Cooking is an enjoyable, relaxing pleasure of mine that is great fun when shared with friends. I’ve begun to miss it tremendously. Dining alone at restaurants for a month gets old. Autumn is my favorite time to cook. The abundance of vegetables, cooling temperatures, and bright colors are great inspirations to cozy up with hearty soups and meals. Last week I blatantly asked a friendly coworker (my age) if I could come over and cook for her and her boyfriend. I offered to bring all the ingredients and cook, if I could use her kitchen. She was awed at the request and was very happy to entertain the idea. The next day she returned with the night that would work best.
The menu of choice was one of my favorites… and something I knew how to make without a recipe. It would be a hummus dip with bread, goat cheese medallions encrusted with toasted walnuts over a pear & cranberry salad, and a roasted butternut squash soup. Monday after work I browsed the big grocery store in town for the ingredients. A single can of garbanzo beans (for hummus) was over $3! It normally costs $0.99 at home. To my dismay, there were no squashes, let alone a butternut squash. There wasn’t even a pumpkin. The soup plan was exchanged for a cauliflower cheddar soup.
It was great fun. My coworker invited over her girlfriend who loves food and wanted to meet the American. Her sister (whom lives 2 hours away) dropped by for the meal and they were laughing how she never has come to dinner before. The boyfriend took some pictures during preparations and left the house so it was just us girls. We had a fun time preparing the dishes with a glass of wine. The flavors and combinations were all very new to them. They did not know what hummus was, never had it crossed their mind to put a pear in a salad, nor to encrust nuts on goat cheese, let alone a soup of cauliflower (blahhh). They were politely skeptical when observing the preparation of the shallots, cauliflower, and cheeses for the soup. Once it was pureed, we huddled around the blender, spoons in hand, taste-testing the soup from the blender. It was determined a success. They were surprised how each flavor really came through in the result. The cheeses here are superb... most are better than the ones at home.
Dinner conversation was around traveling in the US (2 of the 3 girls had been to FL, one worked at Epcot Center and was amused by the same embarrassing polar bear questions as the ex-Epcot employee I met weeks ago). We also discussed traveling around Norway and the local Kongsberg community. One of the big town news stories of yesterday was a blazing fire that happened the prior night. Part of a building in the technology park burned from 7pm – midnight. The girls were explaining that when both of their boyfriends heard the sirens (a couple miles away), they jumped in their cars and followed the fire engines to the excitement. Apparently, this is routine for them. It was very funny to me, imagining a line of cars following the fire engines for no other purpose than to be an audience. That should be a line in those email chains… “You know you’re in a small town when… the men of the town set up lawn chairs to watch burning buildings”.
Dessert was an assortment of bakery goodies and some rum-marinated plums over ice cream. The host’s grandmother has a plum tree and has handed down the recipe. The basic procedure is to pack plum halves (no pits), lime slices, sugar, and vanilla sticks in a jar. Fill it to the brim with dark rum, and marinate for a month. The result is not only beautiful, but delectable too.
We were all excited that the evening turned out so well and vowed to do it again before my departure. That reminds me to inform you that my time has been extended here. I’ll be staying for an extra three weeks due to a necessary overlap/hand-off with a coworker. My new return will be before Thanksgiving. Thank goodness Jamie arrives soon and we get a week off together!
Next week, there are plans to make a pumpkin pie (from scratch) with a different coworker. Cooking or baking with pumpkins is unheard of by Norwegians so she is very curious about pumpkin pie. Norwegian florists only started selling pumpkins within the past couple years to start imitating the American Halloween. As I mentioned, there were no pumpkins at the grocery store. No pumpkins, no gords, and no candy corn has left me squashless… I mean speechless. Is it really Fall or did I skip it and go straight to winter?
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