You go, little rebel!
- From Failblog.org
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Made my day!
…like starting the day with a BLT-sandwich; loads of fresh lettuce, crispy bacon, tomatoes and mayo on wholegrain bread…nomnomnom!
- Or making homemade noodle soup for supper, then realizing there’s just enough left to fit in a recycled curry paste tub that’s a perfect size for lunch tomorrow. I knew hoarding those plastic containers would pay off someday!
..or…finding these AWESOME band-aids at the supermarket : Star Wars band-aids!!!
- I can’t wait till the next time I cut myself. Wait, that came out wrong.
What little things make you happy?
BTW; today I realized that whilst teaching Fredrik tricks, little Alfie had picked up on the training too! During the daily 5 min “training session” Alf suddenly got up and walked on his hindlegs next to Fredrik when I gave the command “walk”. Such a surprise, he was even better at it than Fredrik. I will never underestimate you again Alfie, even though you look like you have syndrome!
A biologist gotta eat! I couldn’t resist this piece of carrot cake, sitting on a plate next to the cash register…tricky lunch ladies. And look, the foam in my milk coffee is in the shape of a heart! It means they were a match made in heaven. Mr.T demanded half the cake, since he bought it and has a weird policy about not eating sweets in the middle of the week, but I managed to scarf down 3/4 of it before he claimed his share. WIN!
I peeked into one of Mr. T’s classes where one of my favourite teachers was showing off his skills..I mean skulls (I’ve taken his class before). Although slightly morbid, I love looking at skulls.
From left to right: European pine marten, cat and red fox. Check out the huge eye sockets of the cat skull!
- Gorilla skull. Check out the fangs! Gorillas are herbivores (they only eat plant material), so the fangs are only used for fighting amongs males and protection against predators like leopards. That weird looking bone mohawk on the top of the head serves as an attachment point for the powerful jaw muscles.
- Male orangutan skull. This skull just cracked me up. The eye sockets sitting so close to each other, and the slightly protruding upper teeth… Mr. Orangutan, you gave your life to science, but today you served the noble art of comedy. Thank you.
At last…I think you all can guess what kind of primate this is ?
Would you take a look at the colours! Those berries look like candy. Considering the amount of sugar they’re covered in, they probably are. You see, my initial plan was to make a berry crumble. But then I got lazy, and decided that a smoothie would be just as satisfying.
Especially the part were I got to smash the berries together with vanilla ice cream and some milk in my mix master was very gratifying. The fact that these were picked by MOI in the garden of my uncle this fall added to the glory of it. - The bags of sour cherries, black – and red currants had been hanging out in my freezer just waiting for the smoothie impulse to happen.
LOOK AT THAT COLOUR!
I was so pleased when I got to serve this up for Mr. T and our buddy Big-A. He’s the one who I served left over liver casserole for dinner the other day, poor thing. I hope this magnificently coloured smoothie made up for it.
We watched A Serious Man (2009), a pitch black comedy, written and directed by the Coen brothers. It’s one of those movies where you follow the main character as his life unravels and crumbles before his eyes, and you can’t do anything but laugh. Oh, and the main character is called Larry Gopnik. Do you like the Coen movies ? My favorites are the Big Lebowski, Fargo and this movie, of the ones I’ve seen.
Now, I gotta get ready for school. And finish my article on “Viruses – where do they come from?”. So far I’ve managed to incorporate the expression “talking into the ‘big white phone’”, and “shrouded in a cloud of mystery”.
I let Fredrik inspect our new homework area (two PC desks next to each other in front of the window). After the initial nosing around, he settled down on Mr T’s fancy electronic mousepad. It didn’t take long before he started making those characteristic “I feel good” noises by grinding his molars together. I think he likes getting some time away from his ratty buddies in the cage, especially the two little ones that have way too much energy, according to Fredrik. If he doesn’t start to chew on any wires or the green houseplant that’s in the middle between the two monitors, I’ll let him hang out here more often.
The only problem is…
..he’s so..
..incredibly…
..cute.
It’s hard to concentrate on getting some studying done when all you want to do is cuddle his lovely little head.
Who would know, that this this brown gooey mass..could taste soo good ? I didn’t, for sure. As I was browsing the fresh meat section of my supermarket I noticed how cheap ox liver is compared to other cuts of meat. And then I realised I’ve only tried liver once before and hated it, when I was a kid. I couldn’t let the opportunity to try to cook something new get past me, so I immediately bought half a kilo (a pound) of ox liver. Let me walk you through my plan to make myself a liverlover (haha, that was a cheap one, I know).
First I peroused the wonderful world of food bloggers, and immediately decided that soaking the liver in milk was a good idea, as many sites that I visited recommended it as a way of removing some of that pretty pungent flavour that puts many off the taste of liver.
