Meg og mitt liv

Om meg og mitt liv

Quickie

4. mars 2009 in Meg og mitt liv by Christiane | No comments

I’m on Svalbard and well! No time for long recaps though, so here comes a short one:

- I am on Svalbard, for the second half of the Arctic Winter Ecology course. It’s awesome.

- We’ve looked at completely dehydrated, nearly frozen collembola (springtails, tiny arctic invertebrates that jump) come back to life after spending 4 months in a freezer.

Onychiurus arcticus

- We’ve learnt how to age and sex-determine Svalbard ptarmigans (Lagopus mutus hyperboreus) from their wing feathers, and looked at their crop contents to see what kind of plants they prefer to eat.

Fluffy, fat birds with hairy feet

- They prefer Bistorta viviparum bulbils (Harerug / the Alpine Bistort), which is also heavily foraged by students while on field excursions (they’re yummy, who would think that viviparous propagation modules would be so tasty).

Bistorta vivipara, the edible bulbils are the brown lumps on the stalk.

- Nybyen (the barracks outside Longyearbyen were the students are supposed to stay while on Svalbard) is full, so now we’re living in Mary Anns Polarrigg Guesthouse downtown. 5 min walk to Unis vs. 35 min….wonderful.

- …Especially since it’s been windy, very windy, I’m talking “grabbing hold of small people almost blowing them out on to the tundra”-windy. I’m talking shaking the house windy, I’m talking the kind of windy were you suddenly can’t move forwards because the wind is stronger than you, grabbing hold of you, trying to move you the opposite way from where you want to go. I love it.

- We (the students + three others) spent the weekend at the studentcabin in Bjørndalen (Bear Valley).

The studentcabin in Bjørndalen/Bjorndalen, Svalbard

The cabin took amazingly two meagre hours to heat up, opposed to the five hours we spent huddling in the sofa the last time, and we were all hyper and happy over such a luxury (not freezing). We ate good food, drank good wine, played card games, tried to play the horribly untuned guitar and went “butt-sliding” down the mountainside the next day. On our way home on Sunday a beautiful orange-red-pink sunset over turquise ice sheets accompanied our retreat along the Adventfjord. I kicked myself a dozen times for not having fixed my camera yet, commanding everybody with cameras to take lots of pictures, secretely planning to go on a picture raid with my USB-stick later on.

- I’ve reached a new level of general cold – hardiness and “don’t give a poop”-attitude regarding temperatures. The part of the guesthouse were our rooms are is separated from the kitchen and the livingroom, meaning one has to venture OUTSIDE to get from the one place to the other. I can not be hassled with meaningless items like proper pants, boots and jackets when I only have to move 10 meters, and I think I peaked the “Svalbards most nonchalant dressers”-record when I ran through a complete white-out (wind, snow, no visibility) wearing slippers, thights, a cotton dress and a hoodie. Okay, maybe nonchalant is not completely deserved, after all I squealed like a piglet as I went along, and had to stand in front of the fireplace half an hour in order to seize shaking when I got inside, but it still counts!

- I’ve ridden a beltwagon for the second time in my life, with a madman behind the wheel taking us over every bump on the tundra he could find at 50 km/h.

I sat in the front wagon with three of my professors having a somewhat “grown up conversation” but I still couldn’t stop myself from squealing whenever the Madman drove over a particularly steep bump/depression. So much for trying to make an intelligent impression on people.

Aubergine Awakening

2. februar 2009 in Meg og mitt liv by Christiane | No comments

Jebus, another month passed by without an update! But I won’t spend to much time apologizing, after all it’s my blog. And I have had a lot flying around my ears lately, not to mention trying to pierce my eardrum again. Yes, I’m talking about the chicks. I’ve just finished another two week batch of behaviour experiments with 12 fuzzballs, and as the batch before them; they were loud. After around 10 days of stuffing my ears with shredded pieces of paper towels, I bought some proper earplugs. Oh the relief. Did you know that chicks, not a mere 2 days old, can produce sounds up to (and I’m sure well beyond) 90 db ? 120 db is the safety limit before you’re in serious risk of hearing damage. But boy! It does hurt at 90 db too.

