1. Chop up two cloves of garlic. Using garlic salt is simply not acceptable. So. The real thing, please?

2. Take 1/2 of a large onion. Or a whole smaller one. You get the picture. Now chop, chop, chop!

3. Add one good sip of olive oil into a large pan. Heat it up and put in the garlic first, and then shortly after the chopped onions as well. Brown the mix for 5 minutes or so.

4. Open a large can of diced tomatoes. Or two normal sized cans. Add it to the pan. Fill the can 3/4 full of water, and add that too.

5. Bring the soup to boil, and let it simmer over low heat for about 30 minutes while you spice it up with some pepper, salt, and about two tea spoons of sugar. How much sugar depends on how sweet the tomatoes are, though.

6. This could be when you would put the soup into a blender to make it smooth. You’re not going to do that. Why? Well, it’s messy. You might not even have a blender (like me). Most importantly; no one will believe you when you say it’s homemade soup. It will simply look too fancy. That it tastes fancy is something we’ll just have to live with. So let’s leave the soup nice and chunky, shall we?

7. Some minutes before the soup is ready to serve, you can chop up some fresh basil to sprinkle over it. Dry basil is OK too.

If you like, you could add some chopped up red chili to make the soup hot and spicy, or add cream or milk to make it creamier, a bit richer and with less tomato taste. Or do a little bit of both. In the soup I just made for myself, I added some balsamic vinegar and a bit of yogurt when serving. There are no rules here. Just soup. Now go make your own version!

If you need some visual aid, this could be helpful, though:

This little poster is something I made as an assignment for class to get to know InDesign a bit better. I considered the target audience for this to be my mother, but am thinking it might work for others as well. You see, my Mom is the one who always asks me about this recipe. However, it’s been a while since the last time she asked, and I’m not sure whether it is because she forgot that this is a part of her kitchen repertoire, or if she actually has learned the recipe by heart now. By printing and hanging this pdf on the fridge, however, both Mom and I will remember to make this soup more often. Which is a good thing, because every time I make it, it’s just so much better than I imagined it to be. Yum.

The table is set. Various delicious courses made out of mainly the same ingredients and some clever IxD brains.

However, the reason for this nice treat just occurred to me. It is not meant to inspire us to create tasty meals on our own in the future. Oh no. This dinner was a “Goodbye to cooking”-ritual. Evening classes combined with a heavy workload simply will not leave me any time to be home at 5 to try out a new delightful dish. Dinners will be consumed in the studio kitchen at school where knowing how to deep-fry calamaris or create hummus or marinara sauce from scratch won’t really fill your stomach. Reading the microwave manual will, though. I guess learning to eat “the American way” – standing up or leaning against a wall with some take-away in a paper box, armed with a fork only is closer than I like to think… Oh my.

Sorry, Mom, but there’s no way around it. I actually will get fat over here.

My Mom is worried that I will get fat in the US. So she decided to teach me how to make some healthy crisp bread the other day. The first thing I suggested was to put some honey in the dough to make it yummier. I am definitely getting fat over there. However, these initially surprisingly-easy-to-make crisp breads end up being not-so-easy-to-separate-from-the-baking-sheet if you add the honey. My advice – DO NOT EXPERIMENT. Do as Tone (my Mom’s colleague) says. If you understand Norwegian, that is. I am lazy today, so I simply won’t bother translating all these seeds and weird flour types into English. I won’t even type the recipe. I think my photos will do. Now go make these crispy delights:

The menu:
- Salmon carpaccio
- Pasta with pumpkin or amatriciana (tomato, bacon, chili++) sauce
- Panna cotta with raspberries

Some of my friends came early to help out (thankyouthankyou!!). But I made the dessert all by myself the night before. A nervous dessert-making session. I am not good at baking or making desserts – probably because I generally prefer eating a starter rather than digging in to this sweet stuff. But panna cotta is the exception that proves the rule. Not when it comes to the making of it, but when it comes to the eating. I simply LOVE panna cotta, and figured that I just had to try to make my favorite dish although my last attempt did not work out at all. After all, every recipe I looked up would mark this as an “Easy” dish to make. And this time it actually was!

PANNA COTTA WITH YOGURT
3 sheets of gelatine
3 dl whipping cream
2 dl plain yogurt
1 dl sugar
1 vanilla beam

RASPBERRY SAUCE
5 tablespoons of sugar
1 dl water
250 g rasberries
1 vanilla beam
Limejuice

Split the vanilla beam lengthwise, Scrape out the seeds with a knife. Put both beam and seeds in a pan with the cream and sugar. Heat it while stirring, but do not bring to boil. Remove from heat for 20 minutes. Put sheets of gelatin in cold water for about 3 minutes. Put the pan back on the stove on medium heat. Remove the vanilla beam. Take the sheets of gelatin out of the water, and squeeze them gently to remove any water before adding them to the pan. Stir until the gelatin is completely dissolved. Turn off the heat, and add the yogurt gently while stirring. Pour the panna cotta mixture into 4 glasses. Put in fridge for about 4 hours.

The raspberry sauce is just one of many ways to add flavor to the panna cotta. But rasberry sauce – how to: put water and sugar in a pan, stir while bringing to boil. Remove the pan from the heat, add a split vanilla beam, the seeds, the berries and some drops of lime juice to enhance the taste. Let the mixture rest for an hour before removing the vanilla beam and put the whole berrysaucethingy in a blender or something. Add some tablespoons of sauce to the panna cotta before serving – just to cover it. Too much sauce will ruin the delicious yogurt/vanilla flavour of the panna cotta. So. Less than on the crappy iphone photo above, then :)

Yummy!

My favorite bruschetta place is Bar Enrica in Manarola, Italy. The summer of 2008 I think we had both breakfast and lunch at Bar Enrica every day of our vacation because of their wonderful bruschettas with various delicious toppings.

Classica Piú, Gorgonzola e noci, Mediterranea. From Bar Enrica, Manarola.
More photos from my Italy 2008 holiday.

In the bruschetta I make, the tomato salsa takes some time to prepare. The ingredients:

Olive oil
Onion
Garlic
Cherry tomatoes
Tin of chopped tomatoes
Balsamic vinegar
Basil
Sugar
Salt

Chopped onions and a couple of fine-chopped garlic cloves in a large frying pan with some olive oil. Add chopped fresh tomatoes after a bit. The more fresh, tasty tomatoes, the better, but if you need to make a large amount, hermetic tomatoes work fine as well. I normally use a combo of the two. I let it simmer over a low heat for quite some time (30-45 minutes), and add a bit of water if the salsa gets too dry. Towards the end I add some balsamic vinegar (a couple of tablespoons), lots of fresh basil, and a bit of salt and sugar to adjust the taste. If the tomatoes are very sweet, then skip the sugar. The salsa is best served cold on crispy bread with grated parmesan cheese, green pesto, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, salt and pepper on the table.

I have made my first pie ever – and it was actually quite successful. I have always thought making pie was very timeconsuming, and at the same time, it doesn’t always taste that much anyway… But this pie was ready to eat in about 45 minutes, and with broccoli, feta, bacon and garlic as main ingredients, it definitely became a tasty lunch! I feel all “housewifey” now. Any suggestions for next steps on the way to housewifeyness?

It was Andreas Viestad that inspired me to try out the pie for lunch :)