The miracle of Tsipoura (Dorade, Sparus aurata)

What I call ''the miracle of Tsipoura'', let's say, lays very very close to Coello's concept of the universe; the one that brings you what you strongly desire. Yeap that one!! Well, I don't know if it is the whole universe in my case but Trondheim wants me happy and pleased here! :)

Living in such a different environment is inevitable that you are going to miss an awful amount of things from your past life. From time to time I become nostalgic about specific flavours and aromas from my country. Especially in the first year, I experienced a constant swift from severe enthusiasm to taste every single aspect of norwegian life to severe homesickness even for things that I hardly ever wanted back home. From squid to baklava, from olive oil soap to octopus, from fresh fig to coarse semolina, from having someone to morn me in greek to the latest example of fresh (!!!) tsipoura... An awful amount of things.

Yes the last two examples are pretty spectacular! 

''Kalimera'' is goodday in greek and it's one of the most lyric words of the greek language. L and r and all the vowels there makes it such a melody! It's starting your day with is a tiny song! :D I had just started missing this little treat when a guest professor from New Zealand moved in in my office and he kept greeting me in greek! So sweet and so appreciated! 

& now the tsipoura miracle; 

I was in the supermarket buying things for my name day party. I was basically sad because 15th of August is a huge celebration in Greece and especially in my family is as important as Christmas! I didn't go for vacation there  and I was regretting it at that time. On top of it, it is a normal working day here while back home is a public holiday. I was feeling very tired and very very very homesick. The party was my last hope to avoid depression. People might get depressed in their birthdays, I now get depressed on my name day, strange human nature?? So as I was approaching the fridge area, I glanced them, laying there with all their silver colour and their big eyes! I though it was an illusion, or I was confusing them with a different kind of fish that looked alike. I stormed towards the fridge window to read the name on the tag! Not much of help. Gkrr! How do I describe a mediterranean fish and verify that the one I was viewing was what I think it was a bit southern of the arctic cycle?? Uff! That's tough and it can end up rather funny. & sure it was. Very. Me rushing to ask and explain with lacking vocabulary in this area... The poor guy answering my questions must have thought I was some kind of weirdo. Such an excitement  for a fish?  But who cares?? To my surprise I was RIGHT! It was it! Coming directly from Spain. The world was wonderful again! & I was overspending on five of them!!! 

They are all cute stories and I have a lot more. Right now I am thinking of all the times that life has provided me what I needed. From the silliest to the most important. In retrospect I'm a lucky person, life has treated me well but I complain a bit and get stressed a lot more. This mental treatment is my way to prove myself that my current struggles will end up fine. Naive way maybe. My future is uncertain and I am thinking of tsipouras! I do what I have to do but I cannot help it, I hope for a new miracle. A BIG one this time. Trondheim please please do your best!! 

For the record;

Tsipoura is my favourite Mediterranean fish. Its taste is oily and bitter and all you need to do to fully enjoy it is to fold it in baking paper seasoned with some salt, pepper, oregano and lemon slices and bake it for approximately 30 min.  You start to yearn for it in 20 min when all the aromas start to fill the space and then you have to suffer for a bit more until your mouth get into heaven. When I was in Greece I used to have it at least once per week. Yummy, yummy! 

A! yeah! & that was the recipe bit of this post.. :P

Cabin trip - the real one I

You can NOT claim you have been assimilated in norwegian culture unless you go for cabin trips. FULLSTOP

As a city girl,my definition of nature involves common flowers occasionally living in my apartment, the trees at the sides of a street and city parks, animals like cats, dogs, goldfishes, city birds, snails and some insects which I prefer it if they avoid me (only a couple of exceptions on this thanks to my grandma's efforts to convince me that they are harmless). Please count also all the beaches and areas that the soil amount is higher than the concrete one but the percentage of the second is higher than 10% in total. That's nature in my comfort zone. And I had been VERY proud of myself that I never screamed aloud or other times too loud when always monstrous cockroaches invaded to my place but I was so amazingly courageous to fight them and heroically kill them! Usually even without employing the aerosol spray so that I'm consistent with my eco-friendly principles. (Sarcasm? Me? Nah)

The other nature- the real one- I enjoy in small and safe observatory doses.

The primitive part of it scares the hell out of me. 

