Hej! (Hello)



Hello everyone!

I’m sure you already know me, but by the chance you don’t and stumble upon this, my name is Sean. I recently moved back to my hometown in central PA after living in Pittsburgh for the last year. Pursuing a career in retail management caused me to work long days with many hours and which took a toll on my personal life and overall happiness. I recently decided to take a step back from all that and spend time with the people I love and pursue things that mean the most to me.

Swedish culture is something that has always interested me. Growing up, my grandfather was a proud blonde hair, blue-eyed Swede who was always trying to teach us sayings in Swedish and introduced our family to a lot of Swedish culture. With the help of my grandmother, father and aunts, our family introduced a lot of those cultural dishes into our holiday gatherings and have drawn excitement and closeness with the making of these dishes every year.

A low quality family photo taken at my grandfather’s 80th birthday party.
Themed in the colors of Sweden (Blue & Yellow)

With the current state of the world (the COVID-19 outbreak) I was only 3 weeks into my new job before being quarantined at home until further notice. With all this new found free time on my hands, and nowhere to go I started some home improvement projects and quickly ran out of things to do. When going through some drawers in my kitchen I stumbled upon some of those Swedish recipes, which brought back a lot of memories and sparked me to explore Swedish and Scandinavian cuisine more with my downtime.

As you already know, (because you’re reading this) I’ve decided why not blog to help share this exploration of dishes with you? I’m calling it “A little too Swede” (For those of you that know me, know I love a good play on words). I’ll be sharing the recipes, tips and sharing a little bit of the culture of Sweden and it’s neighboring Scandinavian countries.

I can’t wait to explore my family’s heritage through food with you all. But, let’s be real, the only people who will probably be reading this are my boyfriend, mother, and other family members. But, if you seemed to have stumbled in along the way - Hej! (or Hello!)

- Sean

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