There’s a number of foods that I make a point of preparing only around the holidays. You’ve already seen the lutefisk. Another holiday treat is krumkake, which I am here eating with chocolate icecream.
I managed to overcook virtually an entire batch of krumkake, which did not make me happy.
I also made a big batch of lefse, a traditional Norwegian flatbread. Imagine a tortilla that tastes a little like potatoes. In this photo I am having a traditional Norwegian breakfast of eggs, lefse, coffee, and pickled herring.
At least that’s what I imagine a traditional Norwegian breakfast would entail.
I had a lot of lefse left over, so I slathered some pizza sauce on a few, and topped them with shredded cheese and pepperoni.
It tasted remarkably similar to a New York style pizza.
Take a look at this picture. It looks like a rootbeer float, right?
Wrong! It’s actually Dr. Pepper! I got this at Naus drug, one of the few remaining soda counters. Everybody seems nostalgic about soda fountains in drug stores, but hardly anyone can be bothered to go. Although it doesn’t help that Naus Drug is only open during banker’s hours.
If you were of the British persuasion, you might be pleased to note that the Fiesta grocery also stocks food that caters to your ethnicity. Here’s a steak and kidney pie.
Emphasis on kidney. There’s so many delicious organs in a cow, why pick the one that tastes the worst?
I make it a point to avoid Whole Foods, but you can buy individual bottles of beer for $1.79 and drink them on premises, so I sometimes find myself with a longneck in my hand, fending off the damn grackles on their patio. While there I sometimes get a beer-snack, like this candied salmon.
You’re thinking, how do you candy a fish? I guess it was smoked and then fried with brown sugar or something, because the skin was vaguely, but not particularly, sweet. Inside, the salmon meat must have been almost half fat. It was like eating a gooey, fishy marshmallow.
When I was a kid, my mom always cooked the bacon in the microwave. Throughout the years as an adult, and hundreds of pounds of pan-fried bacon, I’ve never been able to replicate the crisp texture I remember from the bacon of my childhood. Attempts to use the microwave have ended in failure because you need a special pan that lets the grease pour off as the bacon nukes. Well, I was pleased to find a micro-wave baconing appliance at Goodwill the other day. As seen on TV!
This should be extra-effective because it was on TV, I thought.
Right away I ran into difficulties.
A couple of vital components to the tray were missing, a pair of skewers that pierce the bacon and hold it above the grease pan. I re-purposed some chopsticks to the task, but it’s a huge pain to skewer a floppy piece of bacon on two ends and then thread them through a series of slots at right-angles to the skewer. And once I did there was a lot of overhang. As it turns out, the tray, even though it’s much shorter than the standard size of bacon, is too large to rotate inside the microwave.
Six minutes of high power later, and I had six slices of bacon with hardly a drop of grease.
The bacon had pulled taught and had a weird mummified look, but it did indeed have that crisp texture I remember from my childhood. Thank you TV!
