On our plates: apricot risotto + friends

Apricot risotto dressed up with parmesean and edible flowers, smoked (on the grill) salmon, steamed brocolini and super delicious turnips.

Pickle bonus: sour peppers (made by my good friend Jamie) and sweet rhubarb with star anise and lemongrass (made from the garden).

On our plates: kale slaw

The week after we moved into our new place I had an insatiable desire to eat massive quantities of vegetables. Even now (five months later) I am unsure if it was due to schlepping all those boxes up five flights of stairs, or just because there was an irresistible communal kale patch right around the corner. Either way, this easy to make slaw blew everyone's minds who came over to see the new place. And it's vegan!

The method is simple, but first the ingredients:

Kale
Spring onion (green part)
Tahini
Dijon mustard
Citrus juice (preferably fresh, we used a clementine) - OR - Vinegar
Sea salt
Pepper
Red onion (optional)
Olive oil (optional)

Mix equal parts tahini and Dijon mustard in a bowl. Squeeze in half a clementine or a little bit of vinegar for some acid. Lemon or orange juice would also work beautifully. Add sea salt and pepper to taste. If the mixture is too thick, add a splash of olive oil.

Chop the kale and green onion (and the red onion if you're using it) very fine. See the photo above. If the kale leaves are big and thick, remove the spines before chopping.

Mix the greens and dressing together and make any final adjustments,  i.e. more salt or citrus juice. The slaw should be "wet" but still hold itself together.

Delicious on plain toast or in sandwiches (below), kale slaw is your friend! If stored in an airtight container, it should last for about a week in the fridge. Ours, however, barely lasted the day.

Pancetta

For the past four years or so, I've been making pancetta at Christmastime. The reason for this is simply that when yuletide comes along, Norwegian supermarkets enter into fierce a competition to sell the cheapest Christmas foods—the gilded emperor of which is Ribbe.

Ribbe is basically a side of pork ribs that comes in to cuts "thick" or "thin" and the latter is pretty much pork belly; ideal for bacon or pancetta. So, with a little bit of effort, one can take a (kinda worryingly) cheap cut of meat and turn it into a product that sells for between ten or twenty times the price. Ain't even all that hard.

Now, the recipe I have been using comes from a book called Charcuterie (by way of a Norwegian blog called Ordentlig Mat) and is as follows:

2 - 2.2 kg tynnribbe (pork belly)
60 g curing salt *
2 tbs brown sugar
4 cloves of garlic
2 tbs thyme
2 tbs juniper berries
2+2 tbs black pepper
suitable place for hanging

* Obtaining this is probably the biggest challenge and it is absolutely necessary to avoid botulism. Try your local butcher shop or online.

The first thing you want to do is remove the skin and any bones from the pork. Use these to make soup, some cracklins, whatever. Don't be wasteful! Then put the meat in a plastic bag with the remaining ingredients (and only the first two tablespoons of the black pepper). After that you put the bag in the fridge and leave it for 7 - 9 days.

After a day or so you will notice that the salt is doing its thing and brine is forming; turn the bags every day to ensure that the pork is evenly coated. When 7 - 9 days have passed, the salting process should be done. The meat should be noticeably firmer—if it's still a bit soft in the middle you wait a day or two more.

So now's the time open the bag. Discard the brine and thoroughly rinse of your pork and dry it with some kitchen paper. After this you want to take the remaining "+2tbs" of black pepper and rub it all over the "meat"side of your cut.

It is now ready to hang. And there's at least two ways of going about this:

•  The "authentic" way: deftly roll it up with the fat towards the inside, taking care to avoid air pockets. It'll probably need to hang a little longer this way, but it'll look real pretty. It even works if you roll the "wrong way".. as I found out in 2012 (below).

•  Bind it up with some string (which is the way I've mostly done it)

It needs to hang for 1 - 3 weeks, depending on environmental conditions. 8 - 15°C and 60% humidity is good. If it's too dry it won't dry evenly; if it's too humid you might get mold.

Of course you can adjust this recipe, I don't think I've ever totally followed it. The essential thing is to have a correct ratio of meat/salt/sugar. Rubbing it with black pepper also helps to absorb surface moisture and garlic is a handy antiseptic.

This year I'm making five varieties:

• Thyme, black pepper and garlic **
• Juniper berries, grains of paradise, allspice, cloves and black pepper
• Chilies (guajilo, ancho, casabel, chipotle), garlic, cumin, coriander, star anise and garlic
• Rosemary, garlic and sage
• Bacon with maple syrup instead of sugar ***

** a small piece that will be rolled
*** will be cold smoked before hanging

On our plates: double chanterelle soup with fried polenta and parsley

Creamy soup made with dried winter chanterelles, leek, onion, and garlic—fried in the fat of homemade pancetta and white wine. Topped with freshly picked golden chanterelles fried with pine nuts, flat leaf parsley, bunching onions, and discs of polenta targana.

