Theme Day June 2008: My corner local shop

Hovseter Side Frukt & Grønt (Fruits and vegetables) is a really nice shop to live close to. They're open every day, even Sundays (most shops are closed on Sundays in Norway). Apart from fruits and vegetables, you'll find lots of products from other countries; Turkish bread, børek, spices, feta cheese, olives etc. They have a wide range of tea and coffee, canned products and snacks of all kinds. As we're expecting company today, we went to buy some Italian icecream. Yum!


The sign tells you that the fruit and vegetables can be found inside. The shop has a cold-storage chamber to keep these goods fresh and nice.

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Vafler

A big favourite dessert in Norway is "vafler" (waffles). In the month of May we have many bank holidays and we will soon be celebrating our national day on May 17th. What a perfect time to make "vafler"!

I've made vafler since I was a kid, so I don't really use a recipe. I just take whatever I've got (well, nearly...) and when we decided to have vafler the other day, this is what I had: Eggs, sugar, flours, oil, milk and some spices. I also add baking powder and some vanilla sugar. After another search I found some sour cream and cream as well. Good!


I start off by stirring eggs and sugar. Then I just add the different ingredients and stir until the batter is a bit thicker than pancake batter.

The batter is left to "rest" for about half an hour, then I heat up the waffle iron, grease it and add some batter. After a few minutes the waffle is ready:


You can eat it with different kinds of jam, sour cream and jam, sweet brown cheese or just butter. I'm sure, if you ask Norwegians how they make vafler, you'll get very different opinions about it. The more "good stuff" you add to it (like cream, sour cream, curdled milk), the better they get.

Velbekomme! (Enjoy!)

Bottle deposits

When you buy bottled water, soda pops, lemonades or other beverages, you can bring the empty bottles/cans back to the shop to deposit them and get money. Each shop, kiosk, petrol station (usually) have a machine where you put your bottles, one by one, and when you're done you push a button to get the receipt for how much the shop have to pay you. You then bring the receipt to the cash register and they'll withdraw the amount on what you're buying. If you don't buy anything, you'll just get paid the amount for the bottles.

Metal cans are melted and recycled. The plastic and glass bottles are sanitized and then recycled.

From Norsk Resirk:

Since 1999, Norsk Resirk has made Norway a global leader when it comes to depositing and recycling non-refillable plastic bottles and beverage cans. 82 per cent of plastic bottles are returned, while the figure for cans is 92 per cent. All deposited containers are recycled. The 265 million cans deposited in 2007 provided 4400 metric tonnes of aluminum for new cans, while 77 million bottles provided 3200 metric tonnes of plastic for new plastic products.

Oslo City III

If the shopping makes you hungry, the mall of course has several places to grab a bite :o)

Photo: by Stormel

Ready for something sweet?

This is very typical for Norway: Vaffel. It's a type of sweet I like a lot, mainly because it isn't too sweet (or at least it doesn't have to be). It can be made with a lot of different ingrediants, but it usually contains eggs, sugar, flour, milk and some fat (melted butter). You can add cream, sour cream or curdled milk to give it a different and richer taste. The batter resembles the one you use to make pancakes, only thicker. You bake them in a special waffle iron which gives it the special checker work and the heart shape.

This one is covered with strawberry jam and ready to be eaten. I love waffles with sour cream and a little blueberry jam, or just butter and goat cheese.

The photos are from May 17th and here you see a woman making the waffles to be sold to all the hungry visitors. :)

Celebration food

When we celebrate May 17th, Norwegians like to eat well. This is a typical lunch table with smoked salmon, scrambled eggs, vegetables and ham. What you also can see here is something we call "kabaret" or hors d'oeuvres. It's vegetables, pieces of fish and shrimps and eggs in aspic-jelly. Not my favourite, but it's okay.

It's also very typical with shrimps as you can see in this small photo. I've had some reactions from Americans before when I told them we usually eat shrimps like this: We peel them. Put them on a slice of fine bread and use mayones and lemon on them. Yummie! :)