Join Helena Elm and her family on an excursion to the ramslök forest and Stora Rör.
Spring has arrived with notice to Öland and we have already enjoyed temperatures of over 20 degrees! Just such a sunny spring day the other week, we took the opportunity to go on an excursion to Stora Rör to have coffee and pick spring onions in the surrounding areas.
At the bottom by the water in Stora Rör a red shed is located Grandma's Stone Oven Bakery and Coffee House which is open all year round. Here you can buy sourdough bread and drink a really nice cappuccino, but what the place is most famous for is undoubtedly its cardamom and cinnamon buns.
I'm not exaggerating when I say that these cardamom buns are the best I've eaten in my entire life. Warm and freshly baked, and with that buttery crunch that floats out a little under the buns and hardens... Sometimes I eat two buns myself.
Here we watch as Anita, who runs the café, brushes the buns. The cafe is called Mormors as a tribute to Anita's grandmother, because it was with her grandmother in Stora Rör that Anita spent her childhood summers. Before the Öland Bridge was built in 1972, ferry traffic ran between Stora Rör and Revsudden, and Anita worked in the kiosk in Stora Rör during the summer when she was a teenager.
Although there was plenty of space between the tables in the outdoor seating area, we wanted to sit down by the pier to watch the water and hear the lapping of the waves against the boat moored at the pier.
Freshly baked buns and coffee in the glorious spring sun on a jetty on Öland, what more could you want?
Satisfied after coffee, we then went on to Rönnerum to pick spring onions.
If you've never picked chives before, you might wonder how you really know it's chives? The leaves resemble lily of the valley, which is poisonous, but there's no mistaking it - the chives have a scent that convinces, and it smells like a mixture of chives and garlic. And of the chives and lily of the valley, the chives usually come the earliest.
You can eat both the leaves and the stem, and the spring onion can also be frozen. Personally, I usually freeze it in bouquets of about 20 grams each, as that is a good amount for a batch of scallion pesto or scallion aioli.
When the scallions grow at their best, so do the scallions, and the girls each picked a bouquet.
// Helena Elm, April 28, 2020
