The World in Tonevision

New foodblog up and running: Cirka spiselig

I'm anything but a great cook, but (unsurprisingly to anyone who's seen me in real life) I am quite fond of food. All kinds of food, and especially strange-sounding, strange-looking or very sweet and unhealthy food. And sometimes I have to make it, as well. For these reasons it suddenly (in the middle of the night, I might add, probably triggered by the baby not crying) came to me that I needed to start a foodblog. So I did, it can be found here and is written in Norwegian, but as we all know, ask and Google translate shall answer, so there.

I'm not aiming for the advanced stuff here, as the title (translating as more or less edible) or first post (on the proper way to mix orange juice and coca cola) might indicate, but I do have some nice tricks that will make the world a better place. Like how to nuke popcorn correctly or how to make a mean toasted cheese sandwhich. Feel free to check in!

The idea of not eating

is eating me up.

A nice lady from the midwives' office called the other day and informed me that they would like me to do a glucose tolerance test, and what day would suit me best? Now, let's see. What day would suit me best to be fasting from midnight (including abstaining from water, although if need be I should feel free to rinse my mouth. Rinse my mouth!), show up at hospital at 8 AM hungry to have blood drawn, drink a quantity of hardly mouthwatering carbladen water, wait around for two hours, and then have more blood drawn before going directly to work having lost a good part of the morning to being hungry and correspondingly miffed and then worrying about the test results, the worst case scenario of which is having to stay away from any sugary snacks for at least the rest of the pregnancy (a fate on a par with only having to wear orange or being condemned to watch Lassie reruns on TV for the next three months for someone as enthusiastic about cakes as myself)? Oh sure, any day would be a good day for that.

Today is that day, yay! I would like to assure everyone that I am not (yet) in the habit of getting up in the middle of the night to eat, and that sleeping through the night without eating is in fact my normal MO. But as soon as the midnight ban on eating and drinking fell, I started to feel for it. Was I, perhaps, getting a bit hungry? Thirsty maybe? If I didn't have to get up every blessed hour to go to the bathroom I might have been able to sleep through, but I did so I wasn't. At 4.30 I gave up and got up, and here I am, trying -and failing miserably- not to think about not eating. But hey, only three and a half hours until I get to drink some sugar water. There'd better not be a queue at the lab.

On a related note, I would like to mention that I now - more than ever - have a truly profound respect for people who observe Ramadan.

what happened with the sugar thing

mini cupcakes, originally uploaded by tonbel.

yes, you guessed it, my thirty days on sugar turned out to become three days of sugar. Love it too much, and I have so very few other vices (if indeed any at all).

And cake is so pretty...

Quitting sugar - day 1 of 30

After having a bit of an epiphany upon noticing that I had ingested around half a kilo on sugar yesterday (you think I am exaggerating perhaps? I wish I was) I made a decision to break my sugar addiction. So after quite the feast polishing off all the candy, crisps and coke I could stomach I actually threw away the rest of the candy, poured several deciliters of perfectly good coke down the drain and braced myself for going off sugar. I've done it in the past. I've even survived on Atkins for months and months on end with completely weird eating habits to show for it (in addition to the weightloss, mind you, there was some of that as well) - perhaps most notably pork chops for every meal and some memorable experiments with sugar free chocolate and candy the results of which I wouldn't wish upon my worst enemy - yuck. I'm not ready for another round of that, but the sugar addiction has to go. So I decided to go cold turkey for a month starting today to break the spell.

My local kaffebrenneriet must have somehow found out what I am up to since they are celebrating the event by giving out free samples of merangues, my favourite. The bastards. But hey, it's not a challenge unless it's challenging, now is it? I am proud to say I did not have one.

1 down, 29 to go.

What I learned about myself while cleaning out my kitchen cupboard:

1)The blatantly obvious: that allegations about me being a well-organized person are completely false.

2)That although I think (or have at some point imagined) that I like and eat the following foods, this is not right:

Snails. Expired 2005. Maybe not that surprising. as I recall they were bought on a very optimistic early morning shopping session while on a booze cruise to Denmark, probably around 2003 some time. Tunafish: the illusion that I like and eat it must run deep, these are only two of three cans uncovered, but the last one still has a couple of years of taking up shelf space before I throw that one out, too. Saving it for a rainy day of course. Pineapple: now that is surprising. I could have sworn that I actually like pineapple except of course not eating it on pizza, which any other sane person would also avoid. Corn: now that is shocking, I was absolutely certain that I eat corn and did so only last week, but not this can for some reason. Interestingly that has moved with me from my last apartment, which makes my misconception all the greater. I thought that 6 kroner can of corn was important enough to lug down from Lillehammer, yet four years later I still haven't eaten it. Wokmix. Fair enough. The picture on the can makes it look like something I would be hard pressed to open except on the rainiest of rainy days, evoking worms crawling across a wet road and indeterminate roots. Brekkbønner. I think this translates as green beens, which is something really do eat all the time (fresh though, not canned),  but there is something about the Norwegian name that makes them so utterly unappetizing. It could translate directly as either snap-beans or hurl-beans, and of course the latter is stuck in my mind - although I suppose the former is the one meant by whoever named them to begin with. Fried Bean Curd. Well the tin looks interesting and exotic and contributes to my self image as an adventurous cook and ditto eater with eclectic tastes, but let's face it: when I haven't eaten it in the last seven years (sell-by date 2002) I am certainly not going to do so in the future. Pears: That is really sad, they have  been taking up space in my cupboard for years and years and they would probably have been just lovely with whipped cream, but alas, that was two years ago. I'd better not even go there.

