Cooking

We are trying to eat at home as much as posible. The main reasons are because it is not easy to eat out with Katherine and we are all three trying to live off of Sam's per diem budget.

Cooking has been somewhat of a challenge in Norway. The first week I did not have my shipment which included my recipes so I was just improvising things. You can see that the directions for curry chicken are not in English. Luckily I bought a Norwegian-English dictionary. It has most words in it and there are pictures.

This first meal, curry chicken, was probably not made totally according to the directions, but you can see, it turned out pretty good.

Even after receiving my recipes there has still been frustration in cooking. It seems that every recipe has at least one item that is a challenge to find. Even at the large grocery store with more American items there were things I coudl not find. Some of the more difficult items have been poppy seeds, cream of chicken soup, and dry onion soup mix. I finally found poppy seeds but had to make substitutions for the others. I have found cream of mushroom soup and cream of celery soup.

Here are some of the exciting items that I found in the larger grocery store. It feels like home.

We wanted to have blueberry pancakes for breakfast because we had some blueberries that were going to go bad. The pancake mix had a picture of crepes so we bought the waffle mix instead. This was before we realized how popular really thin waffles were here.

I was ablet to decipher the entire set of directions but when we had the bowl of liquid and the bowl of dry we knew that it was going to be way too runny to make pancakes. Sam mixed until he thought it was the right consistency.

They turned out like pancakes but they were pretty dense and a lot sweeter than regular pancakes.

Another challenge in cooking I have had was an ill equiped kitchen. We are renting a furnished apartment but the kitchen is lacking. There was no casserole dish, muffin tins, loaf or cake pans or good utensils. There was also nothing in the way of spices so I am starting from scratch. The oven also seems to be a little off. Of course the temperature settings are in Celsius but I can figure out the conversions thanks to google. When I cooked salmon though it took over an hour for it to be fully cooked. I am thinking that the oven is not working properly. We are hoping to get an oven thermometer soon so we know the true temperature of the oven.

It is a challenge, but we are eating well and I am thankful that we have the option to cook. I could not imagine living in a hotel room without a kitchen, especially with Katherine.