(The mealworm is UNDER the brown cardboard roof, little chick).

The first week at Uni after the holidays (one week before all the courses started, mind you) I attended an intensive course in lab animals ethics and management. Although I cringed internally every time examples of painful experiment with rats came up, it was quite interesting (and Sam got more than his fair share of treats and cuddles when I came home). A couple of childhood/young adulthood daydreams of a world filled with alternatives to animal testing were sent to their realistic graves – they exist, but only in minute numbers to all the testing needed – and I’m not talking of cosmetics. I mean development and testing of drugs, vaccines, chemicals, etc etc. I wonder what anti-animal testing people do when they’re at the dentist to pull a tooth, do they ask for anaestasia or not ? Cause if they do, they’re hypocrites.

My own lab animal; Sam, testing rats response to beer. Result: whisker licking approval.

Bah! My month long absence from writing in English is really noticable, I feel like I’m slightly retarded, fighting with every sentence. I hope I get back on track soon. On Wednesday I have to make a talk on a paper about food neophobia and food conservatism in chicken in my Behaviour 2 course. In english. In front of a room full of foreign master- and phD students, that do not possess the Norwegian students apprehension to asking questions. Oh, there will be questions asked and discussions galore. And nothing helps preparing for a talk in english more than a tad of blogging, right ?

Here’s some proper blogging for ya’; in the beginning of December last year (2008!) I turned vegetarian. For the whole length of a week. How did Tore go down with the lack of animal protein you might ask? The answer is that he didn’t; he was on Svalbard doing labworks, while I had my friend Mona visiting me, who – surprise! is a vegetarian. Now, I don’t think I could become a proper vegetarian, vegan nonetheless, but I must say I was positively surprised by the whole experience. Not once did I feel abnormally hungry or unsatisfied by the food we were eating. It actually felt quite good. And I discovered a new favourite dish, which I can’t wait to introduce to Tore, just to see what he has to say when I tell him it’s made from eggplants. Now, Mona isn’t much of a cook, at least that was her words. Eager as I am to try new recipes, I took on the “chore” of cooking for us the whole week. Let me present a small week menu of a vegetarian-wannabe:

Monday: veggie pizza with mushrooms, onions, tomatoes, capsicum, garlic, black olives, pesto and cheese. Yum! To my norwegian readers; First Price Margarita frozen pizzas, 12 kr each, serve as an excellent alternative to ready-made pizza bottoms. So cheap and so thin-and-crispy-almost-authentic-Italian.

Tuesday: One of my take-what-you-got Indian stews with lots of red curry paste and coconut milk. On impulse I added sweet potatoes in cubes and red lentils, and it was goood!

Wednesday: Leftovers from Tuesday + some brown rice. Even yummier today after a night in the fridge.

Thursday: Aubergine/eggplant lasagna with salad on the side.

Friday: Leftovers

The Thursday night dish really deserves some closer description. It was absolutely delicious, and although time consuming, very worth it. I cannot, although I want to, claim it to be very healthy, but who cares, it’s vegetarian, and that got to be worth some health points, if not karma points (not that I believe in Karma).

The recipe in short terms: You take an aubergine, slice it, sprinkle with salt, let sit 30 minutes, rinse off salt. Coat with flour, then dip in egg, then crust with breadcrumbs. Fry, slowly, on low heat, until the flesh is soft and the crust is crusty. Layer as follows: Tomato sauce, aubergine, egg-ricotta(cottage cheese on students budget)-parmesan mix, repeat. Top off with tomato sauce and some kind of melting cheese, mozarella if you can afford it. Bake in oven until the cheese melts and the egg-ricotta/cottage cheese mix settles, enjoy! You can find the original recipe here, on the great danish foodblog Newyorkerbyheart.

A closer peek at the preparations:

Oh, I see I added spinach in between, I forgot about that. I always wilt down spinach with some oil, minced garlic and a nutmeg drizzle whenever I use fresh spinach. And if you don’t feel like making this for dinner I don’t know what’s wrong with you. I Promise to post the extensive recipe Soon, capital P, capital S.

