Not only that, but I have a surplus of eggs at the moment. I never seem to remember that I have them at home when I spot a new carton in the supermarket. Before my experiment with poaching, that meant we had 28 eggs in the refrigerator, and some were moving towards their Best Before Date.

Clearly some cooking had to be done with eggs.

And then the notion of attempting to poaching them came to mind. The sister was encouraging (but wanted no part other than as an observer, which was fair enough.) My Norwegian cookbook from the early 80s and Delia Smith’s How to Cook both said the same thing (and Nigella did not even mention poaching an egg in her How to Eat…) to put a small amount of water in a frying pan, put it to boil, and down to simmer and crack a fresh egg into that.

Well, that was nothing like what I was seeing at the telly. Apart from the water and the egg, it was two separate worlds entirely. So I tried with a mix.

It was not very successful. Well, to a certain degree, it did resemble a poached egg. And the yolk was runny when I poked it. But it just did not look like anything we wanted to eat.

And it has taken me two days to recall why it was not tempting me at all (something I should have thought of before I started the experiment): I have never been a fan of eating runny egg yolks.

Instead we used a frying pan and fried four eggs instead. That was yummy. But while the sister had hers sunny side up – I ended up frying mine on both sides.

On New Year’s Eve, though, I managed to find enough energy to be creative in the kitchen. Together with Sister S, we scouted cook book, blogs and recipes online to find the perfect meal. I’m glad to say we did.

We faffled back and forth on what we would make, but ended up with Sweet & Sour Chicken, with Jasmine rice and vegetables. The recipe we found at the Brown Eyed Baker’s.

We made our own adaption:

Sweet and Sour Chicken

Serves: 3-4 (or two, if you want leftovers for the next day… which you do.)

For the Chicken:
4 boneless, skinless chicken breasts.
2.3 dl cornstarch
3 eggs, slightly beaten
vegetable oil

For the Sauce:

6 dl sugar
12 tablespoons ketchup
3.5 dl vinegar (we used white wine vinegar, but rice is also on the list of preferred.)
3 tablespoon soy sauce
3 teaspoon garlic powder

(We doubled the original sauce recipe).

1. Preheat oven to 190 degrees Celsius.

2. Cut chicken breasts into small-ish chunks.

3. Season chicken with salt and pepper.

4. Have a bowl of cornstarch and a bowl of the mixed egg.

5. Put the chicken pieces in cornstarch and then coat with the egg.

6. Heat the oil in a large frying pan, over medium-high heat and brown the chicken, in batches, turning it so that all sides of the pieces are browned.

7. Place the chicken in a single layer in a baking dish. The dish should be large enough to accommodate both chicken and sauce.

5. Whisk together the sauce ingredients in a bowl and pour evenly over the chicken. Make sure the chicken is well coated in the sauce, before putting it into the oven.

6. Bake for 1 hour, turning the chicken every 15 minutes.

The chicken, with rice and vegetables

For dessert we made chocolate fondue and butterscotch fondue, in which we dipped slices of fruit. The butterscotch fondue was quite good for dipping grapes and apples. We felt that the bananas went best in the chocolate fondue.

Butterscotch fondue

Butterscotch is one of those American flavours that I’ve always wondered what tasted like. I’ve come to understand that it was somewhat like caramel, only not.

This recipe tasted very familiar to us, and after a while we got why – butterscotch is very similar to a traditional type of Norwegian caramels, made from butter. Smørbukk.

It’s one of those candies that always seemed to end up in the Christmas tree, and always stayed there for a long time, because it wasn’t anybody’s favourite.

This was quite good, though, and we actually preferred it over the chocolate fondue.

Ingredients

110 g packed brown sugar
80 ml light syrup
60 ml heavy whipping cream
30 g butter or margarine
3 ml vanilla extract

1. Stir together the brown sugar, the syrup, the cream and the butter in a saucepan.
2. Bring to boil. Stir occasionally so it doesn’t stick.
3. Bring down in temperature and let cook for 5-10 minutes (depending on how firm you want the fondue).
4. Stir in the vanilla.
5. Transfer to a fondue pot to keep wam – although it worked fine without one.

