Norwegianne.net

Category: Food

  • Eating at work

    When I got back to work after a two-week vacation, they had started renovating the cafeteria closest to my desk.

    For the past two days we’ve been trying out the other cafeterias in the building – they serve the same food, which is made in the same kitchen – but somehow it is not the same. The food is in the wrong places, I can’t find anything… and so on.

    And since it is the largest dining area that has been closed off, finding a space to eat can be a challenge.

    I guess I am very much a creature of habit on some things.

  • The Eurovision menu

    Having an Eurovision party is an excellent time to try out the recipes I’ve collected from other blogs. Norway isn’t in the finals, which didn’t come as a huge shock, but the food should be good anyway.

    Currently in the oven is the Cinnamon Sugar Pull Apart bread. Earlier today, I made Lemon Poppy Seed Muffins, and Chocolate Dump Cake. I can’t wait to eat the Chocolate cake – it is looking really good out of the oven. (Aside – converting from imperial to metric on the go is not advised. The whole operation took a bit longer than it would have if I’d just printed the recipes and written the conversion on the paper prior to baking. Why can’t we all have the same measurement system?)

    In addition to a bowl of crisps and some sweets, it should be enough to distract from the worst of the songs.

  • Cooking chicken with white sauce

    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.

  • Experimental Cooking: Homemade vanilla extract

    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.

  • Eggy cooking: Poaching an egg

    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.

  • My New Year’s Eve Menu

    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:

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