On our plates: Venison roast, wild mushroom risotto, sea kale

Rolf rolled the self-hunted venison around a handful of garden herbs and butter before roasting it on the grill. So tender, soft, and juicy.. To accompany the meat, I prepared mushroom risotto with our finds from the day before (porcini, sweet teeth, chanterelles) and a stock made with some of last year's dried winter chanterelles. Also on the plate: grilled cauliflower and lightly boiled and salted sea kale from the end of the world. Literally.

There is a quaint and starkly beautiful island south of Oslo called Tjøme and the very tip of that island was crowned Verdens Ende, or the end of the world. We went there and came across a few beautiful sea kale (strandkål)  plants growing in the sandy, rocky soil:

Before picking some to take home, we tasted a bit of a leaf raw. Very thick, though not unpleasant, with distinct notes of both cabbage and the sea. Salty.

The view from Verdens Ende looking out over the North Sea.

For dessert: carrot cake topped with fresh wild raspberries and a glass of wild strawberry vodka.

On our plates: knekkebrød and mixed berry jam

A perfect late night snack

Rolf made the knekkebrød (Norwegian crisp bread) seasoned with cumin, fennel, and chia seeds. Cumin to help control blood sugar; fennel for digestion; Chia for vitamin D.

While I foraged berries and made the jam. To be precise: gooseberries, red and yellow raspberries, and wild strawberries. Making jam is very easy, almost too much so for a tutorial.

Because the gooseberries are naturally high in pectin (nature's gelling agent) all I had to do was put the berries in a saucepan and add about 1/3 of their volume in water. Once that cooked down for about 15 minutes I added the sugar (to taste) and let it thicken for another 15 minutes, stirring a few times to keep it even. Once tiny bubbles start to form over the surface of the pan, the jam is close to being done. To be double sure a classic trick is to place a dollop on a cold plate and see if you can draw a metal spoon through it and keep a clean line. Voilà.

Pour that into a sterilized jar and if unopened it will keep through the winter.. if it lasts that long, of course.

On our plate: dandelion leaves

Fried lentil cakes, oven roasted eggplant and bell pepper, bulgur, homemade tzatziki with thyme and mint from the garden, dandelion salad.

Dandelion leaves were the perfect addition to this weeknight meal. Tips for preparation: the old and young leaves alike are edible, but the thicker ribs of the larger leaves can be removed if desired. Let the leaves soak in cold water and drain right before serving. This will both keep them crisp and reduce some of their bitterness.

On our plate: fiddleheads

A slightly more involved weeknight dinner courtesy of Rolf: jerk salmon with fiddleheads, squash, coconut rice and beans. Really great combination of spice, texture, and flavor.

A tip for cooking fiddleheads: add a tiny bit of sugar to balance out their wild bitterness. Otherwise they can basically be cooked like asparagus. These were put in a shallow pan with water that was allowed to cook off then lightly fried with sesame oil, salt, and sugar.

Peanut butter

Since we are in the process of moving, one of my goals has been to try to eat everything in the apartment. So far we have worked our way through dozens of varieties of grains and dry lentils, canned coconut milk, and various homemade and store bought vinegars..

Last week I found myself making homemade peanut butter on a whim after finding two unopened bags of raw peanuts. And in less than an hour flat, at that! Including the time it took to roast and skin the peanuts (the hardest part):

Anyway, this post almost shouldn't really be tagged as cooking, but..

Ingredients
unsalted roasted peanuts (or raw peanuts you plan to roast yourself)
peanut or other nutty / neutral oil
salt (optional)
honey (optional)

Directions
If you are starting with raw peanuts, preheat your oven to 175° C. Spread baking paper over a baking sheet and cover in a single layer of shelled peanuts. Let them bake for approximately 20 minutes, checking first at 10 and then 15 minutes to stir them around a bit. They should be golden brown but not black (burned).

Skinning the peanuts is perhaps the most time consuming part. One trick is to dump the hot peanuts on a clean kitchen towel, fashion the towel into a bag with the nuts inside, and roll the entire mass repeatedly letting the friction separate the nuts from the shells.

Now comes the fun part: dump your roasted peanuts into a food processor and watch it magically turn into butter. If the food processor is having a hard time, drizzle in some oil (we used hazelnut) to help it along. Not too much, though—there will already be a lot of oil from the peanuts themselves.