Bringing the butterscotch fondue to a boil

It is a quick and easy cake to make, and if you don’t have blackcurrants or redcurrants, I would think you could substitute with blueberries or other similar berries. Given the season, it might not be easy to get fresh berries, so frozen berries work perfectly.

I ended up making double the size to fill a Bundt pan. (Otherwise, it is the recipe for two 22 cm round cake pans)

Ingredients

150 g butter or margarine

6 eggs
4 dl sugar

5 dl flour

4 dl fresh or frozen (cleaned) redcurrant or blackcurrants (or any other berries for that matter)

Icing:

1 dl icing sugar

1 tbsp water

A desilitre of frozen redcurrants

1) Melt the butter/margarine and let it cool.

2) Preheat the oven to 200 degrees celcius.

3) Mix together eggs, sugar, flour and the melted butter. Don’t use an electric mixer!

4) Put the mixture into a well-greased cakepan (whether it be a bundt pan or an ordinary one)

5) Add the berries. It is not necessary to thaw berries if they are frozen.

I added the redcurrants both to the top and bottom of the cake

6) Bake the cake in the lower parts of the oven for 25-30 minutes, depending on how you want your cake.

7) Let the cake cool down before you take it out of the pan.

Mix the icing sugar and water to an icing and add to the top of the cake (after the cake has cooled down). Let the icing set before serving.

Cake, just out of the oven

If you want to freeze the cake, omit the last step.

We ended up using melted white chocolate as the icing on the cake, since it was a festive occasion.

Redcurrant cake with white chocolate icing

I think the first time I really made this dessert, was back in home ec. in seventh grade. I remember it, because the other dish my group had to prepare, boiled fish of some sort, ended up being inedible, and so it was really pure luck that the lemon mousse turned out splendidly.

This time around, many things seemed to go wrong, and it did not turn out perfectly in consistency – the mousse refused to set properly. But as it tasted absolutely delicious, and tart, I’m still sharing

Lemon Mousse, or Sitronfromasj, from Gyldendals Store Kokebok,

Published 1981

Recipe should yield 4-6 portions, depending on size. It says that it should take 2-3 hours to set after making.

Ingredients:

2 eggs, split into yolks and whites.

2 tbsp sugar (granulated)

the juice and zest of half a lemon

4 sheets gelatin, loosened in water.

3 dl whipping cream.

Instructions

1. Prepare all the ingredients – ie. zest the lemon and juice it, separate yolks and whites, and so on.
2. Whisk the egg yolks and the sugar together.
3. Add the lemon juice and the lemon zest to the egg/sugar mixture, and whisk a bit.
4. Make sure to squeeze the water out of the gelatin sheets, and put them in a pot on low heat on the stove to melt them.
5. Pour the gelatin into the egg/sugar/lemon mixture, while stirring gently.
6. Let it set for a bit.
7. If you’re making the mousse with whipping cream (see below for alternative ingredients if you don’t), whip the cream, then add it to the lemon mousse mixture.
8. Whisk the egg whites until they’re firm and white. (And you can turn the bowl upside down without anything falling out. NOTE: Don’t turn it on its head until you’ve been whisking for a while, and when you do, do it carefully.)
9. Mix the egg whites carefully into the mousse.
10. Pour the mousse into a serving bowl or individual serving bowls.
11. Put it in a cold place to let it set.

Notes:

• We had a lot of lemons and limes, so I ended up using the juice from a whole lemon, plus a lime, which I suspect (in addition to trouble with the gelatin) was why the mousse did not set. It made the recipe wonderfully tart, though, as I did not add any additional sugar to compensate for the additional lime juice.
• Despite it not setting, it did get somewhat mousse-like qualities, and it tasted fantastic. We couldn’t have more than a couple of spoonfuls, as we were full from dinner. The rest was eaten the next day, by the grandmother, an experienced lemon mousse maker, who thought it tasted wonderful.
• Even though raw eggs are deemed safe to use in Norway, due to testing and procedures, because the nature of the internet means things can be read here and made everywhere, I thought it might be good with an additional note. Obviously there is a salmonella risk here that a) was not apparent in 1981 when the cookbook was published, but b) is also rather slim according to statistics I’ve seen. But follow the guidance of your country’s health/food departments, however also be sure that the hygiene is top-notch, and that your eggs look and smell normal before using. (Some countries you can buy pasturized eggs, which I’ve read can be difficult to whip the whites off, but anything to feel safer.)

