Little Tiger

... that the old cat food in the bowl tasts soooo much better after I add one or two new bits?

It's the same thing every day almost. If I get home first, Little Tiger greats me at the door and screams for some attention. Then Little Tiger runs to the kitchen screaming for food even though there's plenty left in the bowl. I add just a pinch, and all of a sudden she eats. Somtimes if there's a lot left, I try just poking in the bowl moving the pieces around, but that doesn't fool her. I have to add something.

My S.O. feeds her almost as often as I do and he's the one giving her all the "goodies", but it's only when I approach the kitchen that she comes running, screaming as if she had been starved for weeks. Cats!!

Norway is an expensive country to live in and Oslo is a very expensive city. Just as an example, one liter of milk is 12-14 NOK (~$2,5). That's twice the price of milk in Sweden, and the border is only a couple of hours away. (Needless to say, the border trade is booming.)

Most foreigners living here complain about the food prices. A very common joke is to say "Oh, it's 200 NOK, that's just 10 000 000 [insert currency of your country of origin here]". The other day whan I was meeting my knitting group, an American and an Australian talked about Starbucks and how much they missed it. The conversation ended with "But it's a good thing they don't have it here. People would have to get loans to afford the coffee." And that's sad but (almost) true.

The high prices are of course partly due to the general wellfare of the country, but a lot of it is pure protectionism. I'm not sure it really makes sense to grow eg tomatoes in Norway, when they are 70 NOK per kilo and not as tasty as Spanish tomatoes anyway, but hey, you keep a few farmers in some godforsaken place busy. And there are a lot of such places among the fjords.

On the positive side, bananas and peanuts are cheaper here than in Sweden. It's said to be because Norway is not in the European Union, and therefore they don't have to import these products from former French colonies. I don't know if it's true but it wouldn't surprise me. Protectionism goes both ways.

The apartment we're staying in for another few days comes with an ice cream maker. I had never tried making ice cream before. I started out by carefully reading the recipe, but now after a few batches I'm more like "how can it possibly go wrong?". So far it has worked out well. The paddle has been broken for a while (totally my fault, I stuck the spatula in while it was stirring) but today I got the spare part so tonight I made a batch.

I got some inspiration from a cook book by Ben & Jerry, but I didn't have the exact amount of cream and milk so I mixed freely and poured in some chocomilk as well. It got too diluted to give any taste, but it gave a nice café latte color to the mix.

If you want to add "chunks" to the ice cream, the trick is to do it at the right time. The ice cream should be almost done and in the maker I'm using you can tell this because the paddle starts changing directions. It's also possible to see it on the ice cream - it's time when it starts to look "elastic" and behave a little like bread dough.

Today the "chunks" were chocolate chips, both white and milk chocolate, that my sister brought from England when she came to visit.

As I had to wait and watch the ice cream maker for a while before it was time to pour the chips in, I had time to read on the containers. They were from ASDA (which is actually Wal-Mart with a British twist). All products sold under their own brand have a lot of interesting information on them. Fruit for example is marked "suitable for vegetarians". The chocolate had that too, but also "no artificial flavoring" in big letters. Does artificial chocolate flavor even exist??

Me and my sister usually make fun of these pretty obvious statements, but they do print some useful information too, such as readable lists of ingredients (ie not the classical ones where the print is so small you have to have a magnifier to start guessing what it says), and they also list all the things that people might be allergic to, "contains nuts", "does not contain soy products", etc.

Anyway, back to the ice cream. It turned out really well. We didn't freeze it for long after it was done so it was very soft. The white chocolate chips were a bit of a disappointment because they didn't taste much and were too soft to add any texture, but the milk chocolate ones were very good. I like a bit of crunch in my ice cream.

Little Tiger looooves ice cream, but prefers plain vanilla. She's going to move to us soon, in one or two months. I'm a little worried she will get bored being the only animal in the household again, but maybe she will think of it as vacation getting away from my parent's cat and the chicken herding. :-) She's well trained in climbing trees nowadays, and our new apartment has some visible wall studs. That could be an interesting combination...

I've been very busy with my new job and haven't even called to ask about Little Tiger in a long time. We made up for it over Easter by going to see her. And my parents of course.

After the usual big confusion of seeing us in my parents house she showed that she was still our little cat, and slept at our feet all night. My parents told us about all the ruckus she had been up to, breaking a few things. I'm pretty sure their cat had something to do with it as well, but they blame Little Tiger. It's just because they like her more but won't admit it.

One thing she had done all on her own was to scare the heck out of the rooster. My parents had to slaughter 3 of the roosters since they were fighting all the time so now they only have one rooster and one hen left. Little Tiger usually herds them but this time, while my father was trying to make them enter their house for the night, she came running from out of nowhere and leapt for the poor rooster. She didn't hurt him in any way, but he got so scared that he ran away and my father had to spend the rest of the evening trying to catch him. Little Tiger got a well deserved scolding. Not sure it helps on a cat though...

After this incident, she's gone back to herding and the rooster seems to have forgotten all about it as well. It would be very interesting to know what went through her head that day, if it was some hunting instinct or if she was just in a mood for playing and picked the wrong animal to play with. In any case it was a stupid thing to do. The rooster is pretty big and if he hadn't been taken by surprise, he probably would have fought back. That's what happened to my parent's cat and he now stays clear of the chicken. Cats might seem smart, but they aren't always.

We were not able to bring her with us this time, but in June we hope to have found a more permanent place to stay and then she will move here with us. Missing her already.

It's Saturday evening and on prime time on one of the Norwegian TV channels they show a documentary about Samis. We have 25 channels, and that's the best program on. Well, well. Why entertain when you can educate?

My first week living in Norway has gone well, despite a terrible cold. One thing that differs here is that lunch is served in the company canteen. In Sweden that is very rare. You either go out to a restaurant for lunch or bring yesterday's leftovers in a box to microwave. Anyway, one day this week the canteen served sweet rice porridge. It's eaten with cinnamon and sugar sprinkled over it. I'm used to eating it with milk, so that's what I did. That was a bit strange to the Norwegians. They eat it with melted butter.

There are very many nationalities at our office, and not everyone understood that this was porridge. I saw at least 5 people using an ordinary plate and scooping the porridge up next to the slices of sausages (that were actually for the sandwiches )like it was mashed potatoes. How surprised they must have been when they tasted and it was sweet...

Here's a recipe. Make sure you use round white rice. It resembles sushi rice but is a bit stickier and less expensive (at least in Sweden). Picture from ica.se.