Recently, I was asked to put together a recipe for pyttipanna. Actually, I was asked to put together a recipe for a Scandinavian dish. When I think Swedish food, I think lots of things, but the one thing that I actually make on a regular basis is pyttipanna.

Pyttipanna is essentially just a bunch of leftovers thrown into a frying pan with potatoes as the base. It is considered husmanskost in Sweden which can be translated as home cooking. The meal is quite common in Sweden still today and one of the few things my father was able to cook for my brothers and me when the dinner duties fell on him while we were growing up. Each recipe will differ. Mostly because, as I mentioned above, it’s just a bunch of leftovers. Without further ado, is the “recipe” (in quotation marks, because I throw in all kinds of veggies and meats that aren’t necessarily listed):

What you’ll need:
Potatoes
Onions
Meat
Oil
Salt
Pepper
Egg
Red Beets

What you’ll do:

• Chop as many potatoes as you want to eat or that will fit in your frying pan.
• Boil them for a while so that they are soft-ish but not cooked all the way through (some people fry the potatoes separately. I like to boil them first).
• Dump a bit of oil (or butter, or margarine, or fat) into a frying pan. Let it heat up.
• Toss in your potatoes. Start frying them.
• Chop your onions in chunks.
• Add your onions to your frying potatoes.
• If you’re feeling adventurous, add more veggies. I like bell peppers, jalapenos, and garlic (none of which are particularly Swedish, but all of which are delicious).
• Chop your meat into chunks.
• Add the meat to your frying potatoes and onions (you can choose sausage, hotdogs, meatballs, ground beef. Whatever. If you’re a vegetarian, you can add mushrooms. Or tofu.)
• Add salt. Add pepper. Lots of pepper.
• Keep frying. The meat needs to cook through. The potatoes should be cooked through (I usually cook them until they have that fried look on the outside). The onions should be see-through.
• Technically, while all this is happening you should fry an egg in a different frying pan. That gets laid on top of your pyttipanna when it is ready to eat. Of course, I am awful at frying eggs, so I usually just move the pyttipanna to one side in the pan and crack an egg in there and kind of let it half-fry, half-mix with the pyttipanna.
• Once your egg is ready to go (it shouldn’t take long because you want it a little runny), serve it up on a plate and add some red beets on the side.
• Add more pepper.
• Then squirt a bunch of ketchup on it.
• Eat. With a fork and knife. It is Swedish after all.

What is your favorite Swedish dish to eat? To make?