The finished product

The Lemon Mousse can also be made without cream.

Then you use:

3 eggs, separate yolks and whites

1 dl granulated sugar

the juice from a whole lemon

the zest from half a lemon

and 3 sheets of loosened gelatin.

And omit step 7 from the instructions above.

If you have a food processor, this is not a time-consuming recipe. If not, like me, you’re going to be spending some time shredding the carrots and potatoes.

Carrot patties (gives about 6-7 patties)

from Kokeboka – for deg som syns mat er gøy by Aase Strømstad

Ingredients

4 carrots, finely shredded.

4 raw, medium sized potatoes, finely shredded-

1 dl rolled oats

1/2 onion, finely chopped

1 tbsp parsley, chopped.

2 eggs

1 ts salt (It could probably do with a bit more than this, but better safe than sorry.)

1 ts ground Nutmeg

margarine for frying.

1. Shred carrots, and potatoes if you haven’t done it already.

Shredded carrots and potatoes

2. Finely chop the onion and parsley.

3. Mix all the ingredients together well in a mixing bowl, until it looks like a dough/thick mixture.

The dough mixture. It kind of looks like a meaty mixture, doesn't it?

4. Take about a handful of the dough, and shape into a patty. (You might want to squeeze out some extra moisture – the carrots seem to generate quite a bit of it.) Do this until you have no more dough in the bowl.

Look at that carrot juice, just flowing out.

Two properly squeezed patties

5. Cook them on a frying pan in margarine until the patties are nice and brown on both sides.

6. Serve.

With apologies for the bad picture quality, the finished product

It tasted surprisingly yummy.

Additional notes:

• I would have this either as the main “meat” or as a side dish to meat.
• Make sure you squeeze the additional moisture out of the patties – carrots produce a lot of juice, I discovered, and it was easier getting some shape to the patties after the surplus juice was gone.
• Make sure you cook the patties long enough – keep them small in shape and not too big. My first patty was rather large, and it resulted in it being slightly undercooked, but only just so I could taste the raw potatoes, which was tasting too undercooked for me. The others were fine.

We borrowed Roald Dahl’s Revolting Recipes by Felicity Dahl and Josie Fison, illustrated by Quentin Blake (in Norwegian) from the library and glanced through it. While a lot of the recipes were decidedly revolting, there was also a limit as to what could be done easily, and what was really suitable for a party for adults…

We ended up making the chocolate cake from Matilda. It’s called Bruce Bogtrotter’s Chocolate Cake in the book, but I wonder if the more accurate name would be Miss Trunchbull’s Chocolate Cake?

The thing to realize, before cooking, is that this is a rather easy cake to make, but not really to eat (As Bruce Bogtrotter came to realize.) It is chocolate-y, sinful and moist. And you can’t eat more than one slice, one thin slice, at the time.

(This can be made to look elegant, but part of the point at the day was to have it look slightly sloppy.)

The Roald Dahl Fansite has the recipe in American measurements here

Translated, and adapted, from the Norwegian version with metric measurements.
Bruce Bogtrotter’s Miss Trunchbull’s Chocolate Cake

You need:

a 20 cm round cake pan.

225 g. decent quality dark chocolate.
175 g. softened butter
225 g. granulated/caster sugar
1 dl flour
6 eggs, separate yolk and whites.

Frosting:
225 g. good quality chocolate (We used 70% cocoa content, which was good, but a tad too bitter for our taste).
2 ¼ dl heavy cream.

(We also used white chocolate, to create a spiderweb pattern in the frosting, but that’s not in the original recipe).