Happy New Year everybody!

1. januar 2009 in Meg og mitt liv by Christiane | 1 comment

Despite my month-long absence from this blog, I am alive and well. Well, “well” is maybe stretching things a bit far, regarding the fact that my left eardrum EXPLODED second day after Christmas, but apart from that, I’m perfectly fine. I just wanted to wish you all a happy new year, and hope that you’ll be able to fulfill most of your new years resolutions. Mine is to begin to practise some sort of fighting sport again; I used to do Taekwon-do, now I’m thinking of boxing. I think I need some sport were I can get rid of built up frustration and stress from working on my masters thesis, and I can’t think of a better stress relief than flailing about with my arms and legs.

I’ll get back to you soon, with a more elaborate report of December and its activites. But right now I feel the need to crawl back under the covers after last night/todays early morning new years party.

Arctic Winter Ecology Course, bit by bit

27. november 2008 in Meg og mitt liv by Christiane | No comments

Part One: Moraine Cave Spelunking

Definition of ’spelunking’ here.

There are so many things that I want to tell you about from the short two weeks on Svalbard, but I have a final exam on Tuesday, so I have to restrain myself in the blogging department. One of the first things we did after settling in in Nybyen (studenthousings) was to climb/crawl/squeeze through a moraine cave which took us 3 hours. It was me, Tore, Jago, Heather, Phillip and Matteo. None of us knew the whole way through the cave, or had any cave climbing experience, but we borrowed crampons from the student equipment storage and went out to the Longyear glacier with fresh courage. Well, that’s an exaggeration on my part. I’ve never felt comfortable with thight spaces, but I felt that I had to do it (now I’m very happy I did).

- Here’s a picture of me, forgetting about my mild claustrophobia, just enjoying the spectacular site of the insides of a moraine cave (a tunnel through the deposited mounds of earth, gravel and stones (up to the size of boulders) at the foot of a glacier, dug out by the glacier melt water).

There were passages in the cave that were so thight that you had to lie your head down sideways to get through, with stones sticking up from the frozen ground as well as hangin down, frozen to the ceiling..let’s just say; I bumped my head more than once. But after the horrible passages that I would crawl/squeeze through as quick as possible just to get them over with, we came to this huge cathedral-like open rooms, glittering like diamonds from all the ice crystals that covered all of the walls and the ceiling.

In another room there were thousands of thin ice icicles hanging from the ceiling, almost touching the ground; on the picture to the left you can see Heather sliding on her back in order not to break any of them.

Pure, pure water, frozen to form the most perfect ice crystals; hexagonals. Actually, the same day we had a lecture about snow; it was fun to look for the “trumpet crystals”, “sugar snow” and the hexagonals.

Even though the 3 hour journey was an adventure, it was quite a relief when we finally came to the opening and Jago had managed to dig us a way out. In the thight spaces I would sometimes have to wait for the people in front of me to get a bit a head to avoid getting kicked..well, in the head, with their crampons. While I was lying there; feeling stuck, stones poking from both sides and nothing but darkness around me besides my crappy head light; my mind would wander to the tons of stone and rock above me, only held together by a thin film of frozen water. That’s when I discovered that I really am nuts about cooking. Thinking of what I would make for dinner if I survived was the thing that managed to diverge my thoughts away from the frozen death trap I was in. And Hooray, I didn’t get a single panic attack in there, at least not one that I couldn’t stop by taking a few breaths as deeply as the floor and ceiling would allow me to.

Now I HAVE TO get back to studying. I want to warn you readers that despite my tale of the dreadful crawl got an urge for moraine cave spelunking; it IS dangerous. Talk to someone who knows what they’re doing before you go ahead. In some of the big rooms we were in, there were patches of exposed rock in the ceiling; which means that stones must’ve fallen down recently; ice crystals hadn’t formed on the bare spaces yet. Lastly, I must credit Phillip for these pictures; my big bulky camera wouldn’t have made it through the cave with me. You can find some more of his pictures here:

Phillips Picasa Folder – Arctic Winter Ecology Course

Oh, and one last thing (disregard this if you know Svalbard winter conditions) : We had SNOW ! And lots of it! We had to dig ourselves in and out of the cave. Big, fluffy snowflakes, oh, how I adore thee!

