The Susanne

Here in Norway we have some­thing called ’fjellørret’ mean­ing ’moun­tain trout’. Basic­ally it’s trout caught in little moun­tain rivers and lakes, they’re small and incred­ibly deli­cious! I call them arctic trout as their latin name has ‘arctic’ in it. Hard­anger­trout are trout caught on Hard­anger­vidda. With a birth­place so wild and won­der­ful, no wonder they taste like a little piece of heaven…

Serves 2 hungry Nor­we­gian fish lovers

• 2 Hard­anger trout, boned and skin scraped
• 4 tbsp butter or margarine
• Salt and pepper

Cut the fil­lets in half so you have eight pieces. Rub both sides with salt and pepper to taste.

Put a heavy-​bottomed skil­let on a high heat, and melt 1 tbsp butter. Add two pieces of trout, skin side down. Let them cook for about two minutes, then flip and cook for about 1 minute on the other side. If the skin isn’t crisp, flip them again to let the skin turn lovely and crunchy. Repeat with the rest of the fish, cook­ing two at a time and adding more butter when needed. Serve imme­di­ately, with a potato salad or maybe twice baked potatoes?

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: