The Susanne

here’s how to make 100% dairy-​free, lush mashed pota­toes. They taste divine, so even if you’re not lactose intol­er­ant I recom­mend trying them out - after all it’s so incred­ibly easy:

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 in even sized pieces before cook­ing to drastic­ally shorten the cook­ing time, whilst making sure they’re evenly cooked.

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!

As a poor little lactose intol­er­ant girl, I often find myself thank­ing higher powers for not being born with intol­er­ance to wheat or car­bo­hydrates. I love pota­toes, pop­corn, pasta, any­thing starchy and packed with carbs. Here’s my non-​dairy recipe for twice baked pota­toes. I use new pota­toes because they’re so tasty and also because they’re smal­ler, which reduces cook­ing time!

Serves 2

This is what you’ll need:

• 4 new potatoes
• 4 wooden kebab skewers
• A little kosher or sea salt
• 1 dl chopped cloves
• 4 strips bacon, in 1 cm pieces
• 3 tbsp dairy-​free margarine
• 1 dl chopped onion

Here’s how to do it:
Pre­heat the oven to 200 degrees Celsius.
Stick the wooden sticks in the pota­toes, almost all the way through. Be care­ful not to pierce your hand! Cut off the tail end of the sticks, leav­ing about 10 cm to grab onto. Wet the pota­toes and sprinkle them with some salt. Place them on a baking sheet in the oven, for 1 hour.

Whilst the pota­toes are baking, make the ‘stuff­ing’. In a skil­let, heat 1 tbsp mar­gar­ine and cook the bacon and onion on a medium-​high heat. When the bacon is done and the onion is soft, move everything (mar­gar­ine included) to a mixing bowl, and add the rest of the margarine.

The pota­toes are done when the skew­ers come out easily, with no res­ist­ance from the potato. When they’re done, take the pota­toes out of the oven, slice them in half and let cool a few minutes. Then scoop out the potato insides, leav­ing a little around the edges to let the potato halves keep their shape. Mix the potato well with the onion and bacon. Add the cloves last and mix care­fully so they don’t colour everything green.

Put the mix­ture back in the potato halves, and place back in the oven for a few minutes until the tops begin to brown. Just make sure the bits of bacon or onion stick­ing out don’t burn.

Take them back out, and serve! (very good with the pan-​seared Hard­anger trout!)

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: