My New Norwegian Home

I love food. There is one thing I can promise you and that is if you're looking for a blog about dieting and fitness, well, you are at the WRONG place. Usually after spending some time with Norwegians I come back home and start eating like them too. After trips to Denmark with my hubs and his parents, I come back home and eat a bunch of bread. Open-faced sandwiches with butter all day long until I'm absolutely tired of it. Speaking of which, bread or brød. Brød. Brød. Brød. Norway eats A LOT of bread! Being stubborn in my American ways, I will eat a Norwegian pancake, which is more like a crepe compared to the fluffy, buttery pancakes in the U.S., but I usually eat them "the American way" with maple syrup and butter. Occasionally I'll give in and eat my pancakes "the Norwegian way" by mixing sour cream with jam to place on my pancake though. Disclaimer: Staged photo! Our table never looks this nice and organized. It always has tiny smudgy hand p...

Americans love food. It's a stereotype, it's a fact of life. Food is awesome! After following the Americans in Norway group on Facebook, I've realized a common complaint among Americans is the lack of food variety in Norway. I'm guilty of complaining of the same thing - A LOT. I've made compromises, but for the most part, I've come to terms with it and do as Teddy Roosevelt once stated, "Do what you can, with what you have, where you are." This means making a lot of things from scratch and that's okay because I could desperately use the cooking experience and homemade meals are generally healthier. ****Just a side note of advice from one expat to another: Depending on my mood, sometimes it's not a great idea to replicate a family recipe. Even if I follow the recipe EXACTLY, it never tastes the same. It's frustrating and if you're homesick at the time, it just doesn't go over well.***** Due to our daughter's approaching due ...

This past Friday was a big day for Norway. It was the 17th of May or in other words the National Day where Norway gained its independence from Denmark 199 years ago by making their own constitution. Today it's celebrated with parades of bunad-wearing school children, marching bands, eating cake, ice cream, waffles and hot dogs all day. Yep, this pretty much explains it! From:  http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/17%20mai I was very excited to be here to finally celebrate my first 17th of May in Norway! We went to the city center in time to watch the children's parade and left right as the Russ were beginning their parade. Ate ice cream, then went to my husband's old elementary school where we thought there would be a local parade. Instead there was no parade, so we ate cake. Afterwards we went and ate more ice cream and hot dogs. That sums up our 17. mai! We were also bombarded by a couple of sugar crazed 9-10 year olds who were wondering if we were Russ. Apparently Russ g...

While there are a lot of good foods and bakeries that will make you drool, there are also a lot of foods in Norway you can't help but wonder in its strangeness, "People really eat that?" As a foreigner coming to Norway, it's expected that I find some cultural aspects strange or weird. At first thinking people actually eat moose was a bit strange to me, but I've tried some and it's not so bad. If I hadn't known better I'd have thought it were beef. However, US customs doesn't allow "exotic meats" such as moose and reindeer jerky, so in Detroit's airport I had to hand over the jerky I was trying to bring to my family. First and foremost, being so accustomed to chocolately peanutbuttery candy as we have in America it was a bit of a let down when I couldn't find but some makeshift Reese's cups and in place of all the chocolately marshmallowy peanutbuttery candy, I have found an American's worst candy nightmare - LICORICE! ...

My husband had a very special birthday. He turned 30 years old. I've known him since he was 27, but it was also the first of his birthdays we've spent in person so I wanted to make his day more special than it usually would have been. So, I had to document many parts of his birthday. While he was sleeping on Saturday morning, I wanted to prank him, but I wanted to do something that was more or less a clean prank - nothing that would ruin his day. In order to do so I had to hide the supplies for this prank  (as well as his birthday gift) in our storage room. His clear warning sign on the door. HAPPY BIRTHDAY!  So I went outside and placed wet cotton balls on his car.  I made him his favorite food - cheese fries made from sliced potatoes.   I baked a chocolate cake from scratch and added sprinkles because sprinkles make everything taste better! If the cake didn't taste great then, hey at least the cake had sprinkles! And because 30 lit cand...

