, when King Gustav V brought lawn tennis and the whole romantic, English-influenced style that went along with that to these Northern parts of Europe. King Gustav was quite the sharp dresser — he always wore hats, often vests and driving gloves (a garment for each occasion), had enormous feet and, rumor has it, tended to fancy the gents over the ladies. I got to try on one of his hats (or, more likely, a replica), which is about as close to actually playing dress-up in a royal closet as I got.

Here’s some photos I took from the exhibit:

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Berlin Fashion Week: Backstage Exclusive with Mika Modiggård

Abigail Wick — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 21:11:53 +0000

ExclusiveAn interview backstage at Berlin Fashion Week with Swedish sustainable designer, Mika Modiggård.

The industry’s biggest names converged in Germany’s capital last weekend for Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Berlin. Historically, haute centers like New York, Paris, and Milan have defined global garment trends, and these cities’ gridiron prominence make it difficult for emerging designers to make inroads in high-concept couture. Berlin, still gritty over 20 years after the Wall dividing East and West fell, is a different story altogether, and has become a prime platform for new, less-established designers to showcase their collections on an international stage. Swedish-born, Berlin-based fashion designer Mika Modiggård is one such artist.

With astounding industry momentum and only 23 years under her belt, Modiggård is a rising star in Europe; this year, the Swedish Fashion Council ranked her as one of the best up-and-coming designers at Stockholm Fashion Week, and she presented her business and designs to the Crown Princess of Sweden. On Thursday, Modiggård kicked off the catwalk for the Lavera Showfloor in the Kosmos building on Karl-Marx Allee, a monumental socialist boulevard that divides the Mitte and Friedrichshain boroughs of Berlin. She debuted her collection, Rollercoaster, for over 1,000 attendees, featuring sustainably-produced clothing crafted from upcycled vintage-leather and ethically-sourced silks.

Sweeping change has defined 2011 for Modiggård, a theme that manifests in her latest designs: Her life has been a professional and personal roller coaster this year. Post-runway show, EcoSalon sat down backstage with the designer to talk about her career and latest collection.

Mika Modiggård

Modiggård explained that she has been hand-producing and selling clothing since she was 15 years old, when she began experimenting with a sewing machine and creating projects with scrap and secondhand shop garments she deconstructed for auto-didactic purposes: “My education wasn’t formal, but rather one of reverse engineering,” Modiggård said. Growing up in downtown Stockholm, she would frequent used-clothing stores, picking up items that she would disassemble at home, in the process learning how to recreate the shapes and patterns herself. After “one hundred so-so projects,” she received an internship and, summoning all her young-adult courage, asked if she might sell some of her own designs in the shop.

Out of bits of leftover cloth, she stitched together quirky little wallets with a set sales price of only 10 euros. Later that year, she and her father went out for a quick bite to eat at, of all places, a European McDonald’s. At the eatery, a fashionable young woman stood in line in front of Modiggård; to pay for her meal, the young woman pulled money out of one of the billfolds that Modiggård had sewn. At that moment, the designer said, “I knew that I could make it, and that this is what I was going to do.”

Four years ago, Modiggård relocated to Berlin, a cultural destination for indie artists from around the world, who are attracted by the city’s cheap rent for apartments and studio space. She set up shop in the city’s Neukölln borough, a district with one of Berlin’s highest immigrant populations and began fusing her existing eco-fashion sensibility with a harder-edged style. The result? Rollercoaster, a collection that bespeaks the designers current state of mind.

“The past year has been a figurative roller coaster ride. My designs burst into the public eye, garnering me attention I could never have foreseen. The limelight has been overwhelming, but more so an inspiration to push my work into riskier territory.” With the challenge to up the ante creatively, Modiggård retained her loyalty to Scandinavian minimalism but began fusing this design tradition with influences from Berlin’s burgeoning hip-hop scene and also street fashion, which tends to be hard, dark and with little whimsy.

With Modiggård’s gravitation toward experimentation has also come a deepening of her commitment to ethical production of her garments. Her company motto – Fashion, but not at any price – translates her ecologically-minded philosophy toward her craft, one in which environmental and labor conditions are just as important as developing her unique brand of clothing that gives you extreme street cred.

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