Norwegian Food
Excerpt from a letter to friends :
Bread can be made very cheaply at home : water, butter, flour, eggs, yiest. So I went into the halls of the supermarket, picking up butter in an entire isle of only butter. But then comes a lady and just to confirm I ask her to identify the product for me and she tells me it is yiest -- in Norway, yiest is this butter-like cube that you dissolve in water before putting into the bread! Then I go to get the flour and see an extremely big selection of flour so I stand there trying to make sense of the pictures until a mom of four kids (who have in vain tried to make conversation in Nowegian with me, perched up on the shopping cart) finally elucidated the mystery for me: the packages I saw were not flour. Indeed, they were pre-mixed bread mixtures. All the kinds you may want. All you had to do was add the yiest. And so it is that Norwegians spend their budgets on buying pre-packed flour, eggs and butter. Now you may wonder why they would have so many packages if it's only for those few ingredients inside. The answer is that, since the typical diet of a Norwegian consists of sandwhiches, essentially, four times a day, then they - naturally - need some diversity do they not? So in the morning, it's the smorbrod and then you have the nistepakke, lefse and a ton of different types in addition to those. And just so as to leave no doubt for their culinary affections: they have a word in their language, which is "palegg". And this word - which I doubt exists anywhere else - roughly translates to "something to put on your bread". It is an all encompassing word to describe the butter, ham, cheese, and veggies.
Unsurprisingly, the second biggest treat for a Norwegian is pizza. What I call a hot sandwhich, really (dough with hot ham and melted cheese and hot veggies). Norwegians are the first consummers of frozen pizza in the world (it's an actual statistic!). I thought my local friends were joking when they said it's Norway's unofficial main dish, but now that we received a backpack from school containing "Peppe's Pizza" advertisements inside and the corresponding logo etched on the outside of it - I believe them.
*** Note: I have since some to try elk and special sauce-based meat dishes and they are fantastic. So it's not all bad :p