Since moving here I've been trying many new foods. I'm still skeptical of meat (leverpostei and stuff in a tube DOES NOT tickle my fancy) but I've tried moose and if I didn't know better I'd have thought it was beef. My biggest norsk mat (Norwegian food) fascination is lefse. When I was first introduced to it, I couldn't stop eating it. I ate lefse everyday when I first moved here to Norway. Even that is sounding strange now because it's been 5 months since my move and I'm realizing there's been some history since my move. My favorite lefse is Vestlands lefsa. I think it was around August I couldn't find it - in any store - anywhere. By September I began to really wonder what happened to the lefse. I mean, this is Norway. Lefse is a staple just like flour, bread or sugar. It turns out, there was a lefse shortage due to the company relocating. Thankfully production is back to normal and lefse is back! I think I have an undying love for No...

This past weekend in Skien has been filled with festivities starting with a football game and monster truck show on Friday, food festival on Saturday and Sunday there was the 11 hour viewing on TV of the Henrik Ibsen boat leaving its port in Skien and traveling up the Telemark Canal, as well as a craft festival in the city. We only went to the football game on Friday and the food festival on Saturday. Of course we couldn't miss a football game - that's no surprise. The food festival was fun and attracted many people in Skien. There were booths from tastes around the world - like Finland, Sudan, Thailand, Vietnam and Germany. I tried svele while there. To the best of my explanation, it is a type of pancake, but more like an American pancake. Norwegian pancakes are thin, but American pancakes or as some people call them flapjacks are thicker and larger. Svele is similar to that. The svele we had at the festival was served with butter, sugar, a berry sauce and baked apples. YU...

Just a quick post as it's been a crazy week and I feel I need to update with something. Just anything. So here's my light hearted post. As I'm on a mission to try out all things Norwegian whether it be food, hobbies (yes, I will try skiing this winter - anyone in my path BEWARE!!!), the language, etc. I just thought I'd share this one delicious pastry with my readers. This is one of my favorite things to buy at the bakery here. If visiting or even living in Norway, one thing that should be on everyone's "must try" list is skolebrød. Directly translated it is called "school bread." Basically it's a bun with shredded coconut and custard and it's awesomely delicious! Skolebrød Recipe

I think most Norwegians have an impression on Americans that we're generally outgoing (not all of us) and generous. Just this weekend in Bergen my husband and I encountered a bit of a cultural difference. We ordered a pizza the night we were in Bergen and Arild asked the guy behind the counter if a medium pizza was big enough for one person or two people. The man told us one person, so we each got our own pizza. The pizzas turned out being too big for us to have our own and after we finished eating and combined our pizzas we ended up with over a full pizza left. I hate wasting food. Anytime food gets thrown away at home I just feel guilty and have this icky feeling and it doesn't settle well with me. So my idea was to take the pizza downstairs and give it to our hotel clerk. I mean, it was more than an entire pizza left over! Arild told me, "A Norwegian would never think of doing that." We exchanged our confused looks and I said, "People do things like this in ...

Part of being married is sharing things. Sharing the TV remote, sharing an economy, sharing a bed, and even at times sharing sickness. Unfortunately due to recent sickness that I may or may not have passed onto my husband, he urged me to go with his parents and his older brother on a day trip to the coast. After being reluctant to leave him home and with mono, I finally went. Stavern, Norway was one of the small coastal cities we went to. Like every other coastal city it's nice to take a day trip and go on a walk or hike and just observe and take in some of the nice Norwegian scenery. What sets this city apart is it used to be a naval base. Now the town can be seen with mustard colored houses, a memorial for fallen sailors, and art displays throughout the week days. An old sea mine from WWII.  An old home from the 1600s.  A statue inside the naval memorial.  I even tried fish soup for the first time. I know it's a popular and traditional dish in Norway and...

Norwegian groceries are extremely similar to American ones, but just a few minor differences. For example, there are recycling bins in the entrance of the grocery. This is where you can drop off your cans, plastic bottles, or glass bottles. You can press a button to donate the recycling money to charity or you can get the recycling money back. When you purchase cans, or anything bottled you're charged a fee for it, but once you recycle you get that fee back, so all in all you're just getting money back. However, the other things you recycle go into color coded bags into the garbage bins outside. Food goes into a green bag, plastic goes into a blue bag, garbage and unrecyclable materials goes into another bag. Cardboard and paper goes in its own separate bin. This is the machine you put your recycling into. Another thing I've noticed is how rare it is to find sliced bread. In America we usually have an entire bread aisle of sliced bread. Most of the bread in Norway ...