Norwegian Cooking Class

This past weekend I went to a cooking class to learn how to cook simple and cheap Norwegian food from grad students studying nutrition. We used the kitchen of the school cafeteria, which was by far the coolest kitchen I’ve ever seen. They had racks of about 50 spring form pans, huge mixing vats that had propellers at the bottom to mix automatically mix the food for you and an electronic scale like the ones from a chemistry lab. We split up into three different groups, my group made Norwegian pizza, the other group made vegetable soup and the grad students made Norwegian waffles. We used pita bread for the dough; tomatoes, tomato paste, kidney beans, onions, and garlic for the sauce; and cheese, ham, green peppers, and olives for the toppings. It was probably the strangest pizza I’ve ever eaten, but surprisingly not that bad (even with the beans). The vegetable soup was also really good; it was the first time I’ve had fresh veggies since I got here. We finished off with Norwegian waffles, which are thinner that regular waffles and a lot less crispy. So they are more like pancake-waffles and go really well with jelly and brown cheese or jelly and sour cream (also strange, but tasty). Brown cheese is made from goat’s milk, the same way that regular cheese from goat’s milk is made, just stirred longer and tastes awful by itself but really good with breads and jelly (it basically counteracts for the sweetness of jelly). Waffles in Norway aren’t a breakfast food like we’re used to, but a snack usually with coffee of tea and are very, very popular as an after church snack. I think the one thing Norwegians consume more than coffee (which is drunk here more than any other country in the world), fish or bread is waffles. We did get to try a typical Norwegian breakfast too: breads with different types of spreads, like mackerel in tomato sauce, caviar (that came in a toothpaste looking tube), and chicken from a can (Norwegian spam). They were all really good and you couldn’t tell that the caviar was fish eggs, it just looked like mashed up meat. Other types of toppings for breads are crab or shrimp salad; a chocolate spread, kind of like peanut butter, only chocolaty; or even a boiled egg maybe with some kind of fish from a can. It was all really, really good and I don’t think I’ve ever had so much food in one sitting; other than Thanksgiving of course. I think my favorite part of the class, besides it being FREE, was the kitchen. So many cool gadgets to play with and the fact that I can say that I’ve cooked lunch in an industrial sized kitchen, which reminds me of the “Man’s Kitchen” built for Tool Time from the TV show Home Improvement (with Tim Allen), it was screaming “More Power!”

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