The Susanne

Came across this ad today. My good­ness. What more can I say…

Me? Write a book? Sure!

Yeah, summer is here. And coffee drinker that I am I’ve been feel­ing jeal­ous of all the people I see enjoy­ing iced cof­fees: here in Oslo at least it’s very dif­fi­cult to find iced coffee that doesn’t con­tain milk. Usu­ally the vari­et­ies to choose from are: latte, mocca and cap­puccino. Yeah. So I star­ted exper­i­ment­ing at home, with espresso, ice, water, sugar and soy milk with none too good res­ults. Des­per­a­tion star­ted clos­ing in on me, but then — I remembered a favour­ite drink of mine when I vis­ited Greece with mum and The Sister in 2004: Frappé! It’s Greek iced coffee and it’s beau­ti­ful! And the best part is, it’s milk free! (Okay, milk is optional, but there is really no need for it.) Also it’s lovely tast­ing and has the best froth of any drink I can think of. It’s made from instant coffee which is mixed with a little water and some sugar, then shaken or blen­ded (I use a hand mixer) until it forms a thick froth. Poured over ice into a tall glass and then just enough water is added to fill the glass, served with bendy straws. Amazing!

I have news! I have decided to start with recipes! At the moment I am trying to figure out a good way of post­ing them out­side the chro­no­logy of the blog itself - right now I’m think­ing I’ll use ‘pages’ but that will require some help from The Boy­friend as I’m cur­rently using pages just as photo albums. So I’ve star­ted writ­ing down how I make things… It felt really com­plic­ated at first but I sup­pose it will get easier as I do it more. Have also star­ted taking pic­tures of the cook­ing pro­cess, to accom­pany the recipes. I’m well excited.

As I’m writ­ing this, there’s an exhausted bunny asleep next to me. We took him out today for the first time after let­ting him get used to the har­ness for a few days. I sus­pec­ted he’d like being out­side but I also thought he’d be a bit scep­tical and maybe even a little scared at first; not so! He abso­lutely loved it out­side and he wasn’t afraid at all. He ran, jumped, inspec­ted the dif­fer­ent plants and the cigar­ette butts on the gravel (oh how I love my neigh­bours who smoke…) and basic­ally seemed just in his ele­ment! It was def­in­itely a great suc­cess and some­thing we will have to keep up. When I go to stay at my parents’ for the summer they’ve agreed to help me build a cage for him out of chicken wire so he can be out­side all day. It will be more restric­ted than run­ning around almost freely on a leash (with me trying to keep up), but I’m sure he’ll like it. And the com­pany of The Cat, of course! Here’s my ickle bunnykins enjoy­ing his first taste of Mother Nature:

Since Wed­nes­day, I’ve com­pleted two of my four exams. I’m utterly exhausted but it feels amaz­ing. We’ve been eating a lot of meat lately because it’s what’s been on sale and also The Boy­friend is much more of a meat eater than a fish eater. So when I met mum for dinner on Wed­nes­day night after my first exam, she gave me some money to buy some fresh fish. I haven’t really had a chance to until today because of my second exam which didn’t finish until half six last night, so I finally made the trip to Laksen Fisk og Vilt and bought two Hard­anger trout. It’s basic­ally alpine trout caught on the Hard­anger­vidda, and it tastes divine! I fil­leted it myself which was quite the adven­ture: I got to use the fil­let­ing knife from the set of chef’s knives dad gave me for christ­mas, and I got to figure out how to get all the bones out without mutil­at­ing the fil­lets! I had loads of fun and I’d even gotten pretty good at it by the third fillet. I pan fried the fil­lets in butter (for that lovely crisp skin!) and served with twice baked pota­toes filled with bacon, onion and chives. I’ll be post­ing the recipe as soon as I figure out how I want to do it.