Salt and honey can be added to taste. Enjoy! Homemade peanut butter should stay good up to a month in the fridge, if it lasts that long.

Late nite soba with pork and black trumpet mushrooms

If you are anything like us, you have large jars of dried fall mushrooms lurking patiently in all corners of your kitchen. Part of you wants to save them because you spent hours painstakingly collecting them in the forest, but another part of you knows spring mushroom season isn't that far off and you need to make some space. Porcini mushrooms are easy to use up, winter chanterelles too. They are equally delicious in soups, pasta, risottos, etc. Really any savory dish with butter will benefit from the addition of either of these two mushrooms. Black trumpet mushrooms, however.. they call for something more special.








Turns out the signature black trumpet taste (earthy, fruity, intense) pairs extremely well with soy sauce and other Asian flavors. I unfortunately can't post an exact recipe as this delicious noodle soup is a product of late night carefree experimentation. But I can write down what I did:

For the broth I used a combination of leftover venison stock, instant dashi, water and soy sauce. After the broth came to a simmer I added the soba (buckwheat) noodles and a handful of dried black trumpets. In another pan I fried up in oil fresh ginger and garlic, some sliced zucchini, carrot ribbons, enoki mushrooms, leftover sliced pork roast (marinated in red wine and seasoned with Sichuan pepper and dried mandarin peel) and a pinch of crushed sesame seeds. When the noodles were cooked, in went the meat and veggies. Perfection.

Mapo Puffball

Last Sunday I went mushrooming alone because Rolf was working and it was sad. Not sad because I was alone, but because the mushroom season is pretty much over here in Oslo. Even the prolific winter chanterelles were nowhere to be seen..

But then! Walking back to the subway,  I spotted these (not so) little puffballs in the grass.

Brown giant puffballs? At first I wasn't sure what to make of them. All the ones I'd seen before in pictures from North American friends and on the Internet were pure white. After squatting in the rain with a phone in one hand and a mushroom knife in the other for at least ten minutes, internally debating, they ended up coming home with me. Their seductive spongy white flesh was irresistible.

At home the mushrooms dried off a bit and their shells were more beige in the light. After consulting multiple Norwegian field guides and the web, I came to the conclusion that they were actually examples of the Purple Spored Puffball (Calvatia cyathiformis), a near cousin of the Giant Puffball (Calvatia gigantea). Both of these mushrooms are edible so long as the inside flesh is uniformly white and squishy inside. Lucky us! That night we had a wild rice pilaf with roasted garden pumpkin, chard, and foraged puffball pan-fried in butter. Yum. These puffballs had more taste than we expected and were almost nutty, like extra good button mushrooms. The texture was very soft, almost like marshmallows or silken tofu..

Mapo Puffball

Naturally, Mapo Puffball is Mapo Tofu (one of my favorite Chinese dishes ever) sans tofu. Those white chunks in the photo above are none other than our foraged friends.

Over the last year this dish has become one of my go-to quick lunches. This means I almost never measure anything anymore and often mix up the combination of chili sauces and oils depending on what's on-hand in our kitchen. But! For the sake of how delicious this turned out, I must share. Apologies in advance for the mixed up measurements. I still have US measuring cups and spoons but think in grams.

Ingredients
1 large giant puffball (circa 500g), chopped into approx. 1cm slices
150g ground pork
3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
4 tablespoons chili oil *
1 tablespoon chili flakes *
1 tablespoon soy sauce
1 tablespoon fermented bean paste
1 tablespoon Sichuan chili paste
1 tablespoon ground Sichuan peppercorns **
1/2 cup water
2-3 stalks spring onion or scallion, chopped medium-fine

Directions
Heat up a skillet on medium heat, add chili oil, chili flakes, and garlic. Stir in ground pork, when it starts to turn brown add: soy sauce, fermented bean paste, and Sichuan chili paste. Let the meat cook through. Add water, Sichuan peppercorns, and puffball. Let everything simmer until the mushrooms cook through (and shrink a bit) and the chili pork sauce thickens, approximately 5-10 minutes.

* To promote a more organized and minimal kitchen (ours is anything but) I suggest buying chili flakes in oil if you don't already have both on-hand. My personal favorite is a Vietnamese brand also with garlic.

** To increase the heat, roast your Sichuan peppercorns in a pan before grinding them and/or double the quantity. I like my Mapo pretty spicy but not numbing. If you want that numbing heat, up all the chili quantities at will, especially the Sichuan peppercorns.

Enjoy over white rice or noodles.