I grew up in a glove box. I'm a specie that belongs to urban eco-system. In real nature I'm a fish out of the sea. I met a cow at my 18 and a pig at my 23. I like Trondheim because to my eyes it is almost countryside. 

My childhood outdoor expeditions was always and only in places accessible by car. If it was a non asphalt road then I was always feeling that we were deep down in the wildness. They were lovely. It is true that you can reach really beautiful places following these ''agricultural roads'' in which the car jumps up and down and the voice comes out in distorted sound waves. Magnificent places, really! But there were not real hiking trips, we were walking for 10-20 min and then we may had a picnic until we were back to car for further seated adventures....

Did I make my point clear? The background info is basically for my defense. To explain why I haven't been in a real cabin trip after two and a half years!! Coming to Norway inevitably had a tremendous effect on me when it comes to hiking and re-establishing my definition of nature. But it's a very slow progress. I'm pushing myself out of my limits and I'm becoming more and more a nature person but still .. SO very far away from a nature person! 

Nevertheless, a cabin trip is in my plans. After numerous declines my friends managed to convince me. Since I agreed I keep flirting with the idea to cancel it. Uff...

Out in the woods, no electricity, no toilet, no immediate access by car (even though the parking place is pretty close), no Internet and that comes to my mind before the 'carrying your own potable water' (!!!) and the 'make a fire to get warm' (!!!).
Anyway, if I survive it, which I assume I'll do, provided I go, I'll come back with a celebrating post full of exclamation marks, a couple of photos and being slightly more Norwegian than before. If not you should be proud of me that I was fighting a bigger monster than the monstrous cockroaches; my(inert and scared)self!

Ok, this is the only weed free fun version I found in youtube, even though those apparently mexican cockroaches seem to me a bit high. :P

PS This song has a long and interesting story check it in wiki.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Cucaracha

The ring of fire

I read at some point about a research study which showed that people who had been thinking mostly about food during a specific period, they gained significantly more weight compared to those who were thinking about sex. I guess there are many reasons for this but ...wait a minute...

Oups! One out of two posts in this blog is about food!!

Bells ringing! Bells ringing!!

Alarm! Alarm!!

For the sake of my scale... I have to fix this!! The sooner the better! 

So this post is going to be about the ring of fire as in Johnny Cash... :D

Being a foreign single girl in Norway is certainly interesting! You face almost a paradox; you know how to play but you don't know the rules... Been there done that in the past but now? Suddenly someone has changed the cipher or even worse he enciphered the rules of the game after first encoding them... Most of your interpretation doesn't make sense but you still see it works for the most around you... 

Advanced level for sure but I'm a tough one, I'll break it! I like challenges! ;D

After discussing my frustrations on the issue with a friend (oh yes, teenage years are forced back, apparently!) she sent me this fun post from an American girl who lives in Sweden. It has seeds of truth, believe me! It was such a relief and I laughed my head off! I hope you enjoy it!

''Dating in Sweden: sex, booze and mobile phones''

And just to close with a little food for thought, the extrapolation of the study is very fitting to my views. What you think or you allow yourself to think is who you are going to be! Scary and promising at the same time!
Take care of your thoughts! :)

Greek salad!

First and foremost I have to state that I really really love how much Norwegians enjoy and appreciate greek products! Feta, olive oil, ouzo...
We do,too! :) And I can't help it, every time I find similarities I feel happy!

Now that I made myself clear on this, I can continue with some criticism.
I come across again and again to the term ''Greek salad''.
Yeah, well, only that it is NOT a greek salad!!!

Would any Greek accept a salad that contains lettuce, tomato, olives, onion, pesto and feta cheese with tzatziki on top (!!!!) as a greek salad?? Damn it, NO!

First of all, tzatziki is a salad itself! Yeah, right, a separated one! It isn't a sauce and I doubt that during the almost 30 years I lived in Greece I tasted a single combination of tzatziki and feta at the same dish! Even the idea gives me chills...

Everyone is of course free to use greek ingredients to his fancy, and it is nice to let imagination and creativity wild but by all means don't call it greek! And even more don't present it as greek in your menu!! It is quite unfortunate on how many restaurants and cafes here, you meet this distracting idea of greek salad. Especially when one can easily find ALL the ingredients that a real greek salad contains!
It's insane! It isn't either that Norwegians haven't visited Greece or tasted the real thing...
I really, seriously, honestly find no reasonable explanation why this happens!!! It's simply insane and it drives me crazy!

