Making it last on the road

One of the biggest challenges for me during this home exchange in Norway has been the grocery situation. I am used to a basically unlimited supply of fresh produce, lots of choices for fresh fish and meat, and lots of organic choices.  Here, not only is the selection very limited, it is also extremely expensive and not always of the best quality. Oh, and there is usually only one option - there is only one type of cottage cheese, no competing brand or prices, no big curds battling the little curds for top seller. It’s just cottage cheese, take it or leave it. Same goes for things like frozen spinach, butter, tortilla chips, tuna in a can, and black beans, if you can find them. It’s as though the whole country is one of those tiny gas station grocery stores where you buy stuff when you rent a beach house. So anyway, we’re on a super tight food budget, and I have gone from almost never cooking to cooking each and every meal, including dessert. Even if I wanted to buy something pre-made, it’s not available. To make it even harder, we don’t really eat the same food as the Norwegians, so we have to search even harder for the goods.  Oh, yeah, and Sara is vegetarian and I am mostly vegetarian. I basically turned into a 1950s housewife to make it all work, and came up with my own tricks to extend my budget:

• Save old bread for sweet (banana-chocolate) or savory (red pepper, basil, and parmesan) bread puddings.
• Root vegetables make delicious, inexpensive, versatile soups. Add milk for a smooth, creamy finish, or add beans and, you guessed it, old bread for a Norwegian ribbolita. Top with store-bought pesto (I found some!) for soupe au pistou, or hide some broccoli (Jon hates broccoli) and puree it entirely.  We have soup 3 times a week on average, and I haven’t made the same soup twice!
• Turn 2 portions of salmon into 4 by adding some sweated red onion and root veggies, wrapping it all in pastry, and you’ve got a quick Wellington.
• Lentils are your best friend. Make a hearty lentil soup with potatoes and carrots, and puree half to add thickness. Just add bread and a simple salad for a healthy meal. Or, cook a pot of lentils with garlic, onion, carrots, canned tomatoes, and lots of basil and oregano to make a thick Mediterranean lentil stew and serve over rice.
• Don’t throw out apples that have started to soften – they make great apple cobblers. If you don’t have muesli or breakfast cereal to make a topping, wrap in pastry for turnovers (I am not making pastry here – I found a really good frozen one!)
• Crepes are cheap and can be filled with cinnamon sugar or nutella and bananas for breakfast, or ham and cheese for lunch. Extras freeze really well and take up no room in tiny European freezers.
• Beans and rice are versatile: with a fried egg and green salad for lunch, with a ton of cumin and turned into enchiladas for dinner, as a side dish for salmon, leftovers can become soup.
• Make your own vinaigrette dressing, it also works as a marinade for fish.

I am always curious about what other people eat, so let me know what you’re eating and how you are stretching your food budget.

No cheeseburger in paradise...

I am pretty well-travelled and have eaten all sorts of different food in my lifetime, and I just can't get myself to appreciate the Norwegian food. It is gloopy and bland, and God help you if you're vegan. As we were eating, well I was staring at the other people in awe but Jon and the kids were eating, we joked that there was almost nothing a vegan could eat, just some apple juice, cucumber, and tomato. Maybe the bread, hard to know. But for the rest of us, there was deli ham and a million kinds of salami, liver pate, sliced Norvegia cheese (like Swiss), blue cheese, and tubes upon tubes of spreads: caviar spread, ham cheese, bacon cheese. Yes, bacon cheese spread. Think tube of athlete's foot cream, but filled with something the texture of toothpaste and the smell of meat. Very odd. There were hard and soft boiled eggs and six thousand types of jelly in big tubs, spread on bread with the back of a giant communal spoon. A bowl with something that looked like a fancy spice rub for meat, white and black speckled sand, was labeled "cappucino." Okay, fine, I drink this, but mine is better. Mine is called Latte and it looks like something that I find in the bottom of my sandals after a walk on the beach. There were cucumber slices, tomato wedges, and 2 bowls of yogurt, melon and plain. Melon yogurt was clearly the more popular, they had a hard time keeping the bowl full.  Ick. There was muesli to top the yogurt, and corn flakes that you top with a thin flavored yogurt the consistency of milk. Oh, and orange wedges with the peel on, like you get in a bar drink from TGI Friday's and throw away. You know, they are stained red from a marascino cherry and come on a plastic fruit spear. Delicious. Oh, yeah, and some capers, but no fresh salmon. I think the capers go on the bread with the salmon roe cheese (the foot cream with kaviar written on it). There were also rubbery, cold scrambled eggs that I took one bite of and literally could not eat, despite the thoughtful touch of freeze dried chives. I had to spit them into my napkin, and I'm even used to institutional scrambled eggs. Jon and Sam had a bunch of little sausages that actually smelled delicious and reminded me of the kind the airlines used to serve with pancakes, back when airlines served breakfast. I loved those as a kid, truly adored them, but was afraid to ruin that memory. Instead I made new memories that will probably stick around just as long. Sorry, new Norwegian friends, I don't mean to be rude, but you guys aren't exactly known for your cuisine. Forgive me for agreeing. 

image: Sosia Bert