From my great grandmother’s cookbook from 1920, or thereabouts, I have now learnt how to make chicken with white sauce. It is quite simple, really.
You simply make it like you would make hen with white sauce.
That’s the entire recipe.
Granted, the hen with white sauce was the recipe before that, so it is not very strange, but it has become an internal family joke now.
When I was in London last year, I picked up some seeds. Now they’re bearing fruit. The cherry tomatoes are even tasting nice.
At school, I was a terrible student when it came to the natural science subjects. I just could not see why we should cut a liver and get a reaction to it. Or to cut our fingers to test which blood type we were – when the hospitals could do that a whole lot more accurately, and under more sanitary conditions.
This puzzles my Dad, because I love to experiment, open gadgets, watch reactions and find out how things work. (Putting the gadgets back together again after opening them is less interesting.)
But, I think that if we had done experiments where I could see the use, I might have been more motivated. Such as homemade vanilla extract.
I’m trying this out because it seems to be a staple in a lot of recipes, yet, it is not available commercially in any food store I’ve been to in Norway. Artificial vanilla essence, yes, vanilla extract, no.
I bought vanilla beans, but then was faced with the alcohol problem. Curiously enough, we do have a lot of flavoured alcohol at home – tax free shopping – but very little without any additives at all. So that had to be acquired before I could start.
White wine vinegar, which is rather difficult to find in a regular Norwegian grocery store, ended up having the perfect bottle for the experiment.
I relied on the previous documented experiments of Clotilde of Chocolate and Zucchini and Elise of Simply Recipes. Both of whom have very detailed recipes, so I won’t repost that. I used a bit more liquid than they did, as my bottle was around 2 cups (4 dl) in size, and the vanilla beans looked so alone with a half full bottle.
The day after I put the vanilla beans into the alcohol, it had started changing colour. A week after, it was lightly brown.
Three months down the road, and the bottle is half full – I’ve used so much of it in baking and by making butterscotch fondue.
Almost all the cooking shows I’m watching has someone poaching an egg at some point. I also saw it in Julie and Julia (or was it the other way around?)
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.
Never mind that I’m nearly three months late in posting this. I was hit with something just before Christmas, and was tapped for energy almost all through January.
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:
The finished product
When I was younger, I thought that these cookies were just a tradition in our family. See, my great grandmother was called Serina, and I obviously thought that was the reason for why we were making them. At any rate, they are a delicious butter cookie that you just keep eating and eating… and uh… soon there is nothing left. This recipe has been doubled from the original recipe, from Meierienes Prøvekjøkken.
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Before the Christmas baking set seriously in, my mother had to have a birthday cake. Mum does not particularly care for cream cakes, so this was an easy choice to bake. It first came into the family when Sister started Home Economics in sixth grade and it has been with the family since then. Especially since we usually end up with more redcurrants than we can reasonably eat. (Personally, I’m not a big redcurrant fan, but I like them in this cake.)
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)
Or, lemon mousse in English, of which there seems to be oodles of recipes on the internet.
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 
Is the cookbook shelf. I keep bringing them home, because I’m so tempted by the covers and the titles… But I don’t know where (or if) I’ll get the time to make all of these recipes that look interesting.
After really binging this weekend (why, oh, why?) I felt the need for something healthy for dinner today. I landed on carrot patties – made from the same principle as hamburger patties, I guess, but without meat.
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)
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