Earlier in the week we had pork cut­lets (again). I wanted to use my home made bouil­lon and some of all the pork I’ve piled up in the freezer, and this is what I ended up with:

The Boy­friend has given me the most won­der­ful gift I have ever received: The New Con­cise Larousse Gast­ro­nomique! Oh my lord! How can I study for exams with that abso­lute gem in my pos­ses­sion?! I tell you, it’s pos­sible but extremely dif­fi­cult.
Since my trip to the post office to pick up the mys­ter­i­ous pack­age I have per­used my treas­ure and am now in the pro­cess of making my first ‘real’ stock! It’s been sim­mer­ing for about three hours and has another three hours to go accord­ing to the Larousse. Well, I have noth­ing but time. I can’t wait for tomorrow’s dinner, just make a guess if there will be sauce…

Ok, so I was too impa­tient to wait until it was fin­ished before trying it. I used some for tonight’s dinner, which was sear-​roasted chicken breasts with a garlic and herb rub, and mashed pota­toes. I deglazed the chicken pan with some bal­samic vin­egar and then added about 2 dl of my unfin­ished stock. Reduced to about 1 dl and drained through a piece of muslin. And let me just say: wow! I really had no idea what I was miss­ing, muck­ing about with that store-​bought boul­lion all this time. No more! Here’s a pic­ture of my chicken dinner:

As usual I’m too lazy to write out the recipe, but I will share the secret of my amaz­ing mashed pota­toes! Being lactose-​intolerant I often have to think twice (and resign myself to some uncom­fort­able hours to come if I decide to indulge myself) before tuck­ing into food cooked by other people, and there are cer­tain foods I miss immensely such as pizza (oh my love, why must you hurt me so?). And I used to miss mashed pota­toes. But then I thought of a way to make them just as deli­cious but 100% dairy-​free.

What you’ll need is:

your desired amount of new pota­toes (I keep the skin on for its lovely taste and its nutri­ents),
some non-​dairy mar­gar­ine,
water
and salt.
(and some pepper if you like)

Here’s what to do:

Chop up the pota­toes before cook­ing to drastic­ally shorten the cook­ing time.

Then boil them in some lightly salted water until they are very tender and almost fall apart on touch.

Pour some of the water into a jug before drain­ing the pota­toes in a colan­der, and then throw them back into the pot (off the heat!)

Now add a big slab of mar­gar­ine, and mash away.

Pour in some of the water whilst mash­ing until you reach your favour­ite consistency.

Season with addi­tional salt and pepper to taste, and—

Enjoy!

I am start­ing to see that today is a day of firsts. I have just suc­cess­fully made my very first batch of cook­ies! I got the idea and the ‘how-to’ from a blog I just dis­covered earlier tonight: Cook & Eat. The idea of making leftover-​cookies appealed to me immensely! Like the author of Cook & Eat, I have heaps and heaps of left over stuff taking up pre­cious cup­board space and seeing the photos of the light golden brown cook­ies lit­er­ally made my mouth water. And let me just say, for the record, that I am not a sweet-​tooth!

I made my cook­ies fol­low­ing the recipe from Cook & Eat up to the point of the oats, with only slight adjust­ments to fit my stom­ach and my pantry. I used non-​dairy mar­gar­ine as always, and I used 1 tsp of lemon juice instead of 2 tsp orange juice as I didn’t have any. Also, I didn’t have any brown sugar so just used 1 cup of the normal stuff. Now, when the time came for fla­vour­ing I had dug out all the yummy secrets hidden away in my cup­board and my candy shelf. Here’s what I decided to put into the cook­ies: Hundreds-and-Thousands, shred­ded coconut, chips of 70% cocoa dark chocol­ate and some Lindt chili 86% cocoa chocol­ate my mum gave me once.

I have to say, they didn’t look too appet­ising halfway through the cook­ing pro­cess (I decided against post­ing the photo of it). But My oh My, did they look lovely when they came out! (Oh yeah, I tried cook­ing them for 12 minutes the first time and they came out dark brown and not so yummy. The next two batches were cooked for under ten minutes, just until lightly golden at the edges.) Also, my cook­ies didn’t stay fluffy. They rose in the oven, but then sud­denly they all col­lapsed into flat­ness. They still taste divine, though. Incred­ibly sweet, but divine nonetheless.