I’m back!

26. november 2008 in Meg og mitt liv by Christiane | No comments

- And I’m alive! Despite freezing temperatures (ranging from -5 to -25 degrees Celcius), ALMOST encountering a polar bear, crawling through a moraine cave for 3 hours and partying with the locals in Longyearbyen (probably the most dangerous of the cases mentioned above). I’m still very tired from getting my internal clock all messed up from seeing nothing but darkness two weeks straight, but I’ll try to upload some pictures tomorrow.

In the meantime; something completely different: MORE LLAMAS! This time a very nice flash song:

Flash – The Llama Song

Cabintrip to “Soggy Valley”

4. november 2008 in Meg og mitt liv by Christiane | No comments

Last weekend Tore and I joined a couple of our colleagues from the biology students interest organization (BFU) on a cabin trip to one of the student cabins that belong to the University of Oslo. I think most of them are situated in the more or less the same place; in Sørkedalen, about half an hour outside of Oslo. After a ride with the subway, a short bustrip and an about 5 kilometers (uphill!) hike, we arrived at the cabin.

A decent distance I think; not too far away, but not too close to home either. The snow that only had a 24 hours appearance in Oslo was still on the ground out in Sørkedalen (with some imagination Sørkedalen could be translated to Soggy Valley). In less then an hour the landscape around us transformed from wet, autumny citylife, to a beautiful snow-covered winter country.

The cabin we stayed in was the Pharmacy Students Cabin, and boy! was it a big cabin! I think it had room for 30 people or more. It had a huge fireplace with cozy sofas all around, and a sauna! I, and I think Tore even more, love to take saunas. We piled as much snow as we could into a metal bucket, crammed some beers into it, took it with us into the sauna and sat there for at least an hour. When it got to hot we just ran outside to chill down in the snow, just like the true finnish sauna tradition dictates.

Rodent pedicure

31. oktober 2008 in Meg og mitt liv by Christiane | No comments

The cutest thing was when he started to nibble at my fingernails afterwards.

I forgot to publish the post-artichoke picture; all the clean-eaten leaves and the husky stem looked so nice that I had to shoot a picture of it:

Lastly, I had another urge for salmon a week ago and made this; Salmon with Pasta and Lemon-Dill sauce . I don’t have diabetes but I like to cook healthy as often as possible, and this dish wasn’t just healthy, it was really good! I think I’ll precook the pasta a few minutes first the next time I make this, since I thought the pasta took too long time to cook in the broth with the vegetables. I also added some extra soy sauce and lemon juice.

The first snow came falling down from the sky yesterday, but as most snow in Oslo does, this one melted the very next day too. But it was nice as long as it lasted, it made me start thinking about how to feed the wild birds during the cold season. There’s a small pear tree outside my window, maybe I could just put up some bird food in the tree. During my childhood my mother always took care of the small birds that stay in Norway during winter, and I remember the fun of learning the species names of all of them…I guess that’s one of the reasons for my biology interest!

Here are some house sparrows in the botanical zoological garden Wilhelma, in Stuttgart, Germany.

Wilhelma - botanical and zoological garden of Stuttgart.

According to my text book in Animal Behaviour the little guy with the biggest black patch on his chest is the dominant male in the group.

The best salmon dish ever! + some other food-related triumphs

28. oktober 2008 in Meg og mitt liv by Christiane | 5 comments

I’ve discovered a thrilling new, incredibly tasty recipe for salmon baked in the oven on a bed of baby spinach and leek. I will not take all the credits for this, since I was inspired by a dish Gillian McKeith made during one of her programmes, I think it was “You are what you eat”. I watched the show one day, got totally inspired, and made this dish the following day – it turned out perfectly, was super-tasty and very satisfying. I prepared the salmon pretty much the same way as Gillian does in this recipe but I didn’t sauté the leeks before I added them to the pan, nor did I brush the salmon during the cooking prosess. I used fairly small (cheap!) fillets of salmon that cooked so quick that I didn’t have to do anything with them during their time in the oven. They came out perfectly cooked, juicy and flavourful, not dry at all.