It all adds up to one big note to self: do not buy and carry home cans of stuff you aren't going to cook and eat.

Which leads me to my third conclusion

3)I really don't cook often enough. I eat, sure, all the time, but I don't cook much. When I do cook, it's mostly pork chops, meat balls at a stretch. It just seems wrong. A person more than 30 years away from her retirement age basically subsisting on pork chops and meat balls? Peculiar, and just not right.

There was one lucky find among the antiquities: a can of fish balls, best before october 28th this year. I love fish balls! LOVE THEM! Yet apparently have not had them once in the three years I've been living here. So that one lucky can is now residing on my square foot of kitchen counter, ready to fulfil its destiny and become my dinner some time the coming week.

hot scampi rice

I have to say I was pretty chuffed with myself - after yesterday's two consecutive popcorn + soda pop with the movie dinners (not identical mind you, the first one was butter flavour+solo+welcome to the chtlis and the second one was caramel and butter flavour+champagne flavoured soda+Dean Spanley) some cooking was in order, and this was a big hit with the audience (sadly, just myself). Anyhow, here's how to do it, all measures are approximate of course.

Ingredients:
200 g scampi - the nice ready-cooked kind from the frozen foods counter, it's not like I'm that awful man from Hell's kitchen or anything. Defrost them by all means.
4 dl fresh spinach leaves.
3-4 dl leftover cooked rice.

some tablespoons of sunflower oil
1 tablespoon of sesame oil
a good few drops of chili oil
1 tsp sambal olek
2 garlic cloves

Fry the garlic in the oil in a wok pan, add first the scampi and then the spinach and wok until the spinach is limp. Then add the rice and cook until all is warm. Season with salt if you wish.

The result came out really hot and extremely satisfying, especially with the strong tasting ginger beer I found in the supermarket - to quote John Travolta in Broken Arrow in the scene where they just blew up a nuclear bomb: "I say God Damn what a rush!"

Summery salmon

200g salmon loin (i.e. really fresh salmon)->cut into 1 cm thick slices

Blend together:
0,5 dl dark thick soy sauce
1 table spoon sesame oil
2 cm fresh ginger, grated

Marinate the salmon in the sauce in the fridge for 20 minutes or so

Cut half a cucumber into half-moons and 100 g sugar peas in half, and lay them out prettily on a dinner plate. Spread the marinated fish on top. Eat with a clear conscience and chopstics.

baked root vegetables

I have been reading books about eating again, and as per usual there is a resultant change in diet. I am one of those people whose reading should probably be closely supervised. After I read dr. atkins' new diet revolution I lived of pork chops for a couple of years -happily, I might add. This time, I read You are what You Eat by Gillian McKeith and also Skinny Bitch. Both good books, the former was rich on dietary advice and the experience of reading the latter was more that of being punched in the belly while at the same time having someone shout at you in a megaphone from three feet away. So I have some new ideas. Both books promote a diet based on fruit, vegetables and some grains (one of them says fish are ok, the other is going against Nirvanas assertion and says that fish do indeed have feelings, so the jury's still out on that one).

I boiled the whole thing down in my mind to this one idea: I will only eat food that my body is able to recognize as food.

So I'm eating a lot of veg and fruit these days, and after a loooooooooooooong time eating pork chops and chicken wings 70% of the time, it is a bit of a challenge, but it is dawning on me that vegetables taste really really good. They taste more than meat, and they all taste differently, and they actually do make me feel better (ok, I'm not going to discount the placebo effect here) - so I will try to eat like this as much as possible and see if that helps me not crave chocolate, pepsi max, ice cream and potato crisps every evening.

It means I will have to try out some new recipes, and cooking without meat is a very novel concept for me, but this one was definitely a success:

BAKED ROOT VEGETABLES
Carrots
Onions
Potatoes
Sweet potato
(any root vegetables are supposed to work well, and the amounts are really up to how much you want. I used two carrots, an onion, a sweet potato and four or five quite small potatoes)

2dl chicken stock (ok, maybe it was beef stock -the cube had got separated from the mothership. I think either will work)
two cloves garlic
some fresh ginger, grated.
Butter, to butter the pan (sorry, cow, I know I shouldn't exploit you like this)

I peeled the sweet potato, because the original recipe said so and I have never met a sweet potato before in my life. Did not peel the carrots or potatos even though the original recipe said so, as they were really fresh and had delicate skin and I wanted to keep as much of the nutrients as possible. The onion I had to skin, obviously. And then I just cut all the root vegetables into similar-sized pieces, and put in the pan. Then poured stock with garlic and ginger over the vegetables, and baked them on 180 degrees celsius for about 40 minutes until everything was tender. It was absolutely delicious.

If I didn't have a mind full of images of poor mistreated chickens after reading the skinny bitch book, I would mention that this would almost certainly be a lovely accompaniment for roast chicken, but I won't mention that at this point.

This is going to work out splendidly, I can tell.

new deal

unsurprisingly, the weigth snuck back. Not all of it, but more than enough for it to be too much. So this is what my lunch might look like on a fine day like today. And no crisps. And only very little chocolate. Between this and the gym I should be in top(-ish?) shape in a couple of months.

Pancakes!

Yay! And I thought I'd never eat pancakes again, but these are atkins pancakes - made with atkins bakemix. That makes it ok, you see.

Recipe:
2 eggs
1 dl full-fat cream
2 spoons atkins bakemix
1 dl water
a tablespoon melted butter

Cool palm-sized cakes in a frying pan, these here are served with sour cream and fish eggs, but the next time I'll be having them with blueberries. Oh joy.