Man, it was an unusal experience to handle that big piece of bloody, raw, dark red meat. My hands got blood all over them, and if I’d been a more squeamish kind of person I’d probably abandoned the liver project right there and then. But I didn’t. I was brave…
And then, after I had finished with that bloody mess (literally) I got to fry up some bacon and onions..ohh, the smell!
After the onions had gotten nice and soft, and the bacon was brown and slightly crispy, I emptied the lot into a casserole and started frying sliced baby champignons in the remaining bacon fat. I could eat these babies alone, they smell soo good:
When they were starting to brown up like in this picture, I added in two cloves of minced garlic. The flavour got even better! They got some salt and pepper, before I dumped them into the pot with the onions and bacon.
Finally, I got to play with the liver again…they had been soaking for at least half an hour, and since I don’t have any patience at all I decided half an hour is plenty of soaking time for those little suckers. I coated them in flour seasoned with salt and pepper…
..and fried them on both sides in a mixture of butter and rapeseed oil.
I didn’t aim for cooking them through, just a nice brown crust. I fried them for 1-2 minutes on each side, in several batches, before I dumped them all in the casserole with the rest of the stuff.
The rest was easy; I added in about half a cup of cream, and enough water to just not cover the food. Put the lid on and let it simmer until the liver pieces were just cooked through and the sauce had reduced to a creamy, delicious consistency. I added a bit of soy sauce, Worchestersauce and pepper, but didn’t really have to because the bacon gave plenty of salty, smoky flavour. Bacon really does make everything better! At long last, I plated the brown loveliness with the leftover reheated rutabaga mash, together with a dollop of lingonberry jam.
Then I poured myself a glass of red wine, dug in and decided that my mission was completed: Liver casserole is delicious! You might need loads of additional fat and flavour in the form of butter, cream and bacon to make it delicious, but when the end’s good, all is good. In the words of Rachael Ray: Liver is good and good for you!
The following day we had a friend over and I fed him the leftover casserole, and he loved it too. That’s the kind of person I am; I feed my guests leftovers, and proud of it.
Last nights dinner looked kind of..brown, but boy was it good! Findus had a big sale on their fish products, so I grabbed as many items I knew would fit inside my tiny one-shelf freezer. The breaded crust wasn’t outstanding, but the plaice (a kind of flounder) was delicious, nestled nicely inside the crust with a dill-champignon sauce.
The mash was from the day before, and tasted even better than the night I made it. How can you go wrong with a mash made of rutabaga, a few potatoes and loads of dairy butter ? Some nutmeg accompanied the salt and freshly ground black pepper, as they always do in my mashes. The pickled red beets were added in a spur of the moment, but their sweet and sour, earthy flavour went along nicely with the rest.
Later that night Mr. T and I went to the movies to watch the Avatar movie. The graphics were outstanding, but all the characters were very stereotypic and the plot was as big a cliché as it could get. If you take Disneys Pocahontas and add some components from the Aliens movies plus the special effects, you get Avatar. No surprises, but good entertainment anyway. I’d give it a 5/6. I regret paying the extra bucks for seeing it in 3-D format; it didn’t do the movie much better, and the glasses gave me a headache, and kept on sliding down my nose, which was annoying. Enough with the complaining, I loooveed the Leonopteryxes:
Taco salad – makes enjoying your tacos much easier! Have you ever tried biting off a bite from a stuffed, hard taco shell ? And then experiencing that the shell just falls apart, spilling its contents all over you ? Well, I have. I’ve never succeded in eating a hard shelled taco without messing up terribly, until I one day thought of making it into a salad. The Taco Salad was born. It’s delicious! It looks kinda messy, and this version doesn’t even have the typical taco seasoned minced meat, only slices of sandwich meat, but it still has the “taco flavour” due to the other ingredients (in order of layering on plate) : chopped iceberg salad, cucumber chunks, pieces of red bell pepper and tomato, chili beans (spicy pinto beans from a can), salsa, blobs of sour cream, grated Jarlsberg cheese, a crumbled taco shell, and chopped black olives! This I managed to eat almost without getting it all over my face and clothes.
Arrrrr!!! The Norwegian Government are discussing whether to put a ban on sweets/food that resembles tobacco products (stupid! Who in their right state of mind would think that these licorice pipes looked like real pipes?!). So the last time I came through the tax free shop at the airport I got these babies. Soft, sweet licorice Skipper’s Pipes. Soo goood!! I brought a whole pack of them to the New Years Eve party that we celebrated in a light house at the very most southern part of Norway. It was a fun night, and we all tried our best to make the pipes last as long as possible, trying hard not to munch them up the moment we stuck them in our mouths…Let’s just say; I had a very hard time.
Christiane @ flickr
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