1) Preheat the oven to 180 degrees. (We kind of forgot this stage until much later, and it went fine.)
2) Line the cake pan with bake/wax paper. (If you know that it is the type of paper to stick to things, butter it, but ours turned out fine without that.)
3) Melt the butter by putting it in a glass-bowl (or any bowl that can take high temperatures) over a saucepan filled with water. (Also known as a bain-marie) Put the saucepan on the stove, and heat carefully. (You can also melt the chocolate in the microwave on low-temperature, but there is something fascinating about watching the chocolate melt)
4) While this is going on, gently whisk the egg yolks.
5) Whisk the egg whites until they are stiff.
6) Mix the butter into the melted chocolate, and stir until the butter has melted and melded into the chocolate mixture.
7) Take the mixture off the stove. (If you hadn’t started preheating the oven before, now is the time.)
Add the flour, granulated/caster sugar, and the whisked egg yolks to the chocolate mixture.
9) Add the whisked egg whites carefully, and gradually in small increments, into the chocolate mixture, so that they don’t collapse entirely. (I was holding my breath the entire time, as it was the first time I’ve been working with egg whites in this manner.)
10) Pour the now finished batter into the cake pan, and bake in the oven for about 35 -40 minutes. There will be a thin crust on the top of the cake, and if you test it with a fork or a tooth pick, the cake will appear underdone. That’s the way it is meant to be, and as it cools it becomes firmer.
11) Take it out of the oven, and let it cool on a wire rack.
12) The frosting is made by melting the remaining chocolate together with cream in a thick-bottomed saucepan, on low temperature. Stir occasionally, until the chocolate and cream are mixed together. (It will look disgusting, so to speak once the chocolate starts melting and loose bits are everywhere in the cream. Don’t get discouraged, the frosting will look like genuine frosting in the end.)
13) When the cake has cooled enough, take it out of the cake pan and remove the paper. It sinks in the middle, so, place a plate under it, and turn it upside down on the serving plate before frosting it.
14) Use a spatula to spread the frosting evenly on the cake. Let it cool before serving, to let the frosting set a bit.

Additional note – this tastes fantastic cold out of the freezer. (There was once slice left after the party, but I was full so I had my last slice put in the freezer so I could appreciate it properly at a later date).

With almost half a kilo of chocolate in it, it is not amongst the low-calorie cakes, but then again, it is not a cake you make every day either because of the rich taste, so it should in theory be okay to splurge.

I’m also a tad curious as to how it would be as a cupcake?

Many thanks to the sister for remembering to take a picture of the final product.

According to Wikipedia, an ever reliable source, I know, the sago is “a starch extracted from the pith of sago palm stems, Metroxylon sagu.” It is a small, round grain, looking like a pearl, that apparently can be substituted for tapioca pearls.

This weekend, my sister and I decided to see if the porridge was as tasty as what we could remember from what we were younger, or if we just were idolizing the memories.

To be absolute faithful to my grandmother’s recipe, we borrowed her recipe book. We did this partly to stay true to the recipe, partly because we were having trouble finding it in any of our own cookbooks, and finally, because all the recipes that we hit with Google… well, they had some odd additional ingredients. By going with the older recipe, we ended with less odd ingredients, and more pure in taste.

Grandmother’s cookbook is from the latter half of the 1930s, and the title translated to English means Economical cookbook.

Here is the recipe.

Pearl Porridge from Økonomisk Kokebok by Laura Wathne, Alexandra Olsen & Marie Steensland.
(It will serve about 6-8 people, as it is a hefty recipe.)

2 litre or 4.2 pints milk. (Whole milk is preferable, but half of ours was low-fat, because we didn’t have enough.)

2 ½ dl/1 cup sago grains.

1 tablespoon butter (Butter substitute, such as margarine can be used, but the real thing might give a better taste.)

1 teaspoon sugar

2 teaspoons salt

1) Pour the milk in a pot on the stove, and bring it to the boiling point.

2) Then, you add the sago grains, and stir gently to avoid the concoction sticking to the pan.

3) Do this for 20 minutes, or until the milk and sago grain mixture reaches a thick consistency.

4) Then add the butter, the sugar and the salt, and stir for a few minutes more before serving.

Serve with butter/margarine, sugar and cinnamon.

We found that it had just the same taste as we remembered, and since we were only three eating, we had plenty for dinner the next day.

I’m definitely going to try to be more present, and publish more stuff here.