The ginger and garlic gave the fish a remarkable fresh and delicious taste, and I’ll definitely pair those together in another fish dish. I wanted some starch in addition to the vegetables, so I cooked up some diced sweet potato together with one regular potato, mashed them up with some butter and seasoned the mash with salt, pepper, nutmeg, garlic and fresh ginger. Do you see a pattern? Indeed, the mash complemented the fish very well.

Sweet potato purée..the best mash I've had

Sweet potato purée..I adore thee!

On an impulse I drizzled a new spice mix over the lot (from the brand Santa Maria ; Wasabi and Sesame), which worked out very nice! The next time I will even try to put some real wasabi onto the fish during the baking..mmmmhh!

Santa Marias new Wasabi Sesame spice mix

The finished master piece (I’m getting a hang at arranging my food, don’t you think? (Just say yes, please)) :

I seriously had to retain myself from gobbling it all up before I took the picture..actually, just looking at the pictures now makes me crave this exact dish. Jeez, me and my cravings.

<- Heaven on a fork

Time to talk about the other triumphs. First, I’ve made sun…uh, oven dried tomatoes! My local vegetable marked had these glorious red cherry tomatoes and I just couldn’t leave them there in the shop, so I adopted them, took them home and roasted them! Slice in half, drizzle with sea salt, fresh pepper and olive oil, in the oven at 100 degrees celcius, about 4 hours, done. Mini-photo series below (click on the pics to make them bigger):

<- Look at that glorious, ruby red colour! Just beautiful! I planned to use them in some pasta dish, but I have to hurry, since I’ve already snacked up half the jar…yum!

So, are you curious about my third triumph ? A few nights ago I ate something I’ve never had before, but which I’ve been wanting to try out ever since I read about it in Andy’s great blog (you have to scroll down the page a bit) - ARTICHOKES! Artichokeartichokeartichoke. I heart artichoke. Just a week ago I knew nothing, now I know that I love their subtle flavour, that they are fun to eat, and that artichokes actually are flowers of the thistle family! How often do you eat a flower for dinner? If you’re somewhat like me, you have no idea how to prepare and eat an artichoke; this site explains it all wonderfully.

I made a dip of good balsamic vingar and some mayonaise, which was absolutely terrific, but regular softened butter was very nice too. I can’t quite get over how much fun I had eating this thing with Tore (and Sam, nibbling away like crazy), it must be my inner child that loves the idea of eating a big flower. Just look here, it IS a flower!

Lastly, I want to share a norwegian twist on pancakes with you guys. In Norway, we normally eat pancakes at dinnertime, not for breakfast. They are made without baking powder, just milk, flour, sugar, salt and eggs, and the batter is generally thinner than the american version. To make it even crazier, many norwegians like to have soup with their pancakes. I have to admit, I hadn’t tried this until I met Tore, but I really like it, since pancakes on their own are too sweet on my palate, I like something salty for dinner. Pancakes are one of those dishes that I just can’t bother to make, since they’re time consuming and Tore is more than willing to make them. Instead, I made the soup; a quick soup of little, green peas, fresh from the freezer, I think they’re called petit pois. When Tore visited the Netherlands a long time ago, he had pancakes with cheese on them, and ever since we’ve had cheese on our pancakes too. With sugar and lemonjuice. And my addition today; poppy seeds. Sound crazy, right? But verr d’lish, you should try it.

Oh, I forgot, we added some bacon to the batter too! Yuuumm….You eat them like this; put sugar, a lemon squize, some poppy seeds and grated parmesan cheese (or any other, sharp cheese) along the center of the pancake, roll it up, and cut into pieces with the help of a fork and a spoon. Yes, a spoon, knives are prohibited. Take one bite of pancake, follow up with a spoonful of pea soup. Mmh-mmh-mmmmhhh!!! I’ll post the recipe when I get around to it or if you send me an mail and ask, right away.

