Welcome to always use butter!

Hey! Nice to meet you! I'm so excited that you found my special little internet space.

I'm  Emmeline, a Stockholm-based foodie, wine lover and personal chef to all my friends (unfortunately, this is so far an unpaid position). Corporate employee by day (and sometimes night) and avid home cook and culinary nerd by night, weekend and life.

Since I can remember cooking has been my favorite past-time. Comes with the family, I guess, since I have still to meet a relative that doesn't have a stash of "secret" recipes lined up. Growing up my biggest idol was the Swedish "Mat-Tina" ("Food-Tina") and my dream was to have a cooking show just like hers (something I also often pretended I had, explaining all my steps to a make-believe audience (OK I might still do this sometimes.)).

I was raised in a Swedish/American household where my dad was the main chef (he's also the American and I blame him for me not learning the Swedish word for "spatula" until just a few years ago. It's "stekspade", if you're wondering - I'm sticking with spatula.). We ate a lot of traditional Swedish food (I loved and still love the oven cooked pancake with pork and lingonberry jam), American comfort food (Sloppy Joes! Fried chicken!) but also a lot of Mexican (as opposed to the Tex-Mex so popular in Sweden when I was growing up), Italian (mom makes the best bolognese you've ever tasted, she must have been Italian in a previous life) and Chinese (however I think dad made up the names to just sound Chinese).

As I grew up and started to do a lot of travelling and experimenting with food and visited one or two Michelin-star restaurants (as well as loads of others) I expanded this repertoire to include a lot of Spanish (I could live off paella), Southeast Asian (Thai food makes my soul happy), Japanese (can't beat a good Ramen soup) and more. I cook whatever my heart wants at the moment, and whenever I try something new and amazing at a restaurant I spend the following weeks in the kitchen trying to perfect it. This mix of all kinds of exciting cuisine is what you'll find here at always use butter. At times it will be healthy, at times not, sometimes there will be meat, sometimes not. A lot of the time  (but no, not always - sorry for the misrepresentation) there will be butter. Basically, the same as what's going on in my kitchen.

I started this blog because I want to share my love of food and wine with you, and help you cook up some amazing food in your own kitchen. It doesn't have to be difficult to cook great food at home, you just need to know what to cook and how to do it - I want to help you with that. My goal is to figure out all the pitfalls of a recipe before you have to, so that I can help you make the dish perfectly the first time.

I want you to eat well every day, not just on weekends or special occasions. That's why you'll find all kinds of recipes here: quick weekday dinners, tasty weekend brunches, extravagant 8 course New Year's Eve menus that you can easily (yes, that was irony) serve to 25 people with just a little help from a few sous chefs (that's your friends). (Irony or not, it's not impossible. You just need to have your  sh*t in order and work your butt off in the kitchen. I promise I'll share with you how to do this, in case you feel the urge to really impress your friends. But we'll save that for the holidays, okay?)

Apart from recipes you will find tips, tricks and fun facts I've picked up along the way. I love learning new techniques, backgrounds of dishes and flavor profiles for different types of cuisines. I tend to get a bit overzealous from time to time so please be patient with my occasional rambling. If you want to, you can always just skip my rants and go straight to the recipes.

I hope you will enjoy my recipes (and maybe even my rambling), please leave a note if you do or if you have any questions. If you want to follow me on social media I'm alwaysusebutter "everywhere" - so far that's Instagram, Pinterest and Vivino.

Wanna get in touch about something? Please send me an e-mail.

Now, it's time for me to get back in the kitchen - and maybe for you as well?

xxx

Emmeline