Let's see;

• slided tomatoes
• onion (the colour doesn't really matter) in small half-moon slices
• green paprika in rings
• feta cheese, in a shape of block 8x12 cm
• oregano or thyme
• olives
• salt, preferably sea salt (&for God sake not pepper!!)
• cucumber (of course, corrected after the kind contribution of Camillaki) 
• optionally capers.

Do I forget something? Ah! Yes, a decent amount of olive oil!

Here you go! Greek horiatiki (meaning from the village) salad 1000% acceptable of any Greek around the world!

And another thing the so called tzatziki is another painful story! No, yogurt with garlic and something green inside is not called tzatziki either but I'll stop here because I have an upper time limit in nagging and Ι'm right now approaching it!

Last but not least, you can actually find real feta here! No, I definitely don't mean appetina, but there are greek brands in some supermarkets and you can find it also in Bondens marked in Torg. Once I had an excellent chat with one of the farmers when I certified that he actually makes real feta cheese and we laughed about having a label to his stand like 'Approved by Greeks'! :D

New generation :)

After last summer which is fair to be remembered as the summer of weddings this is definitely the summer of newborns! I'm so happy for all my friends!!! 

To have a little baby in your hands so fragile and so dependant. A little human being that innocent that is impossible not to love! A new life ! What a tremendous miracle and what a tremendous happiness they must experience!!!! 

Right now I'm just looking the photos my friends sent me. Photos and ultrasound images! I do it again and again. With eyes full of tears and a heart full of love for these little people I try to absorb as much as possible of this miracle! It is the first time I regret so much we live in different countries and I cannot be there, to handshake with my finger their little hands, kiss their little feet, deposit my share of love and promises that I'll take care of their well being with whatever way I can.

Is love transmitted within space without a physical presence? Words can do that but babies cannot understand words. Probably they only understand the warmth of your voice and they feel the pace of your heart. But this is not possible in my case. I hope love does!

I cannot help it but I try to understand if I am an appropriate material for mum... Maybe? At least I have really nice intentions but I am horrified of the responsibility and a bit skeptical on the philosophical idea of giving birth. Anyway there is no space for this kind of thoughts in this post! 

This post is dedicated to Anastasis, to Niki's son, to Ellen's baby, to Ntina's daughter and the Trondesk /French baby we are all expecting!!! 

I wish for all of them to be healthy and happy. To become wonderful people who are going to beautify our world with their presence as their parents have beautify my life! And I wish to my beloved friends to be healthy and happy as well! To be patient and wise, to enjoy every single moment of the upbringing and their offsprings to always make them proud!

A little post for the little gentlemen

( I tried hard to find the version of Nora Brockstedt that I like so much but it is not available in youtube so for those who have spotify please check Lykkeliten of hers)

and another norwegian post for the little ladies having or not blue eyes

Love you all!

Louisa cream

Every time that outside is cold or I feel homesick or I want something warm and sweet (which mostly happens when I feel cold or homesick! ) I make this super easy cream my mum taught me in Easter. My mum is fantastic on experimenting in the kitchen. Even though I wouldn't consider her as a great cook (sorry mama :) ), she is very creative in general and she has definitely come up with some excellent recipes of her own and some new versions of other recipes that I prefer better than the originals. At some point I'll post how to make mousaka that won't give you a heavy stomach afterwards!!!  

The idea of the cream is very simple.

First boil water and add Louisa herb leaves (Lippia citriodora), and when it is about to boil remove the leaves and add some sugar.

Mix corn flour in half a glass of cold water (the ratio is 1 big spoon to 200 ml of initial water but depends how dense you like it),  pour it in the Louisa tea and then stir it to one direction so that it gets denser. Remove it from the heat and pour it in little bowls or a big one as I do! 

It is supposed to be eaten warm so after some minutes of cooling is ready for consumption. 

I have played around with spices and herbs and I would also suggest anise, cinnamon with cardamom, and chamomile but nothing compares to Louisa which gives to the cream this lemon aroma but not the acidity. What I like the most is the elegant aroma the cream has even with cinnamon. This and how light it is!! 

I hope you enjoy it!!

As for me I have decided that I'll name my future daughter Louisa after my mum as she doesn't like her name. It always reminds me my late grandpa, too. He planted it in the garden of his summer house and now whenever I recall my times there, they have the aura of  sea and Louisa!