Although this blog is turning more and more into a food blog, I just have to add some pictures of my beloved little chunk of hairy loveliness; my pet rat Sam. Here he is snoozing away on my fake fur blanket, on the couch. Isn’t that little nose just adorable? He didn’t even flinch when I kissed his little head, the sleepy little man.

And one more (look at that little hand under his cheek! So cute!) :

All together now: “Aaaaaaawwwwwwhhh!!!”

Ramen noodle frenzy

20. oktober 2008 in Meg og mitt liv by Christiane | No comments

Tore and I have had an almost weeklong simultanous ramen noodle hang-up. We bought about 1 million different kinds of ramen noodles the last time we were shopping in one of the chinese grocery shops downtown Oslo, and suddenly we both couldn’t go through a day without eating at least one pack of crazy flavoured noodles. They were all sooo fascinating, and if not incredible tasty, it was very satisfying to slurp hot broth after spending a day in the rainy autumn weather. The craziest ramen I tried must be the kimchi-flavoured ones I had yesterday – the broth was pink! And the flavour..indescribable. Kinda like salty, slightly synthetic strawberry-beef broth. But not bad, not bad at all!

Luckily we came off the ramen wagon today, and I made a spicy carrot soup to compensate for the unhealthy week long noodle-overdose. To give us something to chew on I made a side of pizza rolls from store-bought freshpizza dough – we were both so hungry that we just couldn’t wait for a home made dough to rise. They were so delicious! I filled them with tomato paste, chopped olives, garlic, sundried tomatoes, strips of lowfat ham, dried oregano, basil and marjoram, cheese and basil pesto.. Neither of us were really excited about the taste of the carrot soup, but with the help of the rolls we finished it off, which means we ate about 8 carrots for dinner! That must count for something !

The beautiful yellow and red maple leafs from the last weeks of bright beautiful autumn weather have turned to a blackish-brown glistening..mass, covering nearly all the sidewalks on my route to University. With poor street lightning, rain and heavy winds, riding a bike was quite an adventure today. I like that it takes less time to bike than to go by bus and the tube, and especially that it doesn’t harm the environment, but boy, do I have to do some serious self-convincing to get on that bike every morning..Oh well, I’m done whining now. Biking through the rainy darkness makes me appreciate the dry warm inside so much more. I’ve even begun to think about cookies to bake in December! But I will not mention any of them yet, as it’s ONLY OCTOBER, a fact that the supermarkets seem to disregard completely, since they’ve already put the christmas chocolate and – marzipan on the shelves…

I’ve bought the plane tickets for Svalbard, made all the arrangements that need to be done and I can hardly wait to get up there! The course is going to be really hectic (they call it an intensive course, after all) but I’ll make sure to make time to visit some of these guys :

Me and a 5 week old husky puppy + Fram and Tundra (from left); a 3 year old male husky, and a 7 month old husky-greenland dog mix female.

I love dogs, and the sled dogs that I met on Svalbard, Spitzbergen are some of the most amazing dogs I’ve ever met. They live outside in the cold all year round, pull more than their own weight through often deep snow, they compete which each other for food, being chained to small huts when not running – but still so incredible friendly! I helped a friend to feed them last winter and all of the dogs waited politely until I had placed the food bowl on the ground before they tried to inhale their food (at least that’s what it looked like). Huge shaggy greenland dogs that look like teddy bears, sleek beautiful huskys, all super-happy to meet you, jumping up whilst trying to give you puppy kisses, shaking their entire body in anticipation, howling of excitement, ready to run..my kind of dogs.

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Meg og mitt liv

Quickie

Aubergine Awakening

Happy New Year everybody!

Arctic Winter Ecology Course, bit by bit

I’m back!

Cabintrip to “Soggy Valley”

Rodent pedicure

The best salmon dish ever! + some other food-related triumphs

Ramen noodle frenzy

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Meg og mitt liv

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